Our friends Caryl and Clayton sent me this link to an interesting use of wiki technology, WikiThePresidency, sponsored by People for the American Way. Now you can track the failings of W. et al in an entertaining and interactive format!
Word Blogging (and why I probably won't use it)
Relatively reliable rumor has it that the new version of MS Word will include a “blog this” kind of feature. I found this via Alex Halavais’ blog.
I think my main reaction to this is “big deal.” First off, Microsquish comes out with Apple versions of its software almost exactly a year behind the versions for the PC. Second, if Word does “blog stuff” half as well as it deal with HTML code, then we’ll have a mighty mighty crappy product indeed. Third, it will probably remain much easier and efficient to just use something like WordPress or Blogger or whatever because there are all the complications of the server that have to be figured into the process. It’s like using the “publish” feature on something like Dreamweaver: in the end, I just find it easier and a lot more exact to use some kind of ftp or sftp software.
iLife 06 has a blogging software of some sort, one I might play around with more when I have time. For the time-being though, I threw it away to save precious hard drive space.
It would be nice if WordPress had a spell-check though….
Bill's excellent adventure
Colleague and friend Bill Hart-Davidson is in Amsterdam Denmark and he’s blogging about the experience. Feel free to check in and say howdy.
DOPA is dopey
Will “weblogg-ed” Richardson and Alex Halavais have both posted about a bill under discussion in the U.S. Congress that would require schools to ban any web sites where students might see sexy things and/or be exposed to sexual predators. Apparently, the legislation is targeting sites like MySpace but it’s likely to catch all kinds of other services (wikis, blogs, etc.) in its net. Will and Alex say smart stuff about all this.
Personally, I still think MySpace is kind of stupid, and in a way, I don’t have much of a problem with schools blocking it from their computers. I mean, students while at school probably have better things to do than to browse MySpace. But my sense is that most of the kids using MySpace aren’t messing with it at school anyway.
How Wal-Mart might prove that two “wrongs” sometimes makes a “right”
The New York Times has a story today about how Wal-Mart wants to start selling a lot more organic groceries. And, because Wal-Mart is such a bloated monster of a retailer, if it demands that food companies produce more organic products and produce them at a lower price, then food companies will have to produce more organic products. As the article says,
Some organic food advocates applaud the development, saying Wal-Mart’s efforts will help expand the amount of land that is farmed organically and the quantities of organic food available to the public.
But others say the initiative will ultimately hurt organic farmers, will lower standards for the production of organic food and will undercut the environmental benefits of organic farming.
We’ll see; but if the evil Wal-Mart’s bullying demand for more organic processing means a change in the way food is manufactured, I’d say that’s a good thing.
What my iBook makes me think about Web 2.0
Like I know no one here cares, but I’m still happy to report that my laptop should arrive back home this afternoon. The Apple web site is cryptic about what was repaired; I’m curious to see if there will be any more details with the paperwork they send me.
Obviously, I’m very pleased with its pending return, and it has me thinking right now about some of the assumptions/ideas behind the term “Web 2.0.” Now, as I understand it, the whole concept with this is to make web applications/sites more like desktop applications, in part in an effort for people to be able to share and collaborate and stuff like that. You could put various social networking software into this category, but I’m also thinking about sites where you can share bookmarks or store files or even word processing files– I can’t remember the site for that software right now.
This is all fine and good, and I’ve been making use of delicious lately, I think I want to figure out CiteULike, and I’ve found the Google RSS Reader to be very useful. As someone commented earlier, it isn’t exactly a “feature rich” RSS Reader, but the fact that it is a web-based (e.g., Web 2.0) app means I can get to my feeds from anywhere. And I do use two or three different computers on a regular basis.
But still, as this experience with my laptop has taught me, I want to use my computer. Oh sure, I’m not lacking from access, I’ve gotten by. But the PC doesn’t have any of the software I want to use, and my wife’s iBook (which also lacks some software) has a keyboard that feels, well, wrong. Plus her computer doesn’t have my “stuff” on it, doesn’t have the desktop configured the way I like it, doesn’t have the same default colors, etc. I certainly haven’t been able to do any writing of any meaning on these foreign machines. In other words, I guess I still have a physical attachment to my computer, not just any anonymous and universally accessible computer (e.g., Web 2.0).
BTW, the painting at the top comes from “The Playful Painter” blog, which I discovered via boing-boing.
Computer woes, sickness, and Holland
I haven’t been posting much lately, mainly because my computer is visiting the great Apple store in the sky. Actually, I think it’s either in Memphis or Houston, two cities I personally haven’t visited. Long story short, I am getting a long-standing problem with my computer fixed. My basic thinking here is that if I can get my current computer to last another year or two for the $300 I am paying for repair, it’ll be worth it. I write about this on my official blog in more detail here.
But what’s killing me here is that my repair has been delayed. I thought that this would be a quick enough turn-around, maybe as long as five days, tops. But it is looking like it could be much longer than that. This sucks. With Annette’s computer, Will’s PC, and two computers in my office at school, I certainly have adequate access. But not having my computer with my stuff is really killing me here. For one thing, I’m not able to use my computer with my stuff on it. Not right. For another, Will’s computer is a somewhat old PC and the keyboard on Annette’s laptop drives me nuts– a sticky space key makes all the words run together.
Anyway. Hopefully I’ll get some word on my missing iBook in a few days.
(Slight Update: Apple emailed me and informed me that my iBook is repaired and ought to be back this (Friday, May 12) afternoon!)
