My opinion on who should be teaching “baby signing”

Hi all.

It has been interesting to note that many hearing parents are teaching their hearing babies sign to decrease communication frustration derived from being non-verbal for a year or so. However, I find something extremely troubling: The significant majority of baby signing courses are taught by people who do not use sign language.

It seems that the majority of hearing people have misconceptions  about sign language and deaf culture embedded unconsciously in their psyche. These misconceptions cause these parents – however well-intentioned they are – to want to use baby signing as a bridge to speaking.

In my opinion, these misconceptions are as follows:

• People that use sign language cannot talk.
• People that use sign language are stupid.
• People that use sign language cannot do the same everyday things as people who do not use sign language.
• People that use sign language are just using English with their hands.
• People that use sign language should be speaking to get along with the rest of the world who do not use sign language.

If a person that uses sign language taught baby signing, there would be significant benefits:

• The student (parent that does not use sign language) would see that people that use sign language CAN.
• The student would be motivated to continue learning sign language because sign language is useful in a variety of situations.
• The student would have a point of contact for the purpose of learning more sign and questions related to sign language / Deaf culture

The only thing necessary for survival

Hi all.

Sadly, there is something missing from the lives of many people. They may have been hurt, disappointed, angered, or even abused by other people. They are fully aware of this thing, but they don’t want to be hurt again, so they harden up with fear.

Love is the most important thing that has made us survive for thousands and thousands of years.

Unfortunately, it is slowly ebbing away, leading people to think that there is absolutely no hope in this world (to give and receive love).

Why is love slowly ebbing away? Caring for other people the same way that you care for yourself is very important, so why don’t we do it very well anymore?

The reason is very simple: We don’t understand what love means. We think love means romantic love, but romantic love is temporary.

To love someone else is to have joy for them. What is the most important thing that has joy for us?

The Sun.

It is incredibly important to the welfare of us humans. It does not stop shining just because we did something wrong. It does not stop shining just because we have cars. It shines regardless of what we are doing right now.

The Sun gives us many things. It has given us:
* food
* water
* a blue sky to look at and enjoy
* colour
* … and us.

We are all from the Sun, because the billions of atoms in our bodies are in the Sun also. Therefore, we are all one and the same.

We need to stop being so short sighted and incredibly callous.

- Kyle

The cost of copyright infringement

Copyright infringement. The ultimate ethical wrong that some of us may do in our lives without thinking of it. After all, that is what humans do – do things without thinking of the effect on other people. But I digress…

Copyright infringement means, split into the two words, as follows:

• Copyright – a set of exclusive rights given to people like you and I for a time period to copy/redistribute, sell, adapt, perform/display publicly, sell/assign copyright, transmit/display publicly, the way that an idea is expressed if it can be fixed in a tangible medium.
• Infringement – violation of a right

So…. copyright infringement means to violate copyright. There are limitations on copyright designed to protect people, but we will not discuss these here.

Some examples of copyright infringement are…

• Copying a Windows XP CD and giving it away to another person.
• Illegally downloading music or software from the Internet

Why is copyright infringement morally wrong?

Let’s say that you make a CD of YOUR OWN ORIGINAL music and sell it for $20. A person buys it from you. Then he copies your CD onto 1 million CD-Rs and sells those CD-Rs for $40 per CD or $20 for 10 CDs. Is this fair? What about the time and effort you put into making the music?

Let’s see this in detail:

I will assume that the person has bought 10,000 100-packs at a cost of $55.99 each. The total cost is $559,900. There is practically zero cost for copying CDs, but it does take a lot of time:

Assuming that your CD-RW drive records at 52x (52 times 150 kilobytes/second, which equals 7,800 kilobytes/second or ~7.62 megabytes/second) and that your CD is 700 MB, it will take, for ONE CD, ~92 seconds or 1 minute and 32 seconds. Multiplying that by a million CDs tells us that it will take a total of 2 years and 10 months

If this person sold ALL of these 1,000,000 CD-Rs (where half of all sales are for 10 CDs), this means that:

• One person bought one CD at $40. That’s a profit of $20. Multiply the profit by 500,000 CDs – the answer is $10,000,000 profit.
• Another person bought 10 CDs at $20. That sounds like a loss of $20, but it’s not. Per CD, that is 50 cents. Multiply that by 50,000 CDs – $25,000 profit. The rest of the CDs may seem to exist – but they don’t. Recall that these are TEN CDs being sold. 500,000 CDs divided by 10 CDs equals 50,000.

