Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Chancey's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, December 13th, 2007
8:49 pm	So I'm in a relatively temperate part of Cubistan this morning, explaining to a gentleman that the 3.5-inch disk drive (external) manifests itself unpredictably when it shows up in the Braille Note Mpower drive list. I remark: "It's basically random, and I'm not sure why this happens. Sometimes it shows up as floppy, sometimes as hard." Eight hours later and I'm still trying to decide whether that sounded super dirty or whether I am simply going "That's what she said" in my head because no one else is here to do it for me. Self-innuendoization aside, it's been a weird week. I'm staying in the same hotel Paul and I had when we were here together, before the move and Ryan's death and the subsequent fallout. While that time was far from perfect, I wish I could reach back and remind myself not to get carried away from the meaning of the moment by small problems. I was broke, my boss was driving me crazy and I was feebly kicking at several bad habits, but there was a lot of happiness going on too, and I was loved. I've been on my own for long enough now that I can't believe how commonplace it felt to have a partner; and I wish it hadn't felt that way so often. I'm carrying that thought into the new year. This month has been jam-packed with work and will carry on being until the 20th. I'll then have a three-day breather before my family burrows into the Apple (and my house). I'm managing to keep it fun (a sweet little cottage in Kentucky, a visit with an old friend in Texas) but I'll be relieved to spend some time in Brooklyn, and I have hopes of traveling to my home down south sometime soon. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 29th, 2007
3:18 am	Brooklyn Woman, 25, Blames New Media for Lack of Closure Dream writers on strike don't bother bargaining. How you like them reruns? (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
9:43 pm	Project Trainwreck I'm still alive. I haven't posted because I have been treating the journal as some sort of artifact -- maybe if I don't update the damn thing time will prove reversible. Just as long as I put nothing in writing. Maybe I can redo a few scenes. Maybe I can reinterpret the past, like those smiley Williamsburg tourists waving from the stocks. I probably will never write about it because any attempt to rationalize the crisis would feel like vandalism -- a few crooked lines from an amateur, and what would you learn? I was one cocky kid and I got what I've had coming for a good long while -- that's All I have to tell. These calendar pages are heavy and I'm fighting my way up and out, so bear with me. You should be seeing a real update soon. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
10:03 pm	Pursuant to that last post, I have been forced to dance, gone streetfairing and been to see Avenue Q with various awesome people of my acquaintance; come down with the annual Jacobus Tenbroek Memorial Head Cold; been to Neptune--sorry, the one in Jersey; and found out how to trick my BrailleNote into downloading GPS maps without a PC. I am on an aggressive regimen of some mystery cold pills my roommate gave me, water, Nebula Award-winning novels, NO MORE CHEAP WINE, and soup from the Chinese takeaway. I anticipate a full recovery by the time of my flight to Nashville--tomorrow--at noon thirty. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 30th, 2007
5:07 pm	"I think this line's mostly filler" Yayee, I made it to Atlanta. On what seemed to be the only non-delayed flight happening on the Eastern seaboard. Without losing my luggage or having my liquids and gels splode in the cargo compartment. Aside from the fact that I couldn't sleep once I got here, not until 4:30 AM when I decided to acknowledge the insomnia, just be with it a while, walk with it, talk to it, and finally put it to bed, aside from that my first day at Convention 07 has been as gloriously stressless as the last week. Looking back on that sentence, I realize I am setting the bar pretty low in regard to my definition of stressless, because there were a few hmm -- incidents this week. I had this friend in the city who is capricious and dictatorial (and not pulling it off so well that it's hot) and we had not been speaking, but I thought we were on the mend because when I saw her at a party she draped herself over my body like an ingratiating scarf, and invited me to dinner, and, being a fool, I went. Then I went to lunch with her. Then, after assuring me that I could charge my laptop at her house, she locked my belongings in her house and didn't show up until post-midnight, at which point I carefully, reluctantly but with precision, used my old key to her place to get my valuables back. She peppered me with calls and text messages for days -- demanding the key while simultaneously declaring me an ex-friend, murmuring sweet nothings about betrayal of trust and legal action -- until I finally told her I was throwing away the key and if she really wanted, she could run the whole thing by five oh. And then there was breaking my cane in Central Park and dashing through the rain with LZ to the Gay Community Center, where a clever, shy queer boy made a splint for it with a chopstick, and ducking into the Cubby Hole to drink with Manhattan girls who like girls. And equipment failure -- always that. But none of that was the dent-making, shock-inducing kind of stress. So things (to cast a wide net) are improving. Hopefully when I come home I'll continue to be resilient, and know my own mind, and be something more than reactive. Ha. Maybe. Cross 'em if you got 'em. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 22nd, 2007
3:32 am	On Discretion Note to self: Stop referring to the Jernigan Institute staff as "The Friendly friends at Ken and friends" in your joking-but-not-really, annoyed E-mails, because E-mails, they can be forwarded, and not everyone will think that is funny. This is the type of thing you might wish to consider before asking me to be one of your character references. I could probably stumble upon the best way to offend a ScanTron sheet without really trying. D: "It's a Scantron. There is a bubble for "Do you trust this person?" and bubbles for "How well do you know this person?" Me: "Is there a bubble for "When I stay on this person's couch, I am always careful to sleep butt-side-out?" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 18th, 2007
9:04 pm	System Access to Go and SpeakOn Today, I was instructed by management to pack a bag and prepare to get moving. We're rolling out a new line of network-capable Juliet embossers and that means four-hour trainings all over the country. I do not envy my supervisor, who is tasked with coordinating two trainers, maybe a dozen local agency branches, air travel, and all the other concomitant factors. I will post my schedule when I get it. In the meantime, I'm occupying myself with two projects. The first and more germinal of these is learning, testing, and preparing to revamp documentation for Speakon as designed by Isaac Porat, Manchester U. professor of textile processing by day and badass programmer by night. At the time of this post, Speakon consists of an accessible LastFM application (without the Scrobbler for tracking listening habits, for now), as well as a suite of common media apps (library, podcast streaming, and Internet radio.) The software is self-voicing and the interface is minimalist. The next step in the evolution of this beta will be DAISY support, but when I spoke to Isaac he said he is planning applications which go beyond the scope of the media center, and which target, as the media applications do, end users who might not be familiar with screen reader conventions. Other than introducing some funky, uninspired keymapping (Insert f3 to toggle the menus? I miss my Alt) he has come up with an intuitive, functional design to do some things whose complexity was previously unavoidable. On to project the second: Sarotech, an AT software and hardware firm that has mostly been in the news as the plaintiff in a patent dispute with the aptly orwellian Freedom Scientific, has suddenly gone to public beta with System Access to Go. This release may be timed to precede the summer conferences or (and I hope this is true) it may be a strategy to get the SAToGo interface some brand recognition so that Freedom's customers will tell them, en masse, where to put their patents for safekeeping. SATogo is an Internet-based screen reader. It runs on any XP or Vista machine -- sadly, no cross-platform support. It doesn't have the universal usefulness that JAWS does, yet, but it does a limited number of things remarkably well. Notably, it makes solid competition for JAWS IE support -- I was able to handle Gmail, Facebook, an online grocery delivery site, and several others with no slowdown. (On Google Local, SAToGo outperforms JFW, which won't properly find form fields on that page.) Your mileage may vary -- SAToGo is missing some of the shortcut keys (next heading at level, for example) that you may not want to live without, and the SAToGo approach to form fields avoids the need to enter a special mode by assuming that, once you navigate into a form field, you want to type there. This means that tabbing or arrowing out of form fields is the only way to search for more of them -- the F shortcut works when you're not already in form text, but as soon as you are, you're typing f's. This public beta also offers a glimpse into the mysterious Freedom Box Network. The podcast directory is intermittently good, but categories and single casts are spliced together weirdly, and