“Weak” communities, ha!

I have a lot of other stuff I want to post about, but I have a great story to illustrate the strength of online communities.

I’m a moderator of a support-related listserv; last night one of our members found herself in all alone and in a very tough situation.  And within a couple of hours of her posting, one of the other members of our list, who happens to live in the same area, was with her so she didn’t have to be all alone.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

You’d think they would know better…

As I was working on a fellowship application, it occurred to me that an agency offering dissertation fellowships ought to know that a graduate student’s work history I don’t think that I’m alone in this… If we go CHRONOLOGICALLY, my work history since starting grad school goes like this:

• AY1999-2000: TA
• Summer 2000: Departmental Lackey / Con Ed Instructor
• AY 2000-2001: TA
  • (Winter 2001: Con Ed Instructor)
• Summer 2001: Con Ed Instructor
• Fall 2001: TA
• Spring 2002: Teaching Associate
• Summer 2002: Con Ed Instructor
• AY 2002-2003: TA
• Summer 2003 & AY 2003-2004: Rose Fellow
• Summer 2004: Temp (I don’t even put this in my employment history)
• Fall 2004: Medical Leave/Departmental Lackey
• Spring 2005: Teaching Associate
• Fall 2005: Unemployed
• Spring & Summer 2006; Summer & Fall 2007:  Adjunct Prof.

I’m not alone in this, am I? I can’t be… And so ordering my employment by position and then wanting simple dates is just a major pain in the rear.

And let’s not get into applications that break out employment and teaching, and whose applications don’t make any sense for those of us who are in adjunct hell.  Ah well… the application is done & there ain’t anything that can be done about it now.

Survey link: Updated

There has been some craziness with my survey link, so we’re going ultra low-tech here.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=YWpihoh7RtF_2fL0QyOU8IjQ_3d_3d
That will get you there.

Blogger & Podcasting Magazine

I, for one, will be reading this. For free. On the web.

clipped from news.com.com Bloggers and podcasters get their own magazine You’d think that bloggers and podcasters would be happy with their respective media. After all, how much better can it be to have free worldwide distribution of whatever it is you want to say at any moment. The magazine, which features famous blogger and podcaster Robert Scoble on the cover, has a Web site, of course, on which most of its content will be available for free. And it also has a free podcast edition. Why anyone would pay $79 for a subscription to the print magazine is not entirely clear.

Going native…

A guy I know from college just sent me this… made me chuckle a lot.

clipped from www.theartofjoeonline.com

Updated reactions to the new Pew Report

Late last week I contacted Amanda Lenhart at PIALP to ask her about the decision to separate out Blogger & Blogspot and MT & TypePad in the new report on bloggers, which I commented on in passing a couple of weeks ago. We had a pretty good e-mail conversation and she was quite forthcoming about how decisions were made . My main concern about the separation was that it might be capturing some confusion amongst bloggers about exactly which tools they were using to blog (particularly among Blogger users). I suspected that it was an open-ended question. In fact, it was an open-ended question with a group of pre-coded responses, and it might be capturing some of that confusion, but as I thought about it more and more, does it really matter all that much?

I hate starting up again

After being away from my proposal for a couple-plus weeks (daycare was closed for a week, so I of course got a fat lotta nothing done, and then the grownups went on vacation all by ourselves, hooray), I find myself baffled as to where I stopped. And that makes starting again very hard.

But I’ve found my place again, and am writing utter crap at a decent clip. Here’s hoping that I can later turn that utter crap into something actually coherent and use-able.

*toasts*

Various and sundry

Finished reading selections from the last 2 volumes of A History of Private Life.

Am now perusing the new Pew report on bloggers. Some interesting stuff in there, but I must quibble with their categories of blog tools. There were separate response categories for “Blogger” and “Blogspot” as well as for “Moveable Type” and “Typepad”. Was this question open-ended or closed-ended? I’m assuming the former, because I’m sure that the good folks at PIALP know of the relationships between MT & Typepad and Blogger & Blogspot (which isn’t even worth linking, since all it does is take you to the main Blogger page).

Progress, 7/18/06

Friday and today, I read a number of chapters from A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Filling in the gaping 19th and 20th century hole that existed in my review of the development of contemporary conceptions of public and private.

Progress, 7/13/06

Worked through my pseudo-outline of my lit review, rearranged, deleted a lot of stuff. Emphasis on the “deleted”, as you can see below.

I also was frustrated to learn that for whatever reason, EndNote 7.0 won’t play nicely with Office 2004. I’ve downloaded the trial of Bookends and I’m liking it so far (and it would cost less to buy that than to upgrade my EndNote). We’ll see what happens.

Oh, and Matthew picked up my books for me so I can just work with them from home tomorrow.