Twinkle Little Star

It has happened.

The new blog is up, running and has taken off. You are free to look through the archives here for as long as I choose to afford to keep the site up (to the end of my subscription year probably.)

There were a few people who requested the link that I got bounceback emails for. If you didn't get one (regular reader loulin comes to mind), please make sure you have sent me a working email address.

If you are new to this site and want to keep reading, sure! Come on over! But the rules still apply. 1) You can't know me in real life; and 2) you need to send me a valid email address. In turn I will email you the new URL and I will not use your email or personal information for any other reason without your permission. In essence, it will be deleted from my mailbox.

Happy Bloggidy Goodness!

Oh, I give up!

About a year and a half ago, D and I had a big argument that resulted in a "contract." One of the stipulations on the contract was that I would move the blog and go anonymous. I never got around to doing it. Also, since then, I've been fiddling around with wordpress quite a bit, and I have to say I really can't stand typepad now. So, I think it is time for the move. Always tricky. So, we're moving. Soon. And if you want, I'll take you with me. I will pretty much take anyone with me that I don't know in real life. If you do know me in real life, don't be offended. It isn't you, its me. Or it is D and his family. It is just that I have to draw the line somewhere and that seems like the easiest criteria to go by. If you are a close friend, don't worry, I'll get to you eventually. You probably know everything I write about anyway.

So, if you want to know where I've moved, you need to email me or drop a comment that tells me who you are, how you got here, how you know me, that kind of thing. I also need a valid email address. If you have a blog or other website address, even better. I will be whois-ing people if I am still unclear about who you are. But after that, I will discharge all email addresses, IP addresses, any other private information from my computer and my head if so requested. I am not trying to be nosey as to who you are, I just want to make sure who you are not. But I hope some of you do decide to move with me. I like you! I really, really like you! And there will be drama and twin cuteness and humor and bitchiness, too!

I will be leaving this site up for a while, so if you happen upon it and read it and want to find out what happened next, go ahead and email me, too.

But, to close this puppy up...I'll leave you with a brief update.

D is doing really well. No infection. The pump all looks good. He is having to build his stamina still, but it is nice to have the old D who can form complete thoughts and sentences back after his 7 month absence into baclofen induced stupors.

Kids are well, frustrating but well. I have not done a good job this summer with homeschooling stuff or just getting them out and about as much as I should have. I've just been maintaining and it is not good enough. They get ansy and act out. But I am getting geared up for fall. I will be trying to get them into this preschool program that doesn't register until August 19th, so wish me luck with that. I have no idea if they will get in or not. If not, I will be looking at other classes and activities for them.

Last night, I was looking at the reunion site for my 20 year (God!) high school reunion. The reunion took place last weekend in Nebraska and I did not attend. But I noticed this girl I knew was listed in the "In loving memory section" And then proceded to stay up all night searching to see what happened to her. I'm recovering from the trauma that I found. She was murdered by her husband and thrown in a river. They lived on the same street that I spent 11 years growing up on. Horrible crazy sad horrible. I ended up finding out all this by happening upon a dog lovers message board of all places, where I found another girl I knew from highschool who was good friends with her and I was reading it in "real time" as she found out about it. She was missing for two weeks and their was a search and then through finding her and the arrest and trial and everything. Even though it happened two years ago, it was chilling to read like that. I felt so bad for the person on the message board. Armed with her married name, I then went back to find 1800 articles about it that I missed. It was even a story on Greta Van Susteren's show. I must have been knee deep in baby brain or something because I didn't have a clue. I don't know why I'm telling you this, it isn't really an update about me, it was just very, very sad. When I was in middle school, I took industrial arts instead of home ec. Back then, only boys took shop. This girl was the only other girl in the class with me and we sat next to each other all two years. She was way into horses and animals and I was jealous because she had her own horse and went riding and did competitions and stuff. I hate this ending for her and I also hate that this story is so damned typical. She was basically a battered wife whose husband one night battered her to death. The friend on the dog lovers message board even ended up taking her dog, who was found roaming in the streets. She said something interesting. That sometimes battered women have trouble leaving because they can't find a shelter that will take their animal and they know if they leave it behind it will be abused or neglected. So, my friend on the dog lover's site that does animal rescue  did a really cool thing. She was trying to put together a program that linked the women's shelters with animal rescue shelters. So there would be a plan available for the pets, too. Pretty cool, I thought. Anyway, I guess I just wanted to write that story out. Such a terrible and unfair ending.

