I had fun with this one, letting out a bit of my campy side along with my geeky side. I guess I’m just so giddy about getting a new laptop and this fancy new presentation remote. I don’t work for Targus, but I sure wouldn’t mind if they sent me a check! Ha ha. Really, though, I am so happy with this product and it fills a need that anyone who does presentations and has a MacBook Air is going to need to fill. I wish this information had been there for me when I was frustrated with the lack of any solution in the Apple Store yesterday. Just get one. You won’t be disappointed. Or your money back. (If the store you buy it from has a money-back guarantee, that is.)

P.S. There is a tiny switch inside the remote (which you can see when you pop off the back) that allows you to set it to Windows PowerPoint, Mac Keynote, or Mac PowerPoint. Very nifty, but you might overlook it if you didn’t know better. So now you know!

One of my favorite songs for one of my favorite months: “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” from the Broadway musical Carousel– music by Richard Rogers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. Have a great June!

The Groovy Like A Movie studio came to the Wedding Expo at the Center in San Diego to interview people for a project called 30 Years of Pride on May 17, 2004, and I was one of the people they interviewed that night. The studio gave me permission to share this on YouTube, and since I can now post longer videos to YouTube, I’m posting the original video with only a couple of minutes trimmed off here and there.

It is timely that I am publishing this video on the day of Phoenix Pride’s 15th anniversary. Thirty years of pride for fifteen years of pride. This is the beginning of the pride parade season, so it is timely. I hope that it inspires, educates, informs, and entertains.

This is a creative interpretation of The Birthday Song sung in English while signed in ASL (American Sign Language). It is more a compilation of different ways people sign Happy Birthday in ASL than it is an answer to “how do you sign Happy Birthday in ASL?” It is difficult to sing these words and produce these signs at the same time, because the signs do not match the words verbatim— it’s like trying to rub your belly and pat your head at the same time.

I chose these sign couplets with similar handshapes to create sign rhymes; for example, the line CAN’T-WAIT ARRIVE-BIRTHDAY BABY YOU uses the B handshape for all four signs, the line CONDUCT-SONG-BIRTHDAY, TUG-EAR-BIRTHDAY uses the “Closed X” handshape for both signs, the line THRILLED BIRTHDAY uses the “Open 8″ handshape for both signs, and the line HAPPY BIRTH DAY TO YOU uses the 1 handshape twice and the B handshape thrice. I saved the “regular” signs for last, as the last two lines are the two most popular ways to sign Happy Birthday.

I thank the deaf people from other regions from whom I learned the signs CONDUCT-SONG-BIRTHDAY and EAR-TUG-BIRTHDAY, and I thank YouTuber hippiesordo for the line “YOU BORN TODAY, WOO-HOO.” This song is dedicated to my ASL interpreter friend Paul on whose birthday I made this video.

I put on a one–man cabaret concert in 1996. This is one of the songs I sang— “Try To Remember” from The Fantasticks, lyrics by Tom Jones & music by David Schmidt. This performance was held at A Better Worlde Galleria in the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego, California in 1996. My pianist was James Bianchi.

Here’s me being, well, me! I had just got an HD mini camcorder so I could record videos in HD and fill up those widescreen video frames on YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr, and here I was singing a song off the top of my head, just playing around and trying it out.

I had intended to do a more rehearsed video that told people I was moving to HD. I had never intended this silly, off-the-cuff home movie for the public, but then I thought, “There’s no substitute for spontaneity!” and decided to go for it and post this one.

Enjoy the silliness– now in HD and CC!

This is my singing & signing contribution to the celebration of what would be John Lennon’s 70th birthday. Upon deaf YouTube friend mkrajnak‘s suggestion, I sang the soundtrack and did an ASL interpretation over it so that the grammar and rhythm of the signing would be more natural than if I sang and signed at the same time.

“Imagine” music & lyrics by John Lennon

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no country
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possession
I wonder if we can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

The YouTube Story

Here’s a pair of cross-referenced videos I put on my old and new YouTube accounts as an “I’m moving” subscriber retention campaign, or what I guess some people might call a rebranding campaign.

This one tells people I’m moving from azsingersigner to danieljamesgreene:

And this one welcomes people to danieljamesgreene and tells them I’ve moved from azsingersigner:

a href=”http://www.youtube.com/user/azsingersigner”>azsingersigner on YouTube now has a brother channel at danieljamesgreene on YouTube. I’ll keep azsingersigner because I’ve had it for four years and have received many views, comments, video responses, subscriptions, favorites, on my videos there. It wouldn’t be right to scrub all that. I’ll just start uploading all my new stuff to danieljamesgreene, and make sure all my old subscribers know to subscribe to my new channel. In case you’re wondering why I didn’t get the username danielgreene on YouTube, it’s because that username was secured by someone in Belgium a month after I joined, and nothing has been done with the account since. Oh well. My husband’s name, andysmithers, was also secured around the same time by someone in the United Kingdom, and nothing has been done with that account either. Username squatting, anyone?

