Category: I Think …

Starting The Year Off In The Wrong Way

After reading this article I simply had to vent a little – not the nicest way to start the year off but a sharp contrast with the warm fuzzies of the holiday posts.

Wake up people! Evil abounds in the world, even in such non-Evil states as Oregon. Yes, Oregon. There, nestled in the humble towns of Portland and Corvallis, tucked away at the Oregon State University and the Oregon Health and Science University, “scientists” are attempting to find a cure for homosexuality. Not content with the wishy-washy realm of psychology and its “Reparative Therapy“, these researchers are concentrating on finding a chemical cure.

The scientists have been able to pinpoint the mechanisms influencing the desires of “male-oriented” rams by studying their brains. The animals’ skulls are cut open and electronic sensors are attached to their brains.

By varying the hormone levels, mainly by injecting hormones into the brain, they have had “considerable success” in altering the rams’ sexuality, with some previously gay animals becoming attracted to ewes.

Success! Let’s all discuss visions of providing said cure via means of a patch, like the nicotine patch. They’ll be curing those homosexuals while they work and play! Think of the Utopia! Oh, oh, and then they mention the idea of providing pre-natal testing … followed (dare we hope) by in utero hormone treatment. We can cure them before they’re even born! Hallelujah!

This just makes me mad, mad, mad. Say it with me – “Sometimes I just shake my head”.

The good doctor mentions that little research is done on sexuality because it is such a touchy topic – true enough. My question to the good doctor would be “why?” What do you hope to accomplish through this research? Increase ram mating ratios? Bollocks. What happened to social responsibility — think about how your research could be used by our (often times short-sighted) culture. Good lord, even Martina Navratilova has spoken out against this research …. Why is our society so quick to dismiss the contributions homosexuals can make to our world? Why do we see homosexuality as something that needs to be cured, fixed, taboo?

Predictably the researcher doesn’t want to take any personal responsibility for his work, shrugging his shoulders because

it is up to policy makers to legislate on questions of ethics

As a final note, I think this Wikipedia entry on animal sexuality is, to say the least, very interesting. Homosexuality in penguins, fetishistic behaviour, faking orgasms, sex for pleasure – it’s all there. But it makes me wonder what happened to the argument against homosexuality that humans are the only ones with that “sickness” – that it simply isn’t natural? What? Oh? That argument changed to say that homosexuality displays a lack of evolution, of higher brain function? You get to argue both ways? How convenient, er, hypocritical.

Well, welcome to 2007 people!

Flashy Things And Technology Of Olde

I’m no fan of Flash as you may or may not know. However it is almost impossible to consume pop culture sites today without interacting with a Flash site somehow. Well today is a landmark day – I’ve actually found something funny and interesting enough that I’m putting a Flash video link in my post directly. I’ve chosen Google over youtube though they both have the video.

Behold what happens when two geeks get together and think about old technology – stop motion capture. I’ve also never embedded any videos here before so this should be interesting.

In the spirit of hating Flash and the way it makes so much of the web inaccessible, I’m going to share a little secret with you. There exists a “bookmarklet” that allows you to download the .avi file that is played by the Flash player for many Google and youtube videos. Simply follow the instructions and you can view the videos from your own desktop, over and over – all without dipping into proprietary and close-sourced video players!

Finally, I leave you with a link to instructions on how to access the MP3 (audio) files that many Flash sites play so you can enjoy those upon your leisure too.

Hope these are as helpful to you as they are to me – which is to say extremely so.

I’ve Never Met A Blacklist I’ve Completely Agreed With

I’m a paid Shaw subscriber – they give me my daily Internet smack and so far I’ve been very happy with their services — except for their Internet phone service, but that’s another story. I was surprised to read an article the other day about how Shaw will now be blocking access to a list of sites without letting me know they’re doing it, why, or which sites.

This is, quite simply, censorship – and it is certainly for a good cause. They will be using a blacklist of sites provided by a government-funded operation called Cybertip.ca. They are aiming to reduce (eliminate?) child exploitation on the Internet, and I am 100% behind their goal. Child porn and pornography in general are not aspects of the Internet that should be ignored until they go away – they need to be addressed as the real problems they are.

But this initiative makes me a little uneasy, frankly. I have a few questions that I can’t find answers to:

  1. Was Shaw intending on telling me about this initiative? I’m paying them for access to the Internet and now, unannounced, they’ll be silently blocking parts of it
  2. What sites are on this blacklist? As a person affected by it I feel uncomfortable not being able to see what sites are included on it. My experience with blacklists is that inevitably some site ends up blacklisted that shouldn’t have been. How is the site operator to know why their traffic dropped overnight? Email blacklists like this exist in an attempt to stem the flow of Spam emails in the world – another initiative I can get behind. However they are publicly searchable for this very reason – people are put on it accidentally and as a website operator I need to be able to find out if I am listed on any of those lists to take corrective action.
  3. Who works for Cybertips, and what qualifications are required to become a person who decides whether or not my site is available to 80% of Canadian Internet visitors?
  4. Since Cybertips can only do this because it is explicitly against the law to consume this trash, what can we expect from the future? What is stopping politicians from deciding to enforce other laws in Canada this way? For example politicians are not known to stand up to powerful lobbying bodies like the Copyright Cartel in Canada (CRIA). This is giving the government a certain degree of control over what sites I can visit on the Internet – where is the guarantee that this will not become a standard practice for enforcing any other laws, whether or not I agree with them?
  5. Why is the user not given some kind of message as to why the site is not available? It sounds like anyone who tries to access a blacklisted site will simply be pushed off into some kind of DNS dead-end. No special webpage explaining the situation, or giving the person resources to report a problem or miscategorized site. Is this really the best way to handle the problem?

