Loved how daniel validated participants questions and comments by responding to individuals. He used examples from a variety of settings which was helpful. Powerpoint was great.

to:

It was not a particularly involved workshop (last year it seemed there was more participation) and was very powerpoint heavy. I could have skipped and snagged a copy of the P.P.T. notes. =(

Now, I know “there’s always someone” (you can’t please everyone), and most of my participants rate my presentations highly on “Audiovisual and supplementary study materials were an asset to this activity,” but I take all feedback into account. Recently I previewed a PowerPoint presentation to prep for an interpreting assignment, and it got me to thinking about how much or how little a slideshow presentation can tell you about an actual presentation— and how much it should.

Most of the people I present to want me to give them handouts of my presentation, and when I change my presentations at the last minute to include things that aren’t on the handouts—or I offer to send a list of references (works cited)—most people give me their email addresses so I can send them the latest and fullest. But the idea that someone could “snag a copy of the P.P.T. notes” and perceive that they got the workshop is not a pleasing one. My presentation is much more dynamic than my slideshow, and the participation makes it even more so.

But, if someone thinks it’s all in the handouts, does that mean I’m putting too much of my presentation on the slideshow? I know there will always be people who think if they’ve seen the photos, they don’t have to go to the country; if they’re heard the album, they don’t have to go to the concert; if they’ve read the book, they don’t have to go see the author speak. And I think they’re wrong! I also know from feedback I’ve gotten that most people would be frustrated if the slideshow didn’t help them follow and take notes on the lecture. Yet… I wonder if I should pare down my slideshow.

What do you think? Should a slideshow be skeletal or fleshy? How do you perceive a workshop vis-à-vis the handouts? I would love to hear your comments.

The UPS truck delivered something today that brought tears to my eyes: my own hardcover copy of the book Sexting including an chapter by lil’ ol’ me. Gale Cengage Learning approached me a year ago about including a blog post of mine, Sexting highlights society’s issues with privacy and shame, in one of their their textbooks. I agreed to publication with a writer’s fee and copy of the book. They complied with a check and a copy of the book as promised. My article appears as chapter two titled “The Threat of Sexting Has Been Exaggerated” on page 15 of the hardcover edition. The book is part of the At Issue: Social Issues series.

Here is the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Sexting / Stefan Kiesbye, book editor.
p. cm. — (At issue)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7377-5161-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-7377-5162-8 (pbk.)
1. Internet and teenagers. 2. Internet–Safety measures. 3. Teenagers–Sexual relations. 4. Electronic mail systems. I. Kiesbye, Stephan. II. Title. III. Series.
HQ799.2.I5.S49 2011
004.67’80835–dc22

I am excited to be a part of this compilation and I look forward to reading the other chapters!

My article “Interpreting Intentionally Vague Language” was featured in the RID Views, Spring 2011. If you read the article, or are already familiar with VL, I would like to know your thoughts on the subject, so please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post.

In case you’re interested, I teach workshops on VL and other topics– and love to travel.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 49 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 260 posts. There were 24 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 5mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was July 20th with 474 views. The most popular post that day was Reflections on ICED Apology and Abolishment of Sign Language Ban.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were deafread.com, westciv.com, flickr.com, facebook.com, and html.conclase.net.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for epub download, epub downloads, download epub, canadian diamond traders, and epub download sites.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Reflections on ICED Apology and Abolishment of Sign Language Ban July 2010
5 comments

Comparison of EPUB Download Sites February 2010
6 comments

How to get your Flickr photos to show up in your Facebook profile May 2009
13 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Pros and Cons of Photo Sharing on Facebook vs. Flickr August 2009
20 comments

ASL Interpreting FAQs August 2006
15 comments

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 have two blogs (this “professional” one and my more personal family blog) and that’s enough blogs for me for now. I don’t want to splinter myself off into too many pieces. What I want to do is categorize posts on this blog effectively.

