Deaf in the Mall

One of my assinments in my ASL class was to go to a mall and act as though I was deaf, trying to communicate completely through sign and gestures. Kitzzy and I were going to the Prime Outlet mall near the Mall of Millenia on Saturday so I figured it'd be a good opportunity. Kitzzy knows some sign language, enough for us to get by chatting back and forth in the mall. This was a great learning experience for me and it was fun, frustrating and thought-provoking.

I noticed a few things right off the bat that I hadn't expected. For one, it was easy for me to turn off my voice, but I had a much harder time turning off my hearing. In the first shop we went to, I was looking at some clothes and one of the sales people came up behind me and asked if I needed some help. Of course my natural reaction was to just turn around and say no, and just after I did that, I realized that killed my opportunity to act deaf. Similarly I kept telling Kitzzy to turn off her voice so I wouldn't be tempted to look at her when she talked to me.

It took us about 30 minutes before we were finally able to get into the no-voice/no-hearing groove and once we did, it was actually kind of neat walking around signing to one another. Walking around the mall, I noticed we were getting a lot of looks. It felt like a lot of people were watching us sign.

Our signing, while not 100% accurate, was actually pretty understandable and we almost never had to speak to clarify what we were saying to each other. I think the mall is a good setting for this exercise since there's a lot to look at and talk about there. I might try this at Disney some day.

One thing we did find difficult was walking and signing. There were a lot of people there and avoiding obstacles like support columns and kiosks was quite a task while we were busy looking at and signing to one another. Several times we stopped and stood off to the side to finish talking before we started walking again.

The first store where I talked to someone was the Pearl Izumi Outlet. They sell mostly sports-clothing and I was looking at some cycling shoes. I tried to ask the salesman about two of the shoes and found myself asking more of a "which one do you like better?" and me holding up two of them. He was polite, but I was a bit nervous so I didn't talk to him as much as I would've liked to.

After visiting a few more shops, we made it to the food court and went to Tropical Sensations, a sandwich and smoothy place. We stood there for awhile looking at their menu and signing back and forth about what we wanted to eat. We pretty successfully communicated to one another what we wanted and I went up to order. I think the guy working at the register realized we were deaf and was ready for us. As soon as I started ordering, he just handed me a sticky note and motioned to write down what I wanted. This was a bit anticlimactic since I was really hoping to try explaining my order with gestures.

One thing I started thinking about during the experience is how often do hearing people imitate deaf people for things less honorable than academic pursuits. I would say I could've probably done this without knowing much sign language at all since communicating with the salespeople was more focused on visual descriptions than detailed conversation.

I had a wonderful experience doing this and I may try it again in the future. I think having another person with me was beneficial because we could sign together and worse comes to worse, I can have them be my interpreter or vice-versa. I think this was a great exercise and really gave me a good perspective to see part of the world through the eyes of a deaf person.

Busy Summer

As I expected, my summer got incredibly busy so my site updates have slowed.

I'm taking a sign language class, training for a triathlon, working, and doing some freelance work at the moment. Unfortunately this has put a premium on my time and I realize there's not enough hours in the week. Not too big of a deal, but updates to this site may suffer for a little while.

Once June is over, hopefully my schedule will free up a bit and I can start making some cool stuff again.

If anything can go well, it will.

A few weeks ago we were at Hamburger Mary's, a faaaabulous hamburger shop in downtown Orlando. They were selling these Golden Tickets to promote the opening of the Plaza Cinema Cafe, a new movie theater opening downtown. The tickets included movie, food, and a cocktail, but the best part was that they were going to show the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!

Kitzzy, Tim, Chas, and I all bought tickets. Well then we got word that the theater was not yet ready and they pushed the opening date back a week. Well guess what: Willy Wonka wasn't available the following week. Bah! At least they were showing another movie I wanted to see.

So today was the only day I was going to to be able to go because I have class on Mondays and Wednesdays. I dropped the car off at the Chrysler dealership this morning because it needed a controller replaced. I got the phone call that the car was ready around 3 and they asked me if I needed a ride back to the Chrysler dealership. I had to work on some stuff, so I said no and I was going to catch a ride with a friend of mine.

Well she ended up getting caught up in some work so we ended up leaving kinda late. Still, not a problem, the movie didn't start till 7 and it was only 6. I get to the Chrysler dealership, pay, and they bring around the car. The dashboard of the car has every warning light turned on, the tacometer, speedometer, and gas gauge all read 0. To put it shortly, it was worse than when I brought it in. Fail Chrysler, once again. I'll save the Chrysler rant for another post.

So at this point it's already 6:45 and the Chrysler guy is giving me a ride home. I've pretty much given up on seeing the movie and now feel like I've wasted $15 on this ticket. Kitzzy needs the car tomorrow and it's just up in the air what's going on.

I know there's a bright side of this story, hence the title, I'm just hoping for sooner than later.

Time Machine

I added a time machine! Over there on the left is a little slider. Slide it. Pretty cool, huh?

I'm going to try to keep regular intervals of CSS and design updates and I needed a good way of showing them off. I'll probably tweak it over time.

Small Progress

I'm trying to update the site with some consistency, even if in small bits so I can keep myself motivated to finish it. I did a little bit of work in Illustrator to add some color to the header. So far I like the direction that it's going.

I need to set up some sort of blog because updating in HTML is going to get old (and unmanageable) quickly. I'm going to try to get that in this weekend and pull in some other content.

An Evolution

For a long time I've left my website no more than a blank page with a few links on it. I haven't had the motivation to put up a new site mostly because I don't know the direction I want to go with it. I've done several Photoshop mockups of the way I think I want the site to look, but by the time I get close to being finished, I start to hate the design and I end up back at square one.

I was finally asked about my website recently and why it was so boring and bland and I started to realize that I need a better presence. I had an idea this time of how to keep myself motivated: Don't try to finish it all at once.

I'm going to evolve this site over time. My first revision is pretty much just a sketch I did on my clipboard, I scanned and cutout in Photoshop and pretty much nothing else. I don't know what direction this is going to take and I'm kind of excited to see where this ends up, but over time I plan to keep adding to the site and setup a historical timeline of designs so you can jump back to almost any point in time.