Lara Croft is Restless

and so am I!2013-06-30 21.22.20

I found a folder full of poems.  The files are text and they were typed in Applewriter or whatever that *amazing* word processing program of long-ago Macintosh computers was called.  Yes, I’ve forgotten the name.  It would be easy to Google but that would be beside the point.  Fact is that for ten years I used this program and I believe I typed my entire dissertation in it and now I cannot retrieve the name from the folds of my brain.

I got my first personal computer in graduate school.  I bought it off my officemate for five hundred dollars.  It was a reconfigured Mac Plus inside a Mac LISA.  Yes, that fiasco of Steven Jobs, named after the daughter that he refused to claim…you all saw Pirates of Silicon Valley.  8032162544_c565824982_zThat personal computer that was sold for around $10k and was a failure because people aren’t completely insane, all the time.  The shells were refurbished with the internal workings comparable to more reasonably priced Mac Pluses.  (Correction:  It had LISA hardware and used emulation software to mimic the Mac Plus. See Dean’s comment below.) The computer had a black-and-white display and if I remember correctly, it did not have a hard drive.  The system was on floppy disks. (Correction: I did not remember correctly after all.  It did have a small hard disk…the earliest versions ran on a floppy-disk system.)  It looked rather like your grandma’s kitchen radio with a little TV screen on one side.  If I hadn’t given it away to someone who had absolutely no use for it (a street musician, albeit a brilliant one–he certainly could have used it, but wasn’t all that interested in learning how), I might have sold it to a museum or on eBay and made some decent money.  My second personal computer was a Mac Performa, a much more conventional (and brand-new) sort of desktop, with a color (!) display.  That was where I used my first email account.  Truly, I had a computer well before I ever used email.  My first computer I used primarily as a word processor.  I picked over the applications and played with the calculator.

It seems useful to remember one’s old tech as well as one’s old poetry.  I found what had to be the worst poem I ever wrote:

Ditty

fleur du bonheur
fleur du mal
fleur de la jeunesse
fleur du jaune
fleur du lapin
fleur de la vache
fleur de la voiture
fleur du lait
fleur du café
fleur du thé
fleur de la crevasse
fleur des pieds
fleur du merde
et fleur d’or
fleur on the shelf
at the grocery store

On the file I opened, the poem was sandwiched in between chunks of code that appeared as the text reader translated the poem out of Applewriter, a kind of digital noise.  Something weird just happened.  I pasted that code in and wrote a whole paragraph about it, saved and published it–and everything after the poem just vanished.  So I guess it said something to WordPress that turned it invisible.  This is infinitely cooler than what I had written, but a little annoying too.

What I had written is that I had been trying to learn elementary French in graduate school and this poem, as it were, was a kind of nonsense noise my brain was generating, a kind of joke, as I was learning vocabulary and syntax.  And this entire blog post is also a similar kind of noise, like crickets chirping outside through the hum of the air conditioning.  And that that’s ok.  Given what happened, it seems like I should mention in addition that when you’re playing with computer code, noise can silence itself as it becomes visible in the exact right place.

 

Mac LISA photoAttribution Some rights reserved by alvy

A Gravatarium

labrador by possumgirl2I’m not sure such a word, gravatarium, exists, but I’d like to think it’s a type of moratorium that has nothing to do with money or payments.  A moment for reflection on gravatars?

I have a gravatar on WordPress.com and it is finally showing up on my account next to my username, but it doesn’t show up on my list of blogs next to this blog.  It shows up next to my WordPress. COM blogs, not next to my WordPress.ORG main blog.  And it doesn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things, but for some reason I’m completely irritated by it.

People (like me) get hung up on these totally insignificant technical details.  We see this is writing courses a lot with small, fairly insignificant mechanical details when we really want students to attend to something bigger, like critical thinking.  It’s no different, really.  Writing is just an older technology.

The pleasure I feel when I solve a minor tech issue like this is no different than getting the punctuation correct in an MLA bibliography.

