Posts

Posted on

Weather Babies, part 2

A couple weeks ago, I complained about what I referred to as the “weather babies” of the Ypsi School District (and all the other districts in the area) that canceled school just because of a little ice. Well, the weather babies have struck again. School was canceled today due to the cold, and, as I found out via an automated phone call just about 20 minutes ago, it will be canceled tomorrow, too.

Babies.

Look, I don’t want to get all “when-I-was-a-kid-we-walked-through-snow-up-to-our necks” on everyone, but the idea of canceling school just because it’s cold, well, I think that’s silly. I mean, school is an indoor activity, people!

But I also fully admit that much of this attitude comes from my hearty Iowa upbringing. It is always colder in my hometown of Cedar Falls, sometimes considerably colder. It doesn’t happen often, but every other year or so, it doesn’t get above zero in Cedar Falls for about a week (and it is fairly common for it to stay below freezing in my northern Iowa homeland for 40 days or longer in the dead of winter). Do they cancel school? Hell no! Not unless things have changed a lot. Snow, ice, tornadoes– those are reasons to cancel school. Too cold? Put on a freakin’ sweater.

So c’mon, SE Michigan weather babies (because it seems that every school district in this part of the state has already canceled classes for tomorrow), toughen up a bit! It ain’t that bad.

Oh, and a PS: at least the Ypsi school district decided to call at 10:20 instead of at their usual 5 am. Unless they decide to call tomorrow morning too….

Posted on

An Infobits Treasuretrove for Online Teaching Stuff

The latest “Infobits” (which comes out of the University of North Carolina’s Info Tech services area) is particularly useful for the likes of me, someone who is teaching online and someone who is teaching a course about teaching with technology. Lots of stuff about online teaching and also about social software in the college classroom. I think my reading list for my grad class might have just changed again. Anyway, check it out.

Posted on

Blogs as Writerly Spaces: The proposal

When I am advising students who are working on their thesis or a final writing project as part of our MA in Written Communication, my most common bit o’ wisdom is that when you’re working on a project like that, you have to “touch it” every day. I’m not suggesting to these students that they work on their projects for an hour or two every day (though, if you can be that disciplined/regimented, that’s probably a good thing), because different days will afford you different amounts of time. But, I tell my students, even if you have all kinds of other work and life responsibilities and the like, you still should try to at least touch your project, just to keep it in the back of your mind. Sometimes, that will mean spending just a few minutes on it. But those few minutes, I tell my students, will help you on those days when you really do have time to work on your project in more detail, and those few minutes at a time will help you keep on your long-term goal of finishing.

Like I said, this is advice I give to my students, but like so many other pieces of advice, it’s easier given than followed.

Well, today I’ve decided to start taking my own advice and I’m going to make myself get back into the swing of a project I’m calling Blogs as Writerly Spaces. Thus the category here of “BAWS.”

My first “touch” on this project (and to be honest, I see only touches on this thing for the next couple weeks at least, but hey, I’m still following my own fine advice) has been to revisit the proposal I submitted for a sabbatical for next year. I’d be of course curious to find out what others out there have to say about it– oh, and if you’re a book publisher and want to offer me a contract straight-away, let me know.

I’ve obviously got a lot of thinking, researching, interviewing, writing, etc., to do on this yet. But I will say that it’s nice to look back at this proposal, something I haven’t paid much attention to for about two and a half months, and still be reasonably happy with it.

Posted on

On NyQuil

I’ve had a cold for the last couple of days– not one of those “agh, pass me the puke bucket” kind if sicknesses (I think I’ve managed to dodge that bullet this year, and that’s saying something since this was going around at work big-time in December), but just one of those “I feel just miserable enough to complain about it, but not quite miserable enough to just stay away from work” colds.

In the words of Lewis Black, this is just the sort of event that allows me to indulge in my favorite drug, NyQuil. Or at least it was my favorite drug– see below. Every time I’ve gone to the doctor with something like what I have right now, they either seem to suggest NyQuil or to at least say that there’s nothing wrong with it.

I went out and bought me a double-pack of NyQuil and settled down to have my dose before bed. Of course, I chose the original flavor, but this did beg the question last night as I was pouring out my shot: what flavor is the original flavor?

I asked Annette. Her response was “What’s wrong with you?!”

So, naturally, I turned to the Internets for an answer. Oddly, even with this fine wikipedia entry, I could not find a satisfying answer to my question. Apparently, Denis Leary once described the flavor as “Green Death,” but to me, that would be more ashy-flavored.

Anyway, last night, I think I actually had a bit of a reaction to the NyQuil. I ended waking up at about 1 am with a dry hack and a hard time breathing. I ended getting up and drinking about six glasses of water, and then this morning, I went out and bought a humidifier. Hopefully, that will help.

Oh, and I think I know what the flavor of NyQuil “original” is: Jägermeister. Which makes a certain amount of sense because because Jäger is kind of a medicinal liquor. And it’ll mess you up bad.

Maybe I’ll try to use the left of my NyQuil to make a flaming moe or something….

Posted on

Apple Gives Microsoft the Smack-down

Via the Apple “Startup Page” on my Safari browser, I came across this Twin Cities Press dot com article, “Vista’s pretty, but it’s a shameless Mac OS X imitator.” I just think it’s so, I dunno, pissy that Apple decided to have this on their web site the day of the big Vista roll-out.

