Author Archives: John

Live Caption Addendim: A Hearing Aid Horror Story

Posted on by John

I guess I should begin by noting that this happened to me because of my own hard-headedness. I should have gone in to have the aids maintained long before it got to that point, but it’s always hard to find a stopping point in busy life and work. I guess next time I’ll just have to schedule the appointment six months out and aim to make it there for the routine retubing. Anyway, here’s what happened.

Have you ever had one thing happen, then another thing immediately follows and something else follows on that until it feels like catastrophic failure… then you wake up? And breathe a huge sigh of relief? “Man thank goodness, I had no idea how I was getting out of that mess!”

Well this incident felt like that, except unfortunately it was not “but a dream.”

Monday night. My wife and I were wrapping up chatter about our day and about to pack it in for the night, me laying on my side and exerting pressure on the left-side hearing aid. Suddenly I realized the sound had become muffled. “Oh no, not again” I thought. “I know this stupid thing hasn’t become blocked by wax again.” Only when I reached my hand up to investigate, I discovered that the tubing had actually become severed from the earhook. Worse, it had split slightly at the top, meaning there was no way I could reconnect the pieces. My stress meter immediately shot up, and my brain whirred as it tried to come up with at least a minimal fix that could at least let me get to the clinic the following day. Figuring that since my left ear was the most important to hear from, I decided to connect my left-side aid to the right-side tubing so that I could at least nominally communicate. And then I went to bed, restless.

Tuesday morning: I awoke, called out of work, and prepared to settle into my recliner to await the clinic’s opening at 8:00 AM. As I turned on the SiriusXM Real Jazz station I enjoy waking up to and opened the book I was reading on my Mantis Braille display, I happened to reach up and touch the left-side hearing aid for some reason. And then that tubing, which had previously been attached to the right-side aid, also broke. It too would no longer stay attached to the ear hook. This meant, one of my greatest fears, I was completely unable to hear. By this point my wife had already departed for work, which was fortunately only a few minutes away. I sent her a frightened text, and she said as soon as she could get the day started and let those know who needed to know she would return home to assist me.

8 AM came, and no one answered the phone right on the dot. Then 8:10, then 8:15, at which time I left a message. Finally, on my 8:25 attempt someone picked up. I had to hook my USB headphones into the iPhone and turn them up to full volume, thus just being able to make out what was being said. The receptionist said a graduate assistant could see me at 10:30 AM, and I instantly felt much better.

So I put on my clothes, sat downstairs on the couch, and waited for my wife to show up shortly after 9:30. I had already enabled the iPhone’s Live Caption feature that I wrote about in the previous post, so I would know when she had reentered. At one point though, I saw the words “come on” scroll across my display and I thought she had arrived, but it was a false alarm. Yeah, that app, while very helpful, is far from perfect. I sure was curious what it could have heard though, in our supposedly quiet living room.

Once she did get there though, we were able to have a sort of halting conversation as the car sped toward the audiology clinic. She said it felt odd with the delay, as naturally it took me a few seconds to process what had just been said. And sometimes the transcript just isn’t correct, leading to hilarities. For some reason it often thinks people are saying expletives (the F-word especially). And at this point it doesn’t distinguish among voices, meaning what I’m seeing could be coming from a person or the radio. I hope that can be improved in future using AI. Still, it was truly a game changer, and perhaps even a lifesaver, in that kind of situation. The last time I lost pretty much all of my hearing due to an ear infection and needed quick treatment they just had to get started without asking me any questions, which can be dangerous.

In the clinic, the audiologist-in-training was also able to communicate with me, even as she repaired the aids. Usually, I’d just be sitting there waiting for them to plug the left-side aid in so I could hear them. It was great though, knowing what was happening in real time, well sort of real-time.

After that harrowing experience, I was more than happy to take my wife up on a breakfast at a local diner called Brigs. There are three locations in the Triangle, and they serve breakfast until early afternoon. The atmosphere was nice, and at the time we got there it wasn’t too loud, so I could actually communicate with the server. They had large and small cups of orange juice, and I wasn’t sure which to get because how does one define large versus small. I went with the former and was glad I did, as it was only the size of a normal glass. Along with that, I had a delicious sausage and cheese omelet and fruit. She chose to eat blueberry pancakes. It was nice just enjoying a rare meal together in the middle of a workday, and finally, happily, letting all of that stress melt away. Until my next misadventure.

