Stuff and Things

Well, actually it’s been over a year. Not much of note has been going on, but I thought I’d write about the most blogworthy events of the last year or so. Besides said events, I’ve been coding various things, working at my job, and reactivating my Guide Dogs for the Blind application.

May: I purchased an iMac

My good old Dell Dimension had served me well, but at last, it had begun to slow down and fail. Last year, the video card needed to be replaced because it was making the system unstable, and this year the CMOS battery died, which somehow coincided with a decrease in responsiveness. Every few minutes or so, the system would completely lock up for 5 seconds or so, then return to normal. I had considered getting a nice Asus desktop with Windows 7, but somewhere along the way, the idea of purchasing a Mac came along. Eventually, I decided on a 21.5 inch iMac, with an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.06ghz, 4GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive. So far, the experience has been wonderful. I’m sad to say I haven’t been able to entirely switch away from Windows, as there are some apps that don’t have Mac equivalents that I use, but I am trying. I have only had one bad experience with the Mac so far. In October, I started getting kernel panics when the Mac came out of sleep, and an inability to reach the login screen. Eventually, I brought it in to be examined, and the hard drive failed two tests, and was eventually replaced.

July: The ACB conference and convention

This year, I decided to go to the 49th anual conference and convention of the American Council of the Blind. I was still paying off my iMac and Nokia N86 I had bought, so the money situation was very tight, but I still managed to make room for convention costs. In total, the whole trip was roughly $1200.00. That includes administration fees, event fees, plane tickets and hotel costs. That was only the second time I had flown by myself, the first time being when I flew from Minneapolis to Amsterdam, and then on to Germany for a month-long internship in 2007. I had managed to find a roommate, so the hotel costs were split. I don’t think I could have gone if I hadn’t been able to find someone to share the room with. I went to the Grand Canyon tour, which was really fun. That included going to a really awesome reservation where we had lunch and did some shopping, going to the park building to take a look at the different plants in the environment, heading to a nice restaurant for dinner, going to the edge of the canyon, and finally going to a general store for some more shopping before returning to the hotel. We left at about 06:30 AM and returned at around 01:00 AM the next day, if I recall correctly. I also signed up for all of the BITS events. BITS stands for Blind Information Technology Specialists. I met a lot of nice people who share my interests, and heard a wonderful presentation on Apple computers and portable devices. I was also able to take a look at the new iPhone 4. It was amazing! I was a bit nervous holding it… The whole thing seemed like nothing more than two rectangular pieces of glass and a metal chassis. Shattering one of those would be very easy. OF course I went down to the exhibit hall, and saw a lot of really cool stuff, but the only thing I ended up buying was acane tip for my then tipless cane, which had lost its tip in an accident with a couple of elevator doors. That tip is probably still at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Haha.

September: I bought an iPod Touch

After I bought my iMac, I was finding myself more and more interested in other Apple devices. I once joked to my mom that after the iMac, I had been become sick with Apple fever. Heh. On the same day that Steve was due to announce the latest generation of his popular iDevices, My mom and I went to the state Fair. After a really fun day, we went to a Weird Al Yancovic concert. After we got home, I stayed up all night listening to the announcement on Apple’s website, and then reading news articles about the announcement. Somehow, I managed to make it through the next day, when I went to work, without falling asleep at my desk. I was thinking about preordering right away, but I thought it might be better to get my iPod from the local Apple store at the Mall of America, but when I was told that there wouldn’t be any cases available at the same time, I decided to preorder after all. That was September 8th. I received my iPod Touch 64GB on September 13th. Getting Voiceover set up was extremely easy. I really didn’t start messing with apps until mid October, after my Mac’s hard drive had been replaced. As of this writing, I have 21 apps on my iPod, all neatly sorted into folders. I’m really enjoying my iPod Touch, and I did consider the iPhone as my next phone before I bought my Nokia N86 in April, but later discovered that AT&T’s plans were too highly priced and offered too little in the way of features.

October: Birthday.

Well, actually this was pretty uneventful compared to the other notable events of the year. My mom, my sister and I went to the Olive Garden for my birthday dinner, and afterward, I was allowed to pick out a new bathrobe to replace the one I had accidentally left in the hotel in Phoenix at the ACB convention.

