hi darkee darkee
congratulation and my best wishes weeth yooooo
auzam
you are marrying and having a good time weeth yoor layday
I am I mean I am in my treep enjoying and visiting temples.
and tommorrowwww
we will gonna enjoy a waterpark of koyambatoor.
Thanks
Ishan

I am doing well as I sit here listening to the rain fall outside.

Ishan, you asked a question in last month's Monthly Topic. I sent you a private message with some information about it which you may not have seen because you asked it so near to the end of the topic's life.

Do you recommend NFB training centers?

TJT1234, I'd say it depends on the individual and what they want. Someone like Dark, who travels the world willy nilly and had enough reason to justify a pair of kevlar chefs' gloves, probably wouldn't get much if anything from it (And they'd try to pressure him into getting Windows 10. I haven't even told them I have a Windows ME laptop beside my desk. You know, in case I need... ummm... Power...Point?). Most people would/do hate slating, since it's like handwriting, only slower and errors are more troublesome and we have 1970s technology now which is much more efficient (I'm just weird and like the least bulky oldtech. I still want to make a Sega Genesis game, blast it.). There is definitely a culture to adapt to, and it ranges from obnoxious to useful depending on situation. And I've not yet encountered an acknowledgement that things that look vaguely like discrimination might not be just because of ignorance and/or bigotry (or untrained blind people ruining people's expectations).
Yet the atmosphere is also filled with Southern Hospitality™ (disclaimer: probably only true for the one in the south), there is a lot of "do this, and since everyone needs individual attention, I'll check on the end result instead of watching everything" after you've proven sufficiently capable, and I'm not about to complain about the $210 maintenance check. (For comparison, I spent about $95 last night: $14 on a cab, and $81 on groceries and other such supplies. The cheapness of cookie sheets leaves me uneasy. How often do you replace those that they can afford to sell them for $5 for 3? ... ah, counterpoint, though: when people graduate, they invite the entire center to eat somewhere, and there have already been 3 graduations since I've arrived, and there's another on Tuesday, and fancy restaurants every week will chew up money much more quickly than just about anything, and I'm not to the point where I can just not go without feeling like I'm being needlessly rude. My pre-2008 self is looking at 2016 in utter confusion at that last bit.)
The point seems to be pushing one's comfort zone quite much. Even if some of this involves weird "wait, is that efficient?" techniques, or if you never expect to need or want to operate a rotary saw, it's more the "be employably literate and educated" and "go get lost in some random city a minimum of 1000 miles away, find a couple things to do, then come back", and "Build whatever you want, so long as it's sufficiently complicated", and "feed 40 people, making as much as possible from scratch" endpoints I'm interested in. If you can already do those things if you want, there's no point unless you just want to see what it's like. If you can't do those things if need be, and have the time and a funding source to spare, sure, I'd give it a tentative recommendation. It's still too early to say for sure, it does depend on one's personality, skills, and other circumstances, and something might happen to change my mind dramatically at some point. I won't pretend I haven't found things to be annoyed about, but I find things to be annoyed about just about everywhere. (How did I manage to write "toothpaste" as "tffmshaste"? I wrote a novel on a Braille 'n Speak 2000, dangit!)

At Dark: regarding the laptop, there should be a way to turn off the trackpad. Just type "mouse" into the search box, and one of the mess of things that comes up should let you disable it. (Personally, I just miss having a button that can toggle it. Why did they stop including those?). My laptop only lets me disable the actual pad, but not the mouse buttons, which is irritating, but gets in the way much less often than random scroll-tap-oh look you're in the middle of a paragraph-shenanigans.
I've been wondering about the swing thing myself! I've only ever heard them referred to as porch swings, or just swings... but then what do you call the free-standing ones that sit between two trees with an apple tree and grapevines in the background across a tiny bit of grassy space where miniature foxes have apparently started appearing? ... I like garden swing. It seems to cover both situations well enough.

