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January 28, 2006
Artificial Nut Zippers?
Very interesting. It appears Ken Mosher, a former member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, visited my site and posted a link to his new project in a comment to a very old post of mine. Or perhaps an Agent Of Mosher visited. I can't decide what I think about the comment.
The awful advice from a "search optimization" guru which I mentioned some time back advised that your appalling advertisement should be "in dialogue" with the blog it's smeared across or some such. And this actually is -- the comment is responding to something I wrote in my post, about how people keep telling me they've got some new band that sounds like SNZ, about which I'm invariably disappointed.
But it's a very short comment, clearly just a blatant plug, and it could have been posted by someone masquerading as Mosher. As you can see, I've accepted the comment for publication... I'm flattered, I guess, that "he" made it here, and I think I'd like to support his music... but it's likely whoever posted found my site through a search for sites referencing SNZ. What would you do? Ask him if he actually typed and submitted the post with his own two hands? Stop worrying and learn to love the word of mouth?
Posted by me at 11:06 PM | Comments (3)
January 25, 2006
Stop Badware
I'm pleased to see that Google, Consumer Reports, Harvard Law School, and such luminaries as Vint Cerf and Esther Dyson have teamed up to Stop Badware which installs itself on your machine, tracks your Net use, runs popups, etc. Now let's just hope the org has teeth... and that comment spam is also on their list of things to do.
Posted by me at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)
January 21, 2006
From The Vaults: Early Mac Woman
Continuing the investigation of my early technological literacy practices, here's some homework from a computing class, I think sometime in middle school. I'm not even totally sure if it was a Mac or pre-Mac Apple computer assignment... any clues?
So like I said, probably middle school with Mr. Hatridge or Ms. Thornton, though judging by the markings "2D" and "2B," it could well have been with Mr. Kressen or Ms. Lee. And, as one of my current classmates pointed out, my post-D'Nealian-system handwriting is atrocious.
A few other notables:
"How many lines of a long word processor file are visible at one time when you are editing the file?" Holy cow, there's a blast from the past. Gives me the kind of feeling I get when I hold a USB keychain drive in my palm and think to myself that it has more memory that Mac Classics. Like my head is spinning around and around. Also, it makes me think, good lord, why did they bother teaching us to regurgitate any of this when it was all going to change in five and again in ten and fifteen years? Better to try to teach us to teach ourselves, and never have any fear about trying new methods. I guess we got that done on our own time. I'm a little chagrined to find, too, that my computer education was (in places) not so different from the frightful class I sat in on at one point in the Bronx where they forced kids to type in one of Dr. King's speeches to teach them typing. (Then again, we also had Logo and BASIC training.)
But you'll notice that a few of the command keys I was learning back then are still viable today. Nowhere near all, but some. The thing is, I probably didn't learn these by reporting them on a worksheet. I doubtless forgot all of them, and sometime in high school or college picked them back up when driven by the hunch there must be a better way of getting around the screen. And unlearned them so I could learn how to navigate in Pine, and unlearned them so I could learn to navigate in Windows.
Finally, those of you who know me nowadays will also note I went by something closer to my (first) given name back then ;)
Posted by me at 11:19 PM | Comments (2)
Knitting Communities Together
Over the holidays, my maternal grandmother, Deedee, re-taught me how to knit. I asked her to teach me because I wanted something better for me to do with my hands in class than picking at my skin, angrily IMming with classmates, and playing computer games, but I've gone rather berserk with the compulsion of fibers. I've seen ads for local knitting groups, so I sought them out online. The results are promising.
There's also a TC knitting group which as far as I know doesn't have much of a web presence.
Too bad Jon Brier is leaving town, or I would totally take him with me to these events.
Posted by me at 1:30 PM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
Well!
Now, here's a surprising blast from the past... Not that I wasn't alerted in advance. (Thoroughly worksafe even if you can figure out what's going on here.)
Posted by me at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2006
Christine has a good eye
I direct your attention for a moment over to Sushiesque, where there is another, growing, really hilarious example of people not reading the results of their searches thoroughly. Also, Christine has found a subway ad which should be amusing to my grad student buddies. I lmao.