On Braille Access and Live Captioning

Posted on by John

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you probably know that I have significant hearing loss. I could likely even be classified as functionally deaf. This has presented challenges not only in likely spaces like restaurants, on the bus, or even at work, but also sometimes at home. The issue there is that sometimes I’m trying to hear someone over a television or just the way the room is designed causes an echo that interferes with my hearing aid’s ability to clearly perceive the sound. This is stressful, to say the least.

So color me very excited to discover that in Apple’s latest update to iOS 26, they included a feature called Live Captioning. I think there is a Live CAptioning option that provides visual captions usable by those who are deaf but have sight, but the version I’m going to talk about is built specifically for those of us who are blind and also have hearing issues. Yay in itself is a revolution as even in most accessibility regulations they rarely consider persons with multiple disabilities. They have rules for blind folk, rules for deaf folk, etc, but not often an acknowledgment of the potential crossover, which I dare say is more common than we might think.

Anyhow, if you don’t know how to access Live Captioning and want to, here’s how. First, you have to have a Braille display of some kind; it can either be with a Perkins-style keyboard or using a QWERTY keyboard with something like the APH Mantis, which is what I’m using. If using a Perkins keyboard, access Braille Access by pressing dots 7 and 8 with Space bar. And all you need to do to envoke this feature with the Mantis in most cases is to press VO (Control+Option, or Control+Windows if you are more Windows inclined) with Y to enable Braille input, then press the letter A and semicolon as your dots 7 and 8 along with the Space bar. There are other items in the Braille Access menu that appears, which operates separate of your iPhone so you could use VoiceOver’s speech to view other content while it is open. It lets you, for example, take notes, view the time, or use Braille to open other apps.

But I’m just pressing up arrow (Space with dot 1 if using a Perkins keyboard) to navigate to Live Captioning and pressing Enter. You also have two options with this feature open, changed easily by pressing dots 7 (or the letter A with a QWERTY keyboard) plus Space bar: listen to audio or listen to microphone. Audio refers to the audio generated by the iPhone, and if you do this you can have it pick up spoken words even without the phone being turned up. I used this to, for instance, follow play-by-play of a Carolina Panthers game via the display while in a car with others (they beat the Dallas Cowboys on the Sunday prior to this entry’s writing, so I was thrilled as they’ve done virtually nothing over the last five years, but I digress). I’ve also used i to make sure I can hear narrators in an audiobook, as I find that after listening to their voice for a while as I also view the transcript I can actually understand them more.

If set to listen through the microphone, it’s as if the iPhone is recording. This means that you do not really have use of any other audio on the phone while in such mode. But the beauty of this is it will pick up conversations and other things, such as the TV, happening around me. I used this to speak to a coworker whom I’ve usually had a hard time hearing, just because of how things sound in our office and the fact that we’re positioned relatively far apart. I’ve also used it to chat with my father-in-law about work, and that went smoothly.

There is, naturally, a slight delay in between the words being spoken and flashing on the screen, and if you fall behind in reading the transcript, indicated by a braille box on either end of the display, you can just press a cursor routing button to jump to the end. And of course, the transcription is not always totally accurate, though it usually makes enough sense for me to get the gist of what was said. It can also be more challenging to follow if you have lots of crosstalk going on, as it doesn’t identify if a different character is speaking. But it was/is helping me to pick up at least a degree more than I had before, and every little bit helps. This is especially important as I continue to gain responsibility and standing in my career, not to mention that it’ll likely make family social gatherings not feel as difficult. So I applaud Apple for taking such a step. Let’s hope it’s only the beginning of what can be done to get this tech to truly help us all.

AI A-I-O!

Posted on by John

I am still writing this entry, for the time being. I say this as the AI revolution continues to take over, and I am not entirely sure what to make of it yet.

I was, and mostly still am, a skeptic. Of course I’ve used various AI apps like Seeing AI and Be My AI to describe photos and read documents for a while now. And especially where it comes to photo description, I’d taken the readings with a grain of salt knowing that AI often hallucinates and just plain makes things up. But it was no worry, as the descriptions weren’t serious and an error would have no real impact on me.

