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exhilarationOk so one day a few years ago when I still lived with Daniel he was doing something in the corner behind his computer, like with the guts of it or something, and he asked me to pick up his phone and make a phone call for him. Fine. So at the time he had his phone programed to dial on voice command, and so he told me what to say to get it to call. He liked it that way cause he said it made him feel Star Trek-ish to say "call Jay" and the phone would call her. Also fine.
Except for the phone wouldn't recognize my voice! I had to give up and dial her from, you know, pushing buttons and the like.
This just furthers the theory that I talk funny. I don't think I sound different. There's no reason why I should sound different - I used to have a little bit of a stutter but the older I get the less it happens - I speak, as far as I can tell, exactly the same as everyone else. I have no type of speech impediment. Just, voice recognition stuff can't even hear me. It doesn't even process that I'm speaking!
I went to Philly yesterday, back to my old 'hood, to visit a friend that lived down the street from us. He had just gotten home from the hospital - he got shot, oh, sometimes last fall, and he had been in the hospital ever since. It's a pretty sad story - he is basically going to need someone to take care of him for the rest of his life. He's not, like, my bestest friend ever, but we lived on the same block, and we'd hang out pretty often, you know, have a few beers together, order take out, sit on the porch, you know, all that EOL stuff.
I didn't hear about what happened to him right away cause I'm all the way out here in New Jersey and no one knew how to contact me, but once I did I called him up, and we did a video chat a couple times, but that was pretty much it.
Anyway his brother called me to tell me they were having a party to celebrate him coming home from the hospital a few weeks from now, and I said I'd like to see him before the party, you know, so we could have a real conversation without a crowd of people and stuff.
I have spent so much money on transportation this past month. This will be the second time I went to Philly. It's expensive! But I hate being here, and I like seeing the people and things that I sit around missing all the time - is it really that bad that I drop so much money on cab fare/train fare/bus fare?
Where was I going with this again? Ah, the voice recognition stuff. Right. I don't want to say too much about him and his situation, cause that's really his private business... I write all kinds of stuff in this journal but I'm not sure how much of his stuff I want to go blabbing. Usually I try to relate everything back to what it has to do with me, you know. Since it's my journal and all.
Ah, screw it. I meant to make this a light-hearted laughable little story about how voice recognition stuff can't even hear me, for some completely undefinable reason - and I'll get to that, I really will - but I don't want to just gloss over the levity of the whole reason for the high tech stuff in the first place. This guy, who "back in the day" used to sit on our porch (or we'd sit on his porch) and have a beer and talk about the world and life and whatever, got shot and now he's paralyzed. He is going to be disabled for the rest of his life. "Disabled" is a broad term - I'm disabled. He and I have the same kind of injury, even, his is just at a higher level than mine. (If I really never said so, I have an incomplete spinal cord injury. I'm 24; it happened two days before I turned 15. So going on ten years now.) But I live by myself. I can see to my own personal needs. I can drive - I just don't have a driver's license - lots of people with SCIs can drive just fine. Yeah, okay, I made this big post in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
gimp_vent about how I got stuck trying to juggle my groceries and the door at the supermarket and how IT JUST SUCKS to have to get some stranger to help you out - and it does suck, it really does, and I didn't even want to post about it in my personal journal because I thought it would be too much whining from me, and I bitch and moan about stuff like that all the time.
But he can't even breathe. Not only is he in a wheelchair - he's in a wheelchair with a breathing machine stowed away on the bottom of it. He's got a tube in his throat. Barring a miracle, he's always going to have a tube in his throat. He can take it out and breathe on his own for most of the day, but it's the small portion of the day that he needs it that makes the difference between, hey, I'll just go out with my friends, we'll take the van, it'll be fine, and hey, if we're going to try to go out, the nurse has to come with us, or at least my mom or my brother, because I might need suction, oh, and by the way, don't get freaked out by watching someone suck the fluid out of my lungs with a tube, okay?
And we did talk over the phone/video chat twice since he got hurt, once when he was still in the first hospital and once when he was in the rehab hospital. One of those conversations included him insisting that he was going to make a complete recovery. I just... didn't quite know what to say to that. For a lot of reasons. But... I did tell him that the doctors told me my injury was complete, that I was never going to recover anything below my injury, no question about it, and, wouldn't you know it, they were wrong? They were wrong, knew they were wrong, and refused to come out and say it, and it was almost two years before a physical therapist was reading my paperwork out loud and said I was classified as "incomplete." By that time it was kind of obvious, but it was the first time I had actually heard it out loud.
