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The blog’s been pretty quiet for the last couple months for some personal reasons. Hopefully I’ll get back into writing a bit more going forward.

 

Aimee and I used the extended Memorial Day weekend to get out of town for a few days. We started off by driving to Portland on Friday evening where we stayed at the Silver Cloud Inn. This is quickly turning into a favorite hotel when visiting Portland. The hotel is reasonably priced for a Portland hotel, located in a great neighborhood for exploring the city and rooms are spacious and comfortable.

 

Saturday morning we made the obligatory visit to Portland’s Saturday Market. This is a must-stop if you’ve never been to Portland and even after some 12 years of visiting the market I can still say that a couple hours strolling through the eclectic collection of crafts and people is a unique adventure. Saturday Market is really one of the quintessential Portland experiences with the range of people you’ll encounter. This can be everyone from those protesting the outrage of the month to folks who most likely spend most of their shopping dollar in upscale malls.

 

Our weekend continued with a drive over to Lincoln City. This isn’t our usual destination on the coast but the late date for planning our trip caused us to try a different hotel. We found a new cozy place called The O’dysius Hotel that will likely be a place we turn to on a future trip. I wrote a Trip Advisor Review because we enjoyed the hotel so much.

 

Our weekend was relatively quiet with much time spent relaxing at our hotel, walking on the beach and in general taking it easy. We did stroll around at the Yaquina Head Lighthouse and made yet another obligatory stop at the visitor’s center of the Tillamook factory. I’m probably not completely objective as I think Wisconsin dairy products are better but here in the northwest, Tillamook is definitely one of the better brands for dairy you can find. The cheddar cheese is especially tasty.

 

The Oregon coast is one of those places that feels more and more like home each time I visit. The state has done an excellent job at ensuring the public has access to the entire coast. State law mandates that the entire coastline is public land. The beaches run the gambit from flat and sandy stretches that are great for an afternoon stroll to rugged and rocky spots that are more like hiking in the hills just to get access to the water. Numerous state parks and other great hiking stops up and down the coast provide endless opportunities to experience a wide range of nature peppered with the relaxing sound of the ocean close at hand. The relatively unpopulated nature of most cities also means by and large you do not spend all your time fighting crowds. If the saying about home being where the heart is has any truth, then one room in my home is definitely known as the Oregon coast room.

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Here’s an interesting column from the Seattle Times on how to get self-published as a book author. The column details the author’s experience with a company called BookSurge, and the experience sounds reasonably reputable.

 

From time to time I wonder if I have a book in me. The opportunities have been less than I expected when finishing college with a degree in journalism, but there’s still a big part of me that enjoys the craft of writing.

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Here’s an interesting article that seems like it could be a boon for accessibility. The basic premise is that cell phones will be used to get more details on pretty much any object we encounter. Seems like a great match because if this catches on, then you’d be able to easily identify many more objects from the environment.

 

There are already accessibility solutions that use bar code readers to identify products. But those I’m familiar with require use of a computer and frequently a database of known objects or otherwise require the user to have or acquire knowledge about the object being identified.

 

The solution described in this article, while not aimed at the accessibility arena, would seem to place no requirement that the user know anything about the article in question. The bar code would contain all the descriptive details.

 

It sounds like something straight out of a futuristic film: House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and lots of other details about the house.

 

Media experts say that cellphones, the Swiss army knives of technology, are quickly heading in this direction. New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows the phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet.

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On Wednesday morning I signed into my computer to print a document and heard the Windows sound that indicates a device was removed from my computer. Strange I thought since I hadn’t disconnected any devices. The thought was quickly chased from my mind because the PC stopped working in any way that I could detect.

 

Trial and error, multiple reboots and the other standard troubleshooting I can do when things don’t work as expected didn’t get the machine working. Later with the help of a couple of folks I was able to determine that the machine has a hard drive reading problem.

