posted 2007/09/28 at 20:53
It was on this date in 1987 that the first episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint," first aired in syndication. I didn't get into the series until maybe the fourth season or so, which meant that it took me a while to see just how cringe-inducing those early episodes were, but thankfully in later seasons the show hit its stride, and to this day it still remains my favourite of all the Star Trek series. If only network executives these days would give shows that much time to shine. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What is your favorite (toy) stuffed animal?
(Finally a five really geared towards me ...) Asking me to pick a favourite among my Popples is like asking a mother to choose her favourite child. My Popples are my favourites, that's all I'm saying.
2. What do you think of stuffed animals as gifts?I think they're wonderful to give and receive, although the three times I've tried to give them to people I was interested in pursuing romantic relationships with, the tactic backfired horribly on me, so I don't do that anymore.
3. What do you do with a stuffed animal you don’t want?
I've yet to have this happen to me, and would probably keep any stuffed animal I was given unless it was somehow offencive to me. In that case, I would probably just drop it off at a local Goodwill.
4. What are your thoughts on the whole Beanie Babies craze of the nineties?
I never saw the attraction, but I certainly saw the marketing at work.
5. How many stuffed animals do you own?
If I were to hazard a guess, somewhere between 80 and 100.
posted 2007/09/27 at 23:59
I've not felt that good about the recent lack of updates here. I figured that adding my teaching gig to my schedule was going to make things difficult for me in terms of fitting things in, but these past few weeks I've just been so busy I don't know what to do with myself. Things should get better next year when I get done with all the freelance writing I've been doing and some other projects, but then again the main reason for me leaving the freelance gigs is so I can teach more classes. In the meantime I've been neglecting a number of things, and this Website is certainly near the top of that list. I made a special effort earlier this year to really take this Website more professionally, particularly as I was re-entering the job market then and ran under the assumption that potential employers would find this Website. I redesigned the Website to look more professional, and I went from a more conversational and abrupt tone to my entries to something a bit more measured and flowing and lyrical. (That's what I'd like to think, at least; part of me worries that I'm being long-winded here to make up for the fact that I'm not writing huge English papers any longer.) If I don't keep this Website updated, though, in addition to risking alienating long-term readers, I also don't put out that good an image to others.
The real culprit lately has been my dance games. On the one hand, I do seem to be spending an absurd amount of time playing them lately, but at the same time I'm starting to fit into clothes that haven't fit me in years, and I'm making tremendous progress in terms of the way dance games measure player performance. I'm also concerned because I generally feel less comfortable playing out in the garage at night, since I have to walk outside a bit to the garage, and the garage isn't climate-controlled that well. When it gets to be freezing outside I really don't like going out there to work out, so I figure that I should be getting in as much exercise as I can now, while it's still relatively warm outside. In the meantime, though, that just leaves a lot less time for other stuff.
Given all of this stuff I'm doing (and yes, there's something else going on here that I'm not going to tell you scamps about), it's kind of funny that I'm actually starting to look at going back to school next year. I should probably write a whole entry on that (if not a .journal article), but I can't help but look at all the opportunities I have here to do some realy cool stuff and think to myself that I should at least try applying to a couple of places and see what happens. If nothing else, schools generally don't accept GRE scores five years after the test date, and I'm not sure I can duplicate the lights-out performance I had back when I first took the test in 2003. I'd have to do some serious writing to get into these schools, though, and that just gets back to the whole issue of me not having enough time for much of anything these days. I know, I'm just like everyone else in that regard, but it still stinks.
posted 2007/09/25 at 23:24
Heading up to campus to teach kind of brings back memories. I basically take the same highway up from Toledo that my folks would take back when we were visiting my grandparents, and when I head up to Ann Arbor to play dancey games (like I did tonight) I go even further on that route. The first few times I made these drives I was more concerned with keeping my eyes on the road -- Michigan's highways are kind of crazy compared to Ohio's (particularly their nearly-stop-on-a-dime-after-going-70 exit ramps) -- but now that I've gotten the route down, I'm examining the scenery a bit more, and remembering how I used to pass these places when I was younger. As a child I wished I could visit some of these places, but now that I can actually stop at these places, of course now I don't really have much time to visit most of them. (Joe, what's the name of that mall just off of the State Street exit on I-94?)
Driving in Michigan as much as I have been lately has also made me more aware of how traffic signs are changing. In Michigan they still use the old square-type exit markers, which I prefer aesthetically, while in Ohio they're changing to a more vertical style. The new signs are smaller, which doesn't make much sense to me because I doubt they're saving that much money on the smaller signs, plus the numbers on the new signs are much smaller than they were before, which I'm assuming makes it harder for those with poor eyesight to discern. Another strange thing that's happening is that Ohio is adding exit numbers to a lot of exits that previously didn't have numbers; as an example, after I-475 and US-23 branch off from each other (just a third of a mile from my house), there's only one exit before you get to the Michigan border, and it used to be that this exit had no number. Now all of a sudden it's Exit 234. I'm assuming that this is to make it easier for people who download driving directions off of the Internet, but it's still weirdly jarring.
