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Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Level 1

It is my delight and joy to let you know my new ASL book with JannaPicture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Level 1 — is now available for purchase from major online booksellers and in your local bookstore!

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Tending Polymathic Branding Tentacles

Do you brand your online life to identify the work you do in all aspects?

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Writing Four Books in Five Months

It has been a wild week and I am pleased to announce I will be writing three new books for Thomson/Cengage Publishing.

I recently finished my Google Apps Administrator Guide book for Thomson and we are now doing three more books together.

Two books will be published before the end of 2007 — that means I will have written four books in five months for Thomson and while that is a witty and wacky writing pace, that’s the publishing business: You’re either wanted now — RIGHT NOW! — or you suffer in silence. 

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I Married a WordPunk

Okay, so I have David W. Boles’ WordPunk ™ up and running and Going Great Guns over at TypePad. Now there’s the problem of identity and branding.

I came up with this simple logo. I love logos that look like text but are really images. Here’s the single-line logo:

WordPunk Logo Single Line

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Moving Back to Media Temple From Mosso

UPDATE:  April 23, 2008.  We wanted you to know this Urban Semiotic blog — and all of David W. Boles’ domains and blogs
are now solely hosted by Pair Networks!  We will update this article as circumstances demand and we’ll leave this article online to protect the
chain of understanding.

One of the signs of insanity is doing the same habit of action over and over and over again while expecting a different result each time. This time, however, I think I have broken free of expectation by beating my head against the Grid Sharing Theory of Website Hosting wall one too many times.
After three months of struggling to overcome the limits of Mosso hosting, I decided last night to move back to our old favorite — Media Temple — and my previous Dedicated-Virtual (dv) hosting setup:

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Show Me Your Tongue!

The other day Janna went into one of the local shops in our Jersey City neighborhood to buy some food. Janna is Deaf and she usually chooses not to use her voice with strangers because if you use your voice then you are expected to vocally communicate on both sides of the conversation and that puts her at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding what is being spoken by a large immigrant population with many accents and unique vocalizations that are impossible to always comprehend and interpret.

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A Broken Promise Under the Golden Arches

When I was a boy of 13 and a new student at a junior high school, I met a girl my age named Amy. She had the body of a woman, fully shaped and ripe with a juicy sexuality that flowed from her pores and her glinting, tawny, eyes — but she was still a girl in spirit and mind.

She was voluptuous, but didn’t yet know it. Amy told me I reminded her of her father — I wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a compliment. She was popular. Boys older than her hovered around her like flies seeking a sweet landing. She spoke to me infrequently, though I often admired her from afar with my first schoolyard crush.

Amy was good in math. At that time, in the red Republican Midwest, females were not encouraged by their families to seek non-traditional paths in school or out of school, so when a girl showed amazing analytical promise in math and the sciences, she was fast-tracked by the school system to deepen her interest and her ability to fully exploit all of her intellectual talents. Amy was leading the school in spirit, heart and mind.

Then she disappeared.

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Blind Discrimination: Paper Money Feels the Same

Yesterday, in a watershed moment in the history of the disabled, U.S. District Judge James Robertston finally instructed the United States Treasury to find a way for the Blind to discriminate between paper money denominations.

Twenty

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A Shameful History for Gallaudet

Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. made the sort of history last night that one never wishes to make: The University gave in to small minds and ignorance and bullying bad behavior and lost both stature and grace in the process.

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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.