Category: Uncategorized

Seattle’s in yet another endless discussion around what the area’s transit future will be. As the fall election gets closer, there’s another transit package being offered to voters to try and resolve the area’s persistent transit congestion.   Then there’s Portland. As this column illustrates, Seattle has a long way to go before it catches up to what Portland’s already doing with respect to public transit.   I’ve mentioned Portland’s MAX light rail system a…

At some point enough should be enough. Now I read that they want to bring corporate sponsorship to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. It makes me wonder at times if we’ve lost our way to the point that anything’s for sale and if life’s going to turn into one big commercial.   Kevin Bartram, a sponsorship consultant hired by the bridge’s overseers, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, said any sponsorship would be…

At $2 million a mile it will certainly take loads of cash to get enough sidewalks in the greater Seattle area. This article talks about the problems in getting sidewalks in place in the area.   Forty percent of Seattle streets lack full sidewalks on both sides of the road — totaling 650 miles, the city estimates — but installing them is a staggering expense of about $2 million per mile. It’s not just the…

A posting on The American Printing House for the Blind’s blog turned me on to what seems to be a handy web site. Walk Score tries to tell you how walkable a given address will be based on proximity to items like stores, restaurants, coffee shops and more.   A quick trial of several places I’ve lived seems to show that the site is reasonably accurate. It is also much faster than using the various…

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article talking about a strong dislike for physical buttons on hardware by Steve Jobs. One of the things that’s frustrating to me about articles like this is the fact that the reporter rarely seems to apply what has been learned from other reporting to the story of the day.   I recognized the reporter, Nick Wingfield, as someone who wrote about web accessibility in the past for the…

Most everyone probably knows the old saying about what happens when you assume so I’ll skip repetition here. But I was operating under the assumption that the National Center on Accessible Media’s Now Showing page listed all the theaters that had the potential of showing movies with audio description.   Not so I’ve subsequently learned. As one example I’ve come to discover that Regal Cinema has many theaters that have the ability to show descriptive…

Summer in the Pacific Northwest tends to be absolutely beautiful. Temperatures rarely go above 80 degrees. Breezes offer just enough wind to keep things moving. Storms, as much as I sometimes miss them, rarely spoil the day. Mosquitoes and other flying insects are all but absent from the environment. All in all, as I say summer in the Northwest is pretty close to perfect in my book.   Notebook in hand, I decided to resolve…

This definitely comes from the partly too-much-technology department but this post is being written from the road. The road in this question is I-5 as we head back from Portland to the Seattle area.   I was curious how sharing the net connection on my cell phone would work to surf the web from my notebook. So far it is working well with about a 400K connection as we drive along.   We went to…

Six apart has been working on a new version of their popular Movable Type blog publishing platform. I’ve been experimenting a bit with the betas of version 4 and so far am finding no big issues.   Using Movable Type for my blog in some ways is a bit like hosting a small dinner party in a 200-person banquet hall. The software offers dozens of features that I’ll likely never use and I suspect if…

A couple months ago I wrote about a problem drive on one of my computers. Thankfully yesterday with the help of a friend and colleague I was able to get back all the data from the drive so all’s well in computing land. I’m joyfully listening to batches of all the music I had encoded before the hard drive crash and enjoying some of the audio files from our trip to China last summer that…