December 16, 2003

Hmmm . . . the editor seems to be working again.

Bootstrap
Institute . . .
Borders
Employees Union. . .
the
pepys
project. . .

December 13, 2003

Long story longer: I tried Word and it worked (as well as Word
can ever be said to “work”); discovered to my surprise that
it thinks it knows HTML. This could be interesting. Who knows,
maybe even useful. So I created
a
GeoCities account to to post
a draft
into. Sure enough, merely following instructions creates buggy code
(“unterminated string constant; do you wish to continue running scripts”) –
but there are possibilities here and I might end up firing AOL.

PS: I’ve put in some work on
my
comics page (that’s how I found Evanier’s stuff).

December 8, 2003

I recently posted to
a
thread in Isomorphisms, based in its turn on
an
entry in Number 2 Pencil: stupid management tricks
in elementary algebra.

December 7, 2003

Zine Guide
and Diatribe ( www.diatribemedia.com ; browser-crashing
scripts) are presenting an Evening of Love and Hate at
Quimby’s
(in Chicago) on the 10th,
closely followed by cartoonist
Androo
Robinson on the 13th;
the latter event is somehow associated with
SevenTen Bishop.

Also on the 13th: the
Underground
Currents zine fair at DC’s
Brian
McKenzie Infoshop.

I know most of this stuff because Jerianne
Zine
World told me.

December 6, 2003

December 5, 2003

Democratic Socialists of Central Ohio.


Berube
on “Standards of Reason in the Classroom”.

November 19, 2003

November 11, 2003

November 9, 2003

November 7, 2003

October 30, 2003

October 23, 2003

October 16, 2003

September 24, 2003

September 23, 2003

September 22, 2003

September 20, 2003

September 12, 2003

September 11, 2003

September 9, 2003

September 1, 2003

August 30, 2003

August 24, 2003

August 21, 2003

August 17, 2003

August 14, 2003

August 11, 2003

August 10, 2003

August 9, 2003

August 8, 2003

August 4, 2003

August 2, 2003

July 30, 2003

July 29, 2003

July 25, 2003

July 23, 2003

Also there’s a new (online) issue of
workplace:
a journal of academic labor.

July 22, 2003

July 21, 2003

Considering how much time I voluntarily
spend online in any given 24 hours,
I missed it very little in the past 48.
No new links today.

July 17, 2003

Anyhow, I’m heading back to Making Contact right now
to post some comments. Wheee!

July 16, 2003

July 13, 2003

July 13, 2003

July 12, 2003

July 10, 2003

July 9, 2003

July 8, 2003

Sure enough it’s been done to death.
This
Gallowglass piece cites
Kathryn
Cramer quoting a
fatuous
review by Sven Birkerts.
Locus online lists
several more reviews;
a link to
this
USENET thread is provided by
Apothecary’s Drawer,
along with the scolding Dame Atwood so richly deserves (May 2). Never mind then.

July 7, 2003

Meanwhile I’ve updated my
Zine
Resources page among others.

July 6, 2003

PS
Court
Overturns Wal-Mart Union Ban.

July 4, 2003

My defection to the dark side
(“quicker,
easier, more seductive”)
continues:
I’ve uploaded my
review
of John Gatto’s Underground History of
American Education
before publishing the hardcopy version.

July 3, 2003

Updates. 1. I got the job.
Along with my
CLL
and CSCC gigs, this’ll make for
a pretty tight schedule.
2. There’s no contact info for the
blog I mentioned yesterday. Anonymity is one thing
but this is practically unheard-of.
I’ve started to wonder if it isn’t some
vile PR firm’s
astroturf.
I hope I’m just being paranoid.
According to the
cluetrain manifesto,
one should be able to recognize a human voice. It isn’t
always easy.

July 2, 2003

Somebody started a blog called
Math
Ed Matters! a couple weeks ago. Not surprisingly,
they appear to be pretty committed to “reform” as promulgated
by the
NCTM.

For my part, while I agree with pretty much everything MEM! says in posts like
“No
More Excuses”
and
“One
More Time, With Feeling”,
I’m generally much more in tune
with counter-reformers like
Mathematically
Correct than the NCTM.
This looks like a good time to mention my
review of
The Schools We Need
and
“Contradictions
of Education Reform”.

With any luck, there’ll be some good discussions coming up.

July 1, 2003

So I applied to teach a class in the
Summer
Institute in Science and Mathematics today after meeting the director
(Nyenty Arrey)
by accident yesterday. This “real life” thing might have some advantages.

June 30, 2003

Classes start today at Columbus State,
so I guess my summer vacation is over.
We’ll see how the blogging holds up.
Meanwhile, here’s my quasi-recent
“Why
I Teach Such Good Classes”.

June 30, 2003

A.j. Michel’s June 15 entry at
Papercuts
(the “blog*spot” linking feature for the entry itself appears to be busted)
is a report on the
Allied
Media Conference where I saw her.
She’s planning to follow up with zine reviews, so you
know I’ll be checking back often.

If I understand correctly, A.j. was one of the founders
of
Urbana-Champaign
IMC (though she’s leaving Champaign according to
her zine). Anyhow, she’s an all-around outstanding
citizen; Vlorbik sez check it out.

June 29, 2003

There’s very little on the blo’sphere
about the labor movement & unionism.
It sort of makes sense — the players are (currently)
mostly successful professionals of one sort or another.
But it’s still pretty depressing.
Even such lefty sites as
Lean Left and
Left Wing Liberal Commie Agitator and
The Lefty Directory
seem preoccupied with to-me-pretty-much-pointless issues
like the US election of 2004.
uniondemocracy.blogspot.com
rates another look.

Also, while I was searching, I found this
Top
100 Corporate Criminals of the 1990s
page at
The
Mad Prophet Blog, which is pretty cool.

June 29, 2003

askpang had some
remarks
in “Relevant History” recently about the badness of cellphone service
in the USA . I’m the furthest thing in the world from an expert –
all I know is the first one I ever got doesn’t f**king work
and I’m not paying the next bill or any more after that. I told ‘em so
a couple weeks back but they still don’t know since they don’t bother
having a human being read their e-mail (the bot sent me to — another bot,
which sent back a form to fill in; no thanks).

The guilty party here is T-Mobile; the phone in question is a “Sidekick”.
There’s a web browser which works even worse — much worse — than the phone.
I’m usually not an early adopter but I’m a sucker for the web and knew I’d have
to try this thing the minute I first saw it (in NYC [where presumably service is better]
in early February).

June 28, 2003

Unf rightly
complained recently about a
piece in the Chicago Reader
for reviewing the artist’s image and not the record:
Liz Phair. Well, I got the record yesterday and have played it
once. Probably I’ll play it a whole bunch more: lots of interesting
sounds — though I think I prefer the lo-fi approach of her earlier stuff –
and her trademark touching raunchy wit.
The most amusing thing about all this for me is that the indier-than-thou
piece that Unf finds so annoying is in a rag whose very purpose is to sell
eyeballs to advertisers.

June 28, 2003

I really oughta be doing
my zine.
Or anyway reading the new
Xerox Debt.

June 27, 2003

Ever since I found about
Invisible Adjunct
(from some listserv related to
my
adjunct faculty union work)
I’ve been checking it several times daily. It’s caused me to look
at several other blogs. Looks sort of fun. What the heck.
I’ve known about librarian.net
for quite a while and it’s probably still my all-time favorite.
I swiped the HTML code from
READIN
(but cut out most of the features so don’t blame him for the
way this looks).