Kitty: you are my Lucy

As in: Photos

1. Lay in hilarious pose on floor. Pretend to be asleep.
2. Continue laying in hilarious pose while stupid owner gets out his camera with Charlie-Brown-like naivete.
3. The moment before owner takes his picture, sit up and ruin hilarious pose. Owner falls on his back, metaphorically speaking, screaming AARRGH!

Like a Lemming off a cliff

As in: Blogistry

Lessig is to Roosevelt...

As in: Thinking

Someone on Writing and the Digital Life recently made the suggestion that the early conception of cyberspace was much like the early conception of the American West, and its settlement was not unlike the Gold Rush. Following that analogy, I said:

A key emergence, for me anyhow, of digital culture is the "creative commons" movement. Perhaps the Manifest Destiny metaphor applies to the digital world in this context as well. To whit: as the American West was settled, divided, and deeded, people began to realize that despite its size, the resources of North America were not limitless. Those who enjoyed the open, wild spaces of 'nature' began to work to solidify protections for that wild space. The national park system emerged. Similarly, as the digital realm has been 'settled' and deeded, people began to realize that a resource formerly taken for granted (the public domain) was being eroded by the expanded copyright protections brought into law as part of the digital age (see Lessig's FREE CULTURE for a careful delination of this history). In response, the GNU public license and the creative commons movement each work to secure a space in which the public can still enjoy the 'natural wildness' of the digital age. I'm certainly romanticising the National Parks system, but the analogy works for me.

I like this analogy a lot--it encapsulates, for me, the relationship between corporate use of digital spaces and the resultant legal tomfoolery regarding things like copyright. At the same time, I dislike this analogy because I dislike the idea of the public domain being in the position of the Parks system, which we have seen only survives as long as it's actively protected. What would the digital analogue of exploratory drilling in Alaska be? The re-sale of public-domain copyrights to private corporations? Ugh.

Today's inanity

As in: Flotsam

So I recently ordered some printer cartridges from Dell, because I'm a sucker for printing, and they sent me a couple emails notifying me that my order had a) been received, b) been acknowledged, c) been processed, and most recently, d) shipped. Check out their email:

Hilariously, I seem to have had some remarkable influence on this process: That's the epitome of consumer culture right there, where the very act of ordering something online deserves not just thanks but congratulations.

Sonic Hypocracy

As in: Media

In Entertainment Weekly this week, there's an interesting ad from MicroSoft:

Click for a large (82K) version of the image. The ad touts all the nifty things you can do with your music, including: I find it hilariously hypocritical that the company known for its draconian DRM strategies (Longhorn, anyone?) advocates, in the same breath, "mixing and Mashing." They left out the first step: "Get permission."

See also their web presence for this campaign.

Addendum: Now that the supreme court has ruled against innovation and in favor of big money, we should add "but don't let anyone else listen to your mix."

My new favorite thing

As in: Favorite Things , Nerdistry

I finally took a look at the "stats" page for my web-hosting service. The coolest thing ever: the search queries page. So funny.

I'm particularly intrigued by the nonsequiters: "donkey ride" and "rember it for you wholesale quotations". I feel bad for the person searching for "curragh building." I imagine someone in a workshop with a wi-fi laptop, lathe in hand, staring at my blog and going "what the hell is this now"? The real question, does my 'curragh-labs' site give any insight into curragh building? Does the metaphor transfer back?

Back to work

As in: In the Stereo

Sorry for the absence. Our colleagues from colleagues from South Africa were visiting, so there was little time for blogging.

• Catch-22, Keasby Nights
• Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
  At Jeff's recommendation.
• Various, Soundtrack from The Big Lebowski

I expect you to die...

As in: Thoughts from the "L"

On the way home from my birthday comics spree at Chicago Comics, the coolest comic store ever, we sat behind a Chinese man reading a Chinese-language book. Oddly, the title and some of the captions in the book were in English. The book: Gold Island Baccarat Strategies. The only place I imagine anyone playing baccarat is in a James Bond movie. The things you see on the train.

Summer's here!

As in: In the Stereo

• Dinosaur Jr, Without a Sound
• Colin James, and The Little Big Band II
• Paul Simon, Graceland

Wow! Money!

As in: Flotsam

Apparently, I won the lottery:

The Award Department
Barnby Worldwide Business Information
9 Leapal Road,
Guildford, Surrey, GU1 4JX

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What Bombed

As in: Composition , Teaching

For the last few days I've been participating in the 2005 CASTL conference. It's been a pretty cool experience that helped me get insight into some of the ways people do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (or SoTL, which most pronounce like SO-tul but one guy pronounced to rhyme with bottle). Of course, as a compositionist, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning was nothing new—we built our profession on it.

Craig Nelson, one of the featured speakers, presented several key points, but the big one was "sharing" your teaching knowledge with others. Again, not a new idea in Composition, but new for many of the audience. He led us to several models of SoTL research, starting with the "What Works" article. It seems like those kinds of articles might be best shared in updatable, searchable online resources like the Practical Muse. I doodled in my notes, though, that we also needed a "What Bombed" genre, in which we explain our ideas for teaching projects, assignments with an eye toward the challenges these bring.

