November | 2009 | voxygen.net

From the monthly archives: November 2009

My family culture

By ~LS~ On November 15, 2009 · Add Comment · In This is my life? and tagged Tagged With: Family, For Wordies, Pets

Families have cultures. Rules and roles, beliefs and values, habits and customs, these things form the unique reality of a family. One of the ways that families express their culture is through little communication rituals and idioms, phrases that make sense only in the context of the family, and perhaps close friends who get to observe the family in the wild. I often reflect on my family idioms (from my current family, not the clusterfuck of my family of origin). I find them charming and endearing and overwhelmingly cutesy. Of course, those dark idioms exist as well, but let’s not go there.

Most of our idioms revolve on the cats and my niece, Willow. Some are shared in the dyadic coalitions that form among the three of us. Many come in and out of fashion from time to time, and some die off, never to return, except during bittersweet recollections.

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What Google thinks of me…

By ~LS~ On November 14, 2009 · Add Comment · In Humor, The Web and tagged Tagged With: Humor

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End of the semester blues…

By ~LS~ On November 13, 2009 · Add Comment · In I have to work?, Pedagogy and tagged Tagged With: BRCC, Pedagogy, Teaching, Teaching Activities

The end of the semester is drawing near and I’m blue about it. I can’t identify why, either. This semester started in such chaos with all the campus changes. Perhaps I’m just drained from it. I hope that I can re-energize after Rome this Christmas (a little under a month away). I hope that I can start the new semester fresh and psyched, unlike this August. I have excellent students this semester, which really carries me through the weekly grind. There are some definite changes I am making next semester, however. So, in random order:

1. I am adding a service learning component to the interpersonal class. There is a new “conversational partners” program on campus to help international students learn English. I am going to create a service learning project around the program. To that end, I joined this semester. I have a great partner. She’s Chinese and she’s [...]

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Gratitude for copy machines

By ~LS~ On November 13, 2009 · Add Comment · In Technology and tagged Tagged With: For Wordies, Gratitudes, Technoculture, Technology

A current facebook meme is to post a gratitude in your status. Today I am grateful for copy machines. I have to return comments on group projects to students today and I don’t have to rewrite the comments for each student. I can simply copy them on my magical combo printer/fax machine/copier/scanner. This morning I remembered the days where this sort of task was impossible.

I remember carbon paper, ditto machines, and mimeographs. I remember members of the academic generation before mine telling me that they had to type their dissertations on carbon paper and store copies in the freezer to ensure they would survive a fire. Editing and revising under those circumstances were herculean. Carbon paper gave us the origin of the phrase carbon copy. Does anyone use that term anymore?

I remember my life as a work-study student where making copies was the bulk of the [...]

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Facebook feed changes and you

By ~LS~ On November 12, 2009 · 3 Comments · In The Web and tagged Tagged With: Capitalism, Consumption, Facebook, Interface Value, Money

Confused about the difference between news feed and live feed on Facebook? Me too. The whole new new Facebook annoyed and confused me. I finally googled it to see wtf was going on. What I learned was interesting.

The biggest change on Facebook felt like the whole live and news feed thing. That was the most obvious one. We all quickly figured out how to drag our status feed to the top of the links menu on the left. That was supposed to restore the old Facebook, but it didn’t since all the feeds are now split into status, links, pages, etc., plus the new Live Feed and News Feed. So, here’s the difference between all the feeds, which is obvious if you think about it:

Live Feed: A feed of everything in Facebook. In addition to status updates, this includes friends’ quiz results, Mob Wars and Farmville announcements, [...]

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Delinquent

By ~LS~ On November 12, 2009 · Add Comment · In I have to work?, The Quotidian (yadda yadda) and tagged Tagged With: BRCC, Holidays, Work Sucks

1. Except for what people post on facebook, I haven’t read Huffpo in a long time.

2. I am probably a month behind on lolcats.

3. Someone at school rewrote the final exam matrix thereby borking my entire finals week.

4. I am behind on grading and other work-related deadlines.

5. My Gender and Communication class proposal will likely get rejected, so I will be stuck teaching public speaking forever.

6. I’m really frustrated about my final exam schedule since it impinges on getting ready for my trip to Rome (poor me).

7. The faculty senate is an ineffectual, disenfranchised lot of folk who like to “match stories” rather than do anything (with a handful of exceptions). Consequently there’s a lot of horizontal hostility and some bitter resentment going on there. Very unproductive. If any of them are reading this (which I doubt would ever ever ever happen), I hope [...]

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My family culture

What Google thinks of me…

End of the semester blues…

Gratitude for copy machines

Facebook feed changes and you

Delinquent

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My family culture

What Google thinks of me…

End of the semester blues…

Gratitude for copy machines

Facebook feed changes and you

Delinquent

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