Also, Yakov Smirnov is alive and well and living in Branson, Missouri. And apparently is beloved of Republican presidents since Reagan.
Posted by me at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2006
Fries and Propaganda: More Adult, but the Lack of Fry Generosity Persists
Old Town Pub, Ballard, Seattle, 1/6/06. Special guests Nat and Robert. There is some initial discussion about whether the fries at Old Town, which are merely seasoned with parmesan et c., will be acceptable within the guidelines of the study, or whether special-ordering another cheese would be appropriate.
Jen: I don't know. I think provolone compromises the mission.
Nat: Provolone is delicious!
J: But your opinion doesn't matter.
N: If they arrive, I'm gonna eat them!
Gus: I need your napkin. (takes it)
J: Hey!
G: More than you do.
G: I need to take you for fries at the Monkey next time you're in New York. They already had the best fries anywhere, and then for other bar food they had this hot sundried-tomato-feta dip. It usually came with broccoli, then with pita pieces, but we just used it for the fries. Best EVER.
(the fries arrive)
J: They are seasoned fries. You cannot eat all of them! I know you will try. I got a BMT because I specifically wanted to eat the fries!
* * *
G: (steals a fry from Robert)
J: Just steal a fry, why don't you! (Nat tries to steal one of her fries.) I meant her! I can't feed both! Where is my napkin!?
G: Where's my fork? Oh, there.
Robert: Wow, these fries are tasty!
J: They technically qualify as cheese fries -- there is cheese on top of the fries.
* * *
G: (hissing noise)
J: (confused look)
G: Hiccups!
R: Oh, I thought you'd just sprung a leak!
* * *
(Buena Vista Social Club is playing. They sing along.)
J: Chan-chan.
G: Chan-chan.
* * *
J: Oh! You take the cheesiest bite! You are a harsh bitch! You can take Robert's from here on! Mofo! He's got more cheese, anyway.
G: Not cheesy enough.
J: (sarcastic) Oh! I'm sorry to hear it! I thought they were!
G: It's sort of a more adult cheese fry.
J: Which I'm quite frankly not ready for.
* * *
G: Jen has adequacy issues about Calcifer.
J: Adequacy?
R: For most people, twelve inches are enough, but not Jill!
J: Inadequacy issues for me AND Ernesto!
R: Is Ernesto a twelve-inch iBook?
G: I like how fast he picked up on that.
* * *
R: I think these fries should count.
J: They're too adult.
R: You can call them "yuppie fries."
J: At least we're not 30!
G: (dark look)
R: You're a year and a half away!
J: (to Nat) Do you still have your counter?
N: I wrote a script when I was 25 to count down the days left until I turned 30.
G: Everything is insanely peppery here.
J: In a good way!
* * *
G: Ay, mama! Que paso?
J: (lassos her)
Posted by me at 11:55 PM | Comments (1)
Hate School?
You're in good company. Don't know why I didn't think to google for "I Hate School" before. I need to do more zeitgeist-oriented searches.
Posted by me at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
Parrot-lag
I've been remiss in checking others' blogs lately, so it's only just now that I discovered Sarah had posted the picture of us with the parrots in Miami.
We were walking along in this little touristy outdoor mall after dinner with our beloved advisor and one of his peers and her students, and there's this stand where you can get your picture taken with parrots but you have to pay. And for some reason our advisors decide they HAVE to have a picture of us with the parrots. It would scarcely have been memorable except that the parrot Sarah is holding -- "who wants to hold the baby?" the handlers asked, then flipped one bird over and handed it to her -- bit a button off her jacket. Parrots' beaks -- macaws like these especially -- are engineered to crack open hard nut shells, so it just started mouthing it and all of a sudden we hear this CRACK noise. Fortunately, Sarah thought this was hilarious.
I think shortly before this pic we'd gotten Bresman to tell the story about how he's the model for Jar-Jar Binks again. Mm?
Posted by me at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2006
Towards A Place Of Blogging In A World of Assignments: Preliminary Notes on StudyPlace, Adorno, Robbie's Division Me Project, etc
(how's that for a colon-oscopy?)
