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My friend Vivek is getting married, and he's entered in a popularity contest sponsored by a Tulsa TV station. If he gets enough votes, KOTV will pay for a wedding service in Tulsa. (He's getting married in the states, and celebrating the wedding in India.) They're the only non-cracker couple in the contest, and, unsurprisingly, they're running dead last. Please, vote for Vivek and Sherin! Update: I knew this was a dumb post from the outset, but I didn't realize how dumb it was until I went through KOTV's multi-screen registration process. Yes, you have to register with the site in order to vote.

In other news, I've got a WordPress installation up and running here. For the time being, it's just my del.icio.us bookmarks of the day, but eventually, I'll run the front page off of WordPress.

OK, I was wrong about the Rose Bowl last night. In my defense, I was just sharing my gut feeling about the game. Since I know so little about sports, I shouldn't write publicly about football. I've got to say that I'm a little disappointed with the outcome. I'm not looking forward to hearing about Texas' national championship for the next year. I don't think this is because I'm a Sooner fan. I lived in Philadelphia when Oklahoma won the national championship in 2001, and soon after the game I said I was glad I didn't live in Norman, since I'd be so sick of all the Sooner-mania. I suppose living in Austin after the steers win a national championship is my just deserts. Puke.

I'm up in the land of Woody Guthrie, visiting my family for the holidays. I've turned off comments since spammers like to strike over holidays and weekends, and I'll have limited opportunities to go online. I hope both of my readers has a lovely holiday season!

I really need get the idea that writing is easy out of my head. I know why I started thinking that way. When I started grad school, I was so intimidated and anxious I needed to reassure myself that I was capable of completing my assignments. Besides, I had been making a living as a professional writer - if I could pay the bills writing, I could get through a term paper, right?

Working as a professional writer also fostered this idea in another way. I would write several articles in a week, and I'd routinely crank out 1500 words in less than an hour with a reasonable degree of quality. When I started school, I could still write this fast, given I had already done the research and had my ideas mapped out. Over the course of three years of grad school, I don't seem to be able to hyper-focus and produce like I once could. I peck away at the word processor, waiting to get hot, but now it seems l plod through papers, struggling over each sentence. Part of the reason I'm always writing cold, I'm sure, is the return of critical voices inside my head that stifle production, and part of it is that academic writing requires a degree of analysis and precision not required by descriptive journalistic writing.

I've grown to really dread writing. I can sit down and lose myself writing a blog entry. I've come to see blogging as "junk writing" - a waste of time - so I've curtailed my blogging substantially. But writing my papers seems like such a chore: the fun part of research is over, and now I just have to organize and write up my results. I wonder how I can make school writing fun again.

My dad pointed me to this blog, "Lost Tulsa," which documents abandoned and demolished structures in my hometown. While its interest to me is apparent, movie buffs may enjoy shots of the Camelot Hotel, which was featured in the 1982 S.E. Hinton adaptation Tex. After being shot, Matt Dillon's character calls from a payphone on the opposite side of Peoria Ave and uses the hotel as a landmark to guide emergency services.

The blog also reminds me that's it's been a while since I've lived in T-Town. I didn't know that Bartlett Square and the downtown pedestrian mall had been removed over the summer, reopening traffic on Main Street. I have fond memories of that space as a child, as well as hanging out there with college friends before we were drinking age.

Finally, since I've blogged about Casa Bonita before, I thought I would point to the post on Casa Bonita, which relates that the venerable Mexican restaurant has closed for remodeling. The blog says it will reopen with better food. Anything could be better than their previous menu.

While it's still Halloween, I'll point readers to a lovely "Cat and Girl" cartoon with a potential costume idea. I do worry, that the joke might apply to me.

I don't particularly care for Halloween, and I have a hard time coming up with costume ideas. Last year, I went as a "binary opposition," wearing a black t-shirt with a zero ironed-on the front and a one on the back. I had to explain it to a bunch of people, even a communication professor. In 2000, I decided to dress as "a dot-com guy," wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt with a computer company logo. I didn't know the people at the party, and they just assumed I wasn't wearing a costume.

This year I decided to go as a LARPer. I made a foam-and-PVC-pipe "boffer" sword, plus a dorky felt hat. I chickened out before the big party Saturday, realizing that, yet again, no one would get my joke. I just went to party wearing a hoodie and shorts - normal McChris clothes - and I didn't feel out of place. One of my friends confronted me about my lack of costume. I explained that I had started a costume, saying, "I guess it's like conceptual art, making a costume, then leaving it home." My conceptual art costume was comfortable and unobtrusive, which suited me just fine.

As a kid, I got a lot of pleasure out of collecting stamps. When I was quite young, my dad worked as a computer technician at a credit card processing center, and he would bring home stacks of used envelopes. We'd cut out the right-hand corners of the envelopes, then soak them to pull off the cancelled stamps, which I'd dry and put into a book. Commemorative stamps were often dated back then, so I would organize them by year. If couldn't determine the year, I'd try to guess by the face value of the stamp, but I remember organizing a lot of stamps by subject matter. When I got older, my mom and I would go to the main post office in downtown Tulsa, and buy singles of the latest commemorative stamps. I liked the mint stamps better, but buying, rather than salvaging, stamps seem more like a habit than a hobby.

