Daniel Greene

Blog

  • 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.

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  • 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! 🙂

  • Send in Your Estimated Taxes!

    Just a reminder to my fellow freelance interpreters: send in your estimated tax payments due on September 15!

  • There Are No "Inalienable Rights"!

    The current code of ethics for ASL interpreters is the joint NAD-RID Code of Professional Conduct. That document contains in its preface a section titled, “Philosophy,” which reads as follows:

    The American Deaf community represents a cultural and linguistic group having the inalienable right to full and equal communication and to participation in all aspects of society. Members of the American Deaf community have the right to informed choice and the highest quality interpreting services. Recognition of the communication rights of America’s women, men, and children who are deaf is the foundation of the tenets, principles, and behaviors set forth in this Code of Professional Conduct.

    As an RID-certified interpreter and transliterator, I must agree to uphold and follow this code of professional conduct — and I do — but there is a bit of nonsense in that paragraph that I cannot endorse, and that is the fallacy of “inalienable rights.”

    It is ironic that such a fallacy is promulgated under the heading “Philosophy.” Anyone familiar with philosophy knows that rights are social constructs: they are given by society and can be taken away by society. “Inalienable” means “cannot be taken away.” Well, the fact is that rights are given and rights are taken away.

    It may sound paternalistic to say so, but (more…)