Dear brain trust,

I have some vision-related problems with my computer setup at work and our IT and HR departments are ill-equipped to help. I've got a configuration -- a combination of OS settings (Windows), monitor settings, application settings, and lighting -- that kind-of sort-of works, but it's all stuff I figured out on my own. There may be better ways to solve my problems, and some of my problems are currently unsolved and getting in my way. Meanwhile, IT really wants to push me to newer versions that seem to be worse for me.

I would like to find a consultant who is knowledgable in both vision stuff and tech stuff, someone who can sit with me for a few hours and give me informed advice about changes to make. My ophthalmologist of course knows the vision stuff but is not a techie; the techies I know don't grok the vision stuff. I need to find someone who can hear "photo-sensitive" and "restricted focal distance" and "astigmatism" and the rest, understand what that means, and suggest approaches that have not occurred to me from walking the application menus and Windows control panel and Firefox extensions. Technical areas will include the gamut of Windows display settings including custom color themes, CSS overrides in Firefox, configuration of Office and (if possible) Adobe reader, and monitor settings, among things. (Bonus points if this person can make Eclipse suck less.) Once I find this person, I intend to push my employer to hire that person for a consultation. I don't expect to have to push very hard, but I also don't expect to get multiple chances on the corporate dime.

The problem is I haven't been able to find that person. My Google searches have turned up many many consultants who will help employers comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act -- they're compliance people, not usability people. (Also, most of them are about mobility issues.) And I've found folks who will build you accessible web sites (they say). This does not help. Clearly I'm going about this wrong.

So, dear brain trust, can you help me figure out how to search for help with this? And in the "hey, I might get lucky" department, do you, dear reader, know someone who could provide this service in Pittsburgh?

Last night my four-month-old phone (my first smartphone) died -- wouldn't power on and didn't light up when plugged into a charger. This said "dead battery" to me; I briefly considered popping and replacing the battery on the theory that that's probably the control-alt-delete of the phone world, but I was stymied by the case.

A word about the case: I didn't get the phone with a case and wasn't looking for one. I'm pretty careful with my portable electronics and don't expect to be using a phone in situations where I'm likely to drop or crush it. A month after I got the phone the screen-protector peeled off and they replaced it since those are supposed to last a year or more. (So maybe the initial application was faulty, I figured.) A month after that the second one peeled off, despite my being very careful in how I handled the phone. I carry my phone in an otherwise-empty pocket, same as bunches of other people; this should not happen. So that time the guy suggested that a case would help hold it down; the price of the case was comparable to the price of a two-pack of protectors, so I grudgingly bought a case and he put it on for me.

I've not had cause to try to remove the case since then, until last night when I found I wasn't sure how to do it without damaging something. And this "pop the battery" idea was just a theory anyway. So today I visited the T-Mobile store and spoke with Matt.

Matt's first guess was "confused phone", not "dead battery", and he took the case off, popped the battery, put it back in, and plugged the phone into a charger. This time it responded. I asked him to show me how he'd taken the case off and he said that it's very fussy. He then went to put it back on so he could show me, and discovered that it wouldn't go -- something had cracked or bent or something. He apologized for breaking the case and replaced it with a new one. I decided at that point that if somebody who probably does this dozens of times a week couldn't succeed, there's no hope of me doing it -- next time I need to access the battery I'll take it back to the store.

From Matt's point of view this is probably "stupid-customer 101" stuff, but he never said anything that implied that I was anything less than a smart person in an unfamiliar situation. He was very friendly and helpful and not at all condescending. While we were waiting to confirm that my battery could hold a charge, I overheard as he helped someone with questions even more basic than mine -- a customer trying to learn how to use a new "plain old phone". He was just as courteous and patient with that customer.

The salesperson told us when we bought the phones that we could come in any time for help; this wasn't just a sell-and-forget operation. Today they delivered on that, and I'll be asking specifically for Matt if I need to go back there again.