It might seem like pure marketing when the postal service says stamp collecting is an "educational hobby for all ages," but I learned quite a bit through collecting stamps. If I didn't know what a stamp was about, I'd research the topic until I understood it to my satisfaction. Although it was the hegemonic, government-approved culture - I don't think there have been any stamps of Emma Goldman - stamps catalyzed a lot of independent learning about American culture. You probably have to be a pretty bookish kid to get much out of collecting stamps, but it was a great experience for me.

When I was in middle school, I read a biography of Buckminster Fuller that mythologized him as a maverick inventor. Fuller instantly became my hero. His vision of a high-tech utopian future inspired my imagination. I even tried to make a role-playing game based on some of his designs and prescriptions for social organization, but eventually realized that utopian worlds don't offer much in the way of game-play. Yes, I was mind-bogglingly nerdy.

I'm out of stamps, and this morning was cruising the USPS Web site to see what commemorative stamps are available. I'm usually in a rush when I'm at the post office, and it's hard to see the stamps behind the counter. I smiled when I saw that the postal service has issued a commemorative stamp honoring Buckminster Fuller. While my opinion of Fuller may have diminished, maybe some nerdy kid will look him up after seeing the stamp.

Without any explanation....

Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"

Man Ray's "le violin de ingres", "Cadeau"

Richard Serra's "Torqued"

Echoplex tape delay

PXL-2000 product shot

PXL-2000 mods

William Wegman and the giant 20x24 Polaroid camera

Elsa Dorfman's 20x24 Polaroid (better pictures of the camera)

Without any explanation....

Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"

Man Ray's "le violin de ingres", "Cadeau"

Richard Serra's "Torqued"

Echoplex tape delay

PXL-2000 product shot

PXL-2000 mods

William Wegman and the giant 20x24 Polaroid camera

Elsa Dorfman's 20x24 Polaroid (better pictures of the camera)

Attending the Lost Film Festival presentation last night at Cinematexas made me a little nostalgic for my days in West Philly, so I started poking around the Spruce Hill Community Association website this morning. Lo and behold, I found a picture of myself on this page. It's about halfway down, and I'm standing in dirt, holding a shovel, and wearing a red-white-and-blue top. It's not the most flattering picture, but I wish it were in higher resolution. I do miss some of the folks on 45th street.

I ran across a specialized USB cable for connecting to Rio mp3 players. The mp3 player is broken, so I wondered if I would ever need the cable again. I remembered that Rio has discontinued production, so I definitely won't be using it again. I almost dropped it in the wastebasket, but then thought that someone who lost theirs might find it at Goodwill Computer Works, a computer thrift store in Austin.

I can't wait for their computer museum to reopen, but just going to the store is a little lesson in recent computer history. The bins are full of connectors, cables, and jacks for plethora of forgotten computer devices. I still sort of regret passing on a Netpliance I-opener I spotted, since I wrote a research paper on I-opener hacking.

Remembering what a wonderful institution Computer Works is I decided to start a bag of things to take to Goodwill. Here's a sampling:

• cheap quart and two-quart plastic bottles. I used to use these to take water to school and around town, but I've finally admitted that the Nalgene-style polycarbonate bottles really are that much better.
  
• grotty PS/2 mouse from the year 2000.
  
• nice PS/2 Dell QuietKey keyboard. Now that I'm using a Mac, I doubt I'll ever use a computer with PS/2 ports again. I probably bought the keyboard at Goodwill in the first place.
  
• crappy landline telephone/answering machine combo. I don't keep a landline anymore.
  
• plastic pitcher that won't fit in my fridge.
  
• Compaq Aero Pocket PC. Dang, this thing uses a serial port. I don't see much point in a handheld device, but I used to download Web sites like NYTimes.com to this to read on the train. I don't ride trains much in Texas.
  Posted by McChris at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)

One of the things I learned while I was in New York is that I really, really love riding trains. I like to observe the other riders and watch the scenery go past. I like to make connections at other stops, and I love feeling the speed as the train rushes through a tunnel. I got a little nervous when the 7 train goes high above Queens on a rickety El line between the Courthouse Square and Queensboro Plaza stops. I told Erich, "This is probably all the roller-coaster I need." I also learned that I'm unusually afraid of heights.

I think back to when I lived in Philadelphia. I'd frequently take New Jersey Transit from Trenton to New York, which combined with the SEPTA ride to Trenton, took about 3.5 hours. Checking out museums and seeing friends were a definite plus, but I don't think I would have spent so much time if I didn't enjoy riding the train and exploring the MTA subway system. I have fond memories of chatting with a Philly El operator who showed me around his cabin and boasted of how he can take the train nearly 60 mph in a three-block stretch and going out for drinks with a bus driver during March Madness.

bOINGbOING has a post today about a personal subway strap commuters can carry onto trains and busses to avoid transit schmutz. If you're that fussy, I think other factors are going to keep you from riding the subway (or living in the central city) before you worry about coming into contact with the subway bars.

