>More Blinky Gadgets From The Past

>After my big tyrade about the slate and stylus, I got thinking about some other fun devices that were designed with the best of intentions, but in practice, they didn’t work too well. don’t get me wrong, there are a zillion devices out there that made things easier, but a few devices…well, they just weren’t helpful.

I’ve already talked about the beeping baseball. Here’s a description of something else that beeps, and doesn’t hold up to the abuses it’s supposed to. It’s called a liquid level indicator.

Basically, it was designed to be a replacement for putting your finger over the edge of the glass to know when you’re supposed to stop pouring. the explanation was that you don’t want to be pouring hot liquids and using your finger as a stopping point. Either that, or people thought it just looked eeewww to have your finger in a glass while pouring. Anyway, instead of your finger, you put these two prongs over the top of the glass. When liquid hit them, it caused the device to beep, sing “London Bridge is falling down” or give some other audible sign that ya might wanna stop pouring, jackass.

This was great…as long as the device worked. But usually, after it had been hooked over a few glasses, the mechanism ceased to function. Why did we expect it to do anything else? We were exposing electronics to water.

I thought maybe I just had a bad run of luck with those things. I laid waste to two, or maybe 3 of them. But Steve had the same experience. It’s sad, because it was a good idea. It just didn’t work out. I guess the finger is the only tried and true method.

Next in line to go into the hmmm neat idea until you try it files was the braille eraser. It looked sort of like the stylus, only it was more round at the top. It was designed to rub out individual dots so you wouldn’t make a mess when you made a mistake. I watched my teacher use it, and I thought it was cool. Then I got my hands on it, and disaster struck.

Let’s just say I didn’t have the same precision and aim as my teacher. I would think I was on the dot or letter I wanted to remove, rub away, and make a gouge in the paper! It was deceptively sharp! So now, instead of removing a dot or a letter, I had made a mess of things. Again, I thought I was the only blink to do this and I must be clueless, but Steve told me he did the same thing.

Now let’s move up in the world from the simple tech to the more complex. In my early years at school, when I was in the classroom, I wrote everything down with a brailler. This could make things difficult, since I went to a regular school back then, so the classroom teacher certainly couldn’t read braille. So, my braille teacher had to write in between my lines of braille. This could be a difficult task, especially since I made a lot of mistakes, so my braille teacher had to play the roll of interpreter/mindreader.

I guess this got pretty troublesome, so she was trying to figure out ways to automate the process. I’m not sure how this came about, but she must have done some research, and discovered a device called an MPRINT. This device hooked into the brailler and connected to a printer. So, I could braille to my heart’s content, and every time I slammed the new line key, buzz buzz buzz went the printer, supposedly printing what I just brailled! Sweet, right?

That was great, until I made a mistake. Then I would backspace, but it wouldn’t know what to do, and when I would finish the line and hit new line, it would spew garble. So, in the end, my teacher was back to transcribing by hand.

Apparently, as the years went by and before it was discontinued in 1999, it got more sophisticated and capable of understanding what the backspace meant. But that’s not the model I got to work with. Mine was very primitive, and of course, I had no way of knowing whether it printed intelligible text or jibberish.

The last piece of holy crap this would be cool if it wasn’t for a few kinks technology was something called the Versabraille. In one way, it was way cool, because it opened the doors to much cooler, more reliable braille displays. But you’ve gotta start somewhere, and we started with the Versabraille.

First off, the museum exhibit doesn’t mention its weight. It was goddamn heavy! Maybe I found it this way because I was only 11 years old, and a small 11-year-old at that when we tried this thing out. It was so heavy for me that my teacher wanted me to go down the stairs like this: Put Versabraille on step beside me, step down, slide Versabraille down, lather, rinse, repeat. I told her this would not work when I was travelling among the stampeding hoards of children, and I wasn’t even going to try that because I would get killed. The Versabraille might have been fine, but I would be trampled.

And, this thing was so expensive and fragile that nobody was selling it, only renting it. It would have cost $10000 to buy.

