Category: Uncategorized

In general, I’m not much of a computer game person. I’ll play on the PlayStation we (supposedly) bought for Will for his birthday once in a while (I like the driving games), and I really enjoyed playing SimGolf for a few months. But I don’t really like “first person shooter” games because I just find the idea of shooting anything that moves to be both troubling and boring.

The one game I did like when it finally came out for the Mac was “The Sims.” I liked that a lot, bought a lot the expansions of the game (“Livin’ Large,” “Hot Date,” “Superstar,” etc.), and for a while, I played it through the night when I should have been doing other things like sleeping. So of course, despite the fact that I am a very busy academic worker bee right now, I had to buy The Sims 2, and I am fighting the urge to get sucked down that rabbit hole where I lose all track of time and events in the real world.

So far, so good. For one thing, the only windoze PC in the house is Will’s, and I can’t really throw him off of it to play this thing. I’m getting ready to go play golf this morning, and yesterday morning, I rented a roto-tiller and spent quite a bit of time working the maching over most of the garden (we’re working on a “backyard reconfiguration” project).

On the other hand, I was up until 2 am on Thursday playing with it, I have been mindful of the clock when playing it the last couple of nights (because you do lose track of time and space…), and I would be playing it right now if Will wasn’t on his computer.

I am just figuring out how the thing works, and I’m sure I will write a whole lot more on this later on, but a couple of quick thoughts:

* Despite the fact that Will’s Dell computer is just over a year old, has a Pentium 4 2.2 Gig MHZ processor with 512 MB of RAM, this game runs slow, sometimes painfully PAINFULLY slow, especially if you’ve got a bunch of people (“Sims”) running around trying to do stuff at the same time. I browse through magazines while waiting for some stuff to load.

* My favorite part of the game now is the same as it was before: the “architectual” simulation aspects of it. This new one allows you to build even more elaborate and cool houses.

* With the Sims 1, I generally cheated just about all the time– basically, by just giving my Sims as much money. But in the Sims 2, it seems like the motivation to cheat is quite a bit lower and, much like life itself, you can’t solve every problem by just throwing money at it.

* The concept of the Sims 2 is different in a way that I think will keep the game interesting for a lot longer. Sims are born, live, and (potentially, though I haven’t gotten to this point) die of old age, and they have “aspirations,” which are little goals you want to meet to keep ’em happy. Annette always asks “what’s the point?” with this game; this stuff gives it more of a point.

* Still, it’s kind of a stupid game, really. I feel a bit odd as a middle-aged man playing with what amounts to an electronic doll house. And it is also still this computer game where you can actually have your Sim characters playing a computer game, and it is the kind of game where you get really into watching your Sims washing the dishes and cleaning the house while your real dishes pile up in the sink.

Kairos 9.1 Fall 2004 is out, and my essay, “When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction,” is in it. It’s been a bit of a winding road for this piece, which I originally submitted after the 2003 Computers and Writing conference. Obviously, it didn’t get in the journal then, but that’s okay since I think it’s a much better essay now.

Two other thoughts about all this, mostly along the lines of “it’s a small world, isn’t it?”

* I found out that this issue of Kairos had been released during my grad class last night. We were meeting in the library and listening to a librarian talk about some of the research tools available (it tied into the reading for that night, really). The librarian (hi Keith, if you’re reading this!) came across Kairos in an MLA search, he clicked on the link, and I realized it was the new issue. “Hey, my article is in this issue,” I said and explained it a bit to my students. Kind of one of those lucky things that makes me look a lot more well-published and scholarly to my students than I actually am…

* Looking through the table of contents of this issue, I realize how many of these people I know, in the sense of “I’ve heard of her or him,” but in a few cases, in the sense of “I’ve had beers with him or her.” And as I think back on it, I used to know the guy who started Kairos when he was a PhD student, Mike/Mick Doherty, quite well since he was in the MA program at Bowling Green State University when I was in the PhD program there. Small world indeed.