While I'm at it, I'd like to bring up the fact that I actually learned a lot of my first words from highway signs, while my folks were driving me around. (For some reason being driven seemed to stimulate my brain; I can remember back when I was still in my early years of grade school asking my father if the mile markers marked how long the road had gone, or how many miles straight we were from the state border.) I mention this because, for all the talk these days about how "leet speak" and the like are ruining our grammar, I can remember that when I was a kid, coming back down from Michigan to "our exit" from the highway (an exit-only lane), there was a big yellow sign above the lane about a half-mile before the exit that read, "THRU TRAFFIC MERGE LEFT." If "through" hasn't been killed by that, and by drive-thru and all the other uses of "thru," I don't think we need to worry too much about Internet lingo "ruining" our language permanently.
posted 2007/09/23 at 18:21
A few years ago, back before we were in the last days of Media Play, it seemed like every Tuesday the store would be open at midnight to give customers the opportunity to purchase something as soon as they were legally able to do so. I recall it wasn't just confined to Media Play, though; for a while there I think Best Buy was doing the same thing. I'm guessing that this was a response to the sales that 24-hour megastores like Meijer and Wal*Mart Supercentre were generating since they can always bring items out from the shipping docks at the crack of midnight. In recent years it seems like this phenomenon has faded, although of course special midnight sales still happen for things like the release of Harry Potter books, and it seems to be picking up for releases of hot video game franchises like Madden and Halo.
Still, back in 1997, it was kind of rare for these midnight sales to occur, but one of them did happen on this date ten years ago today. The reason for the sale was because the recording of Elton John's reworking of "Candle in the Wind" he performed at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was being released. The single quickly rose to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there into the next year, eventually selling eleven million copies, the only certified Diamond single in this country's history. The single achieved similar success worldwide, and although some ambiguity exists as to whether this single or Bing Crosby's seminal "White Christmas" is the greatest-selling song of all time, the phenomenon of the single's release is yet another testament to the power that Lady Diana had across the world. Thus it was that I was in the Media Play store at midnight that night as most people lined up to buy copies of Elton John's single, with a couple of young men instead asking for the newest album from Boyz II Men that was also being released.
I had to wait until the very end of this blitz, but then I came forward, wearing the same Björk t-shirt I am wearing as I type this right now (which I bought from a mail-order company that used to advertise in the back of Rolling Stone back then), and asked for the album that she had just released at the same time, Homogenic. At the time I just thought that it would be another top-notch album, but after taking it home and listening to it just once, I realized that I had just bought quite possibly the greatest album ever. I had only heard "Joga" up to that point, but following that track on the CD is the greatest three-song sequence in recorded history, with the minimalistic melancholy of "Unravel" and the subdued ebullience of "All Neon Like" bordering the single greatest song in human history, "Bachelorette." Needless to say, if it were actually possible to wear out a CD from overplaying, I probably would have had to have bought several dozen copies of Homogenic by this point.
I will admit that the album isn't perfect; "Five Years" still grates on me with its odd instrumentation and sometimes-awkward lyrics, and I was slow to really latch on to the raw emotion of "Pluto" since it stands in such stark contrast to the rest of the album. In spite of that, though, there is little doubt in my mind that Homogenic is the best album ever released by anyone, and I strongly encourage all of you to buy your own copies if you haven't done so already. If nothing else, if you haven't heard the original album cut of "All is Full of Love," you should; it features the intimacy that was lacking out of the remix (and subsequently nearly everything else Björk has released since then).
posted 2007/09/21 at 16:13
Then again, you already knew that, right? The final of the "ten-year anniversaries having something to do with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales" will come this coming Sunday, and is also music-related. Until then, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. When were you the coldest you’ve ever been?
Probably when I was very young and still liked to go play out in the snow. Back then getting sick meant days off of school, and while that's still kind of the case today, I don't get paid for sick days, so needless to say I'll be avoiding the cold as much as possible this coming winter. (Speaking of which, signs are pointing to a very bitter winter here.)
2. When were you the hottest you’ve ever been?
One summer late in the 1980s we hit 100 several times, topping off at 104 one day. Back then my parents' bedroom was the only room of the house that had air conditioning, so things were incredibly sticky and uncomfortable all over the house.
3. When were you the tiredest you’ve ever been?
The day we arrived in Washington D.C. on that seventh-grade field trip, when I didn't sleep on the bus ride over. I wound up zonking later that day as the bus took us back to our hotel room, which is the only time I've ever fallen asleep in a moving vehicle.
