I have been wracking my brain over this question for the past two days. I haven’t felt satisfied with my blog categories. I’ve felt there were too many categories, that I’ve been categorizing my blog posts improperly, and that the distinction between tags and categories on my blog is blurry. To get help with my dilemma, I searched the Internet for advice. Yesterday, I read Darren Rowse’s How to Choose Categories for Your Blog and today I read Lorelle VanFossen’s Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. They both share sound advice, but I’m still struggling.
I’m going to brainstorm here for my own benefit and yours. What do I write about? I write about ASL, ASL interpreting, the deaf community / world, interpreters, interpreter training, interpreting in general, accessibility, web authoring, web design, HTML, CSS, social networks like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, photography, technology, typography, the Web, and other topics. I review things like gadgets, restaurants, businesses, entertainment, etc. I write opinion pieces about business practices, ethics, society, speaking and writing (grammar, you might say). I post videos of myself singing and signing (and occasionally singing and signing at the same time). I post a lot of photos, some for the sake of art and some for the sake of reportage or lifestyle sharing. I write tutorials and how-to’s. You might think I’m a dilettante, but I prefer to think of myself as a Renaissance Man.
I know I could maintain different blogs for different foci — and believe me, I’ve thought about it — but I already Continue reading →
Today I saw retweet from Jared Evans about the ICED (International Congress on the Education of the Deaf) “formal apology for the Milan 1880 conference which banned signed languages in deaf education.” I believe that was the first I heard of it. This evening, I looked at the DeafRead links on the right sidebar of my blog and saw a blog post by Amy Cohen Efron about the ICED apology along with an embedded vlog she posted on YouTube:
My comment:
I think this is great. And I didn’t realize that the conference of Milan was the second quinquennial conference in a whole series leading up to today. I am glad to hear of this “gesture” though I am cautious about looking at an apology as an action. Yes, it is a step in the right direction, but Continue reading →
[This is one video interpreter's viewpoint, not the viewpoint of a video relay service.]
As a VI, I notice that one of the most important consumer choices that determine the effectiveness of a call is a deaf consumer’s use of Do Not Announce. It can be quite effective when the deaf person explains VRS themselves or when the person they’re calling already knows them and takes their calls all the time. And it can be indispensable when an ignorant company or agency refuses to accept relay calls. But it can be very difficult for both the interpreter and the person they’re calling when a deaf consumer chooses Do Not Announce but then makes no accommodation for the inevitable changes in communication. Those changes are basically due to unexplained silence and the mismatch of gender–voice and name. Continue reading →
I tried installing Typekit fonts on this blog, and I almost gave up because the complexity of it reminded me of why I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. I suppose it would have been easier if Typekit had built-in support for the Twenty Ten theme, but when I tried it a couple of weeks ago, they didn’t. So I had to open one of my blog pages in Safari, select Develop from the menu (because I installed the optional developer tools), select Show Web Inspector, and study the CSS to suss out what the “selectors” were for the masthead and other sections of the pages I wanted to set the new fonts to. Even knowing CSS, it took some searching through the code to see what was styling what, since Classes and IDs are arbitrarily created by each CSS author.
Once I found the Classes and IDs, I had to go back to the Typekit editor (which always took a long time to load, as did everything else on the Typekit site) and manually enter the “selectors” I wanted to apply the fonts to. I found that I had to do it with periods in front rather than hashmarks, or maybe it was the other way around— I would have to be writing CSS on a regular basis to get it right, and who does? (If you do, then you wouldn’t find it complicated at all, but then you might as well have a WordPress.org site and not a WordPress.com site, eh?)
One more thing I must share about NAOBI— something that moved me and touched my heart. Now, I know it sounds funny to talk about “black people” and point out the differences between their culture and mine— black people’s and white people’s. It seems “politically correct” to be hush-hush about the differences between black people and white people, but I want to tell you some positive things about what’s different about black culture! And this is so neat. It seems — now, I interpreted for a full week last year at the NBDA (National Black Deaf Advocates, a deaf association) conference, and at the end of the week, we danced!— It seems to me that black people cannot get together and not dance. It seems that every conference I’ve been to — and that’s only two, but still — in my experience, when black people gather for a conference, they’ve got to dance together. And it’s so much fun! They had a DJ playing music loud, and everyone danced together— deaf people, interpreters, everyone. And they line up facing each other while people dance down the aisle, you know, like Soul Train. That’s where everyone lines up in two lines facing each other, forming an aisle, and as people move up to the front of the line, they dance down the aisle and do their own thing, show their personality, express what they’re feeling. Everyone on the sidelines cheers them on, goads them on, and roots for them. You strut down that aisle, you dance, you swing, you move your body, and you do your thing, you express yourself. Oh, it’s fun! And people are fiercely supportive.
Hi. I’m Daniel Greene, and this vlog is about my experience at NAOBI, a conference for the National Alliance of Black Interpreters. It was a really great experience. I had gone to the RID Region V conference in Salt Lake City the week before, and now I was teaching workshops at NAOBI here in Phoenix. (Last time I did a video about this I accidentally said, “Here in San Diego.” That’s crazy, but it’s because I lived in San Diego for such a long time — twenty-seven years altogether — and I moved to Phoenix five-and-a-half years ago at the end of 2004. Funny. I still sometimes say, “Here in San Diego.”)
So, anyway, here in Phoenix, I taught two workshops. I was actually scheduled to teach three, but oddly enough, the first morning of the conference, there were so few people and so many concurrent workshops — eight workshops at the same time! And I don’t know how many attendees there were at the conference that first morning. I do know that some of the other workshops only had a handful of attendees as well. One person showed up to my workshop, and I told her I would be happy to teach her all the workshop content even though she was the only one, that we could work it out between the two of us. But if she wanted to join another workshop, she should feel free to do so, and I would take no offense. So she went to another workshop, which was fine with me.
This is a brief video I uploaded to see if a movie rotated in QuickTime 7 Pro can appear on YouTube in vertical format. I took this video with my Nexus One upright (vertically) at the Sea Life Aquarium in Tempe at the Arizona Mills shopping mall. Looks like it worked!
Reflections on my recent experience at the RID Region V conference, the benefits of the policy of using ASL at all times during the conference (except in a few of the workshops that were interpreted), and the great contribution of deaf interpreters to the field. I also discuss my experience as a workshop presenter and my thoughts on how to make my discussions of interpreting less hearing-interpreter-centric, and more inclusive of all interpreters, especially deaf interpreters.
I got Froyo (Android 2.2) on my Nexus One yesterday and found out that the camcorder could now record video with the LED flash on constantly. My first thought was to do a Blair Witch Project spoof. Me so silly. By the way, I forgot I had my night guard in. Ha!
I finally got the Froyo (Android 2.2) update pushed to my Nexus One today, and I noticed digital zoom as an option in the new Camera app. I ran an experiment by placing this ad down on the counter, and standing in the same place taking photos at 2x, 1.5x, and 1x digital zoom.
