Singing Answering Machine Greetings

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

When I was twenty years old, I made up a couple of outgoing greetings for my answering machine based on an old TV show theme song and a showtune from Bye Bye Birdie. The TV show theme song was from I Love Lucy and the song from Bye Bye Birdie was “Talk to Me” which is originally sung from a telephone booth. Anyway, I created these outgoing greetings and I left them on my answering machine for a little while, and then I felt sort of silly about them and afraid of what people might think, so I took them off. But now here we are in the Age of YouTube, and it’s—gosh—almost twenty-five years later, and I figured, “Why not? Just for fun, share them with the world.” So, here are my silly outgoing greeting songs that I created in 1988. Hope you enjoy! Continue reading →

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Posted in Performing Arts

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Offline conversations about online conversations

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Daniel Greene| 5 Comments
Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

Sometimes I want to talk with people in person about how we talk with people on the Internet. I know I can get very “meta”– I mean, look at my website, where I sometimes blog about blogging—but I think it’s very important that we take some time to talk about how we’re talking. When I say “blogging” and “talking” I’m talking about any kind of media that you share with people on the Internet. Whatever you put out there, you are in effect “talking” to people. When you write comments, fave or “Like” something, rate something, etc., you’re talking to people. You produce and consume enough of these social media (photos, videos, stories, updates, links, comments, etc.), and you’re talking with people. But you’re not talking with them in real life, and you’re not even talking with them in real time. The communication is abstracted and asynchronous.

This evening, I went out with my husband Andy to a local brewery for something called #evfn, or East Valley Friday Night. As the description says, “Some folks calls it a tweetup. I calls it an #evfn. Remember the agenda: no agenda. Have fun. Meet people. Party on!” I’ve been to several of these, well, I calls ‘em Tweetups, and sometimes they can get pretty meta about social media. How do we share updates? Photos? Videos? Personal stuff? Work stuff? What kinds of relationships are made, bettered, or broken online? How do we bring those online relationships offline and vice versa? Continue reading →

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Posted in Communications & Media

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I now have a Facebook Page at facebook.com/danieljamesgreene

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

I registered my own Facebook Page the other day and, after I got 25 fans, reserved the username danieljamesgreene (I had already secured danielgreene on June 12, 2009 for my personal profile). The reason I got a Facebook Page is that readers, students, viewers, clients, etc. wanted to Friend me on Facebook, but I only Friend family & friends on my personal profile. I felt bad denying my “customers” access to me on Facebook, yet I wanted to keep my profile a safe place for me to share personal things with the people closest to me.

I had resisted setting up a Facebook Page because I thought it might be considered “conceited” to set up my own “fan” page; however, I finally decided that there wasn’t anything wrong with creating a Page for my public life. After all, I am a “public figure” in the sense that I am a writer, performing artist, photographer, interpreter trainer, et cetera. I do create a lot of work for public consumption. My Facebook Page gives me a chance to be more accessible to people I don’t know well and feel comfortable with how much of my personal life I share with them.

Do you have a Facebook Page? Do you “Like” certain Facebook Pages? How has the Facebook Page helped the relationship between producer and consumer, performer and audience, writer and readership, etc.? How have Pages helped the relationships among fans? I am very interested in hearing about your experience with Facebook Pages as I embark on this new venture.

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Posted in Communications & Media, Writing for the Web

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Day before oral exam prep ideas?

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

I’m sitting for an oral exam tomorrow that I have been preparing for the past two months (well, more than that, if you consider workshops and general studies). I’m going to be taking the RID NIC performance exam.

I would love to hear from people who have prepared for oral exams, board exams, etc. What did you do the day before the test to get yourself ready to excel?

Posted from WordPress for Android

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Posted in Interpreting for the Deaf

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How not to break your Nexus One Car Dock

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

… and what to do if you do.

My HTC Nexus One Car Dock broke only a few months after I got it. I searched the Internet about this, and found that I was not alone. One man suggested a way to handle it with care and I am now following his advice with my replacement dock. I am providing this video to give you a visual tutorial about how to baby your fragile car dock. Hope it works for you!

In case your car dock breaks, I recommend that you do what I did: call HTC Repair and tell them that your Nexus One Car Dock broke and you want them to send you a replacement under the one-year warranty. If they give you any trouble, tell them that you know of other people whose car docks broke and who received replacements. They should email you an RMA label. You will have to box up your broken car dock and drop it off at a FedEx with the provided shipping label. HTC Repair should receive it within a couple of days, process the replacement in a couple of days, and ship it back to you via FedEx in a couple of days; i.e., you “should” have a new one in your hands within a week.

