Canned Goods

This site has been abandoned for the last few months due, mainly, to working on my prelims (and a couple other reasons), and I’ve moved over to new digs. Please stop by for a visit.

The new Canned Goods.

I can’t remember the last movie I saw in a theatre (Netflix rocks!), so sharing that three of us (I won’t reveal their identities without a signed consent form) are making plans to see the new Transformers movie demonstrates how nostalgic I am for my 1980s childhood (have you noticed all the 80s fashions reemerging?). We’re prepared for it to be disappointing, and we’re going anyway. If you 22 minutes, check out the first episode of the Transformers (Thank you, YouTube):

And a bit from the Movie, starring Eric Idle, Judd Nelson Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, AND Orson Welles. You gotta love the bad 80s rock music (is there someway to turn it off?).

My first reaction was, “It’s just like the Ms. Pacman machine I played at the bar!” While I can see how the technology would be useful in a hotel (guests looking for directions) and a novelty in your local club/bar (what happens when you drink starts to sweat?), it seems that this is also a home product.

Can’t see getting one useful I have disposable income (maybe Surface will be cheaper by the time I pay off those student loans). I didn’t see any demos of watching movies — why would you want a huge screen that you can’t watch movies or tv on? If it does play video (I’m assuming it does), how long are you going to want to watch it in this horizontal format? And who gets to decide which way is up? Come over here, honey, and watch the table with me. BTW, does it tilt?

I can see this technology taking the place of the chalk/dry erase board, and you’ll never need to lower/set up a screen to show videos or overheads. But Surface is too small for the classroom–at this point; maybe that’s why I couldn’t find a education promo for it.

Here’s the parody of Microsoft’s Surface video from The Sarcastic Gamer. SNAP!

I was listening to some of Brian Eno’s ambient music (Thursday Afternoon) which in my iTunes is followed up by his “Prophecy Theme” for David Lynch’s DUNE on the motion picture soundtrack (which includes the rest of the music by Toto) which led to me to a search for it on YouTube (not sure why, just a whim) which led to finding a video of the Toto song “Take My Hand” (taken from the movie’s credits) which led to this amazing, acoustic, solo version of their song “Africa” (and, I might add, the music video for “Africa”) [add: yes, I own the soundtrack to DUNE; one of the signs of a g33k]:

Kate and I were awoken around 2:30 last night to the sound of a large crunch and a woman’s scream (the kind that makes me think it’s programmed into our genetic code to instantly recognize sound like this). Crunch! Scream! (The time it took to read those two words is how fast it happened.)

Drowsily I walked out of the bedroom, grabbed my glasses and cell, and parted the living room curtains. A car was sideways in the road, directly in front of my Willy St. house — its right front corner smashed in and the bumper lying down the road. A few other people were already at the scene, and from the way they were acting, I thought one of them was in the crash and walked away okay. There wasn’t anyone in the car. And there weren’t any women out there. From whom did the scream come?

The car had apparently veered from the east-bound center lane of Willy St into the outer lane, where cars park during off-peak hours, hitting a minivan (the neighbor says it’s totaled), scraping along the side of the next car, and finally spinning sideways and rolling backward across the street into the rear quarter-panel of another car (no more than 30 feet in total).

Where was the driver? Witnesses saw him running away from the scene. The police, still haven’t found him (I’m assuming they can from the registration, unless it was a stolen car). And, as far as I know, no attribution for the scream.

All that’s left are bits of plastic and glass.

Books I’m reading this week:
1. Zizek (Sublime Object) - as part of a reading group with Scot, Adam, and Tim
2. Rickert (Act of Enjoyment) - also part of a reading group with Scot, Adam, and Tim
3. Jenkins (Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers & 3.5. The WOW Climax)
4. Selber (Multiliteracies for a Digital Age)
5. The Rhetorical Tradition

Books I wish had time to read this week:
1. Dick (Ubik)
2. Boulle (Planet of the Apes) - found a $.65 copy at Vinny’s; always wanted to compare it to the movie
3. Jeter (Noir)
4. Allen (Projecting Illusion) - Would make a nice edition to reading group: Section I, Althusser, Lacan, and Film Theory
5. Nunes (Cyberspaces of Everyday Life) or Weinstone (Avatar Bodies: a tantra for posthumanism)

5 movies I’d like to see (but know I’d be disappointed, so I’ll just wait to Netflix them):
1. Spiderman 3
2. Transformers (okay, I’ll go see this one . . . with Scot, Adam, & Tim(?))
3. Harry Potter 5?, 6?
4. The Simpsons Movie
5. Ocean’s 13

