PSoTD

Does anyone even use that search engine anymore?

I registered that domain almost a year ago, thinking that I'd set up a sideline of shirt sales through CafePress that focused on wear for the back scratching enthusiast. Recipient, not giver. I had an artist lined up, or so I thought, but after a few months of no results she bailed on the idea, and I've lost the mojo for following up.

Can't think of much else to use the domain for, particularly since I'm not planning a porn site, so it'll probably expire. Too bad - it sure seems like a fun domain name.

A little more about the Target case.

The federation for the blind says that's untrue. While Internet access for the blind might sound like a difficult proposition, the federation says standard screen-reading devices can read Web pages aloud to users. The problem is that those devices don't work appropriately on Target's site, the group contends.

"We frequently get to this point (with other organizations)," said the federation's John Pare Jr.

"Virtually all companies say they are willing to make changes to fix that. It's usually inadvertent," said Pare, director of strategic initiatives for the federation. "We contacted Target and they said they would not fix it. As a last resort, we brought them to court."

The federation has not surveyed all of the nation's retailers to see how many have Web sites that are accessible to blind people. But, Pare said, the organization is regularly approached by companies to get their sites certified as usable by the blind.

Some other posts on this topic of interest:

Spinuzzi
The IP Law Blog
Inspire Action
Helvidius, a Pachyderm
SiteProNews Blog
Chris F. Waigl
Adactio

Cool, I just found out there's another PSoTD out there, which stands for

Porn Star of the Day

I wish I was that smart. I bet that gets traffic.

This is one of the most annoying emails I receive, from Classmates:

Hi Wayne,

1 person signed your guestbook yesterday! Can you guess who they are? Find out who's thinking of you.

I'm not a paying member so I don't get to find out "who's thinking of me", and I'm sorry, but Classmates hasn't figured out that the price has to be considerably lower for me to be interested in being a member. Still, I'm curious who actually thought of me. If they offered something like $1 for a 3 day membership, I'd probably do it, just to satisfy my curiousity. But anything more than $15 per year for what they offer just doesn't fit my situation in life - that's the price I'd pay for not being THAT popular in high school!

Good God, I found this confusing. It would be so much easier if they would just put the instructions in a YouTube video, preferably with background music from the 70s, oh yeah...

but they didn't. So I have to do this. It's the law. Blogger's Law, look it up. So first of all, here are these rules.

BTW, this is known as The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme. There will be a test on this later, about 4:30 AM, in your dreams, given by the fellow from the old Cracker Jacks commercials.

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
• You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
• You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

First of all, the path of how this ended up here:

My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-grandparent is archy.
My grandparent is Why Now?
My parent is Rook's Rants.

And now, the questions:

The best alien invasion song in SF/Fantasy is: Planet Claire by The B-52s

The best “bad” movie in SF/Fantasy is: Repo Man

The best sexy song in pop is: “The Sensual World” as performed by Kate Bush.

The best flavor filling in PopTarts is: Chocolate Fudge by Kelloggs

And now for the part you were really looking forward to - who to tag? Unfortunately I can't tag Rook back, dumb Blogger Laws... so here's your poison:

Mike over at Content, because he clearly has spare time.

I know she thinks she's too busy to do this, but What Do I Know?

Ellroon... Ellroon...

Ellroon already mutated. Don't go to sleep! I will now replace Ellroon with Ron at Toad in the Hole. I know she'll appreciate that.

Fixer over at Alternate Brain should be good for this too.

Remember, when you're looking for someone to blame for your problems, the easiest route is to blame your parents. Even in memes!

Just wow.

Google netted 37.1 billion of 61 billion total searches for August, dwarfing totals from Yahoo, Baidu.com and Microsoft.

Google captured roughly 60 percent of the searches conducted worldwide in August, blowing away the field with 37.1 billion of 61 billion queries, according to new statistics from comScore. Five billion of Google's August searches came from the Mountain View, Calif., company's video property YouTube.com.

I just found out I had a Facebook site, sorta. I don't remember even setting it up.

I was taking a look at this site over at the Internet Archive WayBack Machine, and one of the things that struck me is how little my blogroll has actually changed in two years. For the most part, the folks that are blogrolled today were blogrolled then as well. As a general rule, I usually blogroll any blogger that blogrolls me, so what this really seems to be saying is that in general, blogrolls haven't changed much over the past two years.

Last Christmas I received 3 gift certificates for Amazon, and I've slowly been using them up. In the process, I've started wondering about something.

I usually order enough to qualify for free shipping - the 7-9 day delivery option. However, whenever I do this, it seems like the initial shipping day provided is at least a week in advance. Yesterday I made an order in which I was told the shipping date was projected to be 10/15. Delivery estimate: October 22, 2007 - October 26, 2007. This wasn't going to work, because I need one of the items by the 20th, so I didn't want to take the chance. So I upgraded, and paid for shipping, within 3-5 days.

Wala! I get a message today that my order has been shipped - today.

What's up with that? Is Amazon disinforming me so I'll be "encouraged" to pay for shipping? Or is Amazon stalling on fulfillment for free shipping orders to "encourage" me to pay for shipping?

I don't know about you, but I keep waiting to see a big lawsuit against Comcast or some other humungous ISP for the heavyhanded blocking of email in an effort to reduce spam. Just a matter of time, IMHO...

A federal judge in California certified a class action lawsuit against Target Corp brought by plaintiffs claiming the discount retailer's Web site is inaccessible to the blind, according to court documents.

For our small business, we need to make copies of documents, usually about every quarter, to send to our accountant. Copiers are expensive and really unnecessary to own, so we use one of the machines at the local UPS Store.

I say usually every quarter, but sometimes I get behind, and I had about 6 months of documents to copy today. I went to the UPS store, and although I've known that they replaced their old machines sometime in the recent past, I've not had to do this task on the new machines before.

The old machines were able to work with pieces of paper 8 and a half by 11 inches, and frankly, had just about no problem with any document that was 8.5 inches wide, period.

The new machines are another story. They're full of sensors, even more than the last ones, and a feed of every size of paper requires a source tray of that size of paper, or so it seems. A lot of the items I'm copying have detachable invoices, and they print these on a regular 8 and a half by 11, but after detaching for payment, this leaves you with a smaller than 11 inch long document.

Which completely baffles these new copiers with their feeders.

It just seems plain silly to put such machines in a UPS Store. Frankly, it seems ridiculous to even make such machines in the first place, because it's pretty clear that it's too much information that's preventing the efficient feeding and copying. When you throw into the equation the bewildering number of cryptic items to choose from on the touchpanel control of the copier, it's clear that this is not a machine for the less-than-occasional user. It's a seemingly anti-intuitive placement of technology that doesn't fit the user population.