But lately, I’m seeing more and more people use this technology, often called generative AI, to create or edit documents or to help brainstorm when preparing to construct projects. This makes me nervous, because what is that going to do to human creativity long term? What does it do to our ability to learn now? These are deep philosophical questions about which we will no doubt debate for a long time.

But two things happened recently to change my mind a bit. Well for starters, I downloaded the Chat GPT iOS app so I could explore what all the fuss was about. In its suggested things to ask, it offered to play a World Capitals game. This immediately appealed to my nerdy GPS-coordinate, geographical tendencies. I knew the capital of Ethiopia, ADIS Ababba; and Bolivia, La Paz. I found out though that the capital of Bhutan is Thimphu. Hmmm, not likely I would have known that one. Anyway my free time ran out, at least for the next few hours, so I bit the bullet and opted to pay (for at least one month).

And in for a penny, in for a pound, right? So the first of the two things that really got me thinking about the potential power (and perhaps peril) of this and any so-called AI platform was my decision to query it about a project I’m hoping to launch. It’s a revamp of a podcast idea I had back in 2021, where I would explore books featuring characters with disabilities and see if I could land author interviews. Only this time I plan to be much more prepared, thanks in large part to the How to Build a Podcast segments on the Access On podcast. So I also asked GPT for suggestions on content, an author email template, and ideas on show structure, for which it supplied good answers. I guess the good of it is, at least for now, I still have to do a lot of the heavy lifting to really get this thing going. But the AI helped me get it off the ground in a way I may never have done otherwise.

And right on the heels of that, pretty much the day after I made the purchase, a work project surfaced that would also be a good candidate for AI intervention. I had to quickly generate four scripts of sorts, starting that Wednesday afternoon, and if possible have them done by Friday. Again I had GPT create the templates for me and I went in and filled in all of the relevant information, also editing the document so that things would be formatted correctly. It definitely reduced the time it took me to complete that, and I made the deadline.

So I continue to experiment with what all this and other such applications can do. I’ve since asked it for more geography games, and am enjoying guessing countries by three clues it gives me. I do suppose I will also use it for other work and hobby projects as well.

I just completed a work of fiction called Coded Justice, by Stacey Abrams, that explores the role AI could play in medicine. Of course it to some extent goes with the trope of AI gone rogue, but things get deeper than that. It’s the third in her Avery Keene series, and I’ve enjoyed all of them.

A Sad Goodbye

Posted on by John

Annabel (Boo Boo) Miller, 10/31/2010-7/14/2025 (because of course she had her government name and nickname)

You can read the post I made on Celebrating My Daughter’s Birthday to learn about the origins of my relationship with that goofy, 7-pound ball of Pomeranian fur. That was composed in 2018, and we got to be entertained and sometimes supported by her (because she often seemed to know when I was extra stressed and would become extra cuddly, comforting me as I often did her) for another almost 7 years.

We knew that this move we made in 2023 would probably be her last, but it gave her a bigger house and space in which to run, and get into our spaces randomly (she would sometimes come into my room soundlessly then be surprised when I shut the door and she got stuck inside). She also emerged from my laundry pile once. Imagine my surprise when, as I folded and put away clothes, I felt a little paw tapping my hand. “Hey, how did you get in there!” This was her house and we were just living in it.

I guess she figured I was more the beta and my wife the alpha, as she used to try and get me to lift her down the stairs if I either came in from working in the office or once I had completed remote work in my room. (Speaking of which, I once opened my door and found her asleep just outside of it in the hallway, leading us to joke that her job was to monitor me and make sure I was doing mine, but the queen only worked when the queen wanted). As soon as she heard my wife’s voice though, she would stand at the top of the stairs and bark her little head off until she was collected. Then she’d tap dance around the kitchen getting underfoot, knowing that the humans were about to eat and pointedly ignoring her already-available dog food in the hopes of obtaining little morsels of whatever we were having.

We also had silly arguments. She liked to bark at me as I approached the stairs, I guess wanting to keep me safe or alert my wife of my pending movement. I told her to “hush,” and she made a low bark that sounded suspiciously like she was talking back to me. I said “hush” again, and she did the low bark again. I said “hush” a third time, and she low-barked a third time. “Are you arguing with me?” I asked, laughing as I descended into the stairwell.

