Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
I was going to write more here about our Las Vegas vacation, but I decided to just let the pictures and videos speak for themselves. Here’s a link to the set.
On the whole, I don’t think Annette and I are going to be heading off to Vegas a couple of times a year after this trip, but I can see heading back in less than seven years.
I don’t know if I should be starting my Las Vegas narrative at the end like this, but I will anyway since it’s what is on my mind right now:
Annette and I decided to do carry-on luggage for this trip to keep it simple, and it was working great until we tried to go through security here in Las Vegas. I bought a couple snow globes to add to my collection– yes, I collect snow globes– and thought nothing of them crammed into my luggage. Apparently, TSA had other ideas. They told me that snow globes count in the liquids ban for carry-on luggage, and I was given the choice of either checking my bag or mailing my snow globes back home.
I opted for the checked bag route, and I was escorted around back toward the gate by a TSA person, who was perfectly pleasant about it all. “Snow globes,” I said to this woman. “Really?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” she said. “They tell us we’re supposed to be on the look-out for them, actually.”
“Yes,” I said, “because if we are allowed to pack snow globes in our carry-on luggage, then the terrorists win.” She kinda smiled at that. And a quick google search reveals I’m not the only one who thinks this about the TSA crusade snow globe purge, either.
Happily, that was the biggest hassle of the trip– well, so far, since I am writing this in the Las Vegas airport and not at home. There is that whole “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” spiel, but since I am actually still in Vegas, enjoying the free wifi, and I have some time to kill before the flight, I thought I’d give a run-down of the trip.
Continue reading “Snow globe terrorism (and Las Vegas fancy eating)”
In my experience, when I’ve told people that Annette and I are going to Las Vegas, there are two basic reactions. On the one hand, there’s “Oooh, where are you staying? You should go and see such and such,” and so forth. On the other hand, there’s “Oooh, why in the heck would you do that? Las Vegas is like a level of hell,” and so forth. There isn’t that much in-between.
Obviously, we’re in the first camp, though not because we are that interested in gambling. We went about eight years ago, and I think between the two of us, we lost $150. What Las Vegas was good for then (and hopefully will be good for this time around) is just gawking at all of the excess, all the extremes that are America. Las Vegas is the kind of town where it is perfectly acceptable to be walking down the strip at 3 am in a tuxedo or in your pajamas, where you can spend pretty much as much or as little as you want, where you can buy a Prada purse, look at a pretty convincing fake Eiffel tower, and get handed flyers for porn all in the same block.
But as a prelude to Vegas, we first stopped in Chicago and then Iowa. Chicago was an impromptu event. We ended up with a Priceline deal at the Hyatt Regency on Wacker, which was quite nice. I think we ended up paying more money for parking and a bar tab with our friends Troy and Lisa than we did on the actual room. But before we went out with Troy and Lisa, who I’ve known for like 25 or 30 years and who have given us a lot of good Vegas travel advice, Annette and Will and I went to the Navy Pier. It was pretty good people-watching, walking around, festive and park-like atmosphere. We ended up going through a maze (Will’s idea) that was over-priced but kinda fun, and a stained glass museum that was surprisingly good. Okay touristy fun in beautiful summer weather.
Now we’re in Iowa with the Krause grandparents. While Annette and I are in Vegas, Will is going to be staying for the biannual “kid camp,”where the grandparents get lots of quality time with the kiddies. He’ll have fun, though sometimes Will’s only child-ness kicks in on visits like this.
Anyway, I was originally planning for a “computer blackout” period during this trip, but since I am teaching an online class right now, those plans have changed. Just as well; it’ll give me a chance to post some pictures and such from the road.
Spring term wrapped up at the end of last week, and Annette and Will and I took off for a camping trip on Saturday and Sunday night to Orchard Beach State Park, right outside of Manistee, MI. I just got done uploading a set of pictures to flickr; it’s right here.
This is only the second time we’ve been camping (see here for time #1), and once again, we managed to pick some less than ideal weather. The first night, we had a minor hurricane come through; conveniently for Will and Annette, I left them at the camp while I was running an errand that turned out to be a waste of time. Needless to say, they were just thrilled with me.
But hey, things picked up. Our tents didn’t completely collapse, a surprising amount of our things did not get soaking wet, and we were able to roast weenies and marshmallows and all was well.
Undeterred by overcast skies, low 60’s temperatures, and gusty winds, we hit the beach Sunday morning. As this 1:11 video demonstrates, we were going to enjoy it, damn it!