4. When were you the most stressed you’ve ever been?
Given that I'm almost perpetually stressed out (usually over piddly stuff) I don't know if I can single out a moment in particular here, but for the sake of answering the question let's go with last fall when I was going through all those tests and stuff to finish my MA.
5. When were you the dirtiest you’ve ever been?
When I was young and still played in the mud in the summers. (Gee, noticing a trend here?) These days I'm far too much of a clean freak to let something like that happen, though I don't like hanging around people after I've been working out.
posted 2007/09/20 at 23:31
I've had full-fledged Internet access for thirteen years now, if you want to put the start date as when I first got my account at Antioch. (For about nine months before that I did have limited Internet access through some of the local computer bulletin boards I dialed into.) In all this time I've had to deal with relatively few viruses, and although I've always practiced safe computing since my BBS days, I think that to a large extent I've kind of been lucky in that regard. Although I've never been one for conducting file sharing or other not-exactly-legal business over the Internet, I still have visited my share of shady Websites over the years, and no, I'm not going to elaborate on that, thank you very much. (Seriously, do I need to spell it out for you?)
Particularly in my younger years, my father got on my case over some of the Websites I was visiting. (When I was younger I wasn't so good about covering my tracks.) He kept warning me that visiting some of these Websites was basically just inviting viruses and other such things on my computer. The irony here is that over the years I'd never had to deal with anything serious on my computer, whereas I've had to remove a slew of viruses from my father's computers when he just visits professional Websites and discussion boards related to the work his companies do. Granted, I'm far more Internet-savvy than he is, but I still find this a delicious bit of irony that I'm quick to remind my father of when he starts complaining about some of the stuff that happens on the Internet.
Well, yesterday I finally got my first real taste of having a malicious Website hijack my computer. Although I didn't get infected with any viruses, the combination of multiple attempts to download viruses onto my computer and other malicious code basically ground my computer to a screaming halt, and right in the middle of when I was in some real important work that I couldn't afford to throw away. I had to spend most of my afternoon trying to undo the damage wrought by this Website. What kind of debeaucherous Website was I looking at when I finally got bitten in the butt by malicious code? It was a Website on logical fallacies. I went looking for Internet resources on logical fallacies I could point my students to, and one of the top Google searches looked like a legitimate domain and had a good-looking first page, but when I clicked on a link to a specific branch of logical fallacies, BOOM, my computer nearly chokes to death on the crap that got launched from it.
If I hadn't had so much important work to do there, I might have found some kind of humour in this. Given the circumstances, though, I was sitting here at my computer for a good portion of my afternoon steaming mad. Seriously, of all the kinds of Websites to finally slug my computer, a Website on logical fallacies? Unbelievable. (I've run a full scan since then and my computer is safe, but I'm still mad at Norton for not catching that stuff before it could mess me up so badly.)
posted 2007/09/18 at 17:03
I believe that in the seven years or so that the .org has been in existence, this is the first time I'm updating it from another state. I had some free time before teaching up here at work in Michigan, so I decided to come to the faculty lounge and take care of some business on the one computer they have up here. At least the college doesn't schedule classes during this time, so things here are kind of quiet; I like that I'm able to get a good parking spot every time I come up here, although I think that in future semesters I'll probably want to teach earlier in the afternoon, since that would fit to my schedule a lot better. The air-conditioning in here is also nice, although I won't have a problem when it comes time to teach since I teach in the basement of this building, which is always cool. (I'm not so sure that will be so nice once the cold temperatures hit, though, and I don't get any cell phone reception here.)
One of the great ironies for me was that when I visited this room the first time I came up here, there was a poster right above the computer monitor here for a Website for professional adjuncts run by Houghton Mifflin, one of the big textbook publishers. I went back home that evening intending to go on the Website and scour its resources, but when I tried loading the Website up I got a nice big 404 error. You know, if you're going to reserve a domain name for a Website, the least you could do, even if you decide to totally delete the content, is to put something up other than a 404 page. 404 pages reek of carelessness, and although I don't expect high standards from all the big companies, this act in particular just seems to be totally unprofessional. Then again, maybe I'm only thinking that because it's affecting content that would be of great use to me.