But, in better news, I am leaving to go on my trip in one week. Everything seems to be in place except for the little stuff like packing and laundry and stuff. I'm making the kids a chart so every morning they can X out a day that I'm gone so they get an idea that I'm coming back and when I'll be home. And then I will call them daily, of course. I'm leaving them my reluctant team of three that put together don't even equal one of me. (Arrogant, much?) I have a good babysitter. She is great, and I don't include her in my band of idiots (see why I need a private website? I can't help myself.) She is just young. She is 17 and can't drive. she is very dependable and good with them, though. Then my dad and D, who both have their positive points. My dad has the energy and the car and the physical ability. D has the sense and is the closest to the kids besides me. Besides his physical disadvantage and energy disadvantage, I mostly worry about the fact that he has trouble stepping up and taking charge. So, I know between the three of them it will all work out and be fine...but I could think of a few moms, some of which are probably reading this right now, who I think could replace me in a heartbeat and I would not have a hesitation in the world. You know, people who will just get things done and know what to do and do it? And also do it without reluctance and with gentleness and kindness? You know what I mean? I'm not saying that only mom's can do this because I can think of one or two men who can do this, too. I'm just saying that for this trip, I don't have that. But I have three people (and a few friends that would probably step in if the shit hit the fan) so it will all be okay and I'm getting the fuck outta dodge.

I can't think of anything earth-shattering besides all this. There will be a few surprises on the new blog. So let me know in comments if you would like me to email you the URL. I am going to try to work on it tonight and get people emailed in the next week.

Otherwise...thank you and goodbye Twinkle Little Star! You were a good friend the past three years, and led me to some awesome, awesome people!

Couple Quick Blog Items

As a person who has gotten some flack in real life for blogging, by people who think it is dangerous or people who think I'm a geek (hey, no argument there) I'd just like to point out a couple of neat-o things.

1. My bloggy buddy and fellow twin mom, Snickollet (aka Stacey Kim) is featured in CNN today. She talks about blogging as therapy.

2. The infamous Heather Armstrong (aka Dooce) whom I have read since BEFORE the whole dooced thing happened, wrote a really eloquent post about the decision to blog and a response to the critics,  specifically in regards to mom-blogging. She will be on the Today Show today/tomorrow? I'm confused. Soon, okay. Or just yesterday. Just watch online for god's sakes. (Or turn to ABC, I think she is also coming up on Good Morning America). Did you see her?

Great going, ladies! Soon us mombloggers will take over THE WORLD! I say- THE WORLD! Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

You People Are Keeping Me Up At Night

I am going to write a post regarding disabled kids and therapies/interventions. It is a hard topic, but I'll note right off the bat that I never indicated that children with disabilities should NOT receive therapy. But more thoughts on that later.

Okay, so this email I got a week or so ago, and my attempts to ignore it have not worked. Its not that I think the question is so wrong or that it made me angry or anything like that, it is just a touchy subject. But it is keeping me awake tonight so I guess I'll give it a go.

From "thebeck":

...I have spent the past few days going through your archive. Your weblog is sucking me in and I am enthralled with your story. I may be splitting hairs, but there is one thing you said that I just don't understand and can't get my head around. You talked about a horrible day that was something you just needed to get over in your post about the song "Ordinary World" being your theme song. And I assumed you were referring to your rape incident that you wrote about just a few posts before that. And you said that the song's line about "ours is just a little sorrowed talk" was meant to somehow minimize or diminish the crime. And you should just get over it. This is none of my business, but I'm confused about this. I found your site actually searching for "date rape" because my girlfriend was also raped in college. And she would go ballistic on me if I said that she should just get over it or that it was just a little sorrowed talk compared to the problems of the world. I guess I'm asking, how can two people with similar experiences think about it in such completely opposite ways?