Of course, it has been pretty-well documented that the headline here is true– that is, that Vista is pretty much like the Mac with a few windoze features thrown in. Which leads the folks at the Twin Cities Press to make this observation:

Vista hardly rocked my world during weeks of testing. It’s a fine Windows upgrade, but it’s also a shameless rip-off (and not quite the equal) of another major operating system, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X.

That begs the question: Why not just use OS X?

Those upgrading from XP likely will have to get a new computer anyway because Vista doesn’t work properly on most older PCs. (See my recent column, “Take your time buying that new computer,” for details on this.) So, instead of purchasing a Windows PC, they could — and typically should — get an Apple Macintosh computer running OS X.

Really, I don’t care if PC users in general convert or not, but if it is true that the new Windoze/Vista is basically the same as the Apple OS, then I can imagine a future where I have students who aren’t completely stumped with the Macs in our computer labs.

Posted on

A blog reading round-up

I’ve been totally swamped the last week or so with all sorts of different life and school things lately (thus my lack of blogging here). For one thing, I’m behind (though getting caught up) with my online teaching. For another, I’m being paperworked to death because I’m applying for promotion this year, which mainly means putting together a report and a thick binder of materials to make my case. So that’s why I haven’t been around here lately.

But I decided to try to do a little blog reading at least this morning. Here are a couple of links to things I found, some stuff to read later, some things that were interesting, etc.

  • Collin has a post here about reading/re-reading John Trimbur’s 2003 article “Changing the Question: Should Writing be Studied?” He links to posts by a couple of others thinking about this stuff too. About a month or two ago, I wrapped up my very small part of a collaborative editing project of a forthcoming issue of Composition Studies that discusses what a writing major might look like, and I’ve got a meeting later today about changes we want to make to our own undergraduate major in writing. So to me, the answer to Trimbur’s question (without really reading what he had to say or even too closely what Collin et al have to say) is “yes.” Of course, what’s more interesting is why the answer is yes, and that’s why it’s worth reading Collin’s, Jeff’s, and Donna’s posts.
  • Speaking of things I don’t have time to read right now but I’ll have to come back to later: Bitch PhD posted her MLA presentation, something that I wrote about here a few weeks ago.
  • Via Anne 2.0, I like this post, “The Most Tiresome Cliché in Technology Today,” which is “Make it easy enough for my mom to use.” To quote briefly: “I doubt any of my three kids will ever say that. They might say ‘make it easy enough for my dad to use’ because in our house it’s dad who’s the more technologically clueless.”
  • The new issue of Kairos is out, and, just browsing the TOC, I can see one (possibly two or three) articles to include in my current online graduate course. More things to read later.
  • John Walters says there’s a bunch of audio in the Ong collection available online now. Something to listen to while I’m reading these other things I’m going to read later. Actually, this might also be a good thing to have for teaching Ong, too.
  • And finally, I relate quite a bit to Jeff’s YouTube surfing efforts.

Oh, and in the spirit of somewhat random YouTube sites and academia mashed together, I give you Derrida talking about writing:

Posted on

Restaurant Review: Vinology

What and Where:

Vinology | 110 South Main Street | Ann Arbor, MI 48104 734-222-9841

Ratings (1=terrible, 5=mind-blowingly great)

  • Tastiness: 2.5
  • Service: 2
  • Price (1=super cheap, 5=super expensive): 5
  • Value: 1.5
  • General vibe: 3

    • Comments

    • My millions of regular readers will know that it’s been a long time since I’ve done a restaurant review in quite a while. Why? Well, mainly because I haven’t been any place new worth writing about one way or the other in a long time. Until Vinology.
    • I went here on a work-related event with three other people. Which was good because a) I got to hear about a few different dishes in one stop and b) I didn’t have to pay for it (in theory, because I need to be reimbursed for the bill, but that’s another story).
    • Overall, the food isn’t that good and it is horrifically over-priced.
    • They promote themselves as a wine bar, and indeed, they’ve got lots of wine. They have this kind of cool wine menu scheme where they have a very user/amateur-friendly wine drinking menu, but the problem is that a glass of wine on the low-end in this place is $8, and on the higher-end, it’s $15.
    • We ordered a cheese appetizer that I think was at least $12. It was a choice of three different cheeses, which was nice. But if it added up to 8 ounces of cheese, I’ll chew on the glass the wine came in. I mean, I don’t want to be a cheapskate here, but this just seemed out of line to me.
    • They have a “small plate” menu, but we all had main courses. One diner had the Kobe steak, and she loved it. Another had a roasted chicken, and her impression was that it was “okay.” A third diner had the cobb salad. He said he ordered this based the menu description that promised lobster, but he said it was mostly lettuce. I had a duck dish that I thought was kind of on the icky side– far too sweet, odd chunks of meat, and, inexplicably, it included white bread toast. So one for four.
    • We all split a desert, some kind of hazelnut torte thing, and that was pretty tasty.
    • The service was, well, earnest I suppose, but it was pretty slow, and this on a night where the place was pretty empty.
    • So the verdict from me is this is a good place to go and get a glass of wine (and maybe a desert) after you eat someplace else.