Some people get really freaked out about germs, I suppose. I've been wandering through the back-to-school aisles here in Austin, and I keep seeing anti-bacterial hand lotion among the glue and crayons. Are Texas schools now requiring students to supply disinfectant? Or is this just for oppressively protective parents who want their kids to have clean hands? We certainly didn't have anti-bacterial lotion when I was in elementary school twenty years ago, so it seems like some kind of weird ghetto-futuristic artifact. If I rode the subway a lot, though, I might keep a bottle in my bookbag to use after grasping a particularly greasy handrail.

While I'm enjoying the air conditioning at a coffeeshop, I thought I would post a few brief notes about my New York trip.

• I took about 250 pictures on my digital camera, and I don't know if I'll get around to posting any of them. It's a little hassle to process and scan film, so it takes a while to post images taken with a traditional camera. But I'm much more judicious with my shots when I'm shooting on film. I take as many pictures as I want with the digital, and culling through the images and editing them in Photoshop can slow down my uploading process as much as film. The ease of creating digital images introduces it's own data-managment hassles.
  
• I get sloppy shooting on a digital camera, too. I started using the viewfinder to frame shots, because the LCD screen on my camera is hard to see in direct sunlight. When I shoot on film, I'm pretty careful about framing my shots, even when I'll be printing on an enlarger. On the digital camera, I just assume that can crop and recompose a shot in Photoshop, making it easy to take lots of bad pictures.
  
• I still haven't quite figured out the exposure and white-balance settings on my point-and-shoot digital camera to my satisfaction, which also means a fair amount of fiddling in Photoshop. I still don't think I'd want to go back to carrying my 35mm SLR around the city.
  
• Does anyone know of a Flickr plugin for Photoshop on OS X? I'm pretty happy with this plugin that allows me to publish to Flickr from iPhoto, but I would rather export from Photoshop.
  
• $30 seems to be the standard price for a limited-run T-Shirt in New York. I can understand the offbeat-T-shirt-as-status-symbol phenomenon, since I often buy funky, obscure shirts online. $20 is the most that I'm willing to pay for a shirt, but after looking at shirts in New York, I might not feel so bad about buying this $22 shirt from the Space 2026 collective in Philly.
  
• I insisted that my hosts go to P.S.1 with me, since I remembered the building itself was really interesting. On the way there, I worried that it was just a rehabilitated school, but, it was as weird and crazy as I remembered. It's a little hard to describe the experience of walking through the building, but many of the installations are integrated into the building and play off of its urban decay. I would have liked to spend more time there, but I'm glad we got to spend a little time there.
  
• Coming home to a broken air conditioner is a cruel trick. The last two nights in New York, I only got about four hours of sleep, and I got the about the same amount of sleep last night because it was so hot. The temperature inside was still around 90F when I woke up this morning. I was ready to spend a productive day at home, but, by 10am, it was so hot I had to leave my place. I'm feeling a little grouchy and scattered.
  

I got back from New York at about 5 o'clock this afternoon. The first thing I did was walk over to the thermostat and turned on the air conditioner. It's funny how pockets of hot air remain after the AC runs. I opened up the pantry, and the air inside was still in the nineties while the rest of the apartment was 80F.

About half an hour ago, I felt hot and realized I was sweating substantially, so I looked up at the thermometer hanging by my desk. It read 88F, which is hotter than I like to keep my apartment. I assumed that I had the thermostat set too high, so I walked over to check the settings. It was set at a normal temperature. (The temperature settings on the thermostat don't map to real-world temperatures, so I use a combination of a thermometer and futzing to get the desired cooling.) I fiddled with the thermostat, sliding the bar so the AC would be sure to kick in, to no avail. Finally, I realized I heard a faint noise from the unit, but no cold air blew out of the vents. The fan in the air conditioner is broken. I can set the temperature as low as I want, but my apartment won't get any cooler.

Ugh, it's 85F outside right now, so I can open a window and sleep reasonably well, but we're expecting a high of 101 tomorrow, so it could get miserable if the landlord drags his feet on fixing the AC. I guess I should plan on spending the afternoon at the library or the movies.

I'm up in New York, where I'll be looking at art, scowling at motorists, and otherwise hanging out for a long weekend. Posting may be light, or, due to my hosts' wireless connection, posting as much as usual.

I got in at about 6pm last night, and I've already learned a few new things.

• You can take liquor on the airplane, but you shouldn't put it in your checked baggage. I brought my hosts a bottle of Tito's Handmade Vodka - a local Austin spirit - and packed it in a suitcase. I worried about the pressure difference, but I worried more about breakage. Thanks to my bubble wrap skills, the bottle didn't break, but the seal broke, infusing my jeans with a few shots of vodka. I'm just glad I didn't bring bourbon.
• Downloading the past few days of "The Daily Show" was a good idea. A little bit of Bittorrent goes a long way on the plane. A guy in the seat in front of me had a picture of his young daughter on his desktop, but spent the flight reading interviews with porn stars in FHM and watching episodes of "The Man Show" on DVD. Creepy!
• You can take the Q33 bus from La Guardia to the subway, but that doesn't mean you should. It took at least 45 minutes to get from the airport to the R stop on Roosevelt. Although I would expect Q33 to be a major bus route, it bypassed major four-lane roads for a meandering neighborhood route on one-way, one-lane streets. I hate taking cabs, but apparently this is a situation where a cab ride is worth it.
• If you've embarked on an hour-and-a-half long bus and train ride, and you're worried about that suspicious vodka smell coming from your suitcase, go ahead and open up your suitcase. I think I could have salvaged more of the bottle of Tito's with a little strategic re-arranging.

