RantWoman is hereby documenting some of the challenges of providing services at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing.
RantWoman was pounding away on other gigs in her own domicile but she dropped by the Friendly Neighborhood center to meet with a regular there. The receptionist passed along the message that the person RantWoman was hoping to talk to is out with another chapter of medical horrors.
Medical horrors among Friendly Neighborhood Center... regulars are worthy of their own entry. Basically, the Friendly Neighborhood Center runs heavily on a "peer support"model. A charitable way of explaining that would be that a lot of volunteer labor keeps the place open. To a certain extent there are job descriptions but many roles suffer repeated interruptions as the people who fill or are most attached to them suffer round after round of horrendous medical difficulties. These are the sort of horrendous difficulties that make fainter hearts such as RantWoman shut up about many things she might be cross about simply because other people show up in spite of nearly endless ever-mutating forms of awfulness. One downside is that people get really attached to their roles. Another is that there is a severe need for concepts like resilience and cross-training so that needed things continue to happen even when key people are gone.
RantWoman is further meditating about the dimensions of technical support and training needed every time the Friendly Neighborhood Center adds new services. Recently the Friendly Neighborhood Center added video Skype.
This is a HUGE service enhancement but the video Skype and the webcam got installed on one computer and there is no simple documentation. RantWoman possibly has a lot of nerve whining about this since she had to miss the volunteers meeting where this was announced. Well, RantWoman is familiar enough with the Friendly Neighborhood Center to expect that showing up might have made her even more painfully conscious of training issues, but that is a different problem.
Call this communications problems: RantWoman was previously scheduled to be at the Super Duper Powerpoint festival; if the volunteers meetings occur regularly, RantWoman will calendar them, but RantWoman is the sort of geek who like as not will just walk up to technology and start fussing with it based only on her general level of gall and previous life experience.
Today For RantWoman's trouble she wound up:
--rebooting the computer because she started NVDA for trial purposes and did not pay attention to the instructions about how to shut it down before clobbering the screen with the help information.
--Fishing around in Skype limbo trying to call the very person most likely to use Skype, the person who was not where expected because of more medical horrors, one of the people who has a much better time communicating with the sign-language illiterate such as RantWoman if there are aids such as video Skype around.
At this point, RantWoman gave up, went home, caught news of the latest medical mishaps via email, and decided the problems on her mind would keep until tomorrow.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Morning Anxiety 2: Family preparedness
Holy crap! The radio says the kid who is sick with probably H1N1 goes to the school where the world's most irrepressible nephew went to for pre-kindergarten. That school is just up the road from where RantWoman lives. She can walk there. That school is now closed for a few days while the sick boy recovers, everything gets sanitized, etc. Maybe that means everyone with exposure issues is staying home. However, since that is the kind of urban school where lots of people ride the bus as their main mode of transportation, that means there are a lot of people in the 'hood who possibly have already been exposed or who will mock our President's entreaties to stay off the bus if sick simply because they have no other way to get to their medical care. Look for an uptick in sales of hand sanitizer and soap at least.
(Wonder if avoiding infection will also cut down on the gangbangers' inclinations to shoot at each other too.)
The other King County cases are a primary care doctor with members of her household also now possibly sick and another guy the morning news says little about. RantWoman wishes all affected a full and speedy recovery. RantWoman now interrupts this outbreak of good wishes to address her own special freakout and family anxieties.
One of RantWoman's current Make your own job gigs involves teaching disaster preparedness skills all kinds of ways to her friends and neighbors. However, RantWoman's efforts to impart same to her extended family and to have family conversations about a couple subtle but important concepts are, well, bumpy. RantMom recently allowed as how she has no interest in helping organize training in her own building but that if they wind up holding events when she is available, she certainly will go. RantMom is sort of a busy lady and if she goes, RantWoman can at least nag her gently based on whatever RantMom reports back. RantWoman also suspects that there might be a measure of paralyzing nervousness and denial about RantMom's reaction. Since RantMom is hardly unique on that score, forge ahead anyway.
Little Sister is a MUCH harder problem. Little Sister has very complicated medical issues including, no surprise to anyone reasonably conscious, a diagnosed anxiety disorder. Little Sister's medical issues tend to be things that generate three or four inconclusive trips to the ER at all hours before some attentive practitioner finally thinks through all the symptoms and realizes that the problem most assuredly is not all in Little Sister's head. Meanwhile Little Sister has probably gone through multiple cycles of mental freakout over her situation, what "average" means in terms of run-of-the-mill medical run-around, and generalized vexation and aggravation.
Little Sister's husband, nephew's father is from Guatemala. English is a barrier. So is complex info in any language. At the moment Little Sister is still recovering from major surgery a couple months ago. The general trend is positive but the recovery is slow, with, RantWoman thinks still some heightened concern about infection. In other words, in the middle of pandemic pandemonium, Little Sister is exactly the kind of person who both might really need medical care and should definitely try to avoid the all-too-frequent camp out for hours in the ER lobby experiences that define one face of our current healthcare system.
It's also not like preparing to cope with one disaster exactly handles others. Little Sister made much less effort to go anywhere during the Snowpocalypse than even RantWoman did. Little Sister can order groceries online if needed now. But RantWoman is stuck on issues around Little Sister and medical care amid the flu issues going around, and the anxiety disorder gets in the way of even talking about options. Maybe RantWoman just has to let things play out and figure if there are crisis moments, everyone involved will work things out in the moment. To say the least that is an interesting approach to anxiety management.
(Wonder if avoiding infection will also cut down on the gangbangers' inclinations to shoot at each other too.)
The other King County cases are a primary care doctor with members of her household also now possibly sick and another guy the morning news says little about. RantWoman wishes all affected a full and speedy recovery. RantWoman now interrupts this outbreak of good wishes to address her own special freakout and family anxieties.
One of RantWoman's current Make your own job gigs involves teaching disaster preparedness skills all kinds of ways to her friends and neighbors. However, RantWoman's efforts to impart same to her extended family and to have family conversations about a couple subtle but important concepts are, well, bumpy. RantMom recently allowed as how she has no interest in helping organize training in her own building but that if they wind up holding events when she is available, she certainly will go. RantMom is sort of a busy lady and if she goes, RantWoman can at least nag her gently based on whatever RantMom reports back. RantWoman also suspects that there might be a measure of paralyzing nervousness and denial about RantMom's reaction. Since RantMom is hardly unique on that score, forge ahead anyway.
Little Sister is a MUCH harder problem. Little Sister has very complicated medical issues including, no surprise to anyone reasonably conscious, a diagnosed anxiety disorder. Little Sister's medical issues tend to be things that generate three or four inconclusive trips to the ER at all hours before some attentive practitioner finally thinks through all the symptoms and realizes that the problem most assuredly is not all in Little Sister's head. Meanwhile Little Sister has probably gone through multiple cycles of mental freakout over her situation, what "average" means in terms of run-of-the-mill medical run-around, and generalized vexation and aggravation.
Little Sister's husband, nephew's father is from Guatemala. English is a barrier. So is complex info in any language. At the moment Little Sister is still recovering from major surgery a couple months ago. The general trend is positive but the recovery is slow, with, RantWoman thinks still some heightened concern about infection. In other words, in the middle of pandemic pandemonium, Little Sister is exactly the kind of person who both might really need medical care and should definitely try to avoid the all-too-frequent camp out for hours in the ER lobby experiences that define one face of our current healthcare system.
It's also not like preparing to cope with one disaster exactly handles others. Little Sister made much less effort to go anywhere during the Snowpocalypse than even RantWoman did. Little Sister can order groceries online if needed now. But RantWoman is stuck on issues around Little Sister and medical care amid the flu issues going around, and the anxiety disorder gets in the way of even talking about options. Maybe RantWoman just has to let things play out and figure if there are crisis moments, everyone involved will work things out in the moment. To say the least that is an interesting approach to anxiety management.
Morning Anxiety 1: the plague, the bus, the net
Last night the King County health department held a press conference to announce the identification of 6 cases of probable H1N1, aka swine flu, in WA, 3 in King County, 2 in the county just to the north and one in eastern WA. Today the radio says WA authorities have to send the samples to the CDC for confirmation. RantWoman assumes local authorities must be pretty certain or they would not have held a press conference, but RantWoman does wonder what magical blessings the specialists at the CDC will have to utter to verify this.
Those of us who like our denial fresh and refreshed daily now have the option of postponing our freakout for at least a few hours! We have the option, but....
====
Dear Mr. President,
HELLO Mr. President. Live on planet Earth PLEASE Mr. President! It does NOT necessarily make sense to tell people to stay off the bus if they are sick. At least some of the people who get sick are not going to have any other way to get to medical treatment besides the bus! At least some of the people who ride the bus all the time need to ride the bus to get to other regularly scheduled medical treatment.
It's not like there is a reason you would have to think about this what with Marine 1, the presidential limo and all that, but you need to put your ear out SOMEWHERE about this point.
In fact, although we all need to wash our hands and cover our coughs anyway, SOME of us regular bus riders suspect that riding the bus keeps our immune systems fit and toned and able to respond quickly to all kinds of infectious assaults. Well, we suspect that but we still wash our hands!
Love RantWoman
=====
The radio this morning reports that huge numbers of people are signing onto the CDC's Twitter client to follow news of the pandemic. Everyone RantWoman knows who follows Twitter, especially some who must be new users complain that there are lots of problems with Twitter overload just now. This should surprise no one since Twitter like all services that rely on computers and computer networks has a finite capacity, a capacity it might be possible to beef up quickly but still a finite capacity.
What's Twitter? That's the consensus of an email list for visually impaired computer users, the kind that would, in the general jargon of IT marketers, be considered blind geekware power users but not necessarily early adopters. In other words, if you want to reach blind people with info about the pandemic of the week, don't bother with Twitter.
Just last week, one of the blind programming lists RantWoman reads posted a link for an accessible Twitter client. RantWoman has not bothered interacting with Twitter yet mostly because she has more than enough input streams already. Count this as one RantWoman unwittingly doing her part not to contribute to Twitter overload.
=====
Speaking of input overload, RantWoman wonders how a lot of Spanish-speaking and probably mixed status families she knows are getting info at this point. RantWoman wonders but she does not necessarily wonder hard enough to go find some Spanish-language media streams and see for herself, at least until she writes up a whole "cobbler's children have no shoes" saga about her own extended family!
Those of us who like our denial fresh and refreshed daily now have the option of postponing our freakout for at least a few hours! We have the option, but....
====
Dear Mr. President,
HELLO Mr. President. Live on planet Earth PLEASE Mr. President! It does NOT necessarily make sense to tell people to stay off the bus if they are sick. At least some of the people who get sick are not going to have any other way to get to medical treatment besides the bus! At least some of the people who ride the bus all the time need to ride the bus to get to other regularly scheduled medical treatment.
It's not like there is a reason you would have to think about this what with Marine 1, the presidential limo and all that, but you need to put your ear out SOMEWHERE about this point.
In fact, although we all need to wash our hands and cover our coughs anyway, SOME of us regular bus riders suspect that riding the bus keeps our immune systems fit and toned and able to respond quickly to all kinds of infectious assaults. Well, we suspect that but we still wash our hands!
Love RantWoman
=====
The radio this morning reports that huge numbers of people are signing onto the CDC's Twitter client to follow news of the pandemic. Everyone RantWoman knows who follows Twitter, especially some who must be new users complain that there are lots of problems with Twitter overload just now. This should surprise no one since Twitter like all services that rely on computers and computer networks has a finite capacity, a capacity it might be possible to beef up quickly but still a finite capacity.
What's Twitter? That's the consensus of an email list for visually impaired computer users, the kind that would, in the general jargon of IT marketers, be considered blind geekware power users but not necessarily early adopters. In other words, if you want to reach blind people with info about the pandemic of the week, don't bother with Twitter.
Just last week, one of the blind programming lists RantWoman reads posted a link for an accessible Twitter client. RantWoman has not bothered interacting with Twitter yet mostly because she has more than enough input streams already. Count this as one RantWoman unwittingly doing her part not to contribute to Twitter overload.
=====
Speaking of input overload, RantWoman wonders how a lot of Spanish-speaking and probably mixed status families she knows are getting info at this point. RantWoman wonders but she does not necessarily wonder hard enough to go find some Spanish-language media streams and see for herself, at least until she writes up a whole "cobbler's children have no shoes" saga about her own extended family!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Clean Draws
RantWoman is a nerd. This by now should be well-established, but RantWoman discovered a blog that far exceeds her capacity for rants. Plus it seems to do a phenomenal job of digesting a bunch of stuff RantWoman might not otherwise have time to interact with!
http://cleandraws.com/
http://cleandraws.com/
Search
Last night RantWoman had to go to a public hearing with representatives of the King County council about her transit-related public participation project. RantWoman will calendar one more public hearing about the topic and the option down the line of contacting the transit planners she has been interacting with for months about the results of what gets implemented. At the moment though RantWoman is thinking about one vexation of her bus-addicted lifestyle: search or more precisely the things that wind up being a real pain because RantWoman has no car in which to leave things not traditionally viewed favorably during search.
Lots of public buildings in this day and age have a search with x-ray machines, metal detectors of various configurations, and patient but frequently humor-challenged public servants operating the whole apparatus. RantWoman knows that there is really good historical reason to have such a procedure in some places. For instance RantWoman still says a silent prayer every time she goes in one entry to the King County courthouse because of a case years ago when an estranged husband shot his wife and two of her friends outside a courtroom before a hearing. RantWoman also generally tries hard to contain her biting wit, her ill-behaved white cane, and her general demeanor to minimize hassles; this is especially essential if one happens also to be carrying signs or other indicators of vigorous public participation, not the case here. RantWoman's effort in these realms does not reckon with either table knives or an occasional need for a pocket knife.
The table knife story goes like this. Once upon a time, RantWoman baked some kind of quickbread to take to a potluck. For some reason, even though RantWoman knew the place where thepotluck occurred had silverware, RantWoman brought a table knife for her quick bread. The quick bread was munched enthusiastically, but RantWoman put the table knife back in the plastic bag and threw the plastic bag into one of her bags. RantWoman completely forgot about the table knife until it turned up on a search x-ray. Since RantWoman had no car to take the offending item back to, and storage lockers are also incompatible with someone's security sensibilities she had to surrender the offending potential weapon. RantWoman found this especially grating since she had just ridden downtown on a bus watching a kid in a seat opposite her flick a switchblade every other second all the way downtown.
The pocket knife story is even more vexing and pathetic but is to be saved for its own entry. Suffice it to say that RantWoman has gotten good at, for example, slicing apples with plastic knives because actually maintaining ownership of a pocket knife or at least a pocket knife RantWoman might have available in the course of a day away from home is completely unrealistic.
RantWoman was thinking of all these issues while getting ready to go to yesterday's hearing. In anticipation of search vexations, RantWoman even cleaned out a bunch of older mail and unneeded paper, though no weapons out of her bags. The hearing was set to begin after normal business hours. RantWoman arrived off a bus and just passed through the metal detector in search of a human.
RantWoman looked around and around and then proceeded to the elevator where she was finally stopped by a metal-detector wielding public servant in a low-key uniform. Public servant barely glanced at RantWoman's bags: he probably figured even if there were anything dangerous inside, RantWoman might not be able to find it in a timely way. RantWoman got a prefunctory wave of the metal detector and then the public servant lost interest because someone else showed up needing at least token attention. In other words, RantWoman's pre-event fretting about the search was all completely for naught. RantWoman supposes she could have worse problems, but anyway enough!