The net profit is $10 million plus $25k minus nearly $6k = STILL NEARLY TEN MILLION DOLLARS! You can subtract the $25k instead of adding if you want to, but either way, it is still nearly $10,000,000.

Should ASL Vlogs be captioned? My opinion

Hi all.

I have been watching ASL video logs, captioned and not. My whole opinion on the captioning issue is as follows.

Deaf people have been taking advantage of technology in order to use it to their own benefit. Examples include TTYs, closed captioning on TVs, etc.

Now, here comes new technology: the webcam / camcorder.

How should Deaf people use it? Some have chosen to make posts on blogs linking to their videos. These are called ASL video logs.

I have seen captioned ASL vlogs, and to be absolutely honest with you, I focused more on the captions than on the signing.

To me, that is OK for TVs where I can look at the captioning and the TV at the same time because the captioning is the only way to access the TV.

That is NOT OK for ASL vlogs for three reasons, which I will categorize here as Necessity, Economic and Dilution.

–

Necessity: ASL video logs are just a few of the primary ways by which Deaf people spread their language, culture and heritage. Is it really, truly necessary to caption them when we can just put up a separate transcript?

Economic: There is a problem with captioning your own ASL video logs, which is that you are biased. You have your own ideas and opinions of what you signed on the video log, but these are only your own. To resolve this bias, you could pay someone to caption your own ASL vlogs. Captioning is expensive in terms of time and resources, so you could pay quite a lot. Do Deaf people really have a lot of money in general? It’s one of the reasons that there is no charge for using VRS!

Dilution: The mental effort it takes to look at both the captions and the signing at the same time is so taxing. English and ASL are two different languages, with different syntax, culture, etc. Therefore, it should not surprise you that I pick the captions since I’m used to looking at captions on TV! This is an ASL video log, not a English video log, yet the experience is EXACTLY like that when I look at captioned ASL video logs. Due to the mental effort and the extremely unintutive experience of looking at captioned ASL video logs, the beauty and uniqueness of ASL goes down the drain. Some people choose to caption ASL video logs to help hearing people understand what they are saying. i feel that is a very misguided decision. Ultimately, due to the dilution of language (Are English and ASL separate languages? Why is this captioned if so?), it will be the Deaf community who takes the brunt of the damage resulting from one small speck of history.

–

In conclusion, I feel that I have made a significant point that other members of the  Deaf community will appreciate understanding. Small decisions have a veery big impact on other people, and ultimately it is your own responsibility to, before making decisions that seem small, analyze the impact on other people.

- Kyle

The weirdness of the Internet

Hi all,

I’ve noticed that the longest videos on YouTube have the least viewers compared to other videos on YouTube that take a relatively short time to watch.

I also have a hard time waiting for a long video to end, so I usually go off to watch a related video that is shorter. Apart from my impatience, I don’t think that long videos really match up with the Internet model. If it was shown on a TV, I would be more motivated to watch it.

Also, I’ve noticed that e-mail messages should be short and to the point.

What is your opinion on this?

- Kyle

Qemu Launcher Review

Hi all.

Today, after looking at the Qemu Launcher program (a GNOME frontend for QEMU), I must say that its interface is not very understandable or even clear.

The most important element of  a GUI program is the icon. When seen only by itself, the Qemu Launcher program icon is a big problem, because it does not accurately pass around the purpose of the program, nor is it even original (using the letter Q for a icon isn’t original, now is it?).

The other most important element of a GUI program is the name of it. The name of this frontend for QEMU is plain unintutive. Of course it launches QEMU, but do we really want users wincing at the first part of the name? I suggest something like OS Runner, or something that accurately passes around the purpose of the program.

The interface of the program is both bad and good, although mostly bad.

I’ll step through the interface to explain:

There are 3 tabs at the top, Configurations, Launcher settings, and About. The “Configurations” tab is selected for us when Qemu Launcher starts, so I’ll go through that.