Bill Walsh writes about an episode of the Amazing Race in which teams were required to use a manual typewriter to type a supplied passage. The passage contained the number "1". Sadly, Bill notes, the token old people had already been eliminated. Apparently hilarity ensued. (I presume there were no remaining middle-aged people either. I assume that most people of my generation would have known what to do.)

And the title of Bill's post? "LOL 101". :-)

To get my TiVo to shift out of DST I reboot it? Is that what I did last time and I managed to forget? There's no way to manually set the time, and apparently no less-invasive way to ask whomever it asks about the time to go do that. Weird.

Lately I've been having to reboot the TiVo once or twice a week to get it to stop losing part of the signal (sometimes it freezes video; other times it drops sound). So I guess I would have noticed this before too much longer. I don't know what the reduction in reliable uptime means -- aging hardware, dropped support for older models, gremlins, or what. But now I can stop adding an hour to recordings because of clock error, which is handy.

I'm posting this to both LJ and G+.

When I joined LJ there were three levels of publicity for posts: public, friends-only, and private. Years later they introduced filters, so you could group your friends into buckets for both reading and access. Either you could not at the time put a post in multiple filters or I did not know that you could, so I ended up creating some hierarchical security filters. For example, some posts would be restricted to the "best buddies" filter, others to the "know pretty well" filter, and others to the "know" filter. A "best buddy" was therefore in all three groups. This is a royal pain to administer on LJ (you can't put a group in a group), and I've been moving to another model now that I can. I may never get around to correcting the older entries, though.

I would like to not have such a mess with G+. I note that G+ (unlike LJ) tells you right there on a person's page what group (er, circle) you've put that person in. I haven't put anybody in multiples, but I assume that if I did they would all show up.

So I'm thinking that what I want to do is to put everybody in exactly one security filter, and then make posts visible to all applicable filters. Instead of having a person in multiple filters, I would have a post in multiple filters. Does this seem right to y'all? Are there other factors I should be thinking about?

On LJ I post almost everything publicly, but it looks like G+, with its ability to make posts to specific individuals, is likely to involve more non-public posting. I can't tell yet. By the time I know, it will be too late to go back and fix my circles if I get this wrong. So I'd like to hear people's thoughts now, while everybody is in one big "acqaintances" bucket awaiting sorting.

Note that I am not talking about reading filters here, and I don't intend to mingle them. I might trust somebody deeply but not want to give his 20 posts per day high priority, y'know? Reading filters can help manage that.

Edit: To clarify, my current thinking is to put each person in exactly one security filter and in one or more reading filters.

Google Maps almost failed me this morning. That's never happened before. Those "M" guys used to get things wrong so much that I couldn't rely on them at all; they even managed to leave out a major state road once, telling me that I could exit the interstate and get onto such-and-such road that was miles and miles away. And those "Y" guys led me on some merry romps a couple times. But Google Maps had always given me what I needed with a smile and useful photos besides.

This morning I had to run an errand in Wilkinsburg before work. I don't particularly know the wilds of Wilkinsburg, but it's not the land of unnamed dirt roads or anything like that. I was a little surprised that Google's directions didn't actually have me turn onto the street named in the address, but a street number of "xxx02" is likely to be at a corner, so that seemed ok. So, armed with directions and Street View of the key intersections I didn't already know (Street View has made my life so much easier in this land of sometimes-inadequate road signs), I headed off... and at the end of the directions found myself at the end of a road facing an iron gate. Oops.

So I called my destination, told them where I was, and asked how to recover. How far was I from such-and-such road? Sorry, not from around here -- never heard of such-and-such road. Ok, I should go back to other-such-and-such road and... wait, never encountered that one on my way here. We went back and forth a couple times and I said I guessed I was going to have to reschedule and get better directions. I repeated what I had said at the beginning of the conversation: I was at the end of such-and-such road facing an iron gate with an "authorized personnel only" sign and no other markings.

Wait, the guy said, is it a blue sign? Yup. Could I see a white building beyond the gate? Yup. He told me to wait. A couple minutes later somebody came to open the back gate so I could drive in. Weird!

