Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

daily ephemera

Continuing my new lazy habit of just listing my daily reading highlights as bullet points, rather than fleshed-out separate entries...

• sIFR: A nifty CSS/JavaScript method of replacing text with styled Flash-based type (as seen at espn.com and abcnews.com). (Mike Davidson: "Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text" - 08/29/04) On a related note, I love how comments to Davidson's post are numbered. Must figure how how he did that; probably some CSS trickery with an OL or something.
   
• A history of the ubiquitous font Arial. It's really a bastardized version of Helvetica. (Mark Simonson Studio: "The Scourge of Arial" - 02/01)
  
  Related:
  - Game: Helvetica vs. Arial
  - Book: Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface
   
• Beware your neighbors, family members and other people with potential access to your personal financial information.

  But according to the 2005 Identity Fraud Survey Report -- released by the Better Business Bureau and Javelin as an update of the FTC's 2003 Identity Theft Survey -- relatives, friends and neighbors make up half of all known identity thieves.

  This, of course, comes as good news to businesses that have been pushing online banking and other electronic transactions to consumers. CheckFree, Visa and Wells Fargo supported the research by the BBB and Javelin.

  Still, I found it fascinating that when it can be determined how identity theft was committed, the victim usually knew the fraudster. Computer crimes accounted for just 11.6 percent of all known-cause identity fraud in 2004.

  And here's another interesting fact from the report: When family members and friends open up credit accounts in your name and commit other crimes, the total cost of the fraud is greater and requires more time to resolve than frauds committed by other criminals, the report found.

  (Michelle Singletary, Washington Post: "When ID Theft Starts at Home" - 02/13/05)
   

• More musings on IKEA's design aesthetic, this time from British design magazine Icon. (Washington Post: "The Swede Smell of Success" - 02/24/05)
   


• Ask the Post: Robert McCartney, Washington Post assistant managing editor for continuous news, answers questions in an online chat about the paper's Continuous News department (which feeds breaking news to washingtonpost.com) and the relationship between print and online.
   
• AP reports that a digital camera recently turned up which belonged to a Canadian couple that died in Thailand in the tsunami. The camera itself was toast, but the memory card inside yielded photos from the couple's last days -- and moments. (AP/CNN: "Recovered digital photos show tsunami wave" - 02/24/05)
   
• Using Melissa Etheridge's Grammy Awards performance as a thread, CNN looks at public discussion and awareness of breast cancer, and the perception of patients fighting the disease. ("Breast cancer: The path traveled and road ahead" - 02/24/05)