Finally found something good to post. Ha, this is funny.

I realize I haven’t blogged much lately. I don’t want to say that’s because I was busy, which I was but I want to stay committed and try to write as much as I can. Anyway, some updates that’s happened in the last four weeks.

I flew to Illinois to visit parents the first weekend of May as I hadn’t seen them since Christmas. It is painful knowing that time is going by fast and my parents are growing old faster than you can say medicare. My mom’s already a senior citizen and chances for her to become a grandmother are pretty slim since I doubt my finger is going to be bearing jewelry till well after I’m 30 and that’s still four years away, then probably a few couple years more till I’m ready to have kids. So, my mom could be 70 before she can finally add one more word to make it compound. For now, I gotta bear with her for still calling me a baby boy.

While I was there, we went to deaf expo in St. Louis, which was my third trip to a such event. First one was in Chicago, second was Virginia, and now this city home to the Gateway Arch. I wonder why do they still call it a Deaf Expo. It should be called as a battle of VRS services because there are like 8 different VRS services invading 90% of the convention space. Also, I noticed that their booths kept getting larger, more colorful like one VRS company looks like they come right out of Wonka’s Chocolate Factory with their purple setups, and another company thinks they could be as cool as Apple company with their brushed metal design and shadowed lights. Then, I realized something, we’re just like cash cows. The more cows they could register, the more money they can make. That’s what we are to them. Seems like pretty much of our Deaf economy is based on how many minutes we use VRS, then those minutes are billed to the FCC, which gives out paychecks. So we still live on the government’s welfare, either directly or indirectly.

On that Sunday, my parents and I had a brunch with the Chances and one lady who recently lost her husband. It has become into a sort of tradition to have a get-together with them whenever I come in town. Tom Chance was my dorm head supervisor at Illinois school for the Deaf and I was under his wing from 5th grade to 8th grade. He is one of my role models and he carries a certain class that reminds me of Cary Grant. He is also known for making the best martini in town and has a wine cellar in his own basement. I was especially honored when he gave me his favorite light blazer that didn’t quite fit him anymore. I don’t remember feeling this honored. I immediately recognized the blazer because that’s the one he would often choose to wear to award events or graduations at the end of year. The feeling I got was like getting Michael Jackson’s white glove or Elvis Presley’s favorite leather jacket. Something like that.

To this day, I haven’t worn the blazer yet, still waiting for the right occasion but you can bet that when time comes, I’ll wear it with class and integrity that he has always showed.

The interesting thing now with the Chances is that their daughter has adopted two kids from Korea, and I remember I was a little kid when my parents and I attended her wedding. Now, they’re raising two Korean-American kids so I wonder if I had something to do with that.

Before I knew, the weekend had gone by and it was time to go back to DC. The last two weekends, I went on two bachelor’s party, which was accompanied with lots of beers.

to be continued…

Got this email from a friend. My alma mater, ISD, is one of the semi-finalists that could win $25,000 dollars from Expo, the maker of dry board markers. The one that has the most votes will win, so it needs every of your vote.

Click here to vote!

Hello Everyone!

The Junior High science room needs your help and it won’t cost you a thing- just a few minutes of your time! The science room is a finalist to win a $25,000 classroom makeover from Expo markers!!! How do we win? With your votes! There are five finalists from across the country- the classroom with the most votes will win the classroom makeover.

That’s how you can help! Please go to the link below and place your vote for my classroom. In addition- you can forward this to your home email and also use that email address(es) to vote. (One vote per email address). And also important is to send this on to your co-workers, friends, family, every one you know and ask them to vote also!

If you have students- please encourage and permit them to vote also!

(I’ll put something in the announcement papers).

Thanks for your assistance- your vote could make the difference!!!!

— Sherry Humphries

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Sent via BlackBerry from Cingular Wireless

I made an interesting discovery tonight that there are a number of well-known, both fictional and non-fictional, characters that were orphaned. I find this personal because I was also an orphan myself before I was adopted by Deaf parents that I couldn’t imagine not having them as my parents.

My favorite comic character is Batman. In fact, I’m wearing a Batman t-shirt right now, heh. He’s my favorite because first, he doesn’t possess any superhuman powers. He’s a mortal human being just like you and me. Instead, he relies on his intellect, physical prowess, mental toughness, knowledge of science and technology, and build gadgets to enable him to do the job he needed to do. The last part is especially important because I make use of technology to bypass communication barriers as a deaf person. If it wasn’t for technology we have today, well, I couldn’t imagine, we’d probably be as dumb as next dog.

Anyway, I found this interesting article that discusses people who were an orphan.

1) Batman. His parents died when he was a young kid.
2) Superman. His home planet got exploded and the Kents family found him on a farm.
3) Spider-Man. Raised by his uncle and aunt.
4) Harry Potter. His parents were killed by the evil sorcerer Voldemort when he was a baby.
5) The Great Moses. His mother left him in a basket on the Nile river. Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him.
6) Romulus and Remus. Taken care by a she-wolf. Went on to found the city of Rome.
7) King Arthur. Pulled the sword out of the stone and ultimately became a king.
8. Cinderella. Every girl’s favorite fairy tale.
9) Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz.”
10) Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
11) Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Pip from The Great Expectations.
12) Anakin Skywalker, Luke and Leia Skywalker.
13) Frodo Baggins from Lord of the Rings. His parents, Drogo Baggins and Primula Brandybuck “went out boating on the Brandywine River; and [they] were drowned, and poor Mr. Frodo only a child and all.”
14) Alexander Hamilton. An illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, George Washington’s most trusted aide, co-author of The Federalist Papers, the country’s first Treasury secretary and of course, the face of the ten-dollar bill.
15) Dave Thomas – adopted as a baby, never met his birth parents. Went to become the founder of Wendy’s fast food restaurant.
16) Leo Tolstoy – lost his mother when he was two, and his father when he was nine. Often regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists ever.
17) Faith Hill – adopted as an infant. The only female artist to have three consecutive albums debut at Number One on the Billboard albums chart.
18) Edgar Allan Poe. His father left the family and his mother died from tuberculosis. One of the America’s most well-known writers.

