Phone Call

Our phone rang a few minutes ago.  As I sat next to a receiver I answered.  A young woman came on to inform me that my wife has a medical appointment with a “Doctor Smith” tomorrow at ten.

 

My initial thought, “Yeah, Doctor Smith, that’s your real name,” nearly came out of my mouth but this is the kinder, softer and gentler BC who still startles himself when he withholds a perfectly obnoxious comment.

 

I called Susan, my lovely wife, to the phone and then thought, “Hmm… Doctor Smith, ‘Warning, Warning, Will Robinson, Warning, Warning…” and thought of asking if he might have gotten himself lost in space at some point in his lifetime.  Then, based upon the sound of the receptionist’s voice, it occurred to me that our ages probably differ by about 25 years and that her birth may have happened after “Lost in Space” stopped running in reruns.

 

How many cultural cornerstones did I grow up with that people who have grown to adulthood have missed altogether?

 

Recently, on cable channels, Time/Life has been pushing the complete first season, including the rare color pilot of “Man From UNCLE” for a mere $29.95 if I act now.  Do younger adults have a clue as to how wonderful this show was back in its day?  What of the Avengers and its S&M overtones, did those reruns last long enough to inform and pervert this new group of adults?

 

Do these younger adults realize that Morticia Addams was, without a question, the sexiest woman in the history of television?  Do they understand that Eartha Kitt as Catwoman and Natasha Nogoodnik, a cartoon character, tied for second place?

 

Maybe Jeanie and the still beautiful Barbara Eden on “Love Boat” reruns may have sunk in as they seemed to be replayed for years.  Did Dawn Wells do anything in her post Gilligan years?  Her Mary Ann beat Daisy Duke hands down for the hottest butt in cut-offs.  Julie Newmar and Lee Merriweather the other Catwomen deserve a solid mention and Bat Girl, even though she appears in only a few episodes, taught us eight year olds the true meaning of serious leather.

 

Sure, Tuesday Weld tantalized as a good girl but it was the bad girls that caused that inexplicable feeling of warmth in our shorts.  I’m sure I’m missing quite a few from that era so please send in comments on your favorite hotties in television history.

 

To be fair, I’m a heterosexual male so my list is made up entirely of women.  The gay men and female readers should add male hotties as I never found Earnest Bourgnine nor Gomer Pyle terribly attractive.

 

-- End

Office Suites and Search Engines

For what seemed like an eternity, the battle for mainstream software was fought over office suites and for primary AT over how well they supported office applications.  No major software vendor could not have a suite even if it comprised little more than a bunch of marginally related programs held together by a bungee cord.

 

Around 1994, Perfect Office from WordPerfect Corporation and Microsoft Office from MS dominated the market but Lotus SmartSuite: 1-2-3 for Windows, Ami, a weird word processor that didn’t understand the WYSIWYG concept terribly and some random and long forgotten database program that I can’t recall anyone actually using still had inroads into professional environments where 1-2-3 remained king.  Not to be outdone, Borland bundled Sprint, a really bad word processor, with Quatro Pro for Windows (which actually contained some code I wrote), Paradox and Sidekick for Windows which the Accessories that ship with Windows more or less obviated.  Another oddity involving Borland was that Quatro Pro and Paradox were also the spreadsheet and database in Perfect Office through their partnership with the WordPerfect guys.

 

Soon afterward, WordPerfect was, in what would be the largest acquisition of a private company up to that point in history, was purchased by Novell for $1.1 billion.  Novell knew a lot about selling complex networking systems to corporations but nothing about marketing works packages to end consumers.  A few years later, Novell would sell the WP division to Corel for $100 million.  I sent Bob Frankenberg, then CEO of Novel an email suggesting that the next time he wants to spend a net one billion dollars and get nothing in return that he should call me and I’d save him the headache of a lot of legal wrangling involved in such large transactions.  Bob didn’t reply.

 

Meanwhile, the Borland board of directors forced Philippe Kahn, the heart and soul of the company out of the business and PK went off and started Starfish Software which he would later sell to Motorola for a bundle of cash.  The new Borland leadership hadn’t a clue and, today, the company, after a few name changes, still exists and is called Borland again but no one can explain what they actually sell.

