Finally.

Just in time for Friday and weekend!

Beer wallpaper never looks so pretty than this. =)

Notice my firefox browser? It’s Halloween time, :-)

And my god, quicksilver so rules. Basically a command-line interface
with on top of desktop. You can open anything without touching the
mouse. :-)

The tacos he’s been raving.

1. Carne
2. Chorizos
3. Pastor

It has the freshest jalapenos I’ve ever tasted. :-)

At the sushi bar. See boats on water. =)

Awesome.

En route to Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA!

In the last post, I’ve pointed out that if the Board of Trustees decided to force JFK to resign, they’d have to pay her 2 million dollars as her lawyers cleverly advised her to put in the contract. Well, the Protest may have already cost Gallaudet more than 2 millions; however, it’s currently hypothetical right now. The Athens Alabama Personal Injury Lawyer duty varies depending on the state and the circumstances.

First, I’d like to say something about how I felt last night and I would imagine this is how most people feel where such an event has put them to make gasps, cover their mouths with their hands and finally hit them hard and they started to weep. When something like that happens, you know it’s bad.

We just all witnessed something that’s never happened in the 142 years at Gallaudet University and something that’s never happened during the 1988 DPN Protest either, 135 incredibly brave students were arrested.

The emotions just blew to all time high—a sky high—and everyone went into an unbelievable disbelief and was utterly shocked. It was one of those rare moments when everything stopped for a min and we were transfixed on our computer screens, incessantly clicking on the reload button for the latest news from deafread.com, only to find out that we weren’t the only ones clicking down our mouses to death, millions others have done the same thing, which sent the server to crash, had to settle with next two or three servers till our senses and million others finally got what’s really going on.

It wasn’t so about the arrests that broke our hearts; it went much more than that. The place we all have come to know Gallaudet University, the uniqueness around the campus, the sense of belonging that all deaf people feel is gone or rather, destroyed. It feels like Gallaudet University is no longer unique from other places where it is the only large-scale place that ASL is not a minority language there.

Seeing those arrests gave me scary flashbacks what would become of Gallaudet University in the future not so far away from now. It will have interpreters in classrooms, just like every other college and deaf students will no longer see the reason to attend Gallaudet University anymore. ASL will not be a mandatory thing to learn or enforced for the sake of communication standard. Then, Congress will begin to see the same thing, decide to cut off the funding, and tell these students that they can just go home to their local colleges and to give them with ADA laws pamphlets to remind them that they have the right to get an interpreter. Gallaudet University is either closed or re-named to perhaps I.K. Jordan University and its mascot animal will be the Lobsters.

Okay, there I’ve said it, perhaps too extreme in tastes or in ASL, “far-out!” or get the heck out of here! But believe me, this is what most of us fear. All right, let’s ease a bit down on the drama side and explain what the hell I was talking about Gallaudet Protest that may have already cost them more than two million dollars. Well, it’s time to think mathematically.

So, 135 students were arrested. I.K. Jordan and JFK have their names locked on the list. They will be meeting over some lobster bisque soup leftovers from their recent super-fancy dinner. They will discuss if those students should be expelled. And if they were to be expelled from the university, that will cost them a lot of money, my friend. Take a look at this chart from Gallaudet University’s website on tuitions and fees.

The estimated total tuition for a whole semester is $10,735 for an undergraduate student. About $500 more for a graduate student. I’ll just use the UG student figures. Assuming they are expelled and will not return next semester, 135 students times $10,735 is a whopping $1,449,225. Not too far away from 2 million dollars to “buy out” Jane Fernandes. I think many of them are freshmen or second-year students, so they would have come back next year, so I’ll take 100. 100 times $10,735 times 2 (for two semesters) comes to $2,147,000. So, a potential total loss is $3,596,225.

Remember, this is all based on the assumption that I.K. Jordan and Fernandes decide to expel them out of campus. Now, is it worth it? so much for J.K Fernandes and so little for the students.

Think about it, the Board of Trustees.

