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"Happy Blogiversary," from WSJ.com

Just as I am ready to get back from vacation and ease into quasi-sabbatical mode, I stumbled across this article, “Happy Blogiversary,” from the WSJ.com. It is a pretty good and rather long article that spells out the “state of affairs” of blogging, at least from the point of view of a rather conservative newspaper about the world of business. This is certainly something that would be useful to teach a variety of different classes for sure.

Actually, it’s one of those articles that, in relationship to my “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project, I find simultaneously really helpful and really intimidating. It’s helpful because it features a number of famous and semi-famous folks– bloggers and not– talking about why they read/write blogs, and it includes some interesting history. But it’s intimidating because it is one of those articles that, in very basic terms, probably sums up the point I’m trying to make with this project. And if my project can be summed up in a WSJ article, well, is my sabbatical project really a project?

These are normal doubts and misgivings at the beginning of a big project like this, I suppose. It feels a little like working on my dissertation. I recall going through these oscillations where I felt like my diss was literally about everything and therefore impossible, and/or that my diss was common sense and therefore irrelevant. I suspect this project will take some similar turns.

Oh well. I’m just easing into this project. The first things I’m going to do is read and clean my desk, so it’ll be a while before I have to doubt myself too much.

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Home again

We had a lovely time “Up North” this past week. Here’s a link to a collection of flickr picts. In no particular order, here are some random thoughts:

  • This is the first time I’ve been up near Traverse City when I actually didn’t have a whole lot to do with Traverse City. We were staying out at a place near Lake Ann, and we actually only went into to TC one day, in part because we were up there during the dreaded Cherry Festival. Mostly, we hung around Glen Arbor, Empire, and the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lake Shore.
  • My parents rented this gigantic vacation home/cabin called “The Eagles Nest.” We never inquired, but hopefully it had nothing to do with Hitler. Seriously though, it was a great place. Slept 18 people comfortably, great views, very comfy, etc., etc. It made me appreciate cabin aesthetics, too.
  • This is the first trip I’ve taken like this where I’ve thought about how it would be cool to have a cabin. Nothing like this place we stayed of course, but just a place a few hours away in the pseudo-wilderness. It’d be nice to have a place like that to go and write and read and hang out. Maybe someday.
  • Lotsa hiking around with friends (John and Karen M!) and family, mostly through good weather.
  • Some fun golf at a place just down the road from us called Mistwood which turned out to be just a fantastic course. My dad and I played there one day with Will and one of his cousins (just 9 holes, and Will spent most of the time reading), and then the next day me and him for 18, and then my mom and dad the day after that for 9 holes. There’s a lot of great deals up there– my regular golf friends and I might need to check out some of the deals up there.
  • It probably was a good idea for me to not have regular Internet access up there. Relaxing. I might have to figure out how to ration my WiFi access in “real” life, too.

And now we’re here in Ypsi-Arbor for the rest of the summer. No European travel this year, but maybe some gardening.

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Up North

Up North PictureBlogging (and most everything else, happily) will be very slow or completely on hold this week as I am with my extended family (my parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, kids, etc.) “up north,� in a small town near Traverse City. This is the view from the back porch of this house; very peaceful.

I suppose it’s a good thing too that there isn’t any internet access out at this place—I’m sending this message now from a coffee shop in TC. It’s perhaps a good thing for me to unplug at least a little before I head into full-frontal sabbatical-fueled scholarship/ research work.

Anyway, I might post again, I might not.

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Up North

Up North PictureBlogging (and most everything else, happily) will be very slow or completely on hold this week as I am with my extended family (my parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, kids, etc.) “up north,” in a small town near Traverse City. This is the view from the back porch of this house; very peaceful.

I suppose it’s a good thing too that there isn’t any internet access out at this place—I’m sending this message now from a coffee shop in TC. It’s perhaps a good thing for me to unplug at least a little before I head into full-frontal sabbatical-fueled scholarship/ research work.

Anyway, I might post again, I might not.