Lots of public buildings in this day and age have a search with x-ray machines, metal detectors of various configurations, and patient but frequently humor-challenged public servants operating the whole apparatus. RantWoman knows that there is really good historical reason to have such a procedure in some places. For instance RantWoman still says a silent prayer every time she goes in one entry to the King County courthouse because of a case years ago when an estranged husband shot his wife and two of her friends outside a courtroom before a hearing. RantWoman also generally tries hard to contain her biting wit, her ill-behaved white cane, and her general demeanor to minimize hassles; this is especially essential if one happens also to be carrying signs or other indicators of vigorous public participation, not the case here. RantWoman's effort in these realms does not reckon with either table knives or an occasional need for a pocket knife.
The table knife story goes like this. Once upon a time, RantWoman baked some kind of quickbread to take to a potluck. For some reason, even though RantWoman knew the place where thepotluck occurred had silverware, RantWoman brought a table knife for her quick bread. The quick bread was munched enthusiastically, but RantWoman put the table knife back in the plastic bag and threw the plastic bag into one of her bags. RantWoman completely forgot about the table knife until it turned up on a search x-ray. Since RantWoman had no car to take the offending item back to, and storage lockers are also incompatible with someone's security sensibilities she had to surrender the offending potential weapon. RantWoman found this especially grating since she had just ridden downtown on a bus watching a kid in a seat opposite her flick a switchblade every other second all the way downtown.
The pocket knife story is even more vexing and pathetic but is to be saved for its own entry. Suffice it to say that RantWoman has gotten good at, for example, slicing apples with plastic knives because actually maintaining ownership of a pocket knife or at least a pocket knife RantWoman might have available in the course of a day away from home is completely unrealistic.
RantWoman was thinking of all these issues while getting ready to go to yesterday's hearing. In anticipation of search vexations, RantWoman even cleaned out a bunch of older mail and unneeded paper, though no weapons out of her bags. The hearing was set to begin after normal business hours. RantWoman arrived off a bus and just passed through the metal detector in search of a human.
RantWoman looked around and around and then proceeded to the elevator where she was finally stopped by a metal-detector wielding public servant in a low-key uniform. Public servant barely glanced at RantWoman's bags: he probably figured even if there were anything dangerous inside, RantWoman might not be able to find it in a timely way. RantWoman got a prefunctory wave of the metal detector and then the public servant lost interest because someone else showed up needing at least token attention. In other words, RantWoman's pre-event fretting about the search was all completely for naught. RantWoman supposes she could have worse problems, but anyway enough!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Orgasmic Childbirth
RantWoman's Make Your Own Job gig does not exactly come with a good watercooler or a totally feasible crowd of water cooler chatterers. RantWoman considers that unfortunate, especially in light of the following item on Orgasms during childbirth , including a preview of an upcoming documentary RantWoman would have to plug her television in to watch and 500+ comments. The comments definitely run the gamut.
RantWoman could certainly see orgasms during childbirth. RantWoman could definitely see it. RantWoman could also see where the very idea might exist in a completely different universe from some people's childbirth experiences. RantWoman can see a few other points she does not feel a fierce need to post to the article's already overflowing comments section / electronic proxy water cooler.
RantWoman actually has never given birth, and you dear Readers do not possibly know RantWoman well enough to be in the same sentence with anything more than glancing mention of her orgasms. In fact, merely posting about the topic, even posting into the faceless ether, is almost, ALMOST more than RantWoman can bring herself to do, except of course that, like most average lust-filled humans, RantWoman would desperately LIKE to chatter about this very topic over the water cooler.
Admittedly, RantWoman would blush several shades darker than her blog's mauve background if she actually had to talk about this in person with most of the people in her orbit. So unfortunately, even though RantWoman is pretty sure that 99.999999% of her readers would like nothing better than to have a good excuse to wander over and over around the topic of orgasms during childbirth or orgasms in other circumstances, the theme simultaneously exists in an Absolutely Do Not Go There conversational zone.
Here we come to an especially vexing aspect of RantWoman's interest in watercooler chatter about this topic: the issue of orgasms during childbirth often involves mom's partner, presumably often the dad. If one were going to talk about this, one would certainly want to be able to talk sort of frankly with guys who might hypothetically be in a situation to assist the orgasmic possibility, except of course that talking about the topic with many guys is even more blush-provoking that the idea of talking about the topic in general even if on the internet one might or might not even know the gender of all one's readers.
RantWoman has had to think about all this while deciding whether even to post to the list where this item came from. Posters to the list in question are about 80% guys. Sometimes, the list has interesting points about economics. Sometimes, it feels like a giant bucket of the academic worm castings left behind as the list members digest various philosophers, political theorists and economists. RantWoman actually does not mind this aspect of the list: RantWoman does not really have time for in-depth forays into many of the topics that come up but she has been reading the list long enough to have a tolerable sense of who can be counted on in what ways during the conversation and to enjoy enough of the back and forth to make the whole venture worthwhile.
This item was posted by a woman and the women on the list seem to interact with each other in the course of the general conversation less than the guys do. This is true even when the topic is something like which nationalities of men are romantic enough to be good tango partners and whether one should even generalize to the whole nationality based on the sample motivated to tango in the first place.
The guys were in fact stunningly silent about the tango partner question. RantWoman does not wish to speculate on whether the guys on the list the orgasms in childbirth item was posted to even tango. In a few cases, based only on postings, RantWoman finds it hard to picture. If the guys on the list do, they are probably less likely than women to have had the experience of both leading and following at different times depending on the gender balance at a given event. Or maybe tango attracts a greater percentage of men who are uptight about their gender identity and therefore have trouble having women or other men lead than some other kinds of dance.
On the other hand, guy perspectives on gender issues come up on the list occasionally, to varying effect. Also, the list moderator seems to do a search about once a week of odd things from porn sites: think scandalous porn threads with Sarah Palin stand-ins or other guilty pleasures. RantWoman seldom responds to these postings though sometimes she admits to finding them funny. RantWoman occasionally wonders whether the moderator's wife reads her husband's postings and what kind of conversations they might have about them.
The point here is that based on RantWoman's past experiences, the list this item came from would in fact be a reasonable recipient of a RantWoman comment about the topic. It's just that RantWoman exists in this firm shell of reserve. Well RantWoman flings undergarments around fairly nonchalantly in her building laundry room, even when one night she realized that one of her Muslim neighbors, a presumably single guy, might find this cavalier practice a little disconcerting. He did not linger long enough for RantWoman to ask him.
RantWoman thinks of herself as more relax than RantMom who gets appoplectic about racks of bras just hanging on retail displays. RantWoman also remembers one touching moment from one of her evenings dining with her buddies the Weed Whackin Wenches. RantWoman got home and sent the Wenches her customary effusive thank you email. One of the Wenches wrote back sheepishly to say they realized afterward that they had left their laundry, particularly the underwear half-folded in a pile in the living room as RantWoman came in. RantWoman remembers seeing a white pile in her usual visual fog, but had the Wenches not said anything, RantWoman would never have thought twice about what the pile was.
Upon mature reflection though, RantWoman realizes that if she wants to have an electronic water cooler here, she should just quit all the existential back and forth and post already!
RantWoman could certainly see orgasms during childbirth. RantWoman could definitely see it. RantWoman could also see where the very idea might exist in a completely different universe from some people's childbirth experiences. RantWoman can see a few other points she does not feel a fierce need to post to the article's already overflowing comments section / electronic proxy water cooler.
RantWoman actually has never given birth, and you dear Readers do not possibly know RantWoman well enough to be in the same sentence with anything more than glancing mention of her orgasms. In fact, merely posting about the topic, even posting into the faceless ether, is almost, ALMOST more than RantWoman can bring herself to do, except of course that, like most average lust-filled humans, RantWoman would desperately LIKE to chatter about this very topic over the water cooler.
Admittedly, RantWoman would blush several shades darker than her blog's mauve background if she actually had to talk about this in person with most of the people in her orbit. So unfortunately, even though RantWoman is pretty sure that 99.999999% of her readers would like nothing better than to have a good excuse to wander over and over around the topic of orgasms during childbirth or orgasms in other circumstances, the theme simultaneously exists in an Absolutely Do Not Go There conversational zone.
Here we come to an especially vexing aspect of RantWoman's interest in watercooler chatter about this topic: the issue of orgasms during childbirth often involves mom's partner, presumably often the dad. If one were going to talk about this, one would certainly want to be able to talk sort of frankly with guys who might hypothetically be in a situation to assist the orgasmic possibility, except of course that talking about the topic with many guys is even more blush-provoking that the idea of talking about the topic in general even if on the internet one might or might not even know the gender of all one's readers.
RantWoman has had to think about all this while deciding whether even to post to the list where this item came from. Posters to the list in question are about 80% guys. Sometimes, the list has interesting points about economics. Sometimes, it feels like a giant bucket of the academic worm castings left behind as the list members digest various philosophers, political theorists and economists. RantWoman actually does not mind this aspect of the list: RantWoman does not really have time for in-depth forays into many of the topics that come up but she has been reading the list long enough to have a tolerable sense of who can be counted on in what ways during the conversation and to enjoy enough of the back and forth to make the whole venture worthwhile.
This item was posted by a woman and the women on the list seem to interact with each other in the course of the general conversation less than the guys do. This is true even when the topic is something like which nationalities of men are romantic enough to be good tango partners and whether one should even generalize to the whole nationality based on the sample motivated to tango in the first place.
The guys were in fact stunningly silent about the tango partner question. RantWoman does not wish to speculate on whether the guys on the list the orgasms in childbirth item was posted to even tango. In a few cases, based only on postings, RantWoman finds it hard to picture. If the guys on the list do, they are probably less likely than women to have had the experience of both leading and following at different times depending on the gender balance at a given event. Or maybe tango attracts a greater percentage of men who are uptight about their gender identity and therefore have trouble having women or other men lead than some other kinds of dance.
On the other hand, guy perspectives on gender issues come up on the list occasionally, to varying effect. Also, the list moderator seems to do a search about once a week of odd things from porn sites: think scandalous porn threads with Sarah Palin stand-ins or other guilty pleasures. RantWoman seldom responds to these postings though sometimes she admits to finding them funny. RantWoman occasionally wonders whether the moderator's wife reads her husband's postings and what kind of conversations they might have about them.
The point here is that based on RantWoman's past experiences, the list this item came from would in fact be a reasonable recipient of a RantWoman comment about the topic. It's just that RantWoman exists in this firm shell of reserve. Well RantWoman flings undergarments around fairly nonchalantly in her building laundry room, even when one night she realized that one of her Muslim neighbors, a presumably single guy, might find this cavalier practice a little disconcerting. He did not linger long enough for RantWoman to ask him.
RantWoman thinks of herself as more relax than RantMom who gets appoplectic about racks of bras just hanging on retail displays. RantWoman also remembers one touching moment from one of her evenings dining with her buddies the Weed Whackin Wenches. RantWoman got home and sent the Wenches her customary effusive thank you email. One of the Wenches wrote back sheepishly to say they realized afterward that they had left their laundry, particularly the underwear half-folded in a pile in the living room as RantWoman came in. RantWoman remembers seeing a white pile in her usual visual fog, but had the Wenches not said anything, RantWoman would never have thought twice about what the pile was.
Upon mature reflection though, RantWoman realizes that if she wants to have an electronic water cooler here, she should just quit all the existential back and forth and post already!
Monday, April 27, 2009
Swine Flu
Today all the world is abuzz about swine flu, so why should RantWoman restrain herself?
RantWoman all weekend has been hearing the words pneumonia and "working age adults." Today thanks to easing up on the caffeine, taking time off for art and music, and indulging RantWoman's need for sleep, the realization dawned that these two concepts suggest workplace exposure. Further, if people in Mexico get pneumonia while tourists get the flu, either the air is really bad in places like Mexico City (well it is, but there is still the working age adults issue) or the pneumonia suggests greater exposure to inhaled pathogens, probably also a workplace issue.
RantWoman previously heard the words "working age adults" and inhaled pathogen in connection with a USA today story from last year.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-04-16-200349119_x.htm
Basically some Spanish-speaking workers at a meat-packing plant in the US started developing a weird neurological condition. They all went to their doctors and the doctors were all mystified by this rare condition. At some point interpreters who had interpreted for different patients and different doctors about the same rare problem helped put the pieces together. When someone figured out that all the sickest workers worked on a part of the line with lots of risk of inhaled exposure to animal central nervous system material, it was a fairly easy matter to figure out how to protect the affected workers.
RantWoman being a scribe rather than a pandemic flu specialist is going to take others' word about sustained human-to-human transmission of the swine flu virus at this point with the caveat that it's the end of the flu season in the US. Except for the cases with obvious link to something in Mexico, before flying into total panic, I want to know comparisons of flu numbers with figures last year at this time. I also really want to know whatever there is to find out about the geographic distribution of pneumonia cases in Mexico.
Someone RantWoman knows via email compiled the following additional resources:
If anyone is interested in swine flu updates, here is the CDC websitehttp://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/index.htmAnd if you want to follow on Twitter, here is the sitehttp://twitter.com/CDC_eHealthHere are the Interim Recommendations for Facemask and Respirator Use inCertain Community Settings Where Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Virus TransmissionHas Been Detectedhttp://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/masks.htm?s_cid=tw_epr_76
RantWoman is the sort of patient who tends not to go see medical providers until she is basically bleeding to death, and that seems a highly topical response here.
RantWoman all weekend has been hearing the words pneumonia and "working age adults." Today thanks to easing up on the caffeine, taking time off for art and music, and indulging RantWoman's need for sleep, the realization dawned that these two concepts suggest workplace exposure. Further, if people in Mexico get pneumonia while tourists get the flu, either the air is really bad in places like Mexico City (well it is, but there is still the working age adults issue) or the pneumonia suggests greater exposure to inhaled pathogens, probably also a workplace issue.
RantWoman previously heard the words "working age adults" and inhaled pathogen in connection with a USA today story from last year.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-04-16-200349119_x.htm
Basically some Spanish-speaking workers at a meat-packing plant in the US started developing a weird neurological condition. They all went to their doctors and the doctors were all mystified by this rare condition. At some point interpreters who had interpreted for different patients and different doctors about the same rare problem helped put the pieces together. When someone figured out that all the sickest workers worked on a part of the line with lots of risk of inhaled exposure to animal central nervous system material, it was a fairly easy matter to figure out how to protect the affected workers.
RantWoman thus finds herself wondering whether some specific occupational issue is a key part of the current swine flu picture. If so, considering all the potential economic consequences of possible measures to stem the spread of the problem, it could be really beneficial to figure this out sooner rather than later.
Similarly, RantWoman notes some coverage in the Guardian, another of RantWoman's list of websites that do things right on the accessibility front.
Some basic coverage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico>,
A rant RantWoman herself could be proud of about factory farming:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health
In this connection, RantWoman remembers a story related to one of the last upticks in bird flu coverage about how poultry flocks in Burma escaped the same level of problems as other countries in SE Asia. First, factory farming is less common in Burma than in other countries. Second, Burma just closed its borders to agriculture shipments early in the crisis. Since Burma was less integrated into the global food factory in the first place, they turned out to be better off. It would be nice to have a citation about this at my fingertips. Well it would be nice.
RantWoman being a scribe rather than a pandemic flu specialist is going to take others' word about sustained human-to-human transmission of the swine flu virus at this point with the caveat that it's the end of the flu season in the US. Except for the cases with obvious link to something in Mexico, before flying into total panic, I want to know comparisons of flu numbers with figures last year at this time. I also really want to know whatever there is to find out about the geographic distribution of pneumonia cases in Mexico.