After beaching for a while, we all got cleaned up (after all, this campground did have showers and flush toilets and the like) and headed into Manistee for a lunch that turned out to be far too expensive for what it was. Manistee bills itself as being a “Victorian port town,” suggesting cute little shops and touristy stuff, but it reminds me a great deal more of the town where my parents grew up, Algoma, Wisconsin. Actually, Manistee is quite a bit bigger– they have many stoplights for example, whereas I think Algoma still has none– and Algoma is perhaps a bit more touristy nowadays with a winery of sorts and at least a bit more in the way of touristy shops. Either way, there really is no reason why you would go to either town as a tourist.
Then we went back to the camp, hung about, etc. Among other things, Will went and poked at a hole that had a mouse in it and I cooked stew in the dutch oven by the fire. We had a beautiful sunset (see the current masthead here, and/or this picture, for example) and okay but not great stew. We got cleaned up and packed up Monday morning, and then went on a lovely but short hike on one of the paths across the main road from the campground before leaving for home. We should have done this the day before instead of going into Manistee so we could have taken one of the longer hikes; live and learn.
So I think it turned out we had a pretty good time, but I also think all of us learned a bit more about ourselves as campers. The big thing for me is I’m not that interested in camping merely for the sake of camping, merely to get away. Unlike our previous trip to the Pinery, where we were in an area with other tent campers, we were surrounded on this trip by campers with, um, campers– big towing rigs, pop-up campers, and these amusing folks in a gigantic motor home. For me, camping is about “roughing it,” at least a bit, about getting out with family and friends, and about doing something to “connect with nature” in some tangible albeit vague way.
But it seemed to me that for most of the camper campers around us, camping meant simply getting away to a “home away from home.” Our outside TV watching neighbors were far from the only ones who were tuning in; in fact, it kind of felt like we were the only ones who weren’t watching TV. As far as I could tell, most of these folks could be camping just about anywhere– a park with a lovely view, a parking lot, etc.– and the experience would be about the same. I’ll bet that less than 10% of these folks ventured across the road to the hiking paths.
Next summer, I’d like to take a family and friends camping trip to someplace a bit more secluded, something for tents only, and some place a bit more “out in nature” than Orchard Beach. The problem is that these kinds of campsites also tend to be “primitive,” meaning there’s no showers and either an outhouse-styled bathroom or nothing. And while I am okay roughing it a bit and I am all for getting out into nature, I am less okay with pooping in the woods.
First off, let me back-track a bit and fill in a few more details on what I’ve already mentioned about C&W and this trip:
Now on to the “part 3” or concluding episode of Computers and Writing 2008 from my pov:
I was second, and I’ll pretty much let my presentation speak (or not) for itself:
A slight tangent here: I actually managed to forget the do-hickey for hooking up my laptop, so I spent a few moments thinking I was screwed. But it turns out I was doubly covered. Since this was the computers and writing conference after all, someone in the audience (Carl Whithaus, actually) immediately volunteered his adapter. But besides that, the fine folks in Georgia were completely prepared for this, too. The guy doing tech support for UGa told me he had a whole bag full of the adapters I needed and was very confident that he could get the projector set-up to work. Quite a contrast to the way the projectors often work (or not) in Pray-Harrold.Anyway, I got some great feedback from folks on what to do with the whole “finished blogger” issue, and as we discussed during the session, my use of the word “failure” in my talk is probably not right. “Not finished,” “abandoned, or and as often as not, “ended at the appropriate time” are probably better terms. In any event, helpful ideas from attendees.
The third presenter was Natalie Szymanski from Florida State with a talk titled “Wikis and Composition Pedagogy: Avoiding the Bandwagon.” Basically, she was suggesting that maybe we ought to slow down a bit on all of this stuff like wikis. While I didn’t agree with many of the things she had to say, I had to give her credit because it’s nice to see someone at this conference have the guts to point out that we’re in the “writing business” and not the “isn’t this software I just learned about cool business.”
But hey, it was a friendly game, and a good time was had by one and all even if the play wasn’t great. Actually, it got a lot more fun when we started the back nine and we played a cart versus cart scramble, but Nick had to leave a little early, so it just kind of degenerated into some sloppy play at the end of a long death march of a round.
So an excellent conference/roadtrip. Well done, UGa, folks! Here are some pictures of the whole things– eventually, I’ll add some info about all these pictures.
Next year, C&W is going to be at UC-Davis and it is going to be toward the end of June. I don’t know if I’ll be going yet or not, to tell the truth. On the down-side, the CCCCs is in San Francisco this year, and I don’t think I can afford 2 trips to California just to conference. On the other hand, Annette and Will and I might want to make this part of a west coast “pilgrimage” back to Ashland. We shall see….
