Urban Adventures & More

In case you weren’t told already, I shouted a lot at OCS. In fact, I shouted so damn much that my voice was still hoarse a month after I left, which caused me to go to the doctor. He told me that my vocal cords need a rest from talking, so I’m not allowed to talk for a month, at which point I’ll go back for a checkup.

Being mute isn’t so bad; most people don’t talk to you anyway. It’s a little hard to say anything quickly or complicated, even writing it down on a pad. Actually, Little Miss Sunshine has been brought up repeatedly because I’ve been writing instead of talking. I also do hand gestures, though. Sometimes I don’t bother being mute, because it’s just too damn complicated, like when I saw (a different) doctor today, I just talked softly. No big stick, though.

To help me communicate with hand gestures, I thought learning some sign language would help; I’d stick to intuitive gestures that other people could figure out easily. I found a website with sign language videos which was perfect. I wanted to put the videos on my MP3 player so I could study them on -the-go, and also so I could show other people what they needed to know. Unfortunately, all the videos had useless names (e.g. M1543.MOV), so I had to cook up a couple of scripts to download the videos, extract the information (movie, meaning, description), and put it in a readable format, and then rename the videos accordingly (I have the descriptions, too, which will probably go on the player wholesale for reference). Then came the converting part. My MP3 player plays videos in a specific format and size, which this wasn’t. I went through a half-dozen programs to find one that did the conversion how I wanted (between these two formats, and in batch-mode), finally settling on the lovely open-source iriverter for my needs. Sadly, my player still won’t decode the files, even with it’s own converter program, which is a problem I’m stillworking on.