Month: May 2007

No, this blog is not about…

I’m actually afraid to fill in the rest of that for fear that I will attract more “beyond spam” spam. Here’s what I’m getting at:

I’ve been actively ignoring my blog for the last few days simply because I am completely swamped with school right now. I was going/probably still will post something on EMUtalk.org about this, but I kind of feel like I have what I like to refer to as the spring/summer term blues. Here at EMU, we have fall term and winter term (what most folks call spring term), each of which are 15 weeks long, and two summer school terms called spring term and summer term. And actually, the naming makes sense since these are the seasons when these terms take place. It sure is heck not “spring” around here until April at the earliest.

But I digress.

The bad thing about spring/summer terms is that they are 7.5 weeks long, which means that everything moves twice as fast as a “normal” term. Thankfully, there aren’t as many meetings and the administrative load drops off in the spring and summer. But the teaching is very intense. Students taking these classes (as often as not in a mad dash to finish their college careers) do not always know what it is they’re getting themselves into, and are thus sometimes kind of crabby. And even though I’ve done this many times before (actually, I haven’t taken a whole spring or summer off in I don’t know how long), I am always surprised at how the work of the courses creeps up on me. Going to computers and writing, working on an article (I promise, I actually am working on it!), gardening, golfing, and just living my life has put me sadly and woefully behind.

Thus my blues, thus my purposeful ignoring of the blog. Again, I digress.

Anyway, I got an email from a colleague of mine who said that I had some spam of a male enhancement/performance nature on my site. I assumed it was of the typical sort of comment spam. But no, this was different; this spam was one where somehow the attack came on the header information of the blog itself. So, instead of seeing “Steven D. Krause’s Official Blog,” readers saw some information on various enhancement products beginning with a “v.”

I’m not sure this self-censorship is necessary, but I think it’s interesting….

So, if you come across this space and see that kind of message, rest assured, I didn’t do it. And I promise to return and be more vigilant about blog security soon. Really.

As much as anything, this one goes out to Andre

I’ll change my list of links soon, I promise. Do check out Andre’s new blog, Visions of Ypsilanti in the meantime.

As penance for being late in changing that link, I present to you pictures from The Vader Project and this large group of Princess Leia as slavegirls with an Elvis storm trooper. These come via boing-boing and are on the flickr photo collection of bonniegirl. Check that out for even more Star Wars themed picts.

The end of the 17 inch iMac?

From something called Think Secret comes this story, “Death knell tolls for 17-inch iMac.” This actually has something potentially to do with the world I work and teach in at EMU, as the last paragraph of this piece points out:

The omission of a 17-inch iMac means customers looking for a more affordable Mac or one with a smaller display, especially in the education market, will have to hang their hat on the Mac mini and buy a separate display.

We are (supposedly) going to get a computer refresh in on of the labs in the English department, and the original plan was to get the 17-inch iMacs. I don’t know if the powers-that-be are going to opt for the very stealable Mac minis or if they are going to bump us up to 20 inch machines, but I am hoping for 20 inchers, obviously.

At home, I have a 20 inch iMac (and a second 19 inch display, actually). It is true that the price difference was such that it didn’t seem “worth it” to me to get the 17 incher, especially given that the 20 inch iMac also came with a faster processor. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there is a big part of me who thinks I should I have spent just a wee-bit more money and gone with the 24 incher….

Might be a good book; might not

Technicity, edited by Louis Armand and Arthur Bradley. The blurb says (in part) “In this collection, a group of internationally-known figures within the fields of philosophy, linguistics and cultural studies come together to consider the meaning of “technicity” at the beginning of the 21st century.” So it might be interesting. But one of the things I think is weird is the table of contents. (pdf) It has the authors’ names in big and bold letters, and the title of their essays in harder to read and smaller italics. It’s almost as if it’s saying “pay no attention to what I’m saying; pay attention to who I am.” Hmm….

C&W 07: My Presentation

I presented at the very last session on Sunday, May 20, at the recently completed Computers and Writing conference in Detroit. To be honest, more people showed up to this session than I thought would, mainly to support the other two presenters, I think. Still, it was a marked improvement over my “crowd” at the CCCCs.

In any event, I am making my presentation available at this web site with three basic versions:

  • the script of my talk with a few key slides pictures included (the version I’d recommend for most readers);
  • just the script with numbers where I inserted the slides; and
  • the Keynote slides saved for the web.

I’m also going to be sharing this presentation to the EMUtalk.org community since, after all, it’s about them. We’ll see what they have to say about all this.