Friday, April 9, 2004

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

Posted by Derek Mueller at April 9, 2004 10:03 PM to Ground Swell