So I chose ZVRS

A few ZVRS people came and gave a great presentation at Deaf Family Night several days ago.  Impressive stuff, and it appears overall to be the best choice for me right now.

I'm getting the Z-340, and I will use the Z4 software on my Mac and iPhone also.  Now just waiting for my hardware to arrive!  I'm still kind of sad I couldn't get the Z20 for free, since I don't have a competitive VP to trade, but the Z340 looks pretty nice, and I like that I can take it on trips with me.

Switched at Birth - bold writing choices last night!

I was really impressed with the bold choices made last night, exposing some pretty edgy topics in Deaf culture.

The new character Travis is first shown as a strong Deaf militant, intolerant of Hearing people, intolerant of Daphne's intermixing with Hearing and Deaf, and just bitter.  Then the writers connected that behavior with another controversial topic:  Deaf kids in Hearing families who don't learn sign.

I really like that this episode exposed two controversial topics to the masses, who may otherwise be ignorant of their very existence!  Handwaves!!

Teaching Deaf kids ASL - fingerspelling?

So my 3-year-old son is rapidly learning ASL from me.  It's nothing short of amazing how he is accelerating.  One thing I haven't done much around him though is fingerspelling.  As he learns more, it becomes more difficult for me since I don't know signs for everything under the sun.

There are only two cases, though.  Some thing have no signs, and must be finger-spelled, and some things have a sign and I don't know the sign.  How do I deal with this??

Let's take an example:  Octopus.  Clearly this is much to complicated for him to finger spell--if I finger spell this to him he relays back to me "garbage" trying to mimic my hand.

Can someone please help me here to understand how kids learn fingerspelling?  Thanks in advance!!

Switched at Birth - lazy signing?

I watched the premiere of Switched at Birth last night, and although people on the show are improving on their signing skill, it seems like even the Deaf characters are using some lazy signing (but mostly the Hearing characters).  Unlike most newbie signers, the Hearing characters have a really decent "flow", but still, I see a lot of lazy signing all around.

Obviously, if the show were realistic, we would be seeing choppy, malformed signing for years, which doesn't make for good TV.  What do you all think?

No free VP through ZVRS?

I do not currently have a VP.  If I go to ZVRS, it looks like everything is free if I trade in my Sorenson VP, but if I do not have a VP, then I need to pay??

Sorenson VP is free for me.  It seems like if ZVRS wants business of new customers, they should offer the same deal as porting customers from Sorenson.  Otherwise, I might just choose Sorenson for my first VP.

Anyone have any advice?  I know it's a hot topic right now.

ASL class over - again

The first trimester of my 5th year ASL class is over.  With only two short classes left, I find myself wondering what's next.  It has been really enriching to go so deep into a few topics this year, but I feel like I need to have more "general" conversations with people, or I'm never going to be even close to truly fluent.

I'm hoping maybe to start, or help start, Deaf coffee or something similar once or twice a month.  Heck, I would even go every week!  I'm also waiting patiently for the Sorenson nTouch videophone, which is apparently only being offered in my area to people who already have a Sorenson VP (seems kind of backwards to prioritize people who already have one over people who don't, but whatever).  I would love to be able to use VRS and VP with friends soon!

Who knows, maybe I will post another vlog or two.  Need to think of things to vlog about, though!!  Hah!

Rexton Cobalt 16 - added a new program

So I decided to switch up my programs a couple months back when I went in to get a replacement bluetooth receiver.  Program 1 is still "auto", but I changed program 2 to be "music".  The music program has basically no compression, and no noise cancellation.  Ironically, I don't use this program for music, but rather for meetings and really quiet, or really noisy rooms.

My office has a very loud air conditioner fan inside, but in "auto" I cannot hear it because my aids block that sound.  When I first got my Rextons, I found this to be a very difficult "feature" to get used to.  It sounds weird that I would have to get used to noise removal, but there are two reasons:  first, the noise cancellation is not perfect, and second, it's a weird sensation to know that something is missing that you should be able to hear, but you cannot hear it for some reason.

To elaborate more on the first issue.  The noise cancellation is far from perfect.  The program not only blocks noise, but voices become softer as well.  So now after a couple years of having these, if I walk into a room (that isn't a library, for example), and it seems that everyone is barely audible yet nobody else is struggling to hear, I can switch to another program, or ask someone if there is some sort of background noise.

So back to the "music" program.  If there's some fan or something, or I need a boost in dynamic range for more high-frequencies, I simply switch to this program and maybe bump my volume up a notch.  It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than any of the other programs I've used.  The "speech in noise" program seems to be the worst program for actually understanding speech in noise, since it works so hard at trying to cancel the noise, again bringing vocal volume down with it!

Bottom line:  the more effort you put into analyzing your aids and working with your audiologist to understand the problem, the better they will work.  Unfortunately though, for those of us with severe/profound loss, aids are still an imperfect solution.