a lot of podcast links lead to empty pages. A cursory inspection of the games revealed them to be, to use a colloquialism, pretty lame -- although honestly, most accessible games are. The forums for group discussion had some postings, but most were of the cry-in-the-wilderness variety and haven't generated any sustained conversation. The most exciting service on offer, streamed audio tracks of described videos, had me all excited. (They had 12 Monkeys! And Phenomenon -- I love Phenomenon!) But, for this public beta, access is DENIED. Still, it's hard to compete with free, and anyone with more patience than I have will doubtless find something of worth on the Network. I am focusing on figuring out which mainstream applications work well with SAToGo, because it's installed in our lab in DC, we're probably going to end up teaching it, and I don't think our government customers are going to be playing the Legend of Zork or listening to Air America (although those are both, if I may be so bold as to say so, worthwhile pursuits.) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 14th, 2007
2:36 am	ephemeral fictions The fantastic archive of short stories at Scifi.com's SciFiction will vanish on Friday. This is your last chance to go there, check out the stories, and maybe save a few. There are classics and new originals, many of which received Nebula and Hugo Awards. Ellen Datlow curated this collection with consistency and skill until 2005, and it's unclear why the archives are being pulled almost two years after Scifiction ceased publishing new material. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
1:20 pm	Hey, Mac I just received some possibly exciting news from volsi regarding the accessibility of Leopard, the new Mac OS. Once I get an opportunity to test these features out, I'll post an analysis. For now, get a load of these new features for VoiceOver, the out-of-the-box Mac screen reader. The friendly friends at BoingBoing and friends are impressed by the new synthetic voice, Alex, describing the speeded-up demo as "ten-espresso" but still quite intelligible. The embedded Play button on the accessibility features page doesn't work for me, and digging through Google's search results for "voiceover demo" and Laopard got me nothing, nothing, nothing, and then this: Some other dude wore leopard skinned underwear on top of knit tights. ..... On Thursday I got my voiceover demo. I’m not sure how I feel about it. ... I'm not sure how I feel about it either. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
5:26 pm	Blogochondria So last night I realized what my problem is. What one of my problems is. I was talking to my Army friend in Alaska. Who would probably be proud to know that he's also my most reactionary friend in the whole world. And I noticed a heretofore unnoticed-by-me correlation between being in a mildly stressful situation, and me having this verbal tic going on that causes the situation to go nuclear awkward. Remember the episode on South Park, where Kyle's dad just can't not say "fetus"? If you don't, good -- it was gross -- but these days, watching it makes me kind of feel less alone in this affliction. The problem, in haiku form, and in lieu of a probably-very-inappropriate post about phonemes on the loose: Just forget one word - SITUATIONAL TOURETTES! How hard can it be? Current Mood: optimistic Current Music: Kaiser Chiefs - Learnt My Lesson Well (5 Comments |Comment on this)
1:57 am	A lesson on copyright brought to you by Disney: A Fair(y)Use- Tale (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 17th, 2007
6:22 pm	Go Brownback! Earlier this year, the federal Copyright Royalty Board issued a decision, scheduled to go into effect on July 15th, that will raise the royalty rates owed by Internet broadcasters about 300%, to match rates paid by traditional, tower-based broadcasters. If this happens, providers like SomaFM and Live365 will probably go silent, and the Internet streams of college and noncommercial stations may be compromised. The Internet Radio Equality act of 2007, H.R. 2060 in the House and S. 1353 in the Senate, would put the brakes on the royalty hike and replace it with a mandated 7.5% of a station's total revnue. The Republican co-sponsoring the Senate bill with Democrat Ron Wyden is none other than Sam Brownback of Kansas. Thank you, Senator Brownback. I never thought I'd get to say that. Please contact your representatives. This isn't the war and it isn't a national emergency, but the IREA has bipartisan support and would help sustain the small stations that save us from the monotony of terrestrial radio and disseminate the work of independent artists. One of the House sponsors offers a more technical explanation and a link to the relevant legislation. I tried to find a reasonable counterpoint to all the down-with-CRB sentiment, but the best I could find was a press release from some shysters who seem to work for Sound Exchange, who are in charge of collecting the royalties, and who existed in the womb of the RIAA until 2000. Update: Sound Exchange link now works. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