...

Okay, first of all, I am very sorry about what happened to your girlfriend and please extend my sympathies.

And now, second of all, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on for a second while I pry apart the pretzel that is my brain and go back and find out what in God's name I said. (This actually took awhile.) He (I'm going to assume you are a he) is referring to this silly throw away post that you'se all weren't supposed to read that I am so going to take down now.

I say this:

I will continue to use "Ordinary World," which has become my cheesy summer anthem, as my rubber band around my wrist to snap when I get stuck in a forloop and need reminding to just get on with it.

and this:

"... forgiveness is a verb that you have to actively decide to do, it doesn't just come along and fall into your lap by itself via osmosis. Many years ago on a Thursday no less, we had an awful day, and that is what it was, an awful day. We can still remember S while getting on with it. "Ours is just a little sorrowed talk."

In reference to these lyrics:

Papers in the roadside
Tell of suffering and greed
Here today, forgot tomorrow
Ooh, here besides the news
Of holy war and holy need
Ours is just a little sorrowed talk

in this song:

Ordinary World

Okay, first of all, you are wrong about that being about what you think it is about. "We can still remember S" does not refer at all to the TCGRS (Typical College Girl Rape Scenario) experience that I wrote about. Actually, I can find where I wrote a bit about it after that post, but not previous to it. So either you read my posts backwards or I did write about it before and I can't find it now. Anyway. "S" is something I can't talk about here. Because it involves other people than me, and I was only on the periphery of the "S" situation so it is not my story to tell. But, it does involve a crime and loss and grieving, and that, coupled with my experiences around the TCGRS of my own, leads me to want to tell you these things:

No two people are going to handle being victims of a crime the same way. And there is no wrong way to handle it. If your girlfriend is telling you she can't get over it, she can't forgive, and that it is a big deal...guess what? She's right. You didn't say how long ago her experience occurred. I will tell you that my TCGRS was 19 years ago. My involvement in the "S" situation? Started 29 years ago. That makes a helluva big difference as to where you are in the process of grieving and getting over it. I'm going to guess that her crime took place within the last few years? But even if I'm wrong, who am I to say how anyone else should handle their own situation. Everyone is different.

What I meant by "Ordinary World" being my theme song involves how you can be going along, minding your own business, going down your own life's path with 19 or 29 years distance between you and a traumatic incident. And something can come along and totally blindside you, knocking you off your path and back to where you were  decades ago. It happens  to the best of us. It happened to me, and it happened to my friend, A, last summer. And how you have to drag yourself back to your chosen road, your ordinary world, before it gets all out of hand.  You can call this flashbacks or post traumatic stress or triggering or whatever. But when you have this issue, you have to develop your "drag yourself back to where you want to be" muscle. And this can take years to develop. And you can think you are so far beyond all that crap and guess what? You're not. So, out comes the muscle. Lift a few weights with it and get it back in shape. Have a little rubber-band around your wrist to help you if necessary, a theme song, whatever works, and you will get back there. If your girlfriend has issues like these, she may have not developed this muscle yet. Or she may just handle these things differently than me. Maybe she just is still and lets it all pass through her. Maybe she gets really angry. Maybe she needs to relive it for a while. Whatever. I hope she finds a way to find some kind of effective way to live with it. Whatever way she finds, it is the right one for her.

What I meant by "ours is just a little sorrowed talk" is that we (A and I, not anyone else) are so far removed from it. And we worked hard to get here. So every once in a while, we can have our little sad time flashback thingy, but that's it. We do our thing and then we are done. It is not our lives, it does not define us, it is just something we need to get "tuned-up" every few years or so. We talk to each other, have our little sorrowed talk about it, do a little emotional maintenance, and then we get back to our lives. This is our thing. Doesn't need to be anyone else's. And the whole "holy war and holy need" thing is that our discussions always end up talking about the bigger picture. Why is there so much violence and need in the world? Why is there a need to dominate and hate? Why so much hate against women...the supposed "weaker" sex? What is the definition of evil and is there good in everyone or are some people just evil? And if so, why? How did they get that way? Is it innate or environmental? What can be done to help good win out over evil?