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The futility of Wii stalking

All right, you Wii making bastards, I give up. Eventually, Will and I will get one; but it’s going to be based on luck/chance and that’s it. Here’s why:

On Thursday, I dropped off Will at his day camp and then went over to the Food (W)Hole to have some coffee and a bagel and to check my email and browse blogs. There’s a GameStop store in this strip mall complex, and I’ve gotten into the habit of poking my head into the store when I’m around and asking if they have any Wiis. The answer is always no. But on Thursday, when I was there when the store opened, the dude at the counter said “no, but I think there might be some coming in on today’s UPS delivery,” which was going to come in some time between 11 am and noon.

So I went next door to the Panera, got some coffee, and set myself and my laptop out front. I was able to get some work done from Panera’s wifi connection and enjoy the lovely day while waiting for the UPS truck to bring the Wii that would soon be mine. Life was good.

Around 11:30 or so, the big brown truck arrived. I packed my stuff up, feeling very clever at my Wii stalking and very confident that I too would soon be playing virtual tennis and boxing and bowling. But when I walked in the store, I saw a small group of geeky guys hanging around. It turns out they were in line, and, as one of the geeky ones informed me, if you weren’t in the store, you weren’t in line. Two of these guys had been there since the store opened– that is, they were standing around inside a game store for 90 minutes waiting for a Wii. In other words, while I was hanging around outside and actually enjoying some fresh air, these guys were hardcore stalking.

Well, since I was sixth in line, I thought it was worth hanging around. So me and my five fellow geeky Wii stalkers waited anxiously as the UPS guy disappeared into the back of the store followed by the game store dude. Oh, the anticipation! Would there be six games? Would there be only two? But a few minutes later, the game store dude came back out and said “Sorry folks, no Wiis today.” Jeez. He might as well have said “Sorry folks, Christmas is canceled this year.”

Bastards.

So that’s it for me. As far as I can tell, the only way to buy a Wii console nowadays is by spending way too much money or by pure chance. One of my former students bought a Wii this way, and this seems like my best bet.

By the way, if anyone out there want to buy me a Wii, let me know.

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The Ypsilanti July 4 Parade: The Movie

Here’s a video version of how the Ypsi July 4 parade went this year. A good time was had by one and all, though this wasn’t actually the best of Ypsi parades, as Annette’s “eh, it was all right” reaction at the end might suggest. Anyway, enjoy the movie, shot entirely with my Flip Video camera, edited with iMovie on the Mac and with a march from an album I copied from the Ypsi public library called “Hail, Sousa!”

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iPhone envy, part 2: I touched it

A couple days ago, I stopped by a AT&T store and I spent about fifteen minutes playing with an iPhone. It wasn’t a religious experience or anything, but it was pretty cool.

I happened to be there when the store opened at 10 am, so there was no one else in there when I arrived. They had a couple of iPhones leashed down at a display up front, so I went and played for a few minutes before I had to go on to scheduled meetings for the day. I tinkered with the phone for about five seconds, mostly because I am familiar with the way phones work and to me, it’s the least exciting feature of the iPhone. I didn’t mess with the mail program since it looks like Apple’s Mail software, which would mean that I probably couldn’t do much in the way of try it out without actually setting it up. I forgot to look at the iPod features for some reason. On the home screen, there are some buttons/options that I would never use, things like checking stock prices, and I didn’t bother to figure out if there was a way to configure the preferences on the main page (there probably is).

What I mostly played around with was the browser, which is very VERY nice. It works like they advertise. You enter in a URL with a tiny thumb keyboard (a touchscreen/virtual keyboard of course) and a very tiny but surprisingly clear of a web page comes up, basically as it would display in Safari. You tap twice on the part you want to magnify and it zooms in to that portion. Then you can move around this magnified image to different parts of the web page, sort of like the way you can move around a map on the web. When you tap a box where you can enter text, you get a cursor and a the tiny thumb keyboard. I actually commented on my previous iPhone post with it.

