Swine Flu: Still out there....

Last week the WHO declared that swine flu is officially NOT a pandemic (yet?). Today's swine flu snapshots from here and there:

Last week's Keep Sick kids home message from the King County Website, no
w a ways down on the county home page.
http://www.kingcounty.gov/healthservices/health/news/2009/09052101.aspx

another King County Link
http://www.kingcounty.gov/healthservices/health/preparedness/pandemicflu/swineflu.aspx

From today's Seattle PI
WA Swine Flu tests to focus on hospitals

State of WA Dept of Health
WA Department of Health snapshot
The actual county-by-county breakdown is a graphical map. There is a simple table of overall numbers and a link RantWoman did not follow for alternative formats.

The CDC
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/
In Spanish just for variety
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/espanol/


For grins from http://www.gazeta.ru/
http://gazeta.ru/subjects/2980188.shtml#2985375
One official says the peak of the illness has passed; who is in the hospital or not, not confirmed.... In other words in a fast read, RantWoman has no clue what is going on.


The World Health Organization home page in English reminding us that yellow fever and tobacco cessation also need attention
http://www.who.int/en/

WHO Country Breakdown in English Report No 40
There is a link to an ugly jpg map. The map makes RantWoman wonder whether those are the only countries with cases or just cases in countries with the capacity to detect.


Verdict: RantWoman will check her sources one at a time because that seems more on target than doing direct feeds of updates.

In the meantime play the scary shark music from JAWS at very low volume in the background if we need it and keep the hand sanitizer handy but...

Freedom Scientific Podcast about Twitter

RantWoman is stashing this here as much for her own edification as anything; perhaps someone else will find it useful.


Episode 30 of FSCast from Freedom Scientiffic is now available and this
month it is all about using Twitter. It can be downloaded from
http://podcast.freedomscientific.com/FSCast/episodes/fscast030-may2009.mp3

This is a direct link to the file. Information about this edition says:

This month's FSCast discusses the use of the social networking site
Twitter in conjunction with JAWS® screen reading software and PAC Mate Omni™ accessible Pocket PC.

Jonathan Mosen speaks with Shannon Reece, Pratik Patel, and Mika Pyyhkala, who actively use Twitter with Freedom Scientific products. They discuss what Twitter is, how to sign up, and some third party applications and services they use to make the most of it.

Jonathan then speaks with Sean Randall, the author of Jawter, a set of JAWS scripts that give you access to Twitter from within any application while JAWS is running.

We're then joined by Jamal Mazrui, author of McTwit. This is a powerful
application written specifically for blind Twitter users, with functions
accessible using a series of keyboard commands.

If you use Microsoft Outlook®, you can send and receive tweets, and run Twitter searches,
right from within your inbox. The Chief Executive of TechHit, Alex Kovalchuk, tells us about
TWInbox, formerly known as OutTwit.

While the main Twitter site works very well with JAWS, Accessible
Twitter offers a number of enhancements that makes the Twitter
experience easier. It's creator, Dennis Lembree, tells us all about it.

During our discussions, we mention a number of other Twitter tools. Here are links
to a few.

Twikini is a Windows Mobile Twitter client that's easy to use, and works
well with PAC Mate Omni.
http://www.trinketsoftware.com/Twikini


Twittermail facilitates the sending of tweets via e-mail, as well as
scheduling tweets to be sent in the future.
http://www.twittermail.com.


Twimailer provides detailed follow notifications, so you can see some
recent tweets from people who are following you
http://twimailer.com


Tweetlater offers many powerful enhancements to Twitter, including
automatic sending of welcome messages and e-mailing a digest of replies.
http://www.tweetlater.com


Show Host: Jonathan Mosen.

ORCA, take n

RantWoman has been doing so well (NOT!) about electronic interface to her spiffy new ORCA card that this morning in the middle of the rest of the world getting their bus passes the last week of the month RantWoman bounded down to the Metro office to get her next month's pass in person.

RantWoman originally thought of doing this Friday. Thanks to the wisdom of the global economic collapse, the bottom falling out of sales tax collections, and massive governmental deficits, the humble public servants in transit offices were forced to endure Furlough Friday, another unbearable day of leisure tacked onto an already 3-day weekend. RantWoman is sure they were suffering miserably; if they weren't RantWoman will go find some nice statistics about how leisure improves productivity. Everyone in Europe who takes much more vacation than people in the US do is also much more productive. That would kill the vacation buzz since the workers would just be storing up zeal for their return to work, but tough.

Or RantWoman would just show up in person on the first workday after a holiday and reserve judgment about productivity. When RantWoman arrived there was quite a line. RantWoman fretted about needing to leave in time to bus to an appointment. RantWoman took note of a cheery video loop in one corner touting all the wonders of the ORCA card and scanned briefly for evidence that maybe she could just find a machine near the video screen, inser her ORCA card in one place and her bank card in another and process the transaction that way. No dice. Considering RantWoman's experiences with touch-screen interfaces, perhaps she was silly even to harbor hopes in that regard anyway.

RantWoman pondered the line's initial glacial movements and detected several people having customer service moments in various languages. Thwack was at work and RantWoman thought of a story she heard about a blind person having customer service moments and then on his way out (inadvertantly?) demolishing the lovely ribbon and stantion line guides: RantWoman has successfully navigated these several times so she figured unfortunately that it might be hard to claim any lapses were a complete accident.

The line picked up and RantWoman decided just to tough it out. She arrived at the counter, inserted her card as requested in some green thingie, proffered her bank card, entered her PIN with the LOVELY tactile device provided, and once again asked the human about her problems registering her card online. This human made a completely different assertion from RantWoman's two previous respondents: this person said the ORCA site is supposed to ask RantWoman whether the card is already registered. RantWoman came home and almost ahead of her news fix signed in and looked again. Ummmm. No. Not that either.

Now why is it RantWoman usually has a "let someone else beta test" rule?

Festival Merchandising

RantWoman clearly would rather again be out strolling Folklife getting sunburnt, soaking up reggae and techno-bluegrass, foot-tapping at a drum circle, checking out all the dance lessons or just getting a contact high in the crowd while pretending not to shop and of course shopping a teeny tiny amount. Alas the work of the self-employed is never done and if RantWoman wants to have money to buy actual merchandise at any of these local festivities, she needs to get on the ball and do a big invoice.

First, an enthusiastic product placement for the one thing RantWoman regrets not buying yesterday a Medium Boat Tote from Hempmania . RantWoman is completely delighted that this bag has handles that go all the way down the bag, a really nice outside pocket and an inside clip for keys or another item one wants to have handy. More on RantWoman's purchase priorities below.

Folklife abounds in merchandise: There are booths full of jewelry, scarves, kitschy household items, leather cowboy hats, more scarves, handbags made of recycled rubber or old film strips or multi-colored duct tape or recycled placemats. Eco friendly everything earnestly flaunted itself. Scented all natural soaps would all naturally relieve one of up to $100 (you read that correctly) a bar. Lots of bright-colored gauzy clothing and piles of random scarves oozed out of some booths. There was more tie-dye than the entire 60's generation of RantWoman's childhood fascination with the stuff could dream of wearing.

Most of all, there was hemp, at least two booths with different really nice hemp bags. RantWoman is consistently charmed by the hemp marketers' claims about the fiber's eco-friendliness; RantWoman also just really likes the cloth for being tough and pleasant to feel and fairly water resistant. RantWoman's favorite hemp products booth by a long shot is Hempmania . They consistently have a whole range of large and small bags with really cool design features, book bags, fanny packs, pretty much the whole range of personal baggage options--with one small exception RantWoman will mention below.

RantWoman had already strolled a good bit of the festival and there was no obvious reason for her hesitation on the purchase step, but hesitate she did and wander along further. Apparently, RantWoman needed to meet The Purple Competitor. RantWoman found another booth. This other booth seemed to have a lot of yoga cushions. It also had the one thing that could compete with Hempmania's offering, a bright purple hemp tote.

The Purple Competition was a little larger than Hempmania 's offering which would not have displeased RantWoman. The Purple Competition had handles sewn into the top like most such bags. The handles had double rows of anchor stitching and were probably even longer than the ones on Hempmania's bags. There was an inside pocket though no key hook that RantWoman could see. In other words, the bag was competitive; Aside from the brilliant purple color, RantWoman liked some features better on one, some better on the other and if either had had any reflectivity sewn in, that would have settled it handsdown.

Here we get to rant about someone else going to all the trouble to tote mass quantities of merchandise to the festival and then being too far out to lunch to notice a customer who was standing around for a good few minutes and might have bought something if the salesfolk had bestirred themselves to interact. RantWoman naively expects sales staff to be either standing up looking alert or perhaps sitting on some kind of chair at customer level. RantWoman finally located the sales staff at the Purple Competitor's booth seated on some kind of rug in the middle of their booth sitting around and chatting. RantWoman could have cleared her throat at this point or spoken up, but she decided just to play games and see how long it would take for the staff to notice her. When there was no movement for a decent interval, RantWoman just wandered away. Sorry guys. RantWoman knows tending such a booth all day is exhausting, but that's all the more reason not to let your customers get away!

