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Hulu recently announced that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report will no longer be streaming on Hulu.com, along with other Comedy Central shows. Viewers have been encouraged to watch TDS and TCR over at their respective sites, TheDailyShow.com and ColbertNation.com.
I preferred watching TDS and TCR on Hulu.com because the closed captions on Hulu were much better than the network captions on Comedy Central via my satellite provider, DirecTV. The network captions contained a lot of spelling errors, missing words, and were often lagging 10 to 30 seconds behind, so most of the jokes fell flat. Hulu’s captions were timed perfectly and were more accurate.
Unfortunately, the shows on TheDailyShow.com and ColbertNation.com do not have closed captions. While I understand why Comedy Central might not want to compete with Hulu for viewers and advertisers, I hope they won’t cut off the deaf fans of TDS and TCR. I hope that someone working for these shows will see this post and implement closed captions on the videos posted to TheDailyShow.com and ColbertNation.com.
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I’m pretty careful about what I put on the Internet, or at least I try to be. But sometimes the sites we’re relying on to keep our secrets change the rules without telling us.
I’ve had my Facebook profile set up in a way that only people I’ve friended can see my photos and profile information. I have the “photos of me tagged by others” setting set up so that only I see them. I also had my “Recent Activity” set up so that anything I did on Facebook – whether I “liked” someone’s status update, commented on a photo or a Wall, joined a group, or became a fan of something, it remained private and wasn’t broadcast to everyone. But today I discovered that Facebook removed the privacy setting that enabled users to prevent their “Recent Activity” from being exposed to the world. Apparently they did this months ago, and I only discovered it today. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg already discussed this and defended his decision to remove the privacy settings. I confess, I’m a bit behind in my tech blog reading. It’s been a busy couple of months.
Why is this a big deal? Let me walk you through it.
Let’s say you’re friends with Steven and Christine (fictional people) on Facebook, but they don’t know each other. If you comment on a photo that Christine posts, it shows up on Steven’s news feed. Steven can see Christine’s photo on his news feed, even though they aren’t friended. OK, let’s say Steven is a pedophile and you have absolutely no idea of this fact, and Christine posted a picture of their daughter. Through his Facebook news feed, Steven the pedophile becomes aware of this child, and clicks through the photos and Christine’s profile, discovers they live in the same town, discovers which park Christine takes her daughter to, and starts stalking them. Of course, this is a made-up scenario, but it could happen rather easily. If you’re posting pictures on Facebook, don’t you want the security of knowing that you can control who is seeing them?
Well, you can control this bit.
1. In the top right corner of your Facebook, click “Account”
2. Click “Privacy Settings”
3. Click “Profile Information”
4. Scroll down to “Photo Albums” and click “Edit Settings”
5. Set your profile pictures and your albums to whatever you want – mine are set to “Only Friends.” You can also create custom settings where you can exclude individuals or friends lists.
6. When you’re done click “Save Settings” at the bottom.
The catch with this is, everyone has to do this. If someone decides they don’t care who sees their photos and leaves them on the default public settings, then if you comment on their photos, their photo and your comment will show up in all of your friends’ News Feeds. So before you comment on that photo of you and Joe holding the gorilla-shaped bong with “Oh man, I can’t remember much of what happened last night, that was awesome” think about who you’ve friended on Facebook (Mom? Dad? Coworkers?) and whether you’d like that photo + the comment showing up on their news feed.
The next issue: anything you become a fan of will also show up on your Facebook friends’ news feed. Some seem innocuous enough, such as becoming a fan of Bacon, a fan of Mad Men, or a fan of the Atlanta Braves. But what about more personal items like becoming a fan of Rape Survivors, Adam & Eve Sex Toys, or Narcotics Anonymous? As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to stop this from being broadcast to everyone anymore. Fail.
Also getting broadcast: your relationship status, when you post on someone’s wall, when you “like” something, who you add as a friend. You can no longer control this. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to keep my Facebook activity private.
I really don’t understand why Facebook took away this feature, but it was a major oversight on their part. Shame on you, Facebook.
Anyway, be careful out there, folks. This is clearly a big enough deal that people formed a group called “We petition to bring back ‘News Feed and Wall’ privacy settings!“
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This is a story from about five years ago, but I was telling some friends about it the other night and thought I’d write it up here. It’s definitely one for the files of “Misadventures of a Deafie in a Hearing World.” It’s one of my most embarrassing moments ever, but also pretty damn funny.
I was on an airplane flying cross-country and watching a movie on my laptop, a DVD I’d gotten from Netflix that I had not seen before. It was the Todd Solondz film Storytelling, with Selma Blair. Anyway, unbeknownst to me, there’s a scene in the film where the Selma Blair character is having sex with a large black man, repeatedly chanting the whole time, “Fuck me, n***er. Fuck me, n***er.”
A few moments later, the flight attendant came to my seat, looking rather pissed.
Her: “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to turn that down.”
Me: *turning red* “THE SOUND WAS ON?!”
Her: “What is the matter with you!?”
Me: “Um, I’m deaf.”
Her: “Ohhhhh!”
Needless to say, I didn’t dare look the other passengers in the eye for the rest of the flight. When the plane landed and we disembarked, the people behind me were giving me the stinkeye. They had kids with them. Ooops.
To this day, I religiously make sure the volume on my laptop is off!!
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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.
