Month: September 2007

Google Docs: The movie

An interesting little video about Google Docs.

I’ve been using Google Docs quite a bit lately for my BAWS project, using it as a repository for notes, free writings, and (I had planned) actual drafts of things. On the one hand, I like Google Docs for all the reasons mentioned in this video, especially that I can access my files from wherever. I like that it would probably take an apocalyptic of proportions much more important than any book project for these files to disappear. And, of course, it’s free.

As a teaching tool, Google Docs seems to have huge potential. Not only do you get all of the above reasons, but you also get a system where you can share files with each other, something that would make peer review and collaborative writing pretty easy.

On the other hand, I’m feeling the need to actually go back to the evil MS Word when it comes to actually writing things that might turn into parts of a book manuscript, I guess for two basic reasons. First, I’m already running into some feature problems that (as far as I can tell) Google Docs doesn’t do– footnotes, for example. And second, there is the ever-present and somewhat annoying power of MS Word being the thing that everyone else in the universe uses. Hmmm….

"MySpace will target ads to users' personal data"

Via Boing Boing comes this, “MySpace will target ads to users’ personal data.” A potentially interesting piece that might fight into teaching about these things. I have somewhat mixed feelings and I guess it will depend on the ads. I get ads all the time from my gmail, but they don’t bother me. I suppose I should be bothered though….

Camping: Initial reactions

More or less in the order in which I remember them, here are a few recollections and reflections of our recent camping trip– before photos and video, which I haven’t had a chance to process yet. That’s coming soon.

  • I was out shopping on Thursday in preparation for our Friday trip and talking on the cell phone with my colleague and friend Linda. She asked me what I was doing and I told her that I was getting ready to go camping. “Really. Really?! Really?” was more or less what she said for a few moments. This seemed to be a common reaction from friends and colleagues.
  • On said shopping trip, I scored what would prove to be an excellent purchase, a Coleman GeoSport Shade canopy contraption that was on deep discount at Target. We’ll get to the usefulness of this device in a moment.
  • The drive up to the Pinery was dominated by construction and then by lying to the border patrol (“No, we didn’t have any alcohol or food in our car in preparation for a camping trip; why do you ask?”).
  • The Pinery itself is a provincial (e.g., state) park in Ontario on the shores of Lake Huron about 45 miles or less northeast of Port Huron, Michigan. I mentioned our trip to several long-time locals here and it seems like everyone in this part of Michigan has been there at one point in time. It’s quite nice, a very large park with lots of camping and a nice combination between camping in the forest (e.g., “pines”) and the beach a short walk away over dunes that are kind of like Sleeping Bear but without the crowds and with smaller dunes.
  • We got there later than we wanted but still much earlier than Jim and Rachel and their kids, and we set up our camp in some wind but no rain. And this brings me to my first observation about camping: it seems to me that camping is a “meta” activity in that much of one’s time camping is setting up, cleaning, rearranging, fussing with, and, at the end of the trip, packing up the camp stuff. So this setting up part was one of the more important and amusing activities on the trip.Thankfully, we rehearsed putting up the tent the week before and the instructions for assembly are much more clear than you might think.
  • Observation #2: what counts as “camping” is very much a variable. It reminds me a bit of living in Richmond, VA when I would have conversations with folks from places like Alabama about what it was like for me to live in “The South” and they would say to me “honey, this ain’t the south.” (FWIW: as someone who was born in Wisconsin and who grew up in Iowa, when people claim that Michigan is the midwest, I pretty much always say “honey, this ain’t the midwest.”) In other words, our version of “camping” involved a car backed right up onto the camp site, a large tent, an air mattress under our toasty warm sleeping bags, the previously mentioned large canopy, a battery-powered iPod player, and a plastic cocktail shaker set. One of the other “camping” amenities we had once Jim and Rachel and kids arrived included a camp stove (indispensable for future camping, in my estimation). The “comfort station” (I love Canadian euphemisms for toilets and showers) were about 100 yards away. So, is this camping? Well, compared to the people who pull up in their 800 square foot RVs, yes. Compared to people who want to go and spend a week in the back-country and poop in the woods, no.
  • Hey, pop quiz: What can make camping really unpleasant? Why, rain, of course! And what did we have plenty of off and on for the first 18 hours or so? You guessed it! Rain and wind and cold. Wind was like white noise outside the tent Friday night– good sleeping for me and Will, but not so much for Annette. In more pleasant weather, I can see the appeal of spending the day on the beach of Lake Huron, basking in the sun as the kids frolic in the waves. In the weather we had, we went to the beach Saturday about 11 am and said “Holy shit, it’s cold and rainy!” and returned to the camp a bit later. Fortunately, the previously mentioned GeoSport Shade and the coverings that Jim and Rachel set up provided more than enough cover to sit around and enjoy fireside cocktails.
  • It was also cold, cold, COLD. Like in the upper 30s at night, and highs in the low 60s (maybe) during the day. The plus-side of this is it was good sleeping weather and there were almost no bugs.
  • Will’s favorite part of camping by far was running wild with Jim and Rachel’s kids on the beaches, the dunes, and a forest area they called “The Wasteland.” I don’t think it was an Eliot reference. My favorite part was the food. I suppose this might be different if the weather had improved a bit (we did get a chance to hike around a bit on Sunday), but the food experiences were excellent. Jim and Rachel cooked a great beef dish over the grill on Friday night, and we made chili over the fire with a newly purchased camp Dutch oven Saturday night. The breakfast coffee, sausages, oatmeal, and other treats just seemed to taste that much better in the out of doors. There were plenty of other tasty camp snacks, and I made some pie pan concoctions, including midnight (or so) Nutella and banana grilled sandwiches that I thought were magical. So, based on food along, camping has a lot of elements that I could definitely get behind.
  • So, an overall successful camping trip, depending on your definition of “camping.” I can easily imagine more trips in our near future, though probably not until it warms up a bit again.

