Author: Derek Mueller

TR

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

Met 205ers this evening.  I’ll probably jinx the whole dy-nam, but all
in all, it was one of the more encouraging first classes I can remember teaching
(which might only indicate that my memory is on the fritz).  We broke the
ice, socialized until it was too noisy, rolled through the syllabus, and set up
the more general premises of what we’ll attempt in the next 15.5 weeks.  No
need to elaborate, really, but there is something energizing about it. 
Teacherly snap.

Heard one Yike! Not that! comment about McLuhan, which sent me back to
everything I took for granted in deciding it would be a good fit for the course.
Re-composed, though, and we agreed to give it a whirl. Later, a small ugh-rumble
when I said that our only work for Thursday was to build self-profiles in the
Facebook.  Serves as a minor tech-proficiency measure and will set up later
discussions of tagging, links, and so on.  Might help me learn names more
quickly, too.  Granted, it is a bit experimental, but this group definitely
has opinions about it, and they’re willing to share them.  Perfect for a
here-ending first day of Semester.

Para-site’s Fair

/ Derek Mueller

I’m getting ready for Semester, and I don’t have much to say (or blog) right
now.  Spent quite a while today balancing my checkbook from the last
several months. Same vein: why not tidy up some of the kept new stuff
cluttering Bloglines?  Good as anything, right?  On with the show
then.  Here, in no particular order, stowed for no particlar reason, are ten links green-checked as "Keep
New" from the last month.

Feedspeaker
(RSS into digitized voice, I think)
Photospace

Building a better blog
Bubblewrap
Crumpled paper toss

Museum of Food Anomalies
Money Wallet
Botablog (wuh?)
Google
Suggest
Comixpedia

1-3, credit to
unmediated; all the rest from
metafilter

And now I’ll go back to reading the last of four essay-articles on the
formation of composition’s multidiscplinary, many-armed fieldish-ness. 
Bingo. I’m still reading the never-ending one, and it’s up for discussion
tomorrow morning.

Crud Breaker and Other

/ Derek Mueller / 5 Comments

Foul weather in th’days ahead?  Get

this album melting on high volume.

<^>

Or Bowie: But the film is a saddening bore
‘Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It’s about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on

<^>


Glimpse of what’s coming together in the course I start teaching on Tuesday.

And three
I’m
taking.

And now I’m going to shoot hoops.

Scrapbook

/ Derek Mueller

Over the past few months, I’ve come to appreciate the many fine features of
Firefox.  Until
today, the CSS editor (sidebar panel, where code-tuning reveals its effect
immediately) and the Web Developer (good for revealing tags, splitting out
different strata/backgrounds from a page) topped my list of favorite extensions. 
I’m also fond of Linky, Quicknote and Flowing Tabs–the abundance of ease they
bring into my net-tled life. But just now, I downloaded
Scrapbook.  Is
everyone else already using this?  It’s brilliant really, allowing multiple
sites and pages of notes to be tucked together into a custom folder–all at the
sidebar.  It enables in-tab note-editing and HTML coding of the note (for
whatever that might be worth).  And searchable.  Best
extension yet for my needs.  Works great for the dilemma of a bundle of
sites to return to that aren’t quite worthy of del.icio.us or other bookmarking. 
Shuttling them into the scrapbook is a cinch.  Granted, not as social as
del.icio.us, but sometimes the mess I collect wouldn’t be polite to share, you
know?

Picked up on one other web development today.  In

this entry, Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed pointed me to
MSN’s beta search engine with
adjustable search criteria.  Just select "build a search," designate your
preferred conditions, and it will run the search.  But–and here’s the
bonus punch for me–add "&format=rss" to the end of the URL generated by the
search, and you have a live RSS feed, good for keeping up with the search
criteria as a subscription in Bloglines,
for example, or your aggregator of choice. We’ll put it to the test in WRT205 in
the term ahead, I think.

Growth Agents

/ Derek Mueller

Finally, Major League Baseball’s

union and owners have agreed to a drug testing policy bent on absolving the
sport of steroid use (and, noted one Sportscenter talking head, the agreement
came without giving anything back to the players).  I’m interested
to see whether the policy has any

teeth.  With so many conflicts of interest in policing
performance-enhancers in athletics, I remain skeptical, a skepticism rooted in a
few challenges from days playing the part of drug testing coordinator, although
by and large we were running one of the most comprehensive random testing
schemes in all of the NAIA.

The lessons from

Mothra (and co.) on the dangers of mysterious growth agents, lost. (See, the
energy field beaming from the satellite dish is like baseball’s drug policy,
metaphorically.)