Someone RantWoman knows via email compiled the following additional resources:
If anyone is interested in swine flu updates, here is the CDC websitehttp://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/index.htmAnd if you want to follow on Twitter, here is the sitehttp://twitter.com/CDC_eHealthHere are the Interim Recommendations for Facemask and Respirator Use inCertain Community Settings Where Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Virus TransmissionHas Been Detectedhttp://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/masks.htm?s_cid=tw_epr_76
Despite all of RantWoman's numerous questions, she is also going to present just a tiny amount of hyperventilating, along with one self-care point.
A couple weeks ago RantWoman had her annual April cold. RantWoman's April cold nearly always coincides in Seattle with wave upon wave of tree pollen so RantWoman is quite certain that allergies are one contributing factor. However, this year the cold was worse than usual, witha couple days of feeling too crummy to do much except the barest minimum of obligations and drink a lot of tea. RantWoman pointedly ducked a couple obligations where she feared there was too much risk of just being a great big germ vector.
RantWoman is the sort of patient who tends not to go see medical providers until she is basically bleeding to death, and that seems a highly topical response here.
Well, RantWoman in general wonders how important it is that absolutely everyone go to the doctor. Wash hands. If you are sick, stay home and avoid ways to share germs with more people, including doctors' waiting rooms, unless you have high fevers or pneumonia. In those cases, GO DIRECTLY to the doctor.
RantWoman acknowledges that new wonder drugs are supposed to nip the virus in the blood early and it could be interesting to know how soon after symptons first occur is really necessary to take these drugs for them to work. RantWoman also wants to know the typical course of the illness especially when pneumonia is involved: if health care systems could be overwhelmed with a full-scale pandemic, there could be a lot to be said for managing on one's own as much as possible. If RantWoman wants to fret even more, she supposes she can go find the links to the pandemic flu panels at the Super Duper Powerpoint festival. RantWoman does not want to do that--yet.
iPhone Supplier with Labor Dispute
Dear Readers,
Here is RantWoman's cause du jour.
RantWoman realizes we all have much on our minds. That is one reason RantWoman favors lots of little steps that can make a big difference. The text below has not been edited by RantWoman but it contains a fast petition in support of workers' rights at a plant in the iPhone supply chain. RantWoman is posting without testing for accessibility because she assumes she has a variety of readers.
RantWoman welcomes the opportunity to rant about other devices besides the Kindle that are inaccessible to her; even if the iPhone were accessible though, RantWoman definitely prefers that its suppliers comply with local labor laws and treat its workers fairly while producing it. RantWoman also notes that generally workers who know what they are doing are more likely to produce reliable products that provide good customer experience than if the employer is continually churning and always trying to hire new workers.
Cheers
RantWoman
====
Actuality, I was outside of the striked factory for one week after thestrike and interviewed the striked workers.
This is the english story which thanslated and reedited by my Chinesevision(http://blog.roodo.com/torrent/archives/8764933.html).
http://interlocals.net/?q=node/313
Ex-WINTEK Workers Joined in Protest of Poor Working ConditionTo sign the petition online, go to:http://campaign.tw-npo.org/campaign/sign.php?id=2009042210484600
If you are holding an iPhone or an HTC in your hand, you might havecontributed to the ordeals of nearly 8,000 factory workers in China andTaiwan, to speak of the least.
One of Apple's major suppliers, WINTEK, is recently facing a fight back fromangry workers, among who are the 700-strong on Taiwan's manufacture linesthat have been laid off early this year, who were rather surprised when theyfound out WINTEK began to recruit new workers immediately, while theseveterans are left jobless. Meanwhile, "Masstop" (東莞萬士達公司) in Donguan, asubsidiary of WINTEK, saw more than 7,000 broke in outrage when the workerswent on strike last Friday (17 April 2009), in protest of unlawful cuts onovertime wages and basic benefits.
WINTEK Corporation was established in Taiwan during the 1990s. Its majorproducts include flat monitors such as LCDs, LCMs and touch panels,occupying the largest market share of touch panels and small-sized mobilephone panels, ranking among the top 3 suppliers worldwide. WINTEK allocates12 of its manufacture lines in Taoyuan, Taichung and Kaohsiung, Taiwan,employing as many as 3,550 workers; for its two factories in Dongguan andSuzhou, China, 18,150 workers are employed, while its Chennai factory has1,450 workers. It spreads its worldwide sales networks across the US, Koreaand Germany. WINTEK's major clients include Apple (iPhone), Nokia and HTC.
More than 700 Taiwan factory workers laid off
Since November 2008, WINTEK had begun to cut salaries and stopped payingbenefits, and resorted to forcing unpaid leaves on employees. On December17, and the day after, more than 700 employees were laid off unexpectedly(the number can rise to near 1,000 if contract and migrant workers are to beincluded). WINTEK did not file a report to the Administration of LabourAffairs or embark on a negotiation process with its employees 60 daysbeforehand, as was written in the labour laws.
It was said the company targeted pregnant women and veteran workers, forthey would have cost the company much more than just hiring inexperiencedworkers; this could be viewed as an ostensibly discriminative action. Afterprotest, the would-be mothers went back to work, but the others are stillfighting their jobs back.
The company claimed that this measure was necessary because the number oforders has dropped sharply and that it was experiencing a bad loss.However, according to its financial statement, WINTEK still has a surplus offour billion TWD (approx. $118 million USD). Taiwanese press also reportedthat WINTEK had received rush orders, thus needed to hire a large number ofnew workers. (related press coverage:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2009/04/03/2003440066)
For those who appeared lucky to keep their jobs, their pay was cut, (noawards and no subsidies for early shifts) their overtime unpaid, and thenight shifts were asked to work longer hours. The workers had to worknonstop in order to make enough to survive. Moreover, the company has fileda lawsuit of defamation against Wei-li Chu (朱維立), chairperson of NationalFederation of Independent Trade Unions (自主工聯), who has been assisting theunemployed workers for this case.
7,000 workers went on strike, 19 sacked
On April 17, Masstop (東莞萬士達公司) in Donguan, a subsidiary of WINTEK, saw morethan 7,000 angry workers went on strike, an action of desolation triggeredby third-rate food, as well as missing overtime pay and subsidies.
In February, Masstop demanded the workers to sign an agreement for anovertime wages of only 1.5 times of their normal wages, and told theworkforce that this agreement was approved by the labour administration,which later proved to be a lie. By Chinese labour laws, however; those whowork overtime should be paid twice of their normal wages; which means ifthey get less than that, the company is breaching the laws.
Though later in the day of the strike, the company offered to pay twice thenormal wages for overtime, but they did not plan to solve the issues withfood and subsidies, 19 of the workers continued the strike and wereeventually laid off.
Organisation of workers anywhere is no easy task, let along in anenvironment as silencing and sensitive as China, where labour unions arescarce, and organisation work is often oppressed.
Global support and recognition from outside the country is urgently needed,for the workers in Masstop, Dongguan to have a chance of winning, or simplygetting even, in this battle.
WINTEK's violation of Apple's Supplier Code of ConductTo illustrate how international brands such as Apple, Nokia and HTC areresponsible for improving the working conditions of WINTEK workers, theprotesters have referred to the Code of Conduct outlined by Apple (http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/) and listed the misconducts ofWINTEK, Corp.
1. WINTEK has violated the code concerning overtime wages: "workers must becompensated for overtime hours at the premium rate required by applicablelaws and regulations."
Underpaid overtime wages：WINTEK forced its Taiwanese employees to give uptheir overtime pay and holiday subsidies, opting for more days off instead.
Dongguan Masstop, WINTEK's subsidiary in Dongguan, claimed on February 26ththat the labour administration on Dongguan has approved that its 25% cut inholiday overtime wages. In fact, the administration has never approved suchchange.
2. WINTEK has violated the code concerning fair treatment to employeesaccording to applicable laws and regulations.
Illegally laying off workers：Dongguan Masstop, WINTEK's subsidiary inDongguan faced strike because of working condition issues. Though thecompany agreed to adhere to labour laws and pay overtime wages twice as muchas the normal ones, the company made a conditional offer, stating that allworkers should be back at work before three in the afternoon. 19 of theworkers were laid off because they continued the strike. The fact is, thecompany agreed to pay the overtime wages only a few days later. According toChinese labour laws, workers have the rights not to work before they getpaid. The company breached the laws by laying them off.
3. WINTEK has violated the code concerning dormitory and dining: "Suppliersmust provide workers with clean toilet facilities, access to potable water,and sanitary food."
Food problems: Dongguan Masstop, WINTEK's subsidiary in Dongguan, has cutthe expenses for daily meals from 8 RMB to 4.5 RMB. Some say the food is afar cry from satisfactory. This issue directly resulted to the strike, butthe company has not solved it yet.
To sign the petition online, go to:http://campaign.tw-npo.org/campaign/sign.php?id=2009042210484600
Torrent
Here is RantWoman's cause du jour.
RantWoman realizes we all have much on our minds. That is one reason RantWoman favors lots of little steps that can make a big difference. The text below has not been edited by RantWoman but it contains a fast petition in support of workers' rights at a plant in the iPhone supply chain. RantWoman is posting without testing for accessibility because she assumes she has a variety of readers.
RantWoman welcomes the opportunity to rant about other devices besides the Kindle that are inaccessible to her; even if the iPhone were accessible though, RantWoman definitely prefers that its suppliers comply with local labor laws and treat its workers fairly while producing it. RantWoman also notes that generally workers who know what they are doing are more likely to produce reliable products that provide good customer experience than if the employer is continually churning and always trying to hire new workers.
Cheers
RantWoman
====
Actuality, I was outside of the striked factory for one week after thestrike and interviewed the striked workers.
This is the english story which thanslated and reedited by my Chinesevision(http://blog.roodo.com/torrent/archives/8764933.html).
http://interlocals.net/?q=node/313
Ex-WINTEK Workers Joined in Protest of Poor Working ConditionTo sign the petition online, go to:http://campaign.tw-npo.org/campaign/sign.php?id=2009042210484600
If you are holding an iPhone or an HTC in your hand, you might havecontributed to the ordeals of nearly 8,000 factory workers in China andTaiwan, to speak of the least.
One of Apple's major suppliers, WINTEK, is recently facing a fight back fromangry workers, among who are the 700-strong on Taiwan's manufacture linesthat have been laid off early this year, who were rather surprised when theyfound out WINTEK began to recruit new workers immediately, while theseveterans are left jobless. Meanwhile, "Masstop" (東莞萬士達公司) in Donguan, asubsidiary of WINTEK, saw more than 7,000 broke in outrage when the workerswent on strike last Friday (17 April 2009), in protest of unlawful cuts onovertime wages and basic benefits.
WINTEK Corporation was established in Taiwan during the 1990s. Its majorproducts include flat monitors such as LCDs, LCMs and touch panels,occupying the largest market share of touch panels and small-sized mobilephone panels, ranking among the top 3 suppliers worldwide. WINTEK allocates12 of its manufacture lines in Taoyuan, Taichung and Kaohsiung, Taiwan,employing as many as 3,550 workers; for its two factories in Dongguan andSuzhou, China, 18,150 workers are employed, while its Chennai factory has1,450 workers. It spreads its worldwide sales networks across the US, Koreaand Germany. WINTEK's major clients include Apple (iPhone), Nokia and HTC.
More than 700 Taiwan factory workers laid off
Since November 2008, WINTEK had begun to cut salaries and stopped payingbenefits, and resorted to forcing unpaid leaves on employees. On December17, and the day after, more than 700 employees were laid off unexpectedly(the number can rise to near 1,000 if contract and migrant workers are to beincluded). WINTEK did not file a report to the Administration of LabourAffairs or embark on a negotiation process with its employees 60 daysbeforehand, as was written in the labour laws.
It was said the company targeted pregnant women and veteran workers, forthey would have cost the company much more than just hiring inexperiencedworkers; this could be viewed as an ostensibly discriminative action. Afterprotest, the would-be mothers went back to work, but the others are stillfighting their jobs back.
The company claimed that this measure was necessary because the number oforders has dropped sharply and that it was experiencing a bad loss.However, according to its financial statement, WINTEK still has a surplus offour billion TWD (approx. $118 million USD). Taiwanese press also reportedthat WINTEK had received rush orders, thus needed to hire a large number ofnew workers. (related press coverage:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2009/04/03/2003440066)
For those who appeared lucky to keep their jobs, their pay was cut, (noawards and no subsidies for early shifts) their overtime unpaid, and thenight shifts were asked to work longer hours. The workers had to worknonstop in order to make enough to survive. Moreover, the company has fileda lawsuit of defamation against Wei-li Chu (朱維立), chairperson of NationalFederation of Independent Trade Unions (自主工聯), who has been assisting theunemployed workers for this case.
7,000 workers went on strike, 19 sacked
On April 17, Masstop (東莞萬士達公司) in Donguan, a subsidiary of WINTEK, saw morethan 7,000 angry workers went on strike, an action of desolation triggeredby third-rate food, as well as missing overtime pay and subsidies.
In February, Masstop demanded the workers to sign an agreement for anovertime wages of only 1.5 times of their normal wages, and told theworkforce that this agreement was approved by the labour administration,which later proved to be a lie. By Chinese labour laws, however; those whowork overtime should be paid twice of their normal wages; which means ifthey get less than that, the company is breaching the laws.
Though later in the day of the strike, the company offered to pay twice thenormal wages for overtime, but they did not plan to solve the issues withfood and subsidies, 19 of the workers continued the strike and wereeventually laid off.
Organisation of workers anywhere is no easy task, let along in anenvironment as silencing and sensitive as China, where labour unions arescarce, and organisation work is often oppressed.
Global support and recognition from outside the country is urgently needed,for the workers in Masstop, Dongguan to have a chance of winning, or simplygetting even, in this battle.
WINTEK's violation of Apple's Supplier Code of ConductTo illustrate how international brands such as Apple, Nokia and HTC areresponsible for improving the working conditions of WINTEK workers, theprotesters have referred to the Code of Conduct outlined by Apple (http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/) and listed the misconducts ofWINTEK, Corp.
1. WINTEK has violated the code concerning overtime wages: "workers must becompensated for overtime hours at the premium rate required by applicablelaws and regulations."
Underpaid overtime wages：WINTEK forced its Taiwanese employees to give uptheir overtime pay and holiday subsidies, opting for more days off instead.
Dongguan Masstop, WINTEK's subsidiary in Dongguan, claimed on February 26ththat the labour administration on Dongguan has approved that its 25% cut inholiday overtime wages. In fact, the administration has never approved suchchange.
2. WINTEK has violated the code concerning fair treatment to employeesaccording to applicable laws and regulations.
Illegally laying off workers：Dongguan Masstop, WINTEK's subsidiary inDongguan faced strike because of working condition issues. Though thecompany agreed to adhere to labour laws and pay overtime wages twice as muchas the normal ones, the company made a conditional offer, stating that allworkers should be back at work before three in the afternoon. 19 of theworkers were laid off because they continued the strike. The fact is, thecompany agreed to pay the overtime wages only a few days later. According toChinese labour laws, workers have the rights not to work before they getpaid. The company breached the laws by laying them off.
3. WINTEK has violated the code concerning dormitory and dining: "Suppliersmust provide workers with clean toilet facilities, access to potable water,and sanitary food."
Food problems: Dongguan Masstop, WINTEK's subsidiary in Dongguan, has cutthe expenses for daily meals from 8 RMB to 4.5 RMB. Some say the food is afar cry from satisfactory. This issue directly resulted to the strike, butthe company has not solved it yet.
