voxygen.net » Technology

A bare etching and the intimacy of touch

~LS~ — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:58:02 +0000

I bought several Jack Bilander etchings lately. Bilander was an artist in Chelsea, my neighborhood growing up in New York City. Lately I’ve had this urge to go there. I’ve built up an obsession, really, to return to my Grandmother’s apartment, to be in her space, to see the cheap 1960s parquet floors of Penn South, smell the esoteric scent of Jewish working class intelligentsia, and view a wall full of images still strikingly memorable forty years later. I don’t know why I became obsessed with Jack Bilander, but when I found his suite of pictures on Picasa, I sighed audibly, repeatedly, at how many of them I remembered vividly. So indelible and powerful. Clearly it’s a need formed because of where I am in my life at this precise moment. But precise moments are the entire point.

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Outside the interface

~LS~ — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:10:23 +0000

Today I opened something somewhere and got another nag message from Google about its new privacy policy. The nag message invited me to “dismiss” it, a language choice that reflects a mildly amusing and disturbing political and interpersonal frame that we’ve developed with internet computing. Perhaps my amusement about being nagged over privacy derives from my almost-divorced status, but that is neither here nor there.

I’m not going to waste time knifing through the current policy change. The short version: it will consolidate the privacy options for multiple Google services into one statement to accept or reject with one click of a button, all for the sake of clarity and simplicity. Bundled privacy, in other words. I’ll get back to Google first, but I want to talk about the issue of interface. This will be a branching, circuitous route, so bear with me.

Sherry Turkle’s [...]

I’m back

~LS~ — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 10:28:49 +0000

I’m waiting for Typekit to populate/propagate my font. I’m using Cooper. It’s been some time since I’ve blogged. There’s so much to say I don’t know where to begin. I’ll just chalk it up to a lost and found year. The font makes the webdesign. I have to finish rebooting things here.

As always, the design reflects things about my life too numerous to go into. For instance, I tried to de-clutter and get things squared away into a single-file simple column. I failed. However, things did get shoved to the bottom, all linky and soldier-like, messy in an orderly fashion, but overwhelming from a big-picture perspective.

The Sells-Jaros household is now just the Sells household. The Jaros household will be a household with someone else. Quite surreal. The Sells household is also without the beloved Pach Du. That was a devastation too great to be accounted for – [...]

Where’s Neil Postman when you need him?

~LS~ — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 01:22:35 +0000

I’m contemplating teaching Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death in my Introduction to Humanities class this semester, particularly Chapter 4 (“The Typographic Mind”). I don’t feel like scanning the chapter and I couldn’t find a pdf or doc online to use. Then it occurred to me that my students in all likelihood won’t read anything anyway, so why waste time scanning a document in the first place. I began to look for Sparknotes. I know, I’m bankrupt as an educator. At least I opted not to show the seventh grade history teacher’s youtube version of the Renaissance. I should get props for that.

Anyway, in my surfing, I ran into an amusing exchange on a forum. I don’t think the people involved were amused. I was, though, but in a depressing and ironic way. The exchange is started by a desperate student trying to locate a free copy of the [...]

Ten Tech Gratitudes for 2010

~LS~ — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 07:52:49 +0000

(In no particular order)

1. Droid

I bought my Droid in November 2009 and it has changed how I interact with people, sometime for the worse, but usually for the better. On the one hand, even though I’m a technophile, I really don’t like the 24/7 culture of new communication technology. When I first got a cell phone, I only used it to call out and only for emergencies. Now, the convenience and entertainment value of a smart phone make me wonder why I went so long without one. I still have a bad habit of leaving my ringer off, missing calls, and forgetting all about the phone’s existence. But there have been so many situations where the cell phone saved me many hassles and headaches.

2. Palm Pre free WiFi hotspot from Verizon

You can’t go wrong with free wifi.

3. Audible.com

Essential for long trips. I’m working my [...]

Pecha Kucha in Public Speaking

~LS~ — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 15:11:39 +0000

I have always hated using PowerPoint in speeches. Always. I suspect many speech teachers feel the same. PowerPoint becomes a teleprompter and it defeats the purpose of giving a speech. Last semester, I taught Business Communication for the first time in my entire teaching career. In thinking through that class, I felt obligated to teach PowerPoint since it’s expected in the business world. Also, on the POD listserv, there’ve been some discussions and sharing about visual resources. Those two things motivated to teach PowerPoint and to do it well. As a result of my explorations, I learned some very interesting things that I experimented with this semester.

One thing I incorporated is a Pecha Kucha format speech (you can use Prezi too, though). It was designed by American architects in Japan who realized that any time you give a designer the microphone, they go on and on [...]

10 reasons why Blackboard Learn sucks

~LS~ — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 04:07:02 +0000

Why I haet Blackboard Learn:

1. There is no mass edit.

2. It’s sticky as all hell. When you create something new (an announcement, test, file, module, -anything-), you get a dashboard with a box for a title and then a box for the text. Sometimes, you try to type in one of the boxes and you simply can’t. It hangs. The only way I’ve found to work with this is to click in whatever is the opposite box until it un-sticks. So if I’m in the title box, I click on the text area and wait for the page to unstick. What utter effing b.s.

3. It takes forever to refresh. Hum de dum. La la la. Solitaire, Minesweeper. File my nails. Oh, it’s refreshed.

4. Corollary to #3 – Everything must refresh to change. For instance, test questions must be uploaded in RTF without formatting. [...]

Maslow’s Hierarchy

~LS~ — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:15:38 +0000

This cute take on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has been floating around on Facebook for a while. It’s been on my computer desktop for a couple of weeks. I’m definitely showing it in class when we talk about Maslow, but it’s just too cute not to post here as well.

Beneath the circuits, the tree of life

~LS~ — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:53:29 +0000

I am in the process of getting a new tattoo. The image is a “bio-mech” tattoo in which the skin is ripping open to reveal a circuit board beneath it. The skin is tearing because the tree of life, which is growing behind the circuit board, is bursting through. I think it’s an especially splendid idea.

The design reflects a nearly life-long fascination with the dualism of nature vs. technology. I’m not sure when this particular fascination began. Probably with Star Trek and nurtured through old sci fi like Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin. Of course, when I started learning about feminism, I discovered the gendering of this dualism (along with the gendering of the nature/culture divide, hard/soft sci fi, and pretty much everything else). All of this culminated with me turning into a Donna Haraway fan girl with a little bit of the [...]

Mix tape obsolescence

~LS~ — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:28:38 +0000

As the decade draws to a close, many commentators are remarking on the demise of various technologies. I am sometimes rueful and sometimes relieved by the disappearance of the technologies, of their associated objects and habits.

Think of letter writing. Often, the only clues to women’s history or insights into the thoughts and emotions of previous generations lie in their letters. Writing letters was a habitus, a way of being and doing. Today, our digital documentation is excessive and often thin and shallow. A constant stream of 140 characters doesn’t seem to me to capture the nuances of a traditional letter. I suppose that 19th century upper-class women writing about their tea service (see Veblen on spoons; there is no spoon?) could be considered shallow too. Both Twitter and high tea are reflections in “taste” in its fullest sense of the [...]