Categories
Just Shelley

Double take

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In my weblogging neighborhood, and out in the real world, I tend to go by Shell (or Bb) rather than Shelley. So anytime I read either Shell or Bb, I tend to think it’s about me, since both are somewhat unusual nicknames.

So I did a real double-take when I visited Ruzz’s weblog and read:

I should point out Shell is horny as hell …

After going “What?!”, I read the rest of the sentence:

…and his constant meowing and chasing Annabelle down is beginning to be annoying.

Whew! For a minute I was really regretting putting my Myers-Briggs results into a weblog posting.

Categories
Just Shelley Places

Found Gift

I rented a car and drove to Crissy Field and spent a glorious afternoon walking around the Golden Gate Bridge and the beach. The tide was low and the waves were strong so a lot of surf boarders were out. Takes guts to surf around the GG Bridge.

Weather was awesome — brilliant blue skies, cool enough to make walking comfortable, and just enough breeze to blow that wonderful sea spray smell into my face. After all the rain, Crissy was full of all sorts of plant life and the sharp, fresh, green smell from the Field was the perfect accent to a perfect day.

Best of all, absolutely best of all: I can walk reasonably well on water packed sand or dirt (concrete’s disastrous for me); that combined with using a great deal of caution, and I was able to walk the entire beach without having my knee go out AND with relatively little pain. At the end, I jumped up on the sea wall, spread my arms wide, and screamed “I am woman! Hear me roar!” “G-rr-rrr-oarrrr!”

Well, I wanted to and thought about it but there were people around with dogs and I didn’t want to scare the dogs.

Wait, wait! The day’s not over. Tonight I got home and my Mom had sent me a Christmas present — a beautiful Meade ETX-70AT telescope. How did she know that I’ve always wanted a telescope? How did she know which one I wanted? It was about the best Christmas present I’ve ever had. I feel like a kid again!

When you have a day like today, it becomes a found gift — a day that fate gives you, rather than one that just happens.

Categories
Just Shelley

Slashdot let the dogs loose on Mark Pilgrim

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Ah, oh. Mark Pilgrim was mentioned prominently and positively (deservedly so) in a Slashdot interview on accessibility. That sound you hear is Mark’s 3GB bandwidth allowance being sucked dry.

In the re-design of my traditional web sites and weblog (still in process, not rolled out yet), I used Mark’s guidelines to ensure accessibility with my designs. I found that enabling accessibility doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly difficult if you just follow the steps; and if you think about it, the people that need this little extra effort don’t need to hear our whining — think how frustrating it must be for a blind person to go to web page after web page and not be able to ‘see’ the contents?

(Hmmm. Was that last paragraph a little too ‘J’, even for an INTJ? Too bad.)

Categories
Just Shelley

Enough already

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In case you’re wondering if I’ve decided to focus this weblog on “–isms that must not be named” only, no worries. I have no more intention of becoming a Fem-blogger as I have of being a war-blogger or a tech-blogger or a cat-blogger.

Life’s too rich to only focus on one aspect of life, no matter how important that aspect is.

Besides, as I was out and about visiting other weblogs, I became aware that I’ve been guilty of quite sexist behavior, and that’s a rather lowering realization. So, as all good webloggers do in these times, I’m returning to my roots — cat pictures, and Big Click of the moment (thanks to Jeneane for link):

Back to work, Bird!

Categories
Writing

Rated BLG

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Because of the snow over much of the US yesterday, I received several visits to my How to Drive in Ice and Snow posting from people doing Google searches on How to drive in the snow.

I gather that the fact my tongue was planted firmly in cheek while writing this post wasn’t completely apparent, because a reader left the following comment:

I was driving and certainly I was on top of that black ice you can’t see. Car started to spin and when I open my eyes my car was stopped by two others cars inside an auto shop. Nice try to tell people what to do in a snow storm. If a driver is not experience in driving in hazard conditions not tell them what to do. You know how teenagers are and they will go out there and practice what you guys are telling people to do. Be a little more responsible when posting things that young people could read.

That got me to thinking that a lot of my posts could influence young people to act in a contrary manner. For instance, there’s probably a teenager out there right now telling their Dad not to vote for George Bush. Ever. And there might be a teen girl who doesn’t blush and giggle because a group of boys whistle at her as she walks past.

My own irresponsibility shames me.

What we need is a weblog posting rating system — just like the ones the movie, music, and computer game industry use. You know, the ones that attach a Mature rating to a computer game about stealing cars and killing people, which parents then ignore because Joe Jr. keeps nagging them about it?

So here’s my proposed rating system. Please feel free to extend the list as you see fit:

G – Highly innocuous content unlikely to offend — or inspire — anyone

PG – Some independent thought could result from this posting, use caution

R – Post includes coverage of violent topics, such as war

ISM – Post uses language that some readers might find offensive or lacking in humor

TECH – Post contains technical material that may not be suitable for young children and people who go “Gah! Not Again!” when they see acronyms such as: RSS, RDF, XML, XHTML, and CSS.

WAR – Post is about the War on Terror. May not be suitable for those with a low burning point and a heart condition

ME – Post is about me and may not be of interest to people who aren’t interested in me

INTL – Post contains a lot of big words and covers a lot of really intellectual stuff that might cause real pain to some people.

CAT – Post contains some reference to cats. Use ~Cat when referencing dogs or kids

BLG – Post is about blogging, and my not be of interest to people who don’t like to read about blogging

SEX – Post contains material related to sex. Additional ratings associated with SEX are: SEX-R — risque; SEX-M — really risque; SEX-XX — Suzy down on the farm stuff

WTF – Used to gently remind the reader that not everything they read on the web is real