These questions of the ages are where our conversations always seem to end up. And these are issues that are far bigger than what happened to A or what happened to me. We are, unfortunately, just little insignificant dots in the bigger world problem of violence and oppression. Which doesn't mean that our experiences are insignificant, just that unfortunately, we are only two people who have been victimized by crime in a sea of millions and millions throughout history since the dawn of time. For us, and I'm not talking about anyone else here, in a weird way it helps to think that the problem is universal. Not that we, A and myself, were somehow targeted because of something implicit about who we are. That we've done something wrong. It is just saying, look. domination and oppression and violence looms large in our world. This happened to us, but it is so not about us. This is bigger than us and there is nothing we could have done. The only thing we can do now is stay in our chosen "Ordinary World." This is the world of good over evil and kindness over violence. That's all we can do.

Boyfriends of rape victims can either be class A assholes (and if that is your choice, you should probably just gracefully back out) or can be fundamental in recovery. I am EXTREMELY lucky* to have really only ever had experience with the latter type of guy. Even the relationships that didn't work out for whatever reason were actually really cool about this issue. If you want to be one of the good guys and do the right thing; take a step back, learn about rape and its ramifications, get help from a victim's advocate or counselor, do whatever it takes to be supportive. You can click to RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network and they can offer information and refer you to confidential hot-lines, counselors and victim's advocates in your area.

*D notes that my extreme luck has more to do with my infamously extreme screening process. I once got picked up for a first date from work. Not five blocks away the guy says that he can't "sleep with a girl without SLEEPING with a girl." I got out of the car at the next intersection, walked back to my office, and announced to my coworker, "date's over!"

I just have to say...

...that I'm so freakin' glad that Twisty Faster has returned to my daily blog reads. I am not her. I cannot live my life as she does. I can't chuck all of femininity, all thoughts of binary gender roles, all of heterosexual sex. I can't go through life doing as she does; throwing the blinders off so as to really see and label all the patriarchal bullshit there is to behold. I NEED to move through most of my life in denial. Otherwise, wouldn't your head explode if you really thought about it that much?

But I need to read Twisty daily. I need to know that someone else sees it. And not only sees it, but can articulate it so clearly. I need to know that all those things I see on TV that tell me how I am required to act as this or that kind of woman in order to be accepted in "Dude Nation", all the times I see people like my dad who cannot even comment on any facet of a particular woman's life without first summing up her worth in hotness/fuckability points, all the junk science research that assumes the male default and show how females 'deviate' from that norm, all those things that subtly irritate my obstreperal lobe* on a daily basis but I can't articulate into words; that someone else can. Twisty does it.

She took nearly four months off from blogging, and who can blame her? I don't know how she blogs about all this stuff every day without going on a wild shooting spree (especially living in Texas. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel.) Anyway, she came back. And I'm so happy I can almost give up het sex forever.

Almost.

Anyway, today's gem is in regards to the feminizing of everything. The pinking up of unisex products to further separate women as being "different" from the standard, default product that men use. The marketing juggernaut that is making everything pink for women. For example, this bottle of Russian Vodka is now femmed up for women.

Russian Vodka bottle shaped in hourglass feminine shape (no head or arms of course) with a Marilyn Monroe-esque skirt blown up to reveal the brand name on, um, Marilyn's crotch.

Says she:

Behold the neat trick. First, you make women act like simpletons, broodmares, janitors, mannequins, and sex slaves before you grant them social approval. You call this behavior “femininity” and explain that it is their essential nature, and that any deviation from the program will be punished. Then you infantilize and ridicule the ones who get it right, and vilify and abuse the ones who get it wrong (you can also vilify and abuse the ones who get it right, because, let’s be honest; the world is your oyster).

With so much riding on it, whether femininity is performed right or wrong is an issue of enormous concern to women. That’s where the Empowerful Pink Marketing Juggernaut comes it. They package femininity, changing it a bit every so often so that the old version eventually becomes obsolete, and sell it to women as insurance against getting it wrong. This pink capitalist enterprise has the dual effect of diverting women’s income back to the male-dominated megatheocorporatocracy, while simultaneously reinforcing women’s investment in the bogus feminine identity and marking (with pink, the color of female infancy) the objects tainted with girl-cooties. The woman festooned with pink accessories, therefore, may be easily identified from a distance as a friend to Dude Nation.