I've enjoyed teaching here so far, but I'm not going to deny having some thoughts about continuing my education here soon, either in terms of pursuing an MFA in creative writing or a Ph.D. in rhetoric. Even though I don't think I was ever that close to any of my fellow MA students at UT, I still find myself missing the camraderie of being in the student body. Given the tiring life of adjuncts, I don't think I can look for an approximation of that with my fellow teachers, either. More than anything, I wonder if I may be cheating myself by not at least trying to get another degree given that I probably could get one, but at the same time I keep asking myself whether the degree will have any use for me or not. I don't want to get another degree just for the sake of getting another degree, if that makes any sense. I still have a lot of options open to me here in my professional life, and with each passing day that seems to be more of a curse than a blessing.
posted 2007/09/16 at 21:43
When I taught at UT my classes were on Mondays and Wednesdays, so during the fall semester pre-class conversations would invariably turn to the previous day's football games. The combination of me teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, along with the relative lessening of importance of Monday Night Football after its move to ESPN, means that it doesn't feel like we'll have that much football talk in my class this term. Out of curiosity, though, I did ask for a quick show of hands from my students, and even though Monroe County isn't that far removed from UT, I've still gone from classes of mostly Browns fans to a class with no Browns fans whatsoever. After watching the Bengals game earlier today, I'm going to be quite glad of that fact when I go up to teach on Tuesday. That was a painful game to watch, especially since that was pretty much the only "gimme" the Bengals had in their September schedule; I don't think this loss bodes well for the rest of the season.
On the subject of football, I'm still using My Yahoo! (or more specifically the beta of the upcoming new release), and I use the "scores of your favourite teams" unit on several pages. As the NFL's preseason drew near, though, I noticed something which kind of irked me; although the unit in question only displays the current and previous day's scores for the teams you pick, if you have any NFL teams chosen, you get reminders up to a week in advance of any game. Now, I'm fully aware of how football-crazy this country is and how the NFL does such a good job of keeping its fans salivating for their product by making it so scarce, but still, I don't think it's right that football is the only sport where My Yahoo! extends its usual preview window from a day to a week. I can't even turn it off, although if given my choice I'd keep the option for an extra-long preview for one league; for me, though, that league would be the NHL.
On the subject of sports, with the Tigers and Yankees fighting for the AL wildcard, things here at the house have gotten just as tense as they were during the ALDS last autumn. I'm fully expecting the Yankees to win the wildcard, and I guess now I kind of wish I could believe that, in addition to the overt conspiracy on the part of the sports press to keep pushing and promoting the Yankees as somehow being a kind of "America's team," that there's also a more covert conspiracy on the part of baseball big-wigs to keep the Yankees in the playoffs year after year because they think the Yankees are the only team that will generate good ratings for the playoffs. I can't believe in it because it doesn't exist, but I'd sure like to believe in it once the Tigers get knocked out of the playoff hunt. It's lovely how sports can make us want to shut off our common sense just for the sake of a childish assertion that our team really is the best and they'd be the champions if it weren't for some force, whether bureaucratic or cosmic, preventing them from winning their league's title.
posted 2007/09/14 at 16:25
... because Wikipedia lists three baseball events for today next to each other. In 1987, the Toronto Blue Jays hit ten home runs against the Baltimore Orioles, the first time an MLB team reached double digits for home runs in a single game. Three years later, in 1990, Ken Griffey Jr. and his father hit back-to-back home runs on this date, the first time a father-son tandem had ever done so. These are nice, but more ominously, this was also the date in 1994 when a strike cancelled the remainder of the MLB season. I would argue that baseball is still feeling the effects of that last one. On that somewhat dark note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What was the last thing taken from you without your permission?
I generally don't have a problem with people taking things from me without my permission; I'm more than happy to let people run off with things that I'm not using at the moment. My main problem is in getting them back at some point; don't even ask how often I have to go into my sister's bedroom to take back stuff of mine she's "borrowed" for months on end. That being said, to answer the question as best I can remember, it would be the props I had built for me for Spectrum's 2003 Halloween Party, which I'd been storing in the Spectrum office until one day they got moved to someone else's house, and no amount of begging or pleading has yet to help me get these items back.
2. Who was the photographer the last time a picture of you was taken?
A staff photographer for UT's student newspaper when they did those stories on Un/Gagged a couple of winters ago.
3. When were you last taken by surprise?
When I went out to the garage earlier this week and found a Pac-Man machine in there.
4. When were you last taken for a ride (interpret literally or figuratively!)?
Literally, I can't remember the last time I was in a moving vehicle when I wasn't the driver. Figuratively ... let's just say it was last summer and not give any details because things will work out better that way.
5. Where were you the last time you wished to be "taken away from all this?"
Given my propensity for daydreaming, probably no more than three or four answers ago.
posted 2007/09/12 at 22:29
My father has finally agreed to let me build a new computer for him, which will probably be a prelude to (and practice run for) the construction of Yggdrasil Mark II. Although we'll be buying the bulk of the items later this month, we got in a 22" Acer flat panel earlier this week, which will be going to the new computer. (It was on sale for a limited time at Tiger Direct, so we picked it up while the price was low.) Given that we needed to test the flat panel for dead pixels and the like, I hooked it up to my computer earlier tonight. Ignoring how ludicrous it is that I now have a bigger display on my computer than my television right now, I'm kind of falling in love. You wouldn't think that the 1280 × 1024 my old flat panel churns out would be insufficient, particularly given that I don't really have that many applications I tend to run. All that extra desktop space sure is fun to play with, though, particularly given how I like to keep things all nice and tidy and lined up.