As I’m stuck in Atlanta traffic while Steve B. Drives and talks on the phone, a few notes from the road so far:
Just to recap a bit: Thursday turned out to be the last day of the Jacksonville conference for me, and things were both less and more mysterious. I went to an excellent session in podcasting and student video projects in history and humanities courses presented by Deborah Vess from Georgia College and State University. Vess was the winner of the “grand prize” for her presentation: $5,000. No kidding. She gave a great talk held at a very non-stressing hour of 11 am. I linked to a couple of things she mentioned on Friday. And yet there was only about a dozen or fewer people there. Mysterious.
And who was the second keynote speaker at this international conference about education, learning, and technology in higher education? Why, Carl “All the President’s Men” Bernstein, of course. The mystery continues. He didn’t talk much about education, learning, and/or technology, but he did have some interesting things to say about politics and the like. Anyway, I spent much of the rest of the afternoon attempting to get caught up some school stuff and to get some exercise by walking around the Jacksonville riverfront.
Had I known ahead of time that there was nothing really scheduled for Friday morning I wanted to see and that my presentation was going to be on Wednesday, I would have preferred to have spent Friday traveling back home. But I didn’t know any of that when I made the reservations, so I rented a car (out of my own pocket, I should point out) and drove around various beaches and in St. Augustine. I uploaded some pictures from that day and a few from Jacksonville here.
Highlights? Well, there’s a state park between Jacksonville and St. Augustine called Guana River State Park that has the longest undeveloped beach I’ve ever seen in Florida; a pleasant drive indeed. St. Augustine was quite the tourist trap with actual old and historic buildings mingling in with ye olde towne t-shirt shoppe. And, because I know that Will would have wanted me to go, I even managed to get myself sucked into a visit to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum. Here’s the movie:
A few links I came across in various ways the last couple of days before I get on to the conference business of the day, which is a trip to the beach:
I think I would prefer to actually be leaving for the airport today, but when I booked this trip, I didn’t know exactly when the conference presentations were going to happen and I didn’t realize that there’s almost nothing on the program Friday. So as long as I’m here, I think I’ll find out what St. Augustine is like.
Let me first be very clear: this mystery conference in Jacksonville has actually turned out to be a pretty good thing. I went to some good panels this morning and this afternoon, I had some nice chats with various folks, mostly from the community college world, my presentation went pretty well, and I got to catch up a bit with at least one friendly face I recognized from the computers and writing conference world. So it has been a much better conference than I had expected, and I am looking forward to some of the sessions tomorrow.
But it has still been kind of weird.
First off, the sessions this morning that I attended had some pretty small audiences– which is fine, frankly. That’s typical for academic conferences, and I just kind of assumed this is kind of a small conference overall. But when I went to the luncheon banquet, I was rather surprised to see a rather large ballroom with somewhere around 800 or so people in it, complete with a big dais of distinguished people. It was odd; I was just wondering where the heck all these people came from.
Then there was the mini-monolith. Before the keynote speech by Marc Prensky (the first 20 minutes of which were pretty good; the second 20 minutes which were kinda problematic; and the last 20 minutes of which were probably unnecessary), they announced the awards for the conference. Now, one of the reasons I was sent by folks at EMU to this conference in the first place was that I was the EMU nominee for an “Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology.” So I knew I was going to get something, and I also knew that there was 40 or so other winners. But I wasn’t expecting this:
This trophy is pretty cool, but it seems rather dangerous. It’s made out of marble, it’s about eight and half inches high and about three and a half inches in circumference, it is cut so it has a rather sharp point at top, and has got to weigh 10 pounds. Gian Pagnucci (a fellow winner, btw) and I were talking at dinner about this, and we both seriously wondered if you could actually take this thing onto an airplane in carry-on luggage. I mean, I have no doubt that you could most definitely brain someone with this thing if you really wanted to. I’m a little worried about what kind of damage it’s liable to cause in my checked suitcase.
Well, it’s the thought that counts, right?
Tomorrow, more mysteries await.
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m at this something of a mystery conference and listening to a guy talking about a laptop campus program at Cal State San Bernardino. It’s potentially pretty interesting to me because while CSU-SB is a lot smaller than EMU, the profile of what the school is like is pretty similar to EMU. I think this is a guy I should talk to at some point. One of the points he just made: the main complaint that various powers-that-be on his campus (e.g., faculty senate, tech committees, provosts, etc.) was concern about that one poor student who just can’t afford a laptop no matter what. So the solution they came up with was they collected old but still decent laptops from other institutional resources. So far, they’ve loaned out one.
Another fun-fact: 70% of the students at CSU-SB are on financial aid. At the same time, some huge percentage of students had computers, over 70% had high speed internet access where they lived, and over half of the students already owned a laptop before they were required to buy one. Again, given that CSU-SB has a similar profile of students at EMU, I bet that a survey would be about the same.
But a couple of other things I came across via my feed that kind of connect to the conference and that’s just kind of interesting: