cbd

When we moved to Macomb, I was dehydrated for two weeks. The first winter, my eyes burned for weeks. Living for 30 years in Florida makes for a water-loving body. I still laugh when I hear people complaining about how humid it is in Illinois. But this takes the cake: Florida is such a sweatbox, a tropical storm can strengthen over land. Dang.

I’m glad Fay isn’t expected to exceed 80mph, ’cause this three day forecast basically takes her from my brother’s backyard to visit Erin’s family in Jax, just north of the grandparents and Gainesville, then toward my friends in the panhandle. Though I imagine everybody’s got the batteries and plywood already, since hurricanes come annually or more often in the Sunshine State now.

He did it. Awesome.

Not a lot of blogging since Erin and Madelyn got back. Been workin’ on a few things:

Got accepted to CPTSC 2008, for “Teaching standards in technical communication programs.” Good. I’m looking forward to that conference, which I’ve missed the past few years because of prior commitments and/or childbirth. The format is right up my alley: “Each presentation is limited to a 5-minute position statement on a programmatic issue in order to allow for discussion [...] Presentation software and slides are not used. Please do not bring a PowerPoint presentation, but feel free to bring a handout of any length.” Time to make a wiki page and start writing.

Early this week Erin made a pork pot pie with sweet corn, peppers, and beans. I came to the table and found she’d opened a 2002 Echelon Merlot to go with. Both delicious; the pie was a summery mix of crisp, sweet, and savory, and the Echelon was outstanding, deep and rich and smooth. Yesterday Erin took her mom to the airport then did some shopping, returning with (among other things) a sixpack of New Belgium Mothership Wit. I’m impressed. It pours perfectly—golden with a frothy white head—and tastes lovely. One of my favorite styles, to be sure, and a very good effort from New Belgium.

Outside, we’ve worked pretty hard towards reclaiming the “back forty,” where our yard meets our neighbors. Unfortunately, we haven’t done very well keeping up this summer. So we cleaned out a whole bunch of weeds, uncovering some peonies nearly choked out of existence. I put down newspaper then mulch in the hopes of keeping the weeds out and started thinning the black raspberries our neighbor planted (and pretty much abandoned). There’s more work to do on the raspberries. Then Erin is going to transplant some volunteers from our front and side yard–coneflower, columbine, lilies, and the like–to the back, and I’ll continue the mulching (more trips to the yard waste site to get free mulch and wood chips). Slowly, we’ll get this part of the yard looking good.

Our squashes are going nuts, and we still have good chard, cabbages, and kale, but our tomatoes are looking mediocre, and our peppers are even worse. We blame the cool start to summer; maybe things will pick up now that it’s been warmer. Last week Erin thinned and weeded all over the place, producing a mountain of green stuff, so I folded it into our compost piles, which needed a complete turnover and remix anyway.

I look at server stats every month or so, particularly error reports, in the hopes of correcting bad links, etc. It seems my mention of a certain software package prompted the bots and skript kidd13s into action; I found numerous failed requests which correspond to this vulnerability. The would-be leet tried all the obvious places and a few more at random. Sorry, guys: (1) you’re looking on the wrong server; (2) my installation is patched; (3) I’m not running a vulnerable PHP configuration.

In the past two weeks, I’ve exercised a bit less since I’ve spent large chunks of time working outside. In particular, I’ve made it to the Y for swimming only three times in nearly two months. Twice I’ve gone to the pool but been able to get a lane. Ugh. I’ve still made my three times a week commitment, but I need to do a better job spreading out my workouts. Swim today, run tomorrow.

Madelyn has gone to bed by herself three nights in a row. w00t!

Now back to polyurethaning (the kitchen trim) and working on my fall syllabus between coats.

I don’t care about
the things I leave at home
cause things can’t really keep you company
when you’re alone
—Morphine, “Take me with you”

My girls come home tomorrow. Not a day too soon.

Bradley: Time for a run. Last weekend’s 7:09/mi 5K was pretty cool. I’d really like to hit that 21:00 mark; that would be 6:45/mi. Let’s see… four miles in 30:00 is doable. That’s 7:30/mi.

Body: It’s 90° and humid, you moron. You haven’t lived in Florida for five years, man.

Bradley: Don’t be a wimp.

Body: This is gonna suck.

3.5 miles and 27:40 later…

Bradley: Ow! Cramps! Ow! Ow!

Body: Told ya. Now take me home and get me some ^#!$@ water.

Some of you know this already, and I apologize to those who don’t. Anyway, Erin is pregnant, and girl #2 is due October 25, or two days before Madelyn’s third birthday. Yes, fall will be very busy and interesting here; with three of four grandparents retired, we expect (and want!) to see a lot of visitors. Fourteen weeks to go. Here’s hoping everything goes well.