November: Thanksgiving and cell phone dilemma

Thanksgiving was very fun, actually. My uncle and his kids and my grandfather all came over for thanksgiving. We had the usual thanksgiving dishes, which were excellent. We played a few of my CDs in the background, and after the meal we had some wonderful pie and icecream that my uncle provided. We played a game called Say What, which is a game where you are provided with a famous phrase. Each of the five balls on the game are assigned one or more words of the phrase, and the phrase is scrambled, so you have to rearrange the balls to reconstruct the correct phrase. Lately, I’ve been having a problem. My new phone has poor reception, and it’s really been annoying me. I get almost no bars at all in my room, and even when my phone has a lot of bars, it will randomly lose the signal, requiring me to either restart the phone, or set the phone to offline mode, then reactivate the general profile to reacquire the signal. As a result, I have been wondering whether I would be better off selling my Symbian phones and applications and switching to a different phone, probably using a different phone OS. Like I said, I’ve considered the iPhone, but AT&T’s plans are too expensive for what they offer, so the only choice is to get a phone with the Android OS. After all considerations, I’ve decided that within the next few months, I’m probably going to replace my Nokia N86 with a T-Mobile G2. I’m going to sell my N86, TALKS and my copy of K-NFB Reader Mobile.

Besides the above events, I’ve been doing some random coding, I’ve gotten back into Twitter, and I’m trying to get my own apartment and get back into Guide Dogs for the Blind. Among my other coding projects, I’ve been experimenting with BGT (Blastbay Game Toolkit), an audiogame engine developed by a good friend of mine, Philip Bennefall. I’ve developed one sample game so far, called 23 Bricks, and I’m working on developing a highly object-oriented sidescroller. Both have their own Subversion repositories, but only the former’s is publically viewable. The svn repository for 23 Bricks can be located at http://svn.jasonsw.com/23bricks. It contains code not available from the sample game download at the Blastbay site, and experimental code for multiplayer support, though I haven’t finished that.

I understand the arguments that other people have submitted about BGT not being a propper programming language, but unless you plan on creating games with advanced features like 3d sound, I see no reason to use a standard programming language for audiogames, and personally, I would rather spend more time working on the game than worrying about buffer overflows and null-referenced pointers and such.

Well, that’s about it for now. I can’t say for sure that I’ll blog any time soon, but I’ll try and do it a little sooner than a year from now.

Hello to anyone who is reading this. Well… the rest of September wasn’t all that eventful… Working at my job, hanging out, the usual. I did get together with my dad and a few other people, though. October, on the other hand, has some special significance for me, due to the fact that tomorrow (as of this writing) is my 22nd birthday. I’ve been trying to think of things I might want (which I almost always have trouble with). That being the case, I decided to send people a link to my Amazon.com wish list.
A few weeks ago, I got back in to Ebay. I was having a lot of trouble at first, because I couldn’t remember my old user ID and password. I tried guessing, but that was no good. I tried their support system, which was spending too much time trying to get me to tell it what problem I was having, and not enough time telling me how the hell to contact someone. Tried e-mailing them, but didn’t get a response until today, and that was just an automated response saying they were sorry it had taken them so long. Luckily I had been able to regain control of my account long before that message came in. I finally decided to give their online chat a try, and to be honest, I was completely surprised. A chat site that I thought would be very inaccessible was, in fact, 100% accessible. I wish more companies would follow Ebay’s example. Anyway, I was finally able to get them to change the account’s registered e-mail address to my most recent one, and send me a new password.