So I told him doctors can make mistakes, things can look one way in the beginning because of swelling and trauma and the like, but actually be a little different, but, still. I recovered something. I didn't recover everything. I still can't walk.
So... I don't know how encouraging that actually is. Or how encouraging it's actually helpful to be - complete recovery is very, very rare, I think. And I have a really hard time talking about his stuff without talking about my stuff in comparison. And that's kind of cruel, too, really.
Well, okay, enough of that heavy shit. That's really just my business and his business, nothing interesting and entertaining there. Moving along. He was psyched to show me his computers. Cause, you know, I'm a computer chick, and he's always been a computer dude anyway - he has, oh yes, a 47 INCH LG FLATSCREEN on his wall. It's freakin' beautiful. I mean, it's his computer screen, so he can sit in his chair three feet away from it and, you know, read it. But, you know, also it's still a television when it's not being a computer monitor, and it's incredible. And, three feet away from the screen cause his wheelchair is really big and tilts back and he can't use a keyboard anyway so it's not like he can sit at a desk or something. 47 INCHES!! He said the 60 inch would be overkill. I want to know exactly what's wrong with overkill anyway.
He showed me his Skype stuff, which he uses cause he can do the whole telephone thing on voice control using a headset, and I specifically asked to check out because I think I want a Skype set for myself - I only have a cell phone and I think I need a secondary phone option, for emergencies and stuff, and just in case I need to be on the phone for a long time or something (my cell phone plan has a really tiny amount of minutes on it - I never use them anyway but it could happen I guess.)
Then he showed me how he's got a sensor on his headset so he can move the curser around on the screen by moving his head around, and it responds to his voice, so he can say "click" and it's just like clicking the mouse. I asked him how he liked the transcribing program he had (I think it was iTalk or something apple like that...) cause I remember like five years ago how buggy those kinds of programs were, but he said he hasn't used it enough to form an opinion.
AND THEN we got to looking through photoshop files, cause, omg, the huge screen, and, yeah, he's another art student so Photoshop is like his bestest buddy (yeah, all my friends and all my peeps are artists, I guess it seems) and we were just being regular old art dorks turning layers off and on and critiquing particular parts of different projects and stuff (is he gonna get back into graphic design? Yeah probably. I mean, it can all be done on a computer anyway... but his latest "project" has been to try to buy used computers and fix them all up with the same software and equipment he uses and then sell them to people who need accessible computers. I thought that was a fairly brilliant idea, yeah?) and I kept going to use the actual curser and he was like, no, just say, "click," or say "close this window."
So I'd be all, "close this window."
Nothing.
"Close THE window."
Nope.
"Close this window!"
Nuh-uh.
"Close this window?"
Not happening.
And no, it wasn't tuned to his voice or anything. It wasn't using the microphone on his headset, it was using the microphone on the computer, and I got up and stuck my head right freakin' next to it.
The nurse, on the other side of the room, you know, minding her own business and whatever, said "close this window" and it closed.
Come on! Wtf is that?
And these programs supposedly work fine for people with thick acccents, people with speech problems, etc... just not me!
My voice must be at some rare and unusual frequency that doesn't get recognized by this kind of stuff. Daniel used to say that he couldn't hear me sometimes even if I was right there and I thought I was speaking loudly and clearly. He was convinced I sometimes spoke on the one single frequency he for some reason couldn't hear, kinda like the security systems that some people never hear and other people hear like a high incessant beeping or something.
Again, wtf.
Anyway. That is my silly story.
Yeah. And all I can think of, you know, self-centered as I am, as how odd it is that all our talking about medical stuff and hospitals and rehab and whatever did not dredge up more memories for me than it did. And didn't send me into an utter emotional whirlwind like I thought it might. Sometimes that stuff seems so distant - I was a freakin' kid, although I didn't feel like it at the time. Sometimes it's not distant at all, and just sneaks up on me when I'm doing something totally unrelated and perfectly happy and content. But right now its... pretty distant.
So we sat on the porch. The back porch, the one where they built the ramp. (Not even the same house - he's staying with his parents, they live in a different part of the neighborhood) Couple other peeps from down the street came over with a couple pizzas. We drank some beers. Well, I drank my beer from one hand and held my friend's beer for him and tried my damnedest not to spill it when I tilted it back. The first nurse left early, the night nurse arrived late. We went inside. We locked the door so the nurse would have to knock. We watched some weird freak-nasty porn. This was the routine back in the day, see, when we lived down the street from each other and my friend could hold his own beer. Yes, freak-nasty porn, and on that big TV, too. But it wasn't a single thing like old times. It wasn't a bit like old times.
