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If I want to make a phone call, I have to go through a relay operator since I am deaf. Sometimes it works if the person I am calling is someone who knows me, but if I have to call a business or make a doctor’s appointment, the person answering the phone often gets confused and hangs up, thinking I am a telemarketer or a spammer. I’m not sure if the problem lies in that people simply don’t understand this is a deaf person calling through a relay operator, or if the relay operator is doing a poor job explaining the service to them during the introductory call. Either way, it is frustrating as hell, and I often choose businesses that have online ordering or email over businesses that don’t so I can avoid having to use a relay operator as much as possible. All of my doctors have online appointment schedulers and my hair stylist & manicurist have email access.
Today was special. I want to make bœuf bourguignon tonight, and I need a solid block of bacon to make lardons from. I wanted to call three butcher shops in San Francisco; Guerra’s, Avedano’s, and Bryan’s. Since they’re all spread far apart and I am relying on pubic transportation, I wanted to call first instead of spending a chunk of my day visiting them in person to see if they have them. Well, I never got to find out if either butcher has what I need, because they all hung up on me before I could ask. Below is my transcript of my call with Guerra’s. As you can see, they hung up on me three times. This is nothing new. I deal with this sort of thing almost every single time I call a business.
I can’t live like this anymore. If someone can tell me how and what I need to do to fix the broken relay system, I will do it. I don’t like whining and complaining. I would like to fix this.
11:07:03 AM Kathryn Hill: call 415-564-0585 ga
11:07:14 AM 711 Relay: Connecting to relay center… to disconnect, type HANGUP or SKSK.
11:07:17 AM 711 Relay: Connected at 2:07pm EST on Thursday, December 10, 2009
11:07:19 AM 711 Relay: Hello! i711.com CA#90003M
11:07:19 AM 711 Relay: THK U DIALING
11:07:22 AM 711 Relay: 415 564 0585
11:07:31 AM 711 Relay: RINGING 1…
11:07:37 AM 711 Relay: (AUTOMATED SYSTEM)
11:07:53 AM 711 Relay: thank you for calling guerra’s
11:07:55 AM 711 Relay: (recording to relay)
11:08:44 AM 711 Relay: holiday hours for christmas week
11:08:48 AM 711 Relay: are as follows monday december
11:08:55 AM 711 Relay: 21st through wednesday december 23rd
11:09:02 AM 711 Relay: are
11:09:06 AM 711 Relay: from
11:09:11 AM 711 Relay: (garbled message) thursday december 24th christmas eve
11:09:19 AM 711 Relay: are from 9am to 4pm and closed
11:09:23 AM 711 Relay: christmas day our location is
11:09:31 AM 711 Relay: on the corner of 15th and taraville
11:09:42 AM 711 Relay: and we are now accepting holiday orders
11:09:46 AM 711 Relay: for christmas to speak to someone or to
11:09:55 AM 711 Relay: place an order please press
11:09:56 AM 711 Relay: 0 happy holidays thank you GA
11:10:01 AM Kathryn Hill: 0 ga
11:10:10 AM 711 Relay: (pressing 0)
11:10:35 AM 711 Relay: please hold while i transfer you
11:10:35 AM 711 Relay: (ON HOLD)
11:10:37 AM 711 Relay: (advertisement)
11:10:37 AM 711 Relay: (M)
11:10:39 AM 711 Relay: (INTRO CALL PLS HLD)
11:11:12 AM Kathryn Hill: hello I am making lardons and I need a block of uncut solid bacon do you have this q ga
11:11:18 AM 711 Relay: hello this is john can i help you qq
11:11:18 AM 711 Relay: (CALLED PARTY HAS HUNG UP)
11:11:18 AM 711 Relay: (ANOTHER CALL Q GA)
11:11:34 AM Kathryn Hill: redial and tell them I am a customer with a question ga