Femininity, in fact, can’t even be practiced without stuff (which is one way of debunking the argument that it is an inherited sex trait). It is simply not possible for a woman without makeup and deodorant and lingerie and kitten heels and diet pills and clothes without pockets and anti-wrinkle cream that promises “glowing skin” and self-help books explaining the best ways to suck up to men and jewelry and razors and tweezers and lemon-scented cleaning products and boxes of Lean Cuisine in the freezer — all stuff that must be bought — to be fully feminine.

Femininity — selling it, doing it, approving of it, pinking it, drinking it — is antifeminist,
fool.

*The obstreperal lobe is the portion of the brain, discovered by Twisty Faster herself, that resists and denounces control and oppression. Mine is quite often strained and in terrible danger of forming a loud and ugly cancer that will take over my conformacortex, the part of my cerebellum that allows me to keep company in polite society.

New Look, Old Typepad

I really, really, really need to be ordering groceries right now, but instead I'm tinkering with the blog.

Recently, I started a new blog over at Wordpress. It is just a little homeschooling record keeping and thoughts type of blog that would likely bore the lot of you to tears. I haven't decided whether to password protect it or allow certain people to have the URL or just not ever tell anyone about the URL. I need to play with it more.

Anyway, I went over to Wordpress to try it out because it is free (at least my version of it is.) And after the first hour of frustration, I slowly started to fall in love with it and want to marry it and have it's children. Very easy to work with with a lot of nice features. I came back to tinker with typepad here just to compare the ease of use. And I think I will be divorcing typepad, soon.

I'm going to wait till my Typepad year is out and also when my next google ads check comes, so its not anything that is going to happen immediately. I'll keep you posted.

Now I've had websites/blogs for over ten years now. This is what I've come to learn:

HTML-ing it by hand? Sucks
Diaryland (remember those)? insidious.
Live Journal? Disgustingly Ugly and bumbly to use
Blogger? Really bad
Typepad? Okay to Good
Wordpress? Really, really good.
Your own web designer in the family (a la Dooce)? Priceless

...in case you are shopping.

More later, family needs fed, so I'm off to Safeway.com. (Maybe next time I'll rate online grocery services. Surely about as exciting as this post.)

Two Questions, Unrelated

A few of you know that I grew up in the Omaha/Council Bluffs Metro Area and have inquired about the Westroads Mall shooting. My first reaction is that I have a cousin who I thought worked there, and I hoped he was alright. But I since found out that he doesn't work there anymore. It doesn't appear that I know any of the victims (although D's aunt knows the landlord of the killer, so there is always six degrees, I guess.)

My second reaction is the memory of the sheer amount of clock hours, the embarrassing number of weekends of my life I spent at that mall growing up. Countless. I can still remember where every store was. I still remember the time I barfed in Seifert's and then took about 3 years before I entered that store again. I remember which of my high school friends worked there and where. The route I took around and around that mall just hanging out. So it is a bit surreal.

But my third reaction, the strongest, is sadness that these mass killings and seemingly random acts of violence by young men are becoming more and more common and that no place; no one is safe. And that now Westroads will have extra security guards in place and maybe metal detectors and employee security trainings and extra police response training and all that. And how that is so not the right way to deal with this. It is like placing all kinds of parachutes and netting and ambulances and books about how to respond to the medical needs of people who have fallen a deadly distance at the bottom of the cliff while completely ignoring the kids at the top who are running towards it.

Recently, in Oregon, a man committed suicide after he wandered for three days seeking help because he lost all of his belongings on a bus and had no money or I.D. or anything. He most likely had a mental illness. And he went to the Salvation Army and the Emergency Room and the Sheriffs office and the homeless shelter and the county welfare office. None of them gave him any more help than a coat or a meal and sent him on his way. So after wandering for three days, he put himself in front of a train and was killed.