If RantWoman is feeling especially vehement, there might also be a tirade about multiple versions of touch-screen marketing measures so irksome that RantWoman not only bagged any thought of winning any cheesy gifts but also dragged Thwack away quickly since Thwack's approach to social lubricant is um decidedly non-festive.

Speaking of Thwack, another thing RantWoman is in the market for is some kind of bag or case for Thwack. When Thwack is clean and dry and RantWoman is indulging Thwack's tendency toward indolence or her own tendency to try to fake things, Thwack usually lounges curled up in one of RantWoman's regular totes. However, when Thwack is wet or dirty or when RantWoman will want him handy again soon, RantWoman wants another option.

Thwack is the longest version of his model so even when folded up, he does not fit into some of the places people carry their canes such as the water-bottle netting found on some kinds of book bags. As RantWoman write, she realizes she may have seen some bags with shoulder straps designed for larger water bottles and wonders whether that might actually work. File that comment.

RantWoman has seen some offerings on the Internet specifically for white cane cases. Pathetic is the first word that comes to mind about most of them. They are vinyl and have a shoulder strap when RantWoman things she might just want a clip so she could clip the case to the outside of her bags. RantWoman would also prefer something permeable that might promote drying instead of just collect more water to molder away. In fact, although RantWoman could see some combination of Cordura and Velcro that might do the trick, she is also thinking of asking a friend who crochets whether, if for instance she got him some nice hemp cord, he could make her something that will do the trick. Stay tuned.

Bus passengers recognized

Score one for Metro's security cameras. Warning: the video here of a mentally ill man's attack on a blind woman aboard a Metro bus is quite upsetting. RantWoman posts here without an opinion about whether it is good that the surveillance video found its way to Youtube. Surveillance video of attack on blind woman

Score two for a whole bunch of bus passengers who, when a severely mentally ill man boarded the bus and immediately started attacking a blind woman sitting in the front seat across from the driver, swarmed into action. The other passengers pulled the guy off the woman, surrounded and restrained him until police arrived.

The passengers were recently recognized by King County Sheriff Sue Rahr for meritorious service to the community.
http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/45871102.html

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0905/21/ldt.01.html

http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/crime/Blind_woman_attacked_caught_on_tape_20090521

http://doubledoublethoughts.blogspot.com/2009/05/man-punches-blind-woman-on-bus.html

The same KCPQ transcript above along with some freepers raving about how they wish someone had had a Glock to oblige a guy screaming about "the sick must die." Free Republic commentary For the record, RantWoman thinks a gun could have made a real mess here.

Score three for the WA state mental health system keeping the guy behind this attack behind bars ever since the attack. RantWoman is not sure she entirely wants to know whether or not he is another case of totally inadequate monitoring of the severely mentally ill or another case where he was being monitored but the system could not do anything to intervene. (In this vein, RantWoman notes that the severely mentally ill man who murdered a young employee of the Sierra Club near the young woman's Capitol Hill apartment recently pleaded guilty and will henceforth be residing in secure state custody, likely for the rest of his life.)

RantWoman picked up the thread about recent recognition of the passengers in this incident almost as soon as it came across one of her blindness lists; she supposes tomorrow might bring more media coverage or details known to some but probably not many for over a year. RantWoman wishes the passenger involved a full recovery from all injuries and trauma.

Predictably, RantWoman has a whole list of additional thoughts. RantWoman also cautions that she is speaking for herself; other blind people almost certainly have a variety of other perspectives.

RantWoman generally thinks security cameras aboard buses are a very good idea and she suspects some of them are monitored live. RantWoman previously witnessed an incident where some very gawky middle school girls were basically brawling in the back of the bus. The situation was a very underage more ghetto than average version of Jerry Springer with the combatants mouthing off, running back and forth hitting each other and basically being highly juvenile though thankfully without weapons. The driver eventually came back and told the charming young ladies involved that unless they shaped up he was going to put them all off the bus. One of them who seemed to be kind of the instigator got off shortly thereafter and other passengers had a fairly interesting conversation with the ones who remained about insecurity and the difficulties of fitting in for new students. RantWoman was glad of the camera but she was also glad of the wisdom of the other passengers in talking to the girls afterward.

You read that right: RantWoman was sitting in the back of the bus that time. See, the stuff that happens in the front of the bus sometimes makes RantWoman very glad she can kind of fake it a lot of the time. On routes RantWoman rides all the time, routes where she knows where she is going and where to get off without needing to hear the driver, RantWoman's first choice is NOT to sit in the front of the bus.

First, the front of the bus is full of drunks, other disabled people jockeying for space, and heavy traffic by people with bags and backpacks and things to bump into. Second, RantWoman is tall and having her feet walked on by everyone else getting on and off the bus for the whole ride just is not RantWoman's idea of a good time. Third, RantWoman can always justify riding further back just in the name of the rich opportunities for amateur linguistic and sociological research. Fourth, on some occasions when RantWoman does not know where she is going, she is just as likely to wind up with a driver who really does not know either and sometimes will need to rely on passengers more familiar with the route anyway.

If there is room, for example if RantWoman boards near the beginning of the route, RantWoman will often opt for the first seat facing forward rather than the side-facing ones. RantWoman knows a few other blind people who also do this when they can.

On very crowded buses, especially if RantWoman is making Thwack work or the lighting is bad, RantWoman has plenty of times slumped gratefully into a front seat to save herself the awkwardness of trying to find her own seat, and RantWoman thanks passengers very much when they give up their seats for her. RantWoman may at some point offer a general tirade about who does or does not give up their seats in the front of the bus and when or for whom, but not tonight.

The thing is, awful as the incident with the mentally ill guy was, RantWoman is still a huge fan of the bus and still feels quite safe during the vast majority of all her fascinating, functional and frequently entirely unremarkable rides all over Metro's service area.

Accessible Digital Media go global, sort of

See, the thing about this dramatic midlife midstream shift in paths to literacy: not only can RantWoman not consume at the same rate she formerly could, not only does RantWoman have to go through daily rounds of mental calisthentics just to evoke new patterns of retention and organization, not only does RantWoman face whole new financial and temporal barriers, there is just a whole lot MORE material RantWoman also has to assimilate. Take this item from the Irish times about international copyright law!

Disabled must be given equal digital rights - The Irish Times - Fri, May 22,2009http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0522/1224247099810.html
WIRED: Depriving visually impaired people of access to books is but oneillustration of the need for copyright law to be rewritten, writes DANNYO'BRIEN
TWO DECADES ago, hardly anyone but a handful of intellectual propertylawyers paid much attention to the letter of the copyright law. Now, like itor not, we're all caught up in the fight over what copies we can make, how,and for what purpose.

Every act of creation or communication online seems to make some copy that we need to double check isn't infringing. Can we copy our CD collection ontoour iPods? Can you stop someone from forwarding the e-mail you sent them? Issomeone ripping off your website? Your idea? Or are you copying their idea?Everywhere you look, it seems, copyright law looks in need of an overhaul.

Even the most uncontroversial corners of current copyright law seem to provoke argument and confusion. Take the tiny subsection of global copyright law I've been spending time with this week: the special rights it grants for those with disabilities. Many countries make special exception to the normal rules of copying for those who need special formats to access them. Irish and United States law, for instance, both allow designated bodies to convertbooks into braille or audiobooks for the blind.