Except for the phone wouldn't recognize my voice! I had to give up and dial her from, you know, pushing buttons and the like.
This just furthers the theory that I talk funny. I don't think I sound different. There's no reason why I should sound different - I used to have a little bit of a stutter but the older I get the less it happens - I speak, as far as I can tell, exactly the same as everyone else. I have no type of speech impediment. Just, voice recognition stuff can't even hear me. It doesn't even process that I'm speaking!
I went to Philly yesterday, back to my old 'hood, to visit a friend that lived down the street from us. He had just gotten home from the hospital - he got shot, oh, sometimes last fall, and he had been in the hospital ever since. It's a pretty sad story - he is basically going to need someone to take care of him for the rest of his life. He's not, like, my bestest friend ever, but we lived on the same block, and we'd hang out pretty often, you know, have a few beers together, order take out, sit on the porch, you know, all that EOL stuff.
I didn't hear about what happened to him right away cause I'm all the way out here in New Jersey and no one knew how to contact me, but once I did I called him up, and we did a video chat a couple times, but that was pretty much it.
Anyway his brother called me to tell me they were having a party to celebrate him coming home from the hospital a few weeks from now, and I said I'd like to see him before the party, you know, so we could have a real conversation without a crowd of people and stuff.
I have spent so much money on transportation this past month. This will be the second time I went to Philly. It's expensive! But I hate being here, and I like seeing the people and things that I sit around missing all the time - is it really that bad that I drop so much money on cab fare/train fare/bus fare?
Where was I going with this again? Ah, the voice recognition stuff. Right. I don't want to say too much about him and his situation, cause that's really his private business... I write all kinds of stuff in this journal but I'm not sure how much of his stuff I want to go blabbing. Usually I try to relate everything back to what it has to do with me, you know. Since it's my journal and all.
Ah, screw it. I meant to make this a light-hearted laughable little story about how voice recognition stuff can't even hear me, for some completely undefinable reason - and I'll get to that, I really will - but I don't want to just gloss over the levity of the whole reason for the high tech stuff in the first place. This guy, who "back in the day" used to sit on our porch (or we'd sit on his porch) and have a beer and talk about the world and life and whatever, got shot and now he's paralyzed. He is going to be disabled for the rest of his life. "Disabled" is a broad term - I'm disabled. He and I have the same kind of injury, even, his is just at a higher level than mine. (If I really never said so, I have an incomplete spinal cord injury. I'm 24; it happened two days before I turned 15. So going on ten years now.) But I live by myself. I can see to my own personal needs. I can drive - I just don't have a driver's license - lots of people with SCIs can drive just fine. Yeah, okay, I made this big post in
gimp_vent about how I got stuck trying to juggle my groceries and the door at the supermarket and how IT JUST SUCKS to have to get some stranger to help you out - and it does suck, it really does, and I didn't even want to post about it in my personal journal because I thought it would be too much whining from me, and I bitch and moan about stuff like that all the time. But he can't even breathe. Not only is he in a wheelchair - he's in a wheelchair with a breathing machine stowed away on the bottom of it. He's got a tube in his throat. Barring a miracle, he's always going to have a tube in his throat. He can take it out and breathe on his own for most of the day, but it's the small portion of the day that he needs it that makes the difference between, hey, I'll just go out with my friends, we'll take the van, it'll be fine, and hey, if we're going to try to go out, the nurse has to come with us, or at least my mom or my brother, because I might need suction, oh, and by the way, don't get freaked out by watching someone suck the fluid out of my lungs with a tube, okay?
And we did talk over the phone/video chat twice since he got hurt, once when he was still in the first hospital and once when he was in the rehab hospital. One of those conversations included him insisting that he was going to make a complete recovery. I just... didn't quite know what to say to that. For a lot of reasons. But... I did tell him that the doctors told me my injury was complete, that I was never going to recover anything below my injury, no question about it, and, wouldn't you know it, they were wrong? They were wrong, knew they were wrong, and refused to come out and say it, and it was almost two years before a physical therapist was reading my paperwork out loud and said I was classified as "incomplete." By that time it was kind of obvious, but it was the first time I had actually heard it out loud.
So I told him doctors can make mistakes, things can look one way in the beginning because of swelling and trauma and the like, but actually be a little different, but, still. I recovered something. I didn't recover everything. I still can't walk.
