Enjoy. (It's imperative that I get a better camera soon.)

A few months ago, I sent a text message to a friend of mine, not knowing whether or not her phone would accept them. A couple of days later, she called me, laughing, saying that she had gotten the text message, but at her land line, which I had accidentally text-messaged instead. The phone rang, and she heard the message in this weird digitized voice. She was bewildered, having not encountered this before. I sent a text message yesterday to a friend, only to get a return message with the Text to Landline notification. I laughed for a good five minutes. Now I'm going to start text-messaging all my friends who have land lines.

So last night I got back from the Next/Text meeting; this is why I haven't blogged in a few days. I read Baby Laughs by Jenny McCarthy and Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions. I guess last time it was representations of India; now it's the parenting memoir (I also read Life As We Know It by Michael Bérubé and Down Came the Rain by Brooke Shields.

• I cringe in anticipation of Tina Fey's joke about this story on tonight's SNL Weekend Update.
• Would it be so bad if I had the following meal? -- waffles with maple syrup, followed by a dessert of popsicles and yellow cake with chocolate frosting?
• What are the pros and cons of getting a seven-year fraud alert on your credit report?
• This summer I'll be teaching Rhetoric 3401, Internet Communication: Tools and Issues (one syllabus here, another here). If any of you have any tips on teaching online courses or suggestions of readings to assign, I'd love to hear them.
• Recent reads: Down Came the Rain, Brooke Shields' memoir of postpartum depression. It was surprisingly good, but this is of course coming from a general fangirl who, while a child, had a Brooke Shields doll. Also, Life As We Know It by Michael Bérubé, which I've already recommended. I'm now reading Woolf's To the Lighthouse (for the first time!), and will probably read Writing a Woman's Life by Carolyn Heilbrun next.

On April 6, I did a presentation as part of a Technology-Enhanced Learning Seminar at the University of Minnesota's Digital Media Center. The topic was "Web 2.0: Promoting Collaboration and Student-Centered Learning," and I was the third person to present in this four-person panel. If you like, you can view the presentation; it isn't the best one I've done by any means, but you can get a sense of how I've used weblogs in my teaching and how I will use social bookmarking. Bradley Dilger is cited liberally throughout the social bookmarking section of my presentation.

From a book I finished this morning and which I highly recommend:

Even in our many representations of human affairs, from Oedipus to Hamlet to Ronald Reagan, we can find no correlation between reflective self-awareness and effective action. Still less is there any reason to link the rise of self-awareness to the rise of language; although the latter might enhance the former, the former doesn't compel the latter. Finally, though we may have evolved, by whatever chance, that sequence of biochemical reactions which Steven Pinker calls a "language instinct," there's nothing to suggest that a language instinct should also carry with it a reciprocity instinct. Our languages may all have an internal grammar for which we are hard-wired, but we were using our many languages for quite a long time before we conceived of societies founded on the idea of "egalitarian reciprocity" or "justice as fairness." All we know about this idea is that it's here, it's queer, and we ought to get used to it.

Michael Bérubé, Life As We Know It

Microsoft Word saves author information in a doc file. Who knew?

But seriously. It's 2006, and these are people who have had access to computers, Windows, and Word for years now. Hasn't anyone ever hovered a mouse over a file icon before? Wow. It's being discussed on the ATTW listserv and at Crooked Timber as well, thankfully from a more clueful perspective. Back in 2003-4 when we were overseeing the review process for Into the Blogosphere, we engaged in the painstaking process of creating a file for each author, copying and pasting both reviewers' comments into the document, and saving it on one of the machines in the Rhetoric Department, so that the author byline would just read "Department of Rhetoric" or "COAFES" (College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences) when we emailed the file to the reviewer. When a reviewer used the yellow post-it note feature in Word to leave comments in the body of the text, we just stripped the author's information. Admittedly, there still could have been some way a particularly savvy user could find out the information anyway, but if there was, we couldn't think of it, and hey, at least we were aware of the issue and tried to do something about it.

Edited to add: I'm not trying to be a Big Meanie or make anyone feel bad; it's really nothing personal. I'm just honestly surprised and slightly disappointed that there's such apparent widespread lack of awareness of this information.

I love to read the hilarious 5ives, but I rarely feel compelled to respond to any of them. Today, however, I read Five places where the burnouts would hang out and smoke in junior high:

1. The Tree
2. The Bridge
3. The Pit
4. outside the Red Baron
5. Scott’s dad’s trailer

and I was struck by how familiar it sounded, the vagueness of the referents. I guess you're always trying to elude people then. Here are places from my high school days:

1. The Dirt Road
2. The Rock Pile
3. The Country
4. The Pipe Dream
5. The Hacienda

What are yours?

Lovely pithy quote of the day, from John Holbo:

Your average Ph.D. dissertation has the utility and appeal of an X-Ray image of a half-digested meal.

Also, I reread chapter 2 recently (which I wrote last summer), in which I describe my methodology, and while it's no award-winner by any means, it's not that bad.

To elaborate on this, a good friend of mine who is working on his dissertation once said that while my dissertation (or his, or anyone's) might bring up more questions and problems than it even begins to solve or so much as address, people who read it will learn something they didn't know before, and that's what a dissertation should do -- tell a story that teaches somebody something. Some might think that's an awfully low standard for a dissertation, but check this out: Here's what I'm going for. As a variation on what Jenny once said, I'm aiming for around two hundred pages of words with chapters and quotations and paragraphs and subheadings. It will have a beginning, middle, and end, and if you read it, you'll learn something you didn't know before.