Output.

First, I’m going to share a little story I learned in a math class that led me to the idea of outputting. I remember one of the beautiful things about mathematics was this concept called a function.

One time I was sitting in a math class and the teacher was explaining what does a function mean and that we will start using f(x), not y anymore. He drew this simple picture on the blackboard. It looked somewhat like a bin that you put something into it (input) and something would come out (output). So, the bin is like a function. You insert a number into the “bin” and it undergoes some kind of transformation, actually a function, and a new number comes out. Isn’t that wonderful? It can go backwards too, so you can go either way. I thought that was the most simple thing about mathematics and make the problem appear less complicated. This process concept can be applied to many things, for instance, like ourselves.

We especially as deaf people need to OUTPUT more. It doesn’t matter what that might be. Writing, blogging, vlogging, signing, coding, painting, drawing, publishing papers, building websites, so on. There could never be enough output. It doesn’t do any good if you’re doing nothing or making no output. If you have something to share, tell. Don’t be keeping things to yourself because uh how could other people know? It’s even better if you could put on some kind of medium like papers, blogs, pictures, or vlogs because they are reusable and you don’t have to be telling stories over and over. That’s old. In the past, it costs some money to publish stories. Now? it’s nearly free! Anyone can publish.

It is my prediction that in the next few years, we will possibly see the greatest growth in the deaf community ever. No longer do we have to depend on someone to produce media for us like major newspapers. We can make our own news now. We finally have a way to share ASL vlogs easily and it’s spreading like a wildfire. A person doesn’t have to find a deaf person to learn ASL. S/he can look at ASL videos and learn. It’s a little strange to meet a person who has learned some ASL but never met a single deaf person before! Of course, the best way to learn is to hang out with deaf people. The more people learn ASL, the better it will be for us. They will be more likely to support us and respect us as a linguistic culture. They will seek ways to help improve education for deaf kids, bring better accessibility and build more technology.

The only way for people to know more about us is by outputting. Go write something, make vlogs, arts, publish research papers, anything. That is how we advance as a society.

Thought I’d post this to help spread the word out.

Finally, Caption Playback on Google Video

“…however, this is exactly the same problem faced by the early proponents of CC, and it is this very issue which has compelled us to start with baby mis-steps sooner, rather than a giant leap of perfection later. Now that viewers can see the results, we hope that more people will be inspired to caption more videos, and that other services will be encouraged to support similar capabilities. The potential applications here for search quality, automatic translation, and speech recognition should also become more obvious.

Every time I watch TV I’m thankful to all of the many people who first developed and brought closed-captioning to fruition, and wish I could have helped them. So it’s enormously gratifying that Google Video has given me an opportunity to help carry on their work into new domains.” –Ken Harrenstien

I’m seriously thinking about selling my WRX and get this Insight. Gas prices have gone up and it’s become too expensive to own the WRX. :-(

Woot, NBA Playoffs begin now. Go Chicago Bulls!

Man, this video is cool. I’m gonna learn how to dance like him.

You know, we’re all alike. We have a life to live and for that, there are times that we wonder what is the meaning of life and our purpose within.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and what I want to get out of life. One of my friends wrote this, “Well, there comes a time in every man’s life when he must sit up and realize that things are going to change. And today is that day for me.” I think that moment has come for me too. For the past two or three years, I feel like I’ve been floating through life like I’m behind smoked windows or through a long mist without really knowing where I want to go.

Also I’ve been figuring out what is my passion and that’s one big thing I learned about work or things that you do. You must have passion. If you don’t have that, everything pretty much goes sour. I think I’ve found my passion and that is building websites. I’m not that good at photoshop; I always drool at someone’s graphic design skill but I’m not gonna give up. I just gotta play with PS a bit more often and use tutorials. What am I seem to be good at is having an eye and a feel for what makes a good working website. I’m a big believer in “one-page” sites. You don’t want to make a person to waste too much time clicking on pages or for the page to be finally loaded (more than 10 seconds is too long). That’s why I’m using a cache to reduce load time. I’m also not very good at programming like I cannot make a working calculator off a scratch but I’m pretty good at looking at codes, figuring out what they do, and then patch them up together.

I feel I’m at a point where I either act now or it’s never going to happen. The opportunity is there. It’s up to me to take it. If not, well, I’m gonna end up like one of those guys who would go straight to a bar after work and rant about how much he dislikes his manager, how bad his day was, and talk about how he should have done this or that some 10, 15 years ago but didn’t because he was either afraid or just did nothing. I don’t want to become that person. So, I’m going to stop bullshitting around and do something. Be productive. Time doesn’t wait for anyone.

It’s now or never.

Wow, guess there’s no need to download the documentary off the Net as it’s on Google Video now.

Damn, I’m drooling at these pictures. I shall find a place like that someday. Especially with a cement floor and bricked walls.

Damn, I’m jealous of his swing. At least my driving swing has been improving. Did hit once that went almost 300 yards and laid 50 yards from the green. :-)