10:30 pm	I wrote this long post imagined it read out loud. Here's what I have left. Current Mood: accomplished (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
6:13 pm	NFB Punch On April 4, the NFB announced that civil rights icon and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young will be the honorary chair of our March for Independence in Atlanta this July. This is the same Andrew Young who sent mainstream media into paroxysms of simulated shock, and tickled the blogosphere like blood tickles sharks, when he told the Las Angeles Sentinel, an African-American weekly paper, in his role as Walmart's Ambassador to towns across America: "Those are the people who have been overcharging us -- selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs," he added. "Very few black folks own these stores." An argument can be made in defense of Mr. Young that, rather than frivolous hate speech, these comments were the result of legitimate resentment: in many low-income African-American neighborhoods, the produce has historically been overpriced and bad, and the people selling it have belonged to the aforementioned ethnicities. Nevertheless, Mr. Young has achieved that level of infamy whereby his relatives probably do not want to Google his name, because some of the top ten hits ain't nice. Does Andrew perhaps have a strong connection to blindness, a sincerity of purpose, that moved the same leaders who will not utter the word "gay" during general sessions to risk the wrath of countless Jews, Arabs, Koreans and assorted hangers-on? Allow me to attempt to answer that question with a small passage from the press release “As a youth, I would read the Bible to my grandmother who was blind. This grounded me in my love for humanity and affirmed for me the value of all people,” said Ambassador Young. “The National Federation of the Blind demonstrates that blind people are an integral part of humanity, and reinforces the valuable role blind people play in our society. Still today, the blind face discrimination because of misconceptions about their capabilities, and the march will demonstrate their true capabilities to the public and advance the cause of civil rights for the blind. Therefore, I am honored to serve as the honorary chair of the National Federation of the Blind March for Independence.” 'scuse me ... it's hard to hear my screen reader because the wind just picked up something fierce. I am unabashedly in favor of legally protecting free speech even when it's ill-informed, nasty, offensive or skewed. However, I think that attaching Mr. Young to our cause, for the apparent reasons that he was once the mayor of the city where we are marching and he was available when we asked, is a PR maneuver that smacks of cynical figureheading. Will appointing Mr. Young be good for revenue? (The primary purpose of the March is fundraising, and each marcher is expected to raise $250 minimum, to be received no later than May 31. Want to march for the fun of it? Tough.) Maybe he'll pull in some funding, but maybe he'll push some away. I know that if I were Mahmoud the Crooked Bodega Owner and Secret Social Entrepreneur, I wouldn't give him or his marchinets a red cent. Dr. Betsy Zebrowski is blind, well-respected in her community, and has led our research and training institute very capably since its inception. She has a serious, though treatable, form of cancer that shares common cause with her blindness, and she will be stepping down as director of the Jernigan Institute after the national convention. Personally, I would rather be led by the genuinely inspiring Dr. Z, or OCR pioneer Ray Kurzweil, or any number of blind and sighted friends of the Federation, than some washed-up Walmart windbag. But that kind of sentiment, while appropriate to a grassroots movement, is anathema to a corporation, so I'm not going to bother calling. Not just yet. A note on my last entry, regarding Bookshare.org: Thank you if you wrote in to discuss the issue. The PDF is still there, crying for comments, but the promo material now disappears after log-in, and the UserName and Password fields found their little lost alt-tags. Looking better, Bookshare. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