I had so much fun with that dog. I’ve encountered several dogs over the course of my life, from the somewhat untrained Shannon, a Doberman/German Shepherd mix we had as kids, to Sade, a terrier my cousin had in 2004. But none had been in my life as long as Boo Boo was, a little over 10 years.

She started to suffer though, so we had to make the difficult decision to put her down. My wife and I stood with our hands on her little body as her quivering and fast breathing steadily slowed, and I silently said “bye bye Boo Boo.” Eventually, all was still. It was a profound experience, and ultimately I’m glad I was there as she left us. She will definitely be missed.

A Third

Posted on by John

So here we sit, April wrapping up and headed into the second third of 2025 already. I started the year off with hopes of being more verbose than I had last, but thus far it just isn’t happening. I guess to some extent the problem is I feel like I’m stuck in one big routine. Monday=Work,Home;Tuesday=Home/work,HOme:repeatedWednesdayAndThursday. Saturday and Sunday, resting up and preparing for next week’s festivities. It’s the rhythm of life, or something like that. This is not to say that nothing ever happens, it’s just mostly quiet. Let’s take a look at some of this year’s highlights, though.

Work

This year on the job has been interesting. We’ve started a rotation of regularly-scheduled classes, and April’s was a successful course on using Freedom Scientific’s JAWS for Windows screen-reader with Microsoft Outlook. I demonstrated and had my trainees try creating folders, adding meetings to their calendar, sorting messages using rules, and creating and editing signatures. It was fun, and I enjoyed working with the engaging group of Customer Service reps who opted to join me.

I’m also working intensively with someone in what we’re calling a JAWS Boot Camp, wherein I’m helping her to acquire the basic skills she can use to learn other tasks needed for a computer-based job position. This is a challenge, because it really requires me to think outside the box and come up with activities that can make harder-to-remember concepts manageable.

Travel

As far as trips go, we did take one journey right at the end of March to Virginia Beach to see my sister in law. This gave me an opportunity to break out my GPS apps, BlineSquare for GPS coordinates and a somewhat accurate listing of my surroundings; Google Maps for direction information and hotel reviews; and Ariadne GPS, because it allows me to run my finger along the iPhone screen and hear what streets it is encountering. I’m sure I’ve written about these apps before, but I just like that they let me hear so much about an area’s geography.

We also did a bit of a riding tour of Virginia Beach, traveling through Regent University which is a religious school. The best thing we did though was eat, and particularly at a place called Gus and George’s Spaghetti and Steakhouse. Although I’m still grumbling a bit about the fact that my spaghetti only had 2 meatballs in it, it and the before-dinner sallad were delicious.

Books

And of course, I’m always reading. I’ve already hit 30 as the month concludes. Currently engrossed in one called Death of the Author, by NNedi Okorafor. Split between Lagos Nigeria and Chicago USA, this story is about a young woman who has acquired a disability after falling out of a dead tree and becoming paraplegic. It addresses interesting issues of so-called accepting one’s disability, and the controversies that can arise if one chooses to modify functioning with the assistance of technology. It’s an interesting thing to ponder, and I would of course note that all of us modify our functioning in low-tech (canes, glasses, wheel chairs) and high tech (hearing aids, screen-readers, scooters) ways. Mostly this is done to achieve the highest quality of life we can manage, which constantly changes as technology improves, but hopefully it does not mean we are “ashamed” of our disability. These are and probably always will be delicate questions, since they are framed by each person’s experiences and the perceptions of those around them. In any event, it is a pretty good story.

And that’s about all I’ve had going on for these first four months. Hmmm, when seen through that light I guess there has been more going on than I thought. I hope whatever you’re up to has been relaxing when needed yet eventful when desired. More soon.

Let IT… NO!

Posted on by John

This winter has been, thus far anyway, one ofthe coldest I can remember. Ah, what happened to those glorious days of 60 degrees and sun.

Before I continue though, I should acknowledge the wildfires in Los Angeles that are happening as I write this. I’m sure I know people who are out there, and I can only hope and pray that they and everyone else are all right. The loss has already been incalculable, unfortunately including some lives. I hope some kind of rain or cold will come soon to help put the fires out.