11:11:43 AM 711 Relay: (thank you redialing please hold)
11:11:53 AM 711 Relay: RINGING 1…
11:11:55 AM 711 Relay: (AUTOMATED SYSTEM)
11:11:59 AM 711 Relay: thank you for calling guerra’s
11:12:05 AM 711 Relay: (navigating to a live person)
11:12:27 AM 711 Relay: (ON HOLD)
11:12:32 AM 711 Relay: (advertisement)
11:12:38 AM 711 Relay: (M)
11:12:38 AM 711 Relay: (INTRO CALL PLS HLD)
11:12:42 AM 711 Relay: (relaying instructions)
11:12:58 AM 711 Relay: (EXPLAINING RELAY)
11:13:13 AM Kathryn Hill: please don’t hang up I have a meat question ga
11:13:32 AM 711 Relay: hello this is robert (too fast)
11:13:34 AM 711 Relay: (sounds hurried)
11:13:34 AM 711 Relay: (CALLED PARTY HAS HUNG UP)
11:13:34 AM 711 Relay: (ANOTHER CALL Q GA)
11:13:42 AM Kathryn Hill: nooo
11:13:47 AM Kathryn Hill: why are they hanging up
11:13:49 AM Kathryn Hill: redial ga
11:14:00 AM 711 Relay: (thank you redialing please hold)
11:14:08 AM 711 Relay: RINGING 1…
11:14:14 AM 711 Relay: (AUTOMATED SYSTEM)
11:14:22 AM 711 Relay: thank you for calling guerra’s
11:14:24 AM 711 Relay: (recording to relay)
11:15:05 AM 711 Relay: holiday hours for christmas week as follows
11:15:11 AM 711 Relay: monday
11:15:12 AM 711 Relay: december 21st through wednesday
11:15:18 AM 711 Relay: december 23rd are from
11:15:23 AM 711 Relay: 9am to 7pm thursday december 24th
11:15:29 AM 711 Relay: christmas
11:15:36 AM 711 Relay: eve are from 9am to 4pm and closed
11:15:42 AM 711 Relay: christmas day our location is on the
11:15:50 AM 711 Relay: corner of 15th and taraville and
11:16:00 AM 711 Relay: we are now accepting
11:16:02 AM 711 Relay: holiday orders for christmas to speak to someone or
11:16:12 AM 711 Relay: to place an order please press
11:16:16 AM 711 Relay: 0 happy holidays thank you GA
11:16:43 AM Kathryn Hill: 0 ga
11:16:50 AM 711 Relay: (pressing 0)
11:16:54 AM 711 Relay: RINGING 1…
11:17:00 AM 711 Relay: xxx
11:17:10 AM 711 Relay: please hold while i transfer you
11:17:10 AM 711 Relay: (ON HOLD)
11:17:12 AM 711 Relay: (music playing)
11:17:23 AM 711 Relay: (M)
11:17:25 AM 711 Relay: (INTRO CALL PLS HLD)
11:17:41 AM 711 Relay: hello this is robert
11:17:43 AM 711 Relay: (CALLED PARTY HAS HUNG UP)
11:17:43 AM 711 Relay: (ANOTHER CALL Q GA)
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I remember the day the Berlin Wall came down. I was 17, it was my junior year of high school, and I was doing my homework when my father came in the room and told me to come watch the news with him.
I sat transfixed for hours watching the graffiti-covered concrete slabs come down, illuminated by camera flashes. I still remember all the people dancing and celebrating, and the ones reaching through holes in the wall to connect with people on the other side. Some people were hacking at the Wall with sledgehammers. I remember feeling a little bit scared for them. I was worried that at any minute the East German guards would change their minds and say “never mind, you can’t have this” and start shooting people. I don’t think it really sunk in that this was happening and there would be no turning back. It was all happening so fast.
The next day, Peter Jennings was standing on the Wall surrounded by happy people. He reached in the pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a chunk of the Wall that someone had given him.
My friend Claudia was living in Berlin at the time and wrote me long letters describing the atmosphere in Berlin. I think I might still have these letters somewhere. She talked about the general celebratory mood that hung over the city for weeks, and about how the subways and shops were crowded.
