The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez, a (children's? young adults'?) book about a girl who moves from Berkeley to Philly and uses her blog to communicate with her friends back home.

Publishing a Blog with Blogger. Huh? We really need an entire book to tell us how to do this? The poor trees...

Buzz Marketing With Blogs for Dummies. My inner crank can think of a few other ways to put "Buzz Marketing With Blogs." Ugh. Okay, I didn't find that one in WorldCat.

Today's New York Times had an article about malfeasance in the Army recruitment process. According to the article, criminal and educational backgrounds aren't being checked, and recruiters are even helping new recruits cheat on the aptitude examination, and one recruiter told a recruit "how to create a diploma from a nonexistent school." Niiiice. I immediately thought of this older article, by the same author, actually, which describes the mental stress and depression recruiters are experiencing due to intense pressure to meet quotas, which are down from pre-Iraq years. Enlistment is down from pre-Iraq years. I assume the quotas are the same...

UPDATE: If anyone is doing anything on technology, especially weblogs, and you're looking at submitting something individually but would like to get in on a panel, email me; I have one interested party but we need a third!

I know the deadline for CCCC is tomorrow at midnight, but I'm wondering if anyone doing technology in the classroom would like to invite me to be on their panel, or if any of you would like to give me some feedback on this at the moment half-baked idea I have, which I'll be submitting as close to the deadline as possible, when it will be fully baked, or at least sound like it.

In the conference theme statement, Akua Duku Anokye writes:

[W]e find ourselves in a quandary, a middle space battling against the polarities of everyday life. We work between theory and praxis, object and subject, reading and writing, black and white, literature and composition, native and non-native, oral and visual, cognitive and affective, product and process, academic and personal, individual and group. Now we need to ask, "How does composition reconcile the binaries to build coalitions, culture and community in the rich way that Chicago has built its identity?" How do we meet the challenges of this middle ground by embracing our diversity, forging new alliances, and joining with others that care about America’s literacy needs?

The whole conference is about middle spaces and coalitions between polarities. I plan to submit a proposal about the rhetoric of innovation and access, the need to work within and respond to technological innovations and the sense of social responsibility associated with issues of access. A couple of questions keep buzzing around in my mind: Assuming coalitions could and should be built, how would we as a field go about it? If the call to "think critically about technology" has become an empty gesture, how can the original idea, which, as I understand it, is to keep socioeconomic context of technological tools in the foreground and to refrain from being technological determinists (in other words, let the pedagogy drive the technology, not vice versa -- but wouldn't some people argue that this aphorism is misguided?), be reframed in a more vital way? This is one of those times I'd like to be able to propose a completely different format, a discussion rather than a presentation, but oh well. I was inspired by, and will be citing, the discussions spurred by Will Hochman and Chris Dean's article, Hypertext 101. Collin responded, then Jeff, Sharon, Mike, Jeff, Collin, Collin, and Sharon. I'm probably forgetting some posts, but that's a good start. It was, for me, an extremely thought-provoking conversation, and I of course like the idea that the idea for this presentation grew out of blogging -- open access scholarly discussion. I have (a lot) more to say, obviously, but must pause for now and ruminate about it.

I neeeeeed an FTP program for this iBook. I've searched on here for Fetch, but haven't been able to find it. Does it go by a different name now?

Also, now OpenOffice doesn't open. I start Start OpenOffice.org, and it starts, as does X11, but the actual OpenOffice program doesn't start. It's maddening. I'm going to try restarting to see if that helps... UPDATE: Works now -- but I still need an FTP application.

May 1. Looking outside my window, and it's snowing -- like, almost blizzardly. According to my forecast-hookup-thingie in Firefox, 44 degrees and snow showers. Sigh.

As I did a little cat-sitting last night (and let me tell you, somebody was wallowing in affection), I pilfered through Amy's CDs and borrowed Sonic Youth's 1992 album Dirty. I've been listening to it ever since, remembering how many times I listened to the whole thing, over and over, when it came out. Listen to "100%" and "Youth Against Fascism" and appreciate how much they ROCK.

But if you don't have the album, go to Jeff's blog and listen to the song he links to. Hilarious!

I'm embarrassed to be blogging this now, seeing as I found it on the Creative Commons blog posted on 4 April, but oh well. Eric Von Hippel's book Democratizing Innovation is available for download under a CC license. It's Attribution-NoDerivs-Noncommercial, which is basically fair use 100% instead of 10%, but hey, it's open! Cool.

Sorry, y'all. I'll try to do better. I'm just kind of spent right now, ready to go HOME one week from today (for a month, yay!).

This whole Los Alamos National Laboratory thing should be studied by someone interested in organizational communication. The lead: "A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos."

And later in the article:

The blog runs a petition for Dr. Nanos's immediate removal; it has garnered more than 100 signers, although most have concealed their names.

One who signed openly in February was Dr. Brad Lee Holian, a theoretical physicist who worked at the lab for 32 years. He retired a month later.

"People were feeling like they were in a pressure cooker," Dr. Holian said in an interview last week. "Nanos is so abusive, not just to the general staff but his underlings. People were afraid to say anything. On the blog they could vent without fear of reprisal."

Interesting in terms of its implications for leadership, communicative norms, scientific/technical communication, privacy, etc.