As if life wasn't hard enough, some lowlife, scumbag griefers have taken to deliberate assaults on people who suffer from both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epilepsy.

Wired magazine reported last month: "Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users"

"The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs."

Hopefully these dirtbags will be found and prosecuted somehow, but in the meantime their heinous actions have raised awareness of a potential problem with websites: your nifty new website effect could cause seizures in people, and you can be held accountable for it.

So as a public service, we've released a relevant tip from Jeremy Sydik's book, Design Accessible Web Sites 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms The tip It's Not Polite to Flash The Audience is now available for free for your reading pleasure. Please take a look.

Suing your best customers, as the RIAA is so fond of, is bad enough. But physically assaulting them is even worse!

In the dead of the night last week, someone delivered our new phone books, carefully wrapped in plastic bags. One large volume of White Pages, for residential listings, and one large volume of Yellow Pages, for businesses.

The kind folks in the phone directory-printing-business then called us on the phone—to make sure we’d received our phone books in good condition. They wanted to make sure we had them in hand.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the books never made it into the house. I pitched them straight into the recycling bin next to the garage.

When was the last time you ever looked up a phone number in a city-wide, paper directory? I honestly can’t remember.

There was a similar story over at ars technica last month, where a bunch of EMI (the record company) execs were holding a focus group with some willing teens. As a “thank you” for participating, they offered the kids a big pile of compact discs for free—they could just help themselves to as many of the CDs as they wanted.

None of the teens took any of the discs. Even for free. Too much hassle, I suppose.

Come to think of it, the only time of year I tend to get CDs is around Christmas, as gifts. I dutifully rip them (320kbps), take a brief but appreciative look at the cover art, and then file the CD in the Backup Box deep in the closet of death. (Ok, that’s what my family calls it; the closet with old CDs, the occasional router or Hayes Smart Modem, enough cables to restring the Golden Gate Bridge, and an amazingly odd assortment of different SCSI adaptors.)

Phone books? Don’t need ‘em. Google for most folks or businesses, AddressBook for our friends with unlisted access.

Compact discs? Dead, it appears. Can’t give ‘em away. Download is where it’s at, and vinyl is making a surprising, nostalgic resurgence. I have to admit, I miss the presenc