 

A little more than a decade later, the search engine has replaced the office suite as the top dog in the drive for dominance in the software world.  Google clearly leads the pack but, in Vista, it seems that I can’t hit a TAB or do much else without landing in something that will search my email, my desktop, my hard disks my documents (inside and out) and nearly everything else one might accidentally misplace. 

 

Searching the Internet is a really important task that grows more important as the web increases in content And complexity.  The sheer enormity of data on the web makes finding almost anything popular nearly impossible as one will get more hits than they could read in a lifetime.  Google seems to do a better job of this than anyone else but common search criteria, for instance, I searched for a friend of mine who is now a Catholic priest.  Have you any idea how many guys named Father Kelly live in or around the New York and Boston areas with their huge Irish immigrant populations?

 

All of the big players seen to think I need a search button bar or control in nearly everything I own.  Saving a new file in MS Word or, even worse, trying to open one, provides me with a bazillion search options.  I’m a really organized guy.  All of our PCs back up daily to our home server and the big back up disk backs up to another for redundancy sake.  I have loads of files and folders that I find easy to navigate and the files for which I want to read or edit at any given moment.  Does everyone else forget the names of their files and folders and just leave them strewn about their disks?

 

On the other side of the coin, while Microsoft tries to muscle its way into the search biz, Google is building an office suite.  Thus, we’ll have MS Office and MS Live Search plus Google Office and Google searches to help us find the things we misplaced on our local computers and home networks.

 

Competition is great but it also seems that MS and Google are trading blows in a manner that could be more innovative way.  Before MS got heavily into search utilities, they made a really good Office suite; before Google got into the office suite biz, they had a really great search facility.  Why don’t these very rich companies try to go out and build new technologies that are currently not served very well rather than trying to grab a piece of the other guy’s sandbox.  Go to the beach, there’s enough sand for everyone there.

 

n  End

 

Visit From Boris Part 1

By Gonz Blinko

 

“Somebody called me on the phone,

They said, hey, hey is BC home,

Ya wanna take a walk?

Ya wanna go cop?

Ya Wanna get some Chinese rock.”

n      The Ramones

 

The house boat phone rang and Samhara answered.  “Are you here?” She shouted in a way that the caller would certainly here.

 

“Sure, why not, who is it?”  I answered and asked.

 

“Boris.”

 

“Really?”  I asked as I reached for the handset.  “What does he want?”

 

“How should I know, I just answered the phone and called you?”

 

Speaking into the phone, I said, “Doctor Blinko.”

 

“Boris Throbaum,” he said, “What’s up with this Doctor thing?”  Did you get yourself a PhD?”

 

“Sure did,” I replied, “I got an email that said that if I sent $30 to a University in Kansas, I would be granted a PhD from any of the top universities in the world.”

 

“So,” Boris started trying to hold back laughter, “Which university do you have a PhD from?”

 

“Edinborough .”

 

“Why did you pick Edinborough?”

 

“Well, for starters, I have never been to Scotland so no one can claim they saw me there.  Next, I don’t know a single person associated with the university so they can’t claim that my work sucked and, finally, I liked the idea of a university with such an ancient tradition.”

 

“Why didn’t you pick Krakow?”

 

“I don’t speak Polish and I have visited the place.”

 

“Makes sense.”  Added Boris.

 

“Ok, with that aside, what can we do for you?”

 

“I’m in Florida up at BC’s place and wanted to visit you.”

 

“Sure, it would be fun seeing you.”

 

“What’s your address,” asked Boris.

 

“Hang on,” I said and yelled to Samhara, “Where are we?”

 

Sam responded with three numbers separated by periods and I repeated the sequence to Boris.

 

“Excuse me?”  He asked, “What the fuck do those numbers mean?”

 

“They are GPS coordinates, we don’t exactly have an address other than those coordinates and the description that we’re in the 10,000 islands region of the western Glades not terribly far from Dismal Key.”

 

“I have a rental, how do I drive to this place?”

 

“Well, you drive to Everglades City and a friend of ours will run you out on his skiff.”

 

“I need a boat to get to you.”

 

“No, a friend of ours, calls himself Chuck, needs a boat to bring you out to us.  You don’t need a boat, you need a ride on one.”

