Comfort Inventory II

Seventy-eight and blue skies.  This is what I expected from a central New York summer. 

Here's what I've been up to:

1. I used up the better part of yesterday puzzling over a few of the finer points of Actionscript.  Messed around with a couple of Excel functions until I was frustrated, too.  Both of these are important parts for a larger, quasi-conceived project.  Two choices: (-a-) develop a programmer's aptitude or (-b-) find some programmer friends.

2. The summer grad course ended Thursday, and everything's well in hand for the two online courses I'm teaching, now entering the fifth week.  I've got one weblog-setup obligation approaching, mid-July, and ongoing projects with CCC Online. Other than that: I'll be working on major re-writes (re-organization, primarily, and a bit of reframing at the beginning) of an essay I hope to send out by the end of August and reading ahead for the New Media/Visualization independent study I'm taking in the fall.  Also dabble-reading some other stuff (flipping around, bits and pieces) and, for leisure, getting further into Asimov's Foundation series. 

3. Microwaving a cloth, rice-filled bag and draping it over my upper back to relieve unbearable pinching-knottiness.

4.  Considering two unwritten weblog entries: (-a-) a follow-up on the carnival concerning process or processual agreement or (-b-) something on punctum as anti-genre (agenera?).  But I need to look again at Fulkerson for the first; for the second, just time to write it and more thought.

5.  I took a few minutes this morning to clean out my Bloglines account, delete a few of the idle or now-boring feeds.  Dropped from monitoring 113 feeds to 100 even; more manageable.  And I reorganized the folders so instead of four jumbled groupings, I now have eight more logically related sets.  I'm not trying to go all Dewey Decimal on the feed organization, but I was needing some improvement.  Too often, the feeds in three folders were simply accumulating to three figures before I'd dump them without reading a single entry.  No good.  While tidying Bloglines, I came across the following keepers:

Science's 125 Big Questions (via).  And composition's 125 Big Questions? Any in common?
Flickr Photographer's Badge (via).  I wonder if they'll give me a free pass and a seat on the media row at SU's home basketball games next season.
Newseum's front pages (via).  This came across techrhet the other day, too.  I'm less interested in it for the news content than I am for the quick and easy access to front page infographics.  Maybe I'll flip through them and capture examples of data visualizations periodically, for the next time I teach the Rhetoric of Dataviz projects.  Like these on the war, strep and fireworks:
 

6.  For the last month, I switched my techrhet and WPA-L subscriptions from digest to regular (every message).  Yesterday, I wised up again, switched them back to digest.