What bothers me, though, is that I don't really need a monitor this big. I mean, yes, I'm certainly getting some use out of the extra space here, but I could survive quite fine without it. It would be a convenience for me to have more space to keep good-sized windows up so I didn't have to keep flipping between windows, and all that extra desktop space gives me more room for my beloved Yahoo! Widgets (I should switch to Google Desktop soon, I know), and I suppose that this translates to more productivity. Still, even if I were to view my old flat panel's smallness as an inconvenience, I don't think it's an inconvenience that is worth spending so much money to remedy, even if right now I'm kind of salivating inside as I use this larger flat panel.
One thing that inconvenienced me, though, was that my old Oh My Goddess! desktop wallpaper kind of got stretched out because the aspect ratio I'm running Windows under now got changed from the old ratio to a widescreen ratio. I've had to "upgrade" my wallpaper before because my screen resolution went up, but I've never had my aspect ratio change. I've never had the reason to go out looking before, but I suppose that there must be Websites out there devoted to widescreen wallpapers. I think I'll go look for some widescreen Oh My Goddess! wallpapers here now.
posted 2007/09/11 at 22:56
Yesterday afternoon as my lunch was cooking I went out to the garage, where I normally play my dance games and we also have a secondary fridge (convenient for keeping cold water and Gatorade nearby) as well as our trash cans. Imagine my surprise when I go out there and there's a Pac-Man arcade cabinet out there. At first I assumed that my brother-in-law had picked it up from one of his gaming buddies, but later it turned out that one of our next-door neighbours had put it out on the street for anyone who wanted it, and Jeff, on his way out, picked it up and asked if he could keep it here until he could get a truck to take it back down to Bowling Green with him. The machine's kind of dusty, and we're not even sure if it works, but Jeff thinks that he can either get it fixed and place it somewhere or else sell it on eBay.
I guess seeing an old Pac-Man cabinet there kind of took me back to my youth, when arcade machines were still a big thing and I dreamed of owning my own one day. Pengo was my favourite game back when I first got into arcade games, but I probably would have given anything to have my own Pac-Man machine. Having the machine out there kind of took me back to those days, and even though I've got an arcade-perfect version of Pac-Man on one of my PlayStation discs, it's still tempting to go out there, dust the machine off, and see if I can get it working right. As with my older console systems, I just think there's something romantic about playing on the original systems as opposed to playing the games via emulation.
This has also made me think about my own wishes when it comes to owning arcade machines. Right now I'd really like to have an arcade dance game machine, not only because the dance game community online has this thing about only "counting" arcade scores for various reasons (tighter timing windows, can't use a hand controller), but because the platforms are generally a lot more reliable and less prone to break down than any home pads, even the super-expensive ones I have. If you count pinball machines, I also desperately want a copy of the Twilight Zone pinball game, not only because it's the greatest pin ever but because it was the game I played the most when I was at Antioch back in the day. The only other game I can think I'd really want is Street Fighter II Champion Edition, not only because I played the Toot out of it back in my teenage years, but because they're only about $300 each and fairly easy to find.
posted 2007/09/09 at 16:26
As I mentioned in my last post, on Friday I started a new game of Final Fantasy VII in celebration of the ten-year anniversary of its stateside release. Yesterday I played the game for much of the afternoon, and since I don't stick to my diet on Saturdays, I was also drinking red creme soda while I was playing. I can remember drinking a lot of Barq's Red Creme Soda when I was first playing through Final Fantasy VII, which was kind of notable because I hadn't drunk that much of it since I drank it regularly at Antioch. Apart from Fruitopia, Barq's Red Creme Soda was my favourite drink to get from the vending machines in the Student Union there (although when the cafeteria was open they had Mr. Pibb in the fountain drinks, which I probably liked more than the Barq's), and I went through an awful lot of it while I was down in Yellow Springs. Even today I get a strange feeling of comfort from drinking red creme soda, although I can't find Barq's brand of it anywhere so I'm stuck drinking Kroger store brand red creme soda these days.
Yesterday afternoon my Mom was baking pumpkin pies, which is kind of an odd thing for her to be doing at this time of year. Right away when the smell hit my nose, I couldn't help but feel like autumn had hit, given that she normally waits until at least late October to start making pumpkin pies. I did feel a bit cold then, but that was because of the air conditioning; it was still fairly summer-like outside. Still, as I sit looking out my window here, it's hard not to notice that some of the leaves on a couple of our trees have started to yellow and brown, and the other trees have turned a fairly dull green. Today being the first Sunday of the NFL season and all, it does feel like we're accelerating towards autumn fairly quickly here. Strangely, though, the smell of Mom's pumpkin pies was the strongest indicator of autumn I think I've experienced so far.