1989 was an exciting year in history – there was so much change happening in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. At the end of the year, Bush and Gorbachev declared the Cold War to be over. People of my generation were still students at the time – this gave us an unique perspective on what was happening in the world. Only a year earlier in World History classes we’d learned all about the Eastern Bloc countries. I wrote a term paper that year comparing and contrasting socialism, capitalism, and communism. A year later, everything changed – governments, borders, maps. The books had to be rewritten. How many generations get to witness this kind of history?
I can’t believe it’s been twenty years, either. It doesn’t seem like that long ago.
If you have a Twitter, consider posting a message to the Berlin Wall Twitter. (I’m KathrynLHill on Twitter.)
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My collection of Gourmet cookbooks
Wow, I am really bummed about the news of Gourmet Magazine shutting down. My mother was a subscriber in the 70’s & 80’s and archived every single copy. I spent many rainy days sitting in the den reading them as a child, along with my father’s National Geographics. And my parents wonder how I grew up to be a foodie and a traveler. Duh.
At some point, the magazines got tossed out. I managed to inherit four of her Gourmet cookbooks, which I use.
Gourmet was a big influence on me in finding the path to cooking, traveling, and Francophilia. In the older versions of the magazine, the photographs were simple, used natural light, and showed off the food and locations beautifully.
I have vivid memories of flipping through photographs of wicker baskets of radishes, wooden boxes of wine grapes, live Toulouse geese, and women shopping with wicker baskets at open-air markets in France. And other simple images that just captured France beautifully – a woman walking down the street with a baguette tucked under her arm, two men sitting at a cafe table, drinking wine and laughing, and a man wearing a beret and sniffing a truffle.
When I started traveling to France in the late 80’s I happily found the France that I had read about in Gourmet. My timing was auspicious; nowadays most of those charming wood and wicker baskets have been replaced with ugly plastic bins and the wicker shopping baskets are now plastic bags. France has changed before my eyes in the last two decades; since that initial trip in 1989, I’ve returned almost annually. But if you know where to look, you can still see the same timeless images that Gourmet printed forty or fifty years ago.
Thanks for all the gifts you gave me, Gourmet.
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Friends who know I use a T-Mobile Sidekick have been asking me all weekend if I backed up my data in light of this, um, snafu over at Microsoft/Danger recently. (Snafu is putting it mildly.)
Allow me to answer the question of “why are you still using a Sidekick?“ Yes, Valleywag, people still use Sidekicks. I know the SK is not the flashiest or coolest phone out there, and yes, the web browser is crappy, but it’s a very, very good workhorse for someone like me that types a lot and switches between applications constantly. The keyboard shortcuts to switch between apps are great – you just hit the JUMP button + B for Browser, Jump + E for email, Jump + S for SMS, etc. No having to go to a main menu, then scrolling to find the icon the the app, and then pushing it. The UI design kicks other phones out of the water – I can type faster on the Sidekick than on any other phone. (By the way, in case you’re a new reader, I am deaf. The Sidekick has been popular among the deaf community since its inception.)
I haven’t been able to find a comparable smartphone that has:
- Tactile QWERTY keyboard – a must! You can even do numbers and special characters RIGHT THERE without having to switch to another virtual keyboard like on the iPhone.
- Easy gripping of device while typing with thumbs
- Various IM clients (AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger – I need these. Would have liked Google Talk on the SK but was willing to live without it.)
- POP/IMAP email – can have 3 accounts
- Programs continue running in background
- Can easily swap between programs with keyboard shortcuts
This article says it best:
“The first thing everyone noticed about the Sidekick is the way the screen flipped up to reveal the best keyboard made on any phone (to this day, I am still faster on Sidekick keyboards than I am on any other devices except – maybe – a full computer keyboard). The original OS had some great functionality, but a few things set it apart from anything that had been done before.
AIM – this was the first phone that did Instant Messaging well (and had push messages!). To this day, no other phone including the iPhone is as effective at AIM as the Sidekick was. They later added support for Yahoo and MSN IMs.
SMS – with the great QWERTY keyboard, this was an effective means of communications. No guessing or autofill, you could turn out a message in a few seconds without a second thought.”