 

-          * - * - * -

 

“Samhara?”  I asked.

 

“Yeah Gonz,” she replied as we sat in the screened in roof deck atop our house boat.

 

“How long have we been running together?”  I probably could remember if I tried but I wanted to hear my lesbian attorney tell the story in her beautiful African?  West Indian?  Jamaican?  Accent.  I never learned exactly where she came from and as she never told me, I didn’t want to pry.

 

“Oh, you remember,” she started, “You got your ass tossed in the lock up in Kingston and I had just started out as an international attorney and somehow I got your case and got your bony white ass out of Jamaica and later they dropped the charges.”

 

“What year?”

 

“It would be 1988, it’s our twentieth anniversary.”

 

“You know,” I started, “In all of that time, neither of us got into a really long term relationship.  Neither of us got married either formally or otherwise.”

 

“And?”  She asked.

 

“Why not, why do we always end up living and running together?”

 

“Don’t know.”

 

“Are we in love?”

 

“Define love,” demanded Samhara.

 

“Fuck it.”

 

-          * - * - * - * -

 

A few days later, while I was pitching lures into the mangroves in hopes of scaring up a snook for dinner, I heard Chuck yell to me from his skiff running on his electric trolling motor in water this shallow.  “I’ve got one serious asshole for delivery, if you do not sign for him, I’m leaving him on some obscure island to die from starvation and exposure.”

 

“Hey Chuck,” I yelled and heard Samhara starting to laugh.  It had been five days since Boris called and invited himself into our floating abode and I was starting to think he might have thought better of the visit.

 

Chuck pulled the skiff along side and Samhara started laughing out loud.  “What’s so funny?”  I asked.

 

“If you could only see,” choked Samhara through her laughter.

 

“See what?”  I asked starting to get annoyed.

 

“Boris…”  She stammered and fell into useless hysterics.

 

Chuck piped up, “Your weird and annoying friend is wearing a Hawaiian print short sleeve shirt, silk Tommy Bahama shorts, Sperry Topsiders and a fucking pith helmet.  He’s carrying shopping bags from a bunch of designer stores and he screamed at me every time water sprayed onto the skiff.”

 

I started laughing and Boris, now realizing that he was the center of some kind of freakish joke shouted, “What’s so goddamned funny?”

 

“You,” said Sam and Chuck almost simultaneously as she helped him with his shopping bags as he stepped onto the house boat.

 

“I’m tripling my fee if I’ve gotta run him home,” added Chuck, “Of all of your weird, fucked up, twisted bastard friends, this one takes the fucking cake.  If you get annoyed with him, I can use him for crab bait.”  Chucked motored off slowly and yelled, “Samhara, I love you!”

 

Sam replied, “Cut off your penis and we’ll talk.”

 

-          * - * - * -

 

“Where’s my room?” Asked Boris.

 

“We don’t exactly have rooms.  We set up a cot for you on our roof deck.”

 

“The roof?”  Asked Boris.

 

“Yup,” said Samhara who then asked, “Where did you get all of this designer shit?”

 

“I stopped in South Beach to hang with El Negro and did some shopping to get some Florida style clothes.”

 

I was wearing an old t-shirt with a huge fish blood stain on it, a pair of old cut offs, flip flops, sunglasses and a hat advertising some fishing tackle company.  “From what Sam says you brought with you, you spent a whole lot of money on clothing for a different Florida.  Out here, you wear crap that can be stained, ripped, covered with fish guts and, more than anything else, attire that you won’t care if its stained by the Coppertone Sport and Deet we practically bathe in.”

 

“But what if we go to a restaurant?”  Asked our befuddled old friend.

 

“You can see, take a look around, do you see anything resembling a place that may have a restaurant?”

 

“What do we eat?”

 

“I tend to catch a lot of fish and Chuck brings us a grocery run once or twice a week.”

 

“So, you mean we don’t leave this floating chunk of a trailer park?”

 

“Listen fuck-tard, this is our winter home and we really love the place,” snapped Samhara.

 

-          * - * - * - * -

 

I climbed the ladder to the roof deck where the X-Dog was laying in a shady spot.  I could hear Boris following me and Samhara asking, “What do you want me to do with all of this shit?”  referring, of course to Boris’ new clothing.

