Month: March 2008

    Recently, St. Petersburg, Florida has added a small number of cross walk buttons that make it much easier to cross major streets without causing the burden of a stop light which would most certainly be a minor inconvenience for motorists. The buttons on either side of 22 Ave. (a very busy and fairly high speed thoroughfare) and 7 St (a relatively low traffic road) work great and have speech synthesizers built in (they work about half of the time) which provide the pedestrian with moderately useful information.

The first thing the device says, “You have pressed a button,” overstates the obvious as, if I hadn’t pressed a button, it wouldn’t have started talking. The second bit tells the person who pressed the button that he or she is about to cross 22 Ave. at 7 St. which is slightly valuable in the event that the pedestrian thinks they might be at 5^th St. and 22 Ave. which has a similar configuration. Finally, the voice says, “Remember to wave to thank the motorists for stopping.”

I enjoy shopping for fishing gear at Bill Jackson’s, a real terrific store here in St. Pete which sells mostly outdoor gear for fishing, hunting and other sports of that sort. Never in my many visits to this store have I waved to the guy in the gun department for not killing me; why then should I thank motorists for not smashing me and my guide dog on to a one way trip to the hereafter? I find the idea of thanking someone for not killing or severely injuring my dog and me a bit silly, I thought that, in our culture, not killing or maiming people comes as part of the social contract one signs at birth in this great nation.

So, what can we do to remind the sighties that providing thanks for a common courtesy (not killing us) is ridiculous? Enter CrankyBlindPerson.com (a fictional web page), the place for blinks to buy items that tell the world what we really think.

Product number one will come in the form of a “crossing guard” orange. The front of the shirt will have a cartoon of an SUV squishing a blink and his dog. The back, in large and bold black letters will say, “THANK YOU FOR NOT KILLING ME!” I think this statement is apropos to many situations and especially so to crossing streets.

The second idea for items to sell on the “Cranky” site actually requires a minor level of what many people may consider vandalism. This idea, presented to me by Dena, will be a bumper sticker that says, “I Endangered the Life of a Person With a Disability Today.” We expect people with disabilities to use these stickers to come when an motorist parks her car across a sidewalk, crosswalk or, my personal favorite, the case in which a pick-up truck parks in a driveway but has boards or some other hard object sticking out at head level into a sidewalk. In all three of these situations, the blind pedestrian can find the car’s bumper, peel off the back of the sticker and slap it on so other motorists will know that the offending driver has done something that most people might not think about.

The last idea we’ve thought of so far is a bit controversial and one of our friends thinks it goes too far. This item, a sign for one’s guide dog handle, rather than coming in a typical dark color with white lettering and saying something like, “Please don’t pet me, I’m working,” is far less polite. If we do decide to have some of these made, they will come in bright, warning signal orange and say, “Very Friendly Dog, Violent Owner, Touch neither!” And will have a small Uzi stenciled on the bottom As so many sighted people simply do not notice the polite, albeit in understated colors sign on my dog and, after they start petting X-Celerator and I point to the sign while asking them not to touch the animal while he’s working causes reactions ranging from polite apologies to snippy remarks about said sighty’s love for dogs and, occasionally, even a statement that by working my animal, I have crossed some line into abusing the guy which really makes my blood boil. I think that a bright orange sign with a less polite statement would serve us better.

Maybe the Blind Panther Party can help us with distribution?

There seems to be a common feeling among most sighties that we blinks should act excessively politely and be thankful of anything the city, county, state, Federal government, AT companies and any other organization or individual does for us. In his CSUN keynote address, Jim Fruchterman stated that “accessibility is a basic human right,” this statement is contained in the text of the treaty that grew out of the UN Convention on Human Rights and People With Disabilities, a UN initiative to which the United States is the only major nation not to participate. Mike Calvo’s bold move to allow the Accessibility Is a Right (AIR) Foundation distribute System Access To Go (SATOGO) without cost to any user on Earth seems to be the first major move by an AT company to acknowledge that the work they do is different from mainstream technology and that, above all, their duty is to their users first and their investors second.