Sadly, the law hasn't kept up with the digital revolution. While the internet has granted the rest of us the opportunity to import and export books (or download e-books) globally, the rights of people with disabilitiesare still blocked at the border. The designated authorities in the United States can't ship their braille books or audio files to Irish libraries, and vice versa, because no one knows what the rights are when you wander outside your own jurisdiction.
BookShare, a United States organisation with more than 40,000 volumes converted into digitally scanned formats for the blind, can experimentally export just 4,000 of those works. The rest are tied up in a copyright limbo.It gets worse. The truth is, as e-book readers like the Kindle becomepopular, disabled readers could do what everyone else does in this networked world - cut out the middle man.
They no longer need "designated authorities" to convert an e-book to anaccessible format. The consumer version of an e-book itself has all the data a disabled person needs to output in any number of different styles.
With the right software and hardware, a reading disabled person's own computer could convert standard commercial e-books into synthesised speech,braille, or display them in ultra-large fonts.
Except, of course, that would be illegal. For almost all the e-books out there, disabled users would have to break the law in order to re-format thetext with their own readers. That's because most e-books are locked down with digital rights management(DRM) code, which severely restricts what you can and cannot do with thetext.
And, of course, Irish law, written back in the digitally prehistoric days of 2000, still requires disabled users to depend on a "designated authority" to do their legal copying for them. Disabled users making copies for themselves would still be breaking the law.
This is crazy. Companies like Sony and Amazon have done deals to create digital versions of hundreds of thousands of books. All of them are just one, simple - yet currently criminal - step away from being readable by blind computer users.
In the United States, where some exceptions to the laws regarding breaking copy protection are permitted on a temporary basis, disabled users have been granted a special dispensation to break the digital locks on these books.That's a little better than the situation in Ireland.
But frankly, that exception is not much use since, while it allows blind users to crack the protection, it doesn't allow them to tell anyone else how they did it or distribute tools to undo the DRM. Consequently, each disabled person has to invent their own way of breaking into their own e-books.
What can be done? Disabled users could gain the powers to make lawful copies currently only permitted to "designated bodies" under Irish law.But that doesn't fix the problem of importing and exporting accessible texts.
A better global solution has recently been proposed by Brazil and the World Blind Union: an international treaty for the reading disabled, negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This would not only make it easier to import and export works between countries with similar exceptions on their statute books, but it would also encourage other countries to grant the same freedoms. The treaty would grant exceptions to unlock DRM and also allow limited commercial operations to re-package and market books explicitly for the disabled (the current Irish law only allows non-profit groups this power).
A world treaty would be a great step forward for the reading disabled. It would also be the first IP treaty that has taken into account the opportunities of the new digital era. A world law that grants greater accessto those who most need it seems an excellent 21st century step. It will be intriguing to see if Obama's new administration and the European Union join Brazil in supporting this bold new step.
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times***

New Guilty Pleasure from Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn is one of RantWoman's guilty pleasures. True, RantWoman nearly always finds him tiresomely self-absorbed and chemically-addled. RantWoman has even read considerably more textually interesting descriptions of the effects of various mind-altering substances. Still RantWoman often enough finds his prose intriguing and his themes resonant, that she reads him from time to time.

RantWoman considers Kirn the kind of writer one would more likely browse from the bookshelf of someone else's lakeside cabin than buy oneself. Even if RantWoman's eyeballs stood up to that much reading, the new age of digital distribution kind of puts a kink in that kind of culture consumption. Then there is the accident these days of whether or not RantWoman would even encounter announcements about such. RantWoman actually intersected with a promo link on a social networking site. RantWoman's consumption of anything on that site except her friends' updates is so minimal as to be laughable, but there the promo link was!

The last thing RantWoman read of Kirn's until now was http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/kirn Walter Kirn has a new book out. Lost in the Meritocracy by Walter Kirn , marketed as an expansion of the essay mentioned above. In the middle of other press's fandangoes about delivering content in accessible formats, RantWoman thanks Doubleday-Knopf for the downloadable first-chapter preview.

The preview shows another in Kirn's riffs on bright literate kid who is good at those fill in the dots kinds of standardized tests goes off to Princeton, does a lot of mind-altering substances and lives his own version of outsider This Side of Paradise, except that so far RantWoman is not detecting much paradise. Full disclosure, except for the mind-altering substances and the chain-smoking, RantWoman can relate to some of what Kirn writes about as far as college life and literary excess. RantWoman remembers hearing Kirn read and also seeing him in a few places chain-smoking fiercely enough that under more intimate circumstances she might have delivered one of her standard "smoking is a filthy disgusting disagreeable politics financing habit and a waste of precious brain cells" lectures. Not that the lecture would necessarily have helped anything except RantWoman's endless rant reflex, but still.

RantWoman also occasionally admits to a reaction similar to that of a blogger she reads talking about The Lord of the Rings: life is complicated already without continually choosing the path that leads to more adventure than the hypothetical less-adventure alternative and there is a certain annoying decadence in continuing to choose things that make it more complicated. After the zillionth recounting of Kirn's banal clashes with the Princeton social structure or some besotted exploit, RantWoman keeps wanting to scream!

Couldn't you have asked your RA for help about your roommates' unreasonable furnishing practices? GOOD FOR YOU for figuring out that sex with a drunk coed was inappropriate! RantWoman can tell you that being the sober anchor for one housemate seeing bad things while she participated in some of her housemates' group acid trip just confirmed the sanity of opting out of that particular experiment and definitely did not make RantWoman yearn for even greater experimentation. By the way, wasn't there anything else going on in the world like the threat of nuclear war,the ravages of Reagan's social welfare policies, the barbarities of the guerilla wars in Central America or just the technological, social, and economic revolutions of the incipient Internet age?

Even in literary terms, RantWoman has mixed opinions. Kirn recounts how, never having written any serious poetry, he latched onto a local poetry contest to impress one of his steps upward. Kirn won the poetry contest and of course parlayed that into the next steps up his career ladder. RantWoman contrasts that with the emotionally encouraging but economically squelching rejection letter another blogger shared about a poetry book submission. It's nice when literary figures make careers, but in making careers, do they have some kind of role in nurturing the environment for other poets or at least in trying to proffer trenchant commentary about other aspects of the literary world besides their own internal monologues?

RantWoman has only read the opening chapter, so it's probably unfair to assume what she seeks is lacking. Tough. Read the book. Tell RantWoman what you think. What would make it worth her time?

Rite in the Rain Water-resistant paper

This item comes from follow-up marketing email after the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival. RantWoman has mixed feelings about turning too high a percentage of her rants and raves into product placements. RantWoman knows that many of her groupies are perfectly happy not having every single byte of the whole internet flood coming at them turn into an advertising moment. All that notwithstanding, please indulge RantWoman's passion for cool paper and ways to write in all kinds of weather.

Perhaps you are a birder or a geology buff. Perhaps you are like the guy on the site who collects ants from all over the world. Perhaps you have some other ecological fascination. Perhaps you are just a compulsive journaler who lives somewhere on the planet where things get wet unexpectedly without asking anyone's permission.

Rite in the Rain is a Tacoma-area company that produces ruggedized water-resistant paper, paper for printers, paper in spiral pads of various sizes paper in bound packages with a custom pen, paper in cordura covers, paper in all kinds of forms it would not even occur to RantWoman to want. This paper can come custom-printed for a variety of Emergency Response, firefighting and other purposes, but there are plenty of options for more pedestrian applications..

The paper works great with pencils but if you need a water resistant pen badly enough, there is a really cool item with a ring for a lanyard. Okay, so it runs $20 each, but RantWoman who is quite a cheapskate herself could justify it. If you want really a lot of something, there are options for custom orders too.

Or perhaps you are just a Braille user who sometimes needs paper stiffer and more water-resistant than what usually comes in spiral notebooks. RantWoman was very impressed with the stiffness of this paper when she got to put her hands on it and now she means to dig out the little bound notebook she got given for free. RantWoman is pretty sure she is going to really like this paper either for small-sized braille notetaking or for use with her beloved 20/20 fat pens which also are more water-resistant than average.

RantWoman does note that she kind of wishes the paper came in Reporters Notebook size. RantWoman uses Reporters' Notebooks for interpreter notetaking and occasionally works in really wet environments, although she herself has never done the famous Interpret aboard fishing vessels thing where many Russian itnerpreters cut their teeth. RantWoman thinks for now that is not a fatal flaw: RantWoman cannot imagine wanting enough waterproof Reporters' Notebooks to justify a custom order and does not have the fortitude to resell herself, but if anyone else were interested....

Random House Kindle Outrage

Reprinted without embroidery; sign the petition mentioned. Get involved.

Reading Rights Coalition Denounces Random House

Random House Has Denied 15 Million Print-Disabled Americans Access to its Books.

New York City (May 20, 2009):
The Reading Rights Coalition, representing more than 15 million
print-disabled Americans, has denounced publishing giant Random House, which has turned off text-to-speech on all of its e-books available
for Amazon's Kindle 2 reading service.

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: "When Random House turned off the text-to-speech function on all of its e-books for the Kindle 2, it turned off access to this service for more than 15 million print-disabled Americans. The blind and other print-disabled readers have the right to purchase e-books using this service with text-to-speech enabled. Blocking text-to-speech prohibits access for print-disabled readers and is both reprehensible and discriminatory. We urge President Obama, whose e-books are now being blocked from over 15 million Americans, to either demand that access be restored or to move to a publisher who does not engage in discrimination."

Dr. Cynthia Stuen, Senior Vice President of Policy and Evaluation for
Lighthouse International, said: "Having the technology available to
give people with impaired vision and other print disabilities equal
and timely access to the printed word should be celebrated and
encouraged in a civil and just society for all."

Andrew Imparato, President and Chief Executive Officer for the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), said: "Random House is callously disregarding the right of American consumers with disabilities to get access to the same content at the same price at the same time as everyone else. Random House's decision to turn off the feature that makes this content accessible to millions of print-disabled Americans is a bad business decision with real human consequences and it must be corrected immediately."