 

“I’ll take care of it in a little while,” answered Boris with the first productive statement he made all day.

 

I sat near my dog and lit a cigarette.  Boris asked, “You guys have any beer?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Tequila?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Gin and tonic and lime?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“What the fuck do you have?”

 

“Fresh grapefruit juice, some orange and a couple cases of Freska.”

 

“Vodka to put into the grapefruit juice.”

 

“Nope.”

 

“No booze at all?”  He practically whimpered.

 

“Bingo!”

 

“What, did you guys become Mormons or something?”

 

“No, we got clean and sober.”

 

“Why?”  Asked a very puzzled Boris.

 

“Our lives had become unmanageable, we were always in trouble, we were completely unreliable and we would probably be dead if we kept going.”

 

“No intoxicants at all?”

 

“We smoke a little chronic a few times per year and Sam has a cocktail here and there but otherwise we enjoy thinking clearly.”

 

“Shit, I’d have brought booze if I knew it would be like this.”

 

“Look around, hundreds of species of birds, an amazing estuary for fishing and fish watching, American crocodiles, alligators, - in the cooler months living out here alone with Sam is a life second to none.”

 

“Damn Gonz, you have gone mental.”

 

“that’s Doctor Blinko to you.”

 

-*-* - * - * -

 

I left Boris on the deck with his thoughts and climbed down to help Samhara prepare a blackened redfish dinner.  As I started chopping up tomatoes and onions with a Damascus steel knife, Sam asked quietly, “A life with me is one second to none?”

 

“I hadn’t thought about it much but when I’m with you, when we’re here in the Glades, when we read and write and talk, well, it is second to nothing else I, we have ever really done.”

 

“Even without sex,” asked Sam.

 

“Sure,” I replied.

 

“Are we in love,” she asked.

 

“Define love,” I insisted.

 

“Fuck it,” replied Sam.

 

-          * - * - * - * -

 

We awoke to Boris yelling something.  I climbed out of my bunk and shouted, “What the hell are you doing?”

 

“It’s raining.”

Starting to actually wake up, I felt a few drops and said, “No shit.”

 

“What am I supposed to do?”  Asked our guest.

 

“Well, you might start by getting out of the rain,” I answered as sarcastically as possible.

 

“What?”

 

“Come down and we’ll make some coffee in the kitchen.”

 

Boris skittered down the ladder and said, “At least you guys haven’t given up coffee.  It does have caffeine right Gonz?”

 

“Of course it has caffeine and that’s Doctor Blinko to you.”

 

Samhara got up, naked as usual and dove off the lower deck for her morning swim.

 

“What a fucking waste,” stated Boris in a matter of fact manner.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

That such a perfect specimen of the female form is a dyke.”

 

“Fuck you Boris,” I said as I started preparing the coffee.

 

“What, what did I do?”

 

“Just fuck you, that’s all, F U C K you.”

 

****To be continued****

Going Soft and Other Thoughts

This morning, while X-Celerator and I walked through the neighborhood a few random incidents caused me to think twice about whether or not my edge has chosen to abandon me just a couple of months before we plan on traveling to the northeast for the summer.

 

While walking north on 7^th street on the way back to our house, a person (at this point I could not determine gender) and a dog (I could hear the tags jingling) approached us from the front.  I could hear the dog handler step off the sidewalk onto someone’s lawn likely to avoid a collision with us.  His dog growled and snapped at the X-Dude and, I can state with pride that my gentle guide dog ignored the unruly pet and continued walking forward. 

 

Typically, when a random family dog snaps, growls or behaves badly toward X-Celerator and/or me, its human says something out loud.  This morning, the nasty creature just passes by, dog on leash, without acknowledging our existence.  “Hey fuck-tard, we’re not deaf,” pops into my head and I prepare to turn and shout it at the person.  Then, this new idea came in, “Ignore them, shouting won’t accomplish anything,” and I followed the second notion.

 

About one minute later, a male voice from further behind us than the nasty dog and his moron starts yelling in inquiry, “Is that Ralph?”  I think that he may be talking to me as there were only three humans within shouting distance and, perhaps, from behind, the X-Dog and I looked like someone named Ralph.  It also occurred to me that this human may have met us on a walk in the past but forgot my name.  So, I turn around and, while pointing at my chest, ask, “Me?”