I don't know this Omaha kid's story, I don't know whether he asked for help or what happened. But I do know that many non-profits and government agencies do not really help anyone but themselves. They all provide "education and referral" which is code for passing the buck to a different agency. I know that Nebraskan's, if they are like every one else in the country, will throw up their hands and say, "there were no definitive warning signs! We could not possibly imagine that this guy would walk into a mall and start shooting!" And then they will up security and that will be that. But there are ALWAYS warning signs. I'm not blaming anyone for what happened, but I do know that the number one warning sign is when people are regarded as throwaways. Hopeless, helpless, valueless people who are not worth dealing with and are brushed aside as being less than human. That is the biggest warning sign of all. The person you don't want to deal with and no one else does either? The one you don't want to touch? That is the one who will do something like this.

Girls withdrawal and go inside themselves and become anorexic or do drugs or become strippers or prostitutes and disassociate from those who have disassociated from them. Boys? Much more likely to become violent. And why wouldn't they? We train our boys practically from birth to become violent. Read this interview by Army dude/FBI trainer/author Dave Grossman if you have boys. Chilling.

But for the people who are dealing with this loss right now, I extend my sympathies. Hopefully we as a society can come up with a better plan than extra security at Westroads Mall.

*********************************************************************

Okay, now for something totally unrelated. I've been asked about what my deal is with YouTube and whether I can even see/hear it or not.

I really can't see YouTube videos that well. I go to that site a lot, though because it is kind of like the poor man's iTunes. I don't have an mp3 player. I don't really even have a stereo. I can listen to CDs on my computer or by using the DVD player, but most of my CDs are not unpacked and I don't even know where they are. It is easier to just do a you tube search when I want to hear something.

Can I hear music? Yeah, kinda. I can hear it best with headphones. But I mostly hear the bass/rhythm lines. I've actually become kind of a fan of the bass (You Go! John Taylor!) because of that. I never paid much attention before. But, here is the deal. And why everything I have posted here is such embarrassingly old, old school. New music that I am unfamiliar with just sounds mostly like the rhythm section. When I listen to old familiar music? My brain fills it all in. It seriously sounds like the whole song in my head to me. I know that if I really stop and concentrate, I'm only hearing the rhythm section. But my brain just compensates and it integrates perfectly. Hard to explain. The further back the song from my youth, the better this works. Songs from my childhood and early teen years are just ingrained so much that give me a little hint of the song and I hear the whole damned song just like it was coming through the headphones.

I have thought a lot recently about how I need to bring new music in for the kids sake. They do have a small radio/cd player in their room and they listen to kid music like putumayo and raffi and stupid annoying kid songs and stuff. They also listen to a lot of classical. But I have thought about trying to make a better effort to expose them to new and different kinds of music. My buddy Scalzi was generous enough to ask his readers on my behalf for suggestions for appropriate music for kids that is not specifically kid music. I got literally hundreds of suggestions that I am still sorting through. But I should have asked you all as well for suggestions. So go ahead and bring 'em on if you have some.

Another reason I like Youtube is because I like live performances better than most studio recordings. I always have. In skating there is a saying that you are either 20% better or 20% worse in competition that you are in practice. (Me? 20% worse, btw.) I think musicians are the same way. YouTube has some great live stuff that you just can't find on itunes. It has a ton of sucky stuff, too. But it is fairly easy to sift through it.

Take another old, old song like Fleetwood Mac's "Silver Springs" for example. The studio version is just a sweet little teenage girl break-up song. Its okay. But nothing all that wonderful. Now take this live version. The emotion in it (and the irony that the person she threatens to haunt forever with the sound of her voice is right there next to her--30 years later--still stuck listening to the sound of her voice, heh) makes it a whole different song on a whole different level.

I don't know, I'm a You Tube Junky. I put them up here because I used to have a section of my old website that was called "current song in my head" and it is interesting to go back and see where my psyche was at that exact moment. The current song in my head section is a better snapshot of that than anything I probably wrote. I don't expect 99%, if any, of you to actually click through the videos. I will sometimes watch other people's videos but often don't. Who has the time? But if you want to, fine. If you don't, doesn't bother me a bit. I guess I just have it there to remind myself of my state of mind at the time. Or of songs that I can fill in with my brain.