Other bits, pieces, orts…

From

apophenia, a link to

this list of bloggers who have been terminated from their jobs for keeping
weblogs.  Needed work: a list of bloggers who have been hired for
keeping weblogs (or projecting into a linked webspace).

From

Steve Krause, a link to a user-friendly
database query for
the San Fran C’s.  It includes a savable record; much better than the
PDF schedules from recent years.  Now I just have to figure out how to get
to SF for less than one month’s TA salary.  Might have to convene a family
hug tonight just to let D. and Ph. know that we’re getting through March on
laundry soap and a gallon jar of pickles (oh yeah, with boiled eggs, potatoes
for a treat).  Oof! And it is a two-birthday month (both of ’em).  To
the side: I’m only semi-serious about the strain.  I’ve been fortunate
enough to pinch a couple of different forms of support together from here and
there.  But it’s still damned expensive to travel to the conference.

Serendipity and a diccionario

/ Derek Mueller

Serendipitous text day, today.  Started yesterday actually, when one of
the cohort at SU distributed an email to the grad list asking if anyone was
interested in a scattershot of duplicate journals she had–JAC,
Composition Studies, Business something or another, CCC. 
Excess copies of a smattering of non-sequential, eight-year-old journals. 
I clicked on reply, politely accepted the copies of JAC and
Composition Studies.  Already had the copies of CCC (maybe), and
decided the business items wouldn’t get any time because my reading list has
grown immensely in these four months.  I ‘d swear the heap of reading grows
by four books every day and reduces only by a chapter or two–the pattern of my
low-effort break, anyway.

I lumbered up to the office for some pre-term PDFing around noon today,
grabbed the journals from my mail slot in the lounge, and set to leafing through
the tables of contents.  First pick: JAC 17.1 1997.  A couple
of interesting finds, but most notable was a review of JoAnn Cambell’s edit of
Gertrude Buck’s work, Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude
Buck. What. have. we. here?  See, I just signed up to give an overview
of Campbell’s book on Buck for CCR611.  Actually, the bit will cover the
historiographic method employed by Campbell.  Picked it from a generous
list of histories of comp; grabbed up this text even though I read it late in
the last century (spring of ’99) for EN555M, a seminar in feminist composition
history.  The review, by Virginia Allen, introduces several sharp bits on
"excavating our disciplinary roots."  Allen’s review is duly generous to
both Campbell and Buck; jogged my memory, too, about Buck’s vexing "organic
scientism"–tendencies to lever metaphors of nature and evolution (growth?)
against the logics of biological and human sciences.  No need to go farther
with this just yet, and, of course, I’ve said very little about Campbell’s
method, so that remains–among many other busy-makers–for the weeks ahead.

Continue reading →

Rock Chalk Canaries

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments


"Birds
are really sensitive to smoke." From the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World,
a
story from last week on a late morning fire at Pet World.  I figured
since you maybe hadn’t read much news of Kansas over the weekend (other than No.
2 KU’s first road win of the season at No. 8 Ky. yesterday by six
points), you’d be interested. Picked it up over at

unmediated (once removed from

Reiter’s Camera Phone Report) where yatta  wrote about the "camera
phone" credit in the photo bi-line as an instance of "citizen-photographers"
capturing images later used in publications.  My first thought was
yeah…that’s interesting, even though the story is hum-drum, non-newsy
inasmuch as none of the animals were hurt, and

nine of the first-responders look on as the one who drew the short straw scopes
out the building’s roof. Back to feeding the fish and cleaning cages at the
Pet World.  Cell phone images in the newspaper, very

But then, wait a second.  The credit for the cell phone shot goes to the
same person who wrote the article.  A full fledged, story-writing "general
assignment reporter" shot the photo with a camera phone, which means that the
journalistic scene–a futurasm of citizen-reporters–confronts us with new discord. 
I’m wondering, for example, why didn’t the reporter have any other sort of camera.  Is
the LJW sending its reporters to cover happenings around Lawrence with merely a
cell phone (~3.1 megapixels, no less)? Out of film?  Was the reporter merely
being resourceful (having left the Nikkon at home)?  And since when do
newspapers give bi-line mention to the device, the photographic apparatus used
to grab the image? Odd it ies.

Relieved the birds were okay.  