At that price, it should have had a better battery low warning than making a sound as if you just lost an arcade game and ejecting your cassette, because yes, your data was stored on cassette. Well, I guess you did just lose a game, if the game was keeping your school assignments. Whatever you hadn’t saved before the battery ran out of juice just bit the big one. It especially hurt if you were in the middle of a save when the battery went bye-bye.

It made such a hell of a lot of noise. I would always have to wear headphones when I used it in class because it beeped and booped and bamped whenever you did something it didn’t like. No no, we couldn’t flash a message on the braille display. We have to boop. This meant that no one else heard the sounds but me, and they’d startle me so bad that I’d jump. Now I looked like a crazy kid, startling in the middle of class over seemingly nothing.

I’m glad it was invented, because it paved the way for better things. But you could certainly tell it was a first try.

While we’re on the subject of braille, can someone please tell me the benefits of thermoforming braille onto that thin plastic paper? The only one I can see is it made easy to read diagrams. But reading off thermoform was, well, a bitch! If you were in a dry place, the pages would stick together and make nice little static cling snapsnap noises when you turned them. If you were in a humid place, your hands would stick to the paper! Aaaa! You had to read at the pace of a turtle because you had to drag your hand across something that wanted to grab a hold of your hand and keep it there. Plus, it would rip so easily! I can’t count the number of times I would see ripped pages. And don’t read thermoform at night if you share a room with someone. Every time you’d turn the page, it would make the biggest racket!

I don’t know why my mind has drifted to all these older things. Hopefully people aren’t bored, or telling me I should call a waaambulance.

Good Questions

I got asked two interesting questions about Trixie today that I thought deserved a post.

First, I was in the bank waiting in line. From behind me I could hear a kid and his dad ooing and aaaing about Trixie. I eventually turned around and struck up a conversation. The kid said, “Is your dog a girl or a boy?”

“She’s a girl.” I said.

Right away, he shot back with “What do you do if she goes into heat then?”

Now, there’s an honest question! I told him that she’s spayed, so there’s no heat now. But that’s how you know you’re dealing with kids. They’re not embarrassed about a thing.

The other question I got just about floored me. Someone asked me how much longer I would have with Trixie. I looked at him and my face fell at the thought that he thought we were nearing the end together. I said I hoped to have her for another 7 or 8 years if all goes well. Then he said “Don’t you have to trade them in every two years?”

If that was the case, I’d never get a guide dog. The first year is work enough. I couldn’t imagine only having her for another year. Every day I hope that she will be with me for a long long time. I have heard so many horror stories of dogs having to retire early, and I’ve had such good luck with her that I don’t want it to balance out by her needing to retire way before she should have to.

That’s about it for now. I just thought those were neat questions, and I thought maybe other people would be asking the same ones.

Kids Are Going Down The YouTubes!

Let me get this straight. Victoria Lindsay had anger problems, she was known to mouth off, had fought with her parents and had moved in with a girl who became one of her attackers and was having problems with her, but it’s all YouTube’s and MySpace’s fault that she was beaten up by some girls and driven around for 35 minutes with a bad concussion.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a horrible, callous, cold-blooded thing they did. But whose fault is it? Theirs! I doubt YouTube will allow the videotaped brutality to stay up for long, so they’re doing their part. Besides, if the kids didn’t tape the beating to put on YouTube, they would have found some other reason to be assholes. Like hell MySpace is the antichrist for children. There are just some bad kids out there, and that’s all it is. Granted they’re getting worse, but don’t blame YouTube. Blame them, or if you must blame someone other than them, blame their families.

Parlez-Vous Français?

Remember back when I said I was going to take a conversational French class? Well, today I started it, and although we had a couple of bumps, I think dear old French teacher and I are going to get along fine.

First, let me describe my entrance to the class, because it was, well, unceremonious. I knew this place was far out in boonieville, so I took a cab. My problem was I ended up taking the cab later than I should have, so I arrived late for class. This was not the way I wanted to start off. The last thing I want to do is arrive in class late, because being late sucks, and it tends to send the teacher into unnecessary fits because she has no time to breathe and process this whole blink thing that seems to be so hard to do before class starts. But, sucks to be me, that’s what happened.