10:31 am	Bookshare site redesign I should probably create a filter for this kind of thing, but I haven't, so just scroll with it if you're not interested. Sometime in the last two days, www.bookshare.org, from whence come all my fantastic accessible E-books, got hit with a redesign that probably surprises nobody but me and the other five members who would rather read the E-books than the listserve traffic. Something ought to be said about it in the coyly titled News: Stay Up to Date section of the page, but, well, y'know. Log-in is now at the top of the page. This is good, but perhaps since this is a site for persons who have trouble reading print, they could include text tags on those form fields? Yes, I can guess where my username and password are supposed to go, but let me tell you as a trainer, not everybody can. Once you do log in, you may now retain the pleasure of traipsing through links to the Bookshare demo, the VictorSoft demo, some public-domain books, and the CBS coverage of the site, along with a multi-paragraph explanation of what Bookshare is and how it works. Apparently Bookshare is reaching out to the amnesiac demographic, because this stuff used to disappear once one established that one was already a member and, as such, passingly familiar with the service. Now, the cherry on top of this sorry sundae. Check that link oh, about two thirds down the front page. The founder, Jim Fruchterman, has written a white paper on the accessibility of Google's book search and library project. How nice. Here is a link to it. IN PDF FORMAT. If you are not an access technology veteran, allow me to share that Portable Document Format, designed to replicate the printed page, is not an ideal technology for blind people. Sometimes, if one has the latest version of a screen reader and Acrobat Reader, one can access a PDF. If one has a thousand-dollar scanning program, one can import and recognize the document. And if one has the technical acumen, one can sometimes jigger a way for Google to recognize the PDF and convert it to text. However, a large demographic of Bookshare users are running old technology and have average-to-basic computer literacy skills. Posting a PDF on the front page of a site that specializes in accessible texts is at best lazy and at worst a tacit opinion that the membership is not rightfully interested in the founder's technical observations. But from looking at the rest of this redesign, I'm betting on lazy. I realize that Bookshare lost, suddenly and tragically, its site manager this February. The site Gustavo designed was uncluttered, fully accessible, and easy to navigate. Bookshare will probably have a hard time finding his equal, but until it does, the lesser powers-in-residence of web design should restrain themselves. Opinions? Anyone sighted want to weigh in on the visual appeal of this new site? Anyone want me to stop ranting now? It's tech-rants or emo-rants, so today you should all feel spared. Current Mood: pissed off Current Music: po. tate. oes. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 12th, 2007
2:04 pm	At least I've still got rock 'n roll. The manual is done. My other job is slow to the point that I will probably not be going anywhere for at least another week. I am solvent but I am also feeling volatile and this is not a good time for me to be unoccupied. This entry has been curtailed: Control+X is a friend you can always trust. Current Mood: absurd Current Music: Lily Allen - Somewhere More Familiar (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
5:03 pm	Force or Fly the Deadlock I'm getting serious about this manual -- I would seriously like to have it done by the time I get to Virginia on Friday. As it stands now, I have to write the section on Utilities and overhaul the Web Browser, which gets changed every time I write it up. Good changes, though, all of them. I also wrote up and tested the Icon's LJ client today. Full synchronization. I now have 6 years of emo-tastic notes, ramblings and observations riding around in my pocket, and if I discover a yen to add more, I can do that right from the Icon. This will be more fun once I can use the thumb-braille feature instead of alphanumerics, but I already have a crush on this feature. I'm getting to Virginia and probably staying in a hotel on Thursday and possibly Friday nights, unless anyone has a Richmond couch for me. I'll be in Doswell visiting the mama unit on Saturday, and perhaps in Williamsburg on Sunday. (Lots of hypotheticals, I know, because my itinerary is open-ended to a fault.) The purpose of this trip is a workday at a government office in the Capitol district, but I'm excited to be getting what amounts to a free ride to see my folks. About the last entry? I did the requisite thinking and am making an effort (again) to quit keeping the type of company that reinforces some of my least favorite traits, without losing any friendships or making any statements of fault. I could've been trapped in a hopeless logic loop for a long time over this, honestly, but it's spring and I'm getting things done and I may as well take this opportunity to be positive. And lastly, a heads-up for New Yorkers: Governor Spitzer has a line-item in his