Rosie O’Donnell is dead to me.

I used to watch a lot of stand-up on tv when I was young. I have seen a lot of people come and go. Strangely, all the women stand-up comics I loved have come out at some point (Ellen, Paula, Rosie). Wait, that wasn’t my point.

Uh…

Anyway, Rosie, whom I’ve loved for years and years through various tv shows and life events, really crossed the line for me.

She is dead to me. Dead. Her apology sucked.

It doesn’t have the history of the n-word, but if you want to instantaneously make me want to spit bile and make me sick to my stomach, you say ching-chong in front of me. No, don’t. If you are a friend and you care for our friendship, never, ever say that in front of me.

Rage rage.

What with Michael Richards, I’m gonna run out of comedians to like. But I can turn around. I loathed Margaret Cho and her comedy for years because I felt it came from a place of self-loathing and anti-Asian propaganda, but in the recent years, with personal growth, her comedy has also changed. And now I enjoy her comedy because she is funny and can make jokes about race without being racist. Which is definitely possible.

Seriously, I love comedy. I didn’t find her “joke” to be unfunny because I have no sense of humor. I didn’t find her “joke” to be unfunny because it mentioned Asians. I found it to be unfunny because it wasn’t. Furthermore, I found it to be grossly offensive because it was. Sure, that may be subjective but I have plenty of reason to find it offensive, not because I’m a left wing PC nut (which I don’t deny being).

If Rosie wakes up and grows in the future, I guess I can see taking her back of my “dead to me” list. We’ll see. But for now, dead.

Cool product!

Seppo sent me a link to this product today:

The braille screen works with electromagnetic or piezoelectric principles. When the current or voltage goes through every array of six stitches, the resulting rise and decline gives birth to braille. The product scans the original printed matter, then translates the images into analog electrical signals with an optical-to-electrical transducer. Finally, it translates the analog electrical signal into a digital signal.

That’s so rad!

My MIT senior thesis was on a “refreshable Braille multi-line display for the blind” — sort of a computer screen for electronic content that displayed in Braille. It was also a piezoelectric based system.

The big challenge with Braille systems at the time was that it was both costly and challenging to create a consumer-priced electronic display that displayed more than one line at a time. Having more than one line is really important for the ability to scan text rapidly to find what you are looking for, which experienced Braille readers can do as easiler as seeing people can with written text. However, most refreshable display systems generally only show a line or two, because the parts are expensive. With a scanning mechanism like this, I am not sure if it can do what we hoped to do with full-page displays, but this is an awesome product nonetheless. I wonder how much it goes for.

There are a lot of cool gadgets for people who could use them, but a barrier is cost. When creating products like this, is particularly important to keep the prices down, down, down.