I had been thinking about trying Linux. I had tried Ubuntu as a VM, but I didn’t like that too much. I asked for a few suggestions, and got a few good ones, but either the program was too expensive, or the suggestion refered to getting said expensive software in a less than legal manner. Finally, I just decided to buy another laptop, wipe any existing OS off of the hard drive, and install some distro of Linux or other. I made a few bids on some laptops on Ebay, but kept getting outbid. After adding even more money to my PayPal account, I was able to go a bit higher, and eventually won the auction on a nice Dell D610.
I was thinking about giving Ubuntu another chance, but a friend said that many loops had to be jumped through to get Orca to work properly in administrative applications, so in the end, I settled on Vinux, at least for now. I’ll probably install a more widely used distro once I get to know it better. One thing I need to do is figure out what wireless drivers I need — I really want to get on the internet with it. I got it to connect when I was connected via wire upstairs, but I can’t get a wired connection downstairs.
Right now, I’m looking forward to activating my new Sirius satellite radio that my mom bought for me for my birthday. That’s going to be awesome.

Well, it wasn’t so much the first half of the week; the hell started about Thursday around midnight or so. I won’t get into that part in detail, but if someone really wants to know, you know my address. Anyway, besides that late-night incident, I thought nothing else was wrong, But when Thursday morning rolled around, I was dizzy, my head hurt, and what little vision I had was almost completely gone. I could tell the windows were open, and I knew that I should be seeing light pouring through them, but all I could see were dim lighted areas where the windows were. By the time my mom got back from work, things had gotten worse. I was so dizzy, I needed to either lean against or hold on to somebody/something, or I felt like I was going to fall down. My vision problems had also worsened a bit. I was given a glass of water and apple juice, but that didn’t help much. My mom also said I was breathing really fast, but I didn’t notice that all that much. Finally, my mom decided to call the nurse hotline, and they told her to drive me over to the emergency room, so we did. I had to hang onto her all the way out to the van. Once we got there, though, a hospital worker took me into the building in a wheelchair. They got me signed in, my paperwork, medical insurance cards and such checked out, and also checked my blood pressure, heart rate and all that. After my mom got home, she checked my temp a few times before we left for the ER, and the thermometer showed it to be around 104. Anyway, my heart rate was indeed high. Around 160, in fact. Later, when my mom asked the doctor what a normal heart rate was, and he said 90-100, or something close to that. For the next few hours, not much happened. Nurses and a doctor went in and out, I got a lot of tests done, I had an IV put in, and eventually… At almost 1:00 AM, I was given a room. Surprisingly, I was able to sleep, even though the bed was so uncomfortable, especially because every thirty seconds or so, it would start humming, and then adjust itself somehow, maybe air pressure in the bed or something. I could feel the bed moving under me. When I woke up in the morning, I felt a lot better, and my vision had
returned. They served breakfast, French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, milk, juice and coffee. I wondered why they were
giving so much food at once, especially because some of it was so sugary. Then one of the nurse’s assistants came in and took my blood sugar, and it was 283. I thought to myself… “Um… Maybe you should’ve checked it *before* I had breakfast? Duh?” My blood pressure and heart rate had calmed down during the night, and I was breathing slower. I really didn’t do all
that much until lunch… Just did nothing much in that uncomfortable bed while watching the history channel to kill time.
My dad came over to see me, and that was fun, I suppose. He left when lunch was served. Again, it was an abnormally large portion for someone who had just been pretty sick for the last day or so. They were going to put in another IV, because the
first one I had started to fall out when I had to use the restroom. They poked me in four different locations on my arms, trying to find a vein, but to no avail. I’ve been used to getting my blood drawn every six months or so, but those needles
aren’t very painful. Whatever needle they were using for the IV hurt like hell. Luckily my mom showed up before they could try for the fifth time, and the doctor on duty thought I was ready to go home, and wrote the discharge papers. Again, they had someone push me out to the van in a wheelchair, even though I wasn’t nearly as dizzy as I had been the night before. Oh well. The rest of that day was mainly spent lying in bed, listening to Audible books on my BookSense that I had just received that Wednesday, just before the problems started. Saturday was about the same, just lying in bed till about 11:15, then getting up and getting ready for a get-together I wanted to go to later that afternoon. It was a lot of fun… We had homemade chicken wings, burgers, sweet corn, chips and dip. The other people at the get-together either had beer or sodas, but since I had just been discharged from hospital, I took sweet tea instead, probably the safest thing I could drink other
than water. They had their guide dogs there as well. One was retired, the other two were their working dogs, and the only other guest had a guide dog as well. They put their dogs in their kennels and let the other dog walk up to them at first, but nothing bad happened, so they let them all out. It was funny to listen to them running around this big yard, chasing each other and stuff like that. Eventually it got late, and the mosquitoes started biting, so we went inside. About 20 minutes after that, the other guest left, and a further 40-50 minutes after that, my ride showed up, and I left as well.
I was supposed to go to church today, but I wasn’t feeling up to it, so I slept in. After my mom and her boyfriend got back from church, I got up and got ready to go to the Minnesota State Fair. It was a *lot* of walking, but over all, it was
pretty great. I didn’t eat a lot of food or go on a lot of rides as usual, but I still had fun.