On the stuff front, we’re pretty well set. Folks to whom we passed along baby stuff have been rotating it back to us (and in fact we are turning things down). And heck, a newborn doesn’t need much stuff. We will have to figure out what’s gonna happen on the stroller front. Might be time to add a two-seat Chariot to the mix.

Erin and Madelyn are in Colorado visiting Aunt Dee with Erin’s mom. So I’m trying to make the most of my solo time. Today, however, is a bit of a day off.

I ran a 5K this morning: 22:10 (7:09/mi) which is a personal best. Flat course, no wind, and decent weather. After I returned home, I mowed the front lawn and weeded (pic at right). Things are looking better. I’ll finish up tomorrow; by noon I was soaked, tired, and ready to quit for the day. But not before I got a little sunburned. I came in, showered, closed the windows and many of the blinds, and turned on the air. Sitting in a dark house, in the air conditioning, feeling the sunburn under my shirt reminds me of being in Florida, at Bits & Eric’s lake house or in the Keys when I lived there.

Our little homebrew club met today, and I shared some of my pale ale. Dennis poured a very nice California Common, and Jeremy and Bob shared a Samiclaus clone. Afterward, I went next door and listened to some country/folk music for about an hour. On my way out of there, I saw David Banash walking across the square. Took off to catch him before getting all my stuff buttoned up. Bad move. I dropped my cooler, which promptly opened and ejected beer bottles all over the place. Oops. At least I didn’t cut myself picking up all the broken glass.

Embarrassment aside, It was nice to catch up with David, since we’ve been in our own little worlds for the most part this summer. Of which, there’s a month left…

Time to join the fun. Since others have already written some interesting things, I’ll keep this short.

First, on context, to pick up on Alex’s comments about Cortland, what if we shift the ground from research universities to institutions where teaching is the primary mission? While I don’t want to tune my response by saying “That’s not what happens here,” it’s hard not to think students for whom the MA is a terminal degree would respond very differently to the survey. For instance, Derek’s diagrams would be very different with “thesis” substituted for “dissertation”–two years of coursework, not four; none of the deep, focused reading preceding doctoral examinations, etc. Given that non-research institutions dominate American higher education, from comprehensives like Cortland and Western to community colleges, I see a pedagogical imperative even more broadly operant than Kopelson. And it is powerful enough to reverse the field: instead of compelling students to add a pedagogy chapter or “pedagesture,” I often have to encourage (even force) them to think outside the pedagogical box. Kopelson’s call for broadening “pedagogical” is hard to argue with: I think I could live with the pedagogical imperative if it wasn’t at its heart an first-year composition imperative.

And the conclusion. Disappointing for a few reasons. First and foremost, I’m an “eat your own dog food” kind of fellow, and it just doesn’t make sense for Kopelson to end in this manner. There’s a huge difference between an essay like hers and narcissistic edited collections which tell “stories of the discipline” (read: here’s how we do it at Whatever SU). Second, yes, some folks (heck, whole university presses) are entrapped in “endlessly recycled debates,” but it’s not hard to find scholars who aren’t, following the borrowing and/or rhetorical models she presents. I’d like to think that my borrowing from user-centered design, computer science, library science, etc. is productive, even if it doesn’t create a true interdisciplinarity. So I’m just gonna strike out that last paragraph.

It’s great to have Composition Forum on its own domain. That gives me latitude to do a lot more than I was able at FAU. Not long ago I added Peter Suber’s Open Access News to my feeds, and I’ve found it very useful. That led me to a useful book I’ll be writing about soon.

So far, I haven’t found a platform for CF development which looks better than Open Journal Systems. The OJS forums recently included recent discussions of two features not currently in OJS that I’d like to see: forward linking or reference tracking (the “Works Citing” which make CCC Online and the ACM Portal so useful), and automatic interoperation with directories such as CiteULike (given that OJS already does much of the heavy lifting, metadata-wise).

As I review the OJS codebase, I’m looking at several other tasks:

• getting redirects on the FAU site (given my use of includes, this should be pretty easy)
• developing a style sheet, and reviewing the issues of CF currently online to ensure compliance with it;
• working with CF editors to establish an IP policy (I’m thinking Creative Commons Attribution) then applying it to past and future issues;
• learning more about existing metadata standards; revise submissions to collect that data for future CF issues, and applying standards to the archives as well.

This of course is in preparation and connected to my larger goal: pushing journals in English studies to improve their web sites, and developing documentation, standards, examples, and scholarship to go with.

I am very tempted to build a mini-PC like Jeff Atwood’s tiny ultra-low power PC. Why not? More interesting ideas in the comments.