I started out writing this post to help deaf and hard of hearing request captions on Zoom meetings, but really, everyone who hosts should enable this setting! It should be enabled by default. Even with it enabled, I have to request captions or transcription and the host has to turn them on. Changing this setting just means that anyone can request them.

Zoom Live Transcription

Zoom’s Live Transcription feature automatically transcribes the audio and speech from a Zoom meeting or webinar to text for participants to view during the session. It must be enabled by the host in the Zoom advanced settings, and then a participant can request it be turned on after the meeting starts if the host doesn’t turn it on themselves. If it isn’t enabled in the host’s Zoom advanced settings (on the Zoom website) then the option to request captions will not show up for anyone.

Enabling/Disabling Live Transcription in User Settings

1. Login to Zoom at the web.
   • From the desktop client, click the Settings icon > General > View More Settings, which will re-direct you to the web.

2. Navigate to Settings > Meeting > In Meeting (Advanced).

3. Scroll to Closed captioning.

Enable Closed captioning by clicking the toggle so it is marked Blue. To disable Closed captioning, click the toggle again until it is marked Gray.

Once enabled, select the box next to Enable live transcription service to show transcript on the side panel in-meeting. 

To save a copy of transcript as the host (without recording the session), or as a participant enable Save Captions. – Please Note: If this setting is enabled, participants will also have the ability to save a copy of the transcript. This setting enables the saving functionality for both the host and participants.

Last step, after you start a meeting, make sure “Allow participants to request Live Transcription” is selected or Enable it outright. The subtitles will only show for those participants who choose to display them.

Some more details here: https://uis.jhu.edu/zoom/zoom-live-transcription/

I wish outdoor cats groups were more active. My cats have always gone outdoors. I blame this book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/RsaCcEXvE-IC?hl=en&gbpv=1

My girl cat tortie, Babe Ruth, didn’t come home last Saturday. She has a Sure Pet Networked cat door so it’s pretty easy to keep track of when she’s in or out. She (and my boy cats, Twix and Miles) have a curfew of a few hours before sunset until 8am. They’re inside at night 99% of the time. Such good babies.

Kallie and I finally walked all over my neighborhood looking for her on Friday and found her body in a neighbor’s front yard. Just 10 feet from the street, in some beautiful green grass (not much of that around here in Nevada). I feel most sad because I didn’t look hard enough to find her sooner. ??

I don’t know if it was just her time and something happened or if she got into some kind of poison. I didn’t want to go through a necropsy, plus it was Friday night and the vet wouldn’t be around until Monday. She definitely lived her 9 lives fully. We buried her yesterday.

What makes me the maddest is that all of my neighbors mentioned coyotes. I know they are here. She was just too smart for that. She climbs 30+ feet up into trees. She has her claws and isn’t afraid to defend herself. I’ve seen her tell off dogs and chase them. I’m pretty sure she beat up my neighbor’s male cat once. He bit her foot and ended up at the vet in much worse shape. Of course, bad luck can happen to anyone, but after lying in the grass for 6 days, it was still 100% clear she hadn’t been bitten or mangled or, as my mom says, “chewed on” by any predator. I’m grateful for that even though I don’t know for sure what did happen.

Ok, done ranting.

Babe was from my second set of foster kittens ever in 2011. I had their mom (Almond Joy) and 4 kittens: Babe Ruth, Snickerdoodle, Twix, and Musketeer. The Candy Bar kittens. They were with me for a long time because Twix kept having a runny nose and being put on antibiotics. By the time I took them back to the shelter (I DID take them back!), my partner, Don, had fallen in love with her. The morning after returning them he said to me, “I miss her so much, I never had a pet of my own before.” So I decided immediately we had to adopt. Babe for Don and Twix for me. Of course, as cats do, Babe always liked me better and Twix was always trying to be Don’s buddy. When we broke up and I moved across the country in 2016 they both came with me.

She was almost entirely black when she was tiny. As she grew, the orange parts expanded. Don called her a fruit bat but it wasn’t until a few years later that I saw a video of one and could agree. She was part monkey. In Tahoe she decided she was going to hang out on top of a cabinet that was only accessible by jumping up the wall, onto a window sill, walking across the rail of the shower door, and then leaping 3 feet. I put her food up there and Twix couldn’t get to it. In Reno, I built shelves up the wall to make a place for her food.

Babe LOVED being outside. She had her territory. Here it was probably the largest consisting of our yard and the neighboring houses of our cul de sac, about 6-8 houses but we all have an acre of land. She really enjoyed it when we were outside too. Visiting her in Her domain. When she didn’t want to come in at sunset she would try to get me to play tag. I’d chase her, she’d let me almost catch her, then sprint off 20′ away until I chased her again. Sometimes I’d pretend to hide and she’d come to find me. Her eyes would be wide and it was obvious she was playing with me. After 5 minutes of this, she’d let me catch her and we’d go inside for the night.

