Category: tPA 4

Testing . . .

Jeff

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Midland

“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
What American accent do you have?
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(In my best radio announcer voice) This is only a test. Given the absence of my web site for the last 48 hours or so, I thought it best to publish a test. However, I must point out that I am from California.

Bullseye

Jeff

I really enjoyed Nick Coleman’s piece about Target in the Star Tribune. If this were Arkansas, you could just substitute Walmart into the prose and it would be a tidy fit.

Still, I think Brooklyn Park and Hennepin County should go a lot farther for Target than they have offered so far. For example, that whole “Brooklyn Park” name is way stupid and outmoded. It’s not Brooklyn, and it’s not a park. How about showing a willingness to please? How about calling your town Target, Minnesota?

And when will Hennepin County stop being stingy to corporations with their hands out? Forget about forgiving taxes for Target. Let’s start GIVING taxes to Target!

The way this cumbersome abatement thing is proposed now, Target would be freed from property taxes while homeowners and other businesses would pick up the slack. That’s too complicated. Let’s be bold! Let’s put a “Target Tax,” a big one, on everyone. That way, we can take pride in being “Targeted” and be happy our money is shipped straight to Target! That’s the kind of people we are: Happy to Pay For Target.

I don’t know why it took so long, but Minnesota finally has turned into the kind of welfare state worth having.

A corporate welfare state.

This bit of selective censorship from Lamar Advertising, on the other hand, is simply bull.

Geekery

Jeff

Found some good things worth mentioning, software wise, for academic types. Zotero is a great extension for Firefox 2.0 that makes keeping track of citations, books and articles, etc. much easier. I’ve played with a lot of different software packages and web sites to track my research and this one really seems to work easily. The weird thing about it was that I had just started a blog to dump citations and notes into, and now this comes along. I think I like keep research out (at least in a limited way) in a public space instead of buried on a file on my computer. But Zotero makes it easier to generate the citations I need as well as filing the pdfs that can’t make public in a reasonably intuitive way.

Book Burro may end up being my downfall. Making it so easy to locate books may kill what is left of my time. The Worldcat interface is tremendous, so I’m hoping I might avoid buying as many books. Yeah, right. It also makes it much easier to find cheap used copies.

Finally, Notepad 2.1 is a Mac widget that may finally make me use dashboard consistently. Nice to be able to just pop out to take a few notes, or manage to do lists.

Years ago, I told myself that I wouldn’t split up my blogging activities into separate venues. Somehow though, I feel sort of saddled with a certain “brand” of blogging activity here. I usually blow everything up and reinvent a new version of this blog when that happens. But I don’t have time for that now. Instead, I’ve decided to split into the blog for research noting and musing, and a fishblog. When I have something that at least approaches being coherent, I’ll blog it here. The other venues are mainly just for more mundane notes. It’s tempting to put that stuff here to keep this place “alive,” but it wouldn’t be very interesting to most people. So I’m trying to make it a productive split. We’ll see how it goes.

Long Silence

Jeff

I’ve not said much in public for a while, primarily because I’ve been busy trying to get my head together. This is my last semester of coursework for my Ph.D., and there have been many projects claiming my attention. There’s a potential book chapter on photographic research (I just started), a review of a book on Paul Ricoeur (I just finished), a research proposal (I have no clue what I want to write) and a paper on Samuel F.B. Morse (I’m really excited about).

Then there’s the matter of getting set up to do exams. I don’t really have any anxiety about that. I feel as if I’ve been prepping for those for years now. There are only a few more hoops to jump through. I feel pretty relaxed.

I started this blog a long time ago to write my way through ideas, and somewhere along the line I stopped using it for that. I’m not sure why. I’m going to try some different experiments in organizing my projects, and I may manage to write about it here. Or not. I’m not sure at this point. All I know is that those long dreadful farewells retiring blogs, or the whole “hiatus” thing never made that much sense to me. It always made more sense just to write when I felt like it. It seems really strange to me that the “not feeling like it” has lasted this long.

I know

Jeff

I settled in to do some reading this morning, and in a strange serendipity Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” came on my iTunes. It’s weird, but at this particular point in my life I actually do know where it has been going. I’ve been teaching in a fairly stimulating way (for me at least—as for the students, the jury is always out until the bitter end) and taking classes that for the most part are stimulating as well. There have been good lectures, meetings, etc. And at the end of the day when I come home, I really haven’t felt like writing. Or reading (outside of my research interests).

Most of my spare time has been spent staring lengthwise through a variety of fish tanks. It’s oddly peaceful. This morning, as I was trying to figure out how to squeeze in “just one more” tank (under threat of divorce), it dawned on me what the attraction was. Building and landscaping aquariums is like constructing a little world. Not a fictional world (for me, at least), but an actual one. Aquariums are small, but they are more interesting to me when they mirror the real.

I’ve drifted away from “virtual” spaces, and it becomes hard to sustain an interest in the goings-on in the online world. But I never really conceived of this blog as a “social” space—only a public one. I wish I had more time to take notes here about the things I’ve been stimulated by—I’m going to try to persevere on that front. But “social software” never really has interested me all that much. Though learning is frequently “virtual,” I really don’t think that it is exclusively “social.”

First Day

Jeff

The first day of classes went pretty well. I wish my beloved partner would quit reminding me that I have been teaching writing for six years now. I still feel like a rookie. Not because I’m not sure what I’m doing, but because it seems like there is so much more to figure out.

I’m taking the last class that I’m required to take. It starts today, and I’ve been doing the reading. Research methods. Just the name strikes dread in my soul. Not because I’m opposed to research methodologies, mind you, but because my past experiences in methods oriented classes have generally been horrible and irrelevant. For my masters coursework, we used Empirical Research in Writing by MacNeally. This class is using it too. I have no interest whatsoever in watching people write, or using any of the protocols that book suggests. Not that there is anything wrong with “empirical methods,” but I have no use for methods that start with forgone conclusions and then construct studies meant to confirm them. But Designing Qualitative Research (new to me) seems more interesting. For example:

The researcher must let go of some topics and captivating questions as he fine-tunes and focuses the study to ensure its do-ability. Although this entails loss, it bounds the study and protects the researcher from impractical ventures.

Intuition in this phase of the research process cannot be underestimated. Studies of eminent scientists reveal the central role of creative insight—intuition—in their thought processes (Briggs, 2000; Hofmann, 1972; Libby, 1922; Mooney, 1951). By allowing ideas to incubate and maintaining a healthy respect for the mind’s capacity to reorganize and reconstruct, the researcher finds that richer research questions evolve. This observation is not intended to devalue the analytic process but, instead, to give the creative act its proper due. Barger and Duncan (1982) note that research is a process “that religiously uses logical analysis as a critical tool in the refinement of ideas, but which often begins at a very different place, where imagery, metaphor and analogy, intuitive hunches, kinesthetic feeling states, and even dreams and dream-like states are prepotent (p.3). (32-33)

There’s been a lot of that sort of processing going on over the summer. My “disconnect” from reading and writing online has a lot to do with that. I’ve been finding inspiration elsewhere.