 

The human did not respond, he just yelled, “Is that Ralph?” again.  I assumed that this mental magician didn’t hear me so I yell, “Me?”  Again, he yells, “Is that Ralph?”  His voice seemed considerably nearer to me at this point so, without the appropriate serious New Jersey accent attached, I asked, “Are you talking to me?”

 

Finally, the genius yelling for Ralph and the previously silent human both kind of mumbled (can one actually mumble at a volume loud enough to be heard at a distance?) something on the order of, “No, Ralph is the name of this dog.”  Did I respond with a, “Listen dipshit, you might have fucking said something,” but, rather, I turned north again and told X-Celerator to go forward.

 

If I arrive in the Boston area with this newfound lack of profanity and aggression, I may end up in the filet section at the local fish market.  My friends will laugh at me and will have ammunition from which I have no defense.  I fear that I’m going soft and getting their rapidly.  Does anyone make a Viagra for the attitude?

 

Demonstrating further evidence of my newfound politeness, a few blocks further up the street, I could hear a woman and a real little kid, maybe four or five years old talking.  As we approached, the mom or babysitter or whatever the adult’s relationship with the child is, asked, “Does he like children?”  Immediately, my brain lights up with a “Yes, for breakfast, sunny side or over easy.”  I said, “He loves them but,” I leaned down closer to the little girl and explained, “you can’t pet him now, he’s working.  If you see us in the park, you can play with him then.”  The adult thanked me and the little girl said a sweet, “See you soon.”

 

It’s one thing for me to allow a pair of imbecile adult males to act like I’m invisible but kindness toward small children?  What has become of my once nearly famous edge?

 

-          * - * - * -

 

I seem to have regained the ability to include epigraphs in my writing.  I think separating dashes and asterisks with spaces confuses whatever Word does to replace the three stars I used in the past.

 

-          * - * - * -

 

While walking this morning, I did think of another slogan for the back of one of the CrankyBlindPerson.com t-shirts that Dena and I will sell through our upcoming online cranky blind person gear shop.  This one takes one of the originals and makes it a bit more specific by saying, “Thank you for not running a red light and killing me!”  Needless to say, the motivation for this slogan was a car who ran a red light about 5 paces in front of the X-Pup and me while we walked this morning.

 

-          * - * - * -

 

If the guys who make NVDA ever build a virtualized version similar to SATOGO, I think they should change its name to PAWS – Public Access With Speech.  They could use a cute guide dog paw print as a logo instead of that mean old shark that represents the leading brand.

 

-          * - * - * -

 

I think that the people who make Cialis should hire Grace Slick to do the soundtrack for a television commercial.  With a slight tweak, she could revive her most famous song: “Go see Alice when you’re ten feet tall…”

 

-          * - * - * -

 

I started using the dog barking ring tone on my T-Mobile Dash phone.  Of course, I live with two dogs whom we reprimand for barking.  So, when my phone rang I would automatically start shouting, “No noise!  Come!  No noise! No, come!” and so on.  I started to wonder why I had been getting so few calls.  Did our dogs get curious about why I had started maniacally shouting at them?

 

-          * - * - * -

 

On Friday we took delivery on our new shallow water fishing boat.  It has a kick ass electric motor designed for salt water and is sleek, white and shiny new.  We need to register it before we can take it out fishing.  I got a life preserver for X-Celerator and a pair of shades called Doggles to protect his eyes from the effects of the shiny Florida sun and to keep fish hooks away from these organs vital to his employment.  The X-Dude swims very well, he is a Labrador after all, but if he jumps or falls out of the boat in relatively deep water, I haven’t a clue how we would get a wet, 92 pound, hairy beast back into the boat.

 

-          * - * - * -

 

Maybe my edge has started to fade as a result of all of the clean talking, super smart, ultra polite people with whom I work at bookshare.org, CUNY and elsewhere.  None of them come from the northeast and, as I’m entirely outnumbered, I suppose that my subconscious may be surrendering rather than trying to attach an entirely new vocabulary to the people around me.  I really worry about this softness thing.  For nearly 48 years, I have sounded like a guy from Jersey and, in the last 25 years, with that bitterness New England causes in a person.  These days, my newfound, “Aw shucks” attitude scares me and causes me to have a strong desire to move to Nebraska.  The only previous attachment Jersey had to the corn husker state being the Springsteen album named for the place.