She loved joining me on walks around the neighborhood. This made me nervous though as I didn’t want her to get spooked and run off when we were far from home. Once we walked around Willoughby, down my street, across a yard, onto the trail, and then back through the woods to our house. Twix came with me the whole way but Babe took off into someone’s yard, hopping a fence, and met us back at home. Once we walked into Montreux and she tagged along the whole way. The guy in the gatehouse saw her leaving with us and yelled out, “Is that your cat? I just want to make sure she doesn’t belong to someone who lives here.” Usually, I’d trick her to go inside and then sneak off quickly to walk before she noticed.

She loved to get locked into private places where Twix (and later Miles) wouldn’t be able to pester her. In Charlottesville, it was the bedroom. Here it was my shop. No cat door out here so she’d ask to come in and out and in and out. With nice weather, I’d leave the door open and she liked that the best. Some evenings, I’d be working late and mom would see her waiting at the door and send me a message to let her in. She’d stay with me until I quit working and carried her inside for the night.

She hunted. Lizards, snakes, mice, baby bunnies in season, and birds. Most of the time she’d bring them into the house alive. I have a webcam video somewhere of her carrying a blue jay through the cat door by its feet. In March, my neighbor sent me a grumpy text about my “black calico shorthair killing the birds at our bird feeders.” So I put a bell on her collar. I expected her to lose the whole collar at the first chance she got, but instead, it only took her a few days to be able to move without it ringing at all. Ninja cat. There are still some stray feathers floating around in my bedroom. Once she brought a bird in and it flew into the vaulted ceiling of our living room. Miles and Twix just sat below and stared at it but Babe went up on the roof to the outside the window it was sitting at and scared it into flying down where I could trap it in the sunroom. The groundskeeper for the nearby condos in Tahoe greeted her “there’s my girl!” and said she’d been cutting down the number of voles in the lawn he had to care for.

She loved to play. I remember my friend Xtina discovering she would chase a hand dragged across the carpet and then Leap into the air after it doing a backflip. All without ever using her razor-sharp claws on human skin. She lost a baby tooth roughhousing with Xtina. She still loved to play that game. She loved hiding in the cloth laundry hamper and waiting for something to be dropped on top of it. She’d pounce straight up and send it flying into the air. Run out of the hamper to chase it, then back into the hamper to do it all again.

She loved projects. Building furniture was her favorite. I have great photos of her helping me clean out a shower drain. She always helped me at work.

She didn’t like people food, except for some kinds of cheese. She could hear a Bodo’s Bagels wrapper being opened from wherever she was. She wouldn’t touch wet cat food but wolfed down Greenie’s dental treats whole (no help to her teeth since she didn’t chew them).

She slept with me almost every night. She loved to be the little spoon, curled up in a ball with my arm crooked around her feet. When she was small, she’d gently suck on her own tummy for comfort while kneading. Her favorite thing was being in bed between two people petting her at the same time. Undivided attention required.

We buried her under a lilac bush yesterday. Miles and Twix both checked out her body, interrupting me as I put the dirt on top of it. We added the three tiny foster kittens that had been in my freezer since they died this winter (one a week old and two stillborn). Maybe she’ll train them to be ninjas even though she never had any patience for kittens.

The bottle baby kittens I’m fostering now are carbon copies of Babe and Twix. It’s been kind of therapeutic that they need me to feed them every few hours. Babe is the third cat I’ve lost as an adult and all three times have been different. With the first two I had to make that awful “is it time” decision. This time I definitely wasn’t ready, but I know she had the best life she could.

This long boy has tufts of fur on the tops of his toes.

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When you live for 92 years there are many things to talk about. I am here today to tell you things about my dad that you may not know, but also to share the lessons of life he taught me over the years.

Our names:

No one in my family went by their real name

Kelsey (my dad) was Burr

Catherine (my mom) was Kitty

Kelsine was Kelly, the only time I heard my real name was on first day of school and when my mother was mad

David Burr (my brother) was DeeBee, there was another Dave who lived across the street so he went by his first two initials

Arthur Scott (my brother) was Joe – go figure that one out

A Skipper:

Not a boat skipper

He loved to skip, because he was tall, he could go real high

Hold my hand and lift me off the ground

A Block Builder:

We moved to our 3 family house on Franklin Ave in 1946

We lived on the 3rd floor

I was 6 and DB was 3, low ceilings

The objective was to build to the ceiling

Of course we had to knock them down

Banging of the broom on the ceiling from tenants on 2nd floor

A Gymnast:

He was our base man, on the bottom

In our home there were fingermarks on the ceiling

He would lie on floor, put up his feet,

We would go through what ever we had to end up standing on his feet.