I walked into the building with the cab-driver because he was all cute and wanted to make sure I got where I was going. I asked the lady at the front desk where the French class was and she said “Hear that photocopier? That’s your teacher photocopying stuff. Go find her, she’ll show you where class is.”

So off I went with a big grin, wondering how this meet and greet was going to go. The poor woman just about died. “You’re in my class? I was not warned!” she sputtered in French. I reminded her that I spoke to her in the winter, and since I’d already missed too much, I came to this class. She breathed, calmed herself, and muttered something about not being prepared. I told her to relax and we’ll learn as we go. AT least I tried to say that. What came out was a lot of sputtering, breathing, sighing, frustrated attempts to find the words. This, boys and girls, is why I’m in this damn class.

After she showed me to a chair, and everyone ooed at the sight of my four-legged birthday beast of a Trixter, she told me how many students there were. It’s a pretty cute class, I think there are only 5 of us. I thought she said there were five others, but when I think back, I cannot remember any more than four people besides me.

Just as I was starting to settle, in charged the sleepy woman I talked about before. She was convinced that I had not paid. I told her I had, and I told her who I had spoken to. The French teacher looked at her and said “It’s ok, we’re going to give it a try.” Damn right we are, I paid the fee. Were they going to escort me out if the teacher said she didn’t want to teach me?

It’s really weird when you’re trying to skip quickly between English and French and you’re out of practice. Once you start trying to speak French, it’s hard to stop on a dime and go back to English. As soon as sleepy introduced herself, I turned around and started speaking French to her and then went “Oops sorry, you probably don’t speak French.” It’s also really hard to give English commands to Trixie while talking French. It’s a brain-twister!

I think I’m putting the teacher at ease though. I already showed her my good memory and the fact that I can speak French, it’s just rusty and dusty. I felt bad for the poor guy beside me though. We did an exercise where the teacher read an article to us and then We teamed up and we had to answer questions. He had to read stuff to me so we could work together, and I kept answering the questions before he could find the answer. The teacher was surprised I think. I attempted to tell her that learning to listen well was a necessity, because sometimes in school, the teacher would make up exercises on the fly and I wouldn’t have a copy. I think I succeeded in conveying that message. God my French sucks. I can speak simple sentences, but as soon as the message gets complicated, my mind fills with thoughts and I can’t sift through them to find the French words.

It’s going to be a neat experience. This lady’s first language is French, so she doesn’t have all the English words at her disposal that we do. So, sometimes she can’t just give us the English equivalent for a French word. She has to explain it in other ways. Or, it can go the other way. She asked us if a certain word was masculine or feminine. Someone wanted to know what that word was and asked if it meant string. The teacher said “What is string?” Would you believe that’s hard to explain? I couldn’t think of how to explain it! I kept thinking of draw-strings in your pants, but that’s not accurate. Then I thought of cords, but I didn’t want her to think electrical cords. Then I thought about things pulled by strings, but my French is so bad, I was afraid she’d think the thing being pulled by the string was the string. Aa language! How complicated it is!

I was so nervous going in. I didn’t know where I would fall on the spectrum of French-speaking ability. I fall in a pretty good spot. There is one guy who’s totally whooping my ass who also went to the Summer Language Bursary Program that I went to in 2001, only he went more recently and it shows. And there are others who have great vocabulary, but…ils ont une tray mo vez ak sont. Hopefully someone will get that. That was my attempt to phonetically spell what their accent sounded like if they said they had a bad accent in French. Anyway, I’m right smack in the middle, so I can relax and I’m not going to be laughed at by a mass of folk far superior to me in the French department.

One thing that I found to be slightly chuckle-worthy was the discovery that one of the students must wear hearing aids, and she was sitting furthest from the teacher! Now, wouldn’t hearing difficulties be a bigger impediment to a conversational French class than blindness? Just a thought. And why isn’t she sitting closest so she can hear best?