Anyway, today I'm planning to hit The Whitney and The Guggenheim and whatever else strikes my fancy. Maybe I'll have updates and maybe I won't.

At at about 3:45 this afternoon, I remembered that I wanted to pick up a book at the Fine Arts Library on campus. There really isn't a bus that goes from my neighborhood to that building, and I remembered it was relatively cool and breezy, so I decided to walk over to that library. It was still a little breezy at 4pm, but it had gotten well up in the 90s, and I was sort of thinking this might not be the most pleasant walk.

When I got to Fine Arts, I was pretty sweaty and a little tired. At the circ desk, I remembered that I had a book waiting for me over at PCL, UT's main library, so I decided to walk over there as well. I pulled out a bandanna, wiped off my brow, and headed uphill to the other bibliotheque.

After I got my book, I read for a few minutes, then looked at my watch and realized it was happy hour at Little City. A half-price iced coffee sounded pretty refreshing, so I walked down The Drag to the other side of campus and got me some java. At this point, my sweet SEPTA baseball cap was completely soaked with sweat, but I was lovin' my iced coffee as I read a chapter out of my book. As six o'clock rolled around, I decided I didn't want to walk back home, so I headed down the block and waited for the bus.

I've marked my path, with notes, on Flickr:

I'd estimate I walked a little under two miles under the hot Texas sun, and, at the end of it, I felt pretty tired. I run further than that nearly every day, but I don't run with a full backpack and in the heat of the afternoon. I had also spent about two hours at the gym earlier today, so I feel alright about being a little tired.

My casual sneakers are developing holes, and I'm starting to think about getting a new pair of kicks to wear to class, the coffeeshop, and wherever else it is I go besides the gym. I've long been intrigued by the Adbusters-affiliated Blackspot Sneaker, which is an effort to produce an affordable, durable sneaker with fairly paid labor. I don't have a lot of success buying shoes on the Internet, unless I already have a pair of a particular shoe. (You try being nearly six feet tall with a size 8 foot.) There aren't any retailers in Austin that sell Blackspots, so, with my upcoming New York trip in mind, I decided to see if I could check them out in the big city.

The list of retailers revealed that there are two places in New York City that sell Blackspots, but I was surprised to see that a store in Tulsa, Earth Friendly Goods, carries both the sneaker and the boot. I'm sure I drove past the store in the Cherry Street district the last time I was in town, but I never would have thought to look there. I'm impressed there's a Blackspot dealer in my hometown, but not one in the whole state of Texas. I'm not going to be back in Tulsa this summer, so I suppose I could wait until Christmas to check them out or just go to one of the retailers in New York.

While I was writing the previous post, I got "Wiki River, take my mind..." stuck in my head. It's a lame parody of Willie Nelson's "Whiskey River," and it's even lamer when your head won't let go of it. Either my acculturation to Austin is complete or I'm drowning in a Wiki river.

Unsurprisingly, it's been pretty hot here in Austin. One of my pleasures has been sitting outside at a coffeehouse as the sun sets. My apartment building doesn't exactly have a nice outside space to unwind. I really enjoy going to Café Mundi, sitting below the banana trees and smelling the fumes wafting from the El Lago tortilla factory across the tracks.

Saturday night, I was near campus at sundown, so I decided to go over to Spiderhouse, which has a garden that looks like a funky junkyard. I'd forgotten that the coffeeshop would have live "entertainment," so I was a little annoyed when I went outside, but I hoped for the best.

There was some geeky white dude playing acoustic guitar on the makeshift stage. When his song ended, he tuned a couple strings on his guitar, and said, "OK, this next song is a cover; some of you might not know it."

"I wonder if I know it?" I thought to myself.

"It's a song by Talking Heads." He paused and said, "It's off their album Talking Heads '77."

"Oooh, which one will he play? Maybe 'Uh-Oh Love Comes to Town'?"

With undeserved confidence, he said, "This one is called 'Psycho Killer'."

"No, no, poopy no!" I thought to myself, "Everybody knows this song."

If the dude was some kind of experimental folk artist, deliberately trying to induce the kind of obsessive annoyance that comes from a stupid person carrying on a loud cellphone conversation in the train seat behind you, he is a master of his craft.

My thoughts were racing. "Who doesn't know this song? O my goodness, this is awful. Seriously, who doesn't know this song? I used to hear this song on the radio in my Bug, driving to high school. They play this on the classic rock station in Tulsa, Oklahoma! Who possibly wouldn't know this song?" Considering Austin's alarmingly large population of music geeks, I don't think the guy should have assumed that a crowd wouldn't know the piece.

After the song was over, a heavyset woman came up from behind me and interrupted me from my reading. She held a metal bucket, and asked, "Do you have a quarter so the singer can get some ramen noodles?" I'm sure I gave her a look of genuine hostility, but I grudgingly fished a quarter out my pocket and tossed it in the bucket.