To sign the petition online, go to:http://campaign.tw-npo.org/campaign/sign.php?id=2009042210484600
Torrent
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The wrong link
Oh Hell
RantWoman is just going to create a category called Disaster Preparedness. RantWoman promises to continue to address the topic in her merciless RantWoman style, but she might as well collect links in case others in her orbit are also even occasionally interested in the topic.
RantWoman is looking for the posted PowerPoints from the SuperDuperPowerpoint festival. RantWoman could go look at her notes for contact info but why should RantWoman do a thing like that when she can make the internet do it for her.
Here is a link that is not the one RantWoman was looking for but is an interesting one from the citizen participation angle.
http://partnersinpreparedness.com/conference/
RantWoman is just going to create a category called Disaster Preparedness. RantWoman promises to continue to address the topic in her merciless RantWoman style, but she might as well collect links in case others in her orbit are also even occasionally interested in the topic.
RantWoman is looking for the posted PowerPoints from the SuperDuperPowerpoint festival. RantWoman could go look at her notes for contact info but why should RantWoman do a thing like that when she can make the internet do it for her.
Here is a link that is not the one RantWoman was looking for but is an interesting one from the citizen participation angle.
http://partnersinpreparedness.com/conference/
Stuff the Ballot Box
RantWoman heartily endorses the following solicitation. It provides the opportunity to:
--Stuff the Ballot Box, vote early and often, every day between now and May 17.
--Tell a large corporation how to spend its money with absolutely no expenditure of anything but time on your part.
What's not to like? Okay, you do have to register to vote and they will offer to put you on a mailing list, but that's a small price to pay for The Franchise!
Perkins School for the Blind solicitation:
Good Morning,
I would truly appreciate your assistance. In life there are fewopportunities where you can vote early and often (except in Boston wheresome politicians believe this is a natural right)! This is one of those opportunities.Perkins Pond has been closed and fenced off since 1982. Today you can helpbring this natural historic resource back to life.
We have been selected as a finalist by the National Trust for HistoricPreservation to participate in the Partners in Preservation online competition for up to $100,000 from American Express.
>From April 14 - May 17, the public is invited to vote here for the places they would like to see receive preservation funding. Each person can vote once daily for any of the 25 historic places. The winner of the public vote is guaranteed to receive a grant!
We need your daily vote to win! VOTE AT:http://www.partnersinpreservation.com/
For years, the pond was a place for students to experience nature. There was boating in the summer and ice skating in the winter. It remained a useful feature on campus until it was closed.
This project will restore Perkins Pond to the safe, accessible and beautiful resource it once was. This is a restricted opportunity. The prize money can be used exclusively for the Perkins Pond.
VOTE DAILY ONLINE and please share this exciting news with your friends and family!
THANK YOU!
Steven
Steven M. RothsteinPresidentPerkins School for the Blind175 North Beacon StreetWatertown, MA 02472http://www.perkins.org/617.972.7200 - Telephone617.972.7315 - FaxSteven.Rothstein@Perkins.OrgAll we see is Possibility
Full disclosure: RantWoman read the list of other worthy applicants, and found a couple others she is probably going to share her daily votes with! That is the nature of asking RantWoman for her vote, but Louisa May Alcott and a certain ballet theater may be hard to say no to!
--Stuff the Ballot Box, vote early and often, every day between now and May 17.
--Tell a large corporation how to spend its money with absolutely no expenditure of anything but time on your part.
What's not to like? Okay, you do have to register to vote and they will offer to put you on a mailing list, but that's a small price to pay for The Franchise!
Perkins School for the Blind solicitation:
Good Morning,
I would truly appreciate your assistance. In life there are fewopportunities where you can vote early and often (except in Boston wheresome politicians believe this is a natural right)! This is one of those opportunities.Perkins Pond has been closed and fenced off since 1982. Today you can helpbring this natural historic resource back to life.
We have been selected as a finalist by the National Trust for HistoricPreservation to participate in the Partners in Preservation online competition for up to $100,000 from American Express.
>From April 14 - May 17, the public is invited to vote here for the places they would like to see receive preservation funding. Each person can vote once daily for any of the 25 historic places. The winner of the public vote is guaranteed to receive a grant!
We need your daily vote to win! VOTE AT:http://www.partnersinpreservation.com/
For years, the pond was a place for students to experience nature. There was boating in the summer and ice skating in the winter. It remained a useful feature on campus until it was closed.
This project will restore Perkins Pond to the safe, accessible and beautiful resource it once was. This is a restricted opportunity. The prize money can be used exclusively for the Perkins Pond.
VOTE DAILY ONLINE and please share this exciting news with your friends and family!
THANK YOU!
Steven
Steven M. RothsteinPresidentPerkins School for the Blind175 North Beacon StreetWatertown, MA 02472http://www.perkins.org/617.972.7200 - Telephone617.972.7315 - FaxSteven.Rothstein@Perkins.OrgAll we see is Possibility
Full disclosure: RantWoman read the list of other worthy applicants, and found a couple others she is probably going to share her daily votes with! That is the nature of asking RantWoman for her vote, but Louisa May Alcott and a certain ballet theater may be hard to say no to!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Not on an inaccessible device!
RantWoman separately and enthusiastically endorses an initiative by Staples in cooperation with several blind organizations related to improved shopping experiences for people with disabilities. After RantWoman's sordid experiences last night during her nightly exercise in the aisles of food stores, RantWoman wishes to underscore how sorely initiatives such as this one are needed.
After an exciting day of fairly stationary work, RantWoman set out on a quest for exercise, oat bran and black tea. Since RantWoman wound up visiting three stores and staring down gorgeous views along E Madison St, you may assume that more items than that came home.
First stop: Madison Market Organic produce, multiple kinds of grain and starch in bulk along with honey, molasses, various soy products, vitamins, supplements, wine, good bread, deli items, and also bulk cleaning products. Favorite item: any of several choices in multigrain frozen waffles. There is a whole wall of bins full of bulk dry items and RantWoman had not made a list to remind herself she also wanted polenta. RantWoman had to ask for help first to find the oat bran and nutritional yeast and then to find the all-important bin numbers on each. Sigh. Bigger print, better contrast would not hurt anyone, especially when they insist on putting some of the bins at ankle level.
Madison Market, being a food co-op is more likely than say Safeway to attract help who use words like "groovious" and "mellow." RantWoman is not quite sure of the exchange that led to her explaining about a sufficiency already of drama in her life and her own attempts to be mellow. The clerk said something like "well, that makes one of us." RantWoman decided she did not need to know more especially since "mellow" at the Madison Market cash register lasts just about until RantWoman has to interact with their stupid flat screen, no contrast, utterly non-tactile Point of Sale devices.
RantWoman CAN actually see the displays, provided she screws up her eyes, gets her nose about 2 inches from the device and punches her pin in quickly between the spells of visual randomness. Or since RantWoman did not want cash, she could have just made the clerk run the bill as a credit card transaction. Either way the rant potential is just way too high!
Next, RantWoman would be terribly happy to flack the nearby Trader Joes but she is not finding a satisfactory link with location. Satisfactory here means from the company itself and not buried in some pdf file with locations all over the county. RantWoman went there anyway! RantWoman gave in to the temptation to see whether encasing the pears in one of those generally annoying plastic clamshells would help her get the fruit home without turning it into pear butter on the way. So far yes. RantWoman tried olive oil popcorn at the sample booth. Olives are not a RantWoman favorite so she tends to leave them for people she knows really love them. Although RantWoman likes olive oil fine for many things, olive oil on popcorn is not one of them. In fact, RantWoman would be more likely to do, say, tamari, garlic, and nutritional yeast, one of those combos she usually reserves for when she really needs a sentimental journey to previous decades' food fixations.
Once again while making her purchases, Rantwoman groused about the non-tactile devices. This time the ever-so-helpful clerk pointed RantWoman "over there" and "over there" to two checkstands that, the clerk said, just got tactile devices. RantWoman will thank them with "it's about darn time"--as soon as she can figure out where "over there" is for next time.
Next stop, Safeway, according to Lost in Seattle , the brown one. The Madison St. Safeway is "the brown one" because in contract to he endlessly white one near RantMom, this one has brown floors, general vast brownness, brownness sufficient easily to lose a friend of RantWoman's who sometimes accompanies her and frequently wears a brown tweed trench coat. RantWoman shopped up and down, pointedly ignored the rant opportunities presented by black lettering on red background, decided to go elsewhere for one item, and headed for the checkout. RantWoman knows there are one or two checkstands that have lovely tactile devices. RantWoman suspects these checkstands may be highlighted by special lights or signs, though she wonders how the heck RantWoman is supposed to locate them. RantWoman settle for the first express line she found and once again got her nose right up to the device. The last straw was when RantWoman was poking through the transaction on a flat-screen point of sale gizmo. RantWoman practically had to use her nose. RantWoman almost lost it when prompted with an extra question as she was paying: did she want to make a donation to services for people with disabilities. HELL NO, not on such an inaccessible device!
We (heart) Staples
RantWoman comes from a long and tangled line of preachers, faith-based migrants, and other colorful folk with a crusading bent. Perhaps that explains RantWoman's endless capacity to cheerlead for the Cause du Jour!
Today's cause is ....(drum roll....cash register Kaching....) Accessible retail, unencumbered by an actual link to the followowing press release:
Blind Community Leaders Applaud Staples' Initiative to Enhance Staples.comand Store Point of Sale Equipment
April 23, 2009 -- Major advocacy groups for the visually impaired applaudStaples' new initiatives designed to improve service to its customers withvisual impairments. Staples will be improving its payment service terminals at the in-store point-of-sale with tactile keypads to protect the privacy and security of shoppers with visual impairments. The company will also make improvements to Staples.com that will benefit customers with visual impairments and other disabilities.
Today's announcement is the result of collaboration between Staples and major blindness organizations including the Bay State Council of the Blind, the American Foundation for the Blind, the American Council of the Blind, and the California Council of the Blind. These organizations praised Staples' initiative and urged other retailers to follow the company's example.
Web Site AccessToday's initiative includes Staples' commitment to design http://www.staples.com/ in accordance with guidelines issued by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (www.w3.org/wai). The guidelines,which do not affect the content or look and feel of a Web site, ensure thatWeb sites are accessible to persons with a wide range of disabilities. The guidelines are of particular benefit to blind computer users who use screenreader or magnification technology on their computers and who rely on a keyboard instead of a mouse.
"Web site accessibility is of critical importance to both the blind community and to people with disabilities generally," said Paul Schroeder,Vice President Programs and Policy Group, American Foundation for the Blind."We applaud Staples' commitment to address the accessibility of its Website, thereby improving the browsing and shopping experience for a broadrange of on-line shoppers."
Point-of-Sale Improvements Staples will be adding tactile keypads to payment services devices throughout the chain. The new units will allow Staples shoppers who have difficulty reading information on a touch screen to privately and independently enter their PIN and other confidential information. Staplesstores in Massachusetts will have the new devices by September of this year.All stores in the country are scheduled to have the devices by the middle of next year.
The new devices are designed to protect the financial privacy of shoppers who are blind or visually impaired. The devices have tactile keys arranged like a standard telephone keypad and work in conjunction with Staples' existing point-of-sale terminals.
Blind community representatives praised Staples' plan to enhance its payment services devices. "Point-of-sale devices need to have keys with tactile markings so people who are blind do not have to ask for assistance or share their PIN with strangers," explained Kim Charlson of the Bay State Councilof the Blind. "This settlement, and the collaboration that led up to it,demonstrate Staples' understanding of this fact and its strong commitment to accessibility for blind and visually impaired customers."
About Staples Staples, the world's largest office products company, is committed to making it easy for customers to buy a wide range of office products, including supplies, technology, furniture, and business services. With 2008 sales of$23 billion and 91,000 associates worldwide, Staples serves businesses of all sizes and consumers in 27 countries throughout North and South America,Europe, Asia and Australia. In July 2008, Staples acquired CorporateExpress, one of the world's leading suppliers of office products to businesses and institutions. Staples invented the office superstore conceptin 1986 and is headquartered outside Boston. More information about Staples(Nasdaq: SPLS) is available at http://www.staples.com/.
About American Council of the Blind (ACB), Bay State Council of the Blind(BSCB) and California Council of the Blind (CCB)American Council of the Blind is a national consumer-based advocacyorganization working on behalf of blind and visually impaired Americansthroughout the country, with members organized through seventy state andspecial-interest affiliates. The Bay State Council of the Blind and theCalifornia Council of the Blind are the Massachusetts and California stateaffiliates of the ACB. ACB, BSCB and CCB are dedicated to improving thequality of life, equality of opportunity and independence of all people whohave visual impairments. Their members and affiliated organizations have along history of commitment to the advancement of policies and programs whichwill enhance independence for people who are blind and visually impaired.More information about ACB, BSCB and CCB can be found by visitinghttp://www.acb.org/, http://www.acb.org/baystate/, and http://www.ccbnet.org/.
About American Foundation for the BlindThe American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) is a national non-profit thatexpands possibilities for people with vision loss. AFB's priorities includebroadening access to technology; elevating the quality of information andtools for the professionals who serve people with vision loss; and promotingindependent and healthy living for people with vision loss by providing themand their families with relevant and timely resources. AFB is also proud tohouse the Helen Keller Archives and honor the over forty years that HelenKeller worked tirelessly with AFB. For more information visit us online athttp://www.afb.org/.
For More Information, Contact:
For ACB, BSCB, CCBMelanie Brunson, (202) 467-5081, mbrunson@acb.org
For AFBCaitlin McFeely, AFB Communications, (212) 502-7674, cmcfeely@afb.net
For StaplesOwen Davis, (508) 253-8468
RantWoman briefly visited the website and commends the very clean look. RantWoman was not in a position to order anything but recommends the concept.
RantWoman also notes the fervent hope that the Point of Sale devices include not only tactile buttons, but crisp clear, high-contrast print that can be read with less intrusive technology than an electron microscope. Okay, RantWoman can always hope.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Sowing Seeds
When RantWoman wants to feel megalomaniacal, the weather often offers spectacular opportunity. Recently during a spate of absolutely gorgeous sunshine, RantWoman was seduced into GARDENING, only to have the weather revert back to grey and sodden, that is typical for Seattle. A true megalomaniac would be certain that the change in weather is due to RantWoman's recent spell of planting things!
RantWoman two nights ago had as much of a seed-sowing orgy as it is even plausible to imagine considering that RantWoman's gardening domain consists of pots on a balcony she shares with neighbors who are suspected basil-nappers.
The story is last year RantWoman was seduced into buying two silly herb seed kits. RantWoman originally thought that perhaps RantMom might be interested in helping the World's Most Irrepressible Nephew nurture plants from one of the kits, but that did not happen. RantWoman sowed the seed kit seeds in the little peat disks in the tiny plastic pots provided. RantWoman watered and put the minigreenhouses out on her balcony. The seeds sprouted. RantWoman planted them in bigger pots, chives in one, basil in another and RantWoman does not remember the rest of the configuration.
What RantWoman remembers is coming home one day and finding her basil plants had been kidnapped, stolen, vanished into thin air, or more likely vanished into her Chinese neighbors' apartment. The Chinese neighbors fill the halls with lovely garlicky brews on a regular basis. The Chinese neighbors are otherwise unobjectionable and RantWoman would happily have just let them snip leaves anytime they want, which oddly makes the suspected basil-napping that much more vexing.
This year RantWoman has other ideas. When she was at the nearby hardware getting seduced by seeds, she chose the keep it simple option: one packet of basil seeds and one of cherry tomato plants. There will be plants enough for the basil-napping neighbors AND for RantWoman. There WILL also be tomatoes!