I think things are going to go well. The teacher says she’s going to email me the sheets she hands out. We’ll see if she actually does it. I’ve found someone who’s willing to drive me to class so I don’t have to pay 20 bucks a shot in cab fare, so rockin’. the teacher was actually kind of cool about this. I asked if there was anyone who lived in my area of town who wouldn’t mind meeting me somewhere and we could come together. A guy agreed to drive me, and the teacher said, “Do you trust him?” That’s a fair question. I think I do. He seems like a nice guy, and if anything goes wrong, he’s sort of screwed because I can get his whole name from the teacher, not like I’d have to, but you know what I’m saying. He’s not very anonymous.

So, hopefully by the end of the course, I’ll be able to speak French a hell of a lot better than I can right now. No matter what the outcome, it should be a fun ride.

Either Phones Are Getting Worse, Or I’m A Chronic Mumbler.

This has happened to me twice now. I ordered two different things from the states from two different companies, and I ordered them both over the phone. In both cases, when I said Guelph, they wrote down “Guelth!” I even spelled it, and they still thought my p was a t! Do I mumble that much? Both times, I got the shipping notice, saw the error, and had to call and fix it.

Ok, note to self: When ordering by phone from the states, say “P as in papa!” Leave nothing to the imagination!

Happy Birthday Dear Trixie And Company

Happy birthday to Tacoma, Tad, Talbot, Tarragon, Theda, Titan, Trooper, and of course, Trixie! It looks like, next to Trooper, Trixie got the best name of the bunch. In case you’re wondering, those are the dogs that make up Trixie’s whole litter. They were born April 9, 2005.

Hopefully this birthday will be a lot better than last years. She spent the morning of her second birthday trying to guide me when I was in bad knee pain, and then she spent the afternoon in the dorm while I was taken to urgent care and I got that crazy brace.

It’s raining right now. Hopefully that will change. I wanted to take her to a big park nearby and let her have a romp. We’ll see.

I never thought I’d be wishing my dog a happy birthday, I thought they’d never know the difference between their birthday and another day. But here I am. It’s funny what you’ll do when you get attached to your dog. I realize this has more significance for me than her, but oh well. Happy birthday, Trixter!

Matters Of The Heart

That’s just creepy. First we had the guy turned on to housework by a donated kidney from a woman. Now we have a guy who received a heart in a transplant surgery killing himself in the same way as the transplant donor did. Oh, and he married the donor’s widow too. It really makes you wonder how much stuff is governed by the brain, or if other organs have something to do with it.

Trixie Chit Chat

I think it’s time for another episode of let’s googoo and gaga about Trixie. They’re so much fun.

I’ve never written about her giant burps she lets out after eating. Some of them sound like they came out of a person! I was home for Christmas and she burped and mom looked around to see where dad or my brother came from. Now that’s a big dog burp.

If you put Trixie on a leash and walked her around Guelph, she would probably show you everywhere I go. She always makes me look like such a lush if I take her into this funky little mall we have downtown. She heads straight for the liquor store! We’ve been there before, but we’ve also been to the chocolate store, the pharmacy, the Radio Shack, er, The Source, *whatever*, the cafe, but what does she book it for? The booze! Man alive you’d think I was there all the time! She’s developing quite the memory for people we know, and their cars. She recognizes cabs, friends’ cars, buses, it’s amazing.

She’s also capable of amazing leaps of deductive reasoning. Steve’s sister came to pick us up, and I took Trixie to go pee. She watched Steve and his sister get in the car, and when it pulled up next to where she was going pee, she decided that they must be waiting for us, so she wasn’t going to poop. Silly girl.

Sometimes those leaps of reasoning are wrong, but I at least know where her mind is at so I don’t feel like her mistakes are dangerous. I was standing at a corner, and a woman in an idling car at an intersection said I could go ahead. I repeated it back to her to be sure, and we started off. Because we’d had a conversation, Trixie thought maybe I wanted to get in her car! Woops! I told her not today, and she continued on. But hey, I could see where she’d get that idea.

I knew snow would give her troubles, but I never thought she would treat mud as an obstacle to be avoided like the plague. But she did! She would stop dead and show me the mud like “No no. Don’t make us walk through that horrible stuff. No no nooo!” Silly Princess Trixie. But at least the mud is getting to be less prevalent. I love spring. Right now, I can walk outside without even a coat. This is perfect. If only it was like this all year.