I put Talking Head '77 on the turntable this afternoon, and I immediately started dancing. I felt really goofy and lighthearted, in a way that I haven't felt in a long time. I loved Talking Heads growing up. I was a goofy kid.The summer before high school, my friends and I would watch the video for "Once in a Lifetime" over and over again, trying to replicate David Byrne's dance moves. I used to mow the lawn with my best marching band posture, so the CD wouldn't skip in my early-90s Discman. It was good to feel that way again.

Last night, Matthew and I went to a screening of Slacker at the Harry Ransom Center. I had been having random thoughts about Eno's Oblique Strategies for a week or so, and a couple scenes in the movie feature the use of an Oblique Strategies deck. It seems like I should start using them for generating thoughts. One of the first interesting interactive things I found on the Web was an Oblique Strategies generator, so I decided to hunt around to see what the Web has to offer. I'm pretty sure the generator I saw in college was this one at Hyperreal, but online generators abound.

I thought to myself, this would be a perfect for a Dashboard widget! It would nicely complement the Terror Alert widget I have installed, but provide a little more utility. Lo and behold, there is a widget for generating Oblique Strategies. Now I can get a worthwhile dilemma just by punching F8!

It's interesting to note that this capsule review of Slacker quotes Oblique Strategies, but credits it to a character.

Back in 2001, when I was an editor at a computer magazine, my company had laid off nearly all of the editors at the suburban Philadelphia office. My boss wanted me to move to Irvine and work at one of the main editorial office, and I flew out there in September to check out the town and look for apartments. It didn't take me long to realize that Irvine was not a place for me. I jokingly called it "Plano-by-the-Sea" because of it's bland suburban architecture and lack of independent culture; it was about as different from West Philly as I could imagine. I drove around Orange County quite a bit while I was there, and I stopped by UC-Irvine, thinking that the campus might at least offer some interesting coffeeshops and walks. Sadly, campus seemed to have little going on, and, driving around, it seemed like a "strip-mall campus" where students pull up to class in their cars, unlike other campuses like OU, Penn, or UT, where the layout encourages walks across campus and serendipitous encounters. The Wikipedia entry on UC-Irvine seems to confirm this impression.

Certainly designing campuses to minimize protests is not unique to Irvine. UT's West Mall was restructured to limit the size of groups congregating in the space, and OU's Physical Sciences Center was designed to be used as a stronghold in the event of a riot. The Wikipedia article adds that "Most likely, the design of the campus is simply representative of mid-60s urban design, favoring large open spaces and decentralized facilities over the dense layout of older campuses," which reenforces my impression that the campus was designed like a strip-mall.

I've assigned my class the first chapter of John Berger's Ways of Seeing for next Wednesday, and I'm currently in the process of scanning a .pdf of the chapter to put on eRes. While looking around for information about the book, I found a nice little page that has all of the images from the book. They're even in color, so it's even better than the grayscale images in my copy! This is nice, since now I don't have to worry about doing high-quality scans: my students will just need the text.

I got back from Tulsa last night. This is the first New Year's Eve I've spent in Austin, and its in the 70s. It feels a little strange running around town in sandals, especially when it was 24F when I left town last week.

Looking at Pitchfork's year-end record roundup, I wish I could list my favorite records of the year, but I just didn't buy all that many records, and what few records I bought were mostly used LPs from years ago. The record that came out this year that I wish I had is M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts but I'm too lazy and too cheap to pick it up. My favorite song this year is "Slow Response" by Trans Am, and it was released in 2000. Its hardly even a song, I suppose, if the only vocal I can understand is "Sweet, sweet crack cocaine."

The weirdest musical moment of the year for me has to be the use of The Kinks' "Picture Book" in commercials for Hewlett-Packard digital photography products. Unless the folks at HP are way hipper than me and I'm missing a layer of irony, this has to be one of the most inappropriate appropriations of a pop song since Reagan used "Born in the USA" as the theme song for his 1984 re-election bid. The song mocks the use of photography to commodify moments in people's personal lives, right? I'll bet Ray Davies is laughing all the way to the bank.

One of the things I enjoy most about going home for Christmas is casually bumping into people from my past. This morning at the liquor store, I saw my old Scoutmaster Mr. Horowitz, so I went up to him and said, "Hey Mr. Horowitz! It's Chris McConnell from Boy Scouts."
I finished my Eagle Scout badge when he was the Scoutmaster, so I thought he would remember me. I looked at me for a moment, smiled, and said, "Oh hey! I always mean to ask your parents about you when I see them. Where are you living these days?"
"Oh, I'm down in Austin, working on a PhD."
"Austin? That's the capital, right?"
"Yeah. I'm at the University of Texas."
"What field are you in?"
This is always a tough question for me to answer. Sometimes I just say "Communications," but I thought Mr. Horowitz would enjoy that I was doing something a little offbeat, so I said, "I'm in media studies. I study TV and movies and things like that."
He asked the inevitable, "What are you going to do with that?"
"Oh, I want to teach at the university level. Right now I'm teaching kids how to make Web pages and do computer animation. I'll teach kids how to make movies."
Mr. Horowitz is a CPA in Tulsa so that might have blown his mind a little.
My mom asked him what his kids are up to. His son is a physical trainer and his daughter is a social worker of some sort.
We wished him a merry Christmas, grabbed a bottle of champagne, and headed for the checkout.
At the checkout, he asked, "They have all kinds of programs at the universities, don't they? Now what university are you at again?"
A little confused, I said, "Um, The University of Texas at Austin?"
"Now that's just, 'Texas'?"
"Yeah, its 'Texas Longhorns' Texas," I explained, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the crimson "Oklahoma" sprawling across my hoodie.
I guess he's not a college football fan because that didn't seem to make sense to him. He just said, "They have all kinds of programs these days, don't they?"