I'd like to drive over to Cleveland sometime in the next couple of weeks to visit my friend Lara now that she has her own apartment there. (I know, since when have I actually wanted to go to Cleveland? Well, for a good friend I make exceptions to my usual rules.) If there's anything I'm looking forward to more than meeting up with Lara for the first time since this past winter, though, it's the fact that I can get Sbarro pizza at the service plazas on my way to and from Cleveland on the Ohio Turnpike. I already have an inexplicable love of bad road food as it is, but there's something about Sbarro pizza that hooks me for some reason. A mall by my old private school used to have a Sbarro, and for a while there was even a Sbarro at UT's Student Union, but both of those locations have long since vanished, and the only place I can go locally to get Sbarro is the movie theatre in the big mall in town, and not only am I not a movie person and not a mall person, but trying to navigate things there on a Saturday just feels like too much trouble to me. I think going all the way to Cleveland and back just to hit up the Sbarro locations on the way there may actually be more convenient for me, strangely enough.
When I do visit Lara, though, I'll have to be sure to bake brownies for her ahead of time, and I'm already doing a lot of baking for my students. The teacher I had in my undergraduate career who turned me on to teaching often brought cookies to class, and openly admitted that she did so to pump us full of sugar (and thus make us more talkative) as much as to show some appreciation for us. I've kind of brought that to the classes I've taught so far as well, and although it kind of stinks that I have to wait to consume their leftovers on Saturdays when I go off-diet, I'd like to think that my students appreciate the effort I put into making cookies for all of them. The fact that the cookies also serve as a "bribe" to get them to come to class ... well, that's just another positive side effect of the whole thing. Still, I'm trying to figure out how I'd have the time to bake for all of my classes when I start to teach full-time. I guess I should hold off on worrying about that until I actually get a full-time teaching position, though.
posted 2007/09/07 at 15:09
Returning to the "Ten Years Ago Today" theme I used last Friday, I said that the death of Diana, Princess of Wales had impacted me in a lot of ways in the days that followed. Although her funeral was not for a couple of days afterward, watching that funeral and being engrossed in the media coverage of it distracted me from something I had started a couple of days earlier, in fact ten years ago today, because it was on that day that THE GREATEST VIDEO GAME EVER, Final Fantasy VII, was released in the States. I bought my reserved copy at our local Toys'R'Us that day, and thought I would be totally engrossed in it until Diana's funeral coverage kind of distracted me. Of course, I've played Final Fantasy VII several times over since then, and will be starting a new game today to commemorate the anniversary of its stateside release. On that note, let's really hurry through the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What’s your favorite small office supply (like something that can fit in your top desk drawer)?
This should probably come as a surprise to none of you: gel pens.
2. What’s your favorite medium office supply (like something that can fit on your desktop)?
Well, my scissors are too big to fit in the small set of drawers I keep on my desktop, so I'll go with those. They are a rather large pair, and I think they're actually retooled kitchen shears, but they're a necessity for cutting through the impossibly thick plastic that so many things get packaged in these days.
3. What’s your favorite large office supply (like a furnishing or a large tool)?
I'll go with my bookshelves here. I am once again running out of space for all of my books and video games and DVDs and such, and I swear that I'll have to buy a two-bedroom house just so I can turn one bedroom into a library for all of my stuff.
4. To which specific office supply do you have a particular personal attachment?
The only things I get personally attached to are my journaling tools (pencil and binder); I recently bought new ones just because my old ones were in such a bad state, but I'm keeping the old tools on the upper shelf of my closet right now just because I can't bear to throw them out.
5. Which office supply do you consider yourself something of an expert on?
I don't really consider myself an expert on any office supply, unless you're going to count PCs as office supplies. (I don't think that would be in the spirit of this meme, though.)
posted 2007/09/06 at 23:13
Although my political beliefs lead me to really dislike and mistrust a large number of companies, I don't boycott that many companies, in large part because if I boycotted all of the companies that I thought were bad in some way, there basically wouldn't be anyplace left for me to shop. That being said, there are a few companies I boycott for various reasons: Wal*Mart (pretty much the epitome of evil), Nike (incredibly exploitive of their workers), Shell (the worst of the big oil companies when it comes to the environment), and McDonalds (the whole "meaty fries" controversy from a few years ago) are four that spring readily to mind. Maybe I can't practically boycott every company I'd like to, but conducting my daily affairs without doing business with any of those four companies really isn't a problem for me.
