Posts

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Audioblogger soon to be no more….

Well, this is a bummer: according to the folks at Boing Boing, the audioblogger feature on blogger– which allows you to literally call in an audio file over the phone and post it to your blogger blog– is going to be closed down on November 1.

It figures. Computers and Composition Online recently published a special issue on sound that includes my article/website/podcast “Broadcast Composition,” and one of the things I talk about in that piece is the advantages of using audioblogger as a teaching tool.

I thought audioblogger was a pretty cool service– at least when it worked (it was always a little buggy). Make a phone call, talk for up to five minutes, and it automatically posts. That’s it. Super easy, and free is a really good price.

Well, the good news is there are other services, notably Odeo, which I think has more or less cornered the market on free podcasting. You can’t use the phone to record podcasts, but you can use their software– as long as you’ve got a microphone on your computer. And, as the Boing Boing piece points out, there are other services for recording audio for the web over the phone out there.

Still, I’ll miss the audioblogger stuff….

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Wish I was there– or there (maybe)

I stumbled across the web site for “Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences,” which is sponsored by a group I had not heard of before this, the Association of Internet Researchers. It’s going on in Australia.

“Stumbled” is perhaps the wrong word. I came across this because Alex Halavais is blogging about it, along with his travel experiences.

Or, perhaps, I should be here, at BlogTalk Reloaded, which is happening in (I think) Vienna. Jill Walker has been blogging about this one lots and lots.

Of course, the fact that these conferences are on different continents than mine does present a bit of a challenge on my modest travel budget. Besides, both of these conferences, given their topics, have lots of stuff available about them via their web sites, which is why these might be good sites to return to when I start planning my winter 2007 version of English 516. And it’s also why maybe I don’t actually need to be there.

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TC Weekend, Sept/Oct 2006




TC Weekend, Sept/Oct 2006

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

I’m super-duper pooped from a great weekend up in Traverse City, but I thought I’d post a little something about the whole whirlwind of a trip. Kind of in the order of the trip, but also in the order I remembered it:

  • We drove up there in pretty crappy rain, but by the time we got up there, it was just kind of grey.
  • Big BIG ups to our hosts with the mosts John and Karen. John and I were in the comp/rhet program at BGSU together way back when. He and Karen were just very generous and kind and just a ton of fun. Too much fun on Saturday night, but that’s a whole different story.
  • One of our missions was to check out the cabin/house that my side of the family (well, really, my parents) are going to rent next summer. It looks like it’s going to be as cool as this web site suggests.
  • Drove around, went to the beach (see above), saw changing leaves, talked textbook publishing and teaching and stuff, went to Cherry Republic, bought cherry ketchup after much encouragement from John and Karen.
  • We ended up at a very nice restaurant, getting a table after all the homecoming dance kids cleared out. Will was pretty sleepy by then, and the nice folks at this restaurant let him stretch out on a booth bench. They even got him a little pillow.
  • Stayed up way too late Saturday. And I don’t know if it was a good idea to have three different bottles of wine open at the same time….
  • Toured around this morning on Mission Peninsula, hiked a little, looked at pretty views a lot, had a little lunch, and then said our farewells.
  • Not much to report about the drive back, but we stopped at a very cool veggie and fruit market, which included this amusing sale of water-logged golfballs.

Not a lot of pictures, but the set from this trip is here.


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Good CSS Article (or, something else that has been pushed to the side lately…)

I have skimmed through this morning an article on A List Apart called “12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards.” It strikes me immediately as the sort of thing that would be perfect for a class I teach about once a year, Writing for the World Wide Web.

Then I remembered that I was planning on developing an online version of this course for Spring 2007. I had intended to get this into the pipeline/python of getting the proper departmental approvals and such at the beginning of the school year.

And then I remembered: of course, the strike.

It is funny (not in a ha-ha way, of course) the ways in which the strike and its on-going aftermath rears its ugly head.

In any event, it’s a good article on CSS….

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Some interesting NPR links

I’ve been pretty swamped the last couple days with this pesky school stuff. For one thing, my schedule this term is already starting to present problems. Mondays, which are the one day of the week I am teaching this semester, are also the most popular days around EMU for meetings. And a big part of my job as “Emperor of Writing” is to go to meetings. In other words, Mondays are pretty nuts.

Second, there’s been some stuff going on lately that is, um, problematic at best.

Anyway, a couple of interesting links that might come in handy for teaching and other things via NPR “Morning Edition:”

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Getting into college in the first place…

See this Wired News article, “Websites Help Sort College Entry.” Basically, it highlights some of the clearinghouses for information on applying for college: admission standards, student reviews, tips, costs, etc., etc.

It’s interesting because, despite the fact that I am a college professor, I really don’t have much of a clue about how much it costs to attend, about applying to schools, etc., etc. I suppose I’ll figure that stuff out in the next 8 or 9 years with my son though….

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New iMac/Distraction…

iMac w/monitor

EMU sometimes does smart things, and one of the smarter things they’ve done in recent years (IMO) is agressively “refresh” older computers in faculty and staff offices. Generally, folks get a new desktop computer around here every three or so years. There are some problems with that system still, but it is better than it used to be for sure.

Anyway, I was due and and got a new iMac on Wednesday. I also managed to waste piddle away spend too much time getting this machine set up and to get my old computer for someone else in the department who really needs a new machine. Oh well; I guess it means I’ll spend tomorrow working instead of reading the newspapers.

I had an extra monitor in my office left behind by the thieves who took the Mac Mini server that we used to have in here (we now, at least for the time being, are using an iLamp configuration Mac for that). So I decided to hook it up to this new desktop. I did it mainly because I could, and yeah, I know it has a bit of a “these amps go up to 11” quality to it, but I couldn’t resist. And I am enjoying the screen real estate this gets me, too.

Click the link on the picture there to get the flickr with notes tour.

Also, if you’re really curious, you can take a look at this little movie I shot with the iSight camera on the iMac— as much to see if I could do it as anything else. It’s 5 MB. Yes, I have a lot of stupid junk in my office.

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Misc. Catch-Up on RSS Feed Reading, part 2

To continue what I started the other day (though it’s hopeless to pretend I’ll catch up on reading stuff in my feeds– there are over 700 unread entries today):

I think that’s about as caught up as I’m going to get. Time to mark all as read and move on….