Tomorrow, I'm driving up to Tulsa to spend Christmas with my family. Blogging's been light the few days, and I expect it to be light for the next week or so, so, in the meantime, check out that old chestnut of a post about a Tofurky Christmas.

The other night, I had a vivid dream about being stuck in an awful grimy Atlanta mall. A split level mall with narrow corridors, it was filled with cheesesteak stands and check cashing outlets. I only remembered this now as I was reading about the Virgin Megastore. I thought to myself, "remember when you were at the Virgin Megastore in Atlanta?" I quickly realized that never happened. When I was dreaming, I didn't know where I was until I saw the Tower Records in Buckhead. Its funny how you can forget dreams are dreams until you remember them.

I've been in a Virgin Megastore - once - when I was looking for apartments in Orange County, and I was bored. I bought CDs that day, but at the local store Noise Noise Noise in Costa Mesa. I got Viva by La Dusseldorf and Psychedelicate by Slumber Party. When I asked the cute punk girl working at the counter if there were any cool neighborhoods near Irvine, she said, "Hell no! I'm moving to Portland next week." The September 11 attacks occurred the week before, and I remember loving the hell out of the "make love not war" chorus of "Geld" when I was queueing through security at John Wayne International. I've never been to Orange County again.

I've been up in Studio 4B, trying to teach myself the 3D animation package Softimage XSI. Obviously, there's only so much I can learn over the break, but its been worth my while. Hopefully, I'll learn enough to get students started working with it in a future semester, if not generate my own projects.

The Danish exchange student was up there, too. He's been trying for weeks to author a PAL-compatible DVD from an NTSC-formatted After Effects project. From the start, I've thought he would have to go about this by either running it through a hardware scan converter and author the DVD from raw video or starting from scratch and adjusting his resolution and frame rates in After Effects. Either way is going to be a hassle and give less-than-optimal results. He has a Quicktime of his movie, and I keep telling him that it'll play on any computer with the plugin, so its probably not worth the effort to try to make it readable on a PAL DVD player.

Regardless, he's been trying to create a PAL DVD in various DVD authoring packages. He was mucking about with the cheesy wizard-based package that came with the DVD drives on our PCs, and I was like, "Um, you should be able to click something and get more granularity."
"What's granularity?"

Its sometimes hard for me when I'm working with non-native speakers when I use weird words in conversation. I don't want to dumb down my discourse, but at the same time, I want to be intelligible. I imagine the Dane and others do want to learn as many English words as possible, but, then again, how often will he run into "granularity"?

I said, "You know how sand is made up of a bunch of little grains?"
He nodded yes.
"Granularity is like you can mess with each of those little grains. If there's more granularity in software, you have more options to manipulate."
"Got it."
Awesome.

I just can't stop looking at this picture Mel tracked down. I'm Joey Lawrence all over the place.

One of the more unpleasant surprises I've had came this morning when I came back soggy from a hard run in light rain. I peeled off my clothes and turned on the tap, waited a moment, waited another moment, and realized that the landlord had turned off the water for some repair in another unit. This had happened before without warning, but that time I just had to go to school without shaving. This time I sat cold, clammy, and naked until the water came back on.

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.

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?

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.

My dear friend Marnie is hosting a Halloween party Friday, and I've yet to think of a costume. I sense a high level of expectation for costumes, since she sent out a warning email a month ago, so I don't think I'll be able to weasel out this time. I frankly don't like Halloween, and I sort of resent wearing a costume; I think I should think of something clever, but it seems the more clever I get, the more I bomb.

So what should I be? I don't want to wear a costume that involves makeup or masks, since I don't like stuff on my face, and avoiding hats would be nice. Maybe I'll be the Invisible Man and stay home. Jenny wonders if she could she could be Laura Bush or Monica Lewinsky; I suggested Jessica Simpson.

I can't believe how much time I've spent today thinking of road-trip songs. Obviously this was more interesting to me than the material I need to be working on. I wonder if I can go to grad school in mix-tapeology. I know the answer to this: I'm in a department that studies TV, movies, and Internet crap. I would just need to go take a methods class in Anthropology and start an ethnography of mix-tape makers. I'd call it "Burning Passions: reception, reappropriation, and personal mix CDs."