Here in North Carolina, we had our first brush with measurable snow since January 29th, 2022. Of course the drumbeat starts days before its arrival: excitable news reporters whipping themselves and in turn the public to a frenzy. “If it shifts a little south…” “will likely start around 4 PM on Friday…” “dangerous ice mixed in…”

As the appointed time arrived, my wife lined up with all the other Southerners to acqure the essentials: bread, milk, and toilet paper. Our Northern immigrants (yes y’all, we are our own country here,) shook their heads, bemused. They know they’re still cold though, they just don’t wanna admit it. And we don’t have the requisite equipment to continue normal functioning when a couple inches of “the white stuff” sweeps through town. I still do pick on our silliness, even if I understand it.

As I grudgingly rolled out of the blankets on Friday at 5 AM, I scraped the networks for answers as to whether I should venture out to work. These late-arriving storms are the hardest to predict, but since nothing I saw indicated that it would start prior to my 4 PM quitting time and 5 PM return home I decided I should go in. Once, back in 2014, I got stuck on a Durham city bus as over six inches of snow fell in a half hour while trying to return from work early. If not for a kind passenger ensuring I got home and more importantly to my door that could have ended badly. So I do not make this decision lightly.

Work was work, I spent this past week taking a new trainee on a crash course through JAWS to help prepare her for a position. It’s rewarding work, but let’s just say it also led to some good sleep.

As I stepped from the building, I was dismayed but not entirely surprised to feel drops of freezing rain hitting my hands. I was just hoping the GoTriangle paratransit vehicle I would be on would ferry me safely home, and then get the driver safely back to wherever they put them. I think I did feel us slide a little bit, but otherwise all was well and I got home quickly for a Friday. I suppose enough people heeded the warnings “WRAL Weather Alert Day!” our main local news channel intoned, to keep traffic fairrly light.

And now on Sunday, a little bit of that cabin fever is starting to set in. The good thing, I guess, is I can sit in my room and absorb lots of sunshine from my window. How many days till Spring?

2025: A Quarter

Posted on by John

There was an old (because most of the things I think of are old) country song where she says her momma gave her “a penny for your thoughts, a quarter for your calls…”. That and the fact that we are now into the 25th year of this century and millenium inspired this entry’s title.

I know some of you remember entering the year 2000, all those years ago. My most prominent thoughts from then, as I stood in a cramped church fellowship hall and the clock struck 12 were “I wonder if the TV and power are going to just shut off” (Y2K, look it up if you are too young to recall) and “I wish I could talk!” I’d been struck by a horrible head cold that had also taken my voice.

Anyhow, here we are all this time, with smarter phones and… well you can guess the rest. This past year was the first that felt like some semblance of normal since Covid arrived, though I am very much aware that this ss still not the case for everyone. I was fortunate enough to visit Myrtle Beach twice, and to fly to D.C. as Employee of the Year! (I wish I’d finished writing about that. I enjoyed delicious meals and (blah hearing aside) remember some of the fun of diing out. And work continues to hum along, with its new experiences and opportunities to help others come up.

But as always my favorite thing is reading. This year I set an all-time books-read record with 87 titles consumed. Granted GoodReads says that each book was on average 10 pages shorter than in 2023, but I still read more pages by far in 24 as well. And as I did for 2023, I will include a list of my five-star reads. If you don’t plan to look, you can stop here and I will wish you and us all a happy new year.

  • The Boys In The Boat, by Daniel James Brown
  • Somewhere Inside, by Laura Ling
  • All The Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby
  • The House of Eve, by Sadeqa Johnson
  • Thicker Than Water, by Kerry Washington
  • The New Guys, by Meredith Bagby
  • The Women, by Kristin Hannah
  • The Last Lifeboat, by Hazel Gaynor
  • The Familiar, by Leigh Bardugo
  • Noumenon Infinity, by Marina J. Lostetter
  • A History of Burning, by Janika Oza
  • Shelterwood, by Lisa Wingate
  • Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa
  • A Calamity of Souls, by David Baldacci
  • The Uncharted Flight of Olivia West, by Sara Ackerman
  • James, by Percival Everett
  • The Book of Lost Names, by Kristin Harley
  • Dust Child, by Nguyen Phan Que Mai
  • By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult
  • Eruption, by Michael Crichton
  • A Pair of Wings, by Carole Hopson
  • The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden
  • The Berry Pickers, by Amanda Peters
  • Lovely One, by Ketanji Brown Jackson
  • The Deaf Girl, by Abigail Heringer
  • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by Victoria E. Schwab

Gifts, Unwrapped

Posted on by John

And we have reached that time of year, the period for which I save to take time off work and get in some much-needed relaxation. So my vacation began on the 20th and will last till January 2nd as we aspirationally start 2025.

