Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
We saw a fair number of these while we were in Mittenwald, Germany. They are these tiny tiny hummingbirdsreally big moths that really look more like big moths than birds (apparently, because they actually are moths). They’re kinda freaky.
Anyway, I stumbled across this via boing-boing, and it’s part of janerc’s photos at flickr.
Or maybe Rice? Oh well, still a potentially useful teaching article about blogging from the Detroit News Online, “Blogger Nation: Web revolution changes how we communicate.”
What does a boy do who has his office robbed of computer equipment? Why, he goes out and buys more computer equipment! In this case, I decided to buy an iSight camera which I am currently using as a webcam in my office– see http://www.stevendkrause.com/webcam/ This is still a work in progress, and I have it set up right now in motion sensative mode, and since no one is in my office right now (hopefully), all you’ll see is me trying to leave yesterday afternoon, the last motion it detected.
As just a webcam, the iSight camera is a little pricey. The problem I ran into though was to use a cheapy cam for a PC, I would have had to do a fair number of hacks in terms of drivers and such to make it work on my Mac. And in the end, I just bought the iSight. Plug it in and it works, and I am using a very cheap webcam software called KeyCamX that has features like motion detection, the ability to automatically ftp images to my server, and even set off an alarm noice.
And I also decided it was worth the extra money to have a camera that has a lot of other uses, such as capturing simple video and as a bar scanner for programs like Delicious Library. That’s a Monday purchase, I think.
So what the heck.
This is the first batch of pictures I’ve been able to upload to Flickr from our trip to Europe, for all of my millions of readers who care about such things.
I’d recommend viewing it as a slide show. If you want to know what you’re looking at while watching the slide show, click on the image. That will stop the show and you’ll see my comments about the image (what you’re looking at, other observations, etc.)
I would upload more but because of some of the snafus I had while in Europe uploading photos, I have maxed out my Flickr upload access for the month. So I guess I’ll have to wait for next week to add to this.
Via Johndan, I came across this site on the history of speech balloons, in comics and beyond. Potentially very interesting for English 328 teaching (well, and just comics stuff, too).
As my millions of loyal readers will recall, our latest beer efforts have been a wheat beer. See previous beer watching episodes for this season at here, here, here, and here. I didn’t have a chance to have a tasting of the brew until now. And you know what? It tastes like beer.
Well, sorta. It tastes like kind of bad beer.
I can’t tell you exactly where we went wrong, or even if we did entirely went wrong– maybe I just don’t like the kind of beer we made (though I’ve had wheat beers before). But this particular batch tastes, well, homemade. And the reason this is both surprising and disappointing is that the last batch we made was very good, and the one before that (which Bill HD made himself) was also very good. So I don’t know….
Anyway, I’m looking forward to season 3 of the Beer Watcher. And once I do some emptying at the sink, I’ll have plenty of bottles, too….
I did have relatively good Internet access while I was in Europe. It came at a price of between 2-4 Euros an hour, which isn’t too cheap, but it was everywhere. I didn’t take a computer with me, something I will reconsider on my next trip overseas– it would have been nice to do some writing and to watch some DVDs, though there was no WiFi access as far as I could tell. So I went to Internet cafes and I got online about four or five times, mostly to check my email for anything super important, to post to my unofficial blog about our travels, and to check the news.
It’s funny to think about; the last (and only other) time I was in Europe was on my/our honeymoon in 1994, quite a while before Internet cafes and news web sites and such. It was tough back then to even get newspapers and magazines in English, at least where we were. As a result, we found out about OJ and his infamous white Bronco ride a week after it happened while looking at a magazine on the way back home in the plane. This time, we had the ‘net, we had CNN Europe, we had access to USA Today. And as a result, I can tell you I think this John Karr guy is probably just a nut; I’d be very surprised if he did indeed kill JonBenet.
Anyway, even with this connectivity, I didn’t get a chance to read much in the way of blogs while I was away. So, in no real particular order, here are a few things I came across this morning via my RSS reader that might be helpfu to me later on and/or that I just thought were kinda interesting:
Okay, I know I missed a lot, but there you have it.
Home! Here at my computer, drinking my coffee, listening to my radio, in my house! Home! It’s always fun to go on a trip like we went on (and we did have a lot of fun), but it also always nice to be home after a trip like the one we went on.
I’m in that fuzzy space of time right now; it’s 6:30-7:00 am here, but it’s about midnight in Munich, and my body is somewhere lost in that space. So for now, while I download pictures from my iPod, I thought I’d post a few miscellaneous thoughts on our last couple of days:
So, I’m posting this first post after our European vacation (which was quite nice, by the way) at 3:30/4:30 in the morning because a) I’m all confused as to what time it actually should be (I think about 10 pm?), and, more importantly, b) I’m upset because, sometime between Friday (or so) and Monday, someone broke into my office, clipped the security cable on the Mac Mini that was on my desk, and walked away with our server. Apparently, there were some other computers stolen in the building, too.
Nice, huh?
