He Is Not Me. Or.. How Ranger1138 Is Not Wayne Merritt.

Please pass this around to Blind News or what ever list serves you read..

In this week's Top Tid Bits, something you should be reading weekly by the way, Dean lists the following entry:Quote taken from:

http://www.topdotenterprises.com/tid81.htm

"9) Wayne Merritt, in his blog, The Ranger Station,http://www.therangerstation.blogspot.com/gives a summary of his presentation on accessibility of windows Vista and Office 2007 on the July 1 entry, and a summary of his impressions of what he saw in the NFB convention exhibit room in the July 6 entry."

I can say with some certinty that Wayne is not me. I have known Wayne for more than a year and he first got the raw feed email form of what ended up being this blog back when he was an Approved Technology Trainer for the state of Texas. And trust me Wayne has been to a few of my presentations and I doubt he would like being mistaken for the manic and crazed individual who's words you are reading now. I am sure his name got linked to the blog by accident.

I've asked, okay I called the man's answering machine at 2 AM only because I need to cut back on my coffee intake, Dean to issue a retraction or correction to the July 20th Top Tech Tid Bits. I love linking to his work in the Tech Updates so honestly "No harm. No foul".

Ranger1138 is a name I have used on the interweb for an entire decade. It goes back to the Pathfinder message boards of yore and you can find me linked in the Babylon 5 Lurker's Guide and Spoilers Junkie Page. Yep the call sign is linked to a Sci Fi reference. Those who know me in person know that isn't a surprise at all. I mean what can't you figure out about a guy who has a full length Batman movie poster up on his wall at the office right?

But you must be saying why use a web identity, fake name, at all? That's a good question. To answer it simply it is because I don't always want to advertise who I am or what my day job is in the Assistive Technology industry. The field of Assistive Technology is actually a very small world. And this blog, who started off as a way to make sure you got the right info from a dedicated source instead of a reforwarded like a hundred times email >>>, is now linked to and read often by some big names in the biz. Which in all honesty is very flattering indeed.

Here's the paradox of this blog's new found popularity. . My real name is known by several major players in the industry as I am a Beta tester for about 5 venders at the moment. Moreover though I interact with many of these figures semi regularly for day to day operations of our Technology Unit. And if I wanted to write a blog from my official occupation's heading it would be six months down the line from whatever tech news I am trying to write about before it was approved, cleared, filed, stamped, refiled, numbered and eventually posted here. So you can imagine that linking my real name to what I write here at TRS could be a little awkward when trying to get things done at work. When writing this blog and it's Tech Updates there is always a danger of me leaking something I know was told to me in confidence by some VP of this company or that company. And I have actually let some big headlines break elsewhere just to make sure I don't honk off a multi million dollar entity. Oh you can find my real name it's not a trade secret or anything. I just find it a lot easier to let my On Line persona do most of the heavy lifting on the web.

This shadowy and odd practice is kind of standard in the Blogosphere. In fact I read on ZDNET yesterday that 2% of bloggers at major companies have been fired over posting their opinions, and the company's dark secrets, on the web. Here's the link to that article:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=11337

However, for those inquireing minds amongst you, if you really want to know who I am and what I do then I guess I will sort of *out* myself. The below link takes you to an IBM blog where you can read about their fantastic presentation on AJAX/Firefox. They were on the NFB's Computer Science Division agenda with me on july 3rd. As a quick aside;I sort of wish more people took my Vista hardware remarks as "recommendations" rather than hard facts.. well let's just say I didn't make friends with Microsoft that day [they did alter their presentation a bit at ACB though]. But anyway my name is in this post.

http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/schwer

Like I said it's not an earth shattering revelation but you can see that my official position puts me in a little bit of a quandry sometimes when blogging on Assistive Technology. Hence the overdramatic moniker .. Ranger1138. Cue the mysterious music as our scene fades to black.