(I randomly decided to rewatch Street Fighter the Animated series last month. I'd sum up the first season as "GI Joe with fireballs". The second season takes more influence from the Alpha storylines, meaning they can't get away with "Guile and character of the weak (who is almost never Ryu) fights bad guys like they're superheros instead of martial artists". Which, to be fair, fits Guile and Chun-li's stories well enough. It isn't as though Street Fighter set out to be a masterpiece of character and storytelling in the first place, after all. ... Hey, if the 1990s get cartoons based on fighting games, why haven't the 2004-2014 era gotten cartoons based on First Person Shooters? Is it because they still can't show actual guns in children's cartoons, and these games all revolve around guns? Surely they could make a Halo cartoon, at least? Or market to the people they were marketing to in the 1990s, who never had problems with guns in their cartoons in the first place? ... Gah, why am I saying this like I would be interested in a Halo Animated Series? Besides, games these days do their own cinematics, rendering adaptations all but pointless.)

AppleVis is definitely a place to frequent if you use Apple products of any kind.

I agree that the App directory can be overwhelming. That is why there is the list of app recommendations, which are apps that users like and recommend. Take a look at what ranks highly on this list; this could give you an idea of what apps you may like. The list is here: http://www.applevis.com/ios-app-directo … nded/most. Some apps, like Fleksy and Viz Wiz, are definitely less-used than when they were first posted. Viz Wiz is barely supported these days, and Fleksy has changed quite a bit from an app that was designed for blind people to an animated typing experience for sighted people. There is a link to un-recommend an app once you have recommended it, but some people must not use it judging from the number of recommendations that certain apps have today.

You should also check out the AppleVis iOS App Hall of Fame and the AppleVis Golden Apple Awards.

You may find that Braille Screen Input is another good way to type if you are a proficient braille user.

@turtlepower17,
Congratulations on the new iPhone; I'm sincerely happy for you and hope your experience with it continues to be, if not straight forward on a regular basis, at least a fun one.  I'm still in the process of rediscovering the power in iOS myself, honestly, given that I had a droid for nearly a year.  I hope to see more about what you've gleamed in the near future.