If you needed help balancing, fingertips on the ceiling

Once up there, had to get down, the sofa was our mat – down we’d go

A Joyrider:

How many of you have driven up Nolan Road?

There are 2 sets of railroad tracks

The upper track is half way up the hill

Loved to ride in car down the hill

We would come down the hill, dad would let off the brake

we would go flying over tracks, bounce off the back sea, no seat belts,

probably only going 10 miles and hour

but, if you had asked us, we would have said at least 50

A Campfire Addict:

If you ever went camping with dad, there was always a fire,

first thing in the morning and kept it going all day.

He decided to have one at home. Once decided, a man of action,

screw the building codes, just do it.

He built a cinder block base in our basement

he placed it under the chimney from the former coal furnace.

When anyone came to visit we roasted hot dogs, marshmallows, popcorn.

After a few years the campfire met its demise.

Too much creasote and there was a chimney fire.

Fortunately it was detected early and the fire company put it out before the house burned down

A Ski Instructor:

All the grandkids learned to ski with grandpa.

But his two start pupils were me and Gramma Rita.

She started in her 50’s and I was in my early 40’s.

Dad was a beautiful skier, he would just float down the hill.

His favorite place to ski was along the edges on unskied snow,

that meant going in a straight line.

He would just slide down at a nice easy pace. Amazing.

He would challenge us. As a skier, Rita was a speed demon

I was a scardy cat. I would stand at the top of many hills and panic about going down. But I knew dad would never take me on a trail I could not handle.

He would know when to be in front of me, to let me follow

or right behind me, ready to help if I fell.

A Creative Genius:

Dad graduated from high school at age 21. How did that happen? His mother separated from his father when dad was age 5.

He lived with his father and his sister lived with his mother.

Dad’s father was constantly moving.

During the years they lived together, dad was in 11 elementary schools.

His mom realized this was not working

he came to binghamton in 1925 to live with her.

She had an apartment on the corner of North St and Oak.

The elementary school was across the street.

Dad went to school on Monday as a 5th grader, by Friday he was moved

back to 3rd grade.

He went to high school in Syracuse, NYS Regents exams nailed him for another year. But he did graduate

In 1937 he came to binghamton and started working for American Optical.

During the war he had a job as foreman at Link Aviation.

After the war, Link moved the optical divsion to Syracuse

Dad was offered a supervisory position.

That was not his thing. He was a hands on worker. He did not go,

but he did buy a lot of Link equipment and started his own business – Gould Lens Service.

It was tough going, he worked 2nd jobs to support us.

His main business was repairing binoculars and cameras.

In 1959, he got his first big industrial contract with NASA, making lenses for the space program. Slowly the precision optical work came.

He did a lot of prototype work. He could underbid other companies

because he was a one man shop with no overhead.

He worked at home in the basement

One of his jobs for Link Aviation, had to coat lenses to simulate clouds for the Link trainers (the famous blue box)

Another job was for Raymond Corp in Green, NY. He created a lens system that would assist fork lift drivers to see where to stop when they were lifting goods for storage on high warehouse shelving.

he did work for IBM, Corning, and many other companies.

Here was a guy with a high school education, maybe one lousy course in physics, worked by himself, no engineers to consult.

The specs would come in, not only would he have to figure them out,

he would have to engineer his equipment to make it happen.

Trial and error. What a gift he had.

A Stay Home Dad:

As kids we were lucky, we not only had a stay home mom, but we had a stay home dad.

Every day when we would come home from school he was there. Our mother never had to say, “you just wait until your father gets home”. He wasn’t there just for us, he was there for any kid who wanted to talk with him. Over the years many boys in the neighborhood and friends of my brothers adopted him as their friend or surrogate father. To this day those young men still stopped by to say hi and check in to see how dad was doing

Our Employer:

When we needed money, we worked in the shop. We were allowed to try our hands at grinding and polishing lenses. It was not my cup of tea. From age 10 until boys came onto the scene, I was the shipping department. DB and Joe stepped right up to the plate and when dad retired they took over the business.

My Mentor and Teacher:

He taught me lots of things over the years

Honesty is the foundation of trust. With trust comes opportunity

He gave all three of us a very long leash. We had more independence than most of our friends. The grounds rules were set and if we stuck to them we got to do what we wanted, but we also did not want to disappoint dad.