RantWoman lives on the 6th floor. She has one experience with a lone tomato plant that did really well about foliage and produced ONE tomato all last year. There is NOTHING that will get that high to pollinate. RantWoman was seduced by the cherry tomato plant because even if she has to pollinate every single bloom herself (This should be GOOD. Watch!) RantWoman WILL have tomatoes. Tune in next week....
RantWoman two nights ago had as much of a seed-sowing orgy as it is even plausible to imagine considering that RantWoman's gardening domain consists of pots on a balcony she shares with neighbors who are suspected basil-nappers.
The story is last year RantWoman was seduced into buying two silly herb seed kits. RantWoman originally thought that perhaps RantMom might be interested in helping the World's Most Irrepressible Nephew nurture plants from one of the kits, but that did not happen. RantWoman sowed the seed kit seeds in the little peat disks in the tiny plastic pots provided. RantWoman watered and put the minigreenhouses out on her balcony. The seeds sprouted. RantWoman planted them in bigger pots, chives in one, basil in another and RantWoman does not remember the rest of the configuration.
What RantWoman remembers is coming home one day and finding her basil plants had been kidnapped, stolen, vanished into thin air, or more likely vanished into her Chinese neighbors' apartment. The Chinese neighbors fill the halls with lovely garlicky brews on a regular basis. The Chinese neighbors are otherwise unobjectionable and RantWoman would happily have just let them snip leaves anytime they want, which oddly makes the suspected basil-napping that much more vexing.
This year RantWoman has other ideas. When she was at the nearby hardware getting seduced by seeds, she chose the keep it simple option: one packet of basil seeds and one of cherry tomato plants. There will be plants enough for the basil-napping neighbors AND for RantWoman. There WILL also be tomatoes!
RantWoman lives on the 6th floor. She has one experience with a lone tomato plant that did really well about foliage and produced ONE tomato all last year. There is NOTHING that will get that high to pollinate. RantWoman was seduced by the cherry tomato plant because even if she has to pollinate every single bloom herself (This should be GOOD. Watch!) RantWoman WILL have tomatoes. Tune in next week....
Monday, April 20, 2009
Unmentionables
RantWoman promised to post about underwear and accessible restrooms and her panel at the Super Duper Powerpoint festival. RantWoman actually supposes her panel deserves a separate post with meat and summary and points she hopes stuck with her listeners, but first we must address unmentionables.
RantWoman acknowledges that horrifying underwear matters are a staple of all anxiety dreams, fears, and kvetches related to public speaking. RantWoman believes anyone who has ever worn pantyhose has at least one pantyhose calamity story. However, RantWoman also believes each member of her group has achieved whole new and unique levels of underwear and other unmentionable excess. This excess involves both public speaking and public transit; the extent to which this saga involves disaster as opposed to ordinary, all too banal reality is possibly debateable, but RantWoman is going to try to stick to the facts.
In addition to a disaster education professional, RantWoman's panel at the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival involved herself, another woman with pantyhose issues whom we will call Speaker in Pantyhose. Speaker in Pantyhose has a variety of lingering effects from a brain injury in high school but is absolutely the kind of adept social interacter RantWoman needs to help with social lubricant in many different situations. Add a neighbor in a wheelchair who has a severe hearing loss and considerable conversational interest always in toilet paper and accessible restrooms. In honor of this person's devotion to the cause and unfortunately almost endless experience with inaccessible restrooms all along the northern I-5 corridor, we will call him Mr. Accessible restrooms.
RantWoman is asking herself whether she is the one who started the whole underwear thread. Last week during one of the meetings to prep our presentation for the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival, RantWoman mentioned in passing that she recently did laundry to make sure she had underwear that would stay up available for this formal occasion. Considering that this was a mixed group, RantWoman realizes this might have been Too Much Information.
Well, compared to some female colleagues who once were complaining about the effects of childbirth on bladder capacity out loud during an IT-related staff meeting, RantWoman thinks her own underwear comment was positively demure. Still, RantWoman is the kind of person who flings the conversational underwear around almost as matter-of-factly as she does the literal stuff in the laundry room.
Comes the day of the event and our entourage assembled at a downtown stop for the Tacoma bus. RantWoman arrived first. Then came Speaker in Pantyhose. Almost as soon as Speaker in Pantyhose greeted RantWoman, she confessed that her pantyhose had already lost the battle with gravity once at a bus stop. There was no restroom handy so Speaker in Pantyhose simply stood with her back to a nearby window and hiked up the gravity-entangled undergarments. Mercifully the bus arrived shortly after Mr. Accessible Restrooms and there had not yet been time for conversation about the already ill-starred pantyhose. Otherwise, there is some chance that Mr. Accessible Restrooms would have been trying to have a yelling conversation about the Pantyhose all the way to Tacoma.
Mr. Accessible Restrooms made it through his entire part of the presentation without once mentioning accessible restrooms even though his experiences do add a certain piquancy to conversations about the topic. In fact, RantWoman brought the topic up as as example of why it is important to include the voices of disabled people in disaster planning. RantWoman also mentioned some of Mr. Accessible Restrooms' important contributions to the team: for instance he kicks butt at data entry.
Speaker in Pantyhose covered a really great real-life story about how empowered, motivated people can offer help in disaster response even for minor disasters delivered to one's front door. That all went well, without any interference from the wretched pantyhose Somehow the pantyhose even made it all the way through the whole day before, to the great mirth of Mr. Accessible Restrooms, they surrendered completely to gravity at the bus stop where Speaker in Pantyhose and Mr. Accessible Restrooms were waiting to go back to Seattle. RantWoman was catching a later bus; RantWoman has no opinion about why Speaker in Pantyhose didn't just yank the pantyhose in the restroom just before heading out to her bus, but she heard about the gravity-induced loss of pantyhose from both parties at the next group meeting. Is it possible that stories like this are exactly what makes this project so richly rewarding?
As a postscript, enter a different neighbor, Bus Neighbor, and another whole angle on the underwear matter. This neighbor and RantWoman usually share a Sunday bus ride on the way to our respective houses of worship and for our own reasons take great interest in whether the driver calls the stops. RantWoman sometimes uses her Sunday bus rides to conduct selective cellphone chatter, but that was not happening and Bus Neighbor struck up a conversation grumbling vaguely about recent offenses committed by Mr. Accessible Restrooms.
It seems Mr. Accessible Restrooms was at a completely different meeting completely unrelated to either disasters or underwear and he brought up the incident at the bus stop. Bus Neighbor found this in terribly bad taste and told Mr. Accessible Restrooms so directly in a voice loud enough that she is sure he heard. Bus Neighbor was offended on behalf of Speaker in Pantyhose, a person who is fairly matter-of-fact about underwear matters as well. The interesting problem is that although the ill-fated stockings had already put in public appearances at one bus stop and one public meeting that Bus Neighbor knew of and another bus stop she did not know of, she was so incensed by the topic that she would not spell out details aboard the bus. After a couple conversational excursions, RantWoman realized she knew exactly what Bus Neighbor got from what Mr. Accessible Restrooms was talking about, but in deference to Bus Neighbor's concern, RantWoman decided that the details did not need further mention aboard the bus. RantWoman does not even apologize to any other bus passengers who might have felt cheated out of a really, cough, great story!
RantWoman acknowledges that horrifying underwear matters are a staple of all anxiety dreams, fears, and kvetches related to public speaking. RantWoman believes anyone who has ever worn pantyhose has at least one pantyhose calamity story. However, RantWoman also believes each member of her group has achieved whole new and unique levels of underwear and other unmentionable excess. This excess involves both public speaking and public transit; the extent to which this saga involves disaster as opposed to ordinary, all too banal reality is possibly debateable, but RantWoman is going to try to stick to the facts.
In addition to a disaster education professional, RantWoman's panel at the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival involved herself, another woman with pantyhose issues whom we will call Speaker in Pantyhose. Speaker in Pantyhose has a variety of lingering effects from a brain injury in high school but is absolutely the kind of adept social interacter RantWoman needs to help with social lubricant in many different situations. Add a neighbor in a wheelchair who has a severe hearing loss and considerable conversational interest always in toilet paper and accessible restrooms. In honor of this person's devotion to the cause and unfortunately almost endless experience with inaccessible restrooms all along the northern I-5 corridor, we will call him Mr. Accessible restrooms.
RantWoman is asking herself whether she is the one who started the whole underwear thread. Last week during one of the meetings to prep our presentation for the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival, RantWoman mentioned in passing that she recently did laundry to make sure she had underwear that would stay up available for this formal occasion. Considering that this was a mixed group, RantWoman realizes this might have been Too Much Information.
Well, compared to some female colleagues who once were complaining about the effects of childbirth on bladder capacity out loud during an IT-related staff meeting, RantWoman thinks her own underwear comment was positively demure. Still, RantWoman is the kind of person who flings the conversational underwear around almost as matter-of-factly as she does the literal stuff in the laundry room.
Comes the day of the event and our entourage assembled at a downtown stop for the Tacoma bus. RantWoman arrived first. Then came Speaker in Pantyhose. Almost as soon as Speaker in Pantyhose greeted RantWoman, she confessed that her pantyhose had already lost the battle with gravity once at a bus stop. There was no restroom handy so Speaker in Pantyhose simply stood with her back to a nearby window and hiked up the gravity-entangled undergarments. Mercifully the bus arrived shortly after Mr. Accessible Restrooms and there had not yet been time for conversation about the already ill-starred pantyhose. Otherwise, there is some chance that Mr. Accessible Restrooms would have been trying to have a yelling conversation about the Pantyhose all the way to Tacoma.
Mr. Accessible Restrooms made it through his entire part of the presentation without once mentioning accessible restrooms even though his experiences do add a certain piquancy to conversations about the topic. In fact, RantWoman brought the topic up as as example of why it is important to include the voices of disabled people in disaster planning. RantWoman also mentioned some of Mr. Accessible Restrooms' important contributions to the team: for instance he kicks butt at data entry.
Speaker in Pantyhose covered a really great real-life story about how empowered, motivated people can offer help in disaster response even for minor disasters delivered to one's front door. That all went well, without any interference from the wretched pantyhose Somehow the pantyhose even made it all the way through the whole day before, to the great mirth of Mr. Accessible Restrooms, they surrendered completely to gravity at the bus stop where Speaker in Pantyhose and Mr. Accessible Restrooms were waiting to go back to Seattle. RantWoman was catching a later bus; RantWoman has no opinion about why Speaker in Pantyhose didn't just yank the pantyhose in the restroom just before heading out to her bus, but she heard about the gravity-induced loss of pantyhose from both parties at the next group meeting. Is it possible that stories like this are exactly what makes this project so richly rewarding?
As a postscript, enter a different neighbor, Bus Neighbor, and another whole angle on the underwear matter. This neighbor and RantWoman usually share a Sunday bus ride on the way to our respective houses of worship and for our own reasons take great interest in whether the driver calls the stops. RantWoman sometimes uses her Sunday bus rides to conduct selective cellphone chatter, but that was not happening and Bus Neighbor struck up a conversation grumbling vaguely about recent offenses committed by Mr. Accessible Restrooms.
It seems Mr. Accessible Restrooms was at a completely different meeting completely unrelated to either disasters or underwear and he brought up the incident at the bus stop. Bus Neighbor found this in terribly bad taste and told Mr. Accessible Restrooms so directly in a voice loud enough that she is sure he heard. Bus Neighbor was offended on behalf of Speaker in Pantyhose, a person who is fairly matter-of-fact about underwear matters as well. The interesting problem is that although the ill-fated stockings had already put in public appearances at one bus stop and one public meeting that Bus Neighbor knew of and another bus stop she did not know of, she was so incensed by the topic that she would not spell out details aboard the bus. After a couple conversational excursions, RantWoman realized she knew exactly what Bus Neighbor got from what Mr. Accessible Restrooms was talking about, but in deference to Bus Neighbor's concern, RantWoman decided that the details did not need further mention aboard the bus. RantWoman does not even apologize to any other bus passengers who might have felt cheated out of a really, cough, great story!
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Brave Flowers
Last night while RantWoman was out in pursuit of her weekly $20-bananas market basket, she discovered very brave orchids! After listening all day to flower-themed broadcast involving a different flower, RantWoman thinks Brave Flowers is a tolerable way to begin.
The supermarket where RantWoman most often goes on her late-night forays has a wall of floral thingies right next to the door where RantWoman usually enters. RantWoman seldom buys flowers from this supermarket because she usually finds its offerings overpriced and already past their prime. RantWoman's main concern is usually to get past this wall of pollen and fragrance without sneezing, running over a panhandler outside the store with a shopping cart or colliding with whoever is bobbing and weaving around the entryway. Does this wall of pollen problem matter enough that RantWoman would spend more money if it were fixed? Alas, probably not.
Last night RantWoman shopped faster than sometimes. She got through the checkout, seized the precious bananas to pack them herself as usual, and pulled away from the checkstand to make her usual transaction notes. It was here, atop the cigarette case, next to the Lotto tickets, the change-counting machine, and the water dispenser that RantWoman made a most unlikely discovery. There was a parade of solitary orchids, each in its own thin vase bravely presenting themselves for purchase.
At first RantWoman was unsure of what she was seeing, but then she saw more of the incongruous orchids. RantWoman looked and looked and finally located a price, suitably orchid-like, in keeping with the prices of other flora at the place. Of course, this price was completely out of any range RantWoman would have been interested in, so much as she might have liked to rescue at least one of the delicate blooms from its ignominious presentation, RantWoman had to leave and hope others better fortified financially would come along and step up to the task.
At least with supermarket orchids, someone could step up. With state flowers whose names got slapped blandly onto a public school and then forever associated with one day of horrible events there, brave flowers are a bumpier concept, and anniversary broadcasts are dropping the whole theme into the media streams where RantWoman most often wanders.
The Colorado columbine is a lovely flower. The state flower type has delicate pistils, white rounded petals atop more pointed light blue or purple petals. Other columbines have white or yellow centers with pink or red petals. For a lovely picture and nice state flower blurb, see the
Columbine entry at The Flower Expert . Or see Other Columbine Images and a fun item about Some Columbine legalities
Columbines actually like pretty harsh climates. They bloom early in the spring, but early in the spring in Colorado is about May after sometimes months of snow and subzero weather. One broadcast this morning talked about columbines growing through cracks in granite. In other words, despite it's delicate appearance, the columbine is pretty formidable flora.
Perhaps this is exactly the sort of flower to keep holding onto as the media revisit all of April's quota of maladjusted young men with too much access to firearms and other forces of destruction, brave flowers and sensible, caring adults...
The supermarket where RantWoman most often goes on her late-night forays has a wall of floral thingies right next to the door where RantWoman usually enters. RantWoman seldom buys flowers from this supermarket because she usually finds its offerings overpriced and already past their prime. RantWoman's main concern is usually to get past this wall of pollen and fragrance without sneezing, running over a panhandler outside the store with a shopping cart or colliding with whoever is bobbing and weaving around the entryway. Does this wall of pollen problem matter enough that RantWoman would spend more money if it were fixed? Alas, probably not.
Last night RantWoman shopped faster than sometimes. She got through the checkout, seized the precious bananas to pack them herself as usual, and pulled away from the checkstand to make her usual transaction notes. It was here, atop the cigarette case, next to the Lotto tickets, the change-counting machine, and the water dispenser that RantWoman made a most unlikely discovery. There was a parade of solitary orchids, each in its own thin vase bravely presenting themselves for purchase.