 

That’s where the real joy starts I suppose. You begin the scramble to think what was actually stored on that drive? Can I get any of it back? I did back all that stuff up right? After all the 300-gig USB drive bought expressly for that purpose is sitting there purring away just waiting to be connected to a working machine to hand out the information stored on it.

 

Ironic, but I suspect not uncommon, that the first piece of advice I give to anyone I know who asks me for computer help is to backup your information. Sad, but I suspect again not too uncommon, that I fail to completely follow my own advice.

 

So now here I sit convincing myself that it won’t be a big deal to re-encode the 600_plus music CDs that I’ve converted over the last three months to play on my Squeezebox. I say that those digital audio files of sounds from recent trips weren’t that important were they? All those books I’ve scanned do get uploaded to Bookshare anyway so I can get them back right?

 

Thankfully all’s not lost. Important financial data was backed up two months ago and I’ve been successful at downloading all the missing data from the period since the last backup. E-mail is recoverable from all but the last couple months and I do have a full backup from about eight months ago that will have the vast majority of what I care about.

 

Then too, there’s still some hope that more of the data may be recoverable. Using some utilities for this sort of thing it has been possible to see many of the files on the problem drive. Copying them someplace is another story as the utilities thus far only offer a 1.4-meg floppy which is already filled with the utilities themselves as a copy destination. Let the fun begin.

 

The painful lessons in life are probably those we learn the best. I for one will definitely be better about taking my own advice.

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The New York Times ran an excerpt of a new book to be published later this week looking at the life of Thomas Edison. “The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World,” sounds like an interesting read.

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I made previous reference to Bookshare, a service that allows individuals with print disabilities to scan and share printed books under an exception made in the U.S. copyright law. According to the home page for Bookshare, the CBS Evening News will feature the organization on Thursday 2/22.

 

The CBS Evening News will profile Bookshare.org as part of its “American Spirit” series. The Bookshare.org segment is part of a collection of stories about effective and scalable solutions to social needs.

 

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March isn’t here quite yet, but with the Wisconsin Badgers doing so well in basketball this not so young man’s fancy is already turning to March madness. My annual quest for a quality accessible NCAA bracket experience is already starting.

 

Each year I hunt around on various web sites trying version after version of the NCAA bracket. Some are complex web forms that get confusing with a screen reader. Others, and what seems to be the majority here, are PDF documents that are basically incomprehensible with a screen reader.

 

So here’s hoping the Badger hoopsters make it through their bracket unscathed and that I can actually predict their progress with an accessible experience.

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Every once in a while a phrase I hear in conversation catches my attention. It tends to be something that someone else will use as if it is something everyone is using as a part of regular vocabulary. Over the past two weeks a couple of phrases have captured my imagination because I’d personally not heard them and quite frankly had to seek out their definitions.

 

One evening Aimee was explaining some frustrations with an event at work and said, “I felt like they were gaslighting me.”

 

“Gaslighting?” I had to ask for clarification.

 

It turns out that gaslighting is a term which basically means to mess with someone’s mind by denying reality or twisting facts or the environment slowly over time to confuse someone.

 

The way the phrase was used it was as if it was something we all should know. I was curious so investigated a bit.

 

The mystery was solved when Aimee mentioned that Steely Dan, a band that is one of her top favorites, has a tune that uses gaslighting in the title.

 

The second phrase to catch my curiosity happened while attending some training at work. Someone mentioned that they thought the event had “jumped the shark”. Next I saw the same phrase used in three different e-mails. I figured the meaning of this phrase from context for the most part but it was still interesting to search out the definition and origin. I guess I’m not up on my pop culture.

 

As for the definition of jump the shark, let’s just say that a blog post on what words I find interesting is likely jumping already.

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Interesting what you find out is in your own backyard.  Kirkland is quite literally just down the road from me and here’s an interesting idea on what that city’s doing with pedestrian safety.

What began as an experiment at five intersections with no signals downtown in 1996 has grown to 47 throughout the city. Pedestrians can pick up a flag in a stand, wave it while crossing the street, then deposit it at a stand on the other side.

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