I took Trixie out for a flexi on Sunday, and I forgot how much I enjoy them in the spring. I can run behind her without tripping over snow and ice! It’s just plain fun! I love watching her brain work. I think she figured out that underneath the snow, the same grass was there all along. She was sniffing at some little bits of snow and saw there was grass under there. I could have been dreaming, but I think something clicked in her lab head. She was having so much fun, even more than she had in the winter.

We were having so much fun that we, um, flexied a little too far. Trixie was romping and sniffing, sniffing and romping, when suddenly I noticed that I couldn’t hear the corner’s audible signal anymore! Woops! We were around the corner and travelling up the other street. We were safely on the inner grass, but woops! Trixie suddenly realized we were on foreign territory, because she stopped dead and started looking left and right. I eventually figured out where I was, and we made our way back, but that’s when you know you’re having fun!

I forgot how much of a perma-wag Trix gets going. She had it last year when we came home, and with the change in the weather, it made her less waggy. Now, it’s back! It’s so fun to watch! My puppy enjoys this weather as much as I do.

One thing she hasn’t done yet with this weather is do that flop and snort routine when we come home from walking somewhere. She still flops and snorts in the morning, but there’s no post-route flop snort, or sprint. Now, she just walks around the room really fast. I think she’s happy, but I really enjoyed the post-route flop snort! I hope it comes back.

That big heavy bone I got last year when I came home finally died a month or so ago. It wasn’t intimidating in the least anymore! It had just gotten very pointy at each end. Oh dear. But Autumn, my room-mate from guide dog school if you don’t remember, sent her another one and it arrived today! Heehee! Trixie just about grabbed it and ran off!

AS an aside, Autumn’s dog is having some troubles and is getting looked at by GDB vets. Let’s hope the results of tests are good. I don’t think the troubles are really serious, but they’re serious enough to get her a trip back to GDB for tests.

Wanna know something else scary? The roll of bags that I bought when I got Babs, and still had when Trixie came home, is still kickin’! It has a wabble to it now, but it is very much alive and has many many bags to go. When it finally dies, that’ll be a scary day. Yea Market Fresh roll of produce bags. You rock my world.

Next week, I take Trixie for her annual checkup! Yeah! Again, that feels special to me. That’s something I never got to do with Babs. Hopefully all the news is glowing and good. I’m going to start her on Revolution to prevent nasty parasites from biting her, because I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. Hopefully it’s easy to apply.

Oh, Steve’s little brother has competition for Trixie’s affections here in Guelph. She has fallen head over heels for The guy who came over to watch Mania with us on Sunday. My god! I don’t know what it is, but she just can’t get enough of him.

I have some thoughts that keep circling about Babs after I wrote that final journal entry. First, man did that dog get a lot of ear infections! Lord! I think she had 3 in the time I had her! Yeah, that’s what happens when you don’t get trained to clean her ears. Lab ears are prone to infections! Trixie has had 2 infections during our time together, both of which were caused when her ears would get licked by other dogs, and the alcohol-free baby wipes I was using just weren’t doing the trick. Now that I have the wipes from the vet, we’ve been ear infection free!

And man did Babs have relieving issues. I’m sure anyone who read my final Trixie training entry would have gotten to the part where I talked about how Trixie had already pooped and peed several times here in her new relieving zone and would have been like “What’s the big deal, she’s pooped and peed a few times in her new home. Woopdy friggin doo.” But if they knew Babs, they would understand. Whenever Babs was in a new place, she would not go. She wouldn’t poop, wouldn’t poop, wouldn’t poop. and then she exploded. I was lucky she held it until we got to the park.

Visiting people was a ball of fun. Barb, do you remember how many rainy evening trips we made out to your lawn hoping she would just poop already? She wouldn’t poop until the last day I was there! And then she pooped a few times unexpectedly. I remember your dad saying “don’t worry about relieving her, she already busied herself in the backyard.” Uh, um, oops.

