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I’d like to take this time to express my wholehearted thanks to Allison for signing and spreading the good word about the Money for All Accessible Currency Petition on show #81 of her NosillaCast podcast. Allison and I met in November 2005 at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference. Besides just being good people, she also helped me make a number of great contacts at that event. I’m looking forward to our hanging out for a couple of hours again this year while I’m in L.A. for the CSUN conference.

Here’s our opportunity to encourage the development of accessible XM Satellite Radio Receivers. Ralph Stewart of My Radio Store has positive contact with an XM Radio engineer who may be interested in the development of receivers that are more usable by blind and visually impaired customers. An accessible receiver would enable us to utilize all its features and functions as well as hear important information such as the displayed artist and title for the currently playing song. Receivers that are accessible to the blind and visually impaired can also help drivers keep their eyes focused on the road while they listen to XM Radio programs. Please write to Mr. Stewart by sending an e-mail to ralphs (at) myradiostore.com expressing your interest in an accessible XM Satellite Radio Receiver.

We urge all blind and visually impaired people living in Maricopa County to complete this Dial-a-Ride Paratransit Study online survey right away. There may be important policy changes made to Dial-a-Ride based on this ongoing study. As consumers and taxpayers, we must provide the critical input necessary to protect the services we need to receive in order to fully participate in society on terms of equality with the sighted.

This week begins a new era for Main Menu. We begin our interactive portion during the second hour of Main Menu starting this week. First of all, what
is coming up in the first hour:

• We first hear from Stephen Guerra from Independent Living Aids to talk to us all about the Dora the Explorer Interactive Talking Crayons. This is a very innovative product to assist parents in engaging with their young children who may be blind or who may have low vision.
• We next hear from Marc Mulcahy with a very in-depth review of the Icon from Levelstar.
• During the second hour we open the phones and bring Marc and Stephen on to Main Menu Live to talk with all of you. You will be able to call in and ask either of our guests questions. In addition, we will have three panel experts on the show with us to answer any technical questions you may have. Randy Knapp will talk about serial ATA external drives and Don Barrett will discuss with us some interesting things about File Dir and TextPal among others from Jamal. Both gentlemen have very technical expertise in the assistive technology industry and in computer technology as well.
• During Main Menu Live, we will also be presenting the Access Watch Review of the week. This will be a 1 or two minute segment each week with a short review from the Access Watch web site. This week we hear all about Windows One Care Live from Microsoft.

Coming up on January 31st on Main Menu we talk all about Windows Vista in a very special live edition of Main Menu. We will have Daniel Hubbell from the Microsoft Accessibility Technology Group, Mike Calvo from Serotek and Doug Geoffray from GW Micro coming on Main Menu that week. Get your questions ready and call in and ask away. This is going to be a fun one for sure!

Main Menu can be heard on Tuesday evening at 8:00 Eastern, 5:00 Pacific, and at 1 universal on Wednesday morning on the ACB Radio Main Stream channel.

Jeff Bishop

Main Menu Producer

Petro has created a series of podcasts that demonstrate and teach the use of Applian’s Replay A/V 8.03 from a blind perspective. These podcasts may be reached through Petro’s blog or by adding http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/PetrosPodcasts to your podcatcher or RSS reader.

Jeff Bishop reports the following, which you all certainly will not want to miss.

This week we bring Tim Cumings and his wife on to the show to talk to us all about them.  Who is Tim?  What goes into the production work for the shows we hear on Main Stream like Cooking in the Dark among others.  Come and ask both of them any questions pertaining to the shows they produce as well as
any audio production questions you may have.

During the second hour we bring on Darrell and Karen Shandrow.  Many of you know Darrell from his work on the blog Blind Access Journal and the Google petition.  Darrell has an unbelievable story to tell about his childhood and his life and Karen also has a fascinating story to tell as well.  What brought them together?  How did he propose to Karen? Yes, it even has a ACB connection.

We will discuss the new Main Menu line up during the show as well all about the new live format.  You can come and ask questions about this as well.

All this and more is up for grabs on the next Marlaina, heard on ACB Radio MainStream. It all starts on Sunday night at 8 PM Eastern, 5 Pacific, which is Monday morning at 1 Universal. The program will replay for 24 hours, and of course, is available via podcast from the ACB Radio replay page. As always, we’ll take your calls at our toll-free number, 866-400-5333.

Looks like Mike and the FreedomBox crew are fully ready for Vista! See this press release for all the juicy details.

Well… We tried Blogger’s new custom domain hosting. As many of you may know, it didn’t exactly work as expected. There was a partial outage of the journal for as long as two days for some of you. We apologize for our absence. We have returned to Blogger’s FTP hosting for the time being and do not plan on trying the custom domain anytime soon. Please let us know if you experience any ongoing issues.

We have just switched the journal over to Blogger’s new Custom Domain hosting. This move will provide greater flexibility with respect to enhancements and ongoing maintenance. Please feel free to e-mail us with any feedback.

Jamal Mazrui’s PDF2TXT tool for rapidly converting and reading PDF documents has literally saved my job! I highly encourage all of you to read Jeff Bishop’s announcement below and join him on Marlaina’s ACB Radio MainStream show to meet Jamal and learn about all his accomplishments.

Hello Friends,

Now that all of you have partied the New Year in, it is time to get back to some since of normality on the Marlaina program.  Marlaina and Gary the Board Guy are sailing the ocean blue for the next two weeks, so I will be filling in for Marlaina.

This week we present a fascinating guest.  Jamal Mazrui joins us this week to talk to us all about himself.  He is the author of such computer applications as pdf2txt (a PDF to Text file conversion utility), FileDir (a very robust file manager), TextPal (a very accessible text editor) and many more.  All of these applications are free.  Who is the man behind all of this work?  Come and listen to this fascinating interview all about Jamal. We will discuss with him his childhood, career, and some on his programming skills (from a non-techie perspective of course).  Many of you know his wife Susan who works for Cingular and we will touch a bit on that as well.  A new baby joined the Mazrui family and we will ask Jamal how he and
Susan are doing with all of that, like how he can continue to pump out all of these tools with a new little one in the house.

During the second hour, the phones will be open.  What New Year’s resolutions have you made?  What gifts did you receive for Christmas? We will also be announcing a new show debuting on the Main Stream channel starting the week of January 21st.  It will be a very exciting show, so come
and find out what is up on Main Stream.

All this and more is up for grabs on the next Marlaina, heard on ACB Radio MainStream. It all starts on Sunday night at 8 PM Eastern, 5 Pacific, which is Monday
morning at 1 Universal. The program will replay for 24 hours, and of course, is available via podcast from the ACB Radio replay page. As always, we’ll take your calls at our toll-free number, 866-400-5333. I can’t wait to spend time with you there!

Feel free to distribute this announcement to others whom you think may be interested.

Jeff Bishop