Well, in a word:  “Wow.”  If that’s enough for you, you can stop reading.

Oh, you want more details.  Okay!

First, the bad news:  The TAP plan is not available yet, so us early adopters of the iPhone 3G have had to pick the standard plans, which start at $69.99 per month, plus text messaging for extra.  They should get that ironed out in due time, though.  Various reports on the internet indicate that the TAP (text accessibility plan for deaf/hh folks) will be anywhere between $30 to $40 per month.

On with the mini review (I will skip over things that are standard iPhone fare and only focus on things that are either new or new to me):

Applications

• Email works great.  Added 2 Gmail accounts and some other accounts easily.  It’s not “push” email, though — for “push” email you have to either have access to an ActiveSync-enabled Microsoft Exchange server or use Apple’s Mobile Me service ($99/year).   Push means the messages are sent to your device immediately like Blackberries or Sidekicks.  The iPhone “checks” your email like a desktop email application every 15 minutes (configurable).
• The camera makes beautiful images.
• App Store (downloading applications, both paid and free) is OUTSTANDING.  Downloaded AIM, Facebook, Bank of America, Flickr, Google, a game (Monkey Ball, $9.99) and Yelp applications right off the bat.  They all worked great
• AIM deserves a special mention since we’d all use that a lot — Works great, fast, easy to navigate and communicate with folks.  Note:  when you exit AIM it quits the app.  All iPhone apps have this behavior to keep speeds high, no applications are left “running” in the background.  Front most application always has all the iPhone resources.

Speeds

• 3G is a nice speed boost over the EDGE connections on Blackberrys and Sidekicks.  Everything internet-related is a lot snappier.  Affects battery life though.
• GPS acquisition speed is a bit slow, have to be patient.  But it works great, you can easily find where you are on the map.  What’ll be more interesting is how applications from the App Store integrate GPS for location-aware services.  For example, finding what friends are nearby.

General Advice

Get it.  If you want the best phone/communication device out there…get the iPhone.  The only downside that affects me a little bit is the lack of free push email.  But I’m sure that’ll be remedied soon enough.  In the meantime the combo of the iPhone and Mobile Me kicks the pants off of any Blackberry service out there, and compares favorably to the Sidekick’s online email access/device combination.

So, AT&T has finally offered a “Deaf/HH” plan for the iPhone. Yay! Deaf iPhoners — go forth and changeth your plans to saveth money.

AT&T offers iPhone plan (via Engadget)

AT&T Text Accessibility Plan

Executive summary:

• $40/month
• Unlimited SMS & data (web, etc)
• 40¢ per minute voice
• visual voicemail (pretty useless for most of us)

You have to “certify” that you are disabled, and have a professional sign a form. Text from the pdf:

A certifying agent must be a qualified health care professional, audiologist or hearing health professional, speech or language therapist/specialist, representative of an institution, agency or non-profit 510c3 organization actively engaged in work in the disability area specified by the applicant.

A certifying agent must have direct knowledge or documentation of the applicant’s condition or functional limitation.

Examples of certifying agents include licensed physicians and/or surgeons operating in the scope of their licenses, Vocational Rehabilitation Agency Counselors, Teachers, Audiologists, Credentialed Therapists, Directors of independent living centers, or local, state, or national chapter presidents of associations of/for persons with disabilities including but not limited to: The National Association of the Deaf, Hearing Loss Association of America, AG Bell, Association of Late-Deafened Adults or Telecommunication for the
Deaf, INC.

On an tangential point; something makes me feel awkward that I have to certify myself if I wanted to get the plan.  It’s nice that the certifying agent list doesn’t only include medical personnel, but still…  I would like to see something a little more self-service.  “Please tell AT&T that I’m deaf” sounds kind of stupid, doesn’t it?

Sharing this with DeafDC for our collective amusement — my first “deaf” spam (I don’t read spam so I might have gotten one before now, but this one slipped through Gmail’s spam filter…).  Pasted verbatim, including errors.

Dearest One,

I look forward to hear from you soonest.
Love..Saral

Mmm.  Gotta love those 419 scams.

Deaf folks aren’t the only ones using sign language, as we all know — from baseball umpires to the gnomes on airport tarmacs.  The New York Times published an interesting infographic on the sign language used in the New York Mercantile Exchange here.

For me the most interesting thing was to see some parallels between a few of their signs and ASL; I wonder if they borrowed from ASL or from another root language from which ASL also borrowed from (stock and mercantile exchanges have been around a long time…).

Thoughts?  Reactions?

The internet can be a powerful force. Just witness the righteous fury that whipped the internet community to search for and identify an teenager who stole an Xbox and Powerbook from Jesse McPherson in Philadelphia.

He blogged about it, and it was picked up on Digg and from there it gained a life of its own. People did research, called his parents (with IP Relay, no less), and helped Jesse track down the miscreant. They even made a wiki page.

Ended up that due to the furor and incessant IMs, emails, and social-media harassment, he returned the Powerbook, although the Xbox is still missing.

Thought for today: What if that poor kid had nothing to do with it like some argue, or even received the goods secondhand? What if, like the story of the soldier throwing the dog off of the cliff, there was more to it than meets the eye (he claims it was already dead…).

