Sephy’s Platzish

A thought occurred to me when I was writing down my phone number recently, about something that we had taken for granted (and see less frequently even on TV) - the 1 you dialed for accessing long distance calling. I haven’t used it for dialing a phone call for at least a half of a year (when I fired the old phone company), and even before then, it was rare for me to use it because we just didn’t do that much long distance phoning.

Here’s the ironic part - as far as I can tell, for a long time, the numbers for area codes (i.e. three digits, second was a 0 or 1), were likely reserved as unavailable. The reason for this was that the telephone numbers used to be Two letters followed by a varying number of digits (in big cities, out where I live, it was more like a ring pattern that was dialled). In fact, some businesses took that particular tactic of advertising their old letter prefix into the 80s, as seen here by this series of Lincoln Carpeting commercials from Chicago -

Of course, the 0 and 1 don’t have letters (unless you have one of those phone models that have the Q and Z on the 1, even though it’s common practice to put them on 7 and 9 respectively), so they weren’t part of the mnemonic dialing system of the olden days, along with a lot of other opening combinations which really didn’t have a logical word to correspond to them like 57. Though of course, I expect to be proven wrong on that.

Why is it that we’re not using the 1 as much as we were before? Simple - the advent of digital phones. The first time I experienced not having to dial the 1 was when I was at my last job when my boss pointed out to me that I didn’t need to dial the 1 to get access to the main phone system out of the office and out of the area. Then, we move a few years into the future and we get the digital phone activated at home, and I try dialing without the leading zero, and voila, it works perfectly.

I know that you can’t repurpose the first number of the 11 in the dialing sequence (i.e. the 1) because of the people who dial into the country from overseas and kind of need that number to make sure that their call gets to here instead of winding up somewhere in Africa or Asia, but I do wonder if it is possible to consider a way to use that almost new opening for another digit to be added to phone numbers, which should alleviate the problem of reducing available phone numbers and constant expansion and contraction of area codes.

About a week ago or so, I finally got my hands on one of the digital converter boxes I’d talked about not being available at Wal-Mart at all. It turns out that Best Buy has literally scads of them for sale. So, they’re $10 more than the Wal-Mart ones, but you’re getting a much better box.

Interestingly, the box that is sold at Best Buy (under their Insignia name) is manufactured by LG Electronics for Zenith. As we all probably know, LG make some darn good products, and they haven’t gotten this one wrong either.

Now that we’re finally getting towards the cutoff of analog TV and we finally have the digital converter boxes (set top box, STB for short) available in stores, and to be honest, I’d be prepared to buy another one at full price even for my room, or for the computer.

As it stands, with analog TV, using rabbit ears, we’d get 11 channels over the air, and the signals on those channels went all the way from fairly clear to barely watchable. Of course, since it is digital, now all the channels come in crystal clear, and there’s 28 of them. That’s just from Milwaukee!

The only problem is that this number goes down to around 8 when something happens. This happens when the noisy neighbor comes through. Its presence interferes with the UHF signals (I think the term for that is “multipath” - where the signals bounce off of something causing confusion), so I’m only left with the 8 channels of public TV, including one which shows Mr. Rogers Neighborhood at midnight…

However, the greatest thing is that I can get all the programs in HD now. Well, not purely HD, but it’s widescreen and just as clear as HD pictures, just downscaled to the proper resolution for an analog TV. Seriously, if you haven’t gotten a coupon for the digital boxes, you can do it at dtv2009.gov - the program should still be available for a little bit of time from now.

I’ll have some shots of the digital channels soon, because there is something annoying about some of them.

As much as I love Skype, and think that everyone should have a go at trying it out (trust me, it can be quite revolutionary in how you go about communicating on the internet), there are a few faults which only become apparent when you are a keyboard-intensive user, or have certain disabilities.

Keyboard shortcuts

When you go through setting up Skype, you have the option of setting up keyboard shortcuts for only a few things - Show/Hide Skype, Answer Incoming Call, Place Call on Hold, Mute Microphone, Hang up/Ignore call, and Find users.

