Gregory J. Rosmaita
- Age: 40
- Sex: Male
- Location: Unspecified
- Occupation: muckraker, gadfly, knight of standards & practices, web accessibillity guerilla, and prematurely old codger
- Status: not dead yet...
- Member since: Feb 2007
- Forum posts: 53
- IRC oedipus
- Jabber: oedipusnj [at] jabber.org
- Skype oedipusnj
- Web site: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/
About me
my avatar is a photograph of Man Ray's nail-studded flat-iron, of which he wrote:Anyone can make an iron adorned with a row of tacks, but only one person can come up with the original idea.
my personal photograph is courtesy of joe clark, and was taken in january 2003, on joe's trip to new york city, on which he made a side-visit to joisey city, where i was then located... the section of joe's blog post concerning his visit to me features 4 photographs, and the one i chose is the one captioned:
Greg Rosmaita in hat with fag. Blindfold lends that hard-night-at-CBGBs air
moreover the filename of the photo is: "Greg-in-hat-and-fag", and the alternative text provided for the image is "Greg, hat, fag", so how could i possibly resist using it as my world-wide identifier?
as for a long description of my photo, it is a three-quarters view of my head and upper torso, taken from joe's left (my right) -- i have about 2 or 3 weeks' worth of facial hair (mustache and sideburns-bleeding-into-but-not-quite-forming-a-beard, and am wearing a south african hat, made of water-buffalo hide, with a hatband of antelope skin (i forget which type of antelope), and, of course, there is an unfiltered cigarette (most likely a gitane or a lucky strike) dangling from my mouth... i'm also wearing a black wool jacket, an off-white shirt, and a tie which no one has been able to identify with any certainty, only that it has a red background overlayed with an indistinguishable design... as the owner of well over a thousand neck-ties -- many of which date from the 1930s through the 1970s, my collection runs the gamut from skinny hand-painted art deco ties to gargantuan polyester ties with bizarre psychedelic patterns -- so i can't blame those with ties that bind to me for failing to precisely identify which tie i am wearing...
Fast facts
- At the movies I like to see:originally a huge silent film fan, these days i'll listen to pretty much anything for which Descriptive Video Services (DVS) is available, just so i can call up the broadcaster and let them know that someone is listening and that it IS worth the bother...
- Last movie seen:The Simpsons Movie (the first audio described film i've "seen" in a movie theater!)
- Music I listen to:african, medieval, jazz, (roots) reggae, blues, cumbia, baroque, gamelan, hokum, western swing, klezmer, chant (gregorian & otherwise), ska, rock steady, 2Tone, most things percussive, polyrhythmic, and/or polyphonic
- Best album right now:Heliotrope: "In the Time of Daffodils: Music of the Troubaritz"
- Favorite author:Crockett Johnson, AE Houseman, HH Munro, Henry Fielding, Rabelais, Gogol, Jaroslav Hašek, A Bierce, T Paine, JP Martin, HD Thoreau, Chaucer, Gregory of Tours, Gerald of Wales, PG Wodehouse, T Wilder, S Lewis, Boris Vian, Billy Collins, H. Murakami
- Last book read:An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, by Henry Wiencek
- Software I use:Orca (screen reader for GNOME), JAWS (screen-reader for windows), NVDA (open source screen-reader for windows), Thunder (free screen-reader for WinXP/Vista); various DAISY/Digital Talking Book readers
- Hardware I use:BookPort
- If I won 1 million dollars, I would:start a micro-lending bank for the blind so that no matter where they are, there's someone ready to lend something a bit more tangible than merely a helping hand
- I wish I could:help revive medieval bee-keeping
- Favorite travel destination:anywhere, amsterdam, Oz
- I'm passionate about:equal rights and justice (see: Peter Tosh)
- I don't like:soy (i'm allergic)
Group memberships
| Project Maraña Decathlon | Moderator |
| The Lounge | Member |
| Usability Forum | Member |
My Opera favorites
Favorite links
- WFMU
America's Oldest Freeform Radio Station; Listener Owned and Maintained
- LibriVox
audio versions of works in the public domain
- Red Hot Jazz Archive
a treasure trove of educational & aural material
- Orbis
leading the fight against aquired blindness in the developing world, through hands-on training and medical care
- Braille Without Borders
bringing education, training, and basic life skills to blind individuals in the developing world
- Louder Linux
dedicated to creating a computer for the blind for under $100
- Prabhakar Ragde's One Regret
one of the best - if not the best - use of hypertext i've yet to come across
- Cool URIs Don't Change
Tim Berners-Lee absolves me of responsibility for all those broken links