Category lists I’ve thought of

Casual, Chatty Categories

• Singin’
• Signin’
• Thinkin’
• Writin’
• Just Sayin’…

The idea for this came from my current blog title “Just Singin’ & Signin’ in the Sun” which stems from the fact that I sing, sign, and live in Phoenix, and it’s a takeoff on the line “Just singin’ and dancin’ in the rain” from Singin’ in the Rain. The problem with these categories is they seem too hokey for me, and don’t reflect the seriousness and professionalism I express here when I’m not being more casual. So I don’t think I’ll use that list.

Categories from the NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct

• Confidentiality
• Professionalism
• Conduct
• Respect for Consumers
• Respect for Colleagues
• Business Practices
• Professional Development

The idea for these categories came from the fact that I’m currently studying the CPC so it’s on the brain, and I do already write about business practices (not always related to interpreting for the deaf) and professional development (my own and my job as an interpreter trainer). The problem with these categories is that I don’t write about all of them often enough to make them categories, and not that many people are familiar with the CPC. It’s an idea, but not a good one for me.

Discourse Genre Categories

• Informative
• Normative
• Demonstrative
• Entertaining
• Persuasive

Not bad, maybe, but are people coming to my site looking for “Daniel Greene’s informative blog posts”? No. I’ve thought about similar categories like Opinion, Reviews, Entertainment, News, etc., but there are problems with those too. If I categorize my videos of singing in Entertainment, will people overlook them because they think a category called Entertainment would include blog posts about entertainment.

It’s past 10:00 PM now so I must draw this to a close. I will go to bed for a second night in a row without resolution to this problem. I will “sleep on it” and think on it until I sort it out. This shows what a complex task categorizing your blog posts can be. Wish me luck! Have any suggestions? How do you categorize your blog posts?

I’m a guy who started writing his own HTML and CSS in 1996; in fact, I was one of the first handful of brave ones on the Internet to style valid HTML with CSS knowing that most browsers couldn’t handle it. After all, what did I have to lose? Little old me with his personal website.

This was a decade before Flickr and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter allowed you to post content with ease and let them take care of the code, and years before every major website was written in structural HTML and styled with CSS. This was back when you had to either have a self-hosted website or something like AOL Hometown Web pages. This was when “Web Designers” would charge you an arm-and-a-leg for a page and a couple of links. I was okay with the idea that, if I wanted a site that used proper HTML (without proprietary structural markup) and CSS, I had to get an ISP to host my own website. And I had to write all my own HTML & CSS.

Things have changed in the past few years. Even with WordPress.org, I had more freedom to blog without worrying about the coding. When I didn’t have to worry about updating WordPress and editing .htaccess pages and PHP files, it worked great. But I hated it when I would break my site when trying unsuccessfully to upload new versions of the blogging platform software. I thought, “Why can’t it be more like posting content to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? I can’t break those sites. There must be an easier way.”

So I did some searching and found out that I could import my whole site–actually both sites–to WordPress.com, manage both sites from one Dashboard, and port my domain names for only $10 a year per domain. That’s when I decided to move over to the gentler, easier version of WordPress.

Yes, there are limitations. But there are also benefits. And for me, the benefits far outweigh the limitations. I should have moved over a long time ago, because I wasn’t using the advanced options of WordPress.org anyway.

Another reason I moved over is because I’m just enough of a stupid geek to get lost in hours of trying to figure out how to make things work, and I need to stop doing that. The important thing is for me to create content–be it writings, photos, videos, or updates–and publish it easily. So, here’s to my being more creative and less geeky!

Just as a boat is chained to the sea, sometimes I feel chained to Flickr.

I am now going through the 420 photos I took during the six days of my trip. Four hundred and twenty photos that all came out well. Yes, there are some things that I took multiple shots of in order to get the best one, but still… how do you work your way through all that and post it on Flickr without boring people? I’ve been limiting myself to posting only three or four photos a day so that people will look at them, which seems to be working, except I have to ask myself why I share all these photos with the world. I took this working vacation on my own, and one of the reasons I took these photos was to share them with my husband, Andy, who couldn’t come on the trip with me. That makes sense to me– to want to share with my husband everything I wish I could have shared with him while we were apart. And I suppose it makes sense to want to share photos with family and close friends. But I’m starting to wonder why I care whether people I’ve never met will stop and look at my photos. I hardly make any money giving my photos away. I could write travel articles and get paid for the work I put into taking, geotagging, editing, organizing, naming, describing my photos… but I don’t. Instead, I spend several hours each day on the computer and on Flickr. I post photos and look at other people’s photos. I enjoy this, but often it seems like work.

