Blog-o-licious!

WANTWANTWANTWANTWANT.

This:

Hyperwall 2

just to get ready for this:

Diablo III

June 28th, 2008 Posted by admin | Tech, General | no comments

Boycott Microsoft, now.

Long-time readers of this blog know I have no love for Microsoft. For those of you who need proof, Exhibit A would be this post. Exhibit B, this one.

I run an Ubuntu Linux system and browse with Firefox. When I run searches, it’s through Google or Wikipedia. The likelihood of my wanting to use Microsoft Live Search, MSN, Hotmail, or any other online product Microsoft touts is up there with the chances of a snowflake in hell. So you can imagine my reaction when browsing along the Intarwebs, I click on a link to a web page, and get this:

No, the link itself doesn’t point to Live Search. Not at all. No, I don’t use Live Search, nor do I want to. This is happening while browsing a site I’ve seen before, to a page I know exists. But somehow, stuff gets redirected to Live Search anyway. Worse, this redirection happens even while editing blog posts–WordPress dialog boxes get completely derailed in order to show me Live Search results for the word “customjuju”. Um, yeah, that should make me think your search engine is indispensable. And the best part is, after Live Search takes over a page link this way, that’s where the link always goes–unless I kill my Internet connection and reload. Why? Because Microsoft Live helpfully plants a bunch of cookies to make sure their site loads again and again and again until I use their search engine.

Now, y’all know that ain’t right. When other people who aren’t Microsoft do this, it’s called hijacking. I mean, people pay me to fix their computers when something like this happens. This is obviously some kind of click-piracy to “prove” many people are using Live Search, by showing how many people load the site. In some cloud-cuckoo-land the Microsoft execs inhabit, this kind of server request sleight-of-hand is supposed to prove they’re better than Google, or Yahoo!, or whatever, rather than showing they can’t get market share without sleaze-baggery.

No. I refuse to go along with it.

But you don’t have to take just my word for it. Webmasters have been having problems for a while with server logs spammed with live.com results that um….didn’t really happen.

So I think it’s time to show Microsoft where the money really is–in other products made by companies with a better ethics system.

Who’s with me?

Editrix’ Note: If, like me, you don’t want Firefox/Linux spouting Live Search when you’re trying to read a cool cartoon like Girls With Slingshots or Day by Day, do this:

In Firefox, go to the “Edit” Menu and click “Preferences”.
Choose the “Privacy” Tab.
In the “Cookies” section, click the “Exceptions” button.
Block the following sites:

• live.com
• search.live.com
• msn.com
• search.msn.com

Next, close the “Exceptions” box, and click the “Show Cookies” button.
In the “Cookies” window, search for any cookie names with variations of live.com and msn.com, and delete them.

Close the “Cookies” window.
Close the “Preferences” window.
Restart Firefox.

June 26th, 2008 Posted by admin | Tech, General | one comment

Enabling India

Outside of major metropolitan areas, India is literally an uphill challenge for the differently abled. Sidewalks are nonexistent. Stairwells are frequently built without railings. Homes and temples and even our own Guru Rimpoche statue are accessible only by rocky footpaths, like this one:

Travel in and out of the area is just as bad: few people own private cars, and usually get around by scooter, motorcycle, or non-kneeling bus. Much of the time, in our part of the world, “disabled access” actually means hiring a Bihari kid to run errands for you. As our tale of Sonnam Yutron and our Emergency Medical Fund demonstrated, just leaving the house can be considered a major accomplishment for a differently abled person.

So it was with more than a little interest that I began to hear about Savera Research and Rehabilitation Centre, a home-grown NGO (non-profit organization) dedicated to serving local disabled children. Savera, in Hindi, means “dawn.” The idea behind the name is the intention to help disabled children in the area experience newer and brighter days. Among other activities the organization sends out trained specialists to assess the children in the area, document their medical condition, and suggest courses of physical therapy or educational assistance for the child. The visits are recurring, so the Savera counselor has a chance to assess the child’s current condition and review any physical therapies with the child’s parents. The circuit Savera’s counselors travel is not small, when you consider that they serve not just Rewalsar proper, but many of the remoter hill villages that are barely accessible by bus or scooter.

Some days ago I was invited to a “camp” that Savera held in Rewalsar. At such camps parents are invited to bring their children down for registration in Savera’s programs, and have them assessed for therapy, hearing aids and wheelchairs. This is a part of the world where congenital defects and polio are still very prevalent. As I looked around at the various families, it struck me that these were the folks who were able to transport themselves and their children to the camp, while there must be dozens more families up in the surrounding villages who couldn’t get there.

The first step in the process was registration to determine which category the disabled child fit into.

