My new HP desktop came loaded with game demos, most of which I will never play, but I got curious about them last week and started clicking around, which is when I found Diner Dash, which is the happy story of a woman who was so frazzled by her ordinary office job that she had to run away from corporate life and wait tables for a living.
That sound you hear is my forehead, hitting my desk.
Not in my normal set of reads, but this month Esquire has an interview with Cerf. My favourite quote is this: Instant messaging and chat rooms have basically created a level playing field for deaf people. And the autistic. And terminally shy.
I don’t know who invented it, but I would like to shake their hand. Its like a dream come true: here’s a database that can find any book in the world, and no matter where it is located, a copy will be sent to you, free of charge, and you can keep it for 3 months.
Currently waiting for:
Next up on my list: every other book ever written :)
I know, I know - lots you cannot see the spiffy (thanks, Grandma!) header graphic. Apparently, I have to upgrade wordpress for it to show up again. So, that is on the to-do list - but its pretty far down the list!
A few of my faves:
A comprehensive list of April Fool’s Day nonsense (including past years), can be found at the April Fool’s Day On The Web Repository.
On a HigherEd specific online forum, a post that was meant to exhibit how odd academic life looks to non-academics told the story of a recent proposal defense. I am a consummate lurker there, although I don’t have a login, which is probably for the best, because the post that took my breath away describes how the Chair of the student’s committee decided to invite the defender’s husband to her proposal defense. And I cannot quite wrap my head around that. Does he also invite the wives of male students who are defending their proposals? If he does, well, consider my feminist ire placated. But I suspect that he does not, and I cannot understand why the responses to this post don’t start out questioning why a woman’s Chair would invite her husband to what is, essentially, her workplace and her professional life.
If the student herself had invited her spouse, well, her choice. But that her Chair decided to do it without her knowledge makes the action very different, and not a little patronizing. This notion of spousal deference always hits a sour note for me, probably because I live it every time I make a major purchase, or generally try to conduct business with a man when my own partner is in the same room.What is next, really - should women bring notes from their Dad in to school, giving them permission to attend, which was often the case as little as 40 years ago at some schools?
Dear R1 Institution,
Please accept this note as permission from me that my daughter be allowed to READ BOOKS and WRITE STUFF. Call me if she gets uppity, or starts thinking on her own - we try not to encourage independence in her, in the vain hope that she will come to her senses, drop out of school, and marry a nice doctor.
We did it, even though most of our neighbours did not. And although we live pretty green, we learned that we still have too many things that plug in. More frustrating was how little changed the Chicago skyline was during the hour - big buildings did turn off their lights, but plenty did not.
Scrabble by candelight is hard. Or maybe it was the wine. Better pictures than mine of Earth hour events can be seen in the Earth Hour Flickr Pool. But the big question is, did participation make a difference? Time says, maybe. Sceptics say no. Believers say yes. ComEd says there was a 5% reduction in power useage between 8-9, as compared to last Saturday. Is 5% enough? I don’t think so.
Of course the essential problem remains: people who think this is a problem will always be looking for ways to lower their carbon footprint number, and people who don’t think it is a problem will not, and as long as there are more people in the second camp than the first, very little will change, and that seems like a great shame.
It is my firm belief that sociologists are the most prolific bloggers amongst the professoriate - at least, all the blogs I read are written by professors, and chances are, if someone forwards me a link that relates to academia that they found on a personal blog, that blog will be written by a sociologist. I am sure that if I ever took the time to investigate this and write it up, I could find a higher education journal to publish it - they love to publish articles about faculty - but then again, I would need a 20 page lit review explaining what a blog is, and then my internal rant about how it is 2008, not 1995 would start rolling, the one where I rant about how we ought to expect a baseline of knowledge about the internet amongst college-educated readers, and there isn’t enough antacid in the world for that to happen again. But I digress. Sociologists blog, and I read their blogs, and I get some great information from them. Today’s gem: tips for article writers, by Ezra Zuckerman at MIT Sloan School of Management, via OrgTheory.
Crgslist.com: so web 2.0 we don’t need vowels.