Plus, there was the service cost. I started as a T-Mobile customer in 2002, and got the Sidekick Data-Only Plan which was popular among the deaf community because it was $29.99/month for unlimited data service and no phone minutes. We’re deaf. Why should we pay for phone minutes that we can’t use? I started out with the first Sidekick, the B&W one, then when my contract expired, I moved up to the Color, then the Sidekick II, and now I have the LX. Through four Sidekick versions, I kept my $29.99/mo data-only plan – I was grandfathered into it. T-Mobile offers the data-only plan only on the Sidekicks, and today’s version is $54.99/mo. AT&T has a similar plan for some phones at $40/mo, Sprint does the same with some phones for $29.95/mo, and Verizon has some data-only plans for select phones and with different prices. I’m not certain why all cell carriers don’t just offer a deaf-friendly data-only plan on all their phones. This limits my choice of smartphones; I called T-Mobile to inquire whether I could get a data-only plan on the G1 or the MyTouch. Their reply? “No, ma’am.”
Anyway, back to the Danger/Microsoft clusterf&ck.
This all started last weekend. Around Friday, October 2nd, I noticed that my data coverage had dropped. “Big deal,” I thought. I couldn’t access the Web, email, or IM, but I could still SMS. It was good. By Saturday, it was weird that it was still going on. On Sunday, I was getting a little annoyed. I mean, c’mon, guys. A 2-day outage of data services?
Everything seemed to return on Monday afternoon when I finally saw that familiar “G” in the top right of my screen signifying data service. I didn’t really notice anything amiss, apart from the fact that my emails wouldn’t send out. By Tuesday, everything seemed back to normal.
Friday night, October 9th, I was at dinner with friends and my Sidekick LX just shut off. I’m not sure what happened. I was using it, I paused to talk to someone, and when I went back to it, it was black. I powered it back up and all seemed well. Partway through dinner, someone asked me for a restaurant recommendation in Barcelona, and I had the restaurant information at home, so I sent myself an email from my Sidekick reminding me to look it up when I got home. When I started the new email, I typed in my name expecting it to auto-fill in my address, and it didn’t. It didn’t find “Kathryn Hill” anywhere. I checked my address book, and I was gone. Deleted from my own phone. Gasp! I double-checked my other addresses; I’m not sure how many I had total, but I still had 218 contacts. Um, I guess that’s all of them? I still had my photos, my Notes, my emails, and my messages, so I shrugged it off.
Saturday when the reports started pouring in about Sidekick users losing their data permanently, I realized I was pretty damn lucky. I just lost myself out of my own address book.
I’m not sure what this means for the future. There is a lot of speculation that the Sidekick is in its death throes and that the purchase of the Danger platform (the company that builds the Sidekick) by Microsoft two years ago was the beginning of the end. While I’ve been a faithful Sidekick customer since 2002, I admit I’ve felt ambivalent about the last few Sidekick versions – what, no video? No GPS? No GTalk? No improvement of the screen resolution? And you took away the Terminal Client?
So, just in case the Sidekick goes tits-up, I’m starting to check around and see what my other options are. I’ve only started researching, but my very first smartphone was a Nokia Communicator while I lived in Italy from 1999-2000, and I liked it very much. I’m curious to check out the newest Nokia Communicator, the E90. Also, the Nokia N900 looks pretty intriguing; it’s got a combination touchscreen/QWERTY keyboard. Problem is, I’m not sure which carriers support these phones, and the plans will probably be a lot more expensive than my current one.
Thanks, Microsoft, for screwing this all up.
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In the last 2 episodes of Mad Men, S3E5 (The Fog) and S3E6 (Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency) the captions were so bad that I couldn’t follow them. I tried Subscene and DivX Subtitles but can’t find the subtitle files for these episodes.
Basically, the problem with the captions was, for every 5 lines of captions, only one line was visible.
I have an iPod Touch. I checked iTunes. iTunes is CC compatible – CC can be displayed on it (and on the iTouch) and there is CC available for some shows on iTunes, but CC is not available for any of the Mad Men episodes on iTunes.
I’m at a loss as to what else to do.
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One of my favorite Neruda poems, I read it while I was living in Italy.
