I have known braille since 2012 or so after taking a course at the texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSVBI). I usually use braille with an electronic braille display incorporated into a braille note taker.
I received a braille note from a member of the Braille Revival League of Texas a couple of days ago. It was a pen pal style note that contained a riddle.
I broke out my braille slate and stylus and “brailled” a return note with the solution to the riddle. The slate and stylus are very cumbersome to use. All of the characters must be punched into the braille paper manually. And, each character must be punched into the paper in reverse from the back so the raised bumps are properly oriented for the reader. (Each character must be embossed on the paper in reverse.) Talk about tedious! I used to use a borrowed Perkins Brailler to physically write braille. It is essentially a braille typewriter. Maybe I’ll buy a Brailler if I start getting a lot of pen pal mail.
I mailed off my response today. It is the first time I have ever communicated using braille outside of the classroom. Good feeling day!
I learned Braille way back in 4th Grade at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind, but never really used it outside of Braille class and by the time I went blind in my mid-20s, I had forgotten most of the grade 2 contractions… never used a slate and stylus, and while I used to have a perkins Brailler, it sat in a closet gathering dust for so long it became inoperable and became one of the few purely mechanical things I’ve ever disassembled. Sadly, even for uncontracted Braille, my reading sped is glacial to the point of struggling to keep letters in working memory long enough to string into words and words in working memory long enough to string into sentences even though I used to be able to sight read it like n ormal print… As an aside, I thought the use of Braille for some of the puzzles in the Gen 3 Pokemon games was cool and while some of the puzzles they used Braille for make me wonder if GameFreak were channeling Infocom, I don’t share the Pokemon community’s frustration over the use of Braille.
I can touch read embossed or engraved text suitable for touch reading much faster than I can Braille, but options for embossed print are more limited than for Braille, and Braille is already impractical and prohibitively expensive in a lot of cases… and it’s a crying shame that current cutting edge tactile graphics displays have sub-TI-83 resolution while costing what I grew up think of as “new car money”.
And yay, now that I seem to have a handle on using bounds based on theta, time to try some animation!
I too find it difficult to keep contracted braille current. I don’t use it enough. I need to spend more time with my braille display and practice. The move to Unified English Braille (UEB) made it more difficult for me. Too bad Braille Association of North America (BANA) didn’t adopt Nemeth Uniform Braille (NUBS). It was a much better system that also included Nemeth for math coding.
Braille is one valid reason for having separate TOUCH and FEEL verbs (sorry for bringing again my favorite parser peeve…) but what piqued my curiosity is the “contractions”; I know (and even studied a little) the good ol’ Tironian notes (a shorthands system which put western script into the brink of becoming an ideographical language…), these “contractions” is something akin ?
I started writing introspection in my notebook as well as practicing drawing, and it’s been having a positive effect. Today I went for a walk, and I had to come back because my Sodexo card had insufficient funds. I just laughed about it and thought, oh well, that’s life, at least that way I’ll get even more walking done.
Okay, now that I seem to have worked the bugs out of using polar coordinates in my programmatic art, I’ve made another attempt at animating the radioactive symbol and revisited my first idea in this vein… also cleaned up the /Graphics/Programmatic folder on my website, so apologies if I broke any links/auto embedded images in my previous posts.
Also, a family of Unicones(Unicorns as plump as a scoop of ice cream with ice cream cone horns) plushies arrived on my door step today, 2 parents and 3 children.
Also, recently figured out how to have yt-dlp break videos up into an audio file per chapter when downloading, letting me break up the downloaded videos in my backlog into more manageable parts(I know its the same run time, but if I have 9 10-minute videos to listen to, I can easily fit one or two into many everyday tasks, but a single 90 minute video is a huge commitment to watch in one go and resuming from the right spot isn’t the simplest thing).
The weather has been unusually mild the last couple of days and is supposed to dip below 70 tonight and stay in the low to mid 80s the whole week. I was afraid it would be October before the weather would be this nice.
Another fun fact: They apparently don’t know how to crawl across a tile floor. They just kinda panic, thrash about, but ultimately don’t go anywhere.
Yet another fun fact: They’re smart enough to know not to enter glass jars, and you apparently need to make a paper towel runway to convince them that they’re better off inside the jar than on the tile floor.
You can probably guess how I know these fun facts.
Holy crap, this is a big bug! Unfortunately, I can’t feed it because apparently these are predators. It probably already found the house bugs I would have given to it, and I’m absolutely not letting it have a spider.
So the centipede is just gonna have to survive on whatever metabolism it currently has until morning. I know exactly where to drop it off, though, and it’ll have excellent hunting grounds.
My son and I rented a canoe and took it for a two-hour spin around the Norwegian mountain lake right in front of our tent. Huge rock spires all around, ominous dark clouds so close above our heads we could almost touch them, and a hot shower when we came back to shore.
I have come to an agreement with the house centipede. They are not social and territorial, so if you have one, it will kill other centipedes.
My one positive/neutral thing: I have come up with a single-old-man life hack: I have stretchy Purple sheets which are sometimes clingy and difficult to extricate one’s self from. Last night I discovered instead of getting under the sheet, I lay on top of it, grab the edge, and roll myself like a burrito.
It makes the inevitable wake-up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night much easier since I can roll out of the sheet directly!
I’ve heard some centipedes are a foot long… was this one of those or a smaller, but still big enough to give anyone with a phobia of arthropods a heart attack specimen?
I spent much of February through May this year saying “[Current month] has no business being this hot” but so far, August has been feeling more like what May should feel like. The temperature didn’t even hit 80 today and it’s actually on the high end of comfortable throughout the bulk of the trailer and almost too cold for my liking in my bedroom… and its supposed to be below 85 though Monday with Wednesday being the only day on the 7-day forecast to break into the hellish 90s. This is unbelieveably good weather for these parts this time of year.
The Texas red-headed centipede is routinely nearly a foot long. It sometimes eats mice. That’s right, the bug eats mammals. They are pretty common in the Texas Hill Country and each time I’ve seen one, I thought it was a snake at first. They are terrifying and I’ve heard their sting is excruciating, so it’s one of the few things I’ll kill on sight if I see one near the house.
In positive news: the sunset in the Blue Ridge was stunning tonight, with the last light shining on the mountain to the east and turning it pink and gold. Also, I finished weeding the gravel in the fire pit, which was a big task as I’d let it go too far. Satisfying to get it done.
I have seen pictures of giant red centipedes. Mine is black and stays behind the bookcase. I didn’t spend a lot of time measuring, but it was likely 3-4 inches long.
I had small problem with the power button of my PC for past week. The computer turned on after few pushes, then eventually didn’t turn on. I ordered a new chassis for it, and moved my computer to it yesterday. It works like a charm. I am very happy. The new case was not expensive as well and it’s great.
