News Flashes

May Seminar was completed. I am transformed, without a doubt. I wonder if my colleagues will recognize me. Serious intellectual chaff got burned off, as did my need to perform certain masculinities. For now, at least.

My brain is still reeling from usability. Kept on thinking about MEELS on the way to DFW from LBB. Is it obsession or synaptic burn, I don't know. Thinking about grant writing and/or budget writing formats as genres and usability testing. How I got here from Isocrates I will never know.

I honestly suspect that Prigogine [props to FK] is right on here--keep up the disturbance/pressure for a while and a new order will emerge in a non-linear jump. Or something like that.

Tired brain, but it feels good to not be used much.

Learned a lot about pacing, about working with others, and what not to do. It was great being in the midst of other very smart and very hard working people.

I am still curious why few people write or research information marketing. Hmm. Too tacky or market sender. FK said I should check out the book Joyce edited, Market Matters.

I don't even know if this blog is even relevant any more, technologically or practically speaking--especially considering all of the emergent technologies. I certainly am sure that this mode of using blogger feels outdated.

I really want to figure out some master method of organizing my data and thoughts, and i am not very sure how to do it. I think it may be in databases, but I'm not very clear.

I am starting to see myself and the work I do with language in a very different light, but the light is opaque. It is not transparent.

I'd like to expand my understanding of usability and go into greater depth with it as a research methodology. This could be stockholm syndrome, but it feels more like the approach is actually clear and orderly. I do so enjoy this, you know.

My fashion was clearly disastrous, but that was probably due to my perpetual inclination to resist the academic uniform of slacks and long sleeved shirts with collars. I just do not care for that. My inner 14 year old resisting.

I am curious to see what could happen if there was a usability test done with graduate students and Kindles. That could be an interesting experiment to run at TTU. Or maybe not, we'll see.

I am considering pickiing up a Kindle and working with that process for my writing. From there, I could drag and drop into a database of author, title, etc., or pop into end note or zotero. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure what to do. Brain must relax for a while longer, you know.

I saw this awful ad in a computer magazine for workplace surveillance. Three kinds of employees were represented, and each was guilty of a specific crime. The white guy was guilty of looking at porn, the woman of shopping, and the man of color for sharing internet secrets. Do you see an escalation in severity of crimes here? Struck me as obscenely different. That may be me.

For Zdenek's class I'm looking at exploring macular degeneration resources online. Just a consideration, and I need to see what is there. Similarly, I wonder how the Kindle works for people with macular degeneration. That could be a usability and accessability study there as well.