If you’re looking for a line of work where it’s relatively easy to become well-liked, teaching probably isn’t for you. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to have students and/or colleagues like you — I’ve certainly had my fair share of both — but the heart of your work is convincing a lot of people, more and more of whom have grown up with the instant gratification of modern technology burnt into their synapses at an early age, to set aside those enjoyments and…
When my father moved his business for the last time in 2004, he got rid of a lot of the computer magazines and catalogues that he’d been accumulating over the years. I’d always had a fondness for those early years of PC Magazine — I talked about that a bit in an old Musecast video — but beyond the actual magazine columns and news stories, I always liked looking through the old advertisements for personal computers, seeing Moore’s Law in effect and wondering what more would…
[The following blog contains discussion of child abuse.] I got a new bicycle for my tenth birthday. I wish I could say that was a happy memory for me, but as I was in my father’s wood shop later while he was assembling it, he handed his pocket knife to me (I think he’d just used it to open some kind of packaging) and told me to close it. Never having used a pocket knife before, I asked him how to do that, and he…
For a few years around the turn of the millennium, the main clock at my father’s office was one of those clocks that broadcast a different bird’s call from its speaker for each of the twelve hours. The idea behind getting that clock for the office was to help us all be more aware of time, since it’s easy to tune out the same chiming sound , no matter how many (or few) times it’s made at the top of each hour. Maybe our brains…
Dominatrix Community Condemns Netflix Show ‘Bonding’ As ‘Inauthentic’ and ‘Problematic’ (IndieWire via yahoo.com) I’m old enough that my first explorations of my sexuality online weren’t done on the Internet, but on local computer bulletin boards. I got regular Internet access when I first went off to college, and as wonderful of a resource as the Internet proved to be for that purpose, it also provided me with my first lessons about how “nothing ever really leaves the Internet,” long before anyone thought to coin that…