Turqoise, I love you
as if you were my girlfriend
as if you were mine:
you are everywhere:
you are just washed,
just recently sky blue,
just fallen from above:
you are the sky’s eyes:
you slice through the surface
of the shop, of the air:
blue almond:
sky talon:
bride.
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I watched the “San Francisco” episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations the other night. I thought I’d jot down my thoughts.
It was a bit strange watching this episode. Most of the other episodes have been in locales I haven’t lived in or visited, and it was quite a gear switch to be watching Tony on my home turf.
Tony visited some good places, but I was surprised he visited some other places that I consider mediocre. However, opinions on food are subjective, so I can’t say with affirmation that there is right or wrong here. I was also a bit amazed he didn’t visit other places I thought he would or should. In retrospect, I am placated that he missed some really good places, because that means they’ll stay good. Few things kill a good bar or restaurant more than a cameo in a television show.
I noticed he had martinis at not one, but three different places during the course of the show. That was a bit of a let-down for me, because San Francisco is such a revolutionary cocktail town – where’s the diversity in the cocktails? OK, so he had some lychee martinis at R&G Lounge, but of all the cocktail offerings in San Francisco, why lychee martinis? And Tony, you were less than a hour from the most popular wine country in the US and you didn’t go to one wine bar?
There was something quite “off” about Tony in this episode, I thought. He didn’t seem as into the whole thing this time. Who knows, maybe he was tired, maybe he was bored, maybe he didn’t want to exploit all of San Francisco’s true secrets, or maybe it was all the martinis and the sandwich as big as Giada de Laurentiis’ head.
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I’ve attended the Burning Man festival in Nevada many times; in fact, I am a volunteer Black Rock Ranger. It’s been a truly memorable experience that I recall fondly. One of the things about Burning Man that makes it special is the freedom of self-expression in an environment that is sans arrêt (without judgment.)
As someone who tried to make a living as a professional photographer at one point, I’m pretty adamant about protecting my photo copyrights. Burning Man’s draconian and hypocritical photography rules have always left a bad taste in my mouth.
This past week, the EFF called out Burning Man on their photography rules and Burning Man defended itself. Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for the issue to get this much attention; I’ve been aware of it for years, and Jamie Zawinski has me beat; he figured it out in 2001.
While I realize the policy is to protect the attendants of the event from having their private affairs publicized, it’s a slippery slope. The same entity that promises they’re protecting us is also imploring that we cede a valid right to them. These two things are in direct conflict with each other.
BM isn’t using these rigorous rules to only halt non-consensual exploitation; they are also using these rules to enable them to use these photographs for commercial use, royalty-free. And I am not okay with that.
Yes, we should ask first before we photograph people. Yes, we should not be leering assholes who take photographs of naked women without their consent and then plaster them all over the internet. But that also doesn’t give Burning Man carte blanche to dismantle the rights of legitimate photographers and journalists, or to control how the myriad of visual chronologies of the event are presented. The same organization that promotes freedom of speech and expression shoots itself in the foot when it seeks to control and censor innocuous mementos and journalistic integrity.
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Squirrel Crasher Remix
I am having way too much fun with the Squirrel Crasher meme. (Yes, that’s me in the background, sailing in the San Francisco Bay. I have good friends with boats.)
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Lately, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to HR 3101, which was introduced into the House at the end of June by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA.) Full text of the bill can be read here.
This bill is aimed at providing accessibility to people with various disabilities. I only know what it’s like to be deaf, and not blind or autistic, so I can only tell my own story of why I support HR 3101.
I remember when closed captions first became available on television. I was about 6 or 7 years old when my parents bought a caption decoder for our television, and the first shows I was able to watch were Sesame Street and the evening news. I was too old for Sesame Street, but it was one of the few captioned shows available at the time, and I was happy to be able to watch something on TV with my family and my friends. As time went by, more and more TV shows became captioned. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. Among many things, it required that all televisions built after October 1993 have closed caption chips in them. All commercial and emergency broadcasts must be closed captioned now. It also brought into effect the Telecommunications Relay Services.
As technology evolves and new tools emerge, there is very little regulation ensuring that they will be accessible. Faster, cheaper broadband access is helping to move media onto the Internet. The world has changed progressively since I was a kid. The way we learn, interact, and conduct business today is vastly different than it was for my parents.