First of all, I don’t like the idea of configurations as applied to this program, as it makes the program feel too complicated for the user to handle.

There are 5 tabs inside this tab to handle specific parts, an idea I don’t really agree with, since it wastes screen real estate (There are other, more intuitive ways of doing the same thing that save on screen real estate, like the way it is done in PuTTY).

On the first tab, which is automatically selected for us, we see two checkboxes and a select box.

The first check box is named “Snapshot mode”, and is described as “write to temporary files instead of disk images, unless you instruct the emulator to do so by pressing ‘Ctrl+a s’”. There is a problem with how this is phrased, since the rest of the interface in that tab after this checkbox does not mention “disk images” in an intuitive way.

The other checkbox is “Use CD-ROM”, which is described as “Use CD-ROM instead of hard disk 2″. There is a problem with this description: What is “hard disk 2″? Is it really the second hard disk image,  the third hard disk image, or /dev/hdb (which is hard disk 2)? This option should probably be removed, as it has no purpose at all apart from disabling the third  hard disk selection.

The select box is “Boot disk”, and is described as “Boot on floppy, hard disk, or CD-ROM”. The select box does not put a check in “Use CD-ROM” and enable the “CD-ROM” textbox enabling you to type a path to the CD-ROM when the user selects “CD-ROM” from this select box.

Next we see options for setting up the Floppy, CD-ROM, and Hard disk. In general, all 3 options are equally cryptic in their name and description. and there is a potential for confusion since you cannot read or write from or to “device files” directly by default as a user in most GNU/Linux distributions.

Both options for setting the floppy are  problematic because they do not have a New button for setting a new floppy disk image, as is probably evidenced by the tooltip on both options, which states “Disk image or device file for first/second floppy disk”. What’s the purpose of showing two floppies when only one needs to be shown? Finally, although I agree with the fact that a GUI frontend should be consistent with its backend, it does not need to be so in this case because a GUI should hide arcane details, but not  erase them entirely.

Next we see 4 hard disk configuration options. When you click on New, you see a new dialog with 4 options, depending on which type of image you want to create. This dialog has a small usability pitfall: it does not have options for AES encryption and compression, which it should have.  Other than that problem, this dialog is sound and seems good for the user.

Next we see a box for RAM. Both the name and description is confusing, because it doesn’t say anything at all.

On the second tab, “Linux boot”,  we see that there is a checkbox to boot a Linux kernel directly. When that is enabled, 3 options exist. Not much to see here, moving on..

On the third tab, “Network”,  we see a selector to toggle the number of network interface cards that will be emulated. In the description, it states that if you set it to 0, networking will be disabled. I’m not sure who invented that convention, but I’m not sure that is a very good idea. With the default of one network card, a tab for it has been created named “Card 0″. The tab has options on what stack to use, how it will be configured, etc.

In the redirections tab in the network tab, we see that you can add. remove or apply redirections. I don’t understand why you have to explicitly apply redirections for them to work.

Finally, you can add a folder so that it can be seen by the emulating OS, although the name for it does not win any usability contests.

The next tab, “Hardware” has several groups of options. The name of the first option, “System type”, is inconsistent with the description.  This inconsistency may confuse users.  Nothing else to see here, moving on…

Finally, the last tab “Emulator” includes QEMU emulator options. Nothing to see here that I don’t like, moving on…

At the top tab, we see “Launcher settings” next. The “Data directory” option is at best slightly useful, at worst useless, and should be relegated to the “Emulator” tab. I don’t think that the user should be able to edit the path to qemu or qemu-img unless they cannot be found. In that  case, all tabs except this tab should be disabled and a message shown indicating that Qemu Launcher cannot find the QEMU or qemu-img programs and to ask the user to change them.

The “About” tab just talks about the copyright of the program, etc.

In conclusion, I think that the Qemu Launcher developers could make this into a good frontend for QEMU if they follow what a typical user (like me) like and don’t like.

- Kyle Brooks

Please don’t buy a car. Here’s why.

Hi all.

I have decided not to get a driving license or buy a car.