I sometimes look at what I do as a creative outlet and a chance to share information with others just for the sake of sharing. I guess there’s a part of me that appreciates all the hard work other amateur photographers and bloggers put into what they publish, and I want to give back. I’ve always had a work ethic that demanded that I contribute to my community, be it local or global. So I guess this is my contribution.

But I have a B.A. in English, and I often think I should be writing for a living instead of writing for nothing. And with my 18 years of experience as an American Sign Language interpreter, I think I should be developing and presenting workshops on interpreting, or even writing books about it. But I’m not. So why do I keep giving away hours of my day, day after day, to Flickr? I don’t know. I guess, in a weird way, I’m lonely. I have a husband and two dogs, a few close friends and family who love me, yet I still crave an audience. I want to communicate with people, have them listen to me, receive their response and feedback. But couldn’t I do that as a writer? Sometimes I fear that in the process of communicating with images I am losing the ability to communicate with words. Perhaps it is my purpose in life to paint images with words, not just by capturing them in photographs. It is harder to say what you want with words than it is with images… or is it? I guess if the image above said it all then I wouldn’t be writing this now; would I?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions yet. But I need to keep thinking about what else I should be doing with my life and how being chained to Flickr may be stopping me from fulfilling my potential as a human being. I don’t need to prove that I can take a good photo. I know I can. But then again, one doesn’t do something again and again just to prove he can do it, does one? I mean, if I write a best-selling book, I will have proven that I can write a good book, but I’d still probably want to write another book, and another, and another.

I do know that I get a lot out of photography. The act of shooting photos is meditative; it allows me (or forces me) to really look at things, to see them from various angles, to see them as they are and to capture them as I imagine them. And when I take photos of people or other animals, looking at the photographs afterward helps me to see them, to really gaze at them and take them in in a way that might not feel comfortable for either me or my subject in the moment. I also get to explore my moods and the moods of others, including the earth’s (if you can consider a cloudy day or the flowers of spring as an expression of the earth’s “moods”). My moods often mirror those of the earth, and through capturing images at those times I can share my own feelings with other people.

I do have a need to be seen and heard. Always have. Call it what you will, but I accept it as a fact about myself. I have almost never worked behind the scenes. Even the work I have done behind the scenes (writing, photography) ends up in the public eye. So just about everything I’ve ever done for money or for nothing has been for an audience. Heck, look at what I make my living at nowadays– interpreting phone calls, being heard by hearing people and watched by deaf people.

I hate to think that I need to keep writing, acting, singing, photographing, etc. to feel loved and lovable. I would like to believe that I am loved and lovable regardless of how much I produce or create. I sometimes wonder if it is the occasional photo that gets a lot of response and/or ends up in Flickr’s Explore pages that keeps me going, makes me feel like a star for a day, gives me the feeling of being not alone, but a member of a global family. I don’t know. Whatever my reasons are, I aim to practice moderation and feel completely unchained and free to choose just how much Flickring I do.

I got this fortune in a fortune cookie a few weeks ago and carried it around in my wallet. Coincidentally, a story I was commissioned to write for the book eyes of desire 2, a deaf glbt reader was published, and the book came out just last week.

I found this to be an interesting fortune because one usually doesn’t get a fortune this specific. I mean, how many people will become accomplished writers? I suppose many people are accomplished writers in one way or another, but I found especial hope in this fortune for myself.

I’m not particular proud of the story I told in this book– the story of how my first lover was deaf, and how he turned out not to be able to hold adult conversations on a deep level. I was young and naïve, and I didn’t know enough ASL when I first met him to realize that he was incapable of communicating about abstract concepts. I didn’t know what to expect from a deaf person, I didn’t realize how intelligent most deaf people are, and I didn’t even know how to communicate abstract thoughts myself in ASL, so how could I expect him to do so?