At first RantWoman was unsure of what she was seeing, but then she saw more of the incongruous orchids. RantWoman looked and looked and finally located a price, suitably orchid-like, in keeping with the prices of other flora at the place. Of course, this price was completely out of any range RantWoman would have been interested in, so much as she might have liked to rescue at least one of the delicate blooms from its ignominious presentation, RantWoman had to leave and hope others better fortified financially would come along and step up to the task.
At least with supermarket orchids, someone could step up. With state flowers whose names got slapped blandly onto a public school and then forever associated with one day of horrible events there, brave flowers are a bumpier concept, and anniversary broadcasts are dropping the whole theme into the media streams where RantWoman most often wanders.
The Colorado columbine is a lovely flower. The state flower type has delicate pistils, white rounded petals atop more pointed light blue or purple petals. Other columbines have white or yellow centers with pink or red petals. For a lovely picture and nice state flower blurb, see the
Columbine entry at The Flower Expert . Or see Other Columbine Images and a fun item about Some Columbine legalities
Columbines actually like pretty harsh climates. They bloom early in the spring, but early in the spring in Colorado is about May after sometimes months of snow and subzero weather. One broadcast this morning talked about columbines growing through cracks in granite. In other words, despite it's delicate appearance, the columbine is pretty formidable flora.
Perhaps this is exactly the sort of flower to keep holding onto as the media revisit all of April's quota of maladjusted young men with too much access to firearms and other forces of destruction, brave flowers and sensible, caring adults...
The Super Duper Powerpoint Festival
RantWoman promises to post some actual links from sessions at the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival. Be forewarned, sessions at this edition of the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival ran heavily to Flood Recovery and why SW Washington is having to get good at it; Pandemic flu and how it could more or less lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it or at least modern life as practiced in the US, disaster planning across the spectrum of health care delivery in New Jersey, how to get the state of California to think about massive earthquakes, and other ever-so-cheerful themes.
This version of Super Duper Powerpoint festival drew an interesting mix of people whose job title includes words like Security, Critical Incident Response, Business Continuity Planning, disaster drill devising, as well as a smattering of other planners, researchers,mental health practitioners and assorted people involved in community education, nonprofit disaster services, and miscellaneous ordinary citizens.
Most of the people there because it's their job description were the sort of probably overwhelmed public servant who feel the weight of their responsibility so much they do not necessarily have much room for sense of humor. This can be a challenge for the public education types. While there is not necessarily anything terribly funny about large-scale social, economic, ecological, and other disruption, what gets people through such upheavals is ineffably social, with humor and sensitivity needed all over the place to burnish the edges of stress, upset, and totaly overwrought. And the way to cut down the stress, upset and totally overwrought is to prepare, to build connections ahead of time, and rathr than having to figure out every detail in advance, to get the information where it is needed and to engage everyone in preparedness and in being able to work together to figure things out.
RantWoman herself was there on behalf of a community education project involving herself and many friends and neighbors. RantWoman is likely to post separately about that. Be forewarned, there will be mention of underwear issues and encyclopedic knowledge about the wheelchair accessibility of every men's room on the I-5 corridor. Somehow this will wind up relating to disasters! But first let us speak to the conference side of this intercultural experience.
Consider such staples of conferences everywhere as The Venue, The Lingo, the Vendors, and The Evaluation.
This version of Super Duper Powerpoint festival drew an interesting mix of people whose job title includes words like Security, Critical Incident Response, Business Continuity Planning, disaster drill devising, as well as a smattering of other planners, researchers,mental health practitioners and assorted people involved in community education, nonprofit disaster services, and miscellaneous ordinary citizens.
Most of the people there because it's their job description were the sort of probably overwhelmed public servant who feel the weight of their responsibility so much they do not necessarily have much room for sense of humor. This can be a challenge for the public education types. While there is not necessarily anything terribly funny about large-scale social, economic, ecological, and other disruption, what gets people through such upheavals is ineffably social, with humor and sensitivity needed all over the place to burnish the edges of stress, upset, and totaly overwrought. And the way to cut down the stress, upset and totally overwrought is to prepare, to build connections ahead of time, and rathr than having to figure out every detail in advance, to get the information where it is needed and to engage everyone in preparedness and in being able to work together to figure things out.
RantWoman herself was there on behalf of a community education project involving herself and many friends and neighbors. RantWoman is likely to post separately about that. Be forewarned, there will be mention of underwear issues and encyclopedic knowledge about the wheelchair accessibility of every men's room on the I-5 corridor. Somehow this will wind up relating to disasters! But first let us speak to the conference side of this intercultural experience.
Consider such staples of conferences everywhere as The Venue, The Lingo, the Vendors, and The Evaluation.
The Venue was the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center , a new edifice in the south end of downtown Tacoma. RantWoman really likes downtown Tacoma for its views, its gentler pace than Seattle, and some quaint charm. The Convention and Trade Center is a worthy addition except for one comical point on its website. The website mentions the new free Tacoma Light Rail and completely overlooks other very nearby bus stops. RantWoman arrived thanks to her previous knowledge of Tacoma and a small quota of guesswork.
Since Thwack the Badly Behaved White Cane was on the job, at least at the beginning, RantWoman connected first with very helpful janitorial staff and then a very helpful representative of the conference to help with RantWoman-specific needs. RantWoman figured out the general lay of the land without too much difficulty but was quite grateful for help finding a place to sit in the crowded lunch and plenary area.
Next take The Lingo. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to implanting a specific set of disaster biz jargon into people's heads. The implantation of terminology comes with all manner of levels and codes and colors. This arcana comes with certifications and academic study and for all RantWoman knows secret rituals in large chambers with the lights out, only a few token non-flammable light sticks, and no experienced blind person to offer suggestions about getting around. (RantWoman does not count herself as an expert in the latter. Everything she knows about getting around under poor visual conditions she learned from sharing a bedroom with Little Sister, and RantWoman on the whole considers herself very lucky to have the level of vision and sense of space she does have even if she does sometimes bump into people when Thwack is not being a proper chaperone.)
RantWoman went to one session which was intended as a cheap easy, around-the-table conversation exercise to force disaster responders to make fast decisions about priorities during very challenging circumstances. The audience of 70+ people got divided into 4 groups to practice the exercise. RantWoman noticed that about a third of the people in her group immediately broke out their special disaster lingo without bothering even to try to clue those around them in and had to spend a whole increment of time deciding how the disaster lingo applied to the scenario described.
RantWoman on the other hand found herself chatting with another teammate about how either we would either already be so well-prepared that all imaginable emergencies within our span of control were well-handled or that we would at least know how to organize ourselves to just start dealing with the elements of the scenario even if we were for whatever reason not communicating with other people it might be entirely logical to need to communicate with. After all, communications difficulties, technical and otherwise as well as the imperative to act regardless would probably be highly topical in any event the exercise is intended to simulate.
Having dispatched the Lingo, hopefully without the conversation degenerating into debates about Code Peuce, Code Mauve, Code Cocoa Butter, and Code Chartreuse, RantWoman moved onto the Vendor area, also known as Communications and Costumes.
Communications involved both several kinds of information provision, since they were government agencies via presumably accessible websites, and the kinds of technology packages that, RantWoman supposes, get parachuted in or plugged in when a disaster has knocked out the usual modes of communications. There were 3 or 4 such vendors and RantWoman collected business cards but did not quiz in detail at first. At first, RantWoman just had to steel herself about the sight of all the inaccessible devices she observed getting plugged into these systems and remind herself that as far as she knows all the more accessible mobile devices she might like to acquire speak the same geekery enough to be connected as well. Later after mention in one session of video relay interpreting RantWoman realized that support for interpreting would be a totally obvious thing to quiz the communications hardware vendors about. After one fun conversation in this vein, RantWoman realized that there could be a lot more conversations to be had and she is considering how to get those moving.
Disasters of course are all about drama, and what good is drama without costumes. There were a couple of vendors who seemed to specialize in different flavors of vests for identifying people in key roles. RantWoman lost interest in the vests quickly after she learned that the level of reflective material tended not to be ANSI-compliant for road service or easy visual detectibility under limited light conditions and hence not useful for ordinary pedestrian safety needs. See RantWoman does not see a lot of point in sinking money into things that are mostly going to sit around in closets or warehouses. Build response plans that can use what you have on hand. If you think you need to distinguish people in different roles, use baseball caps, bandanas, or the all-important ad-hoc armband. Oh sorry, RantWoman realizes the Vendors want to make money. Keep trying.
RantWoman is also familiar with the need to mark off a large space into smaller areas such as medical, administrative, communications or whatever, but RantWoman would probably do this on the cheap with a combination of plastic tape, baseball caps or bandanas of different colors, cheap multicolor tablecloths from the party store or maybe if one is feeling especially flush colored tarps.
Finally, we come to the evaluation which like everything else is administered by computer. Perhaps the most amusing point here was the form's insistence that RantWoman fill out an evaluation for her own panel. Oh hell, if you insist, of course we were brilliant and should be invited back! We will not discuss nearly strangling one panelist with the mic cord, tripping over our Powerpoint, and a couple near-tantrum moments for RantWoman at the beginning when the flash drive with the presentation on it in the pouch with one of her magnifiers decided to burrow all the way down to the bottom of a bag.
Please, please, now that RantWoman has filled out her evaluation, how soon can we get real data, not just RantWoman placeholder stuff....
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Taxation can be sexy?
Yet more evidence of RantWoman's lameness about her taxation obligations this year:
1. Due to all her other duties, RantWoman missed out on both a free taco from somewhere in Seattle and a free sex toy from what RantWoman remembers as Toys in Babeland. RantWoman is of course not even supposed to admit knowing anything about such merchandise or such establishments. If RantWoman's dear readers need to preserve this illusion, please skip this entry. Please also skip this entry if you have any thoughts as the hapless Amazon cataloguer did, initially undeteced last week of anything that will slap on labels to dump this out of search...
On the other hand, if RantWoman wants a new item and cannot drag her bones out of bed in time to be one of the first 100 people to show up on tax day, she might have to figure out a way to make such a business expense. Vocabulary research anyone?
2. RantWoman's entry yesterday included a reference to the theme protests of the year a glancing reference to a concept in volving tea bags that RantWoman is NOT going to specify except to refer her readers to
http://www.urbandictionary.com/ or to sex advice columnist Dan Savage. See, RantWoman strives avoid running afoul of undetected cataloguers' idiosyncratic mistakes....
1. Due to all her other duties, RantWoman missed out on both a free taco from somewhere in Seattle and a free sex toy from what RantWoman remembers as Toys in Babeland. RantWoman is of course not even supposed to admit knowing anything about such merchandise or such establishments. If RantWoman's dear readers need to preserve this illusion, please skip this entry. Please also skip this entry if you have any thoughts as the hapless Amazon cataloguer did, initially undeteced last week of anything that will slap on labels to dump this out of search...
On the other hand, if RantWoman wants a new item and cannot drag her bones out of bed in time to be one of the first 100 people to show up on tax day, she might have to figure out a way to make such a business expense. Vocabulary research anyone?
2. RantWoman's entry yesterday included a reference to the theme protests of the year a glancing reference to a concept in volving tea bags that RantWoman is NOT going to specify except to refer her readers to
http://www.urbandictionary.com/ or to sex advice columnist Dan Savage. See, RantWoman strives avoid running afoul of undetected cataloguers' idiosyncratic mistakes....
Taxed?
RantWoman nominates herself for most pathetic response to the imperatives of taxation in a few zillion days. RantWoman has been too busy coping with visual randomness and helping birth her group's contribution to the Super Duper Powerpoint festival to pay due attention to taxation.
(There might possibly be some undue and overweaning procrastination involved here, but RantWoman would, of course, remain mum if that were one of the issues.)
RantWoman finally threw up her hands and filed for an extension. Here enter even more indicators of patheticness.
1. RantWoman filed ON PAPER instead of electronically. Why? to file electronically, one is supposed to have the adjusted gross income used on last year's taxes. This seems like a logical validation check, except that if one could put one's hands on last year's tax information in the first place, one would be considerably less likely to need an extension!
2. RantWoman paid her estimated taxes out of her personal checking account instead of her business one. RantWoman searched high and low in her regular bags for her business check book. It turned up just fine as soon as RantWoman had sealed the envelope with her paper form and a check from her personal account. RantWoman supposes the taxation overseers really do not care which account RantWoman uses; RantWoman however could stand to keep her life simpler with one less bookkeeping transaction to keep her financial streams within their respective boundaries.
3. RantWoman was so charmed by the long lingering sun of a balmy spring evening that, despite being exhausted by the Super Duper Powerpoint festival, RantWoman spent a few minutes at one of the local generic protest zones observing her city's very own TeaBag protest. For description and more verbose, less content-dense than other cases commentary pro and con see The illogic of Hannity and the Tea Party Protestors .
RantWoman is in fact trying to summon her own words to complain about her issues with some of how her taxes are currently being spent. However RantWoman will stop for this evening thanking Seattle police for being even-handed. The TeaPartiers drew about the same number of helmet-clad bike cops as many protests of similar or even slightly larger protests. Well maybe the cops were being even-handed, or maybe they were also enjoying a chance to be out on a wonderful spring evening.
(There might possibly be some undue and overweaning procrastination involved here, but RantWoman would, of course, remain mum if that were one of the issues.)
RantWoman finally threw up her hands and filed for an extension. Here enter even more indicators of patheticness.
1. RantWoman filed ON PAPER instead of electronically. Why? to file electronically, one is supposed to have the adjusted gross income used on last year's taxes. This seems like a logical validation check, except that if one could put one's hands on last year's tax information in the first place, one would be considerably less likely to need an extension!
2. RantWoman paid her estimated taxes out of her personal checking account instead of her business one. RantWoman searched high and low in her regular bags for her business check book. It turned up just fine as soon as RantWoman had sealed the envelope with her paper form and a check from her personal account. RantWoman supposes the taxation overseers really do not care which account RantWoman uses; RantWoman however could stand to keep her life simpler with one less bookkeeping transaction to keep her financial streams within their respective boundaries.
3. RantWoman was so charmed by the long lingering sun of a balmy spring evening that, despite being exhausted by the Super Duper Powerpoint festival, RantWoman spent a few minutes at one of the local generic protest zones observing her city's very own TeaBag protest. For description and more verbose, less content-dense than other cases commentary pro and con see The illogic of Hannity and the Tea Party Protestors .
RantWoman is in fact trying to summon her own words to complain about her issues with some of how her taxes are currently being spent. However RantWoman will stop for this evening thanking Seattle police for being even-handed. The TeaPartiers drew about the same number of helmet-clad bike cops as many protests of similar or even slightly larger protests. Well maybe the cops were being even-handed, or maybe they were also enjoying a chance to be out on a wonderful spring evening.
Ignite!
RantWoman is still floating after two days of the Super Duper Powerpoint festival including her own panel's brilliant, wildly well-received session. All of this is grist for another post. The whim of the moment is a new, recurring event called IGNITE .
20 slides, each visible for 15 seconds seems like a new and extreme way to do Powerpoint, an intellectual or public presentation version of speed dating. The article does not mention, but after two days of the Super Duper Powerpoint festival, RantWoman wonders whether there is any kind of requirement that the slides be decently legible or whether there is some kind of bonus prize for the volume of GIS data or the quantity of text going whizzing by every 15 seconds. RantWoman woners this, but RantWoman is going to defer a decision about whether to put this event on her calendar and go check it out herself.