I've finally started taking a look at StudyPlace, the Plone tool which our department is developing to support academic collaboration. I hadn't really gotten around to it until now for the same reason one doesn't usually get around to using any digital tool -- I haven't really needed it yet. But I'm re-entering the second half of Communication Theory and Social Thought (aka Frogmarch Through Western Thought) this semester, and the course is using it as a central place for discussion and notification. So I've been driven to it over the past few days to look up info on our first reading of the semester, Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
I'd been warned independently by both professors McClintock and Moretti (bless them for taking care of my nerves, knowing I was feeling a little gun-shy about the class after a difficult time in its first semester... and probably remembering that I groused angrily the first time I was asked to read the Greeks in the interest of communication theory) that this first reading was one of the hardest of the semester. So far, though, I've found it has a few hooks connecting to issues very familiar and interesting to me.
First of all, I knew Adorno was in part responsible for The Authoritarian Personality, which I stole off my dad's bookshelf some years back to browse, so I knew what interested the man. That makes it easier to contextualize what he's saying than what the deal was with, say, Tonnies, who I'd never heard of before.
Secondly, it soon became clear that the project of The Dialectic was a very familiar one to anyone who's ever listened to Lester Mazor's description of the founding of Hampshire College. I had long heard that the founders of Hampshire College had been concerned with the direction that a blind faith in the goodness and utility empiricism had taken during World War II on both sides -- eugenics on the part of the Nazis, the development of the atom bomb by the US --but I hadn't known which thinkers were responsible for raising these concerns. I've never read this argument in its original form, so I'm more likely to be able to finish this and participate in class. I feel lucky to have gone to a college whose philosophical underpinning was so lively and accessible that you'd actually hear professors talking about it from time to time. Do Harvard students ever get that kind of living history?
This concern with blind faith in science is also in dialogue with the Bruno Latour I read a few summers ago. It's funny, I took him up because I needed him for work on actor-network theory, but I kept reading because I just needed Latour in general, as a graceful writer as well as someone who addresses the concerns with science I retain from my own childhood living at Caltech and trusting its scientists the way some kids might trust their pastors. Still wish I had time to pick up We Have Never Been Modern, which promised to speak even more directly to my questions than Science In Action.
So granted, I've not left the introduction yet (yes, I use blogging to avoid doing reading), but I'm hoping I'll weather this reading ok.
I'm hesitant about StudyPlace, though, much as I guess I was given pause by Robbie's piece Towards A Place Of Study In A World Of Instruction, for which it appears to be named. Perhaps I'm just seeing it too early in its lifetime; it debuted this semester, and I'm not sure what plans are for expansion. But it seems to me that the site has made the fundamental miscalculation many people with good ideas do: it looks like a great party which Robbie has thrown, at which a few students have made a courtesy appearance and then left.
I hope I don't come off as too ascerbic about StudyPlace in this post. It's a good idea, really it is, and it's set up more intuitively, constructively, and naturally to native Net users than Classweb is. (Though I find its categories opaque. So... some of the sections are just for papers you'd publish, while others are for bloglike thoughts and others are for papers for class? Which is which?) I love that Robbie cares enough about the philosophical underpinnings of education to craft a better site for better learning, supporting student dialogue.
I think the problem we run into here is the same one we see on Classweb; participation happens when it's assigned or encouraged by the professor. Maybe I don't know where to look yet, but I don't see much voluntary comment. I went looking for a place to stick a few casual thoughts about the reading and didn't find anything. The blog contains two posts from my peers, one of which is by Sarah, who is comfortable enough with blogs to maintain a "bloggy" feel even in academic spaces; the other of which is more bloggy than I'd expect, using the first person and all, but has a real I-wrote-a-paper-for-the-prof heft to it.
I don't know how to encourage voluntary, engaged participation in academic forums; that's really what Sarah and Dana look into with their work. Part of the issue is surely that people's attention is elsewhere. Classweb is the academic portal most TC classes use (if they use any at all), so it's not likely that people will venture into StudyPlace on their way to another class space.