My story is not the most bright, cheerful, inspiring, or uplifting story in the book, but it was honest, and it depicts a reality that happened to me, and might happen to others as well. It’s a story I really didn’t want to tell, but I forced myself to, because I had to come to terms with a chapter of my past that haunted me for years. In fact, I often thought that I remained single for so much of my life after that because I was being punished for breaking his heart by leaving him. Who knows? Luckily, I’m long past that now, and have a wonderful marriage with a man I love dearly, a man I truly can talk with about anything and everything. And I still wish the best for my ex, my first lover, the man who gave me the impetus to master ASL and become the interpreter I am today.

I’m creating this as a post on my blog so that people who read the book and look me up through my bio in the book have a space to leave comments on the story. Thanks to Raymond for publishing the story. I welcome your comments.

Please be kind.

Hyper Haiku 俳句

Inspired Meditations in Hyperlinked Haiku

Purpose:

I created this site to explore the possibilities of hyperlinking haiku poems, knowing that the medium of hypertext would encourage me to free-associate and be more prolific. I am interested in your experience as a reader of these poems. Most poems will offer at least two hyperlinks, so you, the reader, may also free-associate by following the links that most appeal to you. [In this post's new format, please feel free to write a haiku poem as a comment inspired by one of the words in the last commenter's haiku poem.]

What is Hyper Haiku?

Haiku is a poetic form with one stanza of three lines; the first line has five syllables, the second line has seven, and the third line has five. As long as one follows those simple rules, the form gives great freedom for expression. Hypertext links pages and sections to each other through hyperlinks. Therefore, hypertext haiku, or “hyper haiku,” ishaiku poetry that contains hyperlinks to other haiku poetry and so forth.

A New Form:

From what I have gathered, mine is the first site on the Internet to offer haiku poetry that follows the haiku form, makes grammatical sense, and contains hyperlinks within each haiku poem that link to other haiku poems. Here is a survey of the literature published in the field of hypertext haiku as of January 19, 2003, the date when this page was first published on the Internet.

Haiku | Japanese Poetry

This page praises the elegance (their word) of the haiku poem, and it offers several examples of translated haiku poems by “the four masters” Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shika. Several examples are given of haiku poems translated from Japanese into English. It is important to note that these translated poems do not fit the haiku form of five, seven, and five syllables in English; they did fit the form in Japanese, but the English translations of these haiku poems could not be considered haiku poems themselves. Also it is important to note that, while this page gives several examples of idyllic poems, it also shows us that haiku can be about the seedier aspects of the human experience. See the poems by Issa near the bottom of the page for examples of this.

Haiku and Hyperku

I found this site when I searched the Web for the word “Hyperku.” I had originally thought of calling my site “Hyperku,” but I wanted to see whether anyone else was using that word, and how they were using it. This author’s idea of “Hyperku” is haiku with links in it, like mine, except his links lead to offsite pages on related topics rather than to other haiku as mine do. After seeing his definition of “Hyperku,” I decided to be more cautious of naming my site “Hyperku,” because I didn’t want my brand of hypertext haiku to be confused with his. One thing I love about this guy’s page is that it’s written in XHTML and CSS, like mine, and it’s quite handsome as a result!

Google Search for “hyperku”

Besides the first two sites that came up in the search results (both related to the link listed above), I found that a lot of sites referred to a now-defunct music search site called Hyperku.com. Many of the pages in the search results that referred to Hyperku.com were in foreign languages. However, from what I could gather from my understanding of foreign languages and the few English sites that referred to Hyperku.com, it seems that the site had something to do with Audiogalaxy.com. What on earth Hyperku means to these people is beyond me! All I know is that I did not want my hypertext haiku site to be associated with these music sites, so I decided against calling my site “Hyperku.”

Mel McClellan: Hyperhaiku

A Google Search of “hyperhaiku” led to this page and the one below. Visually, this is an interesting Flash presentation; I like its use of graphics, movement, sound, and typography. It certainly fits the genre of multimedia. However, there are no links in the presentation, and no allowance for user interaction, so I don’t believe it could be considered hypermedia. In literary terms, the poem is not a haiku poem, for it does not fit the five, seven, and five syllable form. I would call this “multimedia poetry” rather than “Hyper Haiku.” Still, it’s interesting to see what else is out there.