What happened in my case is Continue reading →

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Posted in Consumer Reviews

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Why I chose the Coraline theme & the Eaglefeather font

Posted on August 21, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

WordPress Blog Theme

The WordPress Coraline theme came out the other day, and I like it because:

  • It has a “Leave a comment” link that can’t be missed. The one in the Twenty Ten theme is hard to find. I want to engage readers in conversation, and a loud “Leave a comment” or “# comments” link grants them easy entry.
  • It allows for a body, feature bar, and two sidebars beneath the feature bar. This means I can feature my latest tweets. And knowing that whatever I tweet will be featured prominently on my blog might give me pause before I tweet while drunk. Not that I would ever do that!
  • Like the Twenty Ten theme and the Kubrick theme before it, it allows me to have a banner image, which I think it is fun.
  • I can use the right sidebar to feature my latest Flickr photos on par with my categories, tag cloud, etc. in the left sidebar.

Typekit Web Fonts

I’m also using Typekit to stylize my blog with a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspiredfont. I chose this font because: Continue reading →

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Posted in Writing for the Web

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The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

For those who are in their TypeKit Editor and just want to know the CSS selectors used in the Twenty Ten theme, I am sharing this list compiled by David W. Boles. Thank you very much, David!

content, body, p, h3#comments-title, h3#reply-title, #access .menu, #access div.menu ul, #cancel-comment-reply-link, .form-allowed-tags, #site-info, #site-title, #wp-calendar, .comment-meta, .comment-body tr th, .comment-body thead th, .entry-content label, .entry-content tr th, .entry-content thead th, .entry-meta, .entry-title, .entry-utility, #respond label, .navigation, .page-title, .pingback p, .reply, .widget-title, .wp-caption-text, input[type="submit"], #access .menu-header, div.menu, #colophon, #branding, #main, #wrapper, blockquote, blockquote cite, blockquote em, blockquote i, body, input, textarea, .page-title span, .pingback a.url, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6

The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com UPDATED:  July 4, 2010 I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to code Typekit Fonts into all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs to add some spectacle to the drama of this United Stage blog.  The process isn't simple or intuitive and since there really isn't any  step-by-step documentation that I could find to help me, I decided to help myself — and you — by constructing this Typekit walk through for the new default Twenty Ten theme.  You star … Read More

via United Stage

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I used MacJournal on import this blog into my journal today. Yay!

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

Have you ever feared what would happen if your blog disappeared and all your posts were lost? I know I have worried about losing my blog. It is true that you can back up your blog, and I do, but those backup files are not easily readable. In order to get my blog onto my computer in readable form, I used MacJournal just now to import all my blog entries. Now I can read them in journal style by date, search them for text strings, and back up my whole journal (both private entries and blog posts) in easy–to–read PDF, RTF, or HTML format.

I am not writing this blog post as a paid advertiser of MacJournal, but I did write it in MacJournal and upload it to my blog through the MacJournal Share > Send to Blog function. Regardless of which software you use, I recommend that you find one that allows you to download your blog into a readable form that you can have on your computer and backup to a storage drive. You might even want to use a software that enables you to compose blog entries in the application so they are already on your hard drive before you publish them to your blog. Just another helpful hint from yours truly!

Happy blogging. :-)

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I sing “My Satin Doll” as “My Latin Doll”— and I’ll tell you why.

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment


(Anyone who wants to skip to the singing can jump to 2:30.)

You may have heard the jazz standard “My Satin Doll” written by Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn. Well, I learned that song when I was in high school and I attended the Fullerton Jazz Festival music contest— singing contest. It was adjudicated, and we got to go up there are do our stuff and get some feedback from the adjudicators. Well, I remember when I learned that song it just struck me as a little odd, like why would you call her your satin doll, and why would she speak Latin?

Well, a few years went by, and Continue reading →

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Posted in Performing Arts

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How to add tweets / retweet buttons to your WordPress.com blog

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Daniel Greene| 4 Comments

Have you seen all the blogs with the tweets / retweet buttons? They make it very easy to spread the word about the blog posts you like, don’t they? Great SEO for bloggers, too. I wanted these buttons for my blog so I did some searching to find out how to add them. Here’s what I found.

Mirella McCracken had the easiest how to add a retweet button tutorial I’ve found; in fact, she had the only correct answer I have found anywhere! (Where did she get it, I wonder?)

I can add to Mirella’s post by saying that the answer is a shortcode. WordPress developed these since they don’t allow embedded scripts in WordPress.com blogs for security reasons. I learned about shortcodes when I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. In a WordPress.com blog post, you can use a simple shortcode to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr video. What I didn’t know about was the TweetMeme shortcode.

The TweetMeme shortcode for WordPress.com looks like this: Continue reading →

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