If you try to use the keyboard to find out what events are new, you can try, but it requires a lot of tabbing through the window to find it. Also, if you want to exit the program? You must use the mouse and right click on the taskbar icon. There is no way in the main window (through the file menu) to exit Skype; all you can do that way (or with Alt+F4, is close the window.

Maximum Font Size

Last night, as I was preparing to go over to the couch, I went into a chat window (because that is the only way you can do this) to change the font size from its current 8 point to a more reasonable size for viewing from slightly afar - 20 or greater, or so.

The list in the dialog only went up to 12, so I did the old trick you could do in Word - type in the size I wanted. When I went to click the OK button, I got an error -

Font size must be between 4 and 12 pixels.

Because of that, I have to use the magnifier built into Windows in order to use Skype from my couch. However, it got me to thinking that this isn’t good for someone who has a hard time reading small print on a screen. Sure, they can use a Screen reader or other accessibility accessories, but if that is the only program that they need to use it for, then they might think that Skype isn’t worth the bother to use if they can’t see what is going on in the program.

As great as the program is, you have to wonder how many folks have shied away from it for just this reason.

By the way, if you’re interested, the reason I’m using the couch to work on the computer, my chair has had a minor fault, and I’ve requested a replacement part be shipped to me. Luckily, I have the warranty still in force (for at least another 2.5 years) on some parts of the chair. It should be around just in time for next weekend to start.

In the meantime, I am using a chair from the kitchen for up close work, and can easily move to the couch for other things (like writing, etc) thanks to the wireless keyboard and mouse that I have.

I’ve taken the first step in getting a theme out there for y’all to view - and I’m still quite a long way from having anything concrete. Why? That’s because I am taking the time to read the documentation on how to go about making a theme. I started this afternoon by printing a couple of articles out from the Codex - Theme Development and Designing Themes for Public Release.

As I was reading through the first article as I was working, I started getting bombarded by terms that made no sense. For example, the WordPress Loop (which is explained in another article or two) and the word concomitant (which, incidentally, is a correctly-spelt word in Windows Live Writer, while swear words aren’t - makes no sense to me!). I’m all for expanding language, but when using the word concurrent would suffice, why not use that one?

Anyway, I then read the article about designing themes, and one of the most interesting bits of advice was couched in a long blockquote section (which was on the first printed page, as I had printed it in WLW - which turned out really stunning because of the font it’s printed in ). The advice was something so simple, that if you think about it, this makes total sense, and even if you don’t think about it, you should see the sense.

That advice is - lay out your theme on paper first, and do it away from the computer. After getting that down solid, then you can start dealing with writing the code for it, and by solid, he means that you should have the layout decided on, along with the main colors of the site. Fortunately, I have a bit of an idea in my mind, but now I need to get those onto paper - and decide on some base colors to go with.

However, you know what? I know it’s going to be a quite challenging project to start with, but I’m looking forward to the challenge.

The big news of the day in the world of blogging is the fact that a Release Candidate of WordPress 2.5 has been released, along with a post mentioning some of the changes to the admin panel that had been shown off in the past. Naturally, there was the stream of “all hail WordPress and their greatest version yet” type posts. Clearly, they’re excited about something.

About what? Well, I’m not sure. The cynic in me says that they’re excited because it’s something NEW! And, it’s from WordPress! That’s got to be the formula for instant success, right? Well, it is if you’re someone who, as a guy who advertises on the radio says, in relation to stocks, ones that are exciting, with things happening all the time to them.

However, there is another type of person - the one that he likes to have work for his company - the one who likes to find consistent performers, and items where you don’t have to change constantly. He admits liking something that a lot of people like - boring and consistent.

Anyway, so how does that relate to the latest news about WordPress? Well, the new version has completely changed everything in the backend of the admin panel, for, as far as I can tell, no discernable reason. Sure, there are the marketing speak things like “interviewing users” and making wide generalizations such as this one, which makes absolutely no sense at all to me -

The WordPress navigation has confounded even sophisticated users.