See this web site from NCTE, NCTE’s “1984+20″ Project. Here’s the opening paragraph from that site:

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is sponsoring a nationwide reading and discussion of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 this October. Educators and students in high schools, colleges, and universities, and citizens in libraries, community organizations, and book discussion groups are invited to read the book and discuss its prophetic nature and what it might teach us about life in the contemporary United States. The “1984+20� project aims to promote awareness, discussion, and debate about the key roles of language in politics and culture.

I don’t really teach any classes where incorporating this book would make much sense (and I couldn’t do it at this stage if I wanted to anyway), but the site has lots of interesting resources and such for high school and college teachers. A couple other thoughts:

* Of course, Orwell didn’t write 1984 in 1984. In fact, as I understand it, the date doesn’t really have a whole lot of significance, other than Orwell wrote and/or published the book in 1948.

* It will be interesting to see if the NCTE catches any political heat from conservatives for this choice.

* I think I’m going to read 1984 again, too. It has been more than 20 years since I’ve read it, but from what I remember, it sure does have a lot to stay about contemporary politics and culture, especially in this era of post-9/11 terrorism fears and worries.

See this web site, “Access to the Literature: The Debate Continues”, part of the web site for the scientific journal Nature. Now, but “literature,” they mean science (not Huck Finn), but I think the relevance to and potential for the humanities is obvious. To quote from the site:

The Internet is profoundly changing how scientists work and publish. New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user. This ongoing web focus will explore current trends and future possibilities. Each week, the website will publish specially commissioned insights and analysis from leading scientists, librarians, publishers and other stakeholders, as well as key links, and articles from our archive. All content is available free.

Interestingly enough, the web site seems a bit buggy to me– or maybe it’s just getting a lot of traffic, I’m not sure.

I really like grocery shopping, and it isn’t just because I like food and cooking. Though that’s a big part of it. I think I like grocery shopping quite a bit because I like the stores, the way they’re laid out, the lighting, all of that. I have a similar fondness for office supply stores, too.

Anyway, I thought about all this because I went grocery shopping this morning to my favorite store, Whole Foods. For anyone not familiar: Whole Foods is an “upscale” grocery store chain, though not all of it is that more expensive than a “normal” store. The “365” Whole Foods brand is pretty much the same as the prices at any other place, and Whole Foods sells a lot of stuff in bulk. I tend to buy the fish and meat products (which cost more but which are excellent in quality), some produce and cheeses, bulk stuff, and that’s about it. I go to the regular stores for other things, though that tends to be Hillers, which many folks around here also consider to be an “upscale” store.

Some observations about my trip there today:

* I went in this morning because I had stopped by the store last night in order to grab something for a makeshift dinner before my 7 pm Tuesday class. I put the tab on my debit card and asked for $20 back, and even though I got charged for it, I realized later that I didn’t actually get the money. So I was out $20, which of course pissed me off. But one of the things you pay for at Whole Foods is decent customer service. I called them up this morning, told my story, and (in part because I still have the receipt) the customer service rep was able to figure out that my cashier was $20 over in her till the night before. So I wasn’t out $20, which of course made me happy.

* When I went in this morning to shop and claim my $20, there was a cooking class in there taking a tour.

* People in the store in the morning are extra-friendly, I presume because they haven’t been irritated by customers yet. I will have to keep this in mind.

* Whole Foods, while kind of a “lefty-leaning” place (organic, interested in local farming, etc., etc.), also resists unionization and they post the daily stock price at the customer service desk.

* I know several people who used to or still do work for Whole Foods. One of these people says it is commonly referred to by employees as “the food (w)hole.”

The “call for papers/proposals” for the 2005 Computers and Writing Conference has just been posted. C&W is by far my favorite conference because it is most specifically about what it is I do as a scholar and a teacher, and it’s just a really friendly and laid-back group of people. I gave my first conference presentation about 11 years or so ago at one of these things, and I always recommend it as a good “first time” presentation kinda place. It’s an understanding and supportive group, I think.