On Sunday morning I returned from the gym to find voter registration forms hanging on each of the doors of my building. When our doors were leafeted two weeks ago, I appreciated the effort, and dug up my voter registration card. But it seemed like a waste of energy in a safe Republican state and a safe Democratic house district. (Thanks to the summer's redistricting, I live in a district that extends from East Austin to the Mexican border.) I'm sure some great kids are - like me - really upset about the current political climate, and feel compelled to take action. But engaging my gentrifying neighborhood in a get-out-the-vote campaign? It seems like there are more productive ways to work out this impetus, and I'm not sure what.

I have a whole raft of issues with the Democratic party, and I won't waste our energy elaborating them when you can go read The Nation. And I have problems with "social movements" and their skepticism of the government and the political process. I do think there are a lot of radicals who quickly dismiss institutions as racist, elitist, and sexist - and engage in a intellectually lazy anti-authoritarianism. They fail to recognize the demands placed on government and political systems or the difficulty with which systems evolve. I don't deny that our political system is racist, elitist, sexist, and increasingly difficult to reform, but the existing institutions will better equipped to deal with the needs of our society than ripping them out and replacing them with new ones. Would we expect that people new to government would be effective at maintaining roads, managing health care, or maintaining order? These are complex subject are that I'm sure require a lot of wisdom that comes from experience.

I saw that this year's class of McArthur Fellows has been announced, and remembered that one of my professors from OU, Bret Wallach, had said he won some big fellowship, so I looked to see if he was on the list of past recipients. Indeed, he was. I didn't really think about it at the time, but that's really quite impressive. Dr. Wallach was a good teacher, too. I took his "Human Geography" class my first semester of college, and he seemed genuinely concerned that I was going to drop out, and did his best to encourage and engage me in class.

Oh crap, I think I might be a grown-up now. According to this Web page, I get my very own class next semester. It all seems so official and weird.

At Danah's suggestion, I added this site to Radio-TV-Film is closest to “Arts.” I feel so pretentious.

Wow, today's New York Times has a photo of the owner of Starbase 21. Starbase 21 was like one of two places in Tulsa to buy gaming miniatures and other nerd gear when I was a kid. My parents never wanted to take me there, partly because it was about a 9 mile drive from our house, and partly, I'm sure, because they didn't want me to turn into one of the guys hanging out in the store. (Ha ha mom! I wear untucked black t-shirts nearly every day, I haven't had a girlfriend in years, and I hang out in geeky record stores instead.) I didn't have much disposable income when I was a kid, either. It would have taken me two months to buy a packet of miniatures, so mostly I would just be sad looking at all the blister packs.

Anyway, I guess the reporter didn't realize that Starbase is also a store in T-town, since the caption reads, "John Harper, of Tulsa., Okla., in Starbase 21, his booth of memorabilia at the "Star Trek" convention in Los Angeles." I went to Starbase 21 the last time I was in Tulsa because it was sort of near the transmission shop that fixed my truck. It was pretty depressing, actually. It just seemed sad, dirty, and poorly lit - and barely stocked with miniatures or sci-fi ephemera. I remember it being such a carnival of nerddom. I remembered buying a green patch as a freshman that read "Live Long and Prosper under a Vulcan hand sign. I had my mom sew it on my backpack, but I later realized I probably just got it to fit in. I never really got into Star Trek.

BTW, it should be mentioned that Starbase 21 is in the same shopping center as Casa Bonita. 21st and Sheridan is surely the epicenter of Tulsa's tacky plastic underworld.

Misha Nedeljkovich was one of our favorite film professors at OU. I had Misha for Intro to Film and Video, Documentary Film, and Oneiric and Non-Oneiric Cinema, but mostly what I remember about him was that he had an awesome collection of animation from all over eastern Europe, and he really, really liked Jim Jarmusch. He also had a great story about how he got a new dog as a teenager and was so excited about his dog, he missed an after-school meeting. As a result, he was never able to join the Communist party and was relegated after college to making TV shows about the wheat harvest. Over time, I may have forgotten details and he may have embelished some of the story.

I understand that he got a grant to go back to the Balkans and research mass media there. I poked around the OU Web, looking for information about his research and life, and this is what I found. Its not exactly what I was expecting, but interesting nonetheless. I suspect he may have made it as a demo in a Web-authoring class

Dude, I'm over at Jared and Kara's house right now, and Kara doesn't really get weallhaveaplan.com. I said that just because someone is still working their ideas out doesn't mean she should get angry.

Yo, I'm up in Tulsa for the next few days, lest you worry about my lack of blogage.

Lately, I've been looking for information on making stencils, and Google wasn't much help. However, I came across this thread, which led me to StencilRevolution, which offers stencil tutorials, as well as galleries of stencil art submitted by participants.

I took some strange classes as an undergrad. I think I graduated in English and Film Studies because I made an effort to take the strangest classes I could find, and the English and Film programs offered classes like "Rhetoric, Orality, and Video" and "Pulp Fiction: Oneiric and Non-Oneiric Narratives." But the strangest class I took was titled "Attraction and Repulsion in Anglo-American Culture," but I referred to it as the "filth" class, since it was basically an overview of what you might call "scat studies." We read a lot of the obvious theorists in the field like Kristeva and Battaille and some not-so-obvious theorists as well. Our literary readings included The Madness of King George and Todd Haynes' Safe.