So it worked out in the end (costing me 10 minutes or so), but it was very puzzling.

Stack Overflow has a candidate site for Q&A on Jewish topics. Stack Overflow takes what looks like a sound approach to launching new sites like this, waiting until enough people commit before launching. After all, if they can't attract good questions and good answers, no one will care. I committed.

What Level 3 v. Comcast says about the FCC's obsolescence is a good explanation of what is going on with throttling internet traffic (link, as with many on this topic, from osewalrus). goldsquare writes about why you should care.

Law and the Multiverse (now syndicated at law_multiverse) does fun legal analysis of superhero law. From their "about" page: "If there's one thing comic book nerds like doing it's over-thinking the smallest details. Here we turn our attention to the hypothetical legal ramifications of comic book tropes, characters, and powers. Just a few examples: Are mutants a protected class? Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain? What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?" Thanks to anastasiav for pointing it out.

The first truly honest privacy policy sounds about right to me. Link from cahwyguy.

The semicolon wars discusses differences in programming languages and some of the religious wars that have been fought over them. Thanks to nancylebov for the link.

Thanks to brokengoose for pointing me to Kindle Feeder, which supports RSS feeds to the Kindle. Now, do any of you know how to get an RSS feed to cough up the entire article instead of just the first paragraph? If the publisher didn't set it up that way is there anything I can do about it?

It's clean-out-the-browser-tabs day:

From gardenfey comes this fun video about what motivates us. The presentation is engaging; I didn't mind at all that it's ten minutes long.

shewhomust posted this item about spoilers and meta-spoilers. Heh.

Big numbers can be hard to understand without some localization. With that in mind, try this visualization of the gulf oil spill, linked by siderea.

And speaking of interesting visualizations, dagonell posted this depiction of Earth, from tallest mountain to deepest ocean trench.

Also from dagonell: every country is the best at something, though, as he points out, some fare better than others.

This visualization isn't about the planet; it's about the changes in Facebook privacy over time.

Not a visualization: How to keep someone with you forever through the power of sick systems. Linked by lots of people; I first saw it from metahacker. I have not lived that kind of abuse, for which I am very thankful, but this tracks with what I've heard.

And on the lighter (err) side: a light saber strong enough to burn flesh -- for sale for $200. Wow. And yikes. Link from astroprisoner.

We went to my parents' house this evening. (Their holiday, not mine, but the gift thing is a strong family tradition.) During dinner someone mentioned a gift gone wrong from yesterday: my sister, not understanding the technologies involved, had bought my mother (a dedicated Elvis fan) an SD card with photos and some MP3s. She had thought that she was buying a means to play them, but no -- and since she doesn't know this space, the pricing didn't tip her off. They were talking at dinner about hooking this up to my father's new iMac somehow so she could view/listen, which is more work than anyone intended. (I assume the iMac doesn't have a direct interface and they were going to go through a camera via USB to copy files to disk, or something.)

The digital photo frame we gave my father an hour later made that much easier. :-)

I am now in possession of a Roku box for streaming Netflix to the TV -- yay! There's a bit of delayed gratification, however; due to a bug [*] and connection-type limitations in our TV, I need to go buy some component-video cables. So tomorrow I will be able to set it up (and finish rewiring the TV cluster because, hey, if you have to wade in anyway...). I promised Dani a wiring diagram in exchange for setup help. (This is help of the "hold this" and "plug that in there" variety; actually figuring it out is my job.)

[*] If an s-video cable is plugged in to the TV, all devices using composite video lose their video. Neither the documentation nor Google has been able to help me figure out why. I sure hope component video has no such complications. (Currently the Tivo (series 1) and DVD player are both connected via composite; I'd like to upgrade the DVD player to component and move that composite connection to the Roku box.) The TV does not support three composite connections, only two -- so the third has to be component or s-video.

Notes to self (and any interested onlookers):
( technology, processes, playback options )