Daniel Greene

Tag: opinion

Opinion, provocative, editorial, perspective, call-to-action, soapbox, pet peeves, prescriptive…

  • GOP: Change or die

    Personally, I don’t care if the Republican party dies, but if they want to live, they need to not just “reach out” to people of color; they have to abolish their policies that oppress people of color. They need to not just “speak better” about their policies that infuriate people; they need to abolish those policies. They have tried to “spin” their anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-middle-class, anti-intellectual platform. It didn’t work! They tried to be “the party of No” and make the President fail. It didn’t work! They tried to be the “pro-life” party, against women’s right to abortion even in the case of rape. It didn’t work! I think of the Republican party as anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-woman, pro-man, anti-color, pro-white, anti-worker, pro-millionaire… and that’s not just what I think they are. That’s what they are. If they want to be that, I hope the party dies. If not, I hope it reinvents itself from the platform up, not from the message down.

  • Ever forget an assignment? Make it less likely with automatic agenda emails.

    I hate to admit it, but there have been those mortifying times when I’ve forgotten I had a job to get to. It’s easy to follow a schedule when it’s the same every day, but when you’re a community interpreter and your schedule changes every day, you might need a little help.

    Lately, some of the agencies I work for have started sending out automatic agenda reminders via email, such as “Here is your schedule for this week” or “Here is your schedule today.” These reminder emails are very helpful — so helpful I was about to ask an agency who doesn’t send them to send them. I rethought that, though, because I had forgotten a job with them that week and I didn’t want it to come across as, “Well, it would help if you sent me a reminder.” So I did some searching and found that I could set up my own email reminders in my Google calendar. Here’s how:

    In your Google calendar, go to Settings. Currently the way to do this is to click on the gear icon in the top right corner of the page. When in Settings, click the Calendars tab from the tabs toward the top left of the page (where you see General, Calendars, Mobile Setup, Labs). For your work calendar, look for the Notifications heading just right of the center of the Calendar line (where you see CALENDAR, SHOW IN LIST, NOTIFICATIONS, SHARING). Follow the Notifications link for your work calendar. Scroll to the bottom of the page where it says, “Daily agenda: Receive an email with your agenda every day at 5am in your current time zone.” Check the box next to Email and/or SMS, and you’re done! You will now get your very own agenda reminders at the crack of dawn.

    Go forth and serve thy Deaf and hearing consumers!

    P.S. I know not everyone uses Gmail or Google Apps, but maybe the calendaring program you use does this too. If not, maybe you should get with a program that does.

  • My thoughts on the opening ceremonies of the Olympics

  • Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion: Let’s do the time warp. Again.

    Cougar / Puma / Mountain Lion / Panther (Puma ...
    Cougar / Puma / Mountain Lion / Panther (Puma concolor) closeup. Philadelphia Zoo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    I was unpleasantly surprised when Apple took a step backward a few years ago with their skeuomorphic Address Book, Calendar, and Notes apps — the stitched leather bindings, the yellow ruled paper, the bits of paper in the cardboard binder where the pages were torn out, the handwriting fonts, etc. Now they’ve done it again with the same apps and with the new Reminders app. I understand that a GUI has to look like something, but I don’t think it should look like ancient artifacts. Why should OS X apps look more old-fashioned now than they did the first decade of OS X? Probably because they have to match iOS, and maybe Apple made iOS so skeuomorphic because they thought that’s what they had to do to sell iPhones and iPads.

    Personally, I don’t use any of the OS X apps anymore anyway. I have all I need in the browser: Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Messages, etc. And they’re not so skeuomorphic. I’ll just enjoy the overall system enhancements of OS 10.8 and not do the time warp again.

  • Interpreters beware of “SERVICE NEEDED !!!” scam

    In case you haven’t already seen it, the following email is going around. Gmail was wise enough to put them both in my spam folder. I will quote both so you can see how suspicious they are:

    Here is the first one:

    from: Engr Ivan Bruce bengrivan@gmail.com
    to:
    bcc: danieljamesgreene@gmail.com
    date: Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:50 AM
    subject: YOUR SERVICE !!!

    Hello,

    I’m Engr Ivan,I would like more info about your interpreting service,I will be attending 4days conference in your city on 25th-28th of July to some student(deaf).Kindly let me know your charges per hr and details about your interpreting service(ASL) so that i will book ahead before coming.

    You can mail me directly on
    IvanBruce@usa.com
    Await your reply.
    Engr Ivan Bruce

    And here is the second one:

    from: Dr Russell Park drrussellp@gmail.com
    to:
    bcc: danieljamesgreene@gmail.com
    date: Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 3:53 AM
    subject: SERVICE NEEDED !!!

    Hello,

    I’m Dr Russell,I would like more info about your interpreting service,I will be attending 4days conference in your city on 27th-30th of August to some student(deaf).Kindly let me know your charges per hr and details about your interpreting service(ASL) so that i will book ahead before coming.

    You can mail me directly on
    Rpark@dr.com
    Await your reply.

    Dr Russell Park

    Notice how impossibly similar they are? Note the subject line in ALL CAPS with three exclamation marks — not signs of professionalism. Note also the grammatical errors like the comma splices, the absence of spaces after commas and before open parentheses, the lack of  hyphen and the ungrammatical s in “4days conference,” the lack of period after the abbreviation for hour (“hr”) and the lowercase i. Your English teacher was right; grammatical errors reduce your credibility, and so they should. Finally, note how they each ask you to reply to email addresses other than the address the emails were supposedly sent from. I don’t know what their scam is, but there’s obviously something afoot.

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