And Babs wasn’t too good at letting me know when she had to go in an emergency. Trixie figured out that I cannot see, so if she needs to go in one heck of a hurry, she should come over to me and wack her nose into my leg or my hand. Then when I would get up, she would walk to the door. Yup, that’s straightforward, to the point, and effective! What was Babs’s I gotta go signal. She would sniff my coat! No sir, that would not get my attention. I was just lucky mom was still there when she did that.

And let me say again that I was a fool with Babs. I would think nothing of taking her down completely new routes a couple of days after coming home, expecting her to just know what to do, even if I didn’t. Ooo there were some really really dumb crossings I did where I didn’t line up right, and I just thought she’d fix it. Oh boy no she didn’t, and we had to be rescued! It was bad, bad times. Soon Babs learned that I hadn’t a clue, and started exploiting that, dragging me towards food and anything else she could scavenge. Oh the lessons I had to learn. Sure, you can go on new routes eventually, but that comes with time. AT first, you have to do the tried and true so that you know you can trust her and she knows what you expect. Then you can go exploring.

I think that’s about it for another episode. I’m sure I’ll be back sooner than later. Tomorrow is The Trixter’s birthday, and next Tuesday, we will have been home one year. What a year. What a learning process.

Smile! You’re On Useless Camera!

A new study on the effectiveness of security cameras in San Francisco has come to the obvious conclusion that, no, the things do not in fact work. The only thing accomplished by the spying is that some of the crime that used to take place in camera range now takes place a few hundred feet away, out of range of the cameras. Even funnier is that this mostly applies to murders, while rates of various types of theft were largely unchanged.

But leave it to politicians to come up with a reason why we not only need the existing cameras, but should go ahead and install a few more.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom says that in spite of the report, the cameras are a good idea because even though they don’t really do shit, they, wait for it, make people feel safer.

“When I put the first cameras in, I said, ‘This may only move people around the corner,’ ” he said. “But the community there said, ‘We don’t care, we want our alleyway back.’ No one’s actually had a camera up that they wanted torn down in the community.”

Ug.

With leadership like this, is it any wonder why the
story
also notes that the city is facing one of the largest budget deficits its had in a number of years?

Reworking Errors

I thought I’d try and explain something that I’m sure looks weird if you saw it and didn’t know what the hell was going on. Have you ever seen a guide dog team cross the same street a few times? Have you wondered why in hell they just keep going back and forth over the same street? Your first thought might be that the person is lost. That might be the case, or they could be reworking an error, and that’s what I want to explain.

When a guide dog makes a mistake, it’s not a good idea to gloss over it and just keep going on your merry way. If you do that, the dog may think that what they just did is perfectly fine, and they can feel free to do it again. If at all possible, you should stop, go back, and make sure that whatever they just did, they don’t do again, and they do the right thing. This is called reworking an error. So, if you get smacked into a pole, you should bring the dog back, show the pole to them, and get them to walk past it again and not hit it. If you hit it again, you go back and do it again. When you walk past it without meeting it with a ker smack, you praise your dog!

The same is true of a street crossing. If you cross the street and come up on the other side in a weird spot and not where you should come up, you need to turn around, find the corner, cross over to the side where you just came from, and cross it again until you come up where you should. Does that make sense?

to the person who doesn’t know what we’re doing, it must look completely ridiculous, especially when I’m choosing to cross a very busy street repeatedly. People must think I have a death wish.

The other day, Trixie had a very confused day. I think it was because the snow had melted, and she was trying to avoid phantom snowbanks. It was kind of funny. One of the side-effects of this was she kept crossing this one street crookedly. We would come up far to the left of the curb, standing in some grass.

Somebody saw me crossing and crossing and crossing. She kept asking me where I was trying to go. Try as I might, I could not explain the concept of reworking to her. Every time I tried, she would cut me off with “Yeah, but where are you trying to go?” At this point, the destination is irrelevant. I’m just trying to get across this street straight! She was the one I asked to stand in the same spot so I could cross, turn around, and cross again and know we were on the right track. Her response was to wish me luck and take off.

So the next time you see a guide dog team crossing the same street over and over, feel free to ask the person if they need help. If the person says no, ask if they’re reworking a crossing, and you just might make someone’s day because you’re one of very few people who get it!