Now, I am upset for all sorts of obvious reasons. We (meaning not just me but other folks in the writing program) had a chunk of teaching, scholarly, and administrative-type work on that computer. It was nothing I would describe as “irreplaceable,” but it was still a lot of work that we aren’t likely to ever get back. And I (“we,” if I count my other tech-geek colleagues who have been using ther server) hadn’t gotten around to backing the server up yet, in large part because we hadn’t gotten to the stage of things of figuring out just how and what to back up yet.
In the end, we will get a computer/server back in place to replace this one. This will ultimately be a blip on our use of a server in the department. But what bothers me most I think is how this exemplifies how completely piss-poor security is in the building where I work and how the institution seems unable/unwilling to do anything about it. The fact of the matter is this is not the first computer to go walking, nor is it the first one to go walking out of a locked faculty member’s office.
And what pisses me off about this is that the attitude around EMU seems to be “well, these things happen.” and doesn’t seem to do anything about it.
Now, I haven’t been to school yet to hear what the arguments/excuses are about all this, but I guess the first thing campus “security” would say is that there are lots of different people who have keys to these rooms: former employees, janitors, current employees, etc.. Fair enough, and I also understand that there are many somewhat random, “crimes of opportunity” that take place in Pray-Harrold. I know that laptops and wallets and other things have been stolen out of offices– which is why I never ever leave my office door unlocked or open, even when I go to get something from the main office, and why I would never ever leave my laptop in my office overnight.
So sure, with a building as big and as open as Pray-Harrold, things are going to occassionally turn up missing. But this was no random theft. Someone had to specifically know that in my office on that particular spot on my desk was a computer that they could tuck discreetly away in a bag. I mean, it’s a little computer; it’s not easy to notice. Further, the cable was (apparently– I’ll see it later today) cut, which suggests to me a high degree of planning. In other words, since I am guessing that the thief is not someone reading this blog or another faculty member in the English department, I would argue that someone knew exactly what they were doing, meaning that the person who took this computer had to be someone who had regular and easy access to my office at night.
(And btw, if the thief is reading this blog and steal this computer, please do me a favor and give it back. Just put it back in there the same way you got it out; no questions asked.)
To me, the obvious suspects are the janitors. I’m not saying that that’s who did it, but you’d think that’d be the first person to ask at least. If nothing else, it would give you some names of people who were in/had access to the room at the time the computer was stolen. That is, if campus “security” were to actually do any sort of investigation about this sort of thing. God forbid.
But what is potentially more problematic to me is if it really is was what would be called a random act, a just one of those shrug-of-the-shoulders kinds of things. If that’s the case, what can I “just leave” in my office and not worry about? My desktop computer was right next to the server that was stolen; what would have prevented them from taking two computers? I realize that most breaking-and-entering sorts of people are unlikely to be interested in my books on rhetorical theory or technology, let alone my extensive snowglobe collection and other miscellaneous items that give my office, er, “personality.” But what’s to stop someone from coming in there and just trashing the place on a lark?
In other words, if leaving official school property (e.g., a computer chained to a desk) in a locked faculty office isn’t safe, then what can I leave in there? And why the hell isn’t it safe?
Jeesh. I’ll try to go back to sleep for a while. And then once school gets going, I guess I’ll have to think/rethink what to leave at school and what to leave at home.
Annette, Will, and I took a daytrip to Innsbruck yesterday. That’s the kind of thing you can do when you are in Europe: take a day-trip via train to another country entirely. Well, I guess you can take a day-trip to Canada too, but try that with a train and see how it goes. Anyway, Innsbruck was nice and surprisingly (to me, at least) touristy. We went to a very neat folk art museum, which is a nice relief from all of the Virgin Mary w/baby art we had been looking at in various churches and museums lately. Speaking of chruches: we went into this one in Innsbruck (I can’t remember the name now) that had about 15 or 20 of these giant bronze statues of kings in armor and queens and such all around a tomb. Very freaky. The waitress we had in the cafe we ate at spoke English with a New Zealand accent, and when we asked about that, she told us she had lived down there for 8 months working on a horse farm. And learning English, I guess.
And today is our last day in Mittenwald. Annette and I did a little more shopping while Will and his grandparents are out hiking. Mittenwald has been a lovely place to visit and stay, but I think when we come back (and I am sure we will as long as Annette’s parents keep coming here), we will probably make it for 3 or so days instead of a week. Tomorrow we leave for Munich to get to a sort of “staging area” for our flight, which leaves Monday morning.
Jeez, our timing on flying to Europe seems grand, doesn’t it? Actually, we have been able to keep up on the news here, and I don’t think it will be too big of a deal. As I discuss in the “miscellaneous” part of this message, the TV access we have had has been both good and bad. In any event, the big problem appears to be in the UK. According to this site for Delta (which is the airline we are taking back), the only concern is no liquids on-board. That’s fine; just as long as they let us pack our schnapps.
And now, to the miscellaneous part of things: I have about 14 minutes of Internet time left, so I thought I would post a few last thoughts about our trip in no particular order:
I’m about out of time, so that will be it for now. More photos and more info after I get back to the US…..
