Steven D. Krause

I buy a copy of WIRED magazine about two or three times a year; I bought one today because it included this cool CD from artists advocating for a more open system of copyright and music exchange. As it says on the CD and on the web site, “Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.”

It’s a pretty groovy connections of tunes– David Byrne, The Beastie Boys, Chuck D, and a bunch of people I’ve only sort of heard of (Danger Mouse) and a bunch of other people I have never heard of. I’m enjoying it, though I doubt I’ll be doing much of “mashing” with it…

This is just a test of a new download of firefox. For one reason or another, it isn’t letting me post to my official blog though…

Eh, so-so.

I am sitting right now at about -10 pounds, relative to what I was when I started all this on April 1. I think the best way to describe my eating habbits as of late are “South Beach Light.” For example, I just had a bagel with cream cheese, although it was a 9 grain/lower carb bagel, according to the advertising at least. It’s been kind of hard “being good” since Halloween. There was a lot of candy around the house for that, and then Annette’s birthday party and its decidedly non-SB menu was last weekend. I think I’m still working off some of that weight.

Kind of a strange twist though: the week before Annette’s birthday, right after Halloween, I didn’t go to the gym at all. I was busy, Will was out of school for a lot of it because of parent-teacher conferences, I was lazy, etc. My weight stayed about the same, maybe even dropped a bit, though I didn’t feel that great. This last week, I decided that– damnit!– I need to go to the gym no matter what. I went five times, Monday through Friday, though I was only there for about 30-40 minutes. Now, on the one hand, I feel great, a lot better than I’ve felt for quite a while. On the other hand, despite the extra excercise, I actually gained weight, about a pound and a half. Fat to muscle? Actually eating more and not really realizing it? I dunno.

Anyway, what I’d like to do is make it through the holidaze being somewhere between -10 and -15, and then make another weight loss push at the start of the year. Stay tuned for details…

Once again, I’ve been mulling over changing from Blogger to something else to support my official and unofficial blogs. As I’ve written here before, Blogger works okay, but there are glitches with the Mac and the Blogger interface (at least for me), and a part of me would really like to work again with some “cool” software. And something open source– maybe Drupal, maybe WordPress.

Anyway, that hazy thought was swimming around in my waking head when I came across this post about Mike at Vitia has been having problems with WordPress. I feel his pain, I cannot offer a lick of advice on what to do about it, and it certainly makes me think twice about attempting what he’s attempting.

Part of me feels like I should throw myself into something like Drupal or WordPress and “learn the code,” so to speak, and really get computer geeky, way beyond my means right now. Another part of me feels like what I should be doing is the work of a writing teacher, and as such, I should keep my focus on textual elements and on using tools that work.

The problem is that this seperation between “writing” and “computer” is frequently not so neat and orderly. Teaching even basic html and web authoring requires I teach my writing class students about html (of course), html editing software, SFTP (the protocol for the people.emich.edu server), a bit about image editing, etc., etc. And that’s just for super-simple web sites. When I taught “Writing for the World Wide Web” last winter, I tried to make it clear to myself and to my students over and over again that this was a writing course, that it was not a computer course. But ultimately, this separation was futile. I’m scheduled to teach the course this coming winter, and this time around, I’m not going to even pretend to separate the “writing stuff” from the “computer stuff.” The course will be both a writing class and a computer class.

Of course, there is “computer stuff” that I can handle (Blogger, SFTP, html, some basic Dreamweaver, some basic Photoshop, some basic CSS, etc.), and then there’s COMPUTER STUFF (PHP, advanced CSS, Flash, etc.). And right now, I don’t have the time, skills or desires to do COMPUTER STUFF. Maybe that will change, but it probably won’t change until school is out for the year.

Anyway, good luck, Mike. I might ask you about how to work WordPress once you have it mastered….

Check out what I just got in the mail (From http://www.cafepress.com/wrongdecision:

I think I’ll go stick it on the van right now….

John Lovas and other Bay Area folks may already know about this, but a friend of mine emailed me about this and it sounds totally cool:

The friend in question recently took a trip to San Francisco and he ended up going to a place that he described as “The Pirate Store,” which I think is actually known as 826 Valencia. It’s a “Writing Center” for kids 8 to 18, a place that does tutoring, has workshops, hosts school field trips, and holds all kinds of other events, all for free.

Oh yeah, it’s also a pirate store, a place that the main 826 web site describes as “San Francisco’s only independent pirate supply store. We offer a variety of goods, including lard, flags, eye patches, mops, glass eyes and the like.” You can find most of this stuff on the web site– I couldn’t find the lard though. According to my friend, the place set up operations in a building that is in a commercial zone and the organizers of the center were told they had to either sell something or get the zoning changed. So they said “okay, we’re a pirate supply store.”

Anyway, what a great idea! It just seems to make such perfect sense to me that a writing center is fronted and (in part) financed by a pirate store. I think I’ll run the idea by our writing center director….

Via this post by Steven “Seat of the Revolution” Cherry, I learned about this story about tanks showing up at a war protest in Westwood, CA. There’s even some video of the tanks at the Free Internet Press site. It looks kinda scarry, and kinda confusing, too.

So I did a Google News search and came across this article in the Los Angeles Times that calls the whole thing a coincidence. To quote from that article:

“It’s a whole lot of nothing,” said Officer Kathy Simpson, a Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman. “The ‘tanks’ were there for Veterans Day. They ride in the parade and wave.”

The antiwar protest, sponsored by the group Act Now to Stop War & End Racism, was held Tuesday evening near the VA grounds, where a parade and exhibit were staged Wednesday.

As an aside: The LA Times has the absolute DUMBEST system for subscribing to the online version of its paper.

So, what’s the truth here? How the hell should I know? I will say this: I can easily imagine a group of war protesters believing that the APC (which isn’t really a tank, btw) was sent to stop them, and I can also easily imagine that the guys driving the APC saying to themselves “hey, as long as we’re here, let’s hang around for a few minutes and see what’s going on.” And I don’t think the video does anything to prove the point for one side or the other, either.

Okay– click here.

See this article, “Let’s blog around the clock,” an article published as part of IT AsiaOne. I’m not entirely sure where this is taking place, but I thought it was interesting that it’s taking place in the instruction of Chinese and it is a tool that is being used pretty much in the same way blogs are used to teach English.

Check out Sorry Everybody, a very simple site that I find both happy and sad. Basically, it’s just pictures of people holding up signs of apology for the last election. I made my own picture:

It’s a shame, but “Sorry Everybody” has been such a success that they can’t take any more pictures. It’s not easy taking a picture of yourself, but I like how this one turned out. I like how I got the Howard Finster poster that’s in my home office in the background, and I also like how I was able to do some relatively signifcant editing of this image in Photoshop. I’m not gonna tell you what I changed though…