 

-          * - * - * -

 

I’m working with a lot of Daisy related software lately.  I must say that for the desktop, FS has the hands down winner and I would guess that it is pretty kicking on the PAC Mate as well but I haven’t tried it yet.  I do not know if FS has started or plans to sell it for any other Windows Mobile device so people who use the Dolphin or Code Factory screen readers for them can enjoy the really good book reader.

 

For open source, free desktop software that I think will improve dramatically as more people need a Daisy player for NLS, bookshare.org and other book repositories, AMIS (pronounced ahmee as in the French plural for friend and not Amos as in Famous the cookie) is really quite good.  Its self voicing interface seems a bit incomplete but it works great with SATOGO which makes a very cost effective solution for reading enthusiasts on a tight budget.

 

I’ve heard the Icon does pretty cool things with bookshare.org content and, perhaps, other Daisy content as well.  I haven’t seen one of these in person so I can only describe what my friends have told me.

 

Finally, I’ll say it again: if you want the best Daisy experience, get out the credit card, call my friends at ILA (or your favorite AT retailer) and buy a Victor Reader Stream (Vic) from Humanware.  It continues getting better with each new software release and it has held the lead position (in my survey of myself) for quite some time.

 

-          * - * - * -

 

I’m curious, how many BC readers use the JAWS Quick Keys or one of the knock offs in the other screen readers to navigate web pages?  Of those who use them, how many use more than the (JAWS and SA keystrokes quoted here, I do not know the Window-Eyes defaults off hand) “n” to jump to the next block of non-link text, the “h” to jump to the next header and one or two others?  I have really loved this feature since we put it into JAWS a long time ago but recently have read that although these improve browsing efficiency quite a lot, few people ever learn more than a small number of these really useful features.

 

On the efficiency question, how many people use the JAWS Speech and Sounds Manager?  Again, I really love this feature but hear an awful lot of people say they haven’t tried it or that they didn’t understand it.  I remember working with Eric and Ernie to make this as cool as we could and feel a bit disappointed when what I thought was a real big breakthrough technology goes ignored.

 

-          * - * - * -

 

I’ll stop now.  I have work to do.  I have been receiving a lot of fan mail for BC during my recent silences and really appreciate all of it.  Once I get my various gigs sorted out and build a predictable working schedule, you will see more BC articles on a far more regular basis than I’ve been publishing thus far in 2008.

 

-- End

Am I on the Spam Blog List?

Yesterday, Darrell posted a suggestion that I try to look for something near the visual verification box that I get everytime I try to login to Blogger to post a new article. This would also explain why the email and Word post features have stopped working as they can easily be automated and allow bots with bintentions to post unseemly articles or advertisements.

I'm entirely uncertain how I got onto this list. In over two years of writing BC, we still have yet to reach 300 total posts so I doubt the problem results from a algorithm that searches from blogs with too many posts. I do have over 500 comments that have not been moderated which are all spam and I never went into the blogger interface to delete all of them but this number has hardly grown since blogger has added the visual verification code to the add comment feature which was pretty long ago so, unless the algorithm regarding unmoderated comments has changed recently, this shouldn't be the source of the problem.

I do post to the blog from a number of different IP addresses including my home, various hotels, friends' homes, Starbucks, Asia and the fairly random locations of conferences about this stuff that I attend with some irregularity.

I think I read somewhere that a random reader can file complaints about a blog hosted on blogger that contains content offensive to them. This may add an extra level of complexity to the process because, as any regular reader already knows, BC does not pull punches. I ocasionally use profanity in a quote from one of my fictitious characters as it fits with their personae and once in a while I'll use foul language to emphasize a point. I grew up in New Jersey where such language is used everywhere and to describe everything so the little bit sprinkled throughout BC can actually be considered tame by the standards we had in my adolescent social life.

Also, if anyone did do something to this blog to get us onto a black list, we will take the high road and not try to retaliate as, while I encourage childishness, I don't like resentment very much.