According to UN data, there are 600 million people with disabilities in the global population. According to another statement out of the UN, people with disabilities are the most oppressed minority on the planet but the community has no real leaders on the political front. Who will be the Martin, the Mandela, the Gandhi of our cause? Who is willing to jeopardize their career by pointing out flaws in AT products? Who is willing to take on city governments about the needs of pedestrian rights when many of us already know that the likelihood of change is poor? Who is willing to take on the FCC for doing little or nothing to act on 255 complaints years after the bill came into effect?

Any person who steps up into these issues tends to receive harassment from other blinks who oppose what they consider “radicalism” and think we should just kiss asses and politely hope that kindness will catch more flies than vinegar (to mix metaphors).

I have made the decision to only work on free software that is distributed under GPL or a similar license. I’m making some interesting progress on some of what I think are very cool projects. I also see a number of other open source/free software programs that people throughout the world are working on. I think community developed software may take longer to create than well financed programs from the for profit AT companies but I think that the community based hackers will be more inclusive of changes requested by users and, as free software has been demonstrated to do, will get far more bugs fixed as there will be far more ears listening to the output.

Even non-hackers can take on very important roles in the world of free AT. The movement (as it is) needs users to help design features as they think they should work. We need a lot of people to volunteer to write documentation as free software docs tend to be a bit rough. There are free AT projects for Windows, GNU/Linux and Macintosh so I urge everyone to help out in some way (excepting those people who have a non-compete agreement with an AT company as I wouldn’t want to drag anyone else into the legal hell I’ve experienced).

So, tune in, hack on and yell out!

Afterward

I have a relatively old PAC Mate that has not been used since I got it back from the repair shop at FS which I would like to sell. I believe it qualifies for the upgrade to the Omni edition but I’m not sure on this. The unit is a QX 440 running Windows Mobile 2003, thus, it includes a 40 cell Braille display which, alone would cost far more than I will ask for this item.

I will start the bidding at $1500 plus shipping for the unit in an “as is” state. The highest bidder will, upon payment, get the PM. I’ve long ago lost the case and the strap on mine came from a proto PM relatively early in the development cycle of the product so is different from the shipping Pac Mates.

As I did with the Braille Blazer I sold a month or so ago, I will give half of the purchase price (in the case of the Blazer I gave the entire sum but it was only $150 and splitting it didn’t make sense) to be split evenly between Bookshare.org and Southeastern Guide Dogs. Also, I’m going to keep half of the purchase for myself as I’m feeling greedy these days.

Please send bids to me at the email in the “Contact Me” section of the BC blog.

Bidding on the PM will end on April 15, 2008.

Happy Hacking…

–End

Recently, St. Petersburg, Florida has added a small number of cross walk buttons that make it much easier to cross major streets without causing the burden of a stop light which would most certainly be a minor inconvenience for motorists. The buttons on either side of 22 Ave. (a very busy and fairly high speed thoroughfare) and 7 St (a relatively low traffic road) work great and have speech synthesizers built in (they work about half of the time) which provide the pedestrian with moderately useful information.

The first thing the device says, “You have pressed a button,” overstates the obvious as, if I hadn’t pressed a button, it wouldn’t have started talking. The second bit tells the person who pressed the button that he or she is about to cross 22 Ave. at 7 St. which is slightly valuable in the event that the pedestrian thinks they might be at 5^th St. and 22 Ave. which has a similar configuration. Finally, the voice says, “Remember to wave to thank the motorists for stopping.”

I enjoy shopping for fishing gear at Bill Jackson’s, a real terrific store here in St. Pete which sells mostly outdoor gear for fishing, hunting and other sports of that sort. Never in my many visits to this store have I waved to the guy in the gun department for not killing me; why then should I thank motorists for not smashing me and my guide dog on to a one way trip to the hereafter? I find the idea of thanking someone for not killing or severely injuring my dog and me a bit silly, I thought that, in our culture, not killing or maiming people comes as part of the social contract one signs at birth in this great nation.

So, what can we do to remind the sighties that providing thanks for a common courtesy (not killing us) is ridiculous? Enter CrankyBlindPerson.com (a fictional web page), the place for blinks to buy items that tell the world what we really think.

Product number one will come in the form of a “crossing guard” orange. The front of the shirt will have a cartoon of an SUV squishing a blink and his dog. The back, in large and bold black letters will say, “THANK YOU FOR NOT KILLING ME!” I think this statement is apropos to many situations and especially so to crossing streets.

