That aside, I am feeling considerably less surly tonight than last night, and I am sure the lovely Wall of Books we've now established in the new house (observe below) have something to do with this:
(eeeee! Books!)
And then we have more fun in the living room...this time fun that sounds like the beginning of a joke. (As in, "A duck, a robot, and a murloc are sitting on a mantelpiece...")
Also, we now have grounded outlets (the house is California-old, having been built in 1954, and until yesterday all the outlets were the 2-prong sort, and many of them were broken). And they are the SQUARE HEADED KIND! Of all the American socket variations, this is quite possibly my favorite.
10 comments:
Yay! I love those sockets. They look like someone saying "Oh!"
I am also glad that someone else in the world gets waylaid unpacking while classifying....
xx
Congrats on the new house!
I know you're busy with unpacking but...
There was a post a while back about how to make a quick-and-dirty AAC device with a speaker, some sort of Palm pilot, and a text-to-speech program. This was posted by either you or Bev.
I can't find it anymore.
If you wrote it and can find it easily then could you point me to it?
Thanks.
Cereus Sphynx,
There's a post at Ballastexistenz describing how to make a DIY communication device, which Anne helped set up. Not sure if that's the post you mean, though.
Tera -
That's it!
Thank You! :)
Cereus: Yeah, I had made a talking computer out of an old HP Jornada and then I helped Amanda make one a while back (and I was glad she got to posting about the thing because I kept putting it off...heh).
It works OK when you actually GET it working (and has a fast turn-on time and pretty good battery life) but setting it up to work is pretty difficult.
There are all these Windows CE .dll files you need to copy into the system folders (because the SwiftTalker program from Cepstral was written for PocketPC and not Windows Handheld), and the difficulty there is that you need particular VERSIONS of particular .dlls. For some of them I had to try about 3 or 4 different versions before I found the one that actually worked, and then (because I wasn't going about the process in a very organized manner) I lost track of what the versions I HAD were.
In any case, though, at this point (while I recognize that a device like that one could be helpful or even critical for some people in some specific situations; Amanda outlines some of these in her post), I have definitely come into agreement with a lot of what Joel Smith says about 'second class' AAC devices.
He isn't saying "never use anything but an expensive and highly specialized device", but just to be cautious not to let one's enthusiasm for cheapness or do-it-yourselfing get in the way of efforts to actually make more optimal devices available to more people. E.g., you don't want people being turned away when they apply for some other device that would suit their needs better by someone telling them "oh but can't you just make your laptop do that?"
(I don't know what the risk of that actually is, but I'm trying to be more cognizant of the very existence of the risk).
And finally, a while back I got an iPod Touch (which I loooooove in so many ways), and there's a program called Proloquo2Go available that is actually a "real" AAC program. It's sort of in an ongoing process of development and there will certainly be improvements made to it in the future, but I've been plenty impressed with it so far (I downloaded it back in....May or thereabouts because I figured it would be interesting to experiment with, and also because I figured by learning to use it myself and sending feedback to the developers, I could help participate in something real that would help people in this regard without undermining efforts to optimize). It's not a super cheap program (was about $150 during the initial release period; I think it's up to about $200 now) but still WAY cheaper than pretty much anything AAC out there that isn't "second class".
It has its bugs and obviously wouldn't work for everyone (the iphone/ipod touchscreen isn't really that accessible to people who are totally blind, for instance, at least not without other special added features) but I do think it's a good step in the right direction toward "democratizing" communication technology.
Oh, and Tera, thanks for supplying the linkage - I am definitely an Internet Flake lately due to this whole moving thing, so that kind of question-answering is much appreciated.
Cereus Sphynx: You're welcome! Google fairy-ing is fun.
Anne: I should confess, I really like seeing other people's book/film/video game collections. Every time I go to someone's house and find a "media shelf," I have to read all the titles of everything on it. So...I zoomed into the pictures to try and read some of your book titles. (The shame! I think I have a problem).
My favorite title (that I noticed) is The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. Because, really, everyone should be able to build their own robot. [grin]
hi anne - i know, we think we are so 'modern' in CA, lol. congrats on being in the finishing stages of your move. i'd love to see what's in the Markov chains section of your math bookshelf :)
Tera: Hah, I am definitely the same way re. people's media collections. I don't mind anyone zooming in on the titles, I love looking at other people's bookshelves and figured there might be others out there with a similar predilection.
LaBlogga: California is most definitely sort of a culture unto itself in many ways....I grew up (until I was 17 at least) on the East Coast of the USA, in Connecticut specifically. And it consistently weirds me out here how houses built in the 1950s or 60s are considered "old"...where I came from originally, there were houses MUCH older than that all over the place. Lots of New England Victorians and Colonials and such. But even despite that, the 50s and 60s houses here seem very frequently to NOT have been update much, especially if the same owners have lived in the building for a long time. The previous occupants of the new house lived there for over 50 years, and I guess they just never figured having grounded outlets to be a priority.
"How To Sort Math Books According To Type of Math"
Oooh, that would be interesting. Not too many types of math are related linearly enough that it would be easy to order them on a bookshelf.
Do you have very many math books from different eras? We do, in my house. My dad has calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations books from the early 1980s, while my brother and I have more or less current ones, and I've managed to get a hold of a truly antique Diff-EQ book --- it might be from the 1910s.
The books get a lot bigger, down the eras --- my antique Diff-EQ book is a very slim volume, about the size of a novel, while my dad's books are fairly hefty hardcovers, and my books from school are huge, phone-book- or dictionary-sized monstrosities.
Of course, they do start to get smaller again as you get more specialized. Some of my brother's statistics books are downright petite.
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