Note: I wrote this item in the blogger interface and do not know how to use its spell checker so please excuse any words that look or sound a little funny.

-- End

More on my Pursuit of Word 2007 Publish to Blog Feature

This morning, I had a few emails containing comments people have made to recent BC posts. I have comment moderation turned on so spam comments don’t get through to the blog itself. When I hit the “publish” link on the first comment today, I was presented with an error page from blogger that said something about cookies being corrupted or acting poorly for some reason. After doing a bit of clean up, I could log back into blogger and post the comment.

So, if you see this message with no text following, it means that my Word 2007 problem went away as a function of fixing the possibly related blogger login function.

Ok, that didn’t work and I even tried to delete my blog account within Word and start over from scratch but, for no reason apparent to me yet, I get a dialogue containing an error message that says something like, “Word could not contact your provider, please contact your blog host for additional help.” This sentence was pretty useless but I’ll try sending blogger a note or searching their FAQ to see if others are having the same problems.

Ok, trying to publish using the blogger interface didn’t work either as I seem to have dropped my Internet connection. I’m going to try again with Word before resorting to the blogger interface which almost always means that I need to summon Susan, my lovely wife, to read the visual verification as I can never seem to understand the numbers played in the audio alternative.

Ok, when I returned to Word 2007 and tried the publish to blog feature, I found that I had lost my Internet connection and had to reboot to get it back. Thus, I'm in the blogger interface hoping I can do this independently but suspecting that Susan will need to help again.

Anyone with any information about the Word 2007 blog posting issues that I'm experiencing should please write to me to see if we can find a solution.



--End

More on my Word 2007 Publishing Woes

I had to get assistance from my lovely wife to post the item about the Word 2007 Publish to Blog feature. For no reason I can discern, it simply no longer works for me. If anyone has any ideas how I managed to break this or how/if some combination of Microsoft and google broke it, please send along any information you might have about the problem and, hopefully, anything you may have learned about how to fix it.

Also, has anyone noticed that the keystrokes to get to the publish menu is Alt F U? What are Word’s authors saying with that F U to those of us who want to publish blog entries from within Word? Coincidence? I think not, clearly this is all part of the international conspiracy against my personal happiness.

While I’m writing about MS Word, I will add another problem I encounter with relative frequency that may have a solution somewhere in the Word options dialogues but, for the life of me, I haven’t been able to find it in either Word 2003 or 2007. The symptom, using either JAWS or System Access (I haven’t tried Window-Eyes yet but I’ll take a leap of faith and assume it works in the same manner as the others ifn this case) is that epigraphs disappear, at least in the context of a screen freader’s output.

What is an epigraph? To split up a short written piece of text into “chunks” one may place a few asterisks or some other symbol between two sections of the article denoting to the reader that the next section contains information different but related to the text above it. In Word XP, I could type *** and center it relative to the text above and below it and, using a screen reader, one would hear “star star star,” which our readers could figure out means a break in the story.

Since I switched to Office 2003 and later to 2007, typing three consecutive asterisks and hitting ENTER causes the stars to disappear (to a screen reader at least) and sometimes makes the text flow strangely as scenes in a story change without anything telling the user that one segment had ended and another began. I found this especially annoying in the “Blind Machurian Zone” Gonz Blinko story which jumps from place to place and character group to group pretty frequently and, reading via a SayAll (or the equivalent command in screen readers other than JAWS) it sounds very choppy.

I do not know if the epigraph is translated into anything useful for sighted readers as I haven’t polled any lately. I can only speak to how they don’t work in a usable fashion for readers with vision impairment.

While writing about writing, I’d like to ask our readers a question. Typically, if I have a question about virtually anything regarding grammar or the rules of writing in English, I go immediately to what many consider the Bible of writing guidelines, “Elements of Style,” by Strunk and White. Both Professor Strunk and E. B. White died long before the Internet came to the general public so did not include any style rules regarding usage of URLs and other web related elements. My question: most web addresses (www.google.com for instance) are almost always written in all lower case. What is the rule for starting a sentence with a URL such as, “Bookshare.org is one of my favorite web sites?” Should the author capitalize the “b” or start the sentence with a lower case letter?

Has anyone put out a style guide for the information age and, if so, does anyone pay attention to it?

End