Blog

  • My experience dancing with black people at the NAOBI conference

    Transcript: 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.

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  • My experience teaching workshops at the NAOBI conference

    Transcript: 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.

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  • How to upload vertical video taken with a mobile phone

    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! How to do this? Quoted from QuickTime 7 Pro help:

    To resize or rotate a QuickTime movie:
    In QuickTime Player 7, choose Window > Show Movie Properties.
    In the Properties window, select a video track and click Visual Settings.
    To resize the movie, type new numbers in the Current Size fields.
    To keep the same height-to-width proportions, select Preserve Aspect Ratio.
    To rotate the movie, click one of the rotate buttons.

  • ASL Policy and Deaf Interpreters at RID Conference

    Abstract

    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.

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  • Andy’s Red, White, and Blue Parfait

    How could I be with this guy for seven years and not have had “his” red white & blue parfait? Last time he said “I think I’ll make ‘my’ such-and-such” was about something else he made in this 13×9 Pyrex dish– “My breakfast casserole” —after we had been together for six years! You got any other tricks up your sleeve, honey? 😉