My Usernames on Other Social Networks

• danielgreene on Flickr has been my username for more than four years, so no problem there.
• danielgreene on Twitter has been my username since I first joined almost two years ago, so that’s cool.
• danieljamesgreene on LinkedIn has replaced danieljgreene as my username. You can change your personal URL on LinkedIn, something you can’t do on most social networks.
• danieljamesgreene on Facebook is my Page, and the name on my Page is Daniel Greene. Conversely, danielgreene on Facebook is my personal profile, and my name on my personal profile is Daniel James Greene. Seem strange? Read on.

The Facebook Story

Although it might seem strange that Daniel Greene is danieljamesgreene and Daniel James Greene is danielgreene, there’s a method to the madness. When I first secured my username on June 13, 2009, within the first minute they were available, I picked the name I’d always used. I had barely considered getting a Page, and even if I had a Page, I wouldn’t have been able to secure a username on June 13, 2009 unless I had 1,000 fans by May 31, 2009. When I finally decided to get a Page a few weeks ago, I named it Daniel Greene, which I’ve always gone by professionally. Ironically, I couldn’t secure danielgreene as the username because I had already taken it for my personal profile. So I took the next best thing: danieljamesgreene– my full name including my middle name. But, oops! Now my username for my Page was different from my display name for my Page, and my display name for my profile and Page were the same. It turns out you cannot change your Facebook Page name, but you can change your Facebook profile name. So I changed my Facebook profile display name to Daniel James Greene. Now it’s easier for people to tell the difference between updates from my personal and public accounts. At the same time, I can do the kind of “this is that and that is this” cross-branding that associates one brand with another.

Name Branding

I’m a bit loathe to talk about my names as brands, but — let’s face it — they are. Everybody’s name is, in some way, their brand. One of the reasons I’ve always used my name as my brand is that I do too many things to brand what I do with a company name. As Daniel Greene, I work as an interpreter for the deaf (sign language interpreter and oral transliterator), interpreter trainer, performing artist, writer, Web author, blogger, vlogger, photographer, and more. I do too many different things to limit myself to a blog or YouTube channel about one thing, and it would be too time consuming to maintain separate media channels for all my various vocations.

Using the Middle Name

Daniel James Greene is my full name. There aren’t as many Daniel James Greenes in the world as there are Daniel Greenes, so someday I might have to use my full name as my professional name. For instance, if I joined SAG and there were already a SAG member named Daniel Greene, I would have to join as Daniel James Greene. Likewise, if there are other authors or scholarly writers that use the my first and last name, I might want to use my full name. I plan to go on using the name Daniel Greene as long as I can, but I will use Daniel James Greene when I have to.

Integrity

So that’s the story of my usernames danielgreene and danieljamesgreene. I got them so that I could use my first-last and first-middle-last names for social and professional discoverability and recognition. I like to be able to find the people that matter to me, whether as friends or public figures; in return, I like to help people to find me. I also value integrity and consistency, and I believe in having as consistent an identity as possible. Integrity, to me, is doing what I say I’m going to do and being who I say I am. I believe integrity is also about integrating the various aspects of yourself into one. I’m not interested in using the Internet to take on imaginary personas; I just like being me here, and I prefer to do that with as few names as possible and let people know that both names refer to me.

P.S. I also secured the domain name danieljamesgreene.com and set the URL to resolve to danielgreene.com.

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!

Talk to me. Don’t hang up. Please talk to me.
I don’t care what you say. Talk to me.
Leave your name and telephone—
Gratefully, when I come home,
I will listen very near.
Then I’ll call you, dear.
Talk to me. Leave a message. Talk to me!
And I’ll get back to you— talk to me.

This is Daniel, and I’m not home.
If I were, I’d pick up the phone.
Just leave your name and a message—
I’ll call you before you can rhyme “message.”
Keep it simple and not too long.
If you’d like, you can sing a song!
Just leave your name and number,
And then, you have yourself a wonderful day!
Ba-ba-ba Ba-ba-ba-Ba-ba-bah Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bah!

Original music for “Talk to Me” written by Charles Strouse with lyrics by Lee Adams; new lyrics by Daniel Greene.
Original music for I Love Lucy theme song written by Eliot Daniel; new lyrics by Daniel Greene.

This song, which I remember from a record my mom gave me when I was a little kid, is called Music! Music! Music! It was written in 1949 by Stephen Brewer and Bernie Baum, and it was popularized in the same year by singer Teresa Brewer.