That’s the amount of dollars the Board of Trustees have agreed to pay if they asked her to resign. Obviously, it’s going to take a lot to convince the BoTs to see if it’s worth two million dollars to replace her. Or the FSSA (facuty, staff, students and alumni) finds a way to come up with that amount of money and they can say “Look, we have two million dollars. Please step down.” but that’s just me and my radical thinking. I got this information from where else? Ridorlive.com. Look below about Jane’s contract.

This post isn’t going to be of a Pulitizer’s prize material but a curious observation and opinion by a person who was once a Gallaudet student during his first year of college in 1999 and has been following the protest closely.

The volcano has erupted once again. The protest first started in last May when students were unhappy with the selection of the next University president in Jane K. Fernandes and felt that the presidential search process was unfair and flawed. They also felt that JKF was pampered by I. King Jordan as they both hold a close friendship and JKF has risen all the way from her first job as a Vice President of the Laurent Clerc National Center (which is ironic, that I will explain a moment later), then became a Provost and now she is set to be the next President.

Students feel that with the close relationship between Jordan and she, Jordan would still have some voice/input/control in the future Gallaudet decision-making and isn’t completely out of the picture, basically leaving the current administration intact without going through a big change that would leave him behind the ship. It isn’t very hard to see this because last weekend, two Gallaudet buildings were already named after him and his wife. Perhaps Jordan felt that he deserved some kind of a special party (how does a lobster bisque soup sound to you?) and two buildings being honored after him and his wife for all his hard work, fund-raising skills and one deaf quote that has made him famous, “Deaf people can do anything but hear.” This only enables students to disagree further from him and his administration, feeling that there is an oppression and a suspected fiscal management—-a corruption at play. Gallaudet probably would need more than ten professional CPAs or positions equivalent of IRS agents to audit every cent that has come into the university. Something is sure to find there.

Now, back to the protest, it seems that the protest has caught on a wild fire when someone had an idea of locking out the HMB building where most classes and professors’ classes are. This is strategic because it doesn’t require as many people as it would need to block the whole campus. As in most other protests, they are like a fire or a car engine; all they need is a spark to get them going. Gallaudet students got that spark when DSP decided to get physical with students as one DSP officer tried to choke a student after students kept standing in his way. This was caught on the video. Another DSP officer used a mace spray in an attempt to “shoo” them away out of the HMB building. How did the Administration respond? The public office released a statement that no such accidents occurred and no one was hurt. They probably weren’t aware that those two incidents were actually caught on the videos. So, this only added more to the fire. Now, the Gallaudet Protest has found their momentum, with more people now convinced that there is something that needs to be done about the administration, starting with JKF’s resignation.

To really understand the whole protest, it isn’t as complicated as it sounds. There is a conflict in the philosophy between JKF (and IKJ too) and the FSSA. JKF has announced that in her future plans, she has a goal to include all communication modes from ASL to cued speech to pure oral. She even supports the idea of having an oral interpreter in a classroom if there are some oral students who have no knowledge of ASL and wouldn’t understand what a deaf professor may be signing. JKF sees a problem that with the declining number in unique deaf students who attend deaf schools like myself and my parents, there would be less enrollment numbers to Gallaudet. To help boost the number, she feels that she’d need to welcome ALL kinds of students who have some hearing loss or all of it regardless of what communication mode they use. Gallaudet will give them the accessibility they need when they get to the campus, making it more mainstreamed than it is now.

It may sound good and may help with the enrollment numbers but that’s not what Gallaudet is about. The founder of Gallaudet University, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, went on a ship to Europe to seek what would be the best possible education for the deaf people and in that, he discovered sign language and he personally brought Laurent Clerc, a deaf educator, to America to teach sign language to the deaf. He had to convince Clerc to come with him and there is a rumor that Gallaudet’s first deaf pupil, Alice Cosworth, was the reason why Clerc came, in which they eventually did get married.

With a language that all deaf people can understand, they began to communicate their thoughts better, thus, education is possible. However, the sign language, now known as American Sign Language (ASL), have been going through so much oppression that black slaves or Jews would be embarrassed to hear. For the longest time, hearing people thought ASL was not a language and that it’s equivalent to apes making some funny gestures and in the Milan conference back in 1880, it was decided that ASL must be banned and only oral method shall be taught. As a result, Deaf teachers lost their jobs and ASL almost became extinct but who was there to save the language? None other than Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and the college he founded.