Mitch Pomerantz, President of the American Council of the Blind, said:
"The recent action by Random House disabling text-to-speech on e-books is the latest and most egregious discriminatory action against the
nation's 15 million print-disabled individuals. Random House either doesn't care or doesn't understand the impact this will have on those who
would otherwise have equal access to books and other printed materials
in the same manner as our non-disabled peers. We must work collaboratively to do everything possible to assure such access for this
growing constituency."

James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), said:
"KEI is disappointed that Random House is turning off text-to-speech
on its Kindle 2 e-books. In a world where access to knowledge is
central to everything, Random House certainly understands this action
will isolate and marginalize many persons with reading disabilities."

K. Eric Larson, Executive Director and CEO of National Spinal Cord
Injury Association, said: "All Americans have the right to equal
access and many people living with paralysis use text-to-speech
capabilities in order to gain that access. Our members are also consumers and "turning off" text-to-speech means that some will not buy books they would otherwise purchase."

John R. Sheehan, Chairman of the Xavier Society for the Blind, said:
"The Xavier Society for the Blind is committed to the notion that ALL
books should be accessible to all people. When a book about Mother
Teresa is among those whose text-to-speech functions have been
disabled, we fear that we are seeing the beginning of a blanket
cut-off of a function that should be open and available to all,
especially (but not exclusively) to those with visual impairments or
other problems that limit access to printed materials."
When Amazon released the Kindle 2 e-book reading service on February
9, 2009, the company announced that the device would be able to read
e-books aloud using text-to-speech technology. Under pressure from
the Authors Guild, Amazon has announced that it will give publishers
the ability to disable the text-to-speech function on any or all of
their e-books available for the Kindle 2 service. Random House is the
first publisher to turn off text-to-speech on all of its e-books and
thus deny the rights of print-disabled people across America.

The Reading Rights coalition includes the blind, people with dyslexia,
people with learning or processing issues, seniors losing vision,
people with spinal cord injuries, people recovering from strokes, and
many others for whom the addition of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2
promises for the first time easy, mainstream access to over 270,000 books.

For more information about the Reading Rights Coalition, please visit

http://www.readingrights.org/
. To sign our petition, go to

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/We-Want-To-Read
. If you are an author who supports our cause, please send your contact information to

readingrights@nfb.org

Deferred Rant about the Kindle DX

RantWoman has been deferring comment about the recently-announced Kindle DX. RantWoman is predictably annoyed that:

--The Kindle DX does not even mention text-to-speech
--The Kindle DX has no provision for audible controls.
--Her alma mater is one of the educational institutions that will be experimenting with distribution of textbooks through this bleeping inaccessible device.

(RantWoman perversely acknowledges that for visually impaired students, getting materials in alternative formats with different licensing issues than the Kindle's proprietary interface may actually be a GOOD thing, but RantWoman never passes up opportunities to rant on principle.)

RantWoman was pleased to see calls on lists she reads for students affected by the demo domains to speak up and help blind organizations wend their way through the thicket of issues. Stay tuned.

Haiku Headlines

On a completely different note, when RantWoman is not ranting at full bore about something or other, here is another irreverent contribution and collaboration for the worldwide media maelstrom:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/haikuheadlines/

As an aside, RantWoman's haiku efforts are nearly always under 140 characters per stanza. RantWoman is meditating about feeding this to Twitter. RantWoman supposes this may be total vanity since she herself does not do Twitter but only knows it exists and wonders whether there are Twitter groupies who crave haiku and especially haiku such as this.

Also, this is grouped under Spinoffs even though it technically predates RantWoman's official debut. Tough.

Seattle Transit Blog

RantWoman simply wishes to stow this blog item for future reference.

http://seattletransitblog.com/

It is an excellent collection of transit-related wonkiness.

RantWoman finds herself a little daunted by multiple entries that have dozens of comments each just because RantWoman may frequently not be in a position to plow through all the comments.

Comments, the interchange of people with different expertise and agendas is one of the coolest richest aspects of the interactive new media age. RantWoman finds herself meditating about some very geeky aspects of ensuring that some sets of comments which may register low on some kinds of generalized new media measures but may be extremely important to small population segments register appropriately in the bigger picture, but RantWoman supposes that is way out of scope of this posting.

RantWoman also notes without apology her practice of collecting blogs she is interested in under her Blogger Mutual Admiration Society rather than in some kinds of feeds. RantWoman sees this as a way of managing information streams. RantWoman is a busy girl who tends to spend concentrated amounts of time and energy on one topic and then move to a different one. Aside from RantWoman's impatience about reading instructions for alternatives, this approach gives RantWoman ways to group media streams that are important to her without drowning in a vast stew of things that do not need to be entangled all the time even if they do possibly cross-link idiosyncratically sometimes.

The Art and Heart of Blind Photographers

The same blindness list that has brought RantWoman some other really cool art moments involving blind and visually-impaired visual artists brings the following item from Time magazine The Art and Heart of Blind Photographers about an exhibit currently running at the California Museum of Photography.

Read the article: it is much better than RantWoman would do on the fly.

If you need a teaser, look at some of the photos first:

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1897093_1883570,00.html

The photos are nicely tagged! Some of them really do look like an average day in RantWoman's head.

RantWoman especially likes the teamwork required by the artist who uses a braillewriter to punch titles into his prints: a sighted person needs a blind person to read the braille; the blind person can have the sighted person describe the work.

RantWoman is also meditating about the message in herent in the delivery medium. RantWoman herself appreciates the whole show much more because she can make Mr. JAWS read the text and blow up the images right in front of her nose. She is unlikely to rush out and buy the print edition of Time where the article appears and she wonders how many of the artists featured share her assessment or whether some of them would do the squint up really close thing RantWoman sometimes does.

Swine Flu already so far today

Today RantWoman has already hit the motherlode of swine flu chatter, TWO people in the same meeting with TWO people each, either friends or relatives, who have or had actual swine flu diagnoses. Let us not forget the person now in intensive care. She initially had a swine flu diagnosis. Considering her current horrifying concerns, it might be nice if she ONLY had swine flu, but alas, it's other diagnoses.

Fun with the Swan Flude--in Russian

In RantWoman's recent experience, the internet basically has cooties. RantWoman supposes the problems she has been having with slow performance, webpages seeming to need to detour to the moon before displaying, and cursors that refuse to stay where they are supposed to be probably have a much more technical-sounding, geekery-filled description, but cooties is sufficient for RantWoman's purposes at the moment.

The point is that RantWoman has been dawdling about some needed downloads. Over the last couple days, mainly in an effort to exorcise the cooties, RantWoman has finally been downloading, reading the release notes, and other fun and jollity. Along the way, RantWoman also picked up something that has been vexing her for stupid reasons for quite awhile, a voice that will make Mr. JAWS read in Russian.

Well, Mr. JAWS in Russian has a lovely grammatically correct female teacher-perfect voice. Katerina Jawsovna reads English like on menus with perfectly Russified pronunciation. Even when RantWoman tries to set the speed fast enough that she does not either fall asleep or send the brain on extended walks along some mental beach, Katerina J is downright pokey.

RantWoman also notes that she has always liked lower-frequency voices better than some soprano ones. RantWoman will not go near what that suggests about her own hearing or mindset. RantWoman will opine that now she needs to find a male Russian voice, preferably one that is free or that RantWoman can just talk up in exchange for...

And what texts did RantWoman attempt to use to put Katerina J through her paces. Why, the swine flu selection on http://www.gazeta.ru/ of course. No swine flu does not sound any more delightful in Russian than in English. Apparently the death toll is (only?) 76 worldwide so far. RantWoman read of a new case in Australia. Then RantWoman lost patience with the peculiarities of the Russian voice. RantWoman PROMISES to revisit the issue of a different voice at some point a bit further down the road. In the meantime, she is multiprocessing, metaphorically killing several birds with one stone: technical installations and testing, glossary development, self-training....

All I want to do ...

...is register my ORCA card.


RantWoman has a simple request. She would like to go online at http://www.orcacard.com/ like a normal person, register the spiffy new ORCA card she got last month and set up an automatic transaction so that her disabled sticker gets automatically loaded every month via withdrawal from her bank account.

For some reason this simple, prosaic desire is still a fantasy.

Late last month while ORCA cards were being handed out for free, RantWoman trundled down to the navel of the Metro universe, stood in line, proffered the right magical talismans, had her picture taken (better than the last one actually) and paid her monthly pass fee. RantWoman even put $10 on her transit wallet for various circumstances when her disabled pass alone will not cut it.

RantWoman toted the new token of transit payment home in its silly plastic sleeve with last month's unexpired sticker. As the new month dawned, RantWoman cast off the silly plastic sleeve and began using her new transit token with abandon all over all the buses she usually rides. Many of the readers beeped peculiarly. RantWoman posted a complaint to the local bus system wondering how the heck the drivers are supposed to tell what the readers are saying when the drivers cannot see the readers because of the location and RantWoman cannot either.


