So my schedule this term is an experiment on how tightly I can pack my school/life schedule and remain sane. How's it going?
I'm almost tested out. Last one for tonight. Three more scripts and tests before 23:59 Wednesday. Phew. Then I just have to have a final draft for my annotated bibliography done on Tuesday, study for my LAN final the same day, hand write (Seriously?!?) two pages of notes for my government test on Wednesday and leap a few tall buildings before spring break starts.
I want to apologize, my posting has been a little irregular recently. I'm currently trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of my two express classes which are ending. I wanted to celebrate a gala moment for this blog though. As of last night, my subscription numbers have tripled! That's right! I have three subscribers. Of course, that really isn't important on a student blog - this is the place I practice writing for my Composition Two (Electric Boogaloo?) class. But subscriber number three, you are welcome here!
I have to admit that it went to my head a bit when I found out. First, I enjoyed an exotic alcoholic beverage . . . from Milwaukee. Then I attended a movie premier . . . at my neighbors house. I made him roll out the red carpet and shoot pictures of me entering his living room with his digital camera. We watched the camcorder footage from his vacation last year. There was pop-corn. It was fun. When it was time to go home, I was driven by a chauffer . . . my neighbor's son, in the cargo area of his little red wagon. I tipped him a fiver and returned to my customary seat in front of the iMac.
I may have gotten a little out of control, but I promise to use my newfound power wisely. You won't see me dancing without pants in a Hollywood discotheque. I promise not to run around with strange women. That's going to be an easy promise to keep, because women strange or otherwise seem to have enough sense to avoid running around with me. I won't cheat on my taxes, lie to Congress, or ship arms to the developing world. I won't publicly discuss my blog's subscription numbers or talk about Fight Club.
Oops. Cut me some slack, I'm new at this.
Sometime after Wednesday, I hope to finish up my series on Star Wars, talk a little about RSS readers, and maybe we'll have some cake. See you then, Buckaroos.
Chris Demmons, New Media Mongrel? Maybe I ought to be a "New Media Mongol?" That sounds exciting.
I have to be careful how I discuss this, because I don't want to influence the results of the survey I take, but I need to set my thoughts in order regarding my survey. I'm going to be doing a survey to examine viral messaging habits on various platforms and to produce a picture of the average user who sends these messages. Obviously, I can't discuss the actual structure of the survey here.
Which is frustrating, because that is one of the areas I am having a lot of difficulty with. I'm also not sure how I want to distribute my survey. I have considered using Survey Monkey, but I'm not sure I will be able to convince my subjects to go use it. Which is a pity, I've heard it's great software for just this sort of thing. I've also considered using Facebook to distribute, but frankly it doesn't seem that people spend much time communicating on Facebook. It seems like it is mostly dedicated to broadcasting messages of your own, or more commonly playing poorly designed, scammy games. I don't have enough reach on Twitter or Buzz, so that's out as well. I suspect I'll be distributing via sneakernet.
I'm really slammed at the moment with the two express classes that are wrapping up next week, but I'd really like to have a good draft of my survey done by the end of the weekend. I then hope to beg, wheedle and plead for help from a few classmates in my American National Government class who are taking statistics. This sort of thing really falls far outside my purview, though I don't regret stating that I would do this when I sold my topic. Working outside of your comfort zone is something I think you really ought to be doing as a college student.
I saw Star Wars the year it was released with my parents. I was two or three years old. It changed my life forever. It was one of the last things I remember that we did as a family. My parents separated the next year and eventually divorced. This film was a part of my story well before I was rolling d20s or reading Asimov. I saw it many times that year, and it was my constant companion throughout my childhood.
I saw The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as they were released in the theater. Like Star Wars IV A New Hope, I saw these films over and over. They just never got old. I had the actions figures, the X-Wing, a Tie Fighter, the Milenium Falcon and the Death Star play set. I even had the action figure case shaped like Darth Vader's head, which was probably a bad idea. Darth Vader gave me nightmares. Later I ran campaigns in the Star Wars role playing game that West End Games published. I still have the oversized Star Wars comic book that I got not long after seeing the movie.
I don't think George Lucas "raped" my childhood. Far from it. I owe Mr. Lucas a great debt and thank him for the things he created that changed my life. In my next post I want to compare the original trilogy and the prequels. I hope you'll join me.
One of the things I'm looking at this term is how to make life easier for students. I've known about social bookmarking services like delicious.com, digg and stumbleupon for a while now but I'd never really taken the time to investigate them. Probably because I didn't have a need. I usually have at the very least my Macbook available to me when I'm on the road, but a few times this term I've been stuck without it and had all my very important (ha!) research on my browser here at home.