Well, this is the first time I’ve been on the computer since Wednesday, and I’m just starting to get back into everything. Caught up on e-mails, but I’m not even going to try and catch up on all the tweets I missed, since there are so many of them. Oh well. I still don’t feel 100%, but I think I’m getting there.

Hey everyone, long time no post.

I know it’s been a while, but to be honest, I really didn’t have anything worth blogging about for the last few weeks.
It’s been a mildly eventful week, unlike the last few. I’ve been working at my internship, and all is going well on that front. I go over to their offices every Wednesday. I would go more often, but the cost of paratransit services over here has become rather high in the last few years.
At any rate, things are going well. I’ve been experimenting with some new programs lately, both of which have turned out to be very helpful. I had been hearing people talk about a program called Executor, and was wondering what they were talking about. From what I heard, the program could help with a variety of tasks, including launching applications, looking something up on the web, etc. I didn’t start testing it until Thursday or so. I found the product to be extremely useful. It didn’t take much time at all to learn how to write commands (called keywords) for Executor. For example, I wrote a “phpfunc” keyword that I can use to look up a function in the php function reference manual. All I have to do is press the hotkey to unhide and give focus to Executor, type something like “phpfunc time”, and the reference entry on the php time() function would come up in my default web browser, Firefox.
The other program I was experimenting with is a Windows version of cURL, a program that can perform an enormous number of tasks over the net, including the ability to get a page from the net, submit get or post data, deal with cookies, ftp commands, and more. A very nice program. I haven’t come up with a good use for it yet, but I’m sure something will come to me.
Lately, I’ve been debating whether I should stick with my old Victor Reader Stream, or sell it and buy a BookSense, a new and very much improved book player. I’ve listened to two or three podcasts about it, read the manual from top to bottom, and even had a chance to explore one at my internship. I mentioned to one of my co-workers that I was playing with the idea of selling my Stream, and she said that she would be interested in buying it from me for her husband. She had just bought a BookSense XT for herself, but her husband didn’t have a book reader yet. I told her I would get back to her on it, and after much consideration, reconsideration, thinking over it again and again, I’ve decided to sell the Streem to her, and get a BookSense.
Oh… I almost forgot, I went to go see Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince on friday. It was ok, I suppose, but I think the actor who plays Dumbledore in the fourth movie onward sucks. Oh… And they completely fabricated an entire sceen. Besides that, though, it was ok. I suppose.

Well… That’s about it for now, hopefully at the end of the week I’ll have something else to blog about.

Well… I know I usually only post weekly, but this was such an awesome event, I just had to blog about it.
Almost an hour ago, I received an e-mail from someone at Guide Dogs, saying that my application had been “tentatively
accepted”. Apparently I’ll be there from April 26 to May 22, 2010.
For any of you that are interested, the following is the e-mail I got (minus the signature):

Dear Jason,
We are pleased to confirm that your application for a Guide Dog has been tentatively accepted and a place is reserved for
you in our San Rafael class that begins Monday, April 26 and graduates Saturday, May 22, 2010.

We will be sending you a reminder in December along with a medical report form since the report we have on file will be a
year old in March. If you have moved, we will need to visit you in your new area to verify that you routes established.
Once we have received the updated information, we will send you a pre-class packet. The packet will include the Guide Dog
User Contract, dorm information, a class syllabus and a suggested list of items you may want to plan to bring with you. We
will book travel arrangements for you about 4 weeks prior to your class date and send you additional information.