Home was a place you could come, no matter what

There is no no! You can do anything you want to. Take the risk.

Just need to try. You may not be the best, but you can do more than you think you can.

There are no failures, just opportunites to learn anew.

When you play with children, get down to their level. Have direct eye contact. This means you are either on the floor or they are in your lap.

Live within your means. Set aside money for lean times. When you own your own business there are good months and bad and you have to be ready.

You can have a lot of fun with very little money.

The glass is always half full. He was the most positive person you will ever meet.

Accept every person for who they are – another human being who is doing the best they can.

If dad were present today, he would be absolutely overwhelmed by your presence. If you were to ask him to describe himself. He would say “I’m just an ordinary guy who gets up every morning and lives each day, striving to be a good husband, life partner, dad, grandpa, and friend.

My response would be – job well done.

I enjoy doing personal orders for consumers a lot, but it takes infinitely more “hand-holding” of the customers and an order of one personalized item requires almost as much work as a corporate order of 10 items at once.  So as these types of orders increase, and in the holiday season especially, I spend a lot of time taking care of orders.

While thinking on how to make things more efficient I do a lot of visiting of other sites.  Customization of products is definitely on the rise!  Some sites have online flash-based designers that provide a ‘self-serve’ setup.  Some of these solutions are truly amazing – my favorite has to be moo.com – but vistaprint and sites like Zazzle and Cafe Press are other fine examples.  Those sites are all owned by business much larger than mine, and all use custom proprietary software solutions.  I’ve also looked into three different systems that mesh with my shopping cart (using Magento currently) to allow a designer to be added for custom products.  Unfortunately, none of these have met my expectations for user friendliness, both for customers and for myself.  They didn’t make me more efficient, and were troublesome to set up and use.

So I was planning to go back to just a ‘download a template’ and send it to us system.  This is done really well by sites like StickerMule.com and GroveMade.com.  Grove goes so far to charge for proofs.  I only just started charging for proofs after the first change a few months ago, and I worry that I’ll mess something up during the artwork transfer, so I’m not ready to encourage folks to not see a proof.  But it’s all about setting expectations as clearly as possible, so saying right away that there’s a fee for a proof probably would cut down on the people who think they can email me a description and have it engraved (“I want her name, and hearts, and a fancy border around it all, oh and incorporate Hello Kitty into it if you can?”).

My biggest goal lately has been to better integrate the ordering process.  I use a help desk solution for emails, Magento for e-commerce, Apollo for proofing.  There’s a disconnect between Apollo and Magento that I’d like to solve.  I’ve looked at other online proofing solutions and they’re all a lot more robust than I need.  Apollo has been terrific (and it’s free!) but it’s meant a lot of manual copying and pasting and updating order status.

So, to pull everything together, me and also Sukanto Tanoto currently setting up a whole new e-commerce system that I’ve bypassed before because it was out of my price range.  It looks fantastic, but I’m still at the stage of hoping my expectations aren’t too high.

I’ll be writing more about that soon.

First – no captions yet! gah! I can understand the main speaker, but the video clips aren’t clear enough to hear.

Second – I’m entirely happy with my two CIs. It’s been almost 2 years since the second one was activated and this is definitely my new normal and I wouldn’t go back to hearing aids if given a chance.

Third – I’m still playing saxophone in the sax sextet and in the band. We often play music in the house from Pandora, usually classical or jazz. Music I know well sounds the same as I remember it (because I’m remembering it), music that’s new to me starts out a bit muddled but becomes clearer with repeat listening (kind of like band, but there I’d expect it’s people learning their parts instead). I hear different things than I did with just hearing aids. I hear less of myself, and a little less of the people on either side of me. More of the trumpets, much more of the percussion, and Piccolos! There are definitely moments of beauty and emotion.

That said, you’ll see in this TED Talk video that cochlear implants are designed for speech and don’t do a very good job with music.

Embed code not working, so here’s a link to the video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_building_the_musical_muscle.html

As happy as I am with my CIs, I really do agree with this video.

If you watched the video you’re probably wondering what I thought of the sound clips.

There are some sound clips in the video that portray music which sounds badly if you have normal hearing… I can’t really tell it sounds bad, in fact, the first clip of the MIDI file with pitches moved a semi-tone – sounds the same to me as the original. The trumpet clip vs violin – very similar, the violin had more vibrato, both sound a bit synthetic to me still – like the trumpet sound on electronic keyboards from the early 1990s. The clips of the Usher song, well, I can tell the difference between those… not sure either one sounds great, the second lacked percussion which seems more like a hearing aid issue than a CI issue.

I’m curious to hear what others think and encourage those with CIs to watch the video and then share here or in the comments on the TED page.