I started out using XMarks, which has elements on the client (your browser) and their server. I like the fact that they aren't married to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Apple. Unfortunately, I'm not fond of their UI, it feels cumbersome and difficult to use. When you're using their extension, it is a direct one-to-one sync - meaning that if you delete a bookmark on their server, it will also be deleted in your browser. It is still a beta product, that is still in testing, so perhaps it will improve in the future.
Currently, I'm using delicious.com as my go to social bookmarking site. It's uncomplicated and easy to set up hierarchies of files. It also seems to have a large user base, which is handy in a social service. It's currently my go to and you can see my links here. I have a lot of things for my Comp 2 class, and I'm hoping to put up some of the links we've been using in the perl scripting class as well.
I'll continue to update the blog as I look into other services, and as always I'm open to suggestions in comments.
I wrote the piece in Docs, and then downloaded it for use in NeoOffice, the Open Office.org branch that I'm currently using on my Mac. One of the problems I had is that Docs displays output as a continuous stream of paper, and does not show pages unless you use the new print preview feature. While that worked well for a while, it was distracting and when I went beyond five pages the preview broke. I had to guess at the remainder of the formatting.
The downloaded *.ODT file was also messy on formatting, I had to do extensive corrections both in the introduction and in my bibliography. I think I spent almost as long on that as I did for the writing itself. Probably not suitable for beginners.
I also want to talk about publishing. I was able to publish it as a web page through Google Docs, and through the same set of sharing controls, post it here on Blogger. I'm not very satisfied with the results, but I'm not done trying. At the end of this course, I will post my full research paper as I would do it, using all the formatting tools that I know how to use.
With those caveats, I still am a big fan of Google Docs. I like having my documents and spreadsheets available on my desktop, laptop, and school computer in almost every format under the sun. I'm hoping to have more success doing it in reverse order for the final draft. I am going to try two tacks - first created a formatted file on my local word processor and upload it. Second, try doing it with portable document format file (PDF).
I really want to follow up on my experiment with Google Docs, this blog and a few of the other experiments I'm working on with technology and education. Also, I have some new theories on my research topic to run by you. But, I was puttering around last night and ended up watching Penn Says on Youtube. I'm a pretty big fan of his as a magician, I used to play around with stage magic back in the day, but I wasn't very good at it. I also think he's an interesting person. We agree on a lot of fundamental issues, we disagree strongly on a lot of others.
Penn Jillette is a pretty famous person. A celebrity, in fact. He does stage shows in Las Vegas, has a series on Showtime. I recall that he's had a few network TV specials as well. With his partner Teller, they've put out two or three books as well. The Penn Says series is basically his video diary. He puts it out on Sony's video platform, and it eventually trickles down to YouTube. He talks about whatever happens to be on his mind that day, and often addresses comments from the audience. Pretty cool.
In a previous show, he talked about sending his kids to a fancy private school in Las Vegas versus his lower middle class background. The episode is called "Have I Revealed Too Much," and there's a lot of harsh language in it - so if you're at work, or offended by that kind of language, I'd recommend not clicking the embedded video below.
For those who didn't watch: Mr. Jillette, after making that video I described above went to the parent's orientation night at that private school, and it turned out the principal was a fan. He watched Penn on his Showtime series, and on Penn Says. He said he hoped that they could make Penn feel good about sending his children to this private school. Penn felt uneasy about the principal watching him in a program he puts out for the public.
Now I want to contrast this with Penelope Trunk. I don't know that I would call myself a fan of her work, but I think it is interesting. She seems to write about her life, especially her personal life in a very open fashion out here. She's been called on it by commenters on her blog, people on twitter, and people in her personal life.
One interesting difference between them - Mr. Jillette is only a bit younger than my parents. He would have been entering high school the year after they graduated. Ms. Trunk is a bit older than me, there are about seven years between us. According to this article, and several like it people younger than me are very willing to share personal information online. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was recently raked over the coals for saying "Privacy is Dead" or "Privacy is no longer a social norm" depending upon which site you're reading. The only issue here, is that he didn't say that. He essentially said that social norms regarding privacy are changing, and that people are willing to share more of their lives online. This is not immoderate statement and I would challenge even my most critical reader to deny it.
If the social norms are changing, and I believe they are, what does that mean for us? I can see a few advantages to a more radical version of this change through the lens of my upcoming paper as being a relative "good thing." I can also see why it would scare people, and even I find it a bit unsettling at times.
Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen, cake will be provided shortly.
