Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

This is a post that I have wanted to write about for the past few weeks, and been open about for the past few years.

I’m deaf.

I said it.

Whilst it doesn’t sound like a big revelation, for me it has been. I always have been deaf. My hearing is worse in my right year, even having some surgery on it back 11 years ago. Since then it has felt that it has slowly declined, with my left which was never ‘normal’ declining too.

Previously, I had always been one to hide my deafness. After all, I could get on with my life and over many years I’ve learnt how to cope.

Whether it was by

• Keeping good eye contact with the person/people talking.
• Avoiding situations where I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear.
• Blagging the conversation (it’s easy after a while to know how a conversation ’should flow’, and what you should/are expected to say.)
• Placing myself near the front of discussion/meetings.
• Withdrawing from large groups, into smaller/one-to-one conversations.

The first point has probably become my most required need when having a conversation. If I can’t see your face, I most likely have no idea what you are saying to me. I might know that you are talking, but I may end up blagging that conversation.

Over many years, I’ve used some of the above to hide how bad my hearing actually is. I was in denial.

Eventually I got past the denial part, and I got back to living

(Quote courtesy of Lost).

More recently I’ve come to realise there was no point hiding/denying/avoiding my deafness.

So, I told the world.

After all, on Friday of this week coming I will be trying hearing aids for the second time in my life. It’s been many years since I ‘gave up’ using them. I think the last time I really used them was back towards college time. I never got on with it.

Hopefully that will change on Friday. I’ll be the recipient of two hearing aids. The start of my adventure back into the ‘proper hearing world’.

PS. This is obviously the rather abridged version, I could have talked about early memories of hearing tests in primary school. But i didn’t!

Update: The second part ‘Adjusting to Hearing’

Spotted: November 7th – November 11th:

• Misfit Entrepreneurs – Dan Pallotta – Harvard Business Review – He mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable. It's not the first association you'd make with an entrepreneur.
• google-refine – Project Hosting on Google Code – Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
• 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number — Matt Mullenweg – In that short rapid iteration environment the most important thing isn’t necessarily how perfect code is when you send it out, but how quickly you can revert if you need to so the cost of a mistake is really low, under a minute of brokenness
• Symbiote [beta] :: Stylesheet editing that’s almost alien – Need to find CSS of a website? Just use this bookmarklet.
• How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools » Nieman Journalism Lab – The Guardian takes data journalism seriously. They obtain, format, and publish journalistically interesting data sets on their Data Blog, they track transparency initiatives in their searchable index of world government data, and they do original research on data they’ve obtained, such as their amazing in-depth analysis of 90,000 leaked Afghanistan war documents.
• Adding Cabbie Know-How to Online Maps – Technology Review – Nobody knows how to get around a city like a taxi driver. A new method for creating online maps taps into that expertise.

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