Jane K. Fernandes was a former Vice President at the Laurent Clerc National Center. Instead of promoting or encouraging ASL to be the primary language all across the campus, she does not expect a high level of fluency from each faculty, staff, or a student. Now, she is selected to be the next President and her vision is to welcome all communication modes and expects that such accessibility is to be met. In short, she does not consider ASL to be a requirement to be a student or to work at the university. A good example would be in order to apply to colleges, you’d need to write a strong good essay in English, right? At Gallaudet University, you don’t have to be. There is no specific ASL screening test for faculty, staff and students. Basically, it is possible to waltz through the university with a little knowledge of ASL. FSSA doesn’t want that. They want to see ASL to be as natural as other languages and not to take a backseat to other languages. It seems that the real problem still lies between us and hearing people that they still treat ASL as secondary language and do not want to appoint a person who is deaf-centric and use ASL solely without resorting to what they always want to see—a deaf person who can talk.

This is precisely why FSSA does not want her to be the next leader for the deaf. ASL is like oxygen; we can’t live without it.

UNITY FOR GALLAUDET!

*disclaimer – all of the above was written with speculation and does not claim to be factual or accurate.

Anybody wanna hire me? :-)

Whoa, baby, look what I found. Was bored in the plane, so I asked a girl sitting next to me if I could borrow her Cosmo magazine.

Cool, my uncle gave me his golf travel bag. My clubs better don’t get damaged thru baggage claims. I’m flying to Chicago for a deaf golf charity tournament. Hope I’ll play well!

Mmm… Juicy.

Man, my sleeping cycle is seriously f**ked up. For the last two weeks or so, I’ve been going to bed really late like around 3 or 4 am but still managed to get up by 10 am to go to work at 11 am. Till recently, looks like my body (more of my brain) has finally taken its toll so I was feeling tired and went to bed early at 11 pm—–believe it or not, my body thinks it’s early. I was hoping I could sleep till 7 am to get my full 8 hours but nope, my body began to stir, slowly getting out of REM stage and woke up at 3 am. Three o’clock!!? Now, I can’t go back to sleep and I dunno if I can go back…. I want to play golf before work. Maybe I’ll stay awake and overload on the coffee or mountain dew till I finish my shift. Oh well.

Enough of my sleep ramblings, I wanted to share that I finished reading a book called “Brainac” by Ken Jennings. If you’re not familiar with the name, he flat out broke the Jeopardy! record for the most consecutive games, seventy-five, and earned three million dollars in winnings. This so happened because Jeopardy! decided not to limit five days winning anymore. A champion can stay on as long as s/he keeps winning. I remember reading about him in the newspapers and started to watch him on Jeopardy! I wish I had a tivo so I could watch all his appearances, maybe there’s a dvd? When I watched him on the show for the first time, I could immediately tell he was different from any contestant and his knowledge of trivia was brilliant and freakingly astounding. He was like a machine, going through questions like he’s Dave Crockett shooting these tin cans as they fall one by one quickly. He knows even the smallest details that no one would bother to know but he knows. He said he enjoys knowing “weird stuffs”, which apparently is extremely useful in trivia.

My first experience with trivia probably was the Gallaudet Academic bowl competition. I believe it first started in 1997 ‘cuz my good friend, Kent, was on the team along with his classmates, Beth and Carolyn. They were a bunch of smart seniors. Well, Kent was definitely a slacker but he knows a lot. They went to Kansas to compete in the Midwest Regional, which they won handily over Texas and earned a trip to the deaf national tournament at Gallaudet Univ. in Washington, DC. They didn’t win as California School for the Deaf Riverside (CSDR), became the first school to win the tournament. Kent, Beth and Carolyn graduated that year and who’s the next crop? It was Nick Beck, Jill Birchall, Kevin Symons and myself.

