stevendkrause.com

Via boing-boing, The Alot is Better Than You at Everything, from a very funny blog called hyperbole and a half.

I have been procrastinating from cleaning my office by a) teaching (well, that’s kinda my job, so that doesn’t count as procrastination), and b) looking through some piled up google reader links.  So in an effort to put off office cleaning a bit longer, here’s a bunch of links in no particular order:

• 3×3 from prof hacker. I actually end up doing this sort of thing pretty regularly on my blog.  Pretty good advice, I think.
• From The Rumpus.net, Conversations About the Internet. I got here because of conversation #5 with an Anonymous Facebook Employee, but there’s a lot of cool ones here, all things I’m really interested in.
• Star Wars Burlesque via Boing-Boing. Hope Andre sees this one….
• Harper’s Index “index.” Also via Boing-Boing.  This is super-cool:  enter in a search term and you get back Harper’s Index stuff.  It has to be in their database, of course; Michigan was, but Ypsilanti wasn’t.
• “Blindness Organizations and Arizona State University Resolve Litigation Over Kindle.”
• “Textbooks for Rent… Everywhere.” From Inside Higher Ed; among other “fun facts” from the article is that the claim is that the textbook industry does $7-9 billion in US sales annually.  Whaa???
• From jill/txt, “ethics and guidelines for personal bloggers:  advertising, privacy and honesty” is really good advice for kids and grown-ups alike.
• “Facebook blocks ‘Web 2.0 Suicide Machine,’ now a cease-and-desist reported,” from Boing-Boing.  Might include it in the unit in 516 on Facebook.
• Cory Doctorow:  Close Enough for Rock ‘n’ Roll, which is summed up as “New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.”  It makes a lot of sense, actually.

Okay, cleaning will commence.  Soon….

So, on one of my many errands today, I was in the Food (W)hole with a cart full of provisions– not a mountain of shopping (that would come later at Costco), but a fair amount.  I was searching for an open line, I found one where the purchase was winding down, so I jumped in.  As I’m putting my stuff up on the belt, I notice behind me an older man (60s?) standing behind me holding a carton of self-serve soup and giving me a look of ‘tude.

Now, in my defense, 1) I am (almost) certain that I didn’t cut this guy off in getting to the line; 2) while I clearly had more than him, I did not have an extreme amount of stuff, and 3) I’ve got places to go to0, and hey, you shoulda hustled.  Anyway, as this goes along, the dude is still giving me the evil eye (or perhaps I was just projecting that, I’m unsure), so as I was paying, I mumbled something like “Jeez, I guess I should have let you go ahead of me.”  Which, to be completely honest, I didn’t really mean– see my previously offered defense.

So I ask you:  I wasn’t too big of a jerk here, was I?  Or maybe– just maybe– maybe it was the soup guy who was the jerk because he was trying to make me feel bad with his evil stare and sigh!  Yeah!

This is amusing, though with Glen Beck and fellow tea-baggers not understanding that various governmental czars are not really “Czars,” it strikes me as rather risky.  I wonder if this will turn up on Fox as being true?

I thought this was a lot of fun to read/learn about (while I should have been doing other things):  First, there’s this amazing water slide video:

This is fake, and I guess that’s kind of common sense, really. But what I liked as much and/or better was this from Juice The Blog:  Unbelievable Waterslide Compositing Walkthrough.  Yet another reason to learn more about video….

For the amount of work that these folks put into their Fancy Fast Food, they could make actual fancy food. But I have to admire the artistry of making a chow mein out of a Domino’s pizza.

This was an amusing way to wake up this morning:

Some question appropriateness of mocking e-mail banter during Ann Arbor City Council meetings in the AANews. Here are the opening paragraphs:

After his presentation to the Ann Arbor City Council, Washtenaw Audubon Society member Will Weber had every reason to think city officials shared his views about protecting birds during migratory season.

But while they publicly endorsed the efforts, the same City Council members who backed “Safe Passage Great Lakes Days” in March mocked its significance in e-mails that flew back and forth during the council meeting.

“The highlight of Hohnke’s legislative career a non-binding resolution to dim your lights to help birds,” Leigh Greden wrote in an e-mail to fellow council members Carsten Hohnke, Margie Teall and Christopher Taylor.

Greden’s March 16 missive prompted a dozen messages in which the four council members made sport of environmental or wildlife protection measures that they had passed.

The article goes on to recount a couple other conversations in which Ann Arbor City Council members walk a fine line between being just human, childish and/or assholes. I think my favorite part of the story is how these emails came to light:

Sent from city e-mail accounts, the messages were released by the city in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center.

The Detroit-based law center was seeking communication about the city’s planned underground parking structure on Fifth Avenue. What it got, in addition, were a series of live e-mail exchanges among council members during three meetings in February and March.

So, what have we learned here today?

• Be careful about your email because it never ever goes away, even if you think you deleted it. I worry about this with my colleagues, actually. I’ve been on committees where fairly private/sensitive information found its way into email. I’ve been guilty of sending some of those emails myself. I recently had a conversation with a quasi-administrator-type person about a way to get reimbursed for something (I ended up getting paid the old-fashioned way, taxes and all) and this person told me to erase all those emails because they might get us in trouble. (Deep sigh) Well, if Kwame taught us anything it should be that stuff like email and text messages simply do not go away. Oh, and I don’t think those emails would have gotten anyone into trouble anyway.
• People just can’t resist back-channel discussions, even when they really REALLY should know better. So maybe we really shouldn’t be that hard on students who don’t pay attention 120% of the time, especially when the instructor is just standing there going blah-blah-blah.
• Many of the folks on Ann Arbor city council kinda seem like Douchebags, and, according to this wikipedia entry, I believe douchebag is the correct slang term: “The term implies a variety of negative qualities, specifically arrogance and engaging in obnoxious and/or irritating actions without malicious intent.”

Anyway, besides the local political/humor angle, I will have to remember this for English 516 or maybe English 444, some kind of class where we talk about how uses of email can go wrong.

First off, there is Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video from the American University School of Communication Center for Social Media. How’s that for a mouthful? Anyway, the site includes a very handy video and lots of other resources to help academics/students/etc. navigate a bit through the world of social media. This will probably be must reading for 516 next year, maybe for 444 too.

Then there’s xtranormal “Text-to-Movie,” which is a site that allows you to make very simple animations quite, well, simply. Here’s my first effort:

I don’t know if this is a teachable moment or not; it probably is, actually. But beyond that, it’s a fun little site to play around with. This might even find its way into my 121 this spring.