budget bill providing for the replacement of the Commission for the Blind, which dates back to 1913, with a new Office for the Blind with a new executive director and a board, the majority of whom must be blind, with executive authority. The system as it stands now is basically broken, and blind people in the state ore getting shorted on services ranging from Braille and cane travel instruction to tuition assistance to job placement. Unfortunately, proponents of the status quo such as the ACB and a few private charitable organizations are calling up blind senior citizens and scaring the pants off them by saying that this provision, if enacted, will end their services. It won't. There are provisions in place for a smooth transition, and the civil servants currently emploed under the Commission will not lose their jobs or have their caseloads altered. The status-quo lobby has so far succeeded in having the Assembly remove the Office for the Blind provision from Spitzer's bill, but it remains in the Senate version, and either one could win out. Please call or write your reps, and support the Office for the Blind provision in the budget bill, for the modernized, accountable services that blind people in this state deserve. If you'd like a fact sheet, let me know and I'll E-mail it to you, stat. Current Mood: technology, emo, politics Current Music: Harvey Danger - Diminishing Returns (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007
8:06 pm	No update long time ... I've been lobbying in Albany, entertaining (I hope) my alleged future stepsister in New York, and training an attorney in Jackson. I just got one extra week of grace to work on the manual for the Icon, because the developers realized how hard it is for me to write and then have to make bazillion changes as they update the beta software. The beta release of version 1.0 is dropping next week and from what I've seen of the current release, 7.3, it's going to be fantastic. We support streaming media, tabbed browsing, RSS and podcatching, Bookshare downloads, and playlist creation right on the device. Once we have GSM phone capability, GPS and bluetooth Braille display support, the Icon will absolutely lead the market for features, size and price. And hopefully now that I'm sister-free and gainfully unemployed for this coming week, I can lead the market in planting my butt, getting prolific like Asimov and finishing this thing sometime before the singularity. My love life has started to get ridiculous again, even though I had a serious talk with myself about that in October. It's happening because of choices I make willingly enough, but redefining what I seek in a partner might be easier if good people (in the Heinleinian sense) who know my history didn't write me off as an irredeemable maker of unfortunate romantic decisions. That kind of perception tends to stick. Oh well, I earned it ... but if I keep getting summary-judged, I'll probably keep settling. At least my sister-alleged seems to have forgotten the silliness I was vocalizing at home over Christmas. Good, that's a wrap then, dynamite under the bridge as they say. Mississippi is warm and the people are kind. It's nice to have a quiet space to think for a few days every so often, which is just one of the reasons I love my job. But I am ready to come back home, do some writing and play in the city until my plane takes off again. Current Mood: mostly harmless Current Music: Cash. Jackson. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 28th, 2007
11:37 am	I'm aiming to finish the manual on Friday. Given that I don't have the latest beta yet because I lost my jump drive on an airplane and the Icon won't recognize my CF drive, this is an ambitious goal. This has been a great week for entropy. That's the best way I can put it without pointless bitching. And for contemplating, with a mixture of amusement and resignation, my unreasoned love of systems that prove unstable time and again. Current Mood: curious (Comment on this)
Saturday, January 20th, 2007
5:59 pm	Yipes! Can anyone tell me why every webpage loads just fine except my GMail, and how I could fix this? (Already restarted, disabled funky toolbars, cleared cookies, offline content and history. No luck.) No E-mail. I lost my cell phone in a cab on Thursday, and the cab company no longer had it. My friend Arnie texted my number saying that I'd give a reward, and contact was made. My phone was ransomed for $40 at a house in East New York. There was broken glass on the floor. They didn't have heat (adults in bare feet and winter coats) but they had the Disney channel. Now my phone is (temporarily) off as Cingular catches up with the fact that once they turn it back on, they can resume providing me with sweet, sweet text messages from my loved ones in exchange for dime after shiny dime. Current Mood: hungry (Comment on this)