Posts

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One more blog design revision… I think…

I’ve been playing with the layout here for a while now, and I think I’m going to try straightening this out one more time over the weekend. The idea is to try to get this layout to work with a few customizations so that it is in the same style of my unofficial blog. My goal is to have a nice layout for my various sites and then to not think about it much for the next year or so. But I might give up and just pick a new layout. We’ll see.

Anyway, to anyone checking this site out over the next few days: pardon the dust.

Update:
Well, if you are looking at this in August 2007, then you’re seeing the update– at least as much of an update as I’m willing to deal with for now. It’s a VERY basically hacked version of the theme vSlider; if you follow the link, you’ll see the minor changes I made here. I was going to try to change the color scheme of this site so that it’s similar but different from my unofficial blog; instead, I just have a different set of header pictures on this site, pictures from my office and around campus at EMU.

Anyway, this will have to do until I learn more about PHP, which is a possible sabbatical lite side project.

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Steve plays with photobooth

Steve as Pop Art

There’s an article coming out in the Ann Arbor News this Sunday where they interviewed me about the community blog I run as one of my (too) many side projects, EMUTalk.org. They needed a head-shot of me and I don’t really have one, so Annette took a real picture that I sent on to the newspaper. But after I got done with the real picture, I started playing around a bit with the Apple application, Photo Booth. It’s fun, albeit only modestly useful. Anyway, I put together a tiny flickr set of Photo Booth head-shots, including the one included above.

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Super-duper cool iBook Mod

I found this via boing-boing while looking for something else: The Kowal Portable Typewriter and Adding Machine, which is the creation of one Mary Robinette Kowal, who is a professional puppeteer and sometime writer.

I wouldn’t want to copy exactly what she did here of course, but this does get me to think. I have an iBook which has been sitting largely idle since I set up my fine dual monitor desktop set-up at home and since I’ve made use of a very sweet 17 inch Powerbook owned by EMU. But this is just the kind of thing that I could/should do to my slightly older but still quite usable G4 iBook to make it a very groovy writing machine.

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Just when I start to work on a book…

… comes a new wave (well, ripple, at least) of articles/reports contemplating new modes of academic publishing.

I have to read all of these things more closely to really comment on them in any detail, but let’s just that I find all of this excitement about the “next great idea” to rescue academic publishing a bit, um, dated. Don’t get me wrong– I think that these projects are great ideas, and they were great ideas 10 or 8 years ago when people in fields like computers and composition and journals like Kairos first started kicking them around, too.

It does make me wonder about the home of my still largely imaginary Blogs as Writerly Spaces project (at this stage of the writing/thinking process, wondering abut who will publish my book is a lot like me wondering how I could spend my lottery winnings). Unless I end up writing something that has mass-market appeal, I suspect that my “book” will be published along the lines of the Rice UP and/or Ithaka models.

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Emoticons/Blogging Emotions

Two recent things that I frankly haven’t read yet but both of which might be useful in teaching:

  • (-: Just Between You and Me ;-) from the New York Times about emoticons. I can think of many teaching situations in which students like to talk about emoticons, for bad or good.
  • The Emotions that Make Us Link is a kind of fluff-piece about the emotional motivation for linking to different kinds of blog entries. It appears to be based on no evidence, no references to rhetoric (and, of course, the use of emotions in rhetorical appeals is a pretty old game), and seems powered mostly by photos of the author. I guess I am linking here because, um, of a combination of envy and humor? But it also is one of those things that might be a good conversation starter about blogging in a variety of different classes.
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Furoshiki and other alternatives to bags

I found this via jill/txt: “How to use ‘Furoshiki'” from the Ministry of the Environment in Japan. Basically, a furoshiki is traditional way of folding a square cloth to carry stuff. I also found this YouTube video where a dude in the store makes a couple of different furoshiki bags. I was both amused and oddly comforted by the fact that at the end of that YouTube video, we see Japanese folks carrying their wares out of the furoshiki store in– I kid you not– paper bags.

Anyway, I don’t know if the furoshiki is a practical solution for my grocery shopping, but I have been thinking lately that it might be worthwhile to invest in some basic canvas shopping bags. Eco-friendly, convenient, etc.