Blog Apology Poem

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But could not both live and utter it.

Henry David Thoreau

Commitment

In the U.S., most of us take access to education for granted. It is different in some places.

Simpsonize Me!

August 7, 1991

Aug. 7, 1991: The world wide web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.

The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day, the first web pages summarizing his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents.

From WIRED

Another One Bites the Dust

The Imus vs. Sharpton argument just took an interesting turn.

Don't Mess with Jack Bauer

The next baddie in Jack's sights? Global Warming

Wanna Buy a Jet?

This one is cheap. Pocket change, really.

And So Here I Am

"Since if I'd gone up to Moorhead or North Dakota State, I'd still have to be living at home, I said the heck with college and came to New York. And so here I am."

Philip Roth--The Human Stain, p. 120.

A Blog! How Modern!

Get your modernist fix here at the Philip Johnson Glass House Blog.

"The question on the table, Makower says, was this: "If you could build a car company from the ground up, with all we know about the Web and mass customization and social responsibility and localization and sustainability and viral marketing, what would that look like?"

Maybe like THIS?

Tears for Fears?

Everybody wants to rule the world...

Design on the Battlefront

"Good design is essential, even in the harshest environments. Major Arnold Strong explains how he makes the most of his eight-by-eight foot trailer at an army base in Kabul, Afghanistan."

It's Great to Be Back

Hope you are all having a zen-like busy restful summer.

Sport and I are back. The conversations over champagne and pancakes were wonderful.

Hope Y'all Had a Great Independence Day

Two young, smart, VERY independent women. Intestinal fortitude I haven't seen in many adults twice their age. Happy Independence Day, folks.

Building Markets

Just revised and resubmitted a paper I wrote on Eclipse Aviation. Looks like one of their bigger customers, DayJet, has been profiled by the AP and picked up by the major news outlets.

It will be interesting to see how Eclipse Aviation's ethos appeals change as their industry matures. Eclipse started with the "closed world" Cold War appeals Paul Edwards outlines in The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. They depicted Eclipse Aviation's engine as a type of magic icon that would save the company. When that failed, they switched their marketing ethos strategy to a more transparent "convergence of innovation" model, similar to what Carolyn Miller describes as a "Ciceronian ethos of sympathy" in her article“Expertise and Agency: Transformations of Ethos in Human-Computer Interaction.” Now that they have received certification, Eclipse Aviation has started to scale back the transparency and prepare for a more mature proprietary market to emerge.

Back in Fargo

A few of you are wondering if Sport and I are back in Fargo.

Indeed we are, and today we decided to get into our summer ritual.

We started with a five-mile run (unfortunately the Red River is still flooding, so we ran to and around NDSU).

After a quick shower, we were off to Nichole's for some breakfast:


In case you are wondering what you are looking at, those are two coffee beverages the color of Capucin monks' robes, an almond croissant right out of the oven, and an apricot cherry scone.

Next, we stopped by the first farmer's market of the season:

Unfortunately, there were only root vegetables available, so we got some spring onions to take to our colleagues' farewell party.

Finally, we stopped by Zandbroz and Funky Junque to look for a couple of "thank you" gifts before we walked back home.

It's good to be home in Fargo.

ListServs Aren't ALWAYS Terrible

Recently, the attw listserv has been having several good discussions on usability class materials and culture of technology class materials. One of the most fascinating things about this listserv is the heterogeneity of technical writing. We have our classical rhetoric wonks, our technogeeks, pedagogy experts, newbies, composition junkies, and assorted other groups. One nugget I expecially appreciated was someone pointing me to a nice WIRED story on the development of the iPod. As a technical writing teacher, I try to get my writing students to appreciate the effectiveness of prototypes, especially in engineering cultures. This single picture of the iPod prototype will hopefully convince a few of my students to go along with the process, rather than prejudging the effectiveness of a process before they try it in a work enviroment.

Thanks Jarin!

Our surf instructor.

His rig.

Surf Camp, Day Four

The waves were about as big as ever. Unfortunately, I was too pooped to both catch the waves AND pop up on my board. Sport was able to battle into the surf with quite a bit of invective. It was a worthwhile week that left me with a few nuggets:

• Surfing, like just about anything else, is very incremental.
  
• Despite this inchworm nature, there are a few moments where you feel the rush of progress (when you catch a wave; when you hold your balance; when you have a long ride).
  
• Surfing seems to be a practice that is handed down orally and visually. Literate practices seem pretty inconsequential to most of surfing (probably a big reason that neo-tribal references abound in surf culture).
  
• It is much more brutal than skiing. Sport and I are still finding mysterious bruises in places we didn't think were possible to bruise.
  

Surf Camp, Day Three

Conditions were a tiny bit better. I had a very hard time getting past the first break in the morning. In fact, I didn't. So, even though I caught one wave, I wasn't able to get up on my board. Fortunately, our surf instructor was nice enough to help me out in the afternoon. I finally caught a wave long enough to get a feel for the wave.

Oh, I ripped up my foot pretty nicely this morning. That picture above is the duct-tape makeshift bandage that Jarin helped me craft. Kept me in the water long enough to get up on the board.

LKQ, the instructor brought us sponges (kind of--they had fiberglass bottoms) today. You called it!