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Updated: 12/3/2002; 12:59:56 PM.

   Thursday, June 06, 2002
Somebody found another Patent Office Howler.

Somebody found another Patent Office Howler.

GMSV put up a link to this great patent. What will the patent office ever refuse to patent?

"United States Patent 5,443,036
Amiss ,   et al. August 22, 1995

Method of exercising a cat
Abstract

A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct. "

The Social effects of Blogging

The Social Effects of Blogging

I just got pointed to a really nice mini-essay on the social effects of blogging, What Violating the Golden Rule Means in an Era of Blogging. Scott argues that blogging will reinforce the golden rule. I hope he is right.

No tiny fixed fonts, please.

No tiny fixed fonts, please 

I want to endorse Scott Johnson's pleas to designers and bloggers not to use small fixed fonts for your <P>Body Text</P>. This really bugs me, and I have made comments or sent emails to some people when I found their blog unreadable, unprintable, and unchangeable. One of the people I sent mail to was Scott, and I got a very nice reply.

To my surprise he has taken up the issue and writtien a very nice blog entry on the issue, featuring in part my email. I thought that if he was going to quote my email, I might as wellquote myself  too, so here is my plea, as written to Scott:

Mail#1
Scott,
<snip>
P.S. A hint for your book. Most bloggers have their type size too low, and
have it fixed absolutely, so it is hard for people who aren't used to
staring at tiny type on a screen all to read it. Your friend noopy
http://www.noopy.org/bloghorn/ is a case in point.
 
Mail #2:
Scott,
Sorry, I do seem to have been on a bit of a tear about readability
recently, and your site seems to have borne the brunt of it.
I have Opera 5 with the banner ad installed and use it sometimes, although
I must confess mostly to test out pages I produce. I love the tabs, similar
to the ones in NoteTab. I've used the zoom function on it, but it really
screws up pages sometimes, especially the display of graphics. I also tend
to leave the "use user .css" stuff alone, so that I can test my own the
pages the way the majority of (Opera) users will see them. I haven't seen
the "little author/user mode toggle button" - maybe it is in 6. The real
problem is that I have customized IE so much with add-ons like the Google
toolbar, surfsaver, roboform, etc. that it would be very hard to give them
up, much as I dislike MS. Plus, I want to see pages the way the majority of
users see them.
At least I will download Opera 6 when I get back to my home machine - maybe
it does better with the magnify feature.
Thanks for the notes. Keep on bloggin'. I'm just starting up mine, and I am
reminded what discipline it takes to write something other than email every
day.
Tim
--

What a funny world of blogging this is. People quoting people quoting themselves. Still, I like it. Back to Politics.


© Copyright 2002 Tim Bishop aka Geodog.
 
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