@Dark,
it's awesome to see, even from a distance, which is enough of a privelage, the kind of love the two of you have for each other, something I know I can only begin to scratch the surface of just loosely based on your posts.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, best of wishes to the both of you!
Supposedly Florida is getting ready to get hit by this little, er, big, something called a tropical storm, and I try not to doubt the validity of such claims when made by Floridian news outlets and the like, so I'll let you all know if I end up inside a tornado, am swept away by a flood, struck by lightning, crushed by a tree or other such falling debris, and or die in any other way.  Until then, assume that if I haven't let you know, I'm not dead and that life is still going on, which more than likely means it is time to start preparing to move into a new house!  An actual, house!  No more apartment nonsense!  I'm excited.
As you may or may not be aware, I lost an apartment to a busted waterline which did quite some damage.  While living in another apartment was not exactly on my to-do list I ended up doing it since my family and I needed somewhere to live.  Little time has passed since moving into it, and now we're moving out again into a fairly sizable house which has kindly been leased to us.  An older married couple bought the place some three years ago and, as life would unfortunately have it, the husband, who generally did practically all of the housework, died some months ago, leaving his wife to fend for herself.  She moved in with family and, not wanting the house to go to waste, was ready to rent it off to just about anyone.  I thank God she even considered us, being low income and thus not having much to offer.  It really is a dream come true.
Beyond that, my nearly six month old daughter is teething; nothing fun about it for her.  It must be something to wake up in a fair amount of discomfort and know there is little you can do about it but chew on things to try and ease your pain... Goodness knows I wish I could take it away from her.  My in-laws wanted to take her for a night a couple of days ago, partly because they just love her so much, and partly to give my wife and I a break.  They weren't expecting what they ended up with though and, by 9 that evening, had figured out just how important parents really are to children.  She would, NOT, sleep!
Now that she's excersising a bit more, however, which means doing her best to get herself into trouble as much as she knows how given that she has yet to figure out how to crawl and walk, my wife and I have gotten back into Alter Aeon some.  I always found myself drawn to soloing on Alter in the past; you don't have to blame anyone else for dying and you don't have to worry about anyone else dying.  Having an intuitive and rather faithful sidekick is really fun though.  I'm liking the changes that have been made over the past month or so concerning necromancers and various skills belonging to other classes, particularly the fact that parry is a little easier to better now than it used to be.  i'm not caring much for the new screws in the combat point system though... Ah well.
Oooooo!  This looks yummy! At 8 p.m. EST, the center of Tropical Storm Colin was located near latitude 29.3 north, longitude 84.7 west.
Colin is moving toward the northeast near 23 mph. A northeastward motion at a faster forward speed is expected tonight and Tuesday.
On this track, the center of Colin is forecast to move onshore of the Florida Big Bend area in a few hours, then move across northern Florida and southeastern Georgia through early Tuesday morning, and move near or over the southeastern coast of the United States on Tuesday.
However, it's important to note that the strongest winds and heaviest rains are well removed from the center. Tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 230 miles to the southeast of the center. A NOAA coastal marine observing site at Venice, Florida recently reported sustained winds of 44 mph with a gust to 60 mph. Maximum sustained winds are near 50 mph, with higher gusts. Some strengthening is forecast on Tuesday and Tuesday night.
So, assuming you hear from me again, blame Colin, whoever he is, for not trashing this particular area properly, and until such should happen, or I get bored, I shall go back to browsing this and other sites whilst getting on with my vesperian conquests which include kitchen domination, the eradication of most of what is in my fridge so that I can purchase more things to go in my fridge which will more than likely also be eradicated and digested as necessary, freezing my backside off owing to the fact that I must keep this place exceptionally cold to keep my daughter comfortable, and, um, uh, something else that I can't put my finger on yet but which I've no doubt is important to me for some reason beyond my meager understanding.

@Cae, I don't know about willy nilly, not given the fun yesterday and how shattering an even fairly standard continental flight was, ---- really being passed around airports from one assistant to another can make a person feel rather like a package, but still it's done. The  chef's gloves are just pretty awesome for most cooking things.
As to  discrimination, I'm not altogether certain whether you mean discrimination from one group of blind people towards another, ie, inside and outside the organization, or discriminatory attitudes stopping people getting jobs and opportunities and what not no matter how much the "sell yourself" and "think positive" type of attitude prevails. I've encountered both unfortunately though how prevailent the nfb is I don't know.

I personally don't like the rotory saw and catering things since to me they just don't seem to serve a point other than ticking items off someone else's tick sheet. I have! catered for fourty people back at uni and it was fun, and I could again if occasion arises. While I'm not the most hardware handy type of person I also suspect I could! make something out of wood if I tried, ---- but again I just don't have the desire to so the "This proves your compitancy" seems a bit odd to me, compared to say being able to perform on stage or rock climb or do the things I have! actually taken the time to learn to do. I suspect I'll get a windows 10 machine later on since xp is currently proving mildly inconvenient in terms of  program and website compatibility at the moment, though i'll keep an xp laptop around (the one I'm using now), for useful stuff.

@Turtlepower, glad you like the touch screen on Ios. I'd actually agree with you as far as typing goes, indeed I don't use email or write forum posts on my Iphone for that reason, but there are certain things a touchscreeen is good for, eg, motion sensative gamesand certain abilities to get columns of info. Mainly I've used my  Iphone for games, though i do like blindsquare and some of the default siri functions that come in handy.

Crazy party also is awesome, though I'm rather busy currently for gaming, and anyway at the moment I only have phone coverage in the states so need to try and hook my Iphone up to this wireless network as well as my laptop.