Having said that, I guess I have two somewhat minor complaints about the 2005 conference:

* There doesn’t really seem to be a theme here this year. To quote from the first paragraph on the conference web site:

When computers first came into the writing classroom, they were used mostly as word processing tools, enhancing the capabilities of typewriters by simplifying editing practices. Today, computers and their associated technologies are tools that strongly influence writing, facilitating substantive changes in writing, and perhaps then leading to new forms of writing.

That passage strikes me as overly general and so… 1994. True, C&W does attract a lot of people new to the idea that “computers” (and technology) have something to do with “writing,” but this passage just seems to me like it was written by someone who hasn’t actually been a part of the conversation that’s been going on in theC&W community for the last 10 or so years.

Of course, conference themes are highly overrated anyway.

* I wish it wasn’t in San Francisco, at least not this year. And as I wrote in an earlier post, I wish it wasn’t going to be held in more or less the same place as the CCCCs because it puts me into a situation where I really have to make a choice. I simply can’t afford to go to both, and, unless something dramatic happens, I’ll be skipping C&W this year.

As little as five years ago, the C&W conference had a hard time finding folks willing to host the conference. So the result was (and has continued to be) that the conference would be held anywhere someone was willing to hold it. In recent years, the conference has been in South Dakota, central Illiniois, and Indiana (at Purdue and at Ball State).

I understand the problem the organizers have– sometimes you gotta have it where people are willing to have it. But as I understand it, there is a growing interest in hosting the conference, and it just seems to me that it would have made more sense to try to get the 2005 version of the conference someplace out east and to get the folks at Stanford to do it in 2006.

But hey, I’m not on the inside of how these things are done, and I’m sure there are factors I’m unaware of, too. The advantages of being an outsider, I suppose.

There’s been some good discussion on some of the comp/rhet-type blogs I routinely read about the way that the Conference for College Composition and Communication organizes itself and selects presentations. Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff summarizes and links to other folks in this post right here, so no need for me to re-link again and again.

A few thoughts based on what folks have said in these places:

* The CCCCs doesn’t allow for multiple submissions, but in a way, it kind of does. You can only propose one “panel speaking” role, but you can also propose a role on a “special interest group” (SIG) or a workshop. For example, this past year, I was part of proposals for a panel, a workshop, and a SIG, and the only one that got accepted was for the SIG. A minor role for certain, but enough of a role to seek funding from EMU and to justify the expense on my taxes.

* I kind of like Jenny’s and Clancy’s idea about making the confernence on big huge collection of SIGs, which would mean that just about anyone who wanted some speaking role could have one. But at the same time, what I’d like to see at that sort of version of the CCCCs would be several highly select and competitive panels, and I suppose I say that because of my own habits. When I go to the CCCCs, I tend to go to two different kinds of presentations: I go to panels/roundtables/etc. about things I don’t know much about, and I tend to go to the “big-wig” presentations.

I very rarely go to things at the CCCCs about computers and technology (well, with the acception of the panels I’m on) because that’s stuff I already know about. Tell me something new. And I like going to the really crowded “rock star” panels because, hey, they’re rock stars! The last one of these I remember going to featured Wayne Booth and Peter Elbow. A lot of what they said was, er, “problematic,” but hey, it was still pretty cool to see these two guys doing their spiel.

* I have perhaps gotten too old, but conferences in general are not as important to me as they were when I was first starting out. Back in grad school, I went to as many conferences as I could afford (and some I couldn’t afford) and, because it was all new to me then, I did learn a lot. Of course it also gave me something to put on my CV, and frankly, it’s easier to get a conference presentation on your CV than an article or a chapter or something like that.

I still enjoy seeing folks f2f that I interact with electronically during the rest of the year, and I like traveling. There’s a reason I proposed three different things this year to the conference in San Francisco: I haven’t been there in years. But more and more, the presentations I see at conferences– especially things like the CCCCs or MLA– are sort of the same old “confernence stuff” that I’ve seen for years. It ain’t new anymore, which is why the titles and styles of presentations that come up in the comments to Jenny’s post here are so funny.

