Nine Fluffed Cats Strutting Blogways

I’ve added nine categories to Earth Wide Moth.  Wanted to move toward readability and organization.  I just thought about my interests, the entries over the last three months, where I see future entries fitting, then
dummied up some fun(ky) categories for breakin’ this blog down.  Chunked up, EWM now looks like this:

Media Massage-Dressage – Popular media, politicking, spin-doctoring,
manipulations, decorated pony shows and the Twist.
Critical Ethnogeotechnoinfography – Connections to cultural implications
of information geography, rhetorically and technologically affected places and
the peeps who inhabit them.
Spatialitiespatiality  – Toying with space theory, location,
descriptive realities and other stuff.
Composing Anyplace Afar – Computer-mediated distance education, remote
academia, mobilities in learning.
Reading Notes – Notes on articles/books/sites I’m reading; connections
among texts, etc.
Heteroglossia and Essayism – Free play with theory, essayisms, and
uncategorical leftovers.
Kairotic Strain – Whining and bemoaning, complaints and bad kairos
[credit to A.C. for this
last idea]: entries that might offend, upset, peeve off or otherwise have
professional consequences.
Orange – CNY 13244
On Weblogs, On – On Weblogs
*Dry Ogre Chalking – Re: pedagogy.
*Slouching Toward – Down funk, despondency and despair.
*Ground Swell – Upsurges, optimism, prospective, feelin’ good change.
*Under a Bushel – Obscurity, innuendo, underhanded views and opinions.

These last four are originals.  I’ll keep them around.  I’m not
settled on the categories, but I think they do a better job than the few splits
I had up for past three months.  All of this was brought on by my curiosity
about building aggregation lines (RSS feed) for individual categories in MT. 
It’s not perfectly clear how I’ll use the feeds, but I wanted to see what it
looked like, how tough it was to set up.  I was surprised to find it easy;
followed the fine instructions available

here
.  Category-specific RSS was a recent topic in
blogs
, a
new listserv concerned with a blogging SIG at the ’05 C’s in San Fran. I can
imagine it working nicely for research groups in a course weblog.  The
cat-specific aggregation could pool related entries; it’s easy enough to assign
multiple categories to an individual entry, too.  This might be useful in a
weblog with numerous student-contributors (in a class of 25, say).

A couple of other Friday notes:  D. is working on her teaching
portfolio.  As a final piece of her student teaching, she wanted to piece
together a audio-accompanied video slideshow.  I did a nice one–about six
minutes long–for our wedding last summer.  Tried another one this fall for
the retirement of one of D’s co-workers.  That’s when the cheap Dazzle
converter started screwing up.  When converting the MPEG to VHS, the bridge
(DCS200) would lock up, freezing the video in one blue stop-frame. 
Fortunately, it was sufficiently dubbed to put the three minutes to use, and the
day was saved.  Only now, more than seven months since the last
movie-making struggle, I’m staring at this project and thinking how sucky it is
to attempt video-making with PC equipment.  It’s like chewing broken glass.
Maybe worse.  I can’t keep track of the number of times the whole cruddy
system locks up in a single sitting with the Hollywood app open. The pattern of
lock-ups is a real time-hog.

One of my Good Friday errands was a stop at Kmart.  Mainly, I needed a
new light bulb for the refrigerator.  The other one fizzled early in the
week, so all week we’ve had no way of telling what’s in there.  Food that
was once easy to locate has been lost in the shadows.  So it was Kmart for
the 40 watt replacement.  Returned home.  Screwed it in (yes…it only
takes one blogger to screw in a fridge bulb).  The refrigerator was just as
empty and pathetic as it was earlier in the week.  Bowls of taco salad for
another night.  Dessert of mini-malted milk eggs (Easter Whoppers)–the
best candy of the holiday, if you ask me.

Categorically yours,

dmueller