That's one of the blurbs

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That's one of the blurbs over at The Onion, and it made me laugh, because I wasn't all that impressed by the blackout. During the Great Halloween Ice Storm of '91, our farm was without power for five days, so those sissy city boys with their 24 hour blackout don't impress me much. Did I mention it got down into the 30s, inside our house during that week? After 3 days, when we could actually make it to town, and back to school, I had to go in early to shower in the locker room, since we didn't have power or heat at home. We finally resorted to lighting numerous candles at home, to keep the pipes from freezing, as there wasn't a kerosene heater or generator to be bought for hundreds of miles in every direction at that point. Being without power for 12-24 hours, unless you're stuck in an elevator or an iron lung, doesn't really impress me all that much, sorry. :)

I learned something new today

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I learned something new today at work. Namely, how to use software for the blind and visually impaired. Probably a good thing that I learned it, given the prescription for my glasses. I got to install and mess with two of the most popular software packages, Jaws and WindowEyes. I've gotta say I like Jaws better, it's a lot more polished, though my faculty member said he prefers WindowsEyes to use. The stuff isn't cheap, at nearly $1,000/copy individually, but if you're blind, what are you going to do? It works in a way that I didn't expect too, the software reads the words that are under your mouse cursor, so the blind actually have a good grasp of what the UI for an application looks like to the rest of us. It was kind of neat to watch my user navigating that way, though the software merely spits gibberish when I use it, because I move so quickly. People who can see just fine say I do things too quickly in Windows, so I'm not surprised that the robotic computer voice can't keep up. It helped a lot that this user was very proficient with computers as well, which I think is a requirement for using this kind of software, he had a better knowledge of the keyboard shortcuts for Windows than I did, which sort of freaked me out.

While setting up his new computer, I looked at his old one, which he had just moved, and had been unable to get working since the move. A quick glance showed me what was wrong, he had swapped the PS/2 cables for mouse and keyboard around (they use the same types of plugins) as well as plugged the audio cable into the wrong hole (line out instead of speakers). I've always thought they should have made those interfaces different, especially for the mouse/keyboard. Both the keyboard/mouse and the audio inputs/outputs are color coded, but that doesn't do a damned bit of good when you're blind. He was very happy to learn his new system came with USB peripherals, as you can't get those wrong.

This is freaky, these two

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This is freaky, these two news stories showed up together on CNN.com just now. They both seem like something you'd see on Six Feet Under or Dead Like Me. First, a tourist in Las Vegas was walking barefoot (Barefoot? On the Strip? Eww!) when she got electrocuted by a traffic signal wiring box. Next, a surgical resident is decapitated by a malfunctioning elevator. I tell you, it's not even safe to leave the house anymore. Particularly gruesome is the fact that there was a woman stuck inside the elevator with the severed head for 20 minutes. That's gonna leave a mark... Update: Alert reader Rowena Tan told me about this story, from yesterday. A long-haired carny (Gee, what are the chances of that? He should have stuck with a mullet) got his hair caught in a passing roller coaster car, and wound up dead. That gives us a trifecta of weird deaths in 24 hours. Truth really is stranger than fiction.