Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Hey, I just got picked as a runner-up in the SugarSync Story Contest. Score. My prize was 30 gigs of free space on SugarSync. It's actually way more useful to me than the grand prize, a Dell netbook, since I have two perfectly good laptops and a UMPC already. Y'all know the story already 'cause I blogged about it a month or so ago, but here it is for posterity anyway. (They posted the grand prize entries, but I don't know if they're going to post the runners-up.)
"I transcribe college classes and other events in realtime for Deaf and hard of hearing clients. Whatever anyone says goes up on the screen, a second after they've said it, at speeds up to 225 words per minute, so my clients are never left out of the conversation. I use a steno machine, a laptop with a wide screen, and a UMPC with a touch screen, all connected via Bluetooth. Sometimes I let my client read off the big screen of the laptop while I work off the UMPC. Sometimes my client wants to move around the room, so I give them the UMPC to carry, while I stay in one place and read off the laptop. I also do some freelance transcription work, and this setup gives me a lot of flexibility. One time I actually transcribed an entire interview while waiting in line for NYC's famous Shake Shack (a burger joint with legendary line lengths), using my UMPC mounted to my steno machine with the tripod jacked way up so I could write while standing. SugarSync lets me keep my 114,000-word steno dictionary and all my other client-specific dictionaries active and updated on both my computers, so I can be prepared to switch from one or the other at a moment's notice. It's so much better than transferring them laboriously by hand using a thumb drive or uploading and then downloading each dictionary through my email account. I hardly even notice the transfer, but the files are always where I need them."
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09:16:42 PM,Wednesday 1 July 2009
And in continuing ultra-gayness (Hey, it's the last day of June. I'm doing what I can.):
Yma Sumac sings The Queen of The Night
It's too bad the sound quality isn't better, 'cause this rocks my damn socks.
Via Parterre. (Who else?)
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12:30:32 PM,Tuesday 30 June 2009
I'm back! Oh, it was wonderful. I'm not sure if I'll actually be able to dredge up all the necessary words to blog about it or not, but man, that was one great weekend. Meanwhile, 110 Queer Tangos. K. and I definitely want to learn to tango, and there's apparently a free lesson at a queer milonga every Tuesday, so we're gonna try to make it out there at some point during the summer.
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11:02:32 AM,Tuesday 30 June 2009
Yep, it's that time again. Joe My God mentioned it yesterday, and while I've posted it, what, twice before already, this time is better, 'cause it's in French with subtitles, rather than either the not-quite-as-good English version or the French unsubtitled version.
Also, this weekend is Pride, which we won't be able to attend, because we're leaving tomorrow for our belated honeymoon in Montreal! (We're taking the train up and staying here until Monday. So excited!) That makes reposting the song with bilingual subtitles all the more appropriate, I think. Yes, it's a sad song, but a beautiful one. It rings true, and at the same time, it makes me grateful for how far we've come since it was written. Also for the sensitivity and artistry of Charles Aznavour, a straight man who nevertheless had the guts to write and perform this song back in 1973. I salute him and all our compatriots and allies -- queer and het, cis and trans, butch and nelly, and everything in between.
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10:52:44 AM,Thursday 25 June 2009
The theater captioning company I work for has an opening for a captioner. They're not looking for stenographers; it's done with a laptop, specialized software, and a big LED sign. If any of you are interested, contact my gmail address, username: askeladden, and I can fill you in on any questions you may have.
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04:18:06 PM,Wednesday 24 June 2009
Okay, so Audiosurf, as I've recently rediscovered, is seriously fun. I downloaded it when it first came out, but my old computer was too old to play it without jerking, so I sort of forgot about it. Then, the other day, I got an email saying, "Your record on the Decemberist's 'Oh, Valencia' has just been beaten", and I was like, "Hey, I remember that game. I was incredibly excited by it, and then it turned out to be slow and annoying. I wonder if it's any better on my new computer." It is. It's freaking great. Now I have to keep myself from playing it for hours on end. I just did The Dance of the Furies on Mono Ninja Elite and I'm still tingling.
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05:00:25 PM,Monday 22 June 2009
Trust not a man who's rich in flax.
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02:33:49 PM,Monday 22 June 2009
And to celebrate new mp3 player, new headphones, and new blog rollover, something I haven't done in a while: Guess the lyrics! I looked through one of my old ones, of songs picked at random, and even I couldn't guess most of 'em. So I'm restricting this to lines from songs I can actually sing along with, the first ones to come up from a shuffled sampling of likely songs. I figure it'll be pretty easy.
1. You were the father of modern medicine.Is This What You Wanted, Leonard Cohen
2. This I know from nothing.Lobachevsky, Tom Lehrer (Guessed by Neil)
3. I see centipedes and snakes.All For Me Grog, Traditional (Guessed by Libby)
4. It kind of hovered before my vision.Indier Than Thou, MC Frontalot (Guessed by Remi)
6. Alack-a-day! Oh, woe! Oy vey!The Ballad of Chicken Soup, Carole King (Guessed by Odious)
7. Take me to your daddy's farm. Back in the USSR, The Beatles (Guessed by Martin)
8. Ne'er once had he murdered, nor looted, nor plundered, nor burned.The Ballad of Richard III, Gwydion Pendderwen (Guessed by Neil)
9. And so begins the final drama.The Internationale, Billy Bragg
10. Look for me with the sun-bright sparrow.Yankee Bayonet, The Decemberists (Guessed by Remi) _
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07:25:38 PM,Saturday 20 June 2009
I don't know if any of you guys remember, but back around 2002 I became obsessed with the idea of listening to music while swimming. The only waterproof mp3 players on the market back then were something like $200. Instead, I bought a $15 waterproof pouch off eBay and a $35 flash player -- I don't remember the capacity, but it could only hold about 9 songs -- that was so old it could only connect to my computer via parallel port. These, combined with ordinary earbuds, made for frustrating listening. The earbuds would become waterlogged almost instantly and I could hardly hear anything. It was all absurd-looking, and I'd have to strap it to my middle like some sort of horrible yellow fanny pack. I used the thing maybe half a dozen times but eventually gave it up.
Yesterday, I was at J&R Music World (man, I love that store) buying headphones for transcription. The cheap ones I'd been using were terrible, especially when transcribing on the train or in noisy coffee shops, with staticky audio and improperly amplified respondents. I got some Sennheister HD 280s for $70, which was fantastic. Combined with JackAMP, they've already radically reduced the amount of aggravation I get from my job. This is good. But while I was there, I noticed that they were selling a refurbished 1 gigabyte waterproof Dolphin. For $15.
Fifteen dollars!
I showered with it this morning. It was kickass.
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05:32:26 PM,Saturday 20 June 2009