The Unthinkable

It saddens me beyond words to have learned that one of my readers and sometimes commenter, That Girl, has lost her two-year-old, Jake. Jake had ongoing health issues, but as I understand it, this was quite unexpected. Please keep her in your thoughts and stop by and give her some support.

Jake

RE: Blind People/Internet

Before I forget, I wanted to answer Linda's question about how I use the internet. And no, asking those kinds of questions is not offensive at all. It is much preferable to going around talking about something you know nothing about like the people who said that blind people can't use the internet.

There are different ways blind people access computer technology. I use a combination of a program called Window-Eyes and another called Zoomtext. Window-Eyes is a voice output program. It reads everything on the screen aloud in a synthesized computer voice. My keyboard is exactly like yours, but I don't use the mouse with this program. You actually can use the mouse, but basically you'd just be wandering around the screen playing hit and miss with the cursor and nothing would make much sense. Window-Eyes uses a combination of the already existing keyboard commands in Windows, like Control-C for COPY, and also has its own set of keyboard commands to do most everything else. Much of the navigation around the screen in Window-Eyes uses the number pad. There is a lot more memorization of all of these commands than if you were to just point and click with the mouse. Also, there are some additional commands you have to remember when you hear them. It will read capitals in a higher pitched voice, it will read a link as "link:home, link:contact, etc." It takes some practice to get used to hearing all the ways it reads things aloud.

Zoomtext is a screen enlargement software program that basically blows up the screen to as big as you want it. But it then only shows like one fourth of the screen at a time. Or one eighth or one sixteenth depending on how big you are blowing it up. You then have to sort of scroll around to get to different parts of the screen. Zoomtext is very annoying in this way. I only use it when everything else has failed. Obviously, Zoomtext is not an option for every blind person. One thing I use it for is when I comment on all of your blogs and you have that image of the jumbled letters that I have to type out to prevent spam. I hate those things. Some of them have a little wheelchair icon that you can click and then it will give you the letters aloud to type in or bypass it all together. Sometimes I'm screwed and it takes me two or three tries to get it right. If you have one of these on your blog and I comment on it, then I must really like you because I really hate these and avoid them when I can.

Incidentally, deafblind people can use the internet, but it adds one more layer of tricky. They use the same voice output software like JAWS or Window-Eyes, but then instead of getting translated into a voice that reads aloud, it gets translated into a refreshable braille display. This is a line of braille mechanized pins that raise and lower as the computer reads each line of text. These suckers are incredibly expensive.

I am not an expert on web accessibility. I know when a site is easy to navigate or harder, but I don't know all the whys and hows of how to build an accessible webpage. Straight text that is managed neatly in discernible columns or tables is easy to read, as are text links. When people make their websites with the columns of text going all over the place, it may look OK to the eye, but the screen reader will read it across the columns and it gets all jumbled up. Sloppy HTML makes screen readers really have to work extra hard. Also, graphics based navigation is harder and needs to have alt text in order to be accessible. Pictures should be captioned with descriptive text. (Something I am trying to get better at on this site.) When you get into flash and other multimedia, things start getting impossible. Flash needs to have an HTML or text based option. There are other things that web designers can do to make webpages more accessible. I know I have several blind readers here who probably know way more than me about all this. What are your ideas or expertise about this?

There are a lot of websites that are not accessible at all, but most of the problem sites can be accessed with headache inducing struggle. It depends on how much you really want to read what is one the site as to whether you are going to spend your time deciphering it. The easier the website is to access, the more you are apt to use that site. Web designers can do some simple easy things to make their site easier to navigate and read, and thus open themselves up to a broader population of users. See? Win/win for everyone. Just like most all accessibility issues can be.

Milestone

My weblog hit 100,000 unique visitors today. (It hit over 100,000 straight hits a while back)...

That is either very cool or very scary to think of 100,000 different people have stopped by at least once to check out your blog.

Okay. I'll say it's cool.