So... I don't know how encouraging that actually is. Or how encouraging it's actually helpful to be - complete recovery is very, very rare, I think. And I have a really hard time talking about his stuff without talking about my stuff in comparison. And that's kind of cruel, too, really.
Well, okay, enough of that heavy shit. That's really just my business and his business, nothing interesting and entertaining there. Moving along. He was psyched to show me his computers. Cause, you know, I'm a computer chick, and he's always been a computer dude anyway - he has, oh yes, a 47 INCH LG FLATSCREEN on his wall. It's freakin' beautiful. I mean, it's his computer screen, so he can sit in his chair three feet away from it and, you know, read it. But, you know, also it's still a television when it's not being a computer monitor, and it's incredible. And, three feet away from the screen cause his wheelchair is really big and tilts back and he can't use a keyboard anyway so it's not like he can sit at a desk or something. 47 INCHES!! He said the 60 inch would be overkill. I want to know exactly what's wrong with overkill anyway.
He showed me his Skype stuff, which he uses cause he can do the whole telephone thing on voice control using a headset, and I specifically asked to check out because I think I want a Skype set for myself - I only have a cell phone and I think I need a secondary phone option, for emergencies and stuff, and just in case I need to be on the phone for a long time or something (my cell phone plan has a really tiny amount of minutes on it - I never use them anyway but it could happen I guess.)
Then he showed me how he's got a sensor on his headset so he can move the curser around on the screen by moving his head around, and it responds to his voice, so he can say "click" and it's just like clicking the mouse. I asked him how he liked the transcribing program he had (I think it was iTalk or something apple like that...) cause I remember like five years ago how buggy those kinds of programs were, but he said he hasn't used it enough to form an opinion.
AND THEN we got to looking through photoshop files, cause, omg, the huge screen, and, yeah, he's another art student so Photoshop is like his bestest buddy (yeah, all my friends and all my peeps are artists, I guess it seems) and we were just being regular old art dorks turning layers off and on and critiquing particular parts of different projects and stuff (is he gonna get back into graphic design? Yeah probably. I mean, it can all be done on a computer anyway... but his latest "project" has been to try to buy used computers and fix them all up with the same software and equipment he uses and then sell them to people who need accessible computers. I thought that was a fairly brilliant idea, yeah?) and I kept going to use the actual curser and he was like, no, just say, "click," or say "close this window."
So I'd be all, "close this window."
Nothing.
"Close THE window."
Nope.
"Close this window!"
Nuh-uh.
"Close this window?"
Not happening.
And no, it wasn't tuned to his voice or anything. It wasn't using the microphone on his headset, it was using the microphone on the computer, and I got up and stuck my head right freakin' next to it.
The nurse, on the other side of the room, you know, minding her own business and whatever, said "close this window" and it closed.
Come on! Wtf is that?
And these programs supposedly work fine for people with thick acccents, people with speech problems, etc... just not me!
My voice must be at some rare and unusual frequency that doesn't get recognized by this kind of stuff. Daniel used to say that he couldn't hear me sometimes even if I was right there and I thought I was speaking loudly and clearly. He was convinced I sometimes spoke on the one single frequency he for some reason couldn't hear, kinda like the security systems that some people never hear and other people hear like a high incessant beeping or something.
Again, wtf.
Anyway. That is my silly story.
Yeah. And all I can think of, you know, self-centered as I am, as how odd it is that all our talking about medical stuff and hospitals and rehab and whatever did not dredge up more memories for me than it did. And didn't send me into an utter emotional whirlwind like I thought it might. Sometimes that stuff seems so distant - I was a freakin' kid, although I didn't feel like it at the time. Sometimes it's not distant at all, and just sneaks up on me when I'm doing something totally unrelated and perfectly happy and content. But right now its... pretty distant.
So we sat on the porch. The back porch, the one where they built the ramp. (Not even the same house - he's staying with his parents, they live in a different part of the neighborhood) Couple other peeps from down the street came over with a couple pizzas. We drank some beers. Well, I drank my beer from one hand and held my friend's beer for him and tried my damnedest not to spill it when I tilted it back. The first nurse left early, the night nurse arrived late. We went inside. We locked the door so the nurse would have to knock. We watched some weird freak-nasty porn. This was the routine back in the day, see, when we lived down the street from each other and my friend could hold his own beer. Yes, freak-nasty porn, and on that big TV, too. But it wasn't a single thing like old times. It wasn't a bit like old times.