So while I’m still not going to go out and buy one, I would think about it seriously if my phone contract was up.

Two other things though:

When I was in the store, this guy came in, and, kinda determined-like, he went right up to the store clerk dude standing next to me and said “I want to know if this thing can replace my Blackberry.” So the clerk hands him the other iPhone and starts to point out some features, but determined dude just starts clicking away. Literally, two minutes later, he announces that no indeed, this is no replacement for his Blackberry and he storms out. Obviously, he was trying to prove a previously made conclusion, though he might be right: if all you need is a phone and something to check your email, then a Blackberry might be a better choice. If you want what amounts to a really little computer with a phone and an iPod, then the iPhone might be a better choice.

Second, jill/txt has a really good post here that links to another post about a dude who figured out how to make an iPhone work the way I want it to work– not as a phone at all but just a wifi mini-computer with an iPod– and that also lists some of the things the iPhone won’t do that most European cell phone users are used to doing with their phones. Kinda interesting.

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danah boyd myspace v. facebook article (and a BAWS example?)

Via jill/txt, I came across this entry from apophenia (Danah Boyd’s blog) called “viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” I think it’s interesting, though not necessarily because of the subject matter. Boyd (or, I guess I should say, boyd) more or less argues that there is a class difference between users of MySpace and Facebook– I’ve only skimmed the article, but most of her claims seem reasonable albeit sweeping. For example, she suggests that teens from poorer backgrounds are more likely to be on MySpace than Facebook. That might be true, though at EMU, I’m always surprised by the number of my juniors and seniors who have almost no experience with either of these services.

In any event, I’m not really that interested in boyd’s argument per se (though I think this link could be useful in a class like English 516 or English 444 in a discussion about social bookmarking software), mainly because I have a really hard time getting too excited about either one of these services. I realize this is a bad attitude because there are serious people out there– like boyd, for example– who do serious scholarly work on these Internet environments.

What I’m more interested in is how this figures into my Blogs as writerly spaces project– at least in my own head. boyd wrote this essay– I do not know if she was deadly serious about it or if it was just a toss-off piece– and posted it to her blog. Suddenly, she’s getting a ton of comments and even reflecting here on this unusual level of attention. Her reaction in some ways seems similar to my own reaction on my blog when I was getting an insane number of hits posting about the EMU faculty strike. But while I felt compelled to write even more as a result of this new-found audience, boyd seems to be not that thrilled with the attention. In fact, this post suggests a certain level of “stop bugging me about this already.”

Now, I’m just brainstorming here, and I don’t really know how much of this figures into what BAWS will look like ultimately. I mean, boyd is already something of an internet celebrity, so I presume she’s used to the attention. I am not sure this particular essay has much of an impact in terms of her motivations to write or not write on a blog, though I suppose it has created an unusual exigency from her point of view. It also occurs to me now that a lot of what we’re talking about here is what can only be described as a viral text– and I have no idea why I haven’t made that connection up to this point. In my C&W presentation, I talked about the role that search engines and such figure into the functioning of rhetorical situations, and I think it’s begining to gel more clearly in my head that it is something like this.

And that ain’t that clear, is it?

In any event, I’m going to be following danah’s blog for a while, and we’ll see where it goes with this idea….

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Actual conversation I heard today while on the way to the U of Michigan library

Scene: A truly beautiful Sunday afternoon in the heart o’ America of Ann Arbor, MI. Along South University near the University of Michigan. Sparse crowds, but a few students, a few couples, etc.

A boy of about four, maybe five, is following a woman, presumably his mother, down the sidewalk. The boy is visibly upset. The woman, agitated, carries an ice cream cone– from the variety of neon flavors, probably Superman, a flavor only a small child could enjoy.

Boy: (Crying) You’re mean!

Woman: (mumbles something as she approaches).

Boy: You are mean!

Woman: Oh yeah? Well, I think it’s mean that you are making me carry your ice cream cone.

Boy: You’re mean!

And scene….