20 slides, each visible for 15 seconds seems like a new and extreme way to do Powerpoint, an intellectual or public presentation version of speed dating. The article does not mention, but after two days of the Super Duper Powerpoint festival, RantWoman wonders whether there is any kind of requirement that the slides be decently legible or whether there is some kind of bonus prize for the volume of GIS data or the quantity of text going whizzing by every 15 seconds. RantWoman woners this, but RantWoman is going to defer a decision about whether to put this event on her calendar and go check it out herself.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Finnegan's Wake
RantWoman heard in passing this afternoon that James Joyce went blind late in life and that another famous writer (Beckett?) spent a lot of time reading for him as he was writing Finnegan's Wake. RantWoman herself has a sort of twitchy relationship to the whole idea of being read to; for purposes of this meditation, RantWoman simply notes that the reading / scribing must have been quite a fascinating exercise to have resulted in the multi-lingual density of Finnegan's Wake.
Finnegan's Wake is one of those books RantWoman made a couple well-meaning attempts to read before filing the whole effort in the "maybe someday" category. The current Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce offers a few crumbs of insight that might hypothetically lead RantWoman through some of Joyce's thickets, but RantWoman may also just leave the whole matter to others.
Finnegan's Wake is one of those books RantWoman made a couple well-meaning attempts to read before filing the whole effort in the "maybe someday" category. The current Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce offers a few crumbs of insight that might hypothetically lead RantWoman through some of Joyce's thickets, but RantWoman may also just leave the whole matter to others.
The Boss
Dear Applicant,
For purposes of this conversation, RantWoman is The Boss. RantWoman acknowledges that the particular job posting RantWoman is advertising is a modest opportunity fraught with terribly interesting personalities and freighted with considerably less than vast financial remuneration. However, RantWoman is The Boss and if you want to land within that small circle of people we are going to talk further too, RantWoman strongly recommends you adopt the following practices.
Please just SEND US A RESUME AND COVER LETTER. Your web link is not enough. A chatty email is not enough, particularly when it is not strongly on-topic for what the posting asks for.
RantWoman considers a resume and cover letter in their own file(s) to be the rock bottom minimum needed for further consideration. Grammatical well-crafted items that respond to the posting make RantWoman swoon. Even more modest efforts also draw favorable notice: simply naming the files with your name will go a long way toward warming RantWoman's boss-bitch heart.
(RantWoman takes note of this on her own behalf. RantWoman tends to name her resume submissions after something to do with the place she is submitting the resume. After an exciting evening of foaming at the mouth about everyone else's mistakes, RantWoman sees undeniable merit in adjusting her own approach as well!)
Please do not tell us anything that would allow RantWoman's poorly disciplined prejudices to kick you out of consideration. These points may include religion, excessive involvement with certain categories of employment, or the fact that you have absolutely no topical experience and are causing RantWoman to wonder whether you possess sufficient literacy skills to handle the job's minimal requirements.
It is not really RantWoman's problem that you want to try out the topic of this posting as a break from your regular activity before going off to get an MBA/ JD / PhD / DDS / MDiv / PdQ/ DoA/ DoG or any other title in the fall. Nor is your mid-life crisis. Nor is all that vast experience unrelated to the posting. RantWoman's concern is making the rest of the team and our crowd of eccentric customers happy without having to expend lots and lots of money for ultra-specific high-end gear.
Do not let this tirade completely derail your application. If you have received our form email inviting you to please get serious and submit a real application, please get on the ball and do it. RantWoman's generous mood about this topic has a very short half-life!
Thank you very much for your interest in our position.
Sincerely,
RantWoman
For purposes of this conversation, RantWoman is The Boss. RantWoman acknowledges that the particular job posting RantWoman is advertising is a modest opportunity fraught with terribly interesting personalities and freighted with considerably less than vast financial remuneration. However, RantWoman is The Boss and if you want to land within that small circle of people we are going to talk further too, RantWoman strongly recommends you adopt the following practices.
Please just SEND US A RESUME AND COVER LETTER. Your web link is not enough. A chatty email is not enough, particularly when it is not strongly on-topic for what the posting asks for.
RantWoman considers a resume and cover letter in their own file(s) to be the rock bottom minimum needed for further consideration. Grammatical well-crafted items that respond to the posting make RantWoman swoon. Even more modest efforts also draw favorable notice: simply naming the files with your name will go a long way toward warming RantWoman's boss-bitch heart.
(RantWoman takes note of this on her own behalf. RantWoman tends to name her resume submissions after something to do with the place she is submitting the resume. After an exciting evening of foaming at the mouth about everyone else's mistakes, RantWoman sees undeniable merit in adjusting her own approach as well!)
Please do not tell us anything that would allow RantWoman's poorly disciplined prejudices to kick you out of consideration. These points may include religion, excessive involvement with certain categories of employment, or the fact that you have absolutely no topical experience and are causing RantWoman to wonder whether you possess sufficient literacy skills to handle the job's minimal requirements.
It is not really RantWoman's problem that you want to try out the topic of this posting as a break from your regular activity before going off to get an MBA/ JD / PhD / DDS / MDiv / PdQ/ DoA/ DoG or any other title in the fall. Nor is your mid-life crisis. Nor is all that vast experience unrelated to the posting. RantWoman's concern is making the rest of the team and our crowd of eccentric customers happy without having to expend lots and lots of money for ultra-specific high-end gear.
Do not let this tirade completely derail your application. If you have received our form email inviting you to please get serious and submit a real application, please get on the ball and do it. RantWoman's generous mood about this topic has a very short half-life!
Thank you very much for your interest in our position.
Sincerely,
RantWoman
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Audio Display
RantWoman is aware that in legal context use of terminology can have quite specific statutory, legislative, juridical, and economic baggage. For instance RantWoman notes the $3 billion dollar wrangle about whether for insurance purposes the collapse of the two towers of the World Trade Center after 9/11 was one event or two. RantWoman at the moment has no way to estimate the value of discussion about the following terms. However, she finds the following distinctions highly topical and helpful when considering the matter of rights and the Kindle.
Lexicography item from a recent email
Video display: the usual manner of electronically presenting content such as books and magazines on a computer screen.
Audio display: the original display of content is accomplished by electronic means. This carries with it the assumption that the electronic production and the rights to do so should be managed exactly the same way that video display is managed
Audio performance: original production of audio content is done by a human and then rights to distribute / replay are handled as currently.
One supposes that video performance would then be some kind of performance involving live humans managed and distributed as video files.
RantWoman imagines there are lots of people with way more scarier credentials than RantWoman breaking their heads over these problems, and RantWoman is offering her views anyway!
Lexicography item from a recent email
Video display: the usual manner of electronically presenting content such as books and magazines on a computer screen.
Audio display: the original display of content is accomplished by electronic means. This carries with it the assumption that the electronic production and the rights to do so should be managed exactly the same way that video display is managed
Audio performance: original production of audio content is done by a human and then rights to distribute / replay are handled as currently.
One supposes that video performance would then be some kind of performance involving live humans managed and distributed as video files.
RantWoman imagines there are lots of people with way more scarier credentials than RantWoman breaking their heads over these problems, and RantWoman is offering her views anyway!
Friday, April 10, 2009
Smells like ... 2
Recently, RantWoman got on one of her regular bus routes earlier than usual and found herself suddenly on a most unexpected olfactory journey. The bus was crowded and it was the beginning of the workday where people on average have bathed more recently than at other times of the day. Still, RantWoman found herself stumbling down a long tunnel of odors: rice, sweat, probably the effects of living too close to noxious roadways or places spewing vile fumes.
RantWoman found herself feeling uncomfortably like some of those people she used to travel with, the kind who wrinkle up their noses and every new olfactory experience and cluck about how nice it would be if the locals just "use cosmetics." Actual cosmetics tend to make RantWoman sneeze and break out, so RantWoman was just as glad there was no overlay of cheap hand lotion, but ever since RantWoman has been reflecting on the wonders and oddities of her part of town and the competing imperatives of promoting transit use while coping with the public's preference for being among "the beautiful people," not to mention not smushed in close with quite so many of the particular flavor of "beautiful people" who abound on early-morning bus trips.
The area where RantWoman lives and does a lot of her bus travel includes many of the most ethnically diverse census tracts in the entire country. An incredibly large percentage of the population speaks a language other than English at home. (Depending on who has come over, RantWoman never knows whether to count herself among this number.) There are several thousand each who speak about 6 different languages, and dozens more languages spoken by at least a few residents. RantWoman likes to tease RantMom: RantMom's retirement planning does not really afford world travel so RantMom gets to go out and meet the world on the bus.
Even before the latest olfactory odyssey, a few months ago RantWoman signed up for an important public participation exercise related to some impending changes in the local transit system. This particular project included faces that look somewhat like the neighborhood. Still, there is something about the prospect of poring over ridership data and bus route proposals and sundry related issues that cause the panel to skew heavily toward the college-educated and people with a certain hard-core nerd fortitude.
RantWoman found herself feeling uncomfortably like some of those people she used to travel with, the kind who wrinkle up their noses and every new olfactory experience and cluck about how nice it would be if the locals just "use cosmetics." Actual cosmetics tend to make RantWoman sneeze and break out, so RantWoman was just as glad there was no overlay of cheap hand lotion, but ever since RantWoman has been reflecting on the wonders and oddities of her part of town and the competing imperatives of promoting transit use while coping with the public's preference for being among "the beautiful people," not to mention not smushed in close with quite so many of the particular flavor of "beautiful people" who abound on early-morning bus trips.
The area where RantWoman lives and does a lot of her bus travel includes many of the most ethnically diverse census tracts in the entire country. An incredibly large percentage of the population speaks a language other than English at home. (Depending on who has come over, RantWoman never knows whether to count herself among this number.) There are several thousand each who speak about 6 different languages, and dozens more languages spoken by at least a few residents. RantWoman likes to tease RantMom: RantMom's retirement planning does not really afford world travel so RantMom gets to go out and meet the world on the bus.
Even before the latest olfactory odyssey, a few months ago RantWoman signed up for an important public participation exercise related to some impending changes in the local transit system. This particular project included faces that look somewhat like the neighborhood. Still, there is something about the prospect of poring over ridership data and bus route proposals and sundry related issues that cause the panel to skew heavily toward the college-educated and people with a certain hard-core nerd fortitude.
The other point about the panel that resulted: although the balance by skin tone was not terrible (could have been better; could have been worse), the introductions at the initial meeting revealed an interesting duality. People who had moved to Seattle from elsewhere tended to have lots of experience with transit systems around the world. These people also tended to think the transit system is wonderful. People who have lived their whole lives in the area and have maybe moved with prosperity from the center city to the suburbs tended to have lots of complaints about underdeveloped transit networks near where they lived. Three guesses about the average skin tones of these two groups as well.
Truthfully, lots of effort was made to provide other people ways to participate in the process. Decent statistics were compiled about some areas where people with limited English have strongly different opinions from the people who participated in English. Despite these efforts, RantWoman suspects the project still falls short of extracting actual input about some points from this work. For instance, RantWoman has a 120-page report on her hard drive that she needs to look at on a related thread. RantWoman found herself mumbling Duh, Duh, No kidding several times as she read the 3-page executive summary.
Soon though, reports and public hearings will occur and RantWoman will have her opportunities to speak up. As you might guess, RantWoman being RantWoman, there is another whole thread about which RantWoman vernacular could easily be "This smells." though th time is ot quite ripe for full-bore RantWoman ranting. RantWoman also regrets that she did not have time to lend an ear to the partner project where she might have had some topical linguistic experience
Here though RantWoman needs just to put her ranting aside and share communications from another dedicated transit fan who also sometimes writes about these themes as well as many other issues, Bus Chick.
RantWoman especially recommends Bus Chick's comments on raising her daughter Chicklet on the bus as well as her reflections about the backgrounds of people who choose only to ride the bus
Bus Chick's This I Believe essay
Smells like...Never mind
RantWoman wishes to weigh in peculiarly on the 15th anniversary of Nirvana, the grunge band lead singer Kurt Cobain's suicide. This entry has been simmering for a few days. Tonight RantWoman is seizing the occasion of her annual spring allergies transforming themselves into a sudden spring cold to finish a couple smell-related items.
RantWoman does not actually have that much to say about Kurt Cobain exactly except for one funny and one sad moment from his last big venue show in Seattle, but she is going to take advantage of the situation to ramble on the fantasms of youth, fates of poet-songwriters, the signature popular culture bards of various places she has lived or visited, and perhaps one or two other topics besides the issue of just how aggravating suicides can be sometimes.
When RantWoman moved to Seattle a couple years before Cobain's passing, she had no idea who Nirvana was. RantWoman tends not to swim in the widest currents of popular culture so this is not necessarily surprising. RantWoman was broke, awaiting the arrival of her last pre-Seattle paycheck but she did see acts she wanted to see listed in the local ads of an upcoming community festival. RantWoman coincidentally also saw a job posting seeking "Event Staff" for the very upcoming event she wanted to attend. The wages were fabulous (not!). This MIGHT be one reason RantWoman was able to pester the employer daily for like a week and parley her vast experience handing out symphony programs in high school and deterring the main act from leaving her coffee cup on the soundboard during a break at another event and a few other similar moments into a gig as "Event Staff."
At the time of RantWoman's Event Staff career, the crews included one guy in a wheelchair, another preternaturally skinny but very agile guy and of course RantWoman in her wacky eyeglasses. In terms of income, RantWoman is glad that other circumstances allowed her to keep the "Event Staff" gig in the category of hobby rather than sole means of support, the situation for a few of RantWoman's Event Staff colleagues.
Being Event Staff is not a particularly good way to be guaranteed of seeing one's dream acts. Event Staff sometimes wind up being busy searching bags, counting patrons with handclickers, checking names on the performers' guest lists, giving directions to the bathroom or pay phone, and assorted other unglamorous duties, sometimes well-removed from the main act. Or Event Staff wind up close enough to key equipment to need earplugs. Or sometimes the main act turns out to be so ear-splitting that the Event Staff wind up needing earplugs just to monitor the venue exits.
True, over RantWoman's Event Staff career, she did wind up seeing some fun up-and-coming acts. Barenaked Ladies when they were younger anyone? Sleater Kinney ? RantWoman saw some visiting Pipe and Drum corps who turned out to be really good and watched a crowd of nice clean-cut college students from out of town try to get it going with a Christian rap group called dc Talk.
RantWoman got to see the The Grateful Dead without even too much Deadhead experience, seeing the Grateful Dead while working as Event Staff being of course the epitome of irony in the first place, though possibly no worse than the group's business dude who went about the entire two-show gig in a wig with a very obvious fake ponytail over his cropped hair.
One time RantWoman got dispatched to a travel node where her task was to point the "head-banging Symphony musicians" to their venue and to make sure the rock show crowd found its proper entry. RantWoman was not upset to get to hear the scheduled oratorio, Handel's Judas Maccabaeus) instead of the rock show. RantWoman abandoned this career after seeing the Rolling Stones, but that was a few months after the Nirvana gig.
Event Staff do not wear white gloves or look like protodebutantes. In RantWoman's experience they wear yellow jackets or yellow company-issue T-shirts. The clothing has numbers on it and there is a mind-numbing check out/ check in process to make sure none of these pinnacles of fashion get diverted for any kind of malfeasance. Size is an advantage for some parts of the job, so there was never a shortage of clothing that would fit RantWoman, though alas for health reasons RantWoman always had to demur from one occasionally confrontational role where size was one consideration. Some of the time the Event Staff were low-level crowd control. Some of the time, the Event Staff were, cough, proto-cops.
For example, the yellow costumes were either supposed to help the staff doing search find prohibited weapons and illicit substances or deter the masses of concertgoers from breaking out the illicit substances in the presence of the Event Staff. RantWoman was tolerably competent with the metal detector wand though her colleagues tended to be more successful about ferreting out the prohibited items and routing them without fuss or muss or further legal bother to the ever-present trash cans mext to the Search cordons on the way into venues.