No Poetry

This is, in my opinion, a fine specimen not only of good quality haiku writing, but also an effective use of the Flash medium. After seeing this, I certainly have no qualms about using the term “Hyper Haiku” for my site. The one thing the author’s “Hyperhaiku,” lacks is links within the haiku poem, an important distinction that makes hyper haiku “hyper.” My haiku poems not only contain links within them; they contain links to other haiku poems on my site.

The Hyper Haiku

I found this site after I had already completed mine. The author uses a strange, non-grammatical syntax (or lack thereof) in concocting poems that fit the haiku form. There is an abundance of hyperlinks in each poem, but there is no clear sense of connectedness between the words and poems. Rather, these hyper haiku seem to be random groupings of words mathematically assembled in the proper syllabic form. For me, the lack of cohesive syntax leads to a lack of semantic meaning at the textual level (surely each word has its semantic meaning intact, but the combination of words is so random as to be meaningless). I do not see such a haphazard conglomeration of words as haiku poetry, but I respect the author’s freedom to experiment, and I imagine that, while the experiment does not work for me, it may very well work for others. Even if an experiment doesn’t “work” for anybody, the experiment doesn’t “fail” as long as it demonstrates the results of trying something. As least this poetry fits the form of haiku and contains hyperlinks, which is more than can be said for much of the other “Hyper Haiku” out there.

Moyayama

This site is a fascinating international site of haiku poetry written in Russian and Japanese. It is a good thing to remember that the World Wide Web was meant to be written in all the languages of the world, not just in English. If your browser is able to render these pages in their intended alphabets, it is a testament to the multilingual power of HTML and WWW standards. This looks like a very interesting site. I cannot critique the poetry except to say that I don’t see any links in it, so I don’t see why it’s called “hyper” haiku, except that it’s presented in HTML. In any event, this is a good quality site.

David Robertson’s Haiku Page

This is a collection of haiku poems that fit the form and have, in my opinion, some literary value. They do not have any hyperlinks, so I would not call them “Hyper Haiku,” but they are good examples of haiku nonetheless.

http://www.waxebb.com/main/haikuin.html

This is an experimental site that haphazardly throws five, seven, and five words together to make nonsense poems. The poems do not fit the haiku form of five, seven, and five syllables, and they do not make any sense to me, but each word in each poem is a hyperlink that replaces the word you click with another word. Interesting experiment.

My First Hyper Haiku Poems

[When I originally wrote this hypertext, each poem was on its own page, with at least one hyperlink linking to other poems. In this blog format, I will signify linked words (words in one haiku that inspire another) with an asterisk (*) at the end of the inspiring word in one poem and at the beginning of the inspired word in another poem.]

Drugs* are everywhere.
Even the lights* inject a
stimulating dose.

*Lights are shining* bright.
Why they shine I can’t divine.
My eyes are quite blind.

She called it *shining,
said* Scatman. Danny’s finger
said REDRUM! REDRUM!

*Alcoholism—
A disease that *tells me I*
don’t have a disease.

*Yo hablo ingles.
Y yo hablo español.
¡Me gusta hablar!

I am my *ego.
I* need to get out of my
own way. God help me!

*Yo entiendo
Mas que yo puedo* hablar.
Olvido mucho.

“I think I *can! I
think I can!” Said* the little
train that thought she could.

Moi, je *parle français*
et je parle anglais aussi.
J’aime beaucoup parler!

*Parisians treat you
like the shit they don’t pick up
when they walk* their dogs.

*Hello. How are* you?
I’m fine, thanks, and how are you?
Fine, thanks. So, what’s new?

“All my friends *are gay!”
(Absolutely Fabulous)
“All—My—Friends—Are—Gay!”

An Invitation to Poets:

If you have a 5–7–5 (syllable) haiku of your own based on one of the words in one of these haiku, please post it below as a comment. Thanks!