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How to Help Deaf Children in Accra, Ghana

There are moments in our lives when we pause to reflect on our joy and our luck and our fate-of-birth while being confronted with the reality that others in the world must find joy in desperation and fight a luckless circumstance all while hoping others will care enough to stand with you. Here are the bright faces of the children who attend the State School for the Deaf in Accra, Ghana and they could use your help.

Accra School for the Deaf in Ghana

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A Mirror of Moments: The Wayback Machine Review

There is nothing quite like facing a year-by-year, moment-to-moment mirror of who you used to be and what you used to stand for and how you chose to release your aesthetic on the world.

The Interet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a living testimony to the mist of your past and with its bony, pointed finger you are shown What Used To Be and how Ye Shall Discovereth The Truth of Who Ye Are and the horrors of where you’ve been.

Okay, maybe I’m being melodramatic, but if you’ve had a website domain for any amount of time you can travel back in living history via the Wayback Machine and see what you did and maybe even wonder what were you thinking.

Some of the archived domain pages on the Wayback Machine don’t load and sometimes text characters and images are unavailable. The archive still creates an amazing snapshot in time.

November 27, 1996

Let’s start our journey back with my Boles.com website as our exemplar while we “stroll through the years” of my design for that site. Since Boles.com is my main site I have always wanted it to be clean and really fast. I never cared about animation or Flash or any other goo-gahs to make a site jump and sparkle.

“Internet Insider” became “GO INSIDE Magazine” and “Boles: The Mag” was also folded into GO INSIDE Mag. I liked the text link for my “Resume” because it took you to a text page while everyone else at that time was posting Resumes-As-Images. You clicked on the metered stamp to send me email.

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To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS

HIV and AIDS are infections that still plague the face of the earth even though there are drug treatment therapies that can buy time for those infected.

Without medical intervention and treatment the average incubation period for HIV is 9-10 years and death after a full-blown AIDS diagnosis is still only 9.2 months.

People and their deaths are not best understood on timelines and statistical averages. The value in the human component of living is in remembering those who have suffered and fallen before you.

To live is to remember.

I remember in the mid-to-late 1980’s how this unnamed “Gay disease” we now know as HIV/AIDS was eating people alive. It was a frightening time because no one really knew in a shared, universal societal understanding, how HIV was being transmitted or how AIDS was being contracted.

There were rumors in the mainstream community you could get AIDS — no one really understood the HIV component until years later — by sitting on a toilet seat or by someone sneezing on you or by just shaking hands with an infected person.

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Top Ten Reasons I Love My MacBook Pro

I have had my MacBook Pro for a month now and so far I believe it is the best machine I have ever owned. I have owned a lot of machines! The key to loving the MacBook Pro was to make it my main box — my ThinkPad T43p is still here — but over there as my secondary machine now. Now I do everything with my MacBook Pro.

I have been able to nearly replicate my entire Windows experience on my MacBook Pro by purchasing or cross-grading over to the Mac version of the software. Here are the Top Ten Reasons I am loving my MacBook Pro:

1. Mail: I do a lot of email every day. I get a lot of Spam and Junk. I need to easily reply to 11 email accounts throughout an 18 hour workday using IMAP. The bundled Mail application in OS X is truly magnificent. It beats Outlook 2003 and Entourage 2004 in every conceivable way. The application is fast, robust, reliable and super-easy to setup and manage. I could not ask for a better way to manage my mail and the fact that Mail is bundled for free as part of my MacBook Pro experience is a delight unlike no other.
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Hand Jive Book Cover Art

On July 1, 2005 Janna and I finished writing and creating images for illustration in our Hand Jive book published by Barnes & Noble in New York. The book has been in production for the last year and is now ready to be sent to the printer this week for publication and distribution and sale!

You can see images of the Hand Jive book cover art below and if you have any comments or see any errors, please leave a specific comment. The first image is the front cover and spine; the second image is the back cover; the third image is the inside front flap; the last image is the inside back flap.

Hand Jive Book Cover!

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An Apple Through the Windows: My MacBooks Review

Last week in my article, MacBook Questions from a Windows Heathen, I asked some questions about the new MacBook line of laptops from Apple computing. I have been using Windows computers since the rise of Windows 3.11.

My previous experience with Apple has been limited to the first generation Newton which I loved so much that Apple used a quote of mine in a press conference but without attributing it to me or asking my permission. I had posted on a CompuServe forum explaining why the Newton was “touching the future today.”

I believed in that technology then and the Apple Newton set the stage and started the trend for personalized, portable computing now. I have also used a first generation iPod and I have used iTunes and QuickTime.

I don’t know much about Apple computers so if there are some things in this review you do not understand or that are wrong, please let me know. After using the MacBook for a couple of days, my plan was to make a permanent move away from Windows and become a MacBoy today and forever. I will let you know my decision about moving from Windows to Mac at the conclusion of this article.

One of the great things about the new Intel-powered MacBooks is you can dual boot into Windows and Mac OS X on the same machine so you, in theory anyway, do not have to make a choice of Operating System preference.
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Neighbor in the Hood

We don’t have a washing machine or dryer in our apartment building so every week I drop off our dirty laundry at the corner Laundromat for washing. In our Jersey City neighborhood paying someone else to wash and dry your clothes actually costs less than doing it all yourself in Manhattan. 

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Not Deaf Enough at Gallaudet: Finally Is Not Enough

One of the hardest things for a minority culture to understand is the same history cannot be made twice. History only makes pioneers and always punishes imitators. There is an attempt to warp back to 1988 at Gallaudet, the premier university for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., as some of the 2,000 students enrolled there try to re-enact the historical — and successful — 1988 “Deaf President Now” campaign by erasing the appointment of a new president, Jane K. Fernandes, because she is “Not Deaf Enough” to lead Gallaudet. The students re-created a tent city from 1988 as they camp out to protest her appointment until she steps down. Fernandes cannot and must not be bullied down.

Gallaudet University

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The Power of Peanut Butter and Jelly

For a 15 year stretch growing up in Nebraska — from age five to 20 — I ate a toasted — toasting the bread made it a hot meal — peanut butter and jelly sandwich three times a day: One for breakfast, one for lunch and the final one for a late-night snack.

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Eleven Heart-Shaped Balloons

Janna came home last night and presented me with eleven giant, red, heart-shaped helium balloons.

She apologized one was missing.

She told me on her way home from teaching American Sign Language at New York University she found a guy selling bunches of balloons for .64 cents each. She bought a dozen.

Waiting for a PATH train at the Christopher Street station, a man tried to strike up a conversation with her.

That happens to us a lot and since Janna is Deaf she usually just smiles and points to her ears and shakes her head to let the person know she isn’t interested in communicating.

The guy followed her onto the train and persisted in trying to speak with her. Wrangling twelve helium balloons onto a packed train is no easy task.

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