I’ve reached a point in time in my academic life where I need to spend my time writing things that have a chance of being published some place– I’ve had plenty of conference presentations. And I’ve reached a point in my personal/finanical life where I can’t afford to wrecklessly put $1000 on my credit card just to add another sentence or two to the CV or just to go drink beer with my email pals.

Well, almost zero. I actually have five messages in my inbox, but these won’t be there by the end of the day because they are all things I will be responding to and addressing very soon.

This might not seem like that big of a deal, but considering the fact that I had over 1000 messages in my inbox when I started “thinning out” my email yesterday, I think this is a pretty good accomplishment. I get a lot of email, and one of my bad habits when I get busy with things is to look at the messages in my inbox, answer/deal with the things I absolutely have to deal with, and ignore the rest. This works okay for a couple of days, but if you do it for a couple of months, you get a big mess.

We’ll see how long I can stay at zero. I’ve got some “rules” set up so that mail from two of my classes automatically gets filed away some place, as does all the mail from WPA-L, a mailing list I read off and on. (Lately, I’ve been kind of “off;” I think there are over 1000 messages in that folder that are unread.) But for the time-being, I will bask in the glory of a moment of cleanness.

Now I have to attack my computer desktop– not to mention my “real” desktop, my office, my yard, my…

This morning, there’s this article in the Ann Arbor News,“Eastern Michigan University admits errors and outlines changes.” To quote from the lead in the article in the paper (which is different from what’s available on the web) :

In a marked about-face, Eastern Michigan University apologized for errors it made in the University House project and promised to do better in the future.

In its official response to the state audit of the president’s house, EMU said a number of changes are already in place to make sure errors are not repeated. “We’re ready to move on,” said John Beaghan, vice president for business and finance who prepared the response. “We’re saying ‘this is what happened, these are the changes that have been made, let’s move on.'”

On the one hand, this is obviously a good thing because finally, FINALLY, the administration has admitted that they’ve screwed up. On the other hand, this “let’s just move on” response doesn’t seem enough to me. I mean, don’t people generally lose their jobs for these kinds of mistakes? Arguably, that’s what has already happened with Kirkpatrick (the former president) and Schollaert (soon to be the former provost). But it seems to me there are a couple of other folks who should have to do more than say “sorry” for this mess.

I realized this morning that it’s been days and days since I’ve posted to this unofficial life blog, and I haven’t said anything too terribly interesting over at the official blog, either. So, for the millions of regular readers, thought I’d post a couple highlights from the past week’s adventures:

* This is the first full week of school for me, and I was swamped with a project and classes. Oh wait, that’s something that belongs on the other blog… Oh well, it explains in part why I’m not posting much on this blog.

* My weight continues to head south, though slowly, in a sort of “two step forwards and one step back” fashion. As I noted in a post a week ago, I was down -16 or so pounds. The very next day, we went to a wedding (Annette’s chiropractor, believe it or not) and after that indulgence, I was at -12 pounds. Earlier in the week, I had briefly cracked the -15 pound barrier again; this morning, after being a bit naughty yesterday, I’m back at -13.

* Annette and I watched Bad Santa last night. Freakin’ hilarious movie. And I’m totally sold on the Netflix, by the way. We watch on average one or two movies a week, so I think the $20 a month fee is worth it for us, especially since there are no late fees.

* Later today, Will is going to a “Harry Potter-themed” birthday party, where all of the children are expected to show up in costume as a particular character. Will has been assignd (?) the role of Fang, who is Haggrid’s dog. I looked up some instructions for making a dog costume on the web, and I will be constructing the outfit this morning.

* Steve B. and I made a field trip on Friday to the Apple store in Novi because I was told that they had a combination printer/document-feed scanner/photocopier on sale there for $130 with a $100 rebate. Close. It didn’t have the document feed feature, which is all I really want. Still, it was a pleasant enough trip.

* At some point today, I need to do some more yard work.