The readers have emitted a variety of tones and beeps, sometimes with red lights, sometimes green lights. RantWoman has several times told drivers whose readers seem not to be clued in yet that indeed she has already paid her monthly pass fee.


RantWoman also went home, created a login on the http://www.orcacard.com/ site, and TRIED to register her card online so she can do the next steps to add value automatically. When RantWoman punched in the magical codes requested, the site burbled back that the card is already registered.

RantWoman emailed the designated customer service and got back a nonsensical response. RantWoman suspects based on her long and lurid experience in various technical support roles this was based partly on the responder viewing some kind of admin screen instead of a user screen. The nonsensical response referred to a link which RantWoman does not have, which is why she has formed the suspicion about the admin screen.

Silly RantWoman decided just to drop the problem for a few weeks, but the end of a month is looming. RantWoman was also hoping to accomplish this transaction while she was waiting for something else to download. Log in. Repeat effort to register. This time RantWoman just called a human, apparently not an overly experienced human. RantWoman apologizes for her impatience. Apparently RantWoman's capacity to be patient with customer service have been severely depleted by her own long career in this field.

The hapless human listened while RantWoman repeated her efforts and got the same error message. The hapless human told RantWoman to look for links she knows are not there. RantWoman repeated her comment about the user screen and the admin screen, but the hapless human appeared not even to be able to conceptualize this point. Finally the hapless human took down RantWoman's contact information and promises to call her back.

RantWoman was not displeased to learn that since she has not so far done anything that SHOULD trip withdrawal of funds from her separate travel wallet her travel wallet indeed still contains the sum she deposited last month. Small consolation.

More of This Swine Flu thing

Confirmed Swine Flu Cases at 410 in WA

The headline says it all, 49 new confirmations since FRIDAY, and 293 of the 410 in King County where RantWoman lives. King County is a very big county. RantWoman is debating whether to want more geographic specificity or not. Not seems lovely for now, especially given previous specificity.

RantWoman has a loosely specified job that keeps requiring her to talk about swine flu and general preparedness and YUCKY STUFF with her friends and neighbors. Today RantWoman learned of one person who has no reaction whatsoever to the threat of earthquakes but whose grandmother died in the 1918 pandemic. For her swine flu is, uh, motivating. Okay. Whatever it takes.

RantWoman forgot to share the assessment she heard on the radio recently: not as bad as 1918 but as bad as 1957.

RantWoman did not notice one way or another whether the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing still had its hand sanitizer out. Today RantWoman brought Albie her own enormous laptop so she personally did not have to interact with shared keyboards. Sigh.

Speaking of shared devices, subject of swine flu did not even come up while RantWoman was demoing some Braille devices at local office of a certain bureaucracy. Hand sanitizer anyone?

Finally, RantWoman hears by email from friend traveling abroad who says she and husband do not usually share colds but.... RantWoman emailed back with concern and was assured: no fever, just head cold. RantWoman may ask again in a couple days.

Meanwhile, RantWoman certainly has much else always on her radar.

Another day of swan flude

Radio early this morning says initial cases identified in Turkey and India; also first local case in Japan.

RantWoman's snail mail brings one of those heartwarming "Dear Participant" letters along with sheets of info about covering one's cough.
RantWoman of course could only read such communications with EXTREME difficulty. RantWoman simply notes these points without further comment

Ruth Teichl is NUTS

RantWoman was listening in passing to an interview this morning on KUOW with Gourmet Magazine editor Ruth Teichl. Teichl is flakking her new book "On Not Becoming Your Mother." The book is based on her reading of a long trail of letters written by her mother. RantWoman is disinclined to summarize: the book is about the disappointments of her very bright mother's life, her efforts to send the clear message to her daughter not to be like her, and associated emotional minefields. The book sounds like fascinating reading, if only for the letters themselves.



What caught RantWoman's attention, though, was a comment in passing during the chatter part of the interview, after the reading was basically done about how Teichl is disappointed that First Lady Michelle Obama has seemingly retreated from her role as a successful lawyer to be "Mommy in Chief."



Is Teichl nuts? Does she know nothing of the sandwich generation, women of a certain age who have both children and aging parents to care for? The First Lady is not just Mommy in Chief, she is a symbol to millions that one can be smart, have a smart husband, and also juggle kids and aging parents. Michelle Obama has her mom taking care of her kids. Equally important, she is PROVIDING for her Mom. She is Claire Huxtable with a grandmother in the picture.

It's not just that Michelle Obama is handling her sandwich generation with aplomb Ruth Teichl seems not to have grasped that women more than men somehow get to shift into and out of different roles over their lifetimes. This is the definite upside of the double burden: everyone with any sense, everyone who does any kind of reality check already knows that women do this out of necessity. Their paths are different from men's. This totals up in different ways in terms of money, but in terms of status and effectiveness, Mommy-in-Chief is likely to be only one of Michelle Obama's roles. It's entirely appropriate now. We can all be very glad right now that works for her even as we are poking and prodding at considerably more burdensome realities for millions of other women.

Today's Swine Flu Tidings

It's MAY, headed toward the end of the usual annual flu season. Today multilingual "Cover Your Cough" signs appeared in the lobby of RantWoman's building. RantWoman thinks but did not check that they may have been printed up from some online source. They are bright and colorful and hard to miss. Except for English, RantWoman does not read any of the languages featured in her building; it's just that she can tell it's the same artwork. RantWoman did not check the braille bulletin board to see whether it also includes such exhortations.

RantWoman thinks this is fine advice, a fine reminder; she also thinks people are likely to get inured to this the same way they get inured to almost anything else that is constantly present.

A college friend, emailing from Paris said her flight there included the usual runny-nosed kid running up and down the aisles. Arrival required no particular precautions except the collection and promised short-term retention of locator information in case anyone gets sick.

Swine Flu: King and Queens

Yesterday's media diet brought tidings of local case count (200+ in King County) and of 3 schools across the country in Queens with multiple cases and large numbers of people out sick.

Email from ferrener husband with no mention of swine flu matters on current journey.

RantWoman found herself thinking of SWINE FLU when a mumbling Mr. Meth was hacking at one of her bus stops and when a young woman at the pharmacy kept interrupting her cellphone whines about feeling terrible and buying over-the-counter treatments to cough and hack.

Squeamish volunteer at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing motivated us to get hand sanitizer but is still staying away and sending me querulous email about above figures. This volunteer is needing to take a break for other reasons, but he is missed. RantWoman cannot evaluate whether he has personal health issues that make him feel a need to be especially cautious; RantWoman supposes it might be unseemly to comment on such anyway.

RantWoman also knows another good reason for this volunteer to take a break: the Friendly Neighborhood Center's fearless leader did something countless other authority figures have done to induce resentment among team members. RantWoman is completely unsurprised about the resentment and has not been able to do much directly to ameloriate it. RantWoman even ran out of time to email (or blog) further!

A RantWoman Spinoff

Introducing RantWomanRSoF all about RantWoman's peregrinations among the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers.

RantWoman feels a need to blog-meditate about matters related to her specific faith affiliation. For numerous reasons, RantWoman thinks her many different readers will appreciate it if she makes modest effort to keep the arcana of this topic in a different stream from her other multudinous rant streams.

RantWoman has made these two blog streams display in different colors with some other visual differences. RantWoman will probably post links back and forth, but in the meantime, there is always the Back button.

RantWoman expects to cross-link with abandon. RantWoman does not rule out the possibility that people might be drawn from one stream to another. RantWoman supposes that would not necessarily be terrible in terms of the faith replicating itself; yet she will leave that to forces in the universe greater than herself, forever and ever amen.

Daily Pedestriating 2: Seattle Pedestrian Master Plan

RantWoman has been trying for days to rave about the launch of the Draft Seattle Pedestrian Master Plan.

Forget the "swan flude." If RantWoman wants to go ballistic about untimely and unnecessary death, there is always the 400,000 excess deaths per year in the US caused by sedentary lifestyle, lack of places to walk, high-calorie density low nutrtive value (VITAMINS) food, the cul-de-sac lifestyle, our habit of driving our cars to the gym. The road to hell lies straight through the doors of the automobile and now that the US auto industry is going kerflooey down the economic toilet, it's about dang time a new day dawns in terms of pedestrians and walkability. Or something.

(RantWoman owes her life two different software upgrades; that and what RantWoman is certain must be flakiness on the part of web entities involved. RantWoman only notes this point as part of her relentless effort to track the consequences of certain inconveniences. RantWoman is annoyed as she edits to discover others! Testing to follow.)

The foregoing leaps notwithstanding, RantWoman has been trying for days to rave about the launch of the Draft Seattle Pedestrain Master Plan . RantWoman owes the world a rant about all the personal, environmental, physical activity, epidemiological, and experiential reasons this topic thrills and delights her. Today RantWoman is TRYING to stick to wonkiness.

