Daniel Greene

Author: Daniel Greene

  • More about Transparency

    Below I quote from this Wikipedia entry about Telecommunications Relay Service:

    As much of the tele-relay system, particularly IP-Relay, is open for public use, it is possible for anyone with the proper equipment to place calls. This includes people who are not members of the original intended user group (i.e., persons who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, or speech-impaired). Some such users have noted its usefulness in making long-distance or local calls free of charge and without a telephone. The accessibility even to those who are not deaf, etc. has been defended by providers as a necessary evil. This is because the principle of “transparency” – the belief that the operator and the mechanics of relay should generally go as unnoticed as possible in the call – requires that Relay be as easy to use as a normal telephone, which does not require any kind of verification for hearing people to use. This decision has been defended by leaders in the deaf community, and generally retains strong support among speech and hearing-disabled users of the service.

    One of the “necessary evils” the above quotation refers to is the use of text relay services by Nigerian scam artists. Some text relay operators actually gave up their jobs in order to stop doing what made them sick and be free to break the story to the news. Here are two of those news stories that are linked to from the aforementioned Wikipedia entry:
    Con artists target phone system for deaf – Security – MSNBC.com and Overseas crooks abuse phone service for deaf | www.azstarnet.com ®

    I feel sorry for those relay operators who lost their jobs, but (more…)

  • abc7news.com: Deaf Community Targeted By Scam, Again

    The local Bay Area ABC News “I-Team” (investigative team) ran this news story on Brian Malzkuhn and Michael Johnson, two men — both college teachers who are deaf! — who ripped off deaf people in the process of being ripped off themselves by Nigerian scam artists. These men asked their deaf friends and colleagues for “emergency business loans” so they could come up with the money that the rapacious Nigerian scam artists were demanding in ever-increasing amounts.

    I am incensed to read this! This is a prime example of the sort of abuse that led me to decide a couple of weeks ago not to interpret any kind of VRS call — or live interpreted event — that I believe is a scam.

    I think the ideology that it is not up to interpreters to decide what is good for their clients interpreters are not responsible for the content of their interpretation is potentially damaging, especially in the realm of VRS. This belief in “transparency” (which I actually saw signed as “no skin off my back” or “I’m not responsible” in discussions about TRS CA‘s in the ’90s), along with the “mandate for equal telecommunications access” by the FCC, leads interpreters to feel that they are compelled to interpret any kind of call that comes in, regardless of content. Do you know what it feels like to interpret a call that you know is a scam? It is demoralizing to say the least. You might not be responsible for the scam you interpret, but it’s hard not to feel dirty about it.

    I think it is high time that interpreters started standing up for what they know is right and “reserve the right to refuse service” to scam artists!

    And deaf people, if you agree with this, please make your feelings known to the FCC.

    Thank you.

  • Been Blogging for Over a Month Now

    It seems that every time I get discouraged because no one is responding to my posts, I get a comment or an e-mail that reminds me I’m not just shouting in the dark. Well, I am shouting in the dark– but people are listening! Hmm… let me put that in a deaf-friendly way: I’m waving my hands over the abyss– but people are reading my signs from afar!

    I checked my web site statistics, and my site has received an average of 1,592 hits per day. The site received the most hits — 2,371 — on August 29, the day I posted the video of myself singing Cockeyed Optimist on YouTube.

    One thing I have found is that blogging can be very time consuming! Between this and my activities on Flickr and YouTube, as well as my reading of other blogs, I have been spending too much time on the Internet. I suppose I may as well admit now that I am powerless over the Internet and that my life has become unmanageable, as that is the first step to recovery! Honestly, I don’t know how other people manage it. I guess I’ll have to start scheduling limited amounts of time each day to get on the computer, sign on, do my surfing or uploading or reading or whatever, and sign off and be done with it. Plus, I have to schedule limited amounts of time for writing blog posts, moderating comments, creating vlogs or videos, taking photos, uploading photos to my computer and editing them, etc. It really has become too much. I look forward to finding moderation in this soon!

  • Working on bylaws in HTML and CSS

    Yesterday, I spent some time revising the bylaws I wrote for SDCRID so they could be repurposed for AzRID. The AzRID president asked me to do this, because she had heard from a little bird (Rob Balaam, RID Region 5 Representative) that I had done the bylaws for SDCRID. Since there are some interesting lessons to be learned from my work about bylaws and, incidentally, about HTML and CSS, I thought it might be beneficial to share them here.

    First of all, my sources for the bylaws were the RID bylaws, the RID Affliate Chapter Handbook Sample Bylaws (pp 238–257), and the AzRID bylaws (which link will probably be broken soon when they upload the new ones). I also consulted Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised when I was writing the SDCRID bylaws. I pretty much followed the Sample Bylaws except when I felt the RID bylaws were clearer or more up-to-date. I also, of course, checked the AzRID bylaws for any special bylaws that needed to stay. That takes care of the bylaws part of it.

    I also had an interesting challenge and a gratifying success with writing the bylaws in a plain-text editor (BBEdit) using XHTML 1.1 and CSS. I did this because I wanted tight control over sectioning and listing. Bylaws documents need to be very structured. One can write in all the sections, subsections, and list numbers, but that is a waste of time, especially if one ever wants to rearrange the order of sections and list items. If one does use styles in a word processing program, sometimes formatting can become corrupted during routine editing operations such as cutting, pasting, deleting, etc., and then one can lose the document structure. Besides, I enjoy the challenge of hand-coding HTML and CSS, and I like to demonstrate the power of these structural and presentational markup languages working hand-in-hand.

    (more…)

  • Been sick

    I’ve been suffering so much with allergies the past two weeks that I’ve had to call in sick to work several times. It’s hard to interpret when your nose is running, you’re sneezing, clearing your throat, coughing, hacking, feeling tired, feverish, etc. I’ve been taking Claritin (which I take every day) and generic Mucinex (guaifenesin), which helps with the coughing (and is a lot more pleasant to take than cough syrup). I tried taking cough syrup with the cough suppressant dextromethorphan, but that makes me feel lightheaded and disassociated, as if I’m floating in a bubble– and not in a good way! I don’t even feel safe driving when I’m taking dextromethorphan! Blech! At least the guaifenesin is free of unpleasant side effects, and it seems to help break up the congestion. Anyway, sickness is a part of life; one could even say it’s a part of health. I believe that we need to get sick every once in a while to allow our systems to clean out and recharge– as long as we get the rest our bodies are telling us they need.

    I don’t like to call in sick to work, but I do it when I need to. It’s never convenient for the workplace, but you know what? They’ll manage. If I don’t stay home and rest when I’m sick, I won’t get better. If I’m contagious and I go to work, I’ll get other people sick and the business will lose even more money than if I had stayed home. I just try to give my employers and/or clients as much notice as possible so that they’ll have time to find a replacement. I hate to lose the money by not working, but one has to budget for being sick, and that’s what the bank is for.

    Looking on the bright side, being sick always reminds me to appreciate being healthy! What a joy it is to breathe freely, feel energized, and be relatively free of pain and discomfort! 🙂