It's been a while, I know.

Happy New 2011!

In the year(s) that have gone by, my son has turned 13 years old, and I've turned 2 years older. I guess I've got some catching up to do!

I thought it was time for a fresh start, so I decided to "re-design" my webpage by simply adding a template. What do you think?

This blog has been "inactive" for 2 years because my inspirations have been far and between. I can only count 3 instances I felt worthy to post on my blog in the past two years. But I never posted them. That's it. That's why my blog has been so "slow" for the past 2 years. "Slow" is the understatement of the past 2 years! I'll try to remember those three "inspirations" sometime soon. I probably won't remember them all.

One bad thing about becoming older, I seem to forget things more often lately. Heh. We'll see how long I can keep this up. My motivation's been flagging lately, I know. Yes, it's been flagging for over 2 years. Heh. That's life sometimes!

Barack Obama's Video Message

I guess Barack Obama, our President-Elect, is now a vlogger! But... I can't find a captioned version of this... I guess we'd have to wait for the captioned radio, right? Ha ha. *wry chuckle*

A link to his video is here: http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/your_weekly_address_from_the_president_elect/

I see that it has a transcript below, but it'd require me to scroll down, and the video goes away. I want to WATCH AND READ at the same time, like captioned TV. I see it's also available on AOL, Yahoo, and MSN. But do you want to bet a dollar that NONE of these have captions? I want to have the option to toggle between captions and no captions, like abc.com, and a few selected Google videos, and Project Read-On.

Do any one of you know where we can watch a captioned version of this weekly video message?

Whoa, what changed?!?

Guess what?!? ABC.com now has CLOSED-CAPTIONED full episodes! This is beautiful! I no longer have to miss Ugly Betty, or Pushing Daisies. They're all closed-captioned on abc.com! I wanted to watch Ugly Betty last Thursday but I missed it because the captions were not showing up on the TV! Now, the latest full episode of Ugly Betty is on abc.com, and it's closed captioned! OK, I should go watch it!

To watch abc.com episodes with captions - go into settings and click on radio button for captions on.

Enjoy!

Update: Some, but not many, captions disappear from time to time. Doesn't take away from the main story, though. It can get a bit annoying, though.

I have to say kudos to ABC.com for making all of the full episodes closed-captioned. Now, how do we thank them?

Update II: My So-Called Life episodes are NOT closed-captioned (it's from the 1990s, after all), neither is Jimmy Kimmel Live. But the newer shows are all closed-captioned.

I've now become a BIG FAN of will.i.am...

He's made such great videos! And a BIG THANK YOU to BILL CRESWELL, the WEB Caption Guy, for captioning BOTH Videos of will.i.am - "Yes We Can" and "It's a New Day". I just love these videos, especially now that they're subtitled by the great guy, Bill Creswell.

I happened to catch "It's a New Day" and will.i.am live and closed-captioned on Oprah this past Friday and LOVED it. I'm very glad to see that Bill Creswell got it subtitled already!

Bill's homepage:

http://billcreswell.com/

Direct links to videos:

http://vodpod.com/watch/522468-yes-we-can-subtitled-video?pod=billc

http://vodpod.com/watch/1154203-its-a-new-day-will-i-am?mp=1&pod=billc

What did I tell ya?!? (A post about Obama)

If you go through my previous posts, I made a post on March 5th about a dream I had on March 4th - that Obama was the President of the U.S. What did I tell ya?!? :-)

This is truly history in the making! And, whoo! Virginia became BLUE! First time since 1968! I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia, so I'm very happy to see that. Lots of history being made today!

Cheers!

A new term for hearing kids of deaf adults...

Just a very brief note. My son just coined a new term - TODA. He says he's a TODA - Teenager of Deaf Adults. Too funny. Except that he's not a Teenager yet, but he can still use TODA for himself, because he's a TWEENER! :-D

Too funny...

Has anyone ever heard the term TODA before?

Comcast again...

Well, I've been busy... Well, Comcast is raising the price for internet access $10 a month! It's going from $50 a month to $60 a month. My paltry budget can't stomach that, so I'm switching to a DSL. Plus, I'm voting with my money. I refuse to pay a $10 increase. Wish me luck on the DSL.

I was also thinking about writing to my local phone company to ask if I could only pay for one phone line instead of two, as I have a CapTel at home, and my mother is too lazy to call the special 800 number before calling my home phone. For more information, see http://www.captionedtelephone.com/2line-captel.php (Great, it says optional, it's not required. But for me it's required. If it weren't for the 2 phone lines, I'd be stuck with my mom on a regular phone and I'd keep saying "huh"? "huh?", frustrating both my mom and I.) Anyway, I might petition my phone company to ask them to let me only pay for one phone line - one line is for outgoing calls only and the other one is for incoming calls only, anyways. Why pay for 2? If anything, I should probably only pay for 1 1/2 phone line!

I'm also going to ask my DSL provider to let me have free internet, as it's REQUIRED for me to be able to use the VideoPhone, and being able to surf the internet and check your email is just a bonus *wink* Why not? It's worth a try! :-)

Anything to save a buck, what with the very tight finances I have right now...

Supernanny

Sorry for not writing in a long time. I've had lots of things going on, including recovering from a very bad cold.

So, I am deaf, and I have an 11-year-old hearing son.

I told my son about the Supernanny deaf parents with hearing children episode, and he was very eager to watch it with me. Last evening was very pleasant. This episode gave my son and I an opportunity to talk about communication in our family.

My kid is perfectly normal. I was worried that he was a bit behind in ASL because I do quite a bit of talking (have to - my entire family is hearing, and I work in a hearing environment.), but I was relieved that he's not behind at all. If anything, he knows plenty of sign language for his age. I really identified myself with the parents. I was surprised at that, but also relieved that I was not the only one. I was impressed with the Supernanny's insistence in that the kids learn sign language. If you don't have communication, you don't have anything. Of course I knew that 90% of deaf parents have hearing kids, but I thought it was a nice tidbit of knowledge, a great educational bit of information for the hearing audience.

I offered to send my kid to sign language classes, but in his typical 'tween boy attitude, he's like, "eh, I don't think so." At least he knows enough fingerspelling to communicate with me.

My son and I talked about the fact that the three girls were taking advantage of the parents' deafness. I told him that I thought he was taking advantage of my deafness last year, and he was like, "nah, I did not". (We went through family counseling last year, and it really helped a lot).

Anyway, even though sometimes I think that my kid can be really bratty at times, he's still a good kid. And I'm glad that he always wants to go to deaf events with me, etc. That's embracing his deaf culture :-) I take him everywhere with me wherever there's a deaf event. If I ever went on a Deaf Cruise, I'd take him with me to that one too!

I'm sure these are not my only thoughts on the Supernanny episode, but I need to sleep on things and get back to you. I'll edit this post until I'm happy with it.

Thanks for reading!

Comcast putting cap on bandwith

I just found out today that Comcast will cap bandwidth usage. Comcast is my internet provider. I wonder how that will affect my Sorenson videophone (VP)? Do I draw enough bandwidth to have to pay overage fees? I hope not. I think that Comcast's bandwidth limit is unconstitutional and a violation against the ADA - after all, the VP depends on a high speed internet connection... What about US? Those who depend on videophones, etc.

I wonder if I should go over to DSL... My DSL provider is Embarq. Not sure if Embarq is good... How I wish I had Verizon FIOS in my area! But alas, this is a small town... We're not important...

Is there a way to figure out how much bandwidth is actually used when using the VP?