RantWoman went to a public event the other night to look at the different maps of equity, pedestrian activity drivers, street crossing characteristics and several other examples of the wonders of GIS. RantWoman will likely dissect the Draft Plan further fairly soon. In the meantime, she will seed the environment with various links and the kind of notes she might otherwise scribble in fat pen on the backs of all the envelopes that wind up in her favorite Bus Life Bags.

http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/pedestrian.htm

General Seattle Pedestrian Program

http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2009/02/23/walk-baby-walk

Walking and Sustainability Wonkiness from the Sightline Institute

Besides the map, there was live entertainment, accompanied by Powerpoint no less, by Mr. Mark Fenton, champion racewalker, motivational speaker, mechanical engineer and student of biomechanics, host of Americas Walking on PBS with Mark Fenton and in general a walking maniac orders of magnitude more maniacal than RantWoman.

http://www.pbs.org/americaswalking/

Great Walking Tips from Mark Fenton

http://walking.about.com/cs/beginners/a/fentontips.htm

RantWoman is thrilled simply to know such people exist!

RantWoman predictably also has specific RantWoman rants, but, Dear Readers, you get to thank internet flakiness for sparing you that for now.

In connection with general automobile skepticism and pedestrian alternatives, RantWoman notes a mention in a recent radio broadcast of the point that in Indian cities people more easily get along without cars because they tend not to go very frequently more than about a 10 km radius away from home. RantWoman will stow this point for those moments when she is a really militant pedestrian advocacy fanatic as opposed to merely her average level of fixation and nuttiness about the topic.

Dancing Upside Down

There is a new regular at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing.

She gets to tell her story in her own words.

http://www.dancingupsidedown.com/

Daily Pedestriating 1

Lexicographic note: RantWoman considers the word "pedestriating" jargon completely beyond the pale. However it is the very word used by people who study walkability and pedestrian amenities to specify--hold onto your socks; try not to spasm with excitement--walking around meaning to get from a to b, using public space on foot. RantWoman is unclear whether this activity includes strollers, rollerskates, skateboards or wheelchairs but it definitely does not include cars, bicycling, driving, riding the bus, canoeing, riding in a blimp....

The other piece of lore important to this story: in Seattle, cops give tickets for jaywalking, defined variously as crossing in the middle of the block, crossing against the light, and disputably sometimes at intersections without marked crosswalks.

RantWoman's first pedestriating adventure of the day occurred at her most frequently visited bus stop while waiting for the bus. This bus stop is on a major arterial, technically actually a state highway though in that stretch no one much pays attention to that. The arterial comes through at a diagonal. There is a stoplight at the far end of the block, but the bus stops on both sides of the street are nearer the other corner. Can you say "incentive to jaywalk?" Can you say "open and flagrant jaywalking at all hours of the day and probably night with no regard to weather or traffic conditions and in fact itworks better if traffic is almost stopped"?

There is hot dispute (see above) about whether crossing at this corner is jaywalking since all intersections are assumed to be pedestrian crossings. Whether or not crossing there is legal is one issue; RantWoman thinks based on traffic volume and visibility that it is an astoundingly bad idea, so RantWoman does not do it. Instead she always walks to the other end of the corner and counts the walk as part of the 10,000 steps a day she aspires to.

Other people still cross at this corner all the time. Vigorous youth do it. People with canes do it. People with both white canes and walkers do it People in wheelchairs do it. There used to be a guy on a movable bed who did it. The movable bed guy eventually died, may he rest in peace, of something related to the need for the movable bed. In contravention to all guesses that this intersection might be a complete pedestrian kill zone, at least he did not die from jaywalking at this corner.

(If local traffic engineers asked RantWoman, she would point out that between the bus stop and a lot of people with mobility issues who live in the area, it would be wonderful to have a stoplight there as well as on the other end of the block. Sadly, no one has asked RantWoman's opinion.)

Today those mad jaywalkers were even doing it in clumps in front of TWO cop cars who had already stopped someone. The someone was some hapless youth who crossed at that corner during rush hour. Right in front of a cop. Since it was rush hour the cop was going nowhere fast anyway.

RantWoman SUPPOSES the kid may have done something to attract notice like flash gang signs or give the cop the finger. At that distance, the event was basically a sunny blue fog with poking red flashers to RantWoman. Anyway the cop dutifully turned on the flashers. spreadeagled the kid against the car, ran his ID, and did all the usual cop things, possibly including call for backup. The run ID check took a bit and meanwhile, behind the cop in the short traffic lull created by the cop car with flashers going, people were jaywalking up a storm.

What do YOU think is wrong with this picture?

Craptastic Camelia Time Warp

RantWoman is suffering floral disruptions in the temporal continuum several orders of magnitude more severe than merely trying to put her brain around the "new" Star Trek movie with all the figures from the original now enrolled in the Star Fleet Academy.

The cause of RantWoman's temporal dislocation: RantWoman is not used to having camelias, magnolias, azaleas, rhododendrons and lilacs all blooming nearly at once. Well, RantWoman's last transit to her house of worship was at last free of the camelia crap from a bush on the sheltered north side of a building blooming for weeks and weeks. RantWoman loves camelias. She just does not relish mushy pinky-brown banana peels in her path and believes the bushes that perpetrate such should be planted well clear of anywhere she has to walk.

Magnolias by the way are almost as wretched in their fading as camelias--except that they at least emit a wretched foul fermented odor so RantWoman finds it easier to avoid their detritus all over the sidewalks.

Ahhhh, but the lilacs...

Pest Control

Long ago RantWoman worked an exotic summer living aboard the trains of Europe into her graduate school experience. Living aboard trains meant taking night trains everywhere, doing the tourist thing by day and heading out again the next night. Unless one bought a sleeping cabin, when the train crossed borders, there would shortly appear border guards demanding to inspect documents. The German-speaking ones, PassKontrolle, never ceased to enter RantWoman's sleepy 3 am brain as "Pest Control." In honor of that, we present the following account of part of the ferrener husband's current trip to his homeland.

The plane was met on the tarmac by an extra large bevy of cleaning staff in masks. All of the passengers were inspected and I think disinfected. Then other misadventures befell the ferrener husband, which is why RantWoman even heard the story yet. RantWoman got a mysterious 3 am phone call about picking up luggage in a foreign airport. The ferrener husband appeared via relay call in a totally unexpected place, and RantWoman got to hear all about all the planes from Singapore and everywhere who did not get the level of scrutiny the yankees did. Poor ferrener husband embarking on a long journey without even thinking of the "swan flude."

"Swan Flude" subsiding--NOT!

RantWoman notes, as of an article updated just after 10pm of the first death in WA linked to swine flu.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_swine_flu_wash.html

RantWoman sends heartfelt condolences to the man's loved ones.

The news reports this is the first death outside of TX. RantWoman suspects this is not a coveted distinction. The number of confirmed cases in WA is about double what it was a couple days ago. Numbers continue to increase in many places. Yet RantWoman went virtually all day without hearing a thing about swine flu until she specifically looked online.

RantWoman went to just a scream of a benefit event at RantMom's church. The event: a Cheap Chic fashion show to benefit Fisher House a charity that provides short-term housing for the families of veterans getting care at VA hospitals. RantWoman could with appalling alacrity rant about there being too many veterans entering our experience just now, but RantWoman was too busy enjoying the thrift shop fashion ensembles. High points included the pastor's husband's scary beach shorts and an 80+year-old in a paper swimsuit: all eyes who knew anything about the story were on the face of the swimsuit model's daughter; RantWoman thinks she is grateful RantMom was just in her element buzzing around the crowd making sure everyone had plates of omelette and fresh fruit and muffins. The other point was just that there was nary a word about swine flu and RantWoman did not bring it up either.

Next RantWoman went off on an errand for a friend in the hospital in isolation for what RantWoman suspects is just an ordinary nasty hospital-acquired infection. No word about swine flu there or at the other half of that errand at a different hospital with someone "only" in ICU. Well, the in-room computer had a CDC screen about how hand sanitation saves lives. No swine flu; more than enough other dramas in both cases.

Equal Opportunity Employer

RantWoman is having one of her bouts of job seduction. By job RantWoman means something where RantWoman gets paid well and steadily for showing up and lending her brillian presence and there are gnomes, maybe even gnomes someone else is in charge of, around to help handle the bookkeeping, the IT maintenance, and sundry other necessary tasks both mundane and strategic.

These thoughts often get squashed by the cold splash of reality. Today's cold splash of reality: the juxtaposition of the words "equal opportunity employer" and "requires a valid driver's license."

As you might guess, RantWoman and "valid driver's license" no longer exist on the same planet. RantWoman does not do cosmetics. She does very little television. It should surprise no one that even when RantWoman had a driver's license she did not display the average red-blooded American's level of enthusiasm for driving, and this despite spending her high school years in a city and state where many motorists drive a preposterous number of miles every year just in the course of doing their daily business.