The thing is, though, today for my comp class I wanted to bring in hamburgers for my class. As I've done in the past, I'm starting the class out with critical thinking exercises and techniques, and I wanted to use fast food as a topic to get the class thinking about both the food industry as a whole and power relationships in general. I actually wound up lifting my boycott of McDonalds there to go and buy twenty-four double cheeseburgers for the class before we started tonight. (Of course, I then got stopped by two trains on my way to campus and showed up to class fifteen minutes late; it was a good thing I bought an insulated bag from Kroger before going up there.) I guess that now I'm wondering why I chose McDonalds. I mean, yes, McDonalds is kind of the behemoth of fast food hamburgers, but they aren't the only place I could have gone to. (The Wendy's locations in Michigan are offering fifty cent hamburgers right now, which would have saved me a lot of money.) Did I subconsciously want the students to form a bad impression of McDonalds specifically?
This episode is making me think of why I've ever lifted or stopped a boycott. I mean, last year I used Wal*Mart's money transfer service when I got stuck on my way home from North Carolina with a huge deficit in my bank account, but that was an emergency situation and I looked for a Western Union location for a long time there before finally stopping in at a Wal*Mart in West Virginia. However, there was one time before then that I shopped at a Wal*Mart, to buy a piece of electronic equipment that I couldn't find any place else and which, in all honesty, I could have lived without. I used to boycott Snapple and Pizza Hut because they employed Rush Limbaugh as a celebrity spokesperson, but I haven't really done that boycotting for a while now. (Then again, I haven't had any Snapple in ages; I always preferred Fruitopia, which is of course off the market now because I liked it.) Perhaps my actions today are making me think of the whole nature of boycotting and why and how some of us choose to boycott (or not boycott) certain companies.
I've kind of taxed my mind here without really getting anywhere, so I thought I'd just bring it up here and see what kind of responses I get from the rest of you on the subject.
posted 2007/09/05 at 21:23
Last night after work I went up to Ann Arbor to try out a new dance game location. (Yes, Ann Arbor is still standing after this past Saturday, hard as that may be to believe.) Although I've made a few trips up to Ann Arbor in the past, and used to pass through town back when I was still visiting my grandparents up in the Jackson area (I think yesterday was the first time in over a dozen years that I'd traveled on I-94), this was really the first time I'd ever driven through the suburbs of Ann Arbor. My previous trips there all involved me going downtown and through the odd office park, so this was my first chance to see this side of Ann Arbor. For the most part it kind of looked like the suburbs of Toledo that I grew up in (and still, for the moment, live in), except that the stores looked somewhat nicer (probably because they're newer buildings), and of course Michigan does their traffic lights and lanes differently from Ohio. (They also do their highways a lot differently up there ... I swear you have to slow your speed in half while you're still on the highways just to be able to take those tight exit ramps without spinning out.)
At first I was somewhat comforted by the sight of familiar stores and locations. (Seriously, I think I'd be lost if I didn't have Meijer and Kroger stores to go to.) Like all of my previous trips to Ann Arbor, things just seemed a lot nicer up there, although I'm sure Joe Petrow will be along at any moment here to tell me about all the problems he had while he was living there; I hold no illusions that Ann Arbor is this picture-perfect paradise, and I'm sure I'd find plenty of faults with the city were I to live there, but right now I certainly like Ann Arbor a whole lot more than Toledo. I think it's the combination of the college-town atmosphere provided by the University of Michigan, plus the fact that there are enough people in the area to make sure that the city has all of the conveniences I'm used to here in Toledo, that makes Ann Arbor so compelling to me.
After I woke up today, though, I kind of felt sad when I thought about Ann Arbor. I think that the thought of possibly moving up there one of these days just served to remind me of how soon I'll be moving out, and how I'll be on my own soon. Not only that, but the comforts provided by Ann Arbor come at a price; the cost of living and real estate prices in Ann Arbor, while hardly the worst in the nation, are pretty darn high. Given that it'll be at least 2012 before getting a job at Antioch and moving to Yellow Springs is a possibility, I guess that now I've kind of foolishly pinned a lot of my hopes and dreams on Ann Arbor, and I doubt that they're going to be realized anytime soon. Even if I did move up there, it would mean living on my own, and as much as I know I won't be able to avoid doing that for much longer, it's still something that I'm not really looking forward to for a lot of reasons.
I told Mom about my trip to Ann Arbor as I was making lunch and how it just seemed like a nicer Toledo to me, and right away she used the word "homogenized" to describe what I saw up there. From my trip to North Carolina last year I know that things between Toledo and Raleigh are a whole lot different than between Toledo and Ann Arbor, and I think I'd even put Cleveland in there as being more unlike Toledo than Ann Arbor is. The small towns I've been to in southeast Michigan as I've driven around there getting familiar with the area are also more unlike Toledo than Ann Arbor is. Still, it makes me wonder if maybe there are other places I could go to where I'd get a similar feel to Ann Arbor, without the high living expenses. Maybe this is just a passing thing, but right now I can't help but think wistfully of Ann Arbor an awful lot here.
posted 2007/09/03 at 20:31
For most of my childhood I had an old generic 19" television that was a hand-me-down from my parents. Before then I had an old black-and-white television, and remember coming home from an Adam Ant concert when I was really young (my sister was a big fan of his) to my father watching The Tonight Show on the living room television and marveling at how colourful the curtain behind Johnny Carson was. I was glad to have the colour TV, but it wasn't without its faults; not only did it sometimes make an annoying high-pitched sound (that disappeared if you whacked in the right place), but there was this small patch in the upper-right hand corner that sometimes went all black with a white circle around it. I'm not sure what caused the latter problem, but some things seemed to always trigger it (like Kain's sequence during the ending of Final Fantasy IV). Finally it got to be too much to deal with, so for Christmas of 1996 I asked for, and got, a brand new 19" Magnavox television.