In my opinion, here’s why you shouldn’t either:

1. The cost. Although it may be largely insignificant to you, a car can cost a lot in terms of money, maintenance and gas over many years.
2. The inefficiency. A car usually has FOUR seats. One is reserved for the driver. This is a problem because with only one seat occupied, the car is holding up the weight for THESE THREE EMPTY SEATS THAT ARE NOT BEING USED AT ALL, BUT THEY HAVE BEEN MADE ANYWAY. And this makes a car cost more because the car manufacturer must make the three extra car seats, install supports for the three extra car seats, etc.
3. There are way too many cars out there. This contributes to low air quality, too much chemicals out in the air, traffic jams, etc. This is a problem because with all these combined, you have a city that is full of problems that cannot be easily resolved.
4. The safety of the car relies on the driver. This is a problem because car accidents can happen. If they happen, the roads have to be shut down, causing more traffic jams, smog, etc.

- Kyle Brooks

I am against the death penalty.

Hi all.

What do YOU think about the death penalty? I think that the death penalty is egregious (conspicuously bad or offensive), cruel, inhuman, degrading, violates rights, and is irrevocable. Also, it DOES NOT deter crime more effectively than other punishments.

To expand on those reasons…

• The death penalty is very bad to humans, since it shows other humans that killing is OK, and therefore perpetuates more crime.
• The death penalty is unnecessarily cruel, since it inflicts unnecessary pain or suffering that should not be practiced by other people. Isn’t death penalty some form of covered up murder or manslaughter that should be dealt with?
• The death penalty is inhuman, since for all intents and purposes, no one ever wants to kill other people (ingrained in our human brains).The death penalty could be some form of “humane” violence against our own brothers for all we care. Wouldn’t this still be inhuman?
• The death penalty is very degrading, and has negative effects on humans while they are waiting to die. Do we really want to be treated in a degraded way on our death?
• The death penalty violates our right to life. We do not have a right to change that, whether by murder, rape that kills, forced drinks of too much alcohol, etc. There are way too many ways to die, and many of those ways could be caused by us humans. That doesn’t mean we can inflict those ways on one of our brothers.
• The death penalty is irrevocable since when you die, you’re dead. Just like that in a extreme instant. There is no rolling back death. All the things we see on TV or in movies about time travel are not real.
• It has been shown that after the abolition of the death penalty in Canada, the national crime rate decreased.

Conclusion: Death penalty should and must be abolished for better quality of life, and so that we do not subject our brothers or sisters to such awful and cruel punishment. Think of it like this: Would a government official want to be subject to the death penalty themselves? In the USA? Canada? UK?

- Kyle

Dropping MSN forever

Hi all.

It is 2007. With a new year means new changes and new things.

I have been on MSN (Hotmail / Messenger) for over FIVE years, and since it is 2007, I might as well bow out on MSN and Microsoft for a change. I don’t like them because they are still unethical and have not learned from their mistakes at all.

Therefore, as of June 30, 2007, I will drop MSN permanently.

Fortunately… You can still talk to me if you register for a Jabber account, or use e-mail on my new address. (Jabber and e-mail are the same, thanks to Google)

- Kyle Brooks

P.S. Thank you, Microsoft, for creating MSN and MSN Messenger, and inspiring millions of people to talk to each other instantly. You are truly inspirational, even if you have never innovated, have stolen from other people, and are monopolistic.

[UPDATE June 29, 2007: I have changed my mind because there is no way for MSN users to talk to Jabber users, and because the clients all suck]

Being rich is OK, but…

Hi all.

Have you heard of a lot of rich people? Here are some examples…

• Bill Gates (Founder of Microsoft) (net worth near 56 billion)
• Jeffrey Skoll (Former president of eBay) (6.66 billion)
• Edward S. Rogers, Jr. of Rogers Communications Inc. (2.21 billion)

So, what is wrong with being rich? It’s OK, right?
Yes, but you should not put your money above ANYTHING else. What do I mean by this?
I mean that  you should not, just because you are rich, do any of the following:

• Stop paying for things which you need
• Refuse to help someone, when they have helped you already in some way

If you do any or all of (similiar) things above, then you are being stingy, and when you are stingy, there are very serious consequences, including but not limited to:

• Getting those things taken away from you
• Losing that person, or trust lost

Please, if you are rich, be gladly generous. You will be so much happier when you get your money out there!

- Kyle