RantWoman took her last driver's license eye test with an undiagnosed medical problem, so predictably, she failed the test. She really has never looked back, even when the customary state paperwork reached her eye doctor's assistant and a low-key question: Nope, fine, the bus works great.

Enter the phrase "essential job functions," the all-important specifier for the basis of negotiations about what one is going to promise to do for one's employer. RantWoman is pretty familiar with the "essential job functions" as constructed by the person presently doing the job that provoked this reflection. RantWoman finds herself meditating about alternate methods for fulfilling the "essential job functions," especially alternate methods that get her where she needs to be and do not require forever and a year to accomplish. Let's just say RantWoman is still meditating

The "Swan flude" subsides?

With thanks to whichever local broadcaster is responsible for the above pronunciation

Swine flu worldwide as of this morning.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090506/ap_on_he_me/med_swine_flu_glance

RantWoman notes that the virus does not just hop on airplanes by itself. RantWoman would be interested in encountering some analysis of the virus' movements. RantWoman will file this on her "it would be great..." shelf.

RantWoman notes the second death in the US of swine flu, a teacher from TX with other chronic health problems. RantWoman also notes that both the number of suspected cases of swine flu in King County WA where RantWoman lives (54?) and the number of confirmed cases (9) are higher than last week. Over this short interval RantWoman considers these jumps an artifact of the data collection and confirmation process, not necessarily a spike in infections.

All the schools in the cluster nearest where RantWoman lives have re-opened and health officials have shifted from closing schools to monitoring and making sure individual cases stay home. Mexico City is reportedly returning to normal, and numerous travelers caught in various kinds of instant quarantine and air travel freeze are now movint along.

RantWoman confesses: she knows of a second computer lab with a lot of shared computers. Today RantWoman did not even bring up hand sanitizer when needed supplies were being discussed. RantWoman promises to do something about that by email.

RantWoman has been noting various moments from her diet mainly of NPR. It would be nice if RantWoman noted names or book titles. Well, it would be nice.

One speaker talked about his book about the 1918 epidemic. Apparently in some communities people starved to death because their families were afraid to bring them food. On the other hand, in San Francisco there was a big campaign about "Wear a mask and survive." The masks actually did not offer much protection, but people wore them and no one died of starvation. One would like to know what happened as far as illness, but it is a heartening story.

The other media moment that sticks out: the former CNN science correspondent who decided not to watch this thing unfold, partly because one of the anchors at his former network was dithering on camera about "can we panic now?" RantWoman would generally say, 1. If you have time to ask about panicking, maybe you should be getting real news. 2. Tidings of "swan flude" are going to emerge VERY slowly and probably not in tune with anchors' need to preen on camera. The anchors need good news staff with their eyes on the ball, and the public has plenty of other problems, such as cutting public health at a time like this....

Swine Flu and the Healthy Families Act

RantWoman has decided to farm out her space, with full attribution as follows:

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/sick-leave/
April 30, 2009, 9:00 pmNew York Times Blog
A Sick SituationJudith Warner
Early this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that anyone with flu symptoms stay home from work or school.
President Obama reiterated that advice at his press conference on Wednesday night. "If you are sick, stay home," he said. "If your child is sick, keep them out of school."
"I know it sounds trivial," the president said, after asking families to start taking other "very sensible precautions" like washing hands and covering up during coughs. "But it makes a huge difference."
The president's admonition to the sick to stay home didn't sound trivial to Silvia Del Valle, a 42-year-old restaurant worker in Miami.
It sounded impossible.
When I spoke to her Thursday morning, Del Valle was sick in bed with a cough and a fever. Was she planning to go to work, I asked her, Obama's press conference still fresh in my mind.
"Yes," she said. "I need to go. Because if I don't go, I lose my job."
Del Valle's not alone. Nearly half of all private sector workers in our country - more than 59 million people - have no paid sick time at all. The problem is particularly acute among women, low-wage workers - more than three-quarters of whom have no paid sick days - and part-timers.
Food service employees are the least likely to have access to sick leave. According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, only 14 percent of the people serving and handling food in restaurants can stay home from work when they're coughing and sneezing, without fear of losing their jobs. José Oliva, the policy coordinator for the advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, told me that among the food service employees he normally counsels - many of whom, like Del Valle, speak poor English and earn well below the minimum wage for tipped employees - only about one percent can stay home sick without the fear of losing pay or even their jobs. Del Valle has been working in Miami-area restaurants for seven years. She currently works nine hours a night for a flat fee of $30, and sends much of those earnings home to her parents and teenage daughter in Argentina.
Had she ever had the right to a paid sick day, I asked her.
"Not in this country," she said.
Had she ever had any benefits?
"Never in this country," she answered.
"Never in this country" is the sort of phrase that ought, in our country, to be paired with concepts like "unaffordable health care" or "lack of maternity leave" or "lack of ability to stay home in case of pandemic." Instead, thanks to business groups, it has long applied to any workplace policy that could bring substantial quality of life improvements - including basic job security - to American families.
Not only do a strong majority of people who work outside of government, white collar and union jobs now lack the right to take care of themselves and protect their coworkers when they fall ill, a whopping 70 percent of all workers lack paid time off to care for a sick child. This means that the school closings that are now multiplying as swine flu spreads run the risk of bringing financial catastrophe to many families. Eighty thousand students in the Fort Worth school system started staying home this week and may be out of school until at least May 8th. Schools in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin and California are closing, too.
The Forth Worth school superintendent asked employers to be flexible with employees who need to stay home with their kids. But with so many jobs lost, and so many now on the line, how far do families want to go in testing their employers' flexibility?
For single-parent homes, or for families that depend on two incomes, "This could be the beginning of a spiral into economic disaster," says Debra L. Ness, the president of the National Partnership for Women and Families. "People can't just cavalierly put their jobs or paychecks at risk."
There has never been any genuine financial justification for denying workers some number of paid sick days; productivity studies have long shown that paid leave policies are good for businesses. The opposition is only based on knee-jerk free-market social Darwinism - the kind of thinking that's driven social policy in our country for the better part of 30 years, and helped pitch us right into our current economic abyss.
Our workplace policies have long been unsuited for our times. "We operate as though there's a caregiver at home. It's as though we were stuck back in time," Ness said. And they've never looked more anachronistic than today, with more and more families forced to live on one income, and a possible pandemic in the making.
The Healthy Families Act, which would grant most workers seven paid sick days a year to care for themselves or sick family members, is soon to be re-introduced in Congress. I think it's fair to say that it's an idea whose time has come.
President Obama has repeatedly said we need to remember that crises offer opportunity. If the swine flu outbreak forces lawmakers, at long last, to give workers and families some of the protections that they need, perhaps this crisis will, on some level, turn out to have a silver lining, too.
* Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Haircut

RantWoman wishes to pen short praises to hair cuts.

RantWoman could easily think of big praises to the kinds of haircuts that involve write-downs of terrible loans in pools of toxic assets.

Today, though, RantWoman is indulging in a few moments of total bliss and personal hair vanity brought on by yesterday's trip to an actual chain hairstylist. RantWoman's hair is fluffy clean, freshly shorn and short enough that RantWoman cannot count on it staying braided overnight. The upside of hair this short is that until RantWoman braids it, it hangs crisply around RantWoman's face and RantWoman can pretend to a more sultry look than usual, at least for a bit.

RantWoman is really not a huge beauty industry customer. RantWoman has SOME standards about the hair care products she uses, but generally cheap is the first consideration. RantWoman gets her hair cut about once a year whether she needs it or not, and RantWoman was definitely overdue. When RantWoman's hair gets to be about waist length, it's just a lot of work to comb and braid it, and RantWoman had been feeling vexed for quite awhile.

Yesterday, RantWoman walked in and was seated almost immediately. RantWoman gave the stylist her usual instructions to hack off up to a foot of hair. Unlike previous stylists who sometimes cavil about the scope of this request, this one set right to work and the whole thing was done in a matter of minutes. RantWoman paid her bill, redid her now shortened braid and off she went. This is why RantWoman loves Great Clips .

(Accessibility digression: When RantWoman is searching for places to do business, she definitely gives priority to places with accessible sites. However, RantWoman does not particularly vouch for the accessibility of everything she links to. This site looks pretty functional to RantWoman's quick check, but RantWoman explicitly reserves the right to link to things that might not be accessible because customers come all kinds of ways and it's up to a business to react!)

RantWoman keeps her hair long enough to French braid. RantWoman can do a French braid without looking in the mirror. RantWoman can French braid on the bus, provided the bus is not so overcrowded that RantWoman has to stand or has to worry about elbowing other people mid-braid. RantWoman does not produce perfect braids all the time; some days she covers her hair sins with a hat. Other times, she rebraids.