My response to that is that WordPress has a strange thing called a “learning curve.” If you can’t get the hang of the admin panel after a short amount of time, then I have to wonder if you really are taking the time to understand how it all works. Personally, it took about a week or so of using it to get the hang of where everything was, and then I was set to go. If, as they claim, “sophisiticated users” are having problems with navigation, then I sincerely question the level of their sophisitcation.

Another of the lovely generalizations is this one, from the beginning of the post -

The result is a new way of interacting with WordPress that will remain familiar to seasoned users while improving the experience for everyone.

I’d consider myself a somewhat seasoned user, having been using WP for about 6 months now, and is the new interface familiar? Uh, no. It might say WordPress on the cover, but what’s inside says that this is a product that was designed for beginners.

But there’s more

Apparently, I fall into a minority of people who do not ignore the dashboard. Their solution (as it was for the rest of the admin panel) was to gut the whole thing and make things less user-friendly. For those who aren’t familiar, this is what the WordPress Dashboard looks like currently on my blog -

In my opinion, this current dashboard look is quite simple - you’ve got the links to the things you most likely want to do right at the top - a new post, add a link, and edit your theme. Below that is the Development blog, and to the right is the Recent Activity panel, where you have the latest links to your blog, along with comments and posts, then the Blog Stats section - that’s something that I will come back to shortly, but at the bottom of the page is one of the best features of the dashboard as it is right now.

The links that are grouped under “Other WordPress News” are some of the more interesting links, usually by folks involved in WordPress and their associated projects, but the cool thing is that it’s a way to read some interesting posts written by interesting people. So far, I have not seen this mentioned in the new dashboard.

Now, with the blog stats part of the dashboard. Right now, it’s in a tucked away place, mostly because it’s not something you concern yourself with that much, at least that’s how I’ve become over the last few months - I’m not too concerned about my stats as I used to be. However, the new version of the dashboard puts the blog’s “ego” front and centre with putting the stats (albeit without the number of comments) up at the top. It makes no sense to have it there, and then there’s something right below it that concerns me a lot, especially for new users to WordPress.

The line below it mentions the theme you’re using, along with the number of widgets you have. Next to that is a big old button that says “Change Theme.” I fear that having a button there will make people want to change their themes from day to day, which is something that you don’t want to do if you want to gain an appreciable readership. The current link - “Change your site’s look or theme” is much more subtle, and makes it sound like there is a process that you have to go through to do it. “Change Theme” makes it sound like you can just flip a switch and bam it works. Not good, if you ask me.

Let me just quote one last item from the post -

If you’re jonesing for the old look under your user options you can now select the “classic” colors and get those old blues back.

Now, that’s creative thinking, eh? Let’s change everything around, but you know, if you like the old way, you can have this new way look like the old way. Of course, that won’t change the fact that you’re totally lost as to where everything is supposed to be.

Cause for Concern?

Something that I noticed is that, if you go by the number of trackbacks on the post, only 59 posts link back to that post - quite a few of them aren’t even in English. However, a quick search on Google for blog posts that link results in (as I write this) 284 posts with a link. Now, this great disparity tells me either one of three things - 1. The use of a caching plugin has been insituted to handle the extreme load on the server; 2. There are a lot of trackbacks coming in, and they’re having a hard time handling the moderation task; or 3. They’re manually sifting through the trackbacks to make an editorial comment.

The third one is a result of my noticing that one of the first posts about the new release, Andrew Boyd’s WordPress 2.5: Perhaps I was wrong (posted sometime around 6 AM my time, about 6 hours or so after the original post was made), which had mulitple links back to the original post wasn’t listed amongst the trackbacks. The only ones that are listed there are ones that seem to be neutral (i.e. Mashable) or positive (i.e. BloggingBits).

Some further reading

If you want to read up on what folks are thinking about, there’s always the Aussie Bloggers Forum’s WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peek thread, along with the myriad of links provided by Google’s blog search (hey, Scroogle folks, would it be possible to make a Scroogle blog search? )

Also, if you want to look at what it looks like, you can take the WP 2.5 Demo Site for a test run.

What do you think

Comments are open for this post, so I’d invite you to leave your reaction to the happenings of WP 2.5, and if you are excited about it, for that matter, let me know, and also why you’re excited about the release.