To bring this point home to the deaf community: What if your blog about JKF, or their blog about Julie Rems-Smario, or another blog about the latest deaf community demon did more damage than good? Mob “justice” is usually not justice at all. Innuendo, myspace pages, and rumor do not make a case; but they certainly do make nice gossip and feed righteous wrath. But remember its only gossip, for in a world where anyone can write a blog, the burden is on you, the reader, to appropriately filter and make sound judgments about what you read.

Just review DeafRead or Gallynet for your daily dose of righteous wrath, that like McDonalds, goes down delicious but gives you a case of indigestion a couple hours later.

Give me reasoned logic, orderly evidence, and solid justification any day. What’s that? You’ve heard another juicy story? Do tell!

A friend sent me an awesome link to Submerge, (sorry, Mac OS X only) an new-to-me program that allows you to take any subtitle file (.srt, .sub, etc) and merge it with an mov, m4v, avi file so that you can view the subtitles on any Apple device — from an iPod to the Apple TV.

This is quite a boon for us deaf users, as we usually have to forego watching movies with external subtitles on any portable device due to the lack of support.

Directions:

1. Find, rip, or download a movie.
2. Find its associated subtitle file at DivXsubtitles, mysubtitles, subscene, or opensubtitles.
3. Run the movie and subtitle file through Submerge.
4. Watch on the Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, or just the computer!

One note for new subtitle hunters — subtitles are user generated, so quality will vary. Subtitle files can have different timings than your movie file, contain misspellings or poor formatting, and plain not work.

The path to subtitle nirvana is a long one but you will be richly rewarded.

I’ve been on the SnapVRS Ojo Videophone waiting list for a long time now, and have been looking forward to getting and playing with it. However while waiting for it, a new piece of deaf hardware porn has arrived from Viable — the Viable Vpad.

These two devices, along with the Sorenson VP-200, VP-100, and D-Links fill out the video relay hardware experience for us deaf folks. All this hardware has gotten me thinking. There are some interesting things about this market and the VRS experience that I believe to be true:

• We have no vendor or provider loyalty. Whoever gives us the best hardware/software combination gets our valuable Federally funded minutes.
• Each new piece of hardware is more complicated to use than the last, but has more features except the ones we really want.
• Video quality has stagnated. Sure, it’s improved slightly over the years, but where is my HD VRS service? I want to see the pores on the interpreter’s face.
• The remotes always suck.
• Interoperability is laughable. Why can’t I call anyone regardless of device, easily? The companies are not going to work together on this unless we demand it.
• Why aren’t VPs the de facto “telephone” at places like Gallaudet, NAD, or other “deaf”-related workplaces?

The last one above deserves more explanation. When I worked at Gallaudet, most people (especially hearing folks) did not have a VP. So how were parents, students, or staff supposed to contact them? That’s right, through the relay. Even though they could sign. I found this outrageous, do you? One small concession that Gallaudet makes is that they supply webcams to hearing folks. But this isn’t the same as a full always-on and accessible VP.

Even at The National Association of the Deaf (yes I spelled it out for emphasis) VPs don’t have a full seat at the table. What I want is to be able to go to NAD’s or Gallaudet’s website, grab a person’s phone number (groan, or IP address) and call them. Hearing or deaf. I want to see them on the screen signing back to me. “Hello!” “How are you?”

But back to the point — where’s my Ojo? Hope it comes before the Vpad comes out. Only to be replaced, yet again, and put in the great VP dustbin under my bed.

A friend sent me a link to a comic that I thought was hilarious. The comic’s author relates his experience at Tower A/Ellingson Hall at RIT. Absolutely hilarious, and the punch lines he raises are ones that we are all too familiar with. Speaking from the perspective of someone who went to RIT, he is SPOT ON and skewers deaf people nicely. He’d be a great person to write a Deaf Roast on Comedy Central.

Dorm of the Deaf [Dustinland]

Comments, thoughts? Some people on reddit have commented here, if you’re interested in reading some reactions to this comic from random hearing and deaf people.

It snowed a few days ago in DC and the area, and I managed to snap these pictures before the snow melted the next day.

Enjoy.

Sprinkled snow decorates a Do Not Enter sign.

Capitol Hill is quiet as snow blankets the streets.

A dusting of snow coats a tree that only had just lost its leaves.

I have been following the stories of police tasing various people see (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…) for a while now, and even cases where police were fired for not tasing. So it is not surprising that after tasing pregnant women, police would also tase a deaf man.

It is every deaf person’s nightmare to be in that scenario, with a tase- or gun-happy police officer who has to make a snap judgment whether to kill you or listen to your pleas that you can’t hear. Pleas which a hearing person can very well make too.

However what is more troubling is that tasers are revealing how police tend to err on the side of stepping on our civil liberties versus putting themselves at the slightest risk. Tase first, ask questions later, seems to be the mantra here. Police seem to be encouraged to apply force in more and more situations, rather than speak softly.

That said, its my opinion that tasers are better than nightsticks (see picture). Tasers have less impact on the body, no blood, and the pain only lasts as long as the officer has his finger on the button — with a maxmium duration of 30 seconds. A broken bone lasts months.

Also, tasers have accountability — they leave a trail of evidence and record video that make it much easier to review an officer’s conduct.

Would you rather be beat up with a nightstick or zapped with a taser? I’ll pick the taser anytime.