Whew! Thanks to Dan getting my debugging juices flowing, I got the design issues on my webpage resolved. I had a lot of time to do that today; Thursdays are normally my busiest day but half of my clients weren’t there! I am really looking forward to the switch to VRS though. I’ve notified my company, and the supervisor of the four deaf guys I work with (who forwarded it to her supervisors!), and the liaison between the agency I work at and the company I work for. This is really seeming like a positive change.

Whoops, looks like I had the days mixed up…so I kind of fudged that I posted yesterday! I’ve been getting pretty slack - I still think I’ve missed less than 30 days of posting in the past three years, but many of those have been recently.

Today I started training at Gallaudet for their VRS department. It feels really weird to be in training for a different job while I’m still far from done with my old one, but when I interviewed I pointed out that I wouldn’t be starting for a while, and the interviewer said “well I’m the one that teaches the training, and I don’t want to have to teach just one person later in the year, so you have to come now.” Of course I’ll have forgotten everything by the time I actually start working, but at least I’ll be able to jump right in. Unfortunately I heard gossip that none of my previous credits will transfer, so I’m hoping to hear back from the transfer specialist soon…I really don’t want to start as a brand-new freshman! I also still haven’t gotten my registration packet yet; deaf students got theirs 4-6 weeks ago, and the packets for hearing students were supposedly mailed out last Wednesday, but still nothing has come in the mail. I live in the DC area, there’s no excuse for it taking so long! I am going to stop by the guy’s office on my lunch break tomorrow and ask if he has any extra copies of the packet, or if I have to wait for it to come in the mail.

My job during the school year is taken care of! This morning I interviewed with Gallaudet’s VRS interpreting department and they accepted me. The interview was not easy, but I managed okay. A lot of people don’t realize that anytime an interpreter interviews for a job, there is always a skills test involved. (Or at least at all the interviews I’ve been through.) And then there’s the dreaded period while the interviewers go off and discuss how you did!

Fortunately, when they came back they had good news for me. I have to take even more time off from my current job to attend the VRS training, which they will not be thrilled about, but there’s not much they can do. Even if they fired me I’d already have another job lined up to start immediately! (Not that I want to burn bridges.) And the training is paid, so that’s good at least. I’ll be working as a freelancer, so I can fit it around my school schedule as conveniently as possible; they do take out taxes for you.

So I’m all set with a part-time job for the school year. Yay for me!

I have finally gotten my laptop for work and gotten situated in my new cube. There’s computer equipment all over the place, and I don’t have a trash can, but it’s okay. Actually, I have virtually no amenities; when someone needed me to jot down a note she had to bring by a pad and pen! Fortunately she left them here, which is nice.

Obviously this laptop was freshly re-imaged before I got it, so I am starting from scratch. I had saved my entire Firefox profile - actually, I saved a very old copy, oh well - and I was planning to run Portable Firefox from my USB stick, but it was so slow as to be unusable, so I just installed regular Firefox to the C: drive. (Apparently I cannot install into C:\Program Files due to permissions.) I also grabbed kitten wallpaper to replace the green field thing that XP always comes with.

Oh good grief…they’re going to change where I sit at work, sort of. But instead of being a nice easy move from one cube to another, I am going to sit in my current space three days a week and the new space two days a week, so I don’t really have anywhere to call home.

See, two of my clients are in the area where I sit, and two are in another area several floors away. The two who are in my area can call on me anytime they need to chat with a co-worker; the other two have to schedule me in advance or send an e-mail and hope I’m at my desk to rush down and meet them. Now, it’s perfectly clear that the two downstairs deserve their own interpreter they can call on at any time. It’s also true that these people all work for the same department, and it would be nice if everybody could sit in the same area.

And they were going to put us all in the same area, but the people who would have had to move to make that possible…decided they don’t want to after all. The government can’t afford to hire a separate interpreter to sit with the two downstairs full-time, so they are going to have me split between upstairs and downstairs. They say I will at least get a cube downstairs, so at least I will have a place to sit that isn’t in an aisle or in somebody else’s cube. But who knows if I will have a computer or phone, so it will be difficult for the two upstairs guys to reach me if they need to last-minute, etc.

I agree that this is an appropriate solution since the government can’t hire another interpreter…but I think it’s going to be a big logistical hassle for many people, especially me. So I’m not looking forward to it.