And then, neither Classweb nor StudyPlace is the portal any of us use to get to our usual fun. My dock gets me to iChat and WoW and my IRC and Telnet servers. Yahoo currently gets me to some email and RSS feeds and the comics I read (cuz I'm too lazy to set up a more labor-intensive feed reader). My own site is the easiest way to get to friends' comments on my site, and then their sites. In terms of where I walk every day, these academic portals are off the beaten path. The only academic sites so far which work with my preferred means of navigating are the RSS feeds of TerraNova and Ulises' del.icio.us. I think. Does StudyPlace have RSS?
As a reader, rather than a contributor, there's also little to pull me in, here. The splash screen is a stuffy philosophical statement of purpose for the site. There's no highlights of recently posted material, no articles cited for being particularly interesting -- in fact, aside from the bloglike section, there's no text to read aside from titles. Would it kill the designers to put up some abstracts to whet the palate? This site reads like a library database. If this site is going to be a personal expression of Robbie as a scholar -- and believe me, it is -- it ought to have some personality, some editorial vision which shapes the entry to the site.
I mean, even though I'm in grad school, I'd like to retain a positive identity as a READER, you know? Someone who reads because they LIKE ideas and well-crafted sentences? Oh, all my years studying stylistics are WASTED on you people. E.B. White despairs of you! So do I!
(not that all that stylistic mojo isn't also wasted on this blog ;))
I'm looking forward to working on StudyPlace instead of Classweb, but it's still not someplace I want to hang out. For that, I'm heading over to the lively debates at TerraNova.
Posted by me at 1:30 PM | Comments (6)
January 13, 2006
Human descent
I can't stop looking at these morphed pictures of animals. I kind of wish I could, because they're creepy. (Though worksafe.) A fair sight more interesting than all those stupid greeting cards where they've used Photoshop to superenlarge the eyes of kittens and puppies, though.
Posted by me at 8:47 PM | Comments (0)
January 12, 2006
The Earth is Phat!
Praise the gods, Google has finally released Google Earth for Mac. I still can't get as close a look at the Norwegian Fjords as I'd like, but then again I'm not totally sure I'm looking in the right place. You know what I love about Iceland? There's towns even in the snowiest bits. The Earth is phat!
Posted by me at 3:10 PM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2006
From The Vaults: Cheaticus Maximus
In winnowing down some of my boxes marked "memorabilia," I discovered these instructions I'd written to myself for l33t l00t in a classic Nintendo game. Can you guess which one?
Of course: Kid Icarus. It was my favorite game as a kid, and that's solely because of the music, which I thought was incredible. I think it may have just covered a wider scale than most Nintendo music. I would have been in about sixth or seventh grade when I wrote this down.
IIRC, the advice is aimed at successfully playing a sort of Russian Roulette in which you guessed which of the items on the shelf was loot and which marked your doom. Choosing in the right order was key. If you chose right, the instructions appear to note you'd get high purchasing power with a "credit card." If you chose wrong, the Grim Reaper would chase you out of the room (if he didn't actually kill you).
This would have been one of the few times I sought or wrote down advice about games. I wasn't that into them. Sylvie probably had more examples of written instructions than I do. But this game was pleasantly challenging, not impossible like Mega Man or a pleasant walk in the park like Mario. I would have gotten these instructions from Javier Mora, the class video games expert. I think he subscribed to Nintendo Power, not sure.
This is interesting to me in that my masters' project is ostensibly about kids' literacy practices surrounding games, and this is a rare instance of my own. Note grease stains (probably wrote this down at lunch) and terrible, terrible D'Nealian handwriting intended to prepare me to write in cursive (who needs it? I type everything!).
Posted by me at 12:54 PM | Comments (4)
January 9, 2006
Fries And Propaganda: Dorky and Awesome
Schultzy's, U District of Seattle, 12/29/05
J: It says they have the best fries anywhere, so maybe...
G: ...the best cheese fries? We'll have to see about the layering.
* * *
Waiter (indicating my notepad): That actually says Schultzy's on it.
G: Yeah, we take notes.
W: Just at Schultzy's, or on any restaurant?
G: All of 'em.
W: That really is science. That's kind of dorky and awesome. (leaves)
J: What, he's not actually considering that we're reviewing him? We said it was for science, buddy.
