The latest issue of SIGNews has the following story:

IP Relay Relayed a Death Threat Call against 13-Year-Old
A local television channel in Boston, Mass., reported on April 25 that a death threat was made through an IP relay provider to a thirteen year old girl. Lisa Butler, the mother of Angela, said to Channel 5 News, “The woman said, ‘I’m watching you. I see your every move.’ and continued to speak, ‘Angela, I’m going to kill you when you least expect it. I am going to kill you. I watch you all the time.’ I was like, “Call the police, call the police!” Butler was horrified by the call. She called Dracut police immediately. She was disappointed to learn that the IP relay operators are “mandated” to voice everything that was typed, no matter what. Butler continued, “And I want whoever called and threatened my child caught, prosecuted and I feel IP Relay threatened my child just as much as the person on the other end of the computer.”

I’m trying to keep sane here, because as a relay “operator” I find the woman’s final statement very offensive.

For those of you who aren’t aware, IP relay allows deaf people to use a computer or cell phone to make phone calls to hearing people. Unlike traditional relay, which requires special equipment (usually a TTY), IP relay allows anyone with access to the internet to make calls. This has caused a lot of problems for small businesses because scammers use the service, but it can also be easily used for prank calls…as was done here.

I’m not going to talk about whether the operator should or shouldn’t have relayed the call. What I’m angry about is the woman blaming the relay system. I guarantee you that the operator who relayed that message thought about it as she tried to go to sleep that night, because as a Video Interpreter (VI), I know I would have done the same thing. I’ve had some pretty hateful calls, and let me tell you, they do haunt you. But we’re required to communicate everything that is said or signed, even if it’s hate speech, against our personal values, or death threats. The very idea that “IP relay threatened [her] child” is absurd - the relay operator was doing exactly what all ROs, VIs, and CAs (communication assistants) do. She was conveying the message she was seeing with her eyes into spoken words. She had nothing to do with what was said. The mother needs to take this up with whoever pranked her kid. It is not a relay issue.

Relay is about functional equivalency. Deaf people have as much right to make death threats over the phone as anyone else. Therefore, CAs must pass that message along. If the person giving the message isn’t deaf, well, they’re abusing the system - but it’s not the CA’s fault or relay’s fault. The CA and relay are doing what they were put there to do: convert visual message to spoken message and vice-versa. You cannot blame relay for this. Blame the prankster, not the relay system.

As I’ve talked about before, I have a lot of VHS tapes I want to transfer to DVD. Today we went to a bunch of yard sales, and one of my finds was a dual-deck VHS/DVD unit. It had a button that said “copy” and a post-it saying they hadn’t tested the record function because they didn’t have the discs, so I assumed it was a one-touch copier. Well, it is…from DVD to VHS. Of course I didn’t find this out until I’d paid the $15 and dragged it home, so I now have a combo player…anybody want it?

This did inspire me to get the DVD recorder from our old house, though, and I hooked it up to the VHS player we already have at the new house. So I finally recorded my 1995-1996 season of It’s Ac onto DVD, along with a couple of other short pieces about my high school. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the 1996-1997 season, so I will have to make that into a separate DVD because I’ve already finalized the first one. I also have two huge bags of old VHS tapes that I watched growing up, with movies like Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story and Konrad, which I can now finally burn to DVD! I’m not sure if I have Nadia in the collection or not, but I will definitely want to burn that one…and, of course, my beloved tape of the ‘88 Olympics, which is now 20 years old and needs to be preserved pronto. My father-in-law has given me a bunch of DVD+R’s to start with, and I will be buying more in bulk if I can, because I have so many things to copy!

When I saw on BBCool that the Blackberry 8820 is about to be released, I got slightly worried. The article reported that the phone will combine GPS and wifi in one unit, which as far as I can tell is a first for Blackberry devices. If this phone had a camera, I would have been annoyed because it would be my dream phone - and I just bought my Curve 8310 for $330. But when I checked it out on Gizmodo, sure enough, no camera. A lot of commenters seemed to like that, saying that their employers don’t allow camera phones. Only one person pointed out that the Blackberry camera can be disabled at the enterprise level by administrators. I don’t want a phone without a camera; I first had one with my Color Sidekick (man that thing was crap) and I love it. In fact, the Curve’s camera is so good (2MP) that I haven’t used my regular camera since I got the phone - nothing I’ve taken a picture of has been that important. So even though the 8820 will have both GPS and wifi, it’s not for me.

And neither is the upcoming Curve 8330. It doesn’t have wifi. What’s it take to get a quality smartphone with GPS, wifi, and camera?

I figured out my problem with the 4GB SD card I had bought. It wasn’t Dell’s fault that it didn’t work; I chatted with a representative and confirmed the slot is supposed to accept SDHC cards. It turned out to be a Microsoft XP problem, naturally. It fell under KB 934428, in which XP requires a hotfix to make it recognize cards 4GB or larger. Of course, the hotfix system takes forever to respond, you actually have to wait for a live person to respond, so I found the SDHC card hotfix online and that was that! Now my computer recognizes my 4GB SD card no problem. Yay!

