All posts filed under: Random Thoughts

musique et poésie (1)

Published by

I’m starting this series today because I heard some learners of French were sharing poetry, and I keep a playlist of songs from mostly 50 years ago that I listened to back then, when I was young! 1- Les Feuilles Mortes This is a well-known song and poem by Jacques Prévert that you’ll hear translated as Autumn Leaves, however the translation leaves a whole lot of it out. So get the one sung by Yves Montand (French actor whom I remember from movies like César et Rosalie and Z). I don’t know if this link will work for Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/song/les-feuilles-mortes/1444874656 It was also sung by Juliette Greco, Edith Piaf, and many others. It’s a song about remembering happy days spent together on the sea shore (“et la mer efface sur le sable, les pas des amants désunis”), the fallen leaves an image for thoughts, feelings and remembrances that have since died out and that the cool wind from the north blows away. Or something like that… 2- Je t’aime, moi non plus This one …

More Bags!

Published by

Lately I’ve been making grocery-size bags with the bottom made of a layer of a rigid mesh sewed inside the canvas, which you can’t see because of the lining. I just finished this one (I think I will keep it for myself!) But if you want one I offer these two at the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center online auction!

Do Me a Favor and State Your Pronouns

Published by

In the space of the first two weeks of the Trump regime, they have managed to eliminate DEI not only across government agencies, but also on corporations. Any mention of the existence of trans and non-binary people have been removed from official documents, and everyone was surprised to see LGBTQI+ suddenly was truncated to LGB (hint: some wealthy donors are gay). We ceased to exist. I’m not too worried… They’re wrecking so much that they are going to provoke much bigger crises. I’m actually relieved that they’re erasing us, it won’t be on the minds of tourists improvising as gender police. It was thanks to DEI trainings that I started using They/Them or She/Her pronouns (this regime also put an end to all DEI efforts and even blame DEI for causing plane collisions – it’s code for saying they only want white men everywhere, preferably the ones without a fully developed frontal lobe, but I digress). I don’t say “She/Her” alone, because in reality I am afraid of a backlash. I concede that I make …

The Elevator in my building

Published by

The elevator in my building is relatively simple to operate… But judging from the occasional bell ring I can hear from my apartment, people get confused with the bottom row of the panel. The buttons for the five floors are close enough to their legend and distant enough from each other to make it a clear choice. There’s even Braille although I would have to check with a blind person to know if it’s working for them. Fortunately they thought of putting a star next to the number 1. Too often I see, especially in buildings with a basement, an assortment of letters the user has to guess… Sometimes there’s LL or B for the basement, and G for Ground Floor which could just be 1, because this one user (me) keeps thinking it’s for Garage while LL suggests Lobby… The problem with the bottom row is that it contains both a frequently used pair of buttons to request door opening and closing, as well as two buttons that trigger the alarm. It isn’t clear …

DYI User-Centered Design and Usability

Published by

Too late in my working life to have any effect on my work, I took a class from Richard I Anderson, a survey of user-centered design and usability research, which at the time were relatively new. Designers were relying on their own instincts or copying from others who dominated the market, and more often than not Computer Science curriculum never included the possibility that we were making our users’ lives more difficult by imposing our views on them of how they should interact with our creations. To make matters worse, our employers insulated departments from each other, and conflicts would arise about “who owns the user.” Was it the industrial designer, hired by Marketeers to entice consumers to buy the product, or the Engineer who applied their techniques to the best of their knowledge? I was neither of them, relying mostly on intuition (not really great either), and never being able to impose my views (I came to specialize in fixing other people’s software because I could take it home and rewrite it with clarity, …

In Memoriam: Richard I Anderson

Published by

Recently I was showing a usability issue of the institutional kind to a friend, and mentioned I had learned so much about human-centered design from taking Richard I. Anderson’s class, oh some 30 years ago maybe? So I wanted to check on Richard and stumbled upon the announcement of his passing and a memorial at BayCHI, an organization he gave so much of his time and energy. I retired early, and learned about Richard’s sickness and times of homelessness, contributed to “Friends of Richard,” and I think last time I met him at a cafe in Berkeley he was going to shelter at a friend’s house (I learned at the memorial it did happen). There was no reason for me to not believe his story and discovery of the sickness he had been afflicted with, but I was so sorry that he had relied on friends who sent him on a spiraling downfall by having him committed to a mental ward. I read his now deleted blog telling how after he had recovered (thanks to …

Références: Genre en Français

Published by

L’usage du genre neutre en français tarde à être introduit, car c’est difficile d’altérer une langue avec des règles plutôt strictes qui nous ont été inculquées pendant toutes nos années scolaires… Après ça la maîtrise du langage devient une sorte d’outil pour maintenir la patriarchie… Voici quelques ressources que j’ai trouvé récemment qui pourraient vous aider. En même temps j’ajoute un cours sur l’identité conçu à l’université de Montréal (qui jusqu’à cette année semblait ignorer notre existence). https://divergenres.org/regles-de-grammaire-neutre-et-inclusive ‘comment je te présente’ me demanda ma soeur…  Je n’y avais pas pensé, étant donné que ma démarche trans s’est faite en anglais et que je sens que tout est plus difficile dans ma culture d’origine.  Alors je suis très heureuxe d’introduire ces conseils!  C’est bien en avance de l’académie française qui a déclaré ne pas vouloir reconnaître l’existence du non-binaire. Alors peut-être que la prochaine fois, je dirai à ma soeur de me désigner comme ‘man froeur’ … https://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/fr/blogue-blog/respecter-la-non-binarite-de-genre-fra Un bon côté d’être d’un pays bilingue, la question s’est posée plus vite au gouvernement du Canada …

My Library Thing

Published by

I wanted to share books that I liked by donating them to the Pacific Center’s library, but I was told they no longer could fit more on their shelves.  Sadly, they hardly had any titles relevant to trans people, so I thought I’d make my own, catalog them on Library Thing.  I may end up adding all the books currently in my apartment…  But for now, I may lend a book if you write to me and we can use Berkeley Espresso or Au Coquelet as our exchange site.  I don’t have a front yard to build a little library! Access my Library Thing here…   I get my books from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Pegasus mostly, and I find the book reviews from Almost, Almost very useful (you can find many of the reviewed titles at the Berkeley Public Library).    

les vaches folles

Published by

Inspired by an actual dream, so is it Fiction or Non-Fiction? Photo Essay: the view from inside a bowl of cereal. The dream: my father on the other side of the table from me and my mother; he says something, a comment about us on the other side, alluding to how mad we may be, like mad cows (except it’s in French, and in French the cows are feminine, which is their gender, grammatically that is, as the cows haven’t expressed even their madness to be labeled mad).  I end with finding comfort inside my bowl of cereal, which is very realistic: it is my bowl, it is my cereal, in which I find comfort.