We are looking forward to having you with next Spring!

This was the second week of my job, and I think I’ve made progress. Finally got my 16GB SD card for my Stream, and my 16GB write-protectable USB drive. Moved all of my portable apps from the old one to the new, reformatted the old, updated old and possibly exploitable apps such as Firefox 3.01 to their newest versions, and also updated Firefox extensions to their latest versions, installed FEBE, an extension that I recently installed on my desktop installation of Firefox that can back up your profile and settings, etc. Moved my books from my old 2GB SD card to my new 16GB one. Very nice. Wednesday was interesting, because I went into work, and since my Dell notebook is having issues, I had to use one of their netbooks that only had Window-Eyes and System Access installed. Having to use Window-Eyes instead of JAWS for four or five hours was a bit odd and uncomfortable, but I think that if I really made up my mind to sell my JAWS licence/dongle and jump ship to WE, I could probably deal with the changes. Besides… Their new scripting language makes the JAWS scripting language look pathetic in comparison.
Also… I went looking for an OpenID provider. OpenID, in case some of you haven’t heard, is a new open standard that lets
you login to any OpenID-enabled site. Basically, you enter a URL into the edit box provided, activate the login button, and you’re taken to the site itself, where you’re asked to log in. The site that sent you to your “provider” never sees your login information, only if you were authorized successfully or not. It’s as simple as that. One URL, one username/password.
Anyway… I went to The OpenID site, and went searching for providers. Apparently, logging in with OpenID using Google and Yahoo is possible, though the instructions given there were unhelpful. Looked into MyOpenID, but they apparently let their advertisers send you e-mail, and there’s no way to unsubscribe from that without closing your account. Looked into VeriSign’s Personal Identification Portal, but even when I was able to get WebVisum to give me the right translation of the goddamn CAPTCHA, the form submition would fail, so I gave up on that.
At last, I found what I feel is the perfect solution for anyone with a website of their own:
phpMyID is an open-source, small set of PHP scripts that can allow you to host your own OpenID provider. It’s easy enough, and provides solutions to all of the most common problems you might experience during use. Within about a half an hour of reading docs, configuration and minor problem solving, phpMyID was working for me. I tried it with SendSpace, and it worked perfectly. Woot!

Today (Saturday), my dad, his … girlfriend? Friend? Companion? (hard to say), my sister and I went out for breakfast,
then went back to his house so that he could show my sister some furniture he would give her for her house that she and a few friends of hers would be renting out starting July, then we went to go see the latest Star Trek movie. I thought it was pretty good, but I thought it left a few loose ends dangling. Oh well.

This week has been pretty eventful, compared to the last month or two, anyway. Hopefully the trend will continue.

This week, I started working at the place I’ve been working during the last few summers, and so far, everything has been
going fine. I’ve been working on some custom scripts. Besides that, nothing much has been going on. Been looking at a MUD a
few friends of mine found called Haelrahv, which is really turning out to be a cool
MUD. It’s an odd (but fun) fusion of science fiction and fantasy. I’ve also been doing a few things on DiscworldMUD, a MUD that I am hopelessly adicted to, including the normal management
duty that comes with owning a player shop.
Besides the new job, it’s been a mostly uneventful week.

First of all, I woke up on Sunday at 4:00 AM, and found an e-mail from an instructor at Guide Dogs for the Blind, saying
that she would be available for my home interview Sunday or Tuesday. Since I was available all day on Sunday, I decided
that that might be the best option.

The home interview was awesome. I showed her the route I take up to the bus stop five or six blocks away (well, there were
closer ones, but closer in that case wasn’t considered better), and on the way back, I was able to do the “Juno walk”. It
was a bit weird, but the whole thing was fun over all.

On Tuesday, I ended up graduating from Vision Loss Resources’ “Adjustment to Blindness” training program. It was really fun
and useful stuff, and I’ll miss it.

Nothing much happened on Monday or Wednesday, but today I got an e-mail from the person who I was an intern with for the
last two summers, so I might be able to do that again, which would be fun.

Besides that, nothing else of any significance has happened. Over all though, it’s been a good week so far.