5 movies I know I never need to watch but want to anyway:
1. Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
2. Live Free or Die Hard
3. Pirates 3 (still need to see 2)
4. Superman Returns
5. Ghost Rider

5 things I (recently) watched and recommend:
1. Zizek
2. The Worlds Fastest Indian (K. still liked it a lot, even though she was expecting it to be about a Native American rather than a motorcycle)
3. Lost (finale)
4. Heroes (finale)
5. MIT CMS 2006 Futures of Entertainment Conference (video podcasts)

5 things I wish I could watch (but I don’t have cable):
1. Season 3 of BSG (x 5)

With still another 5.5 days left to this trip (K.’s sister is getting hitched Sunday), added to the 8 we’ve already been away, we’re sure Q is getting very lonely and in need of a long sit on my lap and brushing once we return. Thanks to Jhondra for taking care of her in our absence.

[edit: pics added 5/24]

As are most folks, I’m in recovery from the conference.
I spent yesterday in Frankenmuth, MI with K., taking as many snapshots of us posing with a variety of tourist-trap sculptures (if only I can find a cable so I can transfer the images from the camera–bad packing list): a fiberglass giraffe; the giant mouse head on slice-o-cheese; 9 ft tall angels (at the world’s largest Christmas store). Not sure why we get pleasure from this sort of activity.

Anyway, I met a lot fun and brilliant folks this week (and was able to put faces with many for whom I only through blogs). I greatly appreciated the mentoring and support in our community (all the encouragement/info from Bradley; I’ll start some home brewing as some as, well, I’m done with grad school). I’d especially like to thank Scot for putting up with up to 2 hrs of driving a day introducing me to his peeps.
As a ped-head, hearing so much theory floating around reinforced how valuable it is to what I’m working on, even if I can’t escape the pull of the pedagogical imperative.

As far as the conference itself, it was the best I have attended. My only major complaint is Why have Sunday panels? And this goes for all the big cons. Not only are people leaving for home, but there are organizational meeting running concurrently. Low attendance sucks. No attendance is worse. Why not start a day earlier or reduce the number of panels to avoid this? If it weren’t for a couple friends/colleagues (Scot and Annette) and Jody Shipka (thanks for coming!), I was about to thank the first two panelists for their presentations and walk out. I’ve done the present to just the other panelists before. Why bother?

All in all, great trip, good beer (loved the DBC IPA), and I wish I had had more time to walk around and see everything Detroit has to offer.

As usual there’s all that teaching to be done, but luckily I’ve made it a bit easier this week with students presenting their favorite projects from the semester–and they are, so far, wonderful. Yes, many of the Photoshop and Flash projects may not be the Flashiest, but, as one of my students smartly put it, there are a lot of intangibles that go into the production of a final product. With the work they’ve done, I know they have fulfilled the basic goals of the course:

—to reconsider how we typically define writing,
—better understand the workings of the web, and
—to have some of the technical and social skills that will allow them to produce in a variety of media.

One of the most exciting projects of the semester, in my book, has been their Wikipeida entries. We all learned more about how this community works to collectively construct knowledge.

Also, I’ve been really busy with a few presentations and putting a couple proposals together (when will I get to my prelims?)

Last week I co-taught/led a Writing Center OGE (ongoing ed) workshop on multimodal writing: “It’s Not All Linear Text Anymore: The Least We Should All Know to Help Writing Center Students Compose Multimodal Texts in New Media Landscapes”. I had a great time talking about how/why we work with new kinds of writing in the Writing Center. AND, the process of drafting my ten minute prez helped to prepare me for another talk, this Monday, for the department’s Board of Visitors about how I and my students are using technology for new ways of producing and circulating writing. I have to thank Matt, one of my students, for allowing me to show his research paper-turned blog article. They were very impressed and clearly understood that his remediation of is original text to the blog was essential to achieve his purpose because of its ability to easily embed video. Without him, and the work of my other students, this prez would have left me using new media objects produced by others else where and would have been nowhere near as impressive.

Conference props — the biggie being for Cs, I’m lucky enough to be on a great (proposed) panel with Samantha Blackmon & Alice: “Changing Writing, Alternate Realities: Games and Game Theory in the Writing Classroom.” And I recently submitted to the Writing Across Borders con at UCSB.

In addition to (proposed) self-promotion, the reason I mention these activities is because my experience, I hope, is an example for my students that I can talk about in the classroom: I wrote so much more than ended up in the final products. I easily had 20-30 mins. of material for the BoV prez’s 5 minute slot (ended up going 10, of course, with discussion). This process gave me the opportunity to see what I was thinking and choose from what I felt would be the strongest example for this particular audience.

Now, on to my Computers & Writing paper/prez. I guess I’ll get back to my prelims in June.

:)