It's Thursday again, so I'm back for another update. A lot has actually been going on this past week, work, school, and otherwise.
Work has been quite busy but fun this past week. Last week was very slow, and I only met with one or two customers. This week though, I've met with three or four. I'm still helping one customer learn Dragon, and it's going quite well actually. It's much easier now that I can use and experiment with the software itself. There are still some things to figure out, but it's going well.
Another customer is interested in getting the word out there to senior groups and other organizations he works with about the assistive technology. He also mentioned some class that is taught every so often at SSB on how to teach people computers, kind of how to be a teacher, and how to explain the basics of computers and assistive technology. This sounds interesting because while I am doing pretty well, I could always use more pointers. I'm not certified to be a teacher, I'm just winging it and building on past experience for the most part.
I also attended another training at SSB on Wednesday. This time it was on a couple of electronic Braille devices. It was actually pretty cool, and I could see the use of a small Braille display and Braille keyboard combo. However I just have a hard time still justifying the price for these things. I know I've talked about this probably several times before, but price is just insane. Braille displays are probably some of the most expensive pieces of assistive technology for the Blind. A 40 character display can be over $6000.00 Just thinking about that much for 40 letters, wow.... The small one they shoed off was a 12 character display with a Braille keyboard. This wasn't too bad comparatively speaking. It was just under $2000.00 Still, if I was an engineer, I think my first project would be to come up with a different way of making these devices much cheaper, but still work well.
On another technology note, I just got my new BookPort yesterday. This is a little device that can read many types of electronic books like Daisy, txt, Word documents, Audible books, and MP3 files. It also has a voice recorder for quick notes and a Braille keyboard mode for typing notes. I don't know how to do much with it, but know enough to read and listen to tunes on the way to and from work. Yay! Bus rides aren't boring now, and I can block out all the crazies. I'm going to have to look into a bigger Compact Flash card, like 2 or 4 gigs. The 256 MB one it came with will be filled shortly. So any dirt cheap Internet deals are welcome. It has to be a type 1 card though.
My friends from Crookston came down this week, and so we had some fun this week. We played some cards on Tuesday night, and I'm sad to say I rarely got a good hand all night. We played Smear, and me and my partnor won one game, but lost the other two pretty badly. It was still fun though.
Finally my masters course is progressing a bit further. I really need to finish polishing up the material, and getting everything working in HTML EZ by Monday, so I can start my one to one and small group testings of the module. Most of the content is done though, but I still have to think of a couple of questions for a couple end of unit quizzes. The aim is to have 5 questions for each unit, but I'm a little short on a couple of units. Then it's just adding users and getting a few technical things taken care of. So things are still moving ahead, and I just might be seeing the end of the tunnel in the distance. This project has been very interesting, but I'll be really relieved and glad when May 3rd is here.
That's about all this week. Thankfully the snow's gone, and it's been quite nice lately too. So until next time.
Work has been quite busy but fun this past week. Last week was very slow, and I only met with one or two customers. This week though, I've met with three or four. I'm still helping one customer learn Dragon, and it's going quite well actually. It's much easier now that I can use and experiment with the software itself. There are still some things to figure out, but it's going well.
Another customer is interested in getting the word out there to senior groups and other organizations he works with about the assistive technology. He also mentioned some class that is taught every so often at SSB on how to teach people computers, kind of how to be a teacher, and how to explain the basics of computers and assistive technology. This sounds interesting because while I am doing pretty well, I could always use more pointers. I'm not certified to be a teacher, I'm just winging it and building on past experience for the most part.
I also attended another training at SSB on Wednesday. This time it was on a couple of electronic Braille devices. It was actually pretty cool, and I could see the use of a small Braille display and Braille keyboard combo. However I just have a hard time still justifying the price for these things. I know I've talked about this probably several times before, but price is just insane. Braille displays are probably some of the most expensive pieces of assistive technology for the Blind. A 40 character display can be over $6000.00 Just thinking about that much for 40 letters, wow.... The small one they shoed off was a 12 character display with a Braille keyboard. This wasn't too bad comparatively speaking. It was just under $2000.00 Still, if I was an engineer, I think my first project would be to come up with a different way of making these devices much cheaper, but still work well.
On another technology note, I just got my new BookPort yesterday. This is a little device that can read many types of electronic books like Daisy, txt, Word documents, Audible books, and MP3 files. It also has a voice recorder for quick notes and a Braille keyboard mode for typing notes. I don't know how to do much with it, but know enough to read and listen to tunes on the way to and from work. Yay! Bus rides aren't boring now, and I can block out all the crazies. I'm going to have to look into a bigger Compact Flash card, like 2 or 4 gigs. The 256 MB one it came with will be filled shortly. So any dirt cheap Internet deals are welcome. It has to be a type 1 card though.
My friends from Crookston came down this week, and so we had some fun this week. We played some cards on Tuesday night, and I'm sad to say I rarely got a good hand all night. We played Smear, and me and my partnor won one game, but lost the other two pretty badly. It was still fun though.
Finally my masters course is progressing a bit further. I really need to finish polishing up the material, and getting everything working in HTML EZ by Monday, so I can start my one to one and small group testings of the module. Most of the content is done though, but I still have to think of a couple of questions for a couple end of unit quizzes. The aim is to have 5 questions for each unit, but I'm a little short on a couple of units. Then it's just adding users and getting a few technical things taken care of. So things are still moving ahead, and I just might be seeing the end of the tunnel in the distance. This project has been very interesting, but I'll be really relieved and glad when May 3rd is here.
That's about all this week. Thankfully the snow's gone, and it's been quite nice lately too. So until next time.
posted by Jesse Anderson at 12:56 PM
1 Comments:
Wow, I wish I made over $900 last month having fun.
We missed you at the party, Jesse! Next time.
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