That television stood me in good stead for over ten years, until earlier this winter it just up and died on me. Not wanting to spend too much on a replacement, I bought a floor model 20" Magnavox at Best Buy, figuring it would tide me by until I could afford something more serious. (Well, that and my room's only really designed for smaller televisions, so getting a bigger television will probably require some serious moving around of stuffs, and likely buying new furniture as well.) I know not to expect too much from floor models, but my new television is starting to have a problem similar to the one my old colour TV did. This time, though, there are patches in the upper-right and upper-left corners that are changing, only they're turning yellow. This only seems to be happening whenever I'm tuned to the Urge Radio stations on my cable box, which leads me to wonder if maybe it has something to do with the way Urge Radio sends it visual picture out, or maybe it has to do with the large splashes of single colours that they use in their visuals. I could probably test the latter by playing video games on my television, but I don't really have the time for that much video gaming these days.
Given how little I use my television these days, that's not so much of a problem for me. However, over the past week or so I've noticed that the picture on my flat panel here is sometimes becoming dimmer for brief moments. Usually it's no longer than a second or two, but it's definitely something that's catching my eye here. I realize that I use my computer a lot, and maybe I should expect my flat panel to start conking out here (particularly as it has served me so well these past few years), but until I start getting paycheques from my teaching job, I'm going to be living in fear that my flat panel will just up and die on me here. Given how much better the prices for flat panels are online as opposed to brick-and-mortar stores, if I am going to get a new flat panel, I should probably order one here soon and hope that this one holds out on me just a bit longer. Then again, I really don't know too much about flat panels, so for all I know the dimming problem may never get any worse than it is now, and as it is now it's something I can live with. I just worry that I'll be doing something really important here, and then all of a sudden I won't have anything on my screen and I'll be forced to fight my way out of whatever I'm working on, saving whatever I may have open, without actually being able to see what I'm doing.
I don't take it any of you have any advice you can offer me about fixing these problems, do you?
posted 2007/09/02 at 21:35
Once I get done typing this entry, I'm actually going to switch over to the Jerry Lewis telethon on my television. (I've got one of the digital radio stations playing right now to help me focus on writing here.) I wish I could explain why I find the telethon so mesmerizing; I've never sat through any of Jerry Lewis' movies all the way through (and never particularly cared to), and my appreciation of classic comedy never extended to Martin and Lewis. I'm not even sure I care for him that much as a celebrity, given some of the comments he's made in the press over recent years. It's hardly like the acts on the telethon are the kind of thing I'm into, either. I've never even donated to MDA, for that matter. I guess maybe back when I didn't have cable, the telethon was kind of an "event" for me (this was back when most local television stations never stayed on the air for 24 hours ... a time before infomercials, if you can believe it), and now I keep watching it for no reason I can fathom, except perhaps a strange bit of sentimentality.
It didn't even hit me until today that Labour Day is tomorrow. I don't teach on Mondays, so I guess I didn't really have a reason to keep track of it. In just a couple of weeks it will be autumn, and looking back on this past summer, I don't really know if anything all that notable happened to me. Given the crap that happened last summer perhaps I should be counting my blessings, though. I got too tied up in other projects to do as much writing as I would have liked this past summer, but I'm not going to wait until next summer to rectify that. I'm even thinking about trying to do NaNoWriMo this autumn, something I never could have possibly done when I was still in school. All things being equal, though, I'd rather wait until later to make a decision on NaNoWriMo, given that I have no earthly idea how my work schedule will be.
Speaking of autumn, I'm kind of reminded right now of an exchange I had in grade school, back when I was still in public school. It wasn't too long after the start of the school year, and the teacher asked the students what season it was. The class was divided between whether it was summer or autumn, but I, even back then, gave the teacher an answer along the lines of, "Well, it's not summer anymore, but it's not quite autumn yet." Even back then I was parsing things to the nth degree. It was technically still summer, but I'd like to think my answer was the best answer out of the whole class. I don't know why that particular episode has stuck in my head all this time, but I remember the oddest things, I swear. (Fun fact: The only time I ever fell asleep in class was back in first grade.)
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