Eliza has a new friend: Amelia Anne Gunnels, born 2/7/08 (less than 8 weeks after Eliza!). Welcome to the world, Amelia! Eliza (and I) can’t wait to meet you. And huge congrats to mommy, daddy, and big brother. A trip to Atlanta is in order this Spring, for sure!
Mardi Gras is a really special time for Betsy and I. During our undergrad days, we made a yearly pilgrimage with some of our best friends down to the Big Easy for Mardi Gras, watching the parades and generally acting silly. Years later, it was where and when we decided to get married, eloping to New Orleans and getting married in the New Orleans Parish courthouse on Lundi Gras of 2001.
It’s a great holiday, and to everyone: Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler!
Last year’s 2007 State of the Union Tag Cloud was such a hit, I decided to follow up again this year. A few major differences: Congress is mentioned a lot more this year, while health and oil don’t show up at all. This year’s address looks more active…instead of “fight” we get “fighting”. Overall, the themes are still easily picked out: “terrorists” still play a major part in the speech, and we get “empower” and “hope” and “trust” as themes.
I’ve kept up with the recent Orson Scott Card controversy in libraryland, and I respect nearly everyone who has taken a strong stance against the decision by the YALSA to award OSC the Margaret A. Edwards award for adolescent literature for 2008.
But.
I’m not sold on the controversy here.
There is no denying that OSC is a homophobe…no, that’s probably not strong enough. “Fear of homosexuality” doesn’t approach his views. OSC is a heterosexist bigot, based on his own words, and does not deserve either our respect or our patience. But the two works that are being honored, Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, are not homophobic. They don’t seem to speak with the same voice as OSC in interviews. They portray strong, smart kids doing incredible things, and should stand above and beyond the idiocies of the author.
The award is given, according to the description online, in order to:
…recognizes an author’s work in helping adolescents become aware of themselves and addressing questions about their role and importance in relationships, society, and in the world.
The works do just that.
The author can be an idiot…hell, it could probably be argued that most artists of any sort are damaged in some significant way. Insanity, adultery, substance abuse, and yes, crazy beliefs…all crop up in the pantheon of artists. Just because the author is nuts doesn’t mean that the work is nuts.
Would I give OSC an award? No. Would I honor the work? Yes, I would. It’s a fine line, but otherwise I find myself having to question every piece of art by examination of the artist.
…so that I could order a few of these.
To celebrate the birth of a baby in a way that makes it feel like the kid’s right there in your arms, a rice shop in the southwestern Japanese city of Kita-Kyushu will send out a customized dakigokochi, a roughly baby-shaped bag of high-grade rice to everyone on your birth announcement list. The bag will be printed with the kid’s picture, stats, and a greeting–and it will weigh the same as the kid did at birth.
One of the million reasons that I love Japanese culture. Wish I had a rice bag o’ Eliza!
It’s off to work mom goes. (Yes, new parents tend to talk about themselves in the third person.)
Do I have to go?? Yes. Do I want to? No. Eliza will be exactly one month old the same day I go back to work. It doesn’t seem fair. Why are maternity leave policies in this country so horrible (or non-existent)? I could have had the semester off, sure, UNPAID. That didn’t make sense with diapers, wipes, and formula to buy. Oh well. I guess going back to work will make me treasure spending time with her even more than I do already.
Romero! The Living Dead!
As most of you know that have been reading for any length of time, I’m a huge sucker for zombies. Romero is the king of the zombie film, so this is a must-see for me. I’m a little worried about it coming out near Cloverfield, which takes the first-person-Blair-Witch style storytelling to a major motion picture, and it looks like this might be seen as a rip off. In any case, Romero + zombie = The Win.
There, I said it. Zotero should warm the heart of any academic, but somehow it escapes me. I’ve been loath to admit it for a long time, especially since I was part of the beta, and tried it for a long time. Plus, it’s exactly the sort of tool that I should really love.
Except I don’t.
Why not? Well, after examining my prejudice, I came to one conclusion: I no longer have any patience with applications that are local. Unless the application I want AND my data live in the cloud, I just won’t use it. I’ve found myself, over the last 6 months to a year, moving nearly everything I do online. Documents are created with Google Docs, I prefer Gmail to any local mail client I’ve tried, heck, I’ve even started using Flickr’s editing deal with Picnik to do my photo edits, and I luuuuuuurve me some photoshop.
What’s up with this change? I really only use two computers; my work PC and my Macbook. It wouldn’t be that hard to use local programs, and sync my documents. The problem is that it’s any effort at all. Syncing my documents shouldn’t be something that I think about, it should just happen…Mac nearly has it right with their .mac syncing, but the PC world just doesn’t operate like that without some serious effort on the user’s part. If Apple would move hard into this space, perhaps with Google as a partner…I think they could revolutionize computing yet again, especially if they leveraged their media power as a part of the cloud storage.
But I digress…
After using Zotero for awhile, I found myself cursing the fact that I had two different databases of information…the “macbook” stuff and the “desktop” stuff. This is why the third lobe of my brain is del.icio.us…I don’t have to think about where I might need that information. It just goes to the cloud, and I pull it down no matter where in the world I may be. I know that Zotero has listed on it’s homepage:
Remote library backup
Shared collections
Access your library from anywhere via the web
Give me that, and maybe it becomes a tool that is useful to me. But until then, local just doesn’t cut it anymore.
So I started “wearing” Eliza yesterday in a sling and she really loved it. She fell asleep in there, all snug, while I took the ornaments off the Christmas tree. It looks uncomfortable to see her all squished up in there, but I guess it feels like being in the womb. I’m going to try and use it for a little while very day to get her used to it. That way, hopefully I can take her with me to some meetings and such, and she’ll be content to lie against my tummy. I’m lucky I have a job and work in a department where bringing my baby is okay (at least, once in a while). My department chair has even joked about getting a pack n’ play for her office. 🙂
I’m a bit worried about what will happen when Jason has to go back to work (Monday). He’s much better at calming Eliza down than I am. He also gets her to sleep at night, even though it takes a couple of hours and doesn’t happen until 1:00 a.m. or later. He won’t be able to do that once he has to get up at 6 a.m. to get to work on time. We’ve settled into a routine, but that routine will have to get altered in just a few days. Luckily, I don’t have to go back to work until the 15th, so we have a little bit of transition time. It’ll all work out, I’m sure. Time is seriously flying, and Eliza is now 18 days old.
