PointCast was one of those Internet services that was far ahead of its time. At its root, it was a lot like the news readers we use on our smartphones and tablets today, pushing information to computers during off-peak Internet usage, and its screensaver was far more useful and engaging than those shipping with Windows 98 at the time (or those shipping with Windows 10 today). In an age where 56k dial-up modems were the height of speed for most Internet users, though, PointCast was…
I am not a big fan of the “Hey, remember when this happened X years ago today?” messages that various social media services and other Internet platforms send to me. On top of not always being accurate (like photo services that send me messages about the stock photos that came preloaded on my tablet), those memories often end up being things I’d rather not remember. Sometimes the memories are welcome, or the bad memories come with some kind of silver lining (like seeing the support…
It’s not like leaves turning yellow and falling off of trees when it was still (technically) summer never happened to me when I was living in Ohio, but it was unusual to notice any widespread colour changes until at least the first days of October. One of the hardest adjustments I’ve had to make since moving to Wisconsin is just how much earlier that shift happens here, even though I’m not living that much farther north than I did before. Some of the trees on…
The first nine months I lived in this apartment, I had to deal with at least two dozen false fire alarms. The first of these came before I even began teaching in Wisconsin, waking me up in the middle of the night and instantly plunging me into fear that taking the job offer here would wind up being one of the biggest mistakes of my life. By the time that autumn was over, even the loudness and shrillness of this building’s alarms had become blasé…
Fire and Smoke Map (airnow.gov) I didn’t require my students in my online classes last year to turn their video cameras on, not only because I don’t have a webcam (I left my old one behind in Colorado) and didn’t want to force students to do something I wasn’t doing myself, but because I’m a firm believer in students’ rights to privacy, especially in their own homes. Some of my students may have just logged into Zoom and gone off to another room to play…