The first thing that happened, after our Friday holiday party, was our early dismissal at 3 instead of the usual quitting time of 4 PM. Those who work in manufacturing at my employer actually leave at 3:20, so figuring there might be a glut of people using our GoTriangle Access Paratransit service, I opted to summon a Lyft car. My driver spoke no English, which was immediately clear to me as I entered the vehicle and he didn’t respond to my initial statement and was using his GPS in Spanish. I was ok with this, except for the logistical challenge of ensuring I had arrived at the correct address. But never fear, I used basic high school spanish to convey my address’s exact numbers and we both had a laugh. It later occurred to me that I could have used my phone’s translation app. He was courteous though, waiting to see if I got inside and declining a cell phone call while driving.

I enjoyed that extra hour as a cold Friday unfolded and relief filled me at the time stretching ahead. My next task? Find a couple of good books to accompany my wife and me as we took our Christmas to Myrtle Beach to celebrate ten years since our relationship basically began. Well it’s actually part of our complicated story, one that involves an overlapping circle of friends who saw that we might connect given our similar temperaments. I’m sure I wrote about it in those early entries of 2015.

Anyhow, the two books I settled on after much deliberation were Playground, by Richard Powers, and Katharine, the Wright Sister, by Tracy Enerson. The former is sort of complex even to me, but it talks a lot about the ocean, colonization of so-called French Polynesia, and some sort of “floating city” the Americans want to build. It’s decent. The latter is an attempt to Chronicle the role the Wright sister played in getting her famous brothers off the ground. It flits between three first-person perspectives, Kate’s, Orville’s, and Wilbur’s. It’s riveting.

So after a quick jaunt to pass out and receive gifts from her folks on Saturday, we laid about on Sunday then headed for the beach on Monday. This time we opted to stay in a new (to us) property. I often find it interesting how so many of these hotels choose names meant to evoke faraway places: Tropical Seas, Coral Beach Resort, and our hotel, the Paradise Resort . We pulled in and arrived at the oceanfront king 1-bedroom suite as a cold, rainy wind blew in off the Atlantic. We were completely fine with this though, as it brought back fond memories of our trip down to Myrtle following our January 2018 wedding.

We took a couple of walks down there: a frigid one on Tuesday and a slightly warmer one on Christmas Day. She joked that this constitutes her anual “Christmas-day 5K” but she chopped it up so I could hang. Ha, well truth be told I ain’t no walker. In fact on Wednesday, my apple watch kept tapping my wrist to ask if I was doing a workout, probably to make sure nothing off was happening as my heart rate accelerated. I definitely need to exercise more. Maybe that’ll happen in 2025. Says about half the country.

So didn’t I earn the food we ate there? There was the Olive Garden, where I always get their spagheti and Italian sausage, alwayswith angel hair pasta. And then there wasPaula Deen’s Family Kitchen, a restaurant we found in Myrtle in 2018 and have visited every other time we’ve gone down there. Let’s just say you don’t go there to eat sallads. I had meatloaf, fried okra, and a mac and cheese that had been improved since I had last gone in May.

The only other noteworthy thing we did there was to exchange our own gifts. She got me a comfortable robe to drape over myself on these cold days that feels like a blanket. For my gift, I got her the Usher Confessions 20th Anniversary vinyl. “I know you didn’t spend $200 on this!” she said as she extracted it from the box. The joke was that we had been trying to get Confessions on vinyl from Amazon for some time but could not find it for less than that. I decided to just plug it in and see if I lucked up, knowing it was something she wanted and would enjoy. For the record (get it, record?) no I did not spend 200 bucks to acquire that. They’d only just released the 20th anniversary version.

So all in all we had and are having a good time. Hopefully I’ll be prepared for whatever the next year brings. At the least I hope it brings us all full hearts, full wallets, and whatever else we desire.

