infobong.com

special forces opportunities

Jenny blogged me to it, but I also applaud the Third Circuit's decision to allow law schools to block military recruiting on campus. Its odd that I read this story last night and today I received two recruiting messages from the Army. First, I got an email from a Sergeant Charles R. Hood inviting me to join the Green Berets, where I'd get to enjoy fun activities like "SCUBA diving, Parachuting, and Foreign Languages," all under intense enemy fire, I'm sure. Sergeant Chuck even said "this opportunity is normally reserved for soldiers who have served for a period of 2 to 3 years, but at this time, it is available you with out any special prerequisites." Gosh, if they only threw in deconstruction and reception studies, I'd sign up right away. Chuck was nice enough to give me his phone number, (877) 524-0211, and when I get a chance tomorrow, I'll give him a ring and ask him to quit spamming me. I thought soldiers were of good moral character, so why are they spamming?

Then when I got home from school, I had a message on my machine, inviting me to be an army of one. They even had a little background music as the canned announcer extolled the virtues of dying in Iraq for a war no one believes in. Why don't the get rid of "don't ask; don't tell" before they whining about being unable to recruit enough troops?

UpdateI guess I should read bOINGbOING more frequently, cause they're already on the story. UT students have also been receiving phone spam, and apparently when one student called a recruiter to complain, the serviceman threatened the student with violence. Go Army!

faster than the speed of hype

My end-of-semester load isn't so interesting right now, so I've been goofing off with Flash.

laws of nature

It seems like whenever someone posts a "I'm too busy to blog" comment, its followed by a flurry of blog posts. I'm sure I'm not the first person to articulate it, but for now lets call it "McConnell's first crass generalization of blogging," which can join "McConnell's axiom of software documentation," which is "As the number of open-source projects approach infinity, the amount of useful documentation approaches zero."

Anyway, I finally upgraded this blog to MT 3.1 (actually, 3.121) in the hope that it will rebuild my index page, and reflect the new entries.

Update:Its still not working, and lord knows I have better things to be doing right now. Its also worth noting that as soon as I upgraded MT and deprecated my MT-Blacklist installation, I started to get a bunch of blog spam. Those bots never stop, do they?

Update 2: I got help fixing it via the MT support forums, but I still don't understand what caused the problem in the first place.

structuring absence

I guess my blog is doing a good job of keepin' Austin weird, since the last entry I posted is not appearing on the main page. I rebuilt the index page, but its still not showing up, even though there is an individual entry archive for the post, its appearing in my RSS feeds, and posted to the Austin Bloggers site. I wonder if a test post will do the trick...

self-balancing battery propelled

Today I learned through the Austin bike listserv that guided Segway tours of Austin are now available. The tours cost $65 and guarantee that you will look goofy.

operationalizing inoperability

I'm tied up with end-of-semester projects, and its time for one of those routine, "I'm too busy to blog" posts. Of course, when I realized a few months back that this blog is lame, I decided to blog only when the spirit moves me. As an interesting aside, Google apparently thinks this is the lamest blog on the Internet, as its the top result for "this blog is lame."

Update (11/28): I can't figure out why, but my index page is not adding new entries, like the ones here, here, and here.

traditional sources of self-formation

Some readers may remember I published a 'zine called Au Jus when I was an undergrad. Written and edited by the pseudonymous Sass A. Frass, the "little magazine" featured the expected rants, vegetarian recipes, and images of aliens smoking blunts. I surreptiously duplicated the book at my part-time job editing math textbooks, and, accordingly, I made sure to include some math humor in each issue. I don't think an issue ever reached a reader outside of Norman or Tulsa, but I had a lovely time publishing Au Jus, which eventually became a Web-only project.

I remain interested in 'zines both from a personal and scholarly perspective, but, sadly, 'zines appear to be waning in importance among youth and underground cultures. According to this computer-generated graphic, 'zines are a relatively rare stated interest on the 'ziney LiveJournal. Anyway, I was pleased to see this essay, "The Photocopied Self: Perzines, Self-Construction, and The Postmodern Identity Crisis" by Steve Bailey and Anita Michel posted on the cultstud list today. Like academic writing on scrapbooks, I think much of the discussion of 'zines as exercises in identity construction is applicable to blogs, and, if you can't tell, I'm posting this link here for my own future reference.

pray for hail

When I lived in Philly, I would occasionally remark that I missed a good thunderstorm. It rains a lot in Philly, but they never get those melodramatic lightning-laden storms that seemingly roll in out of nowhere and dump the prairie with rain. Austin doesn't get nearly as much "severe weather" as Oklahoma, but right now I'm thinking, "Be careful what you wish for." Lightning struck so close and with such force that it lit up my apartment and now I can smell what must be that burnt electronic smell.

explosion of vertical search

Google has launched Google Scholar, a search engine for academic papers. It seems to be geared primarily toward science and engineering folks; in the ten minutes I spent playing with it, I haven't really found a use for it. A search for "Donna Haraway" simply spits out a list of her articles, but I suppose clicking the "cited" link might take me to some interesting pieces. A search for "blog historiography" didn't turn up anything useful and searching for "actor-network blog" turned up nothing at all. Perhaps this simply means there are areas waiting to be explored in media studies, but a search for "Marlene Dietrich," mostly results in articles irrelevant to the well-examined movie star.