I also composed a limerick, reproduced here for your amusement. NOTE: I'm using the less common but more-easily-rhymable pronounciation of SoTL (SAW-tull):

There once was a souce who did SoTL
who looked for a good teaching model.
  He said, with a wink,
  I really do think
the answer must lie in a bottle.

Summer break thoughts

As in: Flotsam

Thoughts as I near the end of my one-week break between spring and summer terms:

• What does Huck Finn have to do with donuts?
• Which is the best They Might Be Giants song? Ana Ng? Snowball in Hell? My favorite might be Till My Head Falls Off. [Update: don't forget Meet James Ansor: "Meet James Ansor ... Belgium's Famous Painter ... Dig him up and shake his hand; understand the man."]
• I love the way this guy barrages "Intelligent Design" with wicked rhetoric and cruel taunts.
• I'm working on a comicblog entry about Creative Commons. Coming soon!
• Tech projects for the summer: Finish Random comic archive feature; Roll up drupal or something similar; Linux at home.
• Writing projects for summer: Random comic article; finish Angel / Detective article; bust out the diss and see how much of it I need to throw away to get the bones of a book out of it. My guess: 60%.
Posted by briley at 7:45 PM

Memory Machines

As in: Games

I have a model of this tank, but it's painted with Ork graffiti.

The first review of Dawn of War I read described the game as the "beer and pretzels" version of Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000. True tabletop gamers would not give in, it suggested, to the glitzy blood and diceless battles of this flashy new computer game. For me, however, the sense is rather nostalgia for the old game. A friend from the gaming days suggested that on his next visit to Chicago I should break out the old models for a rumble. Perhaps I finally understand those Deer Hunting games now—they don't function as fun games, but as memory machines, trying to capture the essence of something else that's fun. That's what Dawn of War, a reasonably good but not great RTS game, does for me. It captures the look and feel of those tabletop models squirreled away in my closet.

Summer Tunes

As in: In the Stereo

First week of summer. For me, anyhow.

1. Santana, Abraxas
2. They Might Be Giants, Severe Tire Damage
3. Counting Crows, Recovering the Satellites

The Unseen Hand

As in: Comics , Hobarthy

Month 2:

There were lots of panels that could port to a larger story, as long as your character's name is Mike. Here are a few, arranged in a vaguely amusing way. I imagine the man with bandages as either a man in a hospital bed or a space mummy (the bandages + the weird sci-fi tube) from Mike's subconscious. I like choice 2 better.

Tales from the User-Interface battlefield

As in: Comics , Design

Reasons everyone should read Donald Norman.

1. The recent run of Agnes has been interesting:

2. When Jenny and I went to see Revenge of the Sith, the person in front of us in the line for the pre-bought tickets machine was apparently new to the device and didn't know that he was supposed to swipe his credit card through the credit card reader slot. Instead, he folded up his confirmation printout so that the misleading (and unused) barcode rested at the end of the page; then he swiped the barcode through the credit card reader. Just as I was telling him that he needed to use his credit card, an employee redirected us to a ticket window—apparently the machine was just booting up and didn't have the right display on the screen. As we walked toward the ticket booth, I saw someone else walking up to the vending machine, folding her confirmation printout to swipe the barcode through the slot.

Aside: Donald Norman looks a lot like c-list actor Michael Lerner (whom I remember as the evil warden from the Ray Liotta vehicle, No Escape).

The Most Cluttered Office (OR) How I Learned to Stop Being Afraid of Camera Features and Love "Sports" Mode

As in: Photos , Thoughts from the "L"

A month ago, staring absent-mindedly out the window, I noticed that the Green Line runs right by The Most Cluttered Office. Championship clutter. Olympic-caliber. I've been in Greg Ulmer's office—I know clutter. Yesterday, I got a window seat on the right side of the train, so I thought I'd see if I can get a pic of it. I turned on "Sports Mode" and sat poised by the window, catlike. The kid in front of me looked at me like I was nuts.

It occurs to me that perhaps the piles shield this guy from the terrors of working with the el going by every 10 minutes. My eyes keep returning to the leaning tower of booklets in the left window: how many more can he add before it topples?

Another cultural mystery gone

As in: News

This story isn't getting as much press as I thought it would. Neither Slashdot nor BoingBoing has anything about it. Anyhow, from the Chicago Tribune:

The world's most famous anonymous news source outed himself Tuesday. W. Mark Felt, a 91-year-old retired FBI official living with his daughter in California, revealed perhaps Washington's best-kept secret--that he was Deep Throat, the secret source for the reporting by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that helped break open the Watergate scandal leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.... Tuesday evening, Woodward, Bernstein and their former editor, Ben Bradlee, confirmed Felt's role.

I don't know why this story is getting so little press, but I'm both glad to see the mystery resolved and sad to have it gone. I sort of thought we'd never know. Anyhow, it seems like the University of Illinois Champaigne-Urbana might want to take down this website.