It’s not just about watching television for entertainment, though. Sure, while I’d appreciate being able to watch shows on Hulu or movies on Netflix or any other myriad of online video systems, there’s so much more involved here. Many educational institutions offer online degree programs and distance learning. More and more businesses are encouraging their employees to telecommute, and are hosting online meetings over Internet protocols. Ensuring that these online lectures and meetings are captioned means that I and other deaf people don’t get left out of the loop. The bill also aims to provide more hearing aid compatibility support and real-time text support for emergency services. It is not limited to these technologies and is written in a way that it will expand to include future technologies.
In short, everyone has the right to have equal access to these new technologies, and HR 3101 will make sure those with disabilities have equal access to Internet-based and digital communication technologies now and in the future.
Positions (taken from Caption Action 2):
1. Get 21st Century Communications & Video Accessibility Act of 2009 passed! See Action Alert under Discussion Board. Write Congress! Deadline: Jan 2011
2. Captioning for the deaf and Video Description for the blind & visually impaired on the Internet is inadequate.
3. Deaf and Hard of Hearing People are being left out.
4. The technology exists to caption on the Internet.
5. Captioning also benefits hearing children learning to read and hearing adults learning English.
2. Captioning for the deaf and Video Description for the blind & visually impaired on the Internet is inadequate.
3. Deaf and Hard of Hearing People are being left out.
4. The technology exists to caption on the Internet.
5. Captioning also benefits hearing children learning to read and hearing adults learning English.
How can you help? (via NAD.org)
1. Find your U.S. Representative. You can call, mail, and fax in support of H.R. 3101 to your Representative.
2. Find your two U.S. Senators. You can use the contact list at the link to call, e-mail, and click on their home pages to send faxes as well.
3. You can ask these offices when your Member of Congress will be in town holding a district event so you can go there in person to lobby in favor of H.R. 3101. In-person visits to your elected official can be very valuable. This brings the message home about H.R. 3101 and lets your elected official know how much you care about H.R. 3101.
4. Become familiar with what H.R. 3101 does, and what it would do for the deaf and hard of hearing community in America, so that you sound knowledgeable about the legislation when you write e-mails, letters, or faxes in support of it. You can check out the bill text at Thomas, which is a website that has all of the bills that are introduced in each Congress. You can also read a summary of each of the issues addressed by the bill at www.COATaccess.org (see the list of COAT Issues).
5. You can sign the petition being circulated by COAT, the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology, in support of H.R. 3101.
6. You can join Facebook groups such as this one in support of Internet captioning, and promote efforts to make more people aware about H.R. 3101, and why we need to pass it in the 111th Congress. You can also look for blogs such as Caption Action 2, which is run by Jamie Berke and others, on this issue.
FAQ:
Q: “YouTube? How will that work? Also what is “the internet” do they intend to include all the Chinese, British, French & etc. sites too?”
Q: “Just wondering about the details. Do I have to CC a video if I want to upload it?”
A: The law would include any U.S.-run sites. HR 3101 doesn’t require captions on consumer generated videos on the Internet (i.e., individuals who post videos on YouTube).
Text taken from Rosaline Crawford at the National Association for the Deaf (NAD): “H.R. 3101 adds a definition for television video programming to include programming distributed over the Internet. H.R. 3101 tasks the FCC with creating captioning rules for three types of programming: (1) pre-produced programming that was previously captioned for television viewing, (2) live video programming, and (3) new programming provided by or generally considered to be comparable to programming provided by multichannel programming distributors (such as cable or satellite subscription TV services). This section is intended to ensure the continued accessibility of television video programming, as this programming migrates to the Internet. For example, with authority under H.R. 3101, the new FCC rules would likely cover ABC television programs that were captioned when shown on TV, live ABC programs, and new ABC programs that are shown on the Internet.”
HR 3101 is currently in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce where it is competiting against thousands of other bills for attention. The current Congress (111th) will end in 2011, and if HR 3101 doesn’t pass before that, it will have to be reintroduced.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope you’ll show your support for HR 3101.
