North of the Stupid Line

Oh dear, what a palaver. Susie Grant has created VeeSee so that:

[D]eaf people can realize their dreams too, to support the deaf community in an original way that would allow them to sell themselves, show their skills and versatility and allow others to see how creative they are.

To be honest, I find this quite patronising. Although I would agree that Deaf individuals have a hard time of it in terms of access to education, employment and mainstream services, I don’t think VeeSee is the way to go about it. The hearing world needs exposure to the Deaf community and BSL if attitudes are to change, and I don’t think hearing people are going to be interested in features such as ‘See and Learn’, ‘Chat & Discuss’ etc. There’s also a rather disturbing lack of BSL integration on the website. Ok, individual articles have BSL translations, but compared to Sign Community, Deafstation, it’s evident that BSL is not a priority.

Alison Bryan thereafter provided some constructive feedback, which Susie apparently saw as an opportunity to post some really personal attacks on Alison, going as far to suggest that Alison is not allowed to reveal which interpreters have worked for her. Er, what does that have to do with VeeSee? And besides, the interpreters’ Code of Conduct doesn’t apply to Deaf individuals unless they are interpreters themselves! That’s like saying Deaf people are not allowed to recommend, discuss or talk about interpreters! I would say to Susie, stop it now before you go too far.

Also, although VeeSee is quite pleasing on the eye in terms of colours, it is very badly designed. Navigation is difficult, and there is far too much text. It tries to do too much, which makes it difficult to process. If you are a Deaf BSL user, you would find the website difficult to use. The video clips don’t work in Mozilla Firefox, and you have to upgrade to the latest version of Windows Media Player to be able to view the clips in Internet Explorer.

Finally, I’d like to mention that I am on the VeeSee website. I agreed to contribute, to raise awareness of my career progression and how I decided to become a solicitor. When Susie first approached me, she convinced me that doing so would encourage Deaf individuals to become solicitors. I, of course, want to see more Deaf solicitors out there, so I jumped at the chance. However, I would like to point out that I am not a Solicitor, YET. I will qualify on 27 May 2007, and only then am I allowed to refer to myself as a Solicitor. Susie, if you read this, I would be grateful if you could change any reference to “Solicitor” to “Trainee Solicitor”.

Oh yes, I returned from holidaying in Gran Canaria a week ago today. You’re probably all wondering: “hasn’t he come back yet?”, “didn’t he enjoy it to not mention anything about it at all?”. Never fear, I am back (not that you care, of course), and I did enjoy our little holiday.

We stayed at the Guanabara Park Apartments (NB. the first picture on that page is not Guanabara Park, it’s Portonovo) in Puerto Rico, on what was basically a cheap Teletext holiday. For the price we paid, we were happy with the accommodation, even though it was 170 steps from the local shopping/restaurant area to the apartments. Hey, a bit of exercise never did anyone any harm.

The weather was great – it was really warm in the sun, with very strong sunrays, but cool in the shade and during the night. It meant you could have a nice hot shower without sweating buckets while trying to dry yourself in vain, and sleep through the night without sweating buckets into the sheets. I came home with a reasonable tan – not bad for 7 days.

I came back refreshed and raring to go; shame it only took a day back at work to get rid of that fresh feeling!

There have been numerous photos blogged to the world of the eclipse that happened in the UK today. Here’s my contribution.

You may have noticed that I’ve changed the template, again. I really like this one, called Fjords 03. I’m planning to change the header images to something more relevant to me, so watch this space. I may also tweak the colours as well.  I’ve tweaked the colours to something a bit more butch, and less pastelly.

Don’t worry, I will settle on a template/design soon enough – until the next time that is.

Yes, I’m still experimenting with my blog layout. Just bear with me, I’ll settle on something soon enough. I quite like this current look, called wpjeriko01.

The way in which the posts are laid out accentuates the most recent post. The only problem with this is that it splits longer posts, so that you can only read an excerpt. But then, if you were interested in what you’d read thus far, you’d be happy to just click on the link to read the full post.

We’ll see how it goes.

Update: Ooh, just noticed the “new!” image next to this post. I like!