My classes at UT don't seem quite as strange. Yeah, I TAed a class on transgender studies this spring, and I wrote a term paper about hacking the i-Opener, what weirdness there is doesn't excite me anymore. Its like my life has become predictably weird. I wondered if that "Attraction and Repulsion" really wasn't that weird - I was just a young, impressionable math major struck by the prospect of studying continental theory, so I decided to sneak a peek at Professor Barney's CV. He's since moved to SUNY-Albany, but he seems to be up to his weird ways, presenting papers like, "The Anal Eye of Ecstasy: Scatology, Fantastical Bodies, and Sublime Theory in Enlightenment England." Yeah, I don't think time has given my memory of that class a little extra flavor.

I often think about emailing my old professors from undergrad and pick their brains for a moment. I'd email Professor Welch about her piece on Into the Blogosphere, or ask Professor Barney if he's heard !!!'s "Shit, Scheiße, Merde."

I was a math major for much of my undergraduate experience. I wasn't a very focused student, finally deciding to major in the subjects I had the most hours in, English and Film-Video. I'm still a little bemused about having been a math major, but this NYTimes story reminds me why. It exposes the underground world of computational origami, which the story doesn't adequately explain, but involves math professors making really complex origami. The pictures in the story make my inner math geek go, "Whoa, that's rad."

I just realized that I think its fun to send stuff through the mail. When I ordered stuff from private carriers, I used to sit in my office and obsessively check the tracking page to see where UPS is routing my package. I used to sell computer books through half.com and get a slight thrill from packing up a book on SONET configuration to exotic locales like Buffalo and Reno, knowing that the recipient was footing the bill. When I was an undergrad, I told a used car salesman I knew that I was an English major, and he replied, "So you'll be working in the mail room." At the time, I took that as an insult, but know I think I might have enjoyed that career path.

I also realized that my fascination with shipping services is a pretty geeky interest. (I'm suddenly reminded of The Crying of Lot 49, which has a preoccupation with postal systems.) A lot of my interests are pretty geeky: public transportation and FCC policy come to mind. I should find some non-geeky things to do.

I'm heading up to Tulsa today for a few days. I usually like going back to Tulsa and seeing my friends and family, but, last night, I was really dreading going back. I wanted to call my mom and tell I wasn't going to make it, but my mom is throwing a party for my sister's graduation from college, and I feel like I have to go. Hopefully this will be a pleasant trip nonetheless.

This morning I was digging around the glovebox of my '94 Ford Ranger pickup, looking for a tire gauge. I didn't find one, but after I pulled out all the owners manuals, maps, and legal documents, I found a .22 round at the bottom of the compartment. This was something of a surprise. I used to shoot guns as a kid, but its been years since I've even handled a gun, so I was pretty darn sure it wasn't mine. My dad drove the truck before me, but he takes pride in the fact that he hasn't shot a gun since boot camp in the 60s, so it didn't belong to him either. I imagine the previous owners left it in there, but I guess you know you live in the Southwest when you discover loose bullets in your vehicle.

I usually think its lame when people post their personality quiz results on their bloggen, but now that this blog has been declared officially lame, I might as well. I also thought this quiz was a little funny.

You're an Etch-a-Sketch!! You're the creative,
artsy type who doesn't need to actually utilize
a single muscle group in order to have fun.
Doesn't matter though, you're still cool.

What childhood toy from the 80s are you?

I'm not sure how I feel about being an Etch-A-Sketch. Although the description doesn't mention it, the Etch-A-Sketch seems to lack agency. Perhaps this is a structuring absence...

I'm not sure what do with this blog anymore. I'm not as interested in the things that I blogged about when I started this blog. it seems the blog lost steam as soon as I switched the blog from the UT ACTlab server to private hosting and the Infobong.com domain. I don't really have any vision of what I want to do with this project now, but I certainly don't feel like I have the same energy for blogging as I once did.

With that out of the way, I read the news a lot and the news scares the crap out of me. I just want to want to think about it, let alone blog about it. Ugggh.

Atrios has a little hierarchy over on his blog today.

OK, when I read this I immediately thought of Philly, where people were constantly braying about how Philly was better than New York, Tulsa, or anything in California. But lets read on:

Further down he writes, "Oddly, Philadelphia is a 2nd class city with a 3rd class attitude." Wow. He must have a vastly different experience in Philly than I did. I've already written about the bigots at Boucher Communications, but when I used to live in Philly, I used to joke about how Philly is the Arkansas of the Northeast - most of the people I met were profoundly uncurious about not just other parts of the country, but other lifestyles and cultures. They reminded me of some hillbilly living on some mountainside in Arkansas, boasting about how they haven't left the county in 20 some-odd-years. The Philly Hillbillies seemed to universally eat meat, listen to corporate rock, and openly express racist attitudes; they were urban rednecks with an inflated sense of their city's importance.

After seeing a profile of the Urban Pioneer Project in ReadyMade magazine, I decided to join their project. From readng the magazine, I thought it was an urban sustainability project, but when I got on the site, it looked like a YASN service like Friendster or Orkut. Now that I'm Urban Pioneer #00875, I'm not sure what it is. But in the spirit of sharing, I decided to paste my answers to their membership questionaire below.