After a brief discussion, the particulars would be entered longhand into a notebook. Bookkeeping out here is done by this method, whether it’s by an NGO, a shop, or a construction site. With Rewalsar’s random power outages, electronic bookkeeping isn’t as reliable as a pen and a piece of paper.

To one side of the room, a physical therapy-trained counselor assessed children with physical limitations, and suggested therapies. I’m not sure if the pictures show it all, so I’ve also taken a couple of videos–I should have them up soon.

(AVI video, 27MB)

To the other, a couple more of Savera’s counselors did field-testing for hearing problems, and supplied hearing aids for children who needed them.

(AVI video, 27MB)

Few smiles were more beautiful than the one on this young lady when she discovered she would be hearing things clearly for the first time in her life:

By far the most heart-tugging part of the camp was the distribution of the wheelchairs. As I mentioned before, Savera is a non-profit organization, scraping together what it can for supplies. And the supplies for this particular camp included a truck full of wheelchairs, costing R5500 (About US$140) apiece.

Six children merited wheelchairs; each one was ceremonially seated in his or her chair, and the parents given a quick tutorial in folding the chair, adjusting footrests, and operating the brake.

Just another day in a small hill town on the edge of the world.

June 23rd, 2008 Posted by admin | India | 5 comments

Two years.

Seven hundred and thirty days, give or take or week.

Seven thousand, five hundred and twenty hours.

Two years since I first stumbled off a plane in Mumbai, severely jetlagged, stupified by the 82 degree heat baking the city at 2 AM, and somewhat doubtful that my latest MommyWizard adventure was a Good Idea.

The original plan (well, yes, there was one) was to stay in India for several months, and then rejoin civilization. As those of you who have followed along with the blog for the last two years already know, I never did quite get around to boarding a plane headed out of the country and in a westerly direction. At times the timing for a trip to the West simply didn’t work. At others, financial snarls of this-and-that combined to make a plane ticket hard to obtain. So I stayed, keeping my visa legal with obligatory trips to Nepal, and finally registering for residency.

In that time, I’ve done my share of “going” local. Instead of T-shirts and jeans, my wardrobe consists of salwar kameez suits, kurtas, and dupattas. (Dupattas are an absolutely necessary item. An Indian woman would sooner forget her head and leave it home, than leave the house without a dupatta draping her shoulders. It’s just the way it is.) Chai is the drink of choice, rather than coffee. I no longer grumble when the Sikh temple begins broadcasting prayers at 5:30 AM. In fact, if I don’t hear it, I grumble more, and light a couple of candles to shower by, because the silence means the power’s out again. And I now snicker along with the local ladies when a Western tourist slinks through town wearing yoga clothes and attempting to look mystical.

I should really expand that last thought, because I had a similar experience after spending several weeks in Mexico. San Miguel was far enough off the beaten track–despite the large expatriate population–that I soon grew used to moving through crowds of short, brown-skinned people, all with straight black hair, all close to my height. On my return to the incredibly spiced melting pot that is the Bay Area, it took me a little while to readjust to crowds of people that were all shapes, sizes and colors.

The process does not work at all well in reverse. Rewalsar is, like San Miguel, far away from anything cosmopolitan and filled with crowds of short brown people with straight black hair. Westerners tend to stand out. And….well…

They look funny.

Part of the problem is the Western perception of India as a sensuous place devoted to physical sensations. You know, the Kama Sutra. Yoga. Temples filled with the smoke of exotic incense. All of which overlooks the India with moral conventions out of the 1950s, Sanjaya, and a fetish for cell phones and cricket matches. The result is usually an attempt to dress “Indian” without really buying any Indian clothes. So from time to time we have folks putter through wearing kurtas and pants made from the material that’s normally used for djolas (purses) or as mattress ticking. Sorta like wearing a jacket with a “Saranwrap” or a “Tempurpedic” logo….Then there was the one young lady who attempted the “yogini” style of dress. Unfortunately she decided to wear salwar pants with a white tank top. To most Indian women she looked like she had forgotten to get dressed before heading outside, and they wondered aloud where the rest of her outfit was. I know, I did my share of wardrobe malfunctions before understanding how clothes actually functioned socially here, but two years is long enough to have me snickering along with the natives at other folks’ faux pas.

India is a place where there is no social restriction against staring. Having been the staree for at least a year, it’s sometimes surprising to find myself now the starer–especially at Westerners kitted out in the tourist uniform of t-shirt, shorts, sandals, backpack, hat, and expensive camera. Strange to step through the mirror, and see out…

June 14th, 2008 Posted by admin | General, Travel, India | 2 comments