Another drive-by shooting:

Not the even-more-fabulous sign on Richmond St., as yet unphotographed.

A tab is a “tab” and not a “page.”

I have written at some length, including in the book We’ve Got Blog [short for “Web log”], that during the 1998–2001 Web “gold rush” I couldn’t fucking get arrested. One reason was I knew more than they did. Another was that knowing more than they did intimidated typically mediocre Toronto “recruiters.” Plus my personality is viewed as quite forward by many Canadians, whom I would simply describe as backward. The result was that everyone and his dog (who also got space in the office) had a job and I didn’t.

After I signed the book contract, the doors closed and I gave up pining for an actual day job. It simply never occurs to me. (Except once recently, but I discount that case.) I am nonetheless reminded frequently that the majority of my confreres simply never have to worry about money. They all actually have jobs. The minority that do not nonetheless have many more freelance contracts than I do.

That era looks like it is set to repeat less than a decade later, as “Web 2.0” businesses start up and are bought out. I am not opposed to either of those phenomena (and I think Yahoo’s $36 million for Flickr was criminal underpayment), but I am also pretty sure that I won’t benefit in the slightest from this next bubble. You’ll all continue to have jobs and contracts, some of you will become Butterfield/Fake–level rich, and I won’t.

I screeched to a halt when I saw this combination of parks-department vehicle, lesbian driver, and raccoon blocking the path.

“I thought they were nocturnal,” I said jauntily.

“It’s very sick,” said the lesbian severely. And indeed it was, just barely able to walk. I am pretty sure I startled it by screeching to a halt, causing it to freeze in fear.

“Oh,” I replied brilliantly, and abashedly walked my bike around everything.

I can superexclusively document (and you can’t) that warning labels in a brand-new $750,000 ladder truck are typeset in Arial (also, confusingly, Helvetica and Futura).

Tactile signage in ladder truck

Additionally, this warning sign (yes, it really is located above an A[(]E[)]RIAL INLET!) is somehow typeset in three-dimensional, tactile Avant Garde Gothic and Helvetica Condensed, as though some ill-defined category of blind firefighter were expected to read it at a three-alarm blaze.

I’m sorry, but I am seriously creeped out by the photographs posted to Flickr by the user named Hurls103 (also blog [short for “Web log”]). Her (indeed her) photos are entirely G-rated and show nothing but red-haired males (sic).

Nominally this should not be a problem, because everything that creeps me out has a countervailing factor. They’re athletes, which should be totally hot, but they are fully clothed nearly all the time. They’re all guys, but… they’re not all adults. There are too many goddamned teenagers in that photo stream. I do not know that they’re at least 14 or 18 years of age.

The entire purpose of the Flickr stream is to ogle red-haired guys. If you start doing that and click on to the next photo, what you might end up looking at is a teenager. Is that what you want?

This is not child pornography. It is, however, too frigging close for comfort. Not only do I not do kids, I don’t do teens. Talk to me when you’re in your 20s, all right?

Since many of these photo subjects are legally minors, are their parents or guardians aware of these photos? Again, nominally the pictures are perfectly Christian and pure, but context is everything.

Why are so many of the photos clearly graduation pictures? How does she get access to those?

Are the indisputable adults in that stream really unaware why they are included? Is anyone that naïve anymore? (If these guys look at the whole stream, does the purpose not become apparent?)

What are the exact terms of the photo releases these subjects signed? Did they?

How many girls are going to look at these photos compared to guys? If her contacts are any indication, exactly 1/7 times as many. (Excluding me, her contacts include 14 males, two females, and one unstated or transgenderist.)

Cutline (often incorrectly called a caption) to an illustration by Arnold Roth accompanying Gladwell’s piece on Harvard admission requirements:

In the élite-education business, you are whom you admit, and when Harvard changed whom it admitted, it changed Harvard.

Only in the New Yorker. Is that even English?

Fox News (yes) covers Massachusetts’ decision to adopt open document formats in its government:

The policy also fails to consider accessibility by citizens and state employees with disabilities who rely on assistive technologies. Several such technologies, including screen readers and speech recognition, are not readily supported by applications that use OpenDocument formats. In commentary submitted to the Massachusetts Information Technology Division, the Bay State Council of the Blind and individuals with vision impairments strongly opposed the proposed policy.

State employee Sharon Strzalkowski wrote, “We have worked long and hard to get the computer access we now enjoy, and it would cause much harm to go to this new and inaccessible system.”

(Did “state employee Sharon Strzalkowski” write that on government time using government equipment?)

A file format isn’t a “system” and cannot be intrinsically accessible or inaccessible. It can contain accessibility features. Your computer hardware is a system that can be inaccessible. You the blind person are under no obligation to use a Windows computer system.

If Strzalkowski is trying to say that only Microsoft could ever produce any kind of accessibility, she needs to get out more. Let me quote myself here: “The assumption seems to be that blind people only ever or only can or only must use Windows.” If you think Windows is your only option because that used to be true, well, welcome to the 21st century.