Category: Uncategorized

From Mary’s site, I also found this site about the “Colossal Colon,” which “is an oversized model of a human colon that is forty feet long and four feet tall.” The goal here is to raise awareness of colon cancer, and after hunting around the site a bit, I learned that the “Colossal Colon” was the idea of Molly McMaster, who is a colon cancer survivor who does “crazy things” to raise awareness of colon cancer and such. She has a kind of interesting story, actually.

Anyway, I’m all for awareness of colon cancer and such of course, but I guess the thing that I find amusing is the idea that you can request to have the colossal colon at an event. I assume, of course, that the sort of event these folks have in mind would be a “health fair” or something like that. But wouldn’t it be cool to have it for just some big party? You know, set it up in the back yard, make people climb through the colon to get to the wine and cheese table….

Check out “The End of the World,” which I found by my friend Mary’s blog. Pretty funny.

I went to the gym again this morning (I’ve been pretty good about both exercise and eating this week– more on that later) to do my usual (as of late) fast walking/slow jogging while watching CNN Headline News. Just another day at the gym. Then someone taps me on the shoulder and says “You have to go. We’re evacuating the building.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Bomb threat,” this person said.

The gym that Annette and I go to, One-on-One (here’s a link to their horribly out of date web site), is in this sort of out of the way strip mall sort of place. There’s a beauty parlor, some kind of small business, a day care center, and the gym. Now, I don’t much about the logic of bomb threats, but who the hell would call in a bomb threat to a gym/strip mall?

There isn’t anything in the paper about it tonight, but maybe there will be some kind of update tomorrow.

Just in case you were wondering why krause.emich.edu isn’t working: I’m in the midst of the dreaded kernel panic on my office computer. This is the one thing that can go completely and utterly wrong with the Apple’s OS 10, at least as far as I can tell. For Apple users who have never seen this before, it’s a black screen with a ton of computer gobbly-gook all over it and then the words “kernel” and “panic” buried into the last lines of the code. If that seems a little vague, believe me, if it happens to you, you’ll know it.

What caused it? Well, all I know I ran the routine Apple software update, I installed 10.3.7 and the new version of iTunes (or at least I thought I did), I restarted, and then ka-boom. The tech guru for the college said he always does two restarts before installing any updates, and the fact that I run my computer as a server and hardly ever do any restarts might have had something to do with it. I don’t know, maybe….

Complicating matters a bit is the previously mentioned tech guy. I don’t want to go into it all right now, but in the nutshell, this guy is having some labor problems, and combined with some other issues, he seems a bit, er, tense. You know that sketch on Saturday Night Live, “Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy?”

Anyway, it isn’t all bad. For one thing, my office computer isn’t really my “main” computer, and I’m serving up my class web pages through my stevendkrause.com web space. If I had been having these problems with the laptop I am working on right now, I would be more, well, panicked. But it’s not, so I find the whole thing kind of an interesting technical problem. For another, I was able to restart the computer in “target disk mode” (hold down “T” on restart, and after you get the firewire logo bouncing around on the screen, hook up a firewire cable to another computer and you can mount the hard drive of the computer in target disk mode) and back up key files with no problem. In other words, if I have to, I could erase the whole thing and start over.

Later on this morning, I’m going to attempt the solutions suggested on this helpful web site, including using DiskWarrior (thanks to Steve B.’s help). If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to decide if it’s worth it to deal with our local Nick or to do a disk wipe. I’m kind of leaning toward the wipe ’cause it might not be a bad idea to get a clean start.

Update:
I’m back and running, sort of, and only after spending far too much time dorking around with the solution. Essentially, DiskWarrior sorta fixed it, but not quite (it’s hard to explain), so I had to reinstall the OS. Frankly, I should have just done that in the first place. Live and learn, I suppose.