My work has blocked MySpace for a long time. It’s no big deal, I don’t use MySpace much anyway. I set up my own copy of CGIProxy and it was serving me well. Today I noticed that apparently eBay and Photobucket have also been blocked, or are at least not coming up - but they do fine through my proxy. Ditto for CreamAid, which I just wanted to check out but couldn’t get to…huh. Anyway, it’s rather annoying that Photobucket is blocked, because this screws up my LiveJournal friends page…feh. I will have to re-host the images via Imageshack or something.

But even more annoying is that MySpace is apparently now channeling your login through a secure server…which CGIProxy doesn’t want to let me access. It should work, as far as I can tell…I have the requirements taken care of. I’m not running on a secure server, but this is for accessing MySpace, not processing payment information - I don’t care if it’s secure. But the error message I’m getting is basically “zomg somebody might EAVESDROP on you wtfbbqpolarbear!!!eleventy1one!!” Again…it’s MySpace. I don’t care. Please to be allowing me to talk to the secure server now.

If anybody has a secure server and wants to host a password-protected (.htpasswd is fine) copy of CGIProxy for me, that would be teh awes0me. Meanwhile I will wait to hear back from the script author.

Added: Oh, YouTube is blocked too.

Update: The script author clued me in to $OVERRIDE_SECURITY and all is well now. Except for Photobucket, because I can’t add pictures to the albums at all…sigh.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here before, but the interpreter who had my position before I got here put herself on a ton of mailing lists. She was here for several years, and I guess she thought she was never going to leave, but there was a falling out between her and the woman who runs the contract for interpreters, so she was asked to go.

As a result, I am now on those mailing lists. More accurately, I am on a bunch of telemarketing lists - when my phone rings, there’s about a 90% chance it’s a telemarketer, because I never get calls here.

What I find really annoying, though, are the sleazeballs who pretend they know me. Or more accurately, they pretend they know the president of the company. They’ll say “oh hi, is Dave there?” or “can I talk to David?” But if these people knew the president and were really on a first name basis with him, they’d know…the president is deaf. No, you can’t speak to him. He uses video relay and anybody he interacts with in a corporate or B2B setting knows to call him through that. Buh-bye.

There is video communication equipment all over my building. In addition to the deaf employees who have videophones at their desks, there’s also multiple small rooms that are set up for video conferencing - some are casual and some are more formal. I do at least one video conference a week, in one of the small informal rooms; sometimes there will also be an additional meeting in one of the small formal rooms. Only once have I interpreted in the giant VTC room in the basement - there are multiple screens, multiple cameras, a big “audience” section, and a little camera that’s targeted on a copystand so you can easily show documents to people who are at a remote site. There are two women who work in the big VTC room, and I’m pretty sure their sole job is the scheduling, operation, and maintenance of that room.

I think video conference technology is neat, but as an interpreter, though, I don’t really like doing them. It’s often very difficult to identify who is speaking, because all the voices are coming through the same speaker and the picture is sometimes too fuzzy to even see whose mouth is moving - not to mention the fact that I don’t usually know the names of people at remote sites, so even if I can figure out who is speaking, it’s hard to identify them!

But back to the video equipment the deaf people in my building have - they’re videophones, designed to connect directly to a video relay service. (They have several to choose from, including FedVRS for sensitive communications.) And to be honest, having the videophones in the building has made life easier for the onsite terps, too! It is such a pain to try to balance the phone on your shoulder while you’re signing for a phone call, but now the deaf employees can call through relay. I think some are still in the habit of calling through the other onsite terps, but I’m not in that position anymore - my current clients are perfectly happy to use VRS now.

It’s December again, and Xmas decorations are popping up all over. My aisle has some tinsel and ornaments on a few cubes, the next aisle over has ornaments on every cube. The flowers in the planters in the hallway are now red with green leaves, the door-decorating contest is in full swing, and there’s a giant Xmas tree in the main atrium, which will have its own special lighting ceremony this week.

I am seriously considering putting up a little Hanukkah decoration in my cube. I don’t know what it will be, and I don’t have a color printer so it won’t look too great, and I’m not even really intensely Jewish. But I do have Jewish heritage, and I was raised Unitarian Universalist, and the entirely Xmas-related decorations are kind of overwhelming. It’s time for a little diversity up in here. I just have to find a good printout, and maybe some magic markers.