RantWoman on numerous occasions reflected on sundry issues which might come to mind over the role described here. RantWoman found herself reflecting on numerous stories, on the demands of music promoters, insurance companies and other threads of planet capitalism. RantWoman does not regret these experiences; she also does not regret not doing this forever.
Despite the volume of materials finding the way into the trash cans before concerts clouds and clouds of evidence of illicit substances nearly always wafted forth almost as soon as the concert started. The Nirvana show RantWoman worked a few months before Cobain's demise was no exception. That night RantWoman was working the VIP entry. This was sort of comical. If RantWoman hardly knew who Nirvana were, unlike one or two awestruck colleagues, she certainly did not recognize players in other major local groups either.
Perhaps this obliviousness was an advantage. RantWoman had only to look slightly motherly and be courteous about looking up the guests' names on the official list before letting them pass undisturbed into the show. Sometimes there would be a pair of Event Staff on this duty. Sometimes there might be an actual uniformed cop. The night of the Nirvana show, there was a cop. At some point, the clouds of illicit substances got particularly difficult to ignore. The nice police officer went off to see if said clouds were emanating from the men's room. When he came back, it was RantWoman's job to check out the women's room.
Based on odor distribution, RantWoman has no particular reason to think said clouds were emanating from the women's room. If they had been, RantWoman's fabulous yellow jacket should have clued in even the most addled concertgoer and of course RantWoman did not find anything. So she went back to her station amid the clouds of smoke.
Here I digress. RantWoman's personal experience with illicit substances has a lot in common with her lack of experience with alcohol. RantWoman has personal experience with deliberate rather than occupational ingestion of illicit substances. RantWoman has enough single experiences to have had one or two really pleasant encounters, but RantWoman's general experience has usually tended toward "Why bother?"
This was certainly the case standing with the cop at the VIP gate at the Nirvana show. Why bother, except that RantWoman also noticed one well-known effect of the main illicit substance in use: RantWoman noticed she was getting hungry. RantWoman eventually excused herself to go inspect the wretched offerings at the nearby concession stand. RantWoman remembers standing there waiting for another customer, listening to the lyrics, and thinking "Wow, that is one depressed dude." Then she bought a bag of peanuts, went back to her station, and shared the peanuts with the cop who also seemed to be suffering the same appetite issue. He looked RantWoman and the bag of peanuts up and down to make sure RantWoman was not offering him God knows what before accepting the offered snack.
RantWoman would certainly not have minded in the least being wrong about the lead singer's monster case of depression, but to this day the whole story is stamped with the smell of weed and the taste of peanuts.
With that, we return Kurt Cobain to RantWoman's thematic list of bards, suicidal poets, and people whose family entourage also undoubtedly deserves kind thoughts:
John Denver always summoned images of RantWoman's elementary school years in Colorado, to the point that RantWoman never knows whether to cry or throw up when she hears one of his hits.
RantWoman went to college in New Jersey and developed a taste for Bruce Springsteen, who mercifully survives unlike another singer RantWoman knew much more intimately who does not.
Grad school in IN implanted John Cougar Mellancamp in RantWoman's library of earworms.
Even RantWoman's study abroad trip to Russia implanted a new set of bards and earworms. There was a Perestroika-era documentary about the memorial for Soviet-era bard Bulat Okudzhava. Okudzhava's career had its ups and downs both with the Soviet state and with alcoholism, but he had the temerity to go and die in late middle age in Moscow, just before the 1980 Olympics. The documentary was all about all the different zigs and zags involved in having a public memorial and getting it all out of sight before people showed up, or in the case of the US didn't show up for the Olympics. Dear Readers, you can go Wikipedia Okudzhava yourselves, but in keeping with this poetic memorial RantWoman found a wonderful clear-voiced clip of a tune called Molitva, Prayer about remembering no matter what.
RantWoman also remembers appreciating Neil Young's audio remembrance from one old poet to a younger one, and now RantWoman thinks of every kid anywhere trying to stretch his or her wings past the limits of the place they grew up....
RantWoman does not actually have that much to say about Kurt Cobain exactly except for one funny and one sad moment from his last big venue show in Seattle, but she is going to take advantage of the situation to ramble on the fantasms of youth, fates of poet-songwriters, the signature popular culture bards of various places she has lived or visited, and perhaps one or two other topics besides the issue of just how aggravating suicides can be sometimes.
When RantWoman moved to Seattle a couple years before Cobain's passing, she had no idea who Nirvana was. RantWoman tends not to swim in the widest currents of popular culture so this is not necessarily surprising. RantWoman was broke, awaiting the arrival of her last pre-Seattle paycheck but she did see acts she wanted to see listed in the local ads of an upcoming community festival. RantWoman coincidentally also saw a job posting seeking "Event Staff" for the very upcoming event she wanted to attend. The wages were fabulous (not!). This MIGHT be one reason RantWoman was able to pester the employer daily for like a week and parley her vast experience handing out symphony programs in high school and deterring the main act from leaving her coffee cup on the soundboard during a break at another event and a few other similar moments into a gig as "Event Staff."
At the time of RantWoman's Event Staff career, the crews included one guy in a wheelchair, another preternaturally skinny but very agile guy and of course RantWoman in her wacky eyeglasses. In terms of income, RantWoman is glad that other circumstances allowed her to keep the "Event Staff" gig in the category of hobby rather than sole means of support, the situation for a few of RantWoman's Event Staff colleagues.
Being Event Staff is not a particularly good way to be guaranteed of seeing one's dream acts. Event Staff sometimes wind up being busy searching bags, counting patrons with handclickers, checking names on the performers' guest lists, giving directions to the bathroom or pay phone, and assorted other unglamorous duties, sometimes well-removed from the main act. Or Event Staff wind up close enough to key equipment to need earplugs. Or sometimes the main act turns out to be so ear-splitting that the Event Staff wind up needing earplugs just to monitor the venue exits.
True, over RantWoman's Event Staff career, she did wind up seeing some fun up-and-coming acts. Barenaked Ladies when they were younger anyone? Sleater Kinney ? RantWoman saw some visiting Pipe and Drum corps who turned out to be really good and watched a crowd of nice clean-cut college students from out of town try to get it going with a Christian rap group called dc Talk.
RantWoman got to see the The Grateful Dead without even too much Deadhead experience, seeing the Grateful Dead while working as Event Staff being of course the epitome of irony in the first place, though possibly no worse than the group's business dude who went about the entire two-show gig in a wig with a very obvious fake ponytail over his cropped hair.
One time RantWoman got dispatched to a travel node where her task was to point the "head-banging Symphony musicians" to their venue and to make sure the rock show crowd found its proper entry. RantWoman was not upset to get to hear the scheduled oratorio, Handel's Judas Maccabaeus) instead of the rock show. RantWoman abandoned this career after seeing the Rolling Stones, but that was a few months after the Nirvana gig.
Event Staff do not wear white gloves or look like protodebutantes. In RantWoman's experience they wear yellow jackets or yellow company-issue T-shirts. The clothing has numbers on it and there is a mind-numbing check out/ check in process to make sure none of these pinnacles of fashion get diverted for any kind of malfeasance. Size is an advantage for some parts of the job, so there was never a shortage of clothing that would fit RantWoman, though alas for health reasons RantWoman always had to demur from one occasionally confrontational role where size was one consideration. Some of the time the Event Staff were low-level crowd control. Some of the time, the Event Staff were, cough, proto-cops.
For example, the yellow costumes were either supposed to help the staff doing search find prohibited weapons and illicit substances or deter the masses of concertgoers from breaking out the illicit substances in the presence of the Event Staff. RantWoman was tolerably competent with the metal detector wand though her colleagues tended to be more successful about ferreting out the prohibited items and routing them without fuss or muss or further legal bother to the ever-present trash cans mext to the Search cordons on the way into venues.
RantWoman on numerous occasions reflected on sundry issues which might come to mind over the role described here. RantWoman found herself reflecting on numerous stories, on the demands of music promoters, insurance companies and other threads of planet capitalism. RantWoman does not regret these experiences; she also does not regret not doing this forever.
Despite the volume of materials finding the way into the trash cans before concerts clouds and clouds of evidence of illicit substances nearly always wafted forth almost as soon as the concert started. The Nirvana show RantWoman worked a few months before Cobain's demise was no exception. That night RantWoman was working the VIP entry. This was sort of comical. If RantWoman hardly knew who Nirvana were, unlike one or two awestruck colleagues, she certainly did not recognize players in other major local groups either.
Perhaps this obliviousness was an advantage. RantWoman had only to look slightly motherly and be courteous about looking up the guests' names on the official list before letting them pass undisturbed into the show. Sometimes there would be a pair of Event Staff on this duty. Sometimes there might be an actual uniformed cop. The night of the Nirvana show, there was a cop. At some point, the clouds of illicit substances got particularly difficult to ignore. The nice police officer went off to see if said clouds were emanating from the men's room. When he came back, it was RantWoman's job to check out the women's room.
Based on odor distribution, RantWoman has no particular reason to think said clouds were emanating from the women's room. If they had been, RantWoman's fabulous yellow jacket should have clued in even the most addled concertgoer and of course RantWoman did not find anything. So she went back to her station amid the clouds of smoke.
Here I digress. RantWoman's personal experience with illicit substances has a lot in common with her lack of experience with alcohol. RantWoman has personal experience with deliberate rather than occupational ingestion of illicit substances. RantWoman has enough single experiences to have had one or two really pleasant encounters, but RantWoman's general experience has usually tended toward "Why bother?"
This was certainly the case standing with the cop at the VIP gate at the Nirvana show. Why bother, except that RantWoman also noticed one well-known effect of the main illicit substance in use: RantWoman noticed she was getting hungry. RantWoman eventually excused herself to go inspect the wretched offerings at the nearby concession stand. RantWoman remembers standing there waiting for another customer, listening to the lyrics, and thinking "Wow, that is one depressed dude." Then she bought a bag of peanuts, went back to her station, and shared the peanuts with the cop who also seemed to be suffering the same appetite issue. He looked RantWoman and the bag of peanuts up and down to make sure RantWoman was not offering him God knows what before accepting the offered snack.
RantWoman would certainly not have minded in the least being wrong about the lead singer's monster case of depression, but to this day the whole story is stamped with the smell of weed and the taste of peanuts.
With that, we return Kurt Cobain to RantWoman's thematic list of bards, suicidal poets, and people whose family entourage also undoubtedly deserves kind thoughts:
John Denver always summoned images of RantWoman's elementary school years in Colorado, to the point that RantWoman never knows whether to cry or throw up when she hears one of his hits.
RantWoman went to college in New Jersey and developed a taste for Bruce Springsteen, who mercifully survives unlike another singer RantWoman knew much more intimately who does not.
Grad school in IN implanted John Cougar Mellancamp in RantWoman's library of earworms.
Even RantWoman's study abroad trip to Russia implanted a new set of bards and earworms. There was a Perestroika-era documentary about the memorial for Soviet-era bard Bulat Okudzhava. Okudzhava's career had its ups and downs both with the Soviet state and with alcoholism, but he had the temerity to go and die in late middle age in Moscow, just before the 1980 Olympics. The documentary was all about all the different zigs and zags involved in having a public memorial and getting it all out of sight before people showed up, or in the case of the US didn't show up for the Olympics. Dear Readers, you can go Wikipedia Okudzhava yourselves, but in keeping with this poetic memorial RantWoman found a wonderful clear-voiced clip of a tune called Molitva, Prayer about remembering no matter what.
RantWoman also remembers appreciating Neil Young's audio remembrance from one old poet to a younger one, and now RantWoman thinks of every kid anywhere trying to stretch his or her wings past the limits of the place they grew up....
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Mail Order: Make it So!
RantWoman succumbed. RantWoman was reviewing her early morning email and let herself click through to the sale page for one of her other favorite clothing purveyors. It does not matter which one. RantWoman simply wants to state some preferences clearly and unambiguously. Since none of the places she shops online live up to this fantasy, RantWoman is simply going to state her wishes and see whether the market does anything to accommodate her.
When RantWoman buys clothing she cares about, not entirely in order of importance:
price
fabric content
color, and "tangerine" or "kiwi" only very occasionally
size
key dimensions such as inseam length for slacks, leggings, capris...
length of garment for blouses, dresses, skirts, jumpers, coats
SLEEVE LENGTH for long-sleeved items, a data point which NONE of the sites RantWoman shops can ever characterize in more detail than "short" or "3/4 length." RantWoman's sad experience is that lots of items with allegedly "long" sleeves wind up having "3/4 length" sleeves on RantWoman
kind and number of fasteners such as buttons. RantWoman suffers the quaint delusion that sweaters should have closures and usually more than one. Once in awhile RantWoman takes it into her head to consider something withouth closures, a wrap or a belt, but if RantWoman is lingering over something like that, she will not be using her preferred profiles anyway.
immediate gratification: RantWoman very seldom cares about something that is not in stock, and she somewhat resents her clothing purveyors wasting her time with whole separate color / size availability screens while they gather data on color preferences for items that are not in stock.
RantWoman is aware that people come in all shapes and sizes and that items she would reject out of hand turn out to be ideal for other people. However in RantWoman's rich fantasy life, her various clothing providers would allow her to store preferred profiles and then let her search with those saved queries:
Show RantWoman all pants / slacks leggings of size ZZZ and length between xx and yy that are IN STOCK
Show RantWoman all jackets and sweaters of length between xx and yy with sleeve lengths at least zz that are IN STOCK
RantWoman would also prefer that these profiles remaind the default display mode as RantWoman browses both item categories and the sale rack.
In short, RantWoman would certainly consider stimulating the economy with some purchases, but RantWoman is busy ranting about the Kindle and would love her marketers to meet her halfway about making it faster!
When RantWoman buys clothing she cares about, not entirely in order of importance:
price
fabric content
color, and "tangerine" or "kiwi" only very occasionally
size
key dimensions such as inseam length for slacks, leggings, capris...
length of garment for blouses, dresses, skirts, jumpers, coats
SLEEVE LENGTH for long-sleeved items, a data point which NONE of the sites RantWoman shops can ever characterize in more detail than "short" or "3/4 length." RantWoman's sad experience is that lots of items with allegedly "long" sleeves wind up having "3/4 length" sleeves on RantWoman
kind and number of fasteners such as buttons. RantWoman suffers the quaint delusion that sweaters should have closures and usually more than one. Once in awhile RantWoman takes it into her head to consider something withouth closures, a wrap or a belt, but if RantWoman is lingering over something like that, she will not be using her preferred profiles anyway.
immediate gratification: RantWoman very seldom cares about something that is not in stock, and she somewhat resents her clothing purveyors wasting her time with whole separate color / size availability screens while they gather data on color preferences for items that are not in stock.
RantWoman is aware that people come in all shapes and sizes and that items she would reject out of hand turn out to be ideal for other people. However in RantWoman's rich fantasy life, her various clothing providers would allow her to store preferred profiles and then let her search with those saved queries:
Show RantWoman all pants / slacks leggings of size ZZZ and length between xx and yy that are IN STOCK
Show RantWoman all jackets and sweaters of length between xx and yy with sleeve lengths at least zz that are IN STOCK
RantWoman would also prefer that these profiles remaind the default display mode as RantWoman browses both item categories and the sale rack.
In short, RantWoman would certainly consider stimulating the economy with some purchases, but RantWoman is busy ranting about the Kindle and would love her marketers to meet her halfway about making it faster!
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