Coded

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

I’m mucking around all morning with MT RSS tags.  I was using a chunk of
javascript to pull in delicious bookmarks before, but I wanted a bit more
flexibility. Figured MT RSS would deliver. So I read around the net–mostly old
entries from the 2.+ days–and came up with a few plugins I thought would do the
trick: MT RSS and MT List.  Quasi-teaching-aims motivating me; been
plugging away at a syllabus, rest of the pre-term drill. It’s a course in
critical research; we’re going to aggregate like mad.

Now the plugins are running fine.  Together, they pull the feeds through
a db cache on my server so as not to drain the site of origin site with each
visit to EWM. But I can’t figure out how to grab the date tag from the XML. 
The dates are nested in Dublin Core tags.  I can’t figure out how to tell
the plugin to draw the date into the entry you see here (lower right). So I’m
stuck.  Gonna quit before I overheat (or make this brand new nagging cold/s.throat worse).  Here’s the code, culprit in
bold, just for the helluvit:

 <MTList name="feeds">
http://del.icio.us/rss/dmueller
http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/index.xml
http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ripleys.rdf
</MTList>
<MTListLoop name="feeds">
<MTRSSFeed>
<div class="sidetitle"><a href="<$MTRSSFeedLink$>" target="blank"><$MTRSSFeedTitle$></a></div>
<div class="squish" align="center">Reassembled <lastBuildDate><$MTDate
format="%B %d, %Y %I:%M %p"$></lastBuildDate><br/></div>
<ul><MTRSSFeedItems lastn="7">
<li><$MTRSSFeedItemElement name="date"$>: <a href="<$MTRSSFeedItemLink$>"
target="blank"><MTFirstNWords n="4"><$MTRSSFeedItemTitle$></MTFirstNWords></a>:
<MTFirstNWords n="7"…><MTRSSFeedItemDescription></MTFirstNWords></li>
</MTRSSFeedItems></ul>
</MTRSSFeed>
</MTListLoop></div>

Unicycle

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

Aver, a yare.

Cap and corn, auditor, interest and exertion, aim and audience, interest
and earnest and outside, inside in inside. Alarm no sun, alarm is thinking,
alarming is determination an earth wide moth is something. Price in curving is
weeding.  There is an undetermined super division.  There is the
percolating bread stuff, the window is thickening. -G.S. | Braque

Again.

The Start of More?

/ Derek Mueller / 8 Comments

The "new" Blockbuster has riddled us with promises of abandoning late fees.
The slogan says, "The end of late fees.  The start of more."  Good
enough.  We rent movies from Blockbuster, and we have returned them to the
store late, paid the fees, felt stupid, absolved our delinquency.

So when a postcard showed up in the mail the other day telling me we owed
twelve bucks in late fees to Blockbuster, you can imagine my surprise.  I
was stunned.  But your ad campaign, I thought, it promises the
end of fees.  Is this the start of more?  According to the notice,
we’d returned The Day After Tomorrow five days late when we picked it up
in mid-November.  And my memory isn’t the sharpest (still working on
getting the new phone number right every time), but I’m sure The Day After
Tomorrow was a week-long rental.  We only rent movies one or two times
each month; the infelicity of a late return is generally fresh with us.  We
usually expect the late charge. But not this time.  "The end of late fees. 
The start of more."

When we rented Hero and I, Robot the other day, D. and Ph. went
to the new release wall while I wandered up to the counter (at the store on Erie
Blvd. here in Syracuse). 

"Can I talk with somebody about this late fee notice?  It’s for a movie
we rented in November.  Says we returned it five days late, but I’m almost
certain it was a week-long rental."

Clerk looks at the note card, eyebrows furrowed accusatorily.  "Yeah,
The Day After Tomorrow was returned five days late. It’s [something
incoherent involving long division] per day."

"We’re generally good about returning movies on time [granted, a fuzzy
assertion].  Is it possible that the DVD case said ‘one week rental’? 
When we were in here a few weeks ago renting Supersize Me, I saw that
several of your new releases were shelved in mixed cases.  Some of the
cases said ‘two day rental,’ others ‘one week rental.’" 

Clerk: We run out of cases, but all the new releases are two-day rentals. 
If it’s in the wrong case, you have to read the slip inside.

"The slip?  Is that the same as the receipt?"

Clerk: Yeah.  You should read the receipt to be sure you’re getting it
for a full week instead of two days.

Friends, read your Blockbuster receipts. 

*~*

Denouement: To delay the charges, sleep on it, etc., we rented on my card
rather than D.’s.  Then, to clear our names, salvage our fragile credit
ratings, and restore decency to our lives, D. slinked back to the store a few
days later and coughed up the twelve bucks.  But insult to injury, those
goldang ads.  "The end of fees.  The start of more."