The second idea for items to sell on the “Cranky” site actually requires a minor level of what many people may consider vandalism. This idea, presented to me by Dena, will be a bumper sticker that says, “I Endangered the Life of a Person With a Disability Today.” We expect people with disabilities to use these stickers to come when an motorist parks her car across a sidewalk, crosswalk or, my personal favorite, the case in which a pick-up truck parks in a driveway but has boards or some other hard object sticking out at head level into a sidewalk. In all three of these situations, the blind pedestrian can find the car’s bumper, peel off the back of the sticker and slap it on so other motorists will know that the offending driver has done something that most people might not think about.

The last idea we’ve thought of so far is a bit controversial and one of our friends thinks it goes too far. This item, a sign for one’s guide dog handle, rather than coming in a typical dark color with white lettering and saying something like, “Please don’t pet me, I’m working,” is far less polite. If we do decide to have some of these made, they will come in bright, warning signal orange and say, “Very Friendly Dog, Violent Owner, Touch neither!” And will have a small Uzi stenciled on the bottom As so many sighted people simply do not notice the polite, albeit in understated colors sign on my dog and, after they start petting X-Celerator and I point to the sign while asking them not to touch the animal while he’s working causes reactions ranging from polite apologies to snippy remarks about said sighty’s love for dogs and, occasionally, even a statement that by working my animal, I have crossed some line into abusing the guy which really makes my blood boil. I think that a bright orange sign with a less polite statement would serve us better.

Maybe the Blind Panther Party can help us with distribution?

There seems to be a common feeling among most sighties that we blinks should act excessively politely and be thankful of anything the city, county, state, Federal government, AT companies and any other organization or individual does for us. In his CSUN keynote address, Jim Fruchterman stated that “accessibility is a basic human right,” this statement is contained in the text of the treaty that grew out of the UN Convention on Human Rights and People With Disabilities, a UN initiative to which the United States is the only major nation not to participate. Mike Calvo’s bold move to allow the Accessibility Is a Right (AIR) Foundation distribute System Access To Go (SATOGO) without cost to any user on Earth seems to be the first major move by an AT company to acknowledge that the work they do is different from mainstream technology and that, above all, their duty is to their users first and their investors second.

According to UN data, there are 600 million people with disabilities in the global population. According to another statement out of the UN, people with disabilities are the most oppressed minority on the planet but the community has no real leaders on the political front. Who will be the Martin, the Mandela, the Gandhi of our cause? Who is willing to jeopardize their career by pointing out flaws in AT products? Who is willing to take on city governments about the needs of pedestrian rights when many of us already know that the likelihood of change is poor? Who is willing to take on the FCC for doing little or nothing to act on 255 complaints years after the bill came into effect?

Any person who steps up into these issues tends to receive harassment from other blinks who oppose what they consider “radicalism” and think we should just kiss asses and politely hope that kindness will catch more flies than vinegar (to mix metaphors).

I have made the decision to only work on free software that is distributed under GPL or a similar license. I’m making some interesting progress on some of what I think are very cool projects. I also see a number of other open source/free software programs that people throughout the world are working on. I think community developed software may take longer to create than well financed programs from the for profit AT companies but I think that the community based hackers will be more inclusive of changes requested by users and, as free software has been demonstrated to do, will get far more bugs fixed as there will be far more ears listening to the output.

Even non-hackers can take on very important roles in the world of free AT. The movement (as it is) needs users to help design features as they think they should work. We need a lot of people to volunteer to write documentation as free software docs tend to be a bit rough. There are free AT projects for Windows, GNU/Linux and Macintosh so I urge everyone to help out in some way (excepting those people who have a non-compete agreement with an AT company as I wouldn’t want to drag anyone else into the legal hell I’ve experienced).

So, tune in, hack on and yell out!

Afterward

I have a relatively old PAC Mate that has not been used since I got it back from the repair shop at FS which I would like to sell. I believe it qualifies for the upgrade to the Omni edition but I’m not sure on this. The unit is a QX 440 running Windows Mobile 2003, thus, it includes a 40 cell Braille display which, alone would cost far more than I will ask for this item.

I will start the bidding at $1500 plus shipping for the unit in an “as is” state. The highest bidder will, upon payment, get the PM. I’ve long ago lost the case and the strap on mine came from a proto PM relatively early in the development cycle of the product so is different from the shipping Pac Mates.

