sarenji

Joined 16 years ago

Karma
753
Submissions
21
Member since
Aug 16
site: http://davidpeter.me

email: david.a.peter [at] gmail.com

github: http://github.com/sarenji

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Recent submissions

Comment · 13 years ago
I've worn these glasses a couple times now. They're unfortunately not great. They're quite heavy, so wearing it for two hours gives me pains and aches. The front of the glasses is bulky and presses down hard on the bridge of your nose. The sides don't open fully, so they're squeezing your head like a vise. Since I also wear normal glasses, I have to layer them under these captioning glasses. Friends and I joke about me being six-eyed.

As for watching through these glasses, they use a holographic display for the captions. Since they are projected directly onto the glasses, I learned very quickly to keep my head absolutely still so I could read the capions without getting motion sickness. The brightness and size are adjustable, which means you can choose from a bright green text and background or fainter levels of green. I'm not quite sure how the glasses receive the captions to be displayed, but it's via some sort of wireless technology. In the three theatres I've watched movies at with these glasses, they drop lines frequently, which is an exercise in frustration. I assume those two things are related. These glasses are hard to distribute -- each costs about $1,000, or so I hear. Not good if you run out and a deaf person needs to watch a movie, which has happened before.

Rear-view windows have similar problems, replacing wearing something uncomfortable on your face with wrestling against an adjustable mirror on a stalk. All in all, I'd say I enjoy open captioned movies in theatres the most -- where they display the captions directly in the movie.

Comment · 14 years ago
caffeineninja: The email field is invisible on HN, so you'll need to put it in your about. Either way... my email is in my profile.

A lot of my post outlines a struggle as I become more proactive. I'm leagues beyond what I used to be 3 years ago, but obviously I'm still not completely there.

I couldn't find any good/reputable speech therapists in SF, but I should have been more proactive on this. Do they have to be specifically deaf ones?

> At some point in time, I developed an ability to lip read and was able to speak without difficulty.

Can you expand on this, either on here or email? This seems like the most important part, especially as I'm not at that point.

Comment · 14 years ago
1) Lip-reading is hard. In a group conversation, how many of the people speaking are actually looking at you? How do you follow a back-and-forth? What if someone interrupts? Who is it? People vary in lip-reading skill. I'm on the lower end. If someone says "Lipreading sucks," and you get 50% of it, you get either "Lipread" or "ing sucks," neither of which tell you anything. In longer sentences, you can sometimes guess, but I seem to be terrible at it?

2) My speech has never been a problem as my work understands me quite well. I perceived I had bigger things to deal with, like working on understanding what people say and getting up-to-date on stuff happening at work.

3) I have many Deaf friends back in college who I try to hang out with. I'm still learning sign language from them, and they've all been very helpful and supportive. Until I become proficient enough to actually participate in signed conversations, though, I still don't feel as if I belong.

By the way, me being more proactive is something I'm also working hard on :-) It's all a process.

Comment · 14 years ago
This sounds like a classic case of premature optimisation. Cross that bridge when you get there. Thousands of other deaf parents have done so. Their kids were fine.

Actually, you're right. Sometimes the girl I like is deaf, sometimes not. I should be fine with kids either way, and put in the work to make sure they develop right. I'm rethinking this entire paragraph. Perhaps I should have said I don't specifically search for a girl who is deaf, and then just left it at that, or just removed it entirely. Love is love.

Let me respectfully suggest that this is just untrue, a persistent myth about language learning. Hearing kids learn spoken language just fine, even if their parents don't use it.

Some (old) studies had suggested otherwise, but you made me remember the bilingualism argument, which is gaining traction. I do know that if you have a hearing child to both deaf parents, it's very important to expose the child to spoken language as much as possible. Of course, I hope I'm that kind of parent :-)

Bilingual kids do have a lot of advantages over kids who only know one language. I'd be very happy to teach my child, hearing or deaf, both sign and English.

Thanks for the insightful comment.

Comment · 14 years ago
Thanks, this means a lot. What you say is true. I've had a hard time separating work from personal life, since this is my first job (ever!). Going forward, I have a better idea of what to expect.

I also wanted to make it clear that I'm extremely thankful to my work for taking the chance to hire me. I love literally everyone here, even though, sometimes, I feel alone. Now, I'd consider all of them my friends. That's the basic sense I tried to get across with this post.

Comment · 14 years ago
It was a reference to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

Namely -- Frank Rubin published a criticism of Dijkstra's letter in the March 1987 CACM where it appeared under the title 'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful. The May 1987 CACM printed further replies, both for and against, under the title '"GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?. Dijkstra's own response to this controversy was titled On a Somewhat Disappointing Correspondence.

:-)

Comment · 14 years ago
Comment · 15 years ago
I agree. When I wanted to make a new jQuery plugin site (until this post!), I planned on being able to view the plugin source online, like on GitHub. Aside from viewing the code and its quality immediately, it would also let us copy-paste plugins that are just one .js file. It's a bit bothersome to have a .zip in that case.
Comment · 15 years ago
Anecdotally, there's definitely some truth to it being a matter of what you've grown used to. I moved from an old Windows desktop to a Mac OS X laptop. I found the fonts on Mac OS X to be exactly as you described -- fuzzy, bold, fairly annoying. After a month of heavy usage, I stopped noticing it. When I visited my old Windows computer a year later, I realized I perceived all the fonts as incredibly jaggy, thin, and hard to read. But after a while (1 week) I stopped noticing as much.
Comment · 15 years ago
Some people are hearing-impaired and need a transcript in the absence of captions.
Comment · 15 years ago
This is an important issue in some chat programs. I had to deal with this all the time: malicious users using i vs. l to pose as others, and using unicode to mess up or reverse the entire chat. One of the more interesting unicode had characters going left, right, and up and down. This confused moderators about who to kick/ban and obscured other users' text.

The solution was to implement a regex of whitelisted characters; since it's an English-only program, this works well and is future-safe. For multiple languages, a blacklist is probably okay, but the difficulty lies in keeping the blacklist both complete and up to date.

Comment · 15 years ago
Comment · 15 years ago
Comment · 15 years ago
you brain will be trained to follow a routine upon hearing the alarm. You’ll wake up on auto pilot, no matter how tired you are.

I did this every morning in high school. It also helps to immediately take a shower. I never understood why my peers would just go back to sleep and I didn't, but I suspect this is why.

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