* * *
J: There's this ad in the bathroom stall that's just wrong in so many ways. It's for Always maxipads, and it says "Pamper Your Nether Regions." First of all, there's the association with Pampers, which is just wrong. Second, "nether regions" -- my Grandma says that. Finally, I'm dubious about the connection between "pampering" and Always -- why not pamper your nether regions with, say, Antonio Banderas?
G: roflmao
* * *
J: We should start writing down things to get the waiter's attention. Like, Waiter: 7.5. Name: ?
G: (carefully and obviously writes that down)
J: This cheese fries shit -- it's just gotten to the point where it writes itself. We don't even have to work.
* * *
W: OK, the fried cheese is on top and the melty cheese is on the bottom. We did it all on the grill, under a dome.
(beat. J and G are dumbfounded.)
J: You're a contender. Schultzy's is now a contender.
(commence eating)
J: And they're the small shoestring fries I like! Ooh they're salty.
G: I'm like Teller today, I'm not saying anything.
J: Bakon, eat the cheese!
G: Oo they're salty!
J: Yeah, they're salty. I don't know what's on these.
G: As long as it's not beef, we're OK.
* * *
G: I'm not sure it's cheddar. It looks like American.
J: American doesn't melt that well.
(G goes to fetch napkins)
G: You get one, I get three.
J: You have napkin problems. (picks up a clot of fries and cheese which brings along half the plateful) Have we ever had any that did that?! This place is a diamond in the rough.
* * *
G: (takes a cheese crisp created by the special grilling process)
J: That's the Hope Diamond and you just took it! You don't hesitate, you just say Must take before the coyotes get it! There are norms in this society, you can't just break them!
G: You're too shy and retiring, that's all.
* * *
G: Yeah, he has a cat that shits on the walls.
J: That's something Jordan would do.
G: Huh?
J: One time he got all stressed out and I found him in his room, drawing on the wall with crayons. Another time we went to the drivethrough at McDonald's, and he ordered a whole bag of, like, fifteen hamburgers. Fifteen. I'm not kidding. He's a disturbed individual.
G: Where is he now, anyway?
J: He's applying for a job at the CIA! He asked me for a recommendation! I told him, Honey, if I write you an application they'll do a background check on me and it will torpedo your application for any government position. And I said, have you looked back on any of the stuff that appeared in the Omen under your tenure recently? He doesn't seem to remember any of it.
G: Does he have any idea?! He's completely out of touch with reality. I still clearly remember the time -- we were standing in the Airport Lounge -- and he says to me, You know, the Forward [struggling campus paper] is kind of like the New York Times, and the Omen [campus hate rag which wasn't even trying at the time] is more like Time, or Newsweek. There was such a disconnect. And then the time I found him at three in the morning on a Saturday trying on a suit, and he admitted it wasn't for a date, he was seeing how it looked for a trustee meeting on Monday? Jeebus.
* * *
W: Who's Jennifer... Howww...k?
J: That's Hawk, like the bird.
W: Oh, that's very nice. My name's Tinker.
J: That must've sucked when you were a kid.
W (seeming a little hurt): Yeah, well, people seem to like it now.
* * *
W: Is this all gonna go in when you publish this for your paper?
G: Oh we're not writing for a p-- [stops herself as she realizes she might get more out of the situation if he thought they were writing for a paper, but it's too late, he's left the check and walked off, looking irritated]
(Overall consensus: Schultzy's fries rival Around The Clock in terms of their excellence, edging towards a win with the exceedingly innovative grill method. However, it is vital that they use less salt next time. My tongue was on fire. This could have been an accident, though. Good job, Schultzy's!)
Posted by me at 3:33 PM | Comments (1)
January 8, 2006
The Inexorable March of Technology
I've started a Flickr stream, mostly in order to be contribute to Adorablog's, but also just to keep up with things (I know I'm behind the curve on this one). Some of the recent photos from Seattle are up there -- more to come, as well as the latest Fries and Propaganda, soon.
Still think I prefer hosting my own photos (Itamar may not agree :D). But the idea of having people using the site as a stock photo resource and possibly contacting me to use photos eventually -- even if it never happens -- is alluring.
Posted by me at 10:15 PM | Comments (1)