Jimmy Fallon posted a Facebook snippet about his dog with the tag, “I will always love you, Gary.”  People were confused because they thought perhaps the dog in the picture had passed away.  I wasn’t sure, either.  A few hours later, Fallon clarified that the dog was alive.  A fan posted a concern about the intellectual status of the fans who had thought the dog was dead based on the position of the comma after you.  She claimed that if the comma had been omitted, it would have meant the dog was dead, but since the comma was there, it was absolutely clear that the dog was alive.  She then lamented the state of public education.

I don’t get it, either.

If the dog was named Gary, then he could had been dead or alive, comma or not.  If the sentence was the dog talking to the baby in the picture, then well whatevah, comma or not, it still doesn’t really matter, right?

There should be a comma whether or not the dog is alive!

If you really want to lament the state of public education for a silly reason, get upset over the fact that dogs don’t use speech, and therefore, we cannot know what they are saying…then the problem is Jimmy Fallon’s lack of schooling, since education is all about curbing that out-of-control imagination that allows one to pretend dogs have speech. Obviously, that’s a problem….not.

And, if your mind is yet unblown…Jimmy Fallon’s Gary is a she-dog!

 

Reflecting on AAEEBL, Boston, and what’s ahead

So I just got back from Boston and the AAEEBL conference.

I love Boston and would like to live there someday.  It’s a walker’s city.

The Sheraton Boston is a beautiful hotel, with horrible scratchy towels and peculiar WiFi service, not to mention horrible mobile phone reception. << The view was spectacular from our room.  533680_10201702275189734_1704355893_nThe shopping at Copley Place was pretty much grade-A upscale mall in a gorgeous structure and you never really have to go outside unless you want to.  Food is plentiful and good:  we had seafood one night, Chicago-style pizza the next, and the ubiquity of Cheesecake Factory.  There wasn’t enough time to try P.F. Chang’s, but those giant stone horses in front were like some kind of acid flashback vision (in a most entertaining way).

My presentation was a five-minute “ignite” session.  I saw some of these in Utica last month and enjoyed them, but being on the other end of the presentation was not so much fun.  The presenters at Utica CIT had six minutes and 20 seconds.  That would have made a difference for the 20-slide presentation.  I would have been able to speak without feeling like someone was standing behind me with a pitchfork.  The emcee actually said…he actually said this, “This is a sudden-death, no return kind of presentation.”  I told him to stop and he said oh sorry, it’s supposed to be fun.  -_-  <<that’s my evaluation of this kind of thing….it was not fun at all.  I will not ever travel out of state to present for five minutes feeling like I need to race through my points. All it takes is one stutter or longish breath and you’ve missed a slide.  There it goes….whoosh, you’re screwed.  On the other hand,  many of us are altogether too verbose when we present.  In the future, I will know exactly how to give a tight twelve to fifteen minute presentation with no problem.  The problem is that I feel like there is an inherent caste system at work when some presenters get five minutes while others get twenty and yet others get an hour.  I’m not at all convinced that the presentations I saw that were twenty minutes long were more substantive than the Ignite sessions were.  I don’t see the logic behind the choices.  I also saw presenters during the 20 minute sessions scrambling for time and I found myself wondering why (although I’ve often been in that situation as well).  I think we all should have had ten to twelve minutes to do whatever we wanted with. I don’t feel it was a good format for my presentation, but I hope that some will look over the Powerpoint presentation at leisure. It should be more entertaining there.

I saw two keynote presentations.  I enjoyed Randy Bass and Bret Enyon speaking together, as a unit (no, not at identical moments, but back and forth)…I began to think of them as the Twin Consorts.  They had interesting things to say about the future of the ePortfolio movement in the era of high-tech efficiency and massive deployment we are entering.  There is momentum for more formalized assessment, it seems, of ePortfolio learning.  The second keynote (Helen Chen and Gary Brown) seemed more geared toward “converting the non-believers,” although I may have misjudged that.

One of the most unique regular sessions I saw was Howard Sanborn and Jenny Ramirez presenting “Successes and Challenges of Using ePortfolios to Teach About Asia: Reports from Humanities and Social Sciences,” followed by John McLaughlin and Donna Gruber of Queen’s College presenting on using ePortfolios to teach a hybrid course with Vietnamese students. Both sessions were underattended. The second session, in particular, I felt was instructive in terms of how ePortfolios may eventually play a strong role in shaping the high-tech massive deployment educational culture of the future.