In other news, I have a cold that simply will not go away. I am relatively sure that it is not allergies, though that may be a factor. In any event, it’s something all of us around here have, and there is not a whole lot in this world than the feeling of being sick in the spring/summer time. The only plus of it all is I haven’t been eating much lately because of it and I’m down another pound or so.
So, all of this combined has delayed my posting about our road-trip last Sunday to Holland, MI as part of their annual “Tulip Time” festival. I spoke with my parents about all this a bit on Tuesday, and they kept saying “oh, that’s just like the tulip thing they do in Pella, Iowa. Oh, you wish, Pella. The Holland festival is THE place for tulip and Dutch celebrating in this country, my friend.
Actually, most of the “big” events are going on this week and this coming weekend, including appearances by (I shit you not) Three Dog Night, Frankie Avalon and The Oak Ridge Boys. Not together, of course, on different nights. Anyway, we were in town on the somewhat quiet opening weekend.
After a kind of crappy lunch where we couldn’t even enjoy a beer because of the area’s overly strict Sunday alcohol laws (Annette was right– we should have just grabbed some corn dogs and went with it), we got into the spirit of things by wandering around a very nice little downtown area.
One of Will’s favorite stores was an old-time candy store, the kind of place that had pretty much everything you could imagine in bins that you could buy by the pound. Here’s Will supervising the weighing of some jelly beans.
Then we found our way to the very nice Windmill Island Park. Here are a few pictures:
Here’s the reading why they call this “Windmill Island,” a mondo-gigantic 240+ year old windmill. Though we never figured out why they called it an “island.”
And here’s why they call it “tulip time.”
Here’s Will in front of some pretty cool black tulips. Really, they were a very very dark purple, but close enough to black.
In any event, a good time was had by one and all, though I have to say that the whole fascination with tulips in general escapes me.
How long does a CEO have to work to make your salary?
I came across this via the Susie Bright blog that is part of the Huffington Post (kind of an interesting collection of stuff): It’s the “Make Work Pay!” site, which lets you calculate how much time the average CEO has to work in order to make your salary.
It’s kind of problematic because the web site itself is kind of annoying– the first rule of good web site design is to not start playing music and/or video at me without asking, and that’s what this site does– and the calculator is probably a bit off. As someone on the Susie Bright site pointed out, if you enter in an hourly rate, the calculator assumes a CEO who is working 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.
Still, it puts it gives a little perspective.
Something you are not likely to see here
From an Inside Higher Ed article titled “Overexposed?” comes this:
Diana Blaine, who lectures on feminist theory, recently linked her blog to an online photo album that has topless photos of her near a painting of a topless woman, and at “Burning Man,� an annual weeklong festival in Nevada where clothing is optional.
After a student who has made a habit of criticizing Blaine on his blog, “ Cardinal Martini,� linked to the photos, an NBC station in Los Angeles reported that the pictures are “causing concern,� bringing Blaine even more exposure.
Okay….
First off, USC (where Blaine teaches) has basically said that she hasn’t violated any of their policies, so they aren’t pursuing any action against her. And this is a good thing since these photos etc. (there are links in the article, if you’re curious) are on her Flickr account and her own web server and such.
Second, while I understand and basically support the feminist politics that Blaine is putting in play here, it personally strikes me as falling into the category of “too much information.” Or let me put it to you this way: you won’t be seeing any topless or otherwise exposed pics of me either here or on my unofficial blog anytime soon.
Third and perhaps most distrubring are the angry student(s) keeping a blog that seems directed at attacking Blaine. She seems to be taking it in stride, but if I had former/current students who seemed hell-bent on this sort of attack against me, I don’t think I’d be quite as passive about it.
Sans iBook
I’ve complained several times here over the last few months about some problems I’ve been having with my iBook laptop; just to recap, since December, I’ve had some kind of short/power problem that won’t allow me to run my computer on battery power. On the one hand, it’s not a big deal; on the other, what’s the point of having a laptop if you can’t use it when it’s unplugged? And besides that, it’s a pain in the ass to have to shut down and restart the computer every time I move it, even if I am only moving it from one room to another.
So, given that I’m not quite ready to buy a new one yet, it was time for a fix.
Yesterday, Steve B. and I made the pilgrimage to the Apple store in Novi (about 30 miles from here) to drop it off. I figured it would be more efficient than trying to deal with Apple customer service over the phone. I filled out some forms at the so-called “Genius Bar” with someone who seemed to take his job title of tech support er, “genius,” a little too seriously. Amusingly enough, there were spots on the form where said genius inspected to see if there was any visible cosmetic damage or liquid damage. In other words, if you drop the computer down the stairs and/or spill a beer into it, you have a whole different problem.
Since I didn’t drop it or spill anything into it (and as I think about it, it’s surprising to me that I’ve never done this with any computer I’ve had, and I’ve had computers for over 20 years now), and also since I didn’t have the AppleCare deal and my computer is long beyond warranty, this repair is going to run me $300. This was a tough call, and it falls into that space where people contemplate buying new cars, appliances, lawn mowers, etc.: while $300 might be too much money to spend on a repair, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a new one. I’m just not ready to buy one of these new MacBook Pro things yet, and I figure if I can get another 12 to 18 months use out of this, then it will be worth it.
According to the Apple Support Repair Status page, my computer repair is “on hold” for a part. Hopefully, this “hold” will be brief. Though to tell you the truth, it probably won’t be the end of the world if I can’t get access to my laptop for a week or two. I’m typing this message right now on my son’s Windoze PC, my wife has a iBook I can borrow, I have two computers in my office, etc., etc. I am hardly technology deprived. Still, I kind of want my computer back. Like right now.
Man, I wonder how this withdrawal will feel in August when I’m away from pretty much any computer for (gulp) three weeks?