I thought this was kind of cool:

The program for the upcoming CCCCs is online in a searchable database. So instead of one big ol’ PDF file, you can search the program by a key words, area cluster, level of emphasis (4 year, 2 year, K-12, etc.), interest emphasis (class, gender, disability, etc.), type of session, day (really useful for people like me who aren’t going to be there for the whole thing), and speaker name. The results are an entry just like what you’d see in the program, and if you click on the “more” button, you’ll get the full presentation description, which was never available before. You can put together a program for “your conference” based on your searches, email it to yourself, print it out, etc. Pretty neat.

My review of the collection Memory Bytes has been published in the book review section of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, which I’ve always thought of as a very interesting and handy resource. Besides a lot of good book reviews, the RCCS has a ton of great links and other resources.

Anyway, you can read my review by clicking right here. The short version is it’s a very interesting and useful collection of essays, especially because it’s the only one that I know of that actually acknowledges the history that lead to what we now think of as “cyberculture.”

Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers (and kind of a public service from major comp/rhet textbook publisher Bedford-St.Martin’s) has a new section/entry/update/issue (I’m not sure the best term) about using blogs to teach and to supplement the academic life. Click right here to go directly to that part of the Lore. I haven’t had a chance to look at this too closely yet, but it looks like some interesting reflections.

I thought I’d mention two things here, one serious and one not:

* As most computer geeks know by know, Apple has come out with the so-called “headless Mac,” which they are calling the Mac mini. Basically, it’s a Macintosh box for $500– you furnish the monitor, mouse, and keyboard. It’s a G4 processor, which is kind of a shame if you ask me (my next computer will be at least a G5), but it strikes me as a kind of interesting marketing ploy. This isn’t really a device for me, a devoted iBook user. I think the market they are after are folks who are Windoze users but who are really into their iPods, and/or people who are thinking about switching and want to do it on the cheap, and/or people who wouldn’t mind running both platforms with more or less the same equipment. Which is a huge plus of this thing, it seems to me: I don’t think you could plug and unplug the monitor on the fly (but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some kind of adapter that would let you let you do that), but I guess what I’m saying is you could have both a Windows PC and a Mac PC on your desk, side by side, and you could switch between the two with the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse after swapping out a few cables. I think that would be kinda nice.

* I very much enjoyed this parody Apple ad I found on the enjoyable blog Gizmodo. It falls into the “funny ’cause it’s kinda true” category of things.

We’re back from Florida, we’ve taken down all the Christmas decorations, we’ve started the Winter semester at EMU, and we’re all back to normal, more or less. So now it’s time to get back on to the diet.

My short-term goal is to lose 15 pounds by March 25, which is my birthday. This strikes me as a reasonable goal, and if I’m successful, I’ll be at my lowest weight in probably about 10 years.

I’m going back to Phase 1 of the South Beach Diet, at least for the first week: no alcohol, no carbs, lots of veggies, low-fat meats, eggs or fake eggs, cheese. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stick with this part of things, but my hope is that if I fall off the wagon a bit, I’ll fall just to Phase II, which allows for wine (no beer) and high-fiber carbs like whole wheat bread.

I’m also going to be hitting the gym as often as possible. My schedule this semester will allow me to go at least three days a week, sometimes four or five. Since we’re down to one car, I also expect to do quite a bit more walking to and from work.

Keep various things crossed.

From a couple of different places I’ve learned lately about something called Delicious Library 1.1. Basically, it’s a software (Max OSX) where you can use an Apple iSight camera (I suppose you could use a different camera or maybe a scanner or something) to scan the bar code on books, CDs, DVDs, and video games to catalog your library of stuff. It then puts all this information in an interface that pretty much looks like iTunes.

Personally, I think this would be pretty useful because my academic wife and I have hundreds of books (not to mention CDs and DVDs). The result is I don’t know exactly what we have (or don’t have), and I frequently don’t know where a particular copy of a book actually is. Plus I am attracted to the geek aspect of it.

Unfortunately, I don’t think my wife is persuaded. When I described this to her, she said “if you had something where you can scan the bar code and then have the whole contents of a book, then that might be useful.” Hmmm, I think that development is a few years off….