I truly feel that we couldn’t have a better team, with Nick being our “anchor”, it was his first chance to be in the spotlight than constantly being teased in school or getting stuffed in some lockers. I think we also got to see how smart he really was, despite his eccentric personality. He reads a ton of books, possesses a sponge-like memory, is excellent at remembering people names like the Supreme Court judges or U.S. presidents, and current world events as he likes to read newspapers daily.

Jill, the only girl on the team, knew what most girls like to know–celebrities, literature, art—and she even surprised us with some music knowledge like she knew who was on the Grateful Dead band, despite we’re all deaf and knows NOTHING about music culture. Boy, we would sink without her. She’d spend summers catching up on People magazines and YM/Seventeen’s, although she probably has graduated to reading Cosmopolitan now. Like Nick, she remembers names very well.

Our third player, Kevin, he’s the one who got married recently is a different kind of nerd than Nick is. He wasn’t necessarily eccentric, just a bit of loner who would wander in his own world but he came alive in geography and he knows all U.S. capitals. He’s also good at math—quickly solving problems and guess what? he is now a project manager of a small firm that drafts blueprints for wealthy people who want to build a million dollar home. Those blueprints cost more than four figures.

Now, the fourth player, me. Ha, I don’t have much to say except I know a bit about sports, some random facts (maybe weird) and history. That’s about it. I wonder how did I get on the team. I think I was good at keeping the team together and being upbeat, like Jill and Nick didn’t get along so well, ha. So, that’s the four of us and one coach/teacher, Marybeth Lauderdale. I can see why she was so excited for us and really thought we had a team that was good enough to win the national. Except on one question: Name the two moons around Mars.

It was the last game in the Midwest Regional tournament, having blown away every other teams except maybe for one team, Indiana. Our final opponent was Missouri; we had beaten them in the first round but they fought their way back into the final round. Their team was led by one girl—I don’t remember her name—but she wasn’t pretty and looked like a snotty pig to me. One thing I still remember about that girl was that one MSD student told me that she wasn’t even a full-time MSD student; she only took one class, a PE, at the deaf school while the rest of her classes was at a public school. She had just transferred there so she can be eligible to participate in the academic bowl competition. On the contrary, Jill was born deaf and entered 0 to 3 infant program at ISD and remained there till she graduated. You think such a “scandal” would only occur on the NCAA level? Think again!

In the first three rounds, our brains were hitting on full cylinders, pulling ahead hard and was ten points away from having an insurmountable lead that they couldn’t beat us on the final “jeopardy” question. I think the score was 125 to 55. But on the final question, “Where will be the next Deaf Winter Olympics held in?” That pig-faced girl buzzed in before I could and she answered correctly, Denmark. That gave her team 10 points, from 55 to 65, thus not out of the game because they could bet all of their points to double their score and we’d have to be wise with our wager. I remember I was soo pissed as they still had a chance. And what a big chance that was.

In our final team conference, we knew they would bet it all so we bet only 10 points. The final question’s about to start and it was to “name the two moons around Mars.” We looked at each other, expecting to see who knows the answer. None of us knew. We looked over the other side. We saw the pig-faced girl made a gasp, looked down and wrote the answer. She knew! that pig-faced girl. We tried to re-focus and discuss, frantically trying to get an answer but it was all hopeless. We had lost. They doubled their score to 130 and we went 10 points down to 115. The whole thing was over and they’re going to Washington, DC, not us. It was the worst feeling, like getting kicked in the stomach. I felt like throwing up. Really was sick. I remember being shocked, then got really mad at myself for not stealing the last question—the next Deaf Olympics. I knew that one. Like Ken Jennings, he got jeopardized for not knowing the answer to “most of this firm’s seven thousand seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.”

That was eight years ago and I still remember like it happened last week. At least I had good memories, it was a blast with my team and we really learned a lot of stuffs like how facts are connected to each other and being more in touch with the world like I want to travel Europe someday. I enjoy doing crossword puzzles and like to watch Jeopardy! shows. Of course, I had my high school crush on Jill, so maybe that’s why I got on the team. ;-)