NIB 2024: A Day of Relaxation

Posted on by John

Ah, I meant to chronicle the rest of my time at the NIB 2024 Training Conference and Expo more quickly than I have, but alas work, cooler weather, and reading have interfered with my writing. (I’m already about to set a new record for books read [and listened to] in a year, as the old one is 79 and I’m already at 76). Anyhow, I wanted to capture at least one more day of attendance before it all becomes too distant in my ever-aging memory.

Wednesday, October 16: The day dawned crisp and cold. Most times I’ve visited our nation’s capital, the weather fluctuated crazily with temps in the 80s in the afternoon and snow at night. Granted those visits usually occurred in May, whereas October weather is more uniformly dreary. But the sun was actually out on this day as we meandered out of the hotel and across the busy street to a two-story McDonald’s. We don’t have many two-story restaurants here in North Carolina, but I guess you see them more in places where space is a premium.

I had a sausage, egg, and cheese McMuffin, while my wife probably ate a McGriddle (she likes sweet, I do savory). As we ate, she noted that there were some homeless individuals using the space probably to stay warm. I’ve also noticed that, sadly, that city seems to have a high population of unhoused individuals, perhaps because there are more services available? It’s an interesting question. Anyhow, she said there are signs that specifically say “No Loitering,” so if one wishes to remain for an extended time they must either buy food or devise other strategies to make themselves look occupied. I just hope we as a society keep moving in a direction where people will have fewer of these challenges, because the systems will work as they should.

Food consumed, we went to a little store to get snacks for later. I had a giant cup of grapes, because hey grapes are good for the brain. Back in the hotel, we milled about in the lobby for a while then decided to head down to the basement area to see what was going on in the conference. I then realized that I had missed the technology demo that was put on for the employees of the year, because at that time the app I was using to keep up with events was not sending notifications out. This was ok though, as I got to check out some of these devices in the exhibit hall. I’m always fascinated by what they have in these places, but also overwhelmed by the people pulsing from every nook and cranny. My wife had to keep me grounded and inside of the place. I held and listened to the Envision smart glasses speak. Those are nice and built specifically for blind folk, but at $2,000 I probably won’t be getting a pair. The Meta Ray-ban glasses are a likelier candidate, though I might just hold out and wait for a competitor as that market is now starting to come alive. Many of my trainees at work really want me to acquire those though, so I can show them how to use them.

Anyhow, I also checked out a Freedom Scientific workstation, equipped with a computer running JAWS for Windows and, more interestingly to me, a Focus 40 Braille Display. This is another device some of my trainees would like me to get for demonstrations, but alas. It had a whole lot of buttons and switches, and it is powered by a Perkins-style braille keyboard as opposed to my Mantis QWERTY device. I prefer the latter for writing, but the Focus does have many features that could make it desirable.

After checking those out, my wife and I decided to do a whole lot of, welll… nothing. Hey, one of the rewards of this trip was to be able to relax if one wished, and how often do you get to crawl back into bed and sleep on Wednesday afternoon. It was glorious, but I just wish I had drank more water as I tend to dehydrate easily if I do not and paid for this lacking later. Fortunately I was ok.

At about 5, we opted for another fine-dining experience and one we can no longer get in our area, and ventured to McCormick and Schmick’s. We had visited this chain in Raleigh for our “halfversary” after the first six months of marriage and fallen in love with it, at which point they took it away in favor of a Mexican restaurant. So we said whenever we got to a city with that establishment we would check it out again. Arlington did have a location.

This time, I ate some kind of salmon and mashed potatoes. It was delicious, if a little expensive. And as was the case in Raleigh, I loved the ambience of the place as it wasn’t too loud and we could easily have a conversation.

Before getting a Lyft back to our hotel, we walked around that area a bit exploring some of the ice cream shops and stores they had. You could tell we were in a different city, though of course it still had nowhere near the hustle of a New York or Philadelphia. I enjoyed the feeling.

And that was the crux of Wednesday, the midpoint of our trip. A little learning and a lot of rest. We sure needed that rest for Thursday’s tours, coming up in next post.

NIB 2024: First General Session, and Good Eatin’!

Posted on by John
The FDR statue. He’s sitting in a wheelchair. There were braille plaques nearby, too.

So, this is what happens when I am left to pack.