Another problem is see with Google Scholar is that it largely points readers to journal articles in commercial databases like ingenta.com, which I need to access through the UT Library into order to pull up articles. This NYTimes story suggests Google may feature advertising on the site at a later date, but I suspect this is a product Google plans to sell to academic libraries for indexing and searching electronic resources in-house. Still, I wonder how successful they will be. According to Don Turnbull, copyright restrictions limit UT's ability to create a comprehensive search feature for the many database systems it subscribes to.

small time

OK, Jenny has this post about a woman selling a grilled cheese sandwich which she believes bears an image of the Virgin Mary. I contend that it looks more like Marlene Dietrich, but I'm not getting any props, so I thought I would do a side-by-side comparison.

Unheimlich, isn't it?

technical background necessary

This weekend, I tried to upgrade to reBlog 1.0 and managed to funkdafy the existing installation powering ReBong. I can't seem to get it work, so no new ReBongage until I learn some elementary PHP administration skills. All of the old content is still there, but I'm unable to access its server-side RSS reader, reFeed. Maybe someone can help me at tomorrow's Austin Bloggers meetup. It looks like they're now pointing to the old 0.9b version of reBlog on the site, now, so maybe I'm not the only one having trouble with the "gold" version.

whenever never

desire to document oneself

Here's an annotated bibliography of academic writing on scrapbooks, which, believe it or not, something I'm interested in. Buy me a beer sometime, and I give you my blog-as-scrapbook spiel...

can't even sing

Rest in peace, Dirt McGirt. Gosh, this saddens me. I listened to "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" running this morning and cited Ol' Dirty Bastard in a class paper a few weeks back. I lived in Philly when ODB was busted at the Gray's Ferry McDonald's and helped settled a bar argument over whether ODB would live in West Philly or North Philly. I love that Old Dirty Bastard.

reasonable rational law-abiding drivers

I love the concept of the "mobile speed bump" - well its something I do anyway, but now I have a word for it. In addition to fastidiously observing the speed limit when some redneck rides my ass, I love to hear the brakes screeching behind me when I make an unforseen full stop at a stop sign. Come on people, just because you don't observe stop signs doesn't mean everyone ignores them. Why do so many people think they're smarter than traffic engineers?

discuss our progress

Austinites interested in independent media should come out Thursday night for a benefit for IndyConference, a conference in February for IndyMedia makers and supporters. Here's the scoop:

I've heard good things about Echo Base Soundsystem, so I'm excited to see them for the first time.

nice site

Has anyone else been receiving mysterious blog spam that uses personal names and links to URLs with the form firstnamelastname.com? I click on the URLs to ensure they are indeed blog spam, but I'm getting 404 errors. Since some of the comments say, "I just found your site through Blogspot," or, simply, "nice site" on ancient entries, I assume its spam, but I'm confused about what the spammer is trying to accomplish? Are they thinking I won't despam the comment and upload a spammy site down the road? Or are they simply incompetent spammers?

reception level

I don't understand why, but there are many spots on campus where I can get a strong WiFi signal on one day, and when I return, the signal is very weak to non-existent. I still haven't found a sweet spot in the College of Communications complex, and the lab where I work has no WiFi whatsoever. A few weeks ago, I found a cluster of carrels in PCL that had consistently strong signals for a few days, but when I returned a few days later, it was completely dead, forcing me to return to my ritual of wandering around the library with my laptop open and booted up. I know from years of experience dealing with IT guys, that I don't think the same way as them, but, gosh, wouldn't you think if you were going to create an "un-wired" campus that the main library would be a priority? Or at least they would provide signage to point WiFi users in the right direction?

I don't usually post about gadgets I wish I had, but I saw the Intego WiFi Locator the other day at Fry's Electronics, and I was like, "need, need, NEED!" Its a little device that fits on your keychain and scans the airwaves for 802.11x signals, indicating their strength. This would at least enable me to wander around the PCL staring at a little gadget, rather than risking my laptop's health in the name of connectivity. It belongs on the Christmas list for all of your university geek friends.

reagan

This graffito above the Wheatsville Co-op parking lot pretty much sums up my feelings about the election.

other departments

I'm trying to get into Art History 386N "Art, Science, and Technology in the 20th Century" next semester, but the class filled quickly with Art History students. The professor asked me to write a description of my interest in the class, and, after writing it, it seems like a good overall description of what I do in school, so I'm posting it below. I should tweak it a little to replace the way out-date-bio I have on this site.

devastation migration

I see these shameful anti-immigration stickers plastered all around my Eastside neighborhood. Environmentalist arguments against immigration are not new to me, but I wonder who's printing them up, and, more specifically, who in the neighborhood is slapping them up at bus stations, on telephones, and, in this case, over Rick Perry's head.