If you haven’t seen me online much today, it’s because I’ve been playing with the new phone. In fact I am using it to write this. It is still hard so I will be brief. As of right this minute, I don’t like it. But I must give it time. It’s hard though because there are things I can do fine on the Sidekick but I don’t know how to do them on the Dash yet. It’s also hard because I don’t want to register any programs yet that cost money like the ssh programs I’ve found. I do like that I can use it on the wifi at home though. But yeah…still a lot of issues so far.

For those of you who missed it in the paid post, I’ve got a new phone on the way. I bought a T-Mobile Dash on eBay. I’ve been underwhelmed by my Sidekick for a while, and the Helio Ocean doesn’t have certain capabilities I need, so I looked around and decided on the Dash. I just called T-Mobile and asked about switching plans; because the new data plan requires a few days for setup, I’ve already activated it so it’ll be ready when the Dash arrives. I’m a little annoyed that the wifi will only work with their hotspots, it costs $20/month for “Hotspots at Home” which lets you use any wifi network. Switching to the Dash will cost $15 more per month, because that’s how much unlimited SMS costs - the Sidekick plan has it built in, but the Total Internet does not.

I’m planning to try the Dash for up to a month. The keyboard is much smaller than the Sidekick’s, so I want time to get used to it and decide if I like the phone before I sell my Sidekick 3. The Dash cost me $181 including shipping; if I decide to keep it, I will post my SK3 on eBay for buy-it-now $181 with free shipping, and it will get snapped up fast, I think. I’ll probably do the same thing with the Dash if I don’t like it, too. So we’ll see how it goes - I am looking forward to trying it!

Okay! I think I have resolved my computer problems and my classes. I wasn’t able to do much online the past couple of nights, because the whole SP2 mess really hosed things up. At one point my monitor decided to make itself “vertical” and I had to crane my head sideways to read anything! I got that fixed but then it refused to come out of VGA mode. All I wanted was to have things back the way they were before I tried to fiddle with SP2! Fortunately Dave Pietromonaco has written a wonderful solution for monitor problems that fixed me right up!

Today I attended the history class and I was kind of taken aback by how uninterested the students seemed. I was one of just a few that asked questions or contributed during the entire class. I happened to bump into ayala920 on my way out of class, and learned she was headed to the Honors section of the same class. She wasn’t surprised that I was unimpressed by the regular class, and told me what time the Honors section met - and it was at a time I could fit into my schedule! So this afternoon I spoke to the Honors program director and got permission to switch, and then sent my academic advisor an e-mail and she clicked the magic button. So now I’m in class with ayala920, to_be_in_snafu, and three other people - there’s just six of us in the class now! The books are nearly twice as expensive as the regular section, but I think I will enjoy it a lot more.

Goodbye deaf studies, hello history! No, not my major. But I’ve dropped DST 101 in lieu of HIS 111. The reason is that supposedly the GSR 103 class is going to replace the DST 101 class, so they might be considered equivalent, and I might not need it for the major. Time is money, and classes take time, so I spoke to my advisor today and switched into American History I. This is also required for the deaf studies major, so I have to take it eventually, and my advisor said that DST 101 is offered every semester, so I might as well take history now instead. When I went to the bookstore to check out the required books for the class, I was glad I hadn’t ended up in the Honors version - it requires four books compared to just one for the class I’m in! (Besides one honors class per semester is enough for now, and I already like my Honors English class.)

I am so frustrated with my computer, though. I managed to get SP2 installed, with the expectation that doing so would enable me to use the wifi at school, but now my computer is unbelievably slow. That’s probably why I rolled back the first time, heh. The power cord is also nearly dead, so I bought a replacement on eBay today. I really just want a new computer, but I can’t afford one. One with specs I like - XP Home, 1GB RAM, 80GB drive, and a DVD burner - is $584.50 using the discount program Gallaudet has with Dell. (I thought you couldn’t get XP with a Dell anymore; turns out you can - but you have to call them up to ask for it, you can’t get it online.) So it’s a lot, and I probably will keep fighting with my machine that is a few years old now.

Thanks to curvedmetal I am now coveting a smartphone other than a Blackberry. When I got my Sidekick 3, I had no phone at all because I’d just cracked the screen on my Sidekick 2. So I ran out and upgraded to a SK3 immediately and it was $300. But if I’d taken the time to do the research, I probably would have gotten a different smartphone. Originally I was thinking it would be the Blackberry, but none of them have all the features I want. It turns out that the T-Mobile Wing has just about everything I want except a built-in GPS. I could keep my same voice plan, and the data plan would either be the same price or $10 more per month. (I’m not sure what the difference is between just “Hotspot” and “T-Mobile Total Internet,” though neither comes with unlimited text messaging like I have now - that’s an additional $15/month.) I probably won’t make the change or anything, because I don’t know how much I could get for my SK3, but if anybody wants to buy me a T-Mobile Wing, I won’t say no! I’m just tired of the inflexibility of the Sidekick, feh.

More stuff went down at GenCon today, of course, but I want to get to sleep sometime this century so I’m trying not to think about it now.