@nocturnus, so glad you got a house, that is awesome! Mrs. Dark will be pleased to hear that, she's been quite vicariously sympathetic to the fact of your sudden ddeluging, lets hope Colin doesn't object to the house either (btw, isn't colin an amazingly weedy name for a natural ddisaster?).

Actually Mrs. Dark and I are going to have to think about houses and such. We've been living in my flat which is okay if a bit small for two people, though the fact that we can share a one bedroom space for six months and remain as nausiatingly in love as we apparently are is something of a testament to strength of relationship, actually since I'm over here in Americanland I'm rather shocked at the size of people's houses, ---- My lady's sister has a three story house with three living rooms (counting the basement where we are currently),.

Now we have lots of  wedding things to sort dispite jetlag and such. In amongst that I'd like to get back to Alter since I've been having great fun with my druid, Mrs. Dark also wants to give it a try though whether it'll be her thing I don't know. I am however most recently rather taken up with crazy party which is surprisingly addictive .

So that's what's happening with me currently.

Ishan, when you are logged in, at the top of the screen is a list of nine menu items. The seventh item on the list is "Private Messages". If you activate that link, you will see your private messages.

The message is not confidential, and could be useful for other people to read, so I have copied it from there and pasted it below.

I saw on your post on the Monthly Off-Topic post for May 2016 that you want to learn to play the piano. As it is the last day of the month, in case you do not look at the forum again before the post is deleted for the next month's topic, here is part of a reply that I posted to the discussion.

There is braille music, and the company Dancing Dots sells lessons so that you can learn the piano and braille music at the same time. Alternatively, if you want to learn to play by ear, I have heard that www.musicfortheblind.com has very good lessons.

Yes, all of the resources that I mentioned have costs associated with them.

@dark,
Must agree with that whole year statement above; so much happened to me in just one month, but 2015 was certainly an interesting year to say the least, so that by the time this year arrived I was in a completely different state to the one I started off in, was married, living in an apartment rather than a mobile home, all but adopted a 3 year old child, had the privilege of dealing with two of the funniest cats ever, and then we had a daughter.  This year's not even half way over and, I've already lost my apartment and moved into a new apartment, lost my two cats because of losing my first apartment, picked up OSX and just about dumped windows, rediscovered iOS and grabbed an Apple watch, and I'm getting ready to move into an actual house.  Whoa!  Can anybody slow down time yet?  Methinks I need it!  :d
lol How I miss the days when life was so simple!  I woke up and went to sleep when I wanted to... Now I'm at the mercy of a 6 month old brat!  But I still love her so much.  :d

Hello Guys.
Well it's been a good week. I started reading a really cool book called armada by ernest cline. If you haven't read cline your missing out he's awesome! Armada is wonderful I just started it and I can't stop. Look up something called polybius I don't know how to post links but google polybius it's very interesting whether it's true or not.
Anyway I've been playing a lot of guitar mostly electric because it's easier on my fingers. Today I've been having fun watching the stand miniseries by stephen king with the family. I love the book and the series. The stand is my favorite apocalyptic story lol! It sounds a little wrong I know but I love stories about the end of the world.
Anyway it's been a nice and I'm glad to see this kind of topic is still going strong!

@Dark,
I once heard it said that it takes nerves of steel to be a dad... I don't know if it's true.  What I do know, is that I want to rip my hair out sometimes.  Right now, I can soothe her with dubstep... Tomorrow I might not be able to.  A month ago, we had a big swing she was using a lot, even to the point where she'd fall asleep in it.  Now, she prefers a smaller one.  A month ago, she slept alone, in her crib!  Then the day came, when putting her in her crib was a suicide mission, complete with hours in which we were not allowed to sleep because, she wanted, nay, wants, to be, bounced!  And rocked!  And babied!  Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
To conclude, there is no science to babies!  Sit down, shut up, and enjoy the ride!  Or don't!  lol