Emerging from the wild….

I’ve been slow on blogging and BAWS projects lately because of a camping trip to the Pinery in Ontario. It’s not that interesting though I will soon blog about it unofficially here, but what I thought about mentioning here is the difficulty of getting back into the swing of work after taking it off to the extent that I did. No electricity and no laptop, and really, no time to read, either. Today has mostly been about catching up from all this; perhaps tomorrow will be about actually doing some scholarly work. We’ll see….

Camping: The prelude

It is, as they say, a long story. But the short version is this: Annette and Will and I are going camping with our friends Jim K and Rachel D (along with their kids) at a place in Canada a few hours from here called The Pinery. Now, traditionally, my idea of “camping” has been staying in a hotel without WiFi, or (God forbid!) a television. For whatever reason, I’ve been talked into tent/car camping, meaning that we’ll be staying in a camp ground that has some basic services like flush toilets and showers (thank freakin’ God), but where we’ll lack electricity and anything beyond a tent for shelter.

As the saying goes, we will see how this turns out. I’l report back with pictures and possibly video after the weekend. Wish me luck….

Sometimes, I read things that I think are wrong

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in a kind of interesting and conflicted stage with my sabbatical lite/BAWS project: I’m doing a lot of reading, I’m doing some writing, but I’m also doing a fair amount of writing program coordinator work to get the semester started, and I’m also trying to/worried about painting my house. And of all these things, the painting of the house is the most time sensitive duty– or really, weather sensitive.

In any event, one book I’m reading while on the stationary bike at the gym is Geert Lovink’s Zero Comments, and while I am gleaning some interesting observations as I go, I have to admit that I am struck by some of what Lovnik is saying here that just strikes me as, um, wrong.

Here’s a particularly problematic paragraph with my comments in between:

The blogosphere has been shaped neither by dotcom entrepreneurs nor by techno-geeks. Really? The folks who brought us blogger, wordpress, and/or Moveable Type aren’t entrepreneurs or techno-geeks? Basic computer knowledge does the job. Um, you mean basic computer knowledge like PHP, MySQL, Python, managing server space, and the like? Not even html skills are required. Only if you want your blog/site to look, feel, and function as the work of someone who doesn’t understand the medium at all. For business types there is no immediate money in it. There are dozens of companies making real money off of blogs nowadays, and hundreds of wannabes out there. The open character of blogs even forms a risks who are into branding and PR. Unless you are into radical transparency or you use blogs to shape your message and PR. The geeks feel protected in their Slashdot community and prefer the cleanliness of ASCII in email versus the glossy personality-driven approach of blogs. Isn’t slashdot.com a blog? For most academics. blogs are irrelevant as they don’t count as publications. The same could be said of Internet activists who have not moved beyond the use of e-mail and their own content management system. Whaaaa???

I could go on even with this paragraph, but you get the idea. And again, I want to be clear that I don’t think that everything that Lovink is saying is wrong– this is just a particularly problematic paragraph. But I guess it makes me think of two things with my own project. First, the problem with making too many pronouncements about technology along the lines of what Lovink has done in this paragraph is that the pace of rapid change in online practices versus the glacial pace of print means that things that seemed dead-certain and obvious three years ago can look downright silly once the book hits the market. Second, there’s still a lot of room for debate about what exactly are these things we call blogs and blogging.