Tuesday October 15 dawned cold and blustery, as we knew it would. My wife had stacked sweaters on my couch that were to accompany my dress outfits so that I could stay at least minimally warm, but of course I didn’t notice they were there. This meant all I had was my sturdy jacket, which doesn’t always make the best dressing piece, comfortable as it is. So we needed to make a store run.

but first, we had to get ready. The bathroom in our room, and I presume throughout the hotel, was designed oddly. The showers had no curtains, only a half pane of glass that seemed to allow water to wet the floor more easily, and the head was of the rainwater variety, coming down from straight above. The bed was decent enough, but well let’s just say we have exacting standards about pillows that are rarely met in hotels.

These things were ok though and certainly did not cause a high degree of displeasure. Once dressed, we made our way down to the teeming ballroom for a light breakfast of yogurt with granola and peaches among other things (pretty good) and an empanada with egg and sausage. Then we made a quick trip back to the room to grab everything we needed before shoving off for Target.

I used the Lyft app to get around during this trip, and I was amazed by how accurate the locations were. For instance, it could tell me that we were standing inside of the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, of course, but it also pinpointed exactly which storefront we were in while waiting for our return ride. That kind of exactness would help blind folks more easily navigate, I would think.

In the store, we joked that we were exploring by doing something we could just as easily have done while in North Carolina. But that’s the truth, perhaps sadly: almost all of the world is now a big chain. Local stuff does exist, but it’s becoming increasingly harder to find.

We quickly found two nice, relatively inexpensive and versatile sweaters, then made our way to a Barnes and Noble to await said return ride. What I hadn’t known, because I wasn’t looking as it happened, was that Lyft had switched my car because a closer driver was available. This caused some confusion as a ride that looked nothing like expected pulled to a stop in front of us, but the driver called me on the phone to clarify and my wife could hear my voice coming through the window. So we felt ok about hopping in.

Back at the hotel, we opted for another meal at Cinnabar. This time, I chose a cheeseburger. It was ok, but didn’t come with any sauce or have a whole lot going on in the way of toppings. I had some mayo added, and thus managed to consume a fair amount of it with fries that were different from those we had on Monday. Then we briefly ran to the room for some R&R and to grab whatever we needed before the main event, the general session.

The ballroom was again teeming, with nearly every chair occupied. We’d located spots kind of far back from the speakers, so I could hear decently but maybe not well. This would definitely be a theme throughout my experience, unfortunately, due to my own issues and not anything conference-related. The session itself was interesting: the usual pageantry that accompanies such events. I listened with some interest as they talked about some of NIB’s achievements, especially as relates to helping those of us who are blind experience greater upward mobility. These metrics have definitely improved, and I am, I hope, an example of that.

What I most enjoyed though was the hearty reactions that went into celebrating employees of the year. It boosts morale among the workers, making us feel like what we’re doing matters. And it certainly matters in creating more jobs for blind folks in a way that is or can be transferable to the mainstream as attitudes towards disability improve. The session was supposed to be done by 4, but it actually lasted closer to 4:30 as a long discussion continued on areas that were slightly above my head.

Then the elevator madness ensued. This was another theme, especially as not all of the hotel’s elevators were working the entire time. They slowly brought more and more of them online, but until then massive lines and surges dominated. When we did wrangle a spot, we still had to wait as stops were made at nearly every floor.

After another brief respite in our room, we headed back down to the lobby around 5:30 to have dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. First though, we had to work out how we’d get there. The two of us LCI employees who had won Employee of the Year, our guests, and the higher-ups who had come to the conference as well were to be treated to a delicious meal at this pricey restaurant. The Arlington, Va. location was only about a half mile away, but given that it was already darkening and cold out, we summoned two Ubers and made the short ride over.

Into another elevator and up to the 11th floor of some sort of office building where the restaurant was housed. My wife said it gave a great view of planes landing and taking off from Regan. Though we ate in a private room, it was so buzzing with activity that I could, again, barely hear anything. Yup, same as always. But the food was good though. I had stuffed chicken, with cheese and a sauce of some sort. It was definitely filling. I also consumed a glass of wine along with some water, because why not? I mostly just took it all in and reflected on the significance of even being part of such an occurrrence.

And that was all for Tuesday. More in our next entry.