These are just some questions I haven’t been able to find answers to. It’s a frightening article frankly because it feels like the tip of the proverbial iceberg – we’re giving the government of Canada a new level of control over the Canadian experience of the Internet and I don’t think it is being done the right way, assuming it should be done at all.

Baffled And Disappointed – Top Ten List Gets It Wrong

We all love Top 10 lists – they can be fun, informational and succinct – like a really good parable or story. A recent Top 10 list on CNet has, however, really missed the mark: Top ten girl geeks. I think there’s some humour in there and perhaps some basic research and genuine admiration. But I think in this case the list has done a disservice to women who are trying to topple that horrible trend of geeks and computers being so strictly gendered as masculine and feminine respectively.

If the list of the top 10 geek girls in history is so sparse that the author needed to include a fictional character, a cartoon character, and a Hollwood geek-lust icon then one of two things is wrong:

  1. There is a serious lack of role models and innovators to choose from
  2. The author simply didn’t want to present an honest list

Seeing as how there are some potential list members missing from this list, I tend to think that the first possibily – that there is a lack of people to list – is not the problem.

So that leaves us with the option that the author didn’t want to make a genuine list. Perhaps it was deemed too staid and boring if there wasn’t something pop-culture-related on the list? I’m not sure of the motivations.

However I am sure that this list gives me the impression that when discussing women and computers it is OK to put them on the same level as fictional characters and cartoons. People say that the computing industry isn’t hostile to women anymore? Really?

On a related note I was elated to see that the Gnome project created a women-only opportunity over the summer in relation to the Google Summer Of Code project. Kudos to them for standing up and addressing the elephant in the room, and then for actually doing something about it!

Welcome to Hybridsville – Population: The Bridgers

As some of you may know, Alisa and I have spent the last few weeks shopping for a new vehicle. It sounds like fun, but it’s been … educational. I think I know more about this car than many Ford salespeople out there, though our salesperson at Ocean Park Ford has been a real star. After much research and test driving, many nights of thoughts, budgeting, planning, etc, we have made our choice:

The Ford Escape Hybrid

We purchased a 2006 model to obtain further discounts on the car. Costs are everything to a growing family! This left us with very few choices for cars left in Canada (I believe there were 4 or 5 when we first started test driving the car). By the time we selected the car they had to bring it down from Courtenay – the other two are in Eastern Canada somewhere – Montreal I believe?

We were able to use an employee discount plan through McKesson to get a great deal on the truck. We also discovered that I still qualify for the Recent Graduate Program from Ford, as I graduated from my SFU degree in June 2003. And this is the meat of this post – not to gloat about our “New Shiny” as it were.

Continue reading Welcome to Hybridsville – Population: The Bridgers

The Million Dollar Homepage aka Who Wants to Waste Their Money?

Another enterprising individual has made a million dollars via the Internet. I think all the good idea were taken though – this one is just exploiting advertisers’ willingness to spend money without any proof that their “investment” actually makes them any money. Seriously; they take the shotgun approach without ever actually bothering to prove that their now-missing money actually resulted in income of some kind.

But I digress.

This fellow wanted to pay his way though higher education, and decided to simply sell the space on a webpage. A simple idea that paid off. He sold every pixel on his page – which you can still see for historical reasons (and monetary – he promised his investors they would have a page up for 5 years at least). He made his million dollars though I think he was surprised that he did in the end.

Check out his blog for a little history and his plans for the future. Do you think we’ll ever hear from him again? I didn’t actually hear about this while it was happening, so his media penetration wasn’t quite maximized. Don’t tell his investors that though. Of course just because I didn’t hear about it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t wildly successful. I’m not that egocentric. But then again here I am blogging about myself again rather than about this fellow. Gee, maybe I do have a problem!

Software Accessibility Redux

After the flurry of comments on my last post about accessibility on the web, I wanted to add another tidbit of interesting and related news. An aspect of accessibility that is often not thought of during software and web site design is the troubles that occur for users who are colour blind. Basic usability tenets hold that encoding meaning into colour needs to be done carefully for various reasons such as colour blind users and the large variance in cultural significance for a single colour.

But I’ve always wondered what colour blind users actually experience of my designs. It is a simple thing to activate a screen reader and check to make sure that it is able to convey the meaning of the screen verbally. But how do I check to see what a colour blind person sees?

I came across this neat blog entry by a programmer about a new tool that allows you to preview software in the 3 distinct “flavours” of colour blindness. Note that I did not say you can easily do the preview – it doesn’t look easy at all and seems to be limited to a specific means of building software. However I think tools such as this are a great idea and if we could make this kind of analysis easier and more commonplace I’d be a much happier guy.

NFB vs. Target – Part 2

Sorry for the bad pun in the title.

In February I noted that Target is being sued in a class action lawsuit because its website purportedly discriminates against blind users or anyone else using screen reader technology to shop at the website. I wasn’t shy about my opinion either:

… I support this guy, and I think that if the judicial system chooses again to say that the rules of brick-and-mortar stores do not apply online, screw that. The Internet is no longer a toy or hobby. Social and consumer pressures exist – acknowledge this and don’t let people get away with laziness at the expense of the disabled.

Last week a judge ruled that this lawsuit can go forward – she believes that

… the ‘ordinary meaning’ of the ADA’s prohibition against discrimination in the enjoyment of goods, services, facilities or privileges, is that whatever goods or services the place provides, it cannot discriminate on the basis of disability in providing enjoyment of those goods and services.

I think she’s right – if you offer the public a consumerist service you need to ensure that you do not do so in a discriminatory fashion. Period.