Yesterday's stylist cooed pleasantly about how RantWoman's hair is in great shape. Sure. The hair spends most of its time in a braid, not getting blown around or subjected to other kinds of abuses. The stylist asked whether RantWoman knows any other braid techniques. No, but she might be amenable to learning, and studying diagrams in magazines or stylebooks would be much less of an option than average. Neither RantWoman nor the stylist thought to say, well how much would it cost to have you show me? RantWoman probably would not pay for other kinds of styling, but she might pay to have someone show her a different braid. File that thought for next year, but in the meantime, RantWoman is meditating about who to share her touchable hair with.

Pandemic update

RantWoman was doing great! RantWoman went virtually all day without mention of the pandemic. The newspaper website has new counts for King County and the 5:00 news also had updates: numbers are increasing but some schools have dropped off the list because of ruling out the offending strain.

RantWoman was enjoying going DAYS without mention of swine flu on the bus. This is especially the case because mention on the bus can be predicted to have some hysterical angle, in this case, someone described as both wearing a mask and rubber gloves and getting hyper because someone had coughed on her backpack, basically a daily occurrence in some parts.

Silly RantWoman to think she was in the clear!

Tonight's email when RantWoman arrived home included an item from one of the team at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing. The email forced RantWoman to think about a whole computer lab full of shared keyboards, shared microphones, shared headsets, and assorted other equipment we will want to be sanitizing without damaging the equipment. RantWoman further felt obliged to point out to responsible people that, yes, the Friendly Neighborhood Center... is in the same neighborhood as one of the closed schools. Joy, joy, joy!

Exude calm. Give people the option. Follow a minimum recommended protocol as much as possible. Encourage people to stay home when sick... It falls to RantWoman probably to summon her own clarity and focus and make concise recommendation to responsible people. Oh the thrills of responsibility.

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Little Sister was positively giddy last time RantWoman saw her. Little sister has a new diagnosis she can now look up in Google and collect points in concord between her experience and the web. More importantly, although Little Sister insisted on pouring Rantwoman's ice water, she laughed when RantWoman offered to use a napkin to pick up the handle of the water pitcher. RantWoman made a point of washing her hands thoroughly when using the restroom, and most importantly, the Rant Sisters just gave up and hugged though one SUPPOSES that hugging close on the shoulder where one does most of one's coughing is not preferable. Sigh.

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RantWoman has been digesting the bits of news about maybe not being able to test everyone because of the cost of the tests. RantWoman finds herself wondering whether the test could be made cheaper in the general case without knowing beforehand what the at-risk strains would be. RantWoman also finds herself wondering whether a similar template antibody test could be created. The idea of that: A virus that gets a high percentage of people really sick is a different problem from one that gets everyone a little bit sick, gets a few people really sick, and might leave a lot of antibodies among the people who get a little bit sick. RantWoman realizes she is wandering a little past her depth about the topic, but she will file the question as interesting after she deals with disinfecting matters at the Friendly Neighborhood Center....

Perpetrating Powerpoint

Forgive me oh Lord for I have sinned...

Wait, wrong venue, though forgiveness is still in order. RantWoman responded recently to a request for the Powerpoint presentation that RantWoman's brilliant panel gave at the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival.

RantWoman is in fact relieved to be asked for a new copy of the presentation. The file used for the presentation had two different custom shows. The slides were listed in a completely different order than they were presented. The two custom shows were sort of divided into visuals and text of outline, in contrast to the flow of the live panel, RantWoman figures people reading the slides as a document might in fact like to see the basic outline.

RantWoman finds herself thinking maybe the Smart Art she never could quite adjust to please her readability preferences could at least have involved some animation, this despite the fact that the presentation wound up getting saved in an earlier version due to being shared across multiple computers as part of the team process.

RantWoman did many things to clarify and clean up. Rant Woman annotated in response to audience questions. RantWoman rearranged the slides to reflect the presentation we actually gave, not just the imperfectly choreographed outline we worked with at the conference. RantWoman put a full list of project partners right at the beginning since she suspects that got bounced past a little faster than was politic in the live version, though after submitting the revised file, she realized some of the slides still had too much jargon and too many acronyms and could have been made even clearer.

Alas, despite RantWoman's propensity for, well, bitching about accessibility, her own presentation also falls short of her own aspirations as far as accessibility features. Here are the main remaining sins according to RantWoman:

--Failure to tag some visuals with Alt Text so that a screen reader user could get a description even if he or she could not see the picture.

--Publishing in a PDF. RantWoman has had mixed success herself using a screen reader for reading Powerpoint files that have been turned into pdf files, but for reasons of data stability, RantWoman published as a pdf. For one thing RantWoman also has done limited testing for screen reader readability of the alternate Powerpoint Show format. RantWoman assumes it is supposed to be accessible, but she herself cannot fully verify for reasons of personal sloppiness and also due to the fact that she has theluxury of being able to use screen enlargement and therefore likely bounding past some issues others face.

But as soon as RantWoman sees the presentation posted on the Super Duper Powerpoint festival's site, MAYBE RantWoman will post a link here and other readers can decide for themselves.

Plague post o' the day

RantWoman logs the following pandemic points:

--RantWoman is brewing a special tirade about people including both the President and vice-President dissing public transportation, twice in two days in connection with pandemic concerns. The full tirade deserves its own post.

--RantWoman has been somewhat neglecting one line of work because of all her disaster preparedness activities. Disaster preparedness is not the only reason, but the whys are another post. Today, an email related to this line of work brought the sobering reminder that RantWoman is in interpreter databases and IS getting information related to masks and personal protection and such work. RantWoman is very glad to know such messages are going out.

RantWoman is also vexed by one point about all this parade of mask information: what if one's client is hard-of-hearing and needs to be able to read one's lips? Is this another job for video Skype from another location? Should interpreters just stock up on thos plastic riot shields favored by some police forces? RantWoman is not going to meditate endlessly on this question in the hypothetical vein mainly because she has other worries in queue ahead of that.

--RantWoman gratefully in fact notes the COMPLETE lack of pandemic anything at her eye care provider's today.

--Little Sister is surprisingly light-hearted and freakout free. KNOCK ON WOOD about her staying that way. At one of her medical encounters, Little Sister snagged masks enough for her household and for RantMom as well. In light of the above email, RantWoman figures she can get a mask if necessary. Well RantWoman reckons that she most certainly hopes people will balance their concerns with other realities and pace themselves if health care providers have masks if needed. Is RantWoman being unduly optimistic here at least about continued supply of things like masks? Possibly!

--RantWoman found a pair of much-admired former co-workers via social networking. Former co-workers are living in Mexico City and one of the pair provides interesting piquant details about greeting practices during these times, worthy of its own post, and about masks: Former co-worker wonders how safely to dispose of used masks in a country where multiple people will go through the trash as soon as it hits the curb and even more when it hits the dump.

--RantWoman notes with appreciation the energy and focus of one of her disaster preparedness team members. This person industriously researched one place to get a specify category of masks and then wanted to know more options. RantWoman is generally into do not panic--yet--mode so she does not entirely want to interact with the whole subject. This was one factor in her desire to support team member's own initiative (and possibly to benefit from the research) while offering only a little energy in return. RantWoman is considering whether her project team needs to do anything for our specific context other than refer people to the many sources of info currently available.

Pandemic flu, at least as experienced in the US so far seems likely to be a slow water torture of a stream of stress. It is GOOD not to have to fly into disaster mode full-bore, but coping with the slowly evolving water torture aspects is its own set of skills for sure.

The Vision Thang

Today's vision inventory: RantWoman has recently developed the kind of streaks one gets from poorly washed windows in one eye. For awhile RantWoman assumed this is just dirty glasses. However, weeks of obsessive glasses-washing, while peculiarly resonant with the current plague-related paeans to hand-washing, were doing no good about the streaks. Then somewhere in here, RantWoman realized she was not looking through her glasses and therefore the problem must be within her eyes.

Today RantWoman had to visit her cathedral of eye care. More new staff made RantWoman reflect on a dilemma: one wants people who do a good job to get well-rewarded and to get deserved recognition and promotion commensurate with their distinctions. However, one does not mind seeing familiar faces, especially if one is kind of a frequent flyer.

Furthermore, one's eyeballs are quite personal. RantWoman at least is not just going to gush about new symptoms to every pretty face who asks. Unfortunately, the streaky thing is quite aggravating. Despite RantWoman's very limited positive experiences with mind-altering substances, the idea of ESCAPE holds great appeal, and RantWoman spoke up.

RantWoman had to make clear the issue is not haloes. Haloes are fine all over Christian iconography but are not a good thing in the realm of eye issues. No, it's streaks like badly-cleaned windows. Eye physician suggests it relates to something RantWoman is tapering off of anyway. RantWoman REALLY hope so, especially since she is also vexed with new wrinkles in the realms of multiple vision though mercifully not multiple visions.