This is not really a tech-related musing, other than it catalogues my on-going paranoia with associative links between seemingly incongruous phenomena...kinda like a hyperlink, you know?
> I hardly ever touch our undergrad newspaper at OSU, The Lantern, but for some odd reason felt compelled to do so the other day. Imagine my surprise after happening upon this bottom-of-the fold story: a profile of a graduate student who loves cooking, teaching, and techno-theory...I knew instantly it was my friend J. Must be a slow news week. :)[registration required after initial viewing]
> I left my house on Friday, listening to WTVN 610 AM on the radio, which is my wont on occasion. The traffic report was on. Apparently, traffic in the metro Columbus area was pretty uneventful, with the exception of a small accident at the corner of Lincoln and Sinclair Roads, an intersection right at the entrance of my neighborhood. I approached that intersection at the exact moment the announcement was made. Creepy, huh?
> I have this exercise I use in my writing classes where students create a photoshop parody of a piece of "high art," and I use Edvard Munch's "The Scream" as an example. Late last week, I absently visited the web page I set up for that assignment, even though I'm not currently teaching or anything...and this weekend, someone up and steals the painting!!!
> This one doesn't really count, but it has weighed on my mind since it happened: Yesterday, I drove by an accident scene on Sancus Road, where a Mustang had apparently collided with a bicycle. I found out this morning that the teen on the bike had been killed in the accident. Very depressing.
Last week I pengarticipated in the BETHA Institute for New Media & Writing Studies at The Ohio State University, where scholars from Michigan Tech, MIT, Michigan State, UC Santa Barbara, Kent State, OSU, and a few other places met to discuss the direction of "new media studies" in the humanities (but mainly composition studies, as that was the overrepresented group of the lot).
Also, our afternoon sessions were allotted for studio time in the Digital Union, where participants worked on various projects themselves: short films, Flash animations, web design, curriculum development, and so on. Fun? Of course. Productive? To a point, but many of these projects are works in progress, so they're still in the hopper. Definitive? Can anyone really agree on a definition for "new media," let alone what the teaching/study of it should look like? Suffice it to say that big plans are in the works to extend this conversation into the academy at large.
Here's the Bethablog.
Just an observation: a couple of weeks ago, I helped my friend J move back down to Georgia, and we trucked it down in a 24-foot U-Haul truck...with no radio, air, running lights, parking brakes, ... a bit of a safety hazard, to say the least, but we eventually made it to our destination.
I had forgotten my cell phone charger, and on top of that the signal dropped out through much of the Virginias. I hadn't realized the extent to which I had become emotionally dependent on the device until that moment. I had resisted getting a cell for so long, and once I did, I became one of those people. Granted, I don't overuse my phone, but I now definitely understand the psychological comfort associated with having one. Makes that recent MIT survey hit a little close to home.
And on top of that, even though I brought my Newton Messagepad 2100 with me (along with my wireless PC card), I never found an open network I could leech off of. I know that a lot of people out there romanticize the notion of living off the grid in this all-too-modern world--I've been one of them on occasion--but when you don't have the option of getting back on, it makes you just a wee bit tense.
I need my fix.