Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
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You Are Chicken |
 Bah! You’re hardly meat. But you are quite popular, and people aspire to taste like you. You’re probably quite skinny and free of vices. Except letting people eat your eggs. |
Mmm, chicken… I have to say that I really could eat chicken pretty much every day. And really, if I had to just eat chicken and fish, that’d be okay.
That kind of makes me a vegetarian, right?
One of the coolest things with using del.icio.us (I have lately gotten on that bandwagon) is the “popular” tag section. For example, today’s “most popular” tag is “101 Fabulous Freebies,” and despite it being from PCWorld, there are lots of Mac things here, too.
See this iFixit guide. Of course, they don’t really explain how to put your MacBook back together once you have it completely apart.
Actually, one thing that is very cool is this tutorial makes it pretty clear that putting in RAM or a new hard drive into one of these babies is easy. I managed to upgrade the RAM in my iBook (with much coaching and help from my colleague Steve Benninghoff), but I have been told that swapping out a harddrive in this machine is something an amateur does not want to mess with.
Actually, that’s just a kind of catchy headline. But I stumbled this morning across this list of “Creativity Techniques,” which is at a wiki site for a group called “mycoted,” which is “dedicated to improving Creativity and Innovation for solving problems woldwide.” Pretty interesting; I haven’t looked at it too closely yet, but essentially, this list looks like variations on that old chesnut of the rhetorical canon, “invention.”
A couple of different people have commented to me about my rather ambitious spring/summer to do list. So I thought I’d post a bit of an update on how it’s going:
Right now, Bill H-D (when he isn’t eating, drinking, or juggling) is at a conference in Denmark, Collin is getting ready to go to the Rhetoric Society of America conference, though he is writing here about the Computers and Writing Conference, and, more specifically the “Get Info” project, where presenters offer one minute “teases” or “trailers” on their presentation. Here’s an example from Dan Anderson, though I’m not sure if all of these have to be or are going to be electronic.
I, on the other hand, am trying to get myself motivated to do a little house-cleaning and a little more gardening. I’ll check in on my online class today, though the big day will be tomorrow (a rough draft for peer review is due). I have a couple of meetings next week. And I know I’m playing golf on Monday, at least. In other words, I am most certainly not preparing for a conference.
Originally, I had planned on going to the Computers and Writing conference this year. C&W is easily my favorite annual conference. In short, these are my people. But I didn’t go last year because I couldn’t justify/afford two trips to the San Francisco Bay area in one year, and I’m not going this year also because of money. Mostly.
What it boils down to is the support at EMU for travel, like many under-funded universities, is less than stellar. I can generally get enough money to cover one conference, two if one of those two is cheap. I had originally planned on going to the CCCCs in Chicago and to C&W, but while the CCCCs was not too expensive for me this year (I drove), it wasn’t exactly cheap, either. And Lubbock was going to pretty expensive. Before I even thought about the conference registration fee, I think travel and lodging was going to be close to a grand.
So basically, I did a cost/benefit analysis and Lubbock came up short. Not to be too crass or anything, but I don’t really need to go to conferences anymore, certainly not in the way I did when I was seeking a job and then seeking tenure. And, no offense to the folks in Lubbock (Lubbockers? Lubbockians? Lubbockites?), at this stage of my life, if I’m going to spend $1,000 of my own money to go someplace, that someplace has to be one where I’d actually want to visit on purpose. C&W and the Buddy Holly Center just isn’t enough of a draw for me.
Besides, I’ve got enough going on this summer. I’ve already mentioned my online teaching; beyond that, my “to do” list includes getting a research project on blog writing going, getting my defunct textbook online, revising the layouts of my blogs, setting up a blog/web space for stuff on writing for the web, setting up a blog/web space for an online version of a graduate course I’m going to teach next year, getting geared up to be the interim writing program administrator, etc., etc., etc. There’s a ton of things to do around the house, it is golfing season, and there’s family travel plans, including an August trip to Europe. Looking at it now, it kind of feels like going to C&W this year would have just been “piling on.”
Oh well, have fun in Texas. And I’ll certainly see everyone next year at C&W in Detroit. In fact, since I will more or less not have any travel or lodging expenses, I might even just “attend” and not present….
See this post from Collin on an article by Kevin Kelly called “Scan this Book!” This is something I can easily imagine coming in handy for teaching a class like 516, and given that I haven’t read the article yet, I think I’ll defer to Collin and the things he links to for the time-being.
Very funny. My favorite part is the firey bush.
Via boing-boing, I came across this promising review of the new MacBook released the other day. My first thought was “Damn! And I just spent $300 on this laptop to get it fixed!” But the more I think about it, the more I will probably want more than the “basic” model, which is around $1100 (though there might be some kind of education discount). According to the review, the totally maxed-out version of this computer is around $2K. That might be too rich for my blood, but something in between those two extremes might be interesting.
In any event, unless something very unexpected happens, I think I’m going to wait another year….
The Amazing Race, that is. BJ and Tyler just won the latest season of the only reality show that I watch with any regularity; actually, it’s kind of a family event around here. In any event, congrats to the hippie dudes, now $1 million richer.