As I did with the Braille Blazer I sold a month or so ago, I will give half of the purchase price (in the case of the Blazer I gave the entire sum but it was only $150 and splitting it didn’t make sense) to be split evenly between Bookshare.org and Southeastern Guide Dogs. Also, I’m going to keep half of the purchase for myself as I’m feeling greedy these days.

Please send bids to me at the email in the “Contact Me” section of the BC blog.

Bidding on the PM will end on April 15, 2008.

Happy Hacking…

–End

Below I’ve pasted a BC post I had intended to publish during the time when the email posting system stopped working for me and before I discovered the wonders of the Word 2007 feature. I had a couple of others written then that I found yesterday while reorganizing some files but they seemed a bit too attached to a specific time or date so I’m leaving them out and will release them in the special collectors’ edition with the lost material at some point when I’m more famous and can make money from such a work .

Top 8%

BlindChristian

A number of years ago, a colleague of mine introduced me to the SETI at Home project. SETI, for those less geeky than me, stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and, if I remember correctly, the project lives at Harvard University. SETI software listens for patterns in the background noise of the universe in order to hopefully find something not random and, therefore, a sign of an intelligent source.

SETI’s greatest actual contribution to the world of science has nothing to do with ET trying to come home but, rather, came in the form of a distributed computing project called SETI at Home. This project gave users interested in the project a screen saver to download and chunks of data for it to crunch upon. The more people who installed the software, the greater the overall power of what had turned into the largest massively parallel super computing system would become.

I loved the idea of people installing software at home or work that would use idle time to process compute intensive projects. I did not, however, think that using all of this power to listen to noise in order to find a pattern was a good use of electricity. Shouldn’t such a massively powerful system work on cancer, AIDS or DNA research rather than trying to find a radio signal that may have emanated from some planet of near incomprehensible distance at a nearly incomprehensibly long time ago. By the time researchers could respond to the signal they heard, the solar system from which the signal came may have collapsed or any other catastrophe that might occur in a few million years may have caused said intelligent life to go extinct. True, simply learning that some other intelligent species may have existed in the past or may still live today would be of tremendous interest but little value to our species.

A year or so ago, my buddy Sina introduced me to another project like SETI at Home but worked on protein folding and can be found at the Folding at Home web site. This project, based at Stanford University works on very complex problems with potential outcomes that can cure many different diseases and do a lot to improve the health and quality of life of actual humans.

There are a number of other “at home” projects that work on problems I think are important but I chose folding at home and I stick with it. Today, I am proud to announce that I have broken into the top 8% of individual contributors on the project which has nearly 1 million members. I don’t know if anything my various computers contributed has done anything to move someone’s research forward but, in this case, negative results are as valuable as positives as they can help eliminate trials shown to have little or no value.

As a lot of these “at home” programs work in the background, I suggest you find something cool and useful and sign up. You will not notice any sluggishness if you are running a reasonably current computer and joining a massive computer to solve health and other problems and your idle time will add value to something quite worthwhile.

I accept that trying to find ET is a bit more glamorous than finding a folded protein of value but your probability of making a significant contribution to the world is much higher with the projects working on “real” science.

Afterward

I have an original Braille Blazer from the old Blazie days. It is loud and slow but it is working perfectly. If anyone wants it, I will accept any offer over $150 (plus shipping) and will contribute the entire sum (except shipping) to either Southeastern Guide Dogs or to bookshare.org, whichever the buyer prefers.

A few weeks back, I wrote an article called, “Three New Products,” in which I mention that I had started calling my Victor Reader Stream simply “Vic” in honor of my Uncle Victor Bastek who had fought in both the second world war and in the Korean conflict. A person named Mark Bastek posted a comment to the blog wondering if we might be related and, indeed, we are. Unfortunately, Mark Bastek did not include a personal email address to which my sister, who is really into the family history, and/or I could respond. We’re hoping this shout out results in Mark finding me again but using the information under the “Contact Me” link instead of posting a comment to which I have no way to reply. We would really like to get in touch with Mark as our mother grew up with his father in Jersey City and, somewhere in my very distant memory, I recall meeting him too.

Finally, I’m starting to get involved heavily in the accessible instructional information side of the world of technology used by people with vision impairment. Any pointers or tips to GPL (or similar) Daisy readers would be greatly appreciated.

— End