• August 15 - 21: Ontario
  
  • August 15: Brantford
  
  
  • August 16 and 17: Toronto
  
  
  • August 17, 18 and possibly part of 19: Ottawa
  
  
  • August 19 and 20: … Southern Ontario. Actually I'm wide open then.
  
  
  • August 21: Also fairly wide open
  
  
• August 22-25: New York City


• August 26 through September 1: Boston

Happy birthday to the awesomest tiny_antares ON THE PLANET!

It's still today in the Pacific time zone, right? Also—until such time as someone finds another tiny_antares on this planet, my claim remains unchallenged.

... Right, then. Some of us have to be up for 5:00 AM for conference calls, which means some of us should send certain autistic children back to their gorilla habitat^* bed for the night.

As a disabled person and a person who tends to approach things more logically than emotionally (particularly as pertains disability (particularly what with Seaners and all, as if I thought too emotionally about the ramifications of some of his disabilities it would be … difficult)), there's something that baffles me recently, and that I'll illustrate with an example.

There was a blog post that I'll not link to, mostly because it's been … somewhat edited since its original incarnation … about a new Braille labelling device that's looking for Kickstarter funding. This labelling device has a Braille keyboard, with an option to attach an external qwerty keyboard (what we need to implement after that is a barcode scanner and access to a UPC database). In the article, the blogger tries to spell out, in every sad detail, what life must be like for those who can't see. "They wouldn't be reading this article, for one thing," the author points out, and "... they wouldn't be able to tell the cranberry sauce from the chicken noodle soup until it came out of the microwave that they couldn't operate on their own."

The blogger was … I'm gonna say called out on his factual errors rather soundly by myself and a number of others with this ostensibly crippling condition. The thing that baffles me is his response—that his comments were "insensitive". Actually, they weren't. He was very sensitive to what he imagined the plight of this particular demographic to be. He showed a great amount of concern for those of us who, according to his view, wouldn't be able to distinguish between a can of cranberry sauce and a can of chicken noodle soup. The problem was that he was dead wrong.

And this brings me to my question—why it's all about sensitivity and not facts. It's assumed that if one doesn't follow some specific politically correct protocol, one has offended the poor, delicate sensitivities of The Disabled™. "We don't have a Braille menu," a proprietor of a local restaurant may tell me and apologize for the insensitivity when, in fact, the problem might either be the fact that this had never occurred to them and/or the prohibitive cost of Braille transcription when set against their profits. Do you have an online menu? If so, great! If not, do you mind going over what you've got (even though I may, in fact, have a sighted person with me)? Excellent—I shall tip you accordingly. Alternately, if you go forth on the assumption that said sighted person is there to help me (for all you know, they're a candidate I'm interviewing for a position in my department, and will be reporting to this person that you've just dismissed as incompetent to order his own meal), I'm going to correct your assumption, because it's wrong. Not insensitive—the notion of "sensitivity" never made it into the discussion—but wrong.

phinnia

• Buy two copies of everything?


• Set up a third ID for occasions just such as that? This seems problematic because ... aren't you limited to one Apple ID per device?


• Brutally rip the DRM from the files as they scream for mercy, mercy which I will not grant them because there's no reason content shouldn't be sharable within a household?

• Fixed Seaners' respite. Autism therapy providers != caregivers, so he shall have more respite.


• Looks like phinnia can pretty much definitely get house cleaning and other things that are hard for her to do covered by the State.


• There was an Emily.


• We finally get extra money because we don't have Seaners on my present employer's insurance, since MSFT COBRA covers his therapies.


• I've got it on my docket to contact our benefits manager to try and get Nuance's insurance to cover Seaners' autism therapies.


• I did haz an Emily!


• Seaners starts his weekend program in the community to teach him how to ride buses properly and with the right manners! I CAN HAVE SOME OF MY WEEKEND BACK!


• There's a deal on Amtrak and Vancouver for end of May.

phinnia

I keep promising myself I won't go four months without writing in this thing ... and then ... I ... inevitably go four months without writing in this thing.

Work is ... mostly awesome. I'm taking up two cubes with some schmancy "info-tainment" equipment in various stages of disassembly. On my third day of training waaaaaaay back in December (I should write a post about Germany (and Amsterdam, for that matter)) I ended up coming up with three or four ways they could improve their QA process, something I was never feeling like I was quite able to do on the Windows team for some reason (could have been me, could have been them, could have been third party stressors, could have been all three). Anyway—I'm supposed to come up with some ideas for SMART™ Goals for the year in my next meeting (this feels strangely familiar).

Also also, apparently there may be opportunities for me to work with other operating systems outside of the Windows world, depending on my workload for this project for Ford.

Almost as though to counterbalance this, ( we have SeanersCollapse )

I'll have a better idea of how my new job is when I'm ... well, probably when I'm off to Germany, as that's when a lot of my training will happen. As for today ... I'm filling out paperwork—thank God for legally binding digital signatures.

So yeah. There was a spontaneous trip to Vancouver to get phinnia's passport updated, since it expired pre-Seaners. As ... not infrequently happens, things didn't go as planned. See, Canada apparently requires that you have a guarantor, for some reason, because you might not be who you say you are unless someone with a Canadian passport (or someone from this list of professions that they hide somewhere) vouches for you—or maybe you don't need a guarantor if you can provide two references. Per the Canadian Consular-General, or something, you can fill out a form that they used to use for a passport but don't anymore, include a guarantor from the United States that's one of these professions (like, for instance, the pharmacist that fills phinnia's prescriptions (but not the software developer that's known her for nearly 12 years, until said software developer gets his Canadian passport)), and you get your passport in 10 business days, just in time to turn my business trip to Germany into a vacation.

... Except ... that ... they don't take the old form anymore, and someone forgot to let the consulate in Seattle know. So there was a new form that phinnia needed to fill out (good thing this wasn't me, as I'd have to find a way to fill out and print the form remotely), get signed and notarized (fortunately there was a notary just downstairs), submit and pay a fee for express processing. Oddly, this little hiccup cost us a total of -4 days, as the passport will be ready for pickup in Vancouver next week. So phinnia gets to go to Vancouver next week sometime to pick it up. I sorta wish there was a convenient way to bring me back a double double and a donut from Hortons.

Oh right. Business trip to Germany. My new job at Nuance has me acting as a liaison between their development team in Germany and their hardware developers in Bellevue—as well as a test engineer on their combination voice and touchscreen project for Ford. This leads me to a bit of a philosophical question. How do you write test automation to remotely operate an interface that you can't see? Or ... no! Wait! Maybe that's more of a Remote Tools Framework development question! Or ... maybe it could be either one. Either way, they're sending me to Germany for training, and we seem to have the means to turn this into a vacation from Seaners that doesn't involve the in-patient psychiatric unit and includes a weekend in Amsterdam, unless I miss my guess. But yeah, that's what's new with me.

Oh—regarding the automation. How do you politely ask how much money said automation would save the company, for inclusion in an accomplishments-based resume, without sounding like you're job hunting, which I wouldn't necessarily be? Is there even a way to do that?

I appear to be collecting an inordinate^* amount of font-related stuffs—like, for instance, this game.

Things I need to do before I leave on Tuesday:

• Buy or decant carry-on items


• See if it's cheaper for me or phinnia to get phinnia's MiFi


• Verify BNS API integration with Segmented Postbuild (y'all can just ignore that)


• Figure out what's happening with chezmax (I meant to ring you (I've no email address, oddly), but U2 and laptop shopping and the fact that I had to clean this place up sort of got in the way.)


• Worry that I forgot something

I think that's it.