Jayne Anne Phillips - Violence in American Myth

Jayne Anne Phillips - Violence in American Myth: We might start by asking ourselves what Americans love, what myths and stories feed our perceptions of ourselves as a changing people and much divided community. The source of myth, world-wide, is often violent or cataclysmic, but its reduction as an idea that permeates and shapes a culture often becomes romanticized, simplified, removed from its context and reality. Myth then loses dimension. Myth can become dangerous justification, a costume or disguise up for grabs. The inverse of the myth is always worth our attention, and in America, the inverse of the myth can become a kind of politically correct myth, a myth equally reduced. When

Writing for the web with Markdown: Alternatives to HTML

I'm just writing about this on the odd chance that someone here can use it, although I recognize that this post will probably resemble one of those unpopped kernels of corn that gets discarded, and that's ok.

Markdown is this simple little language that can be auto-converted to HTML, but is much easier to write than HTML and uses a lot of email conventions. Italics are like *this* for example.

So there's a free Markdown editor for the Mac called "Mou." http://mouapp.com/

It shows your text on the left, how it is rendered on the right side, and it can auto-export in HTML when you're done. In addition, a lot of wikis support markdown. Here's a screen cap of Mou:

Anyway, it's terribly convenient if you have to create a lot of text for the web, it's free, and you don't have to mess around with the wackiness that is Dreamweaver.

There are a number of tools out there that will automatically convert Markdown to html, I just use Mou because it is so painless.

Oh, I just discovered that Textwrangler (also free) will convert Markdown. Neat.

Markdown in Textwrangler From Wikipedia:

Markdown is a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz allowing people "to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)".[1] The language takes many cues from existing conventions for marking up plain text in email.

Markdown is also a Perl script written by Gruber, Markdown.pl, which converts marked-up text input to valid, well-formed XHTML or HTML and replaces left-pointing angle brackets ('<') and ampersands with their corresponding character entity references. It can be used as a standalone script, as a plugin for Blosxom or Movable Type, or as a text filter for BBEdit.[1]

The Eagleman Stag

This was definitely worth eight minutes of my life.

aggregating student blogs

I'm using student blogs in a hybrid American lit course, and am trying to figure out the best way to read their work. While writing this query I came up with a solution so I thought I'd send it to the list. Some of my initial attempts at reading student blogs in one place included:

1. Making a wiki page with links to each blog

2. Placing the blogs in a folder in Google reader (this is proving to be surprisingly difficult and counter-intuitive). In addition to folders Google Reader has something called "bundles."

 What I eventually ended up doing was combining their RSS feeds into a single feed and place them in a widget on the course home page. This is proved more difficult than I thought, and took about 2.5 hours of messing around. Chimpfeedr appears to create a useable aggregated feed, but it was difficult to find an rss-->widget creator that actually works, hasn't gone offline, etc.

 Eventually (while drafting this note) I ended up googling around and using this service to create the embedded html widget that shows all of the blogs at once:

http://www.rssdog.com

 So to recap, this is how I cobbled everything together:

1. Asked students to create blogs

2. Copied their blog RSS feeds and used http://mix.chimpfeedr.com to turn them into a single RSS feed.

3. Took that feed over to http://www.rssdog.com/ and created html that I then pasted in a wiki page within Canvas-Instructure. 

Here is the sample feed I created: http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/d503a-amlit-2520 (note: I have since added a late student and created a newer feed)

 I wonder if there is a more elegant solution for aggregating student blogs that I've overlooked. I also don't like depending on free services that could disappear tomorrow.

Friday plans.

Friday: The Friends of the Provo Library is having a top secret pre-sale tonight for members who attend the business meeting. That means I will be able to enter the book sale room and skim the cream, while leaving the dregs behind for the unwashed rabble who will show up at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. This is the closest I will get to experiencing what it is like to be very wealthy. That, and going to bed each night in a warm, safe home, slightly nauseous from eating too much.

Saturday: My weekend is rich with possibilities this weekend, thanks to the recent acquisition of small objects, including the best garlic press ever:

.
When you pick it up, it is so solid it feels like you are holding a Sig Sauer. I will probably bathe in crushed garlic just to test it out.

My son has more merit badge mill at BYU, so I will be attending and also scouring their excellent graphic novel collection, since I acquired a BYU library card last week.

Also, I just put a computer on the bike, so I can track my rides and try to join the 1,000 mile club. Finally, I rented this board game:

and played it last night, and will play it some more. It's like Ticket to Ride, but you buy shares in the railroads and get dividends and it will make your head explode. There is no luck involved and it only takes an hour once you know what you're doing.

Thoughts on the Canon S95

G1x is a pretty *** machine too for a point and shoot person. Canon G series p&s started to get really cool at about the G10 and after. I would use the *** out of anything that came after G9. (to be fair, G9s are not bad at all)

I just bought a Canon s95 with only 50 shutter actuations for $270 from some guy on KSL who used it to take short clips of video robotics at his work. It has similar specs to the G12 but no flash shoe and not as much zoom. It will fit in your pocket, however, and is a nice backup to a DSLR (I sold mine to buy this). It'll shoot in RAW and has full manual controls. It's not as powerful as a 50D, but I always have it with me so I can capture the amazing things I run across every day, like the ventilation pipes at UVU, or hazy shots of Utah Lake.

There's quite a difference in size between the s95 and the Sony A230 that I had for a year. The sensor on the s95 is smaller than the A230, but bigger than some point-and-shoots.



It'll shoot time lapse with tilt shift, which is kind of fun. The s100 has better video resolution: 1920 x 1080p



Sample pics:

Flickr slideshow

I'm not really a photographer, and most of these were just shot on "auto."









Some low light video, 720p HD I think.




Here's a pic from DPreview shot with an s100 at ISO 6400. The colors are nice but there are artifacts:

Load your magazine, soldier.

It is unfortunate that we live in a culture where we cannot freely discuss hemorrhoids, because I have so many jokes I want to make about these:

First of all, they're called "Anusol." Think about it.  Secondly, they are shaped like little bullets and come in a magazine, so using them is remarkably like loading a gun magazine.  Thirdly, they also resemble little missiles, which has earned me the nickname "Rocket Man" from my wife.

Facebook and hands like withered monkey paws.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

  So how should I presume?

  -T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

I'm trying to not use Facebook.  I realize that is a sad, pointless gesture but I have to do something.  This summer I turned 45.   The neighborhood where I live is filled with the elderly.  They are wonderful people, who move and talk slowly and were once 45 too. Seeing them live their lives is like looking into my own future.  I look at my hands and can feel the end of my life creeping closer, like a malevolent black snail.  Due to a combination of riding my recumbent in the desert of Utah, never wearing sunscreen  and probably genetics, my hands look like they could be used to grant three terribly, painfully ironic wishes.  They will never look any younger.  The writhing hands of lotion commercials are like specialized pornography, promising something you can never have again.

Facebook feels like a lemon squeezer, and the lemon is my life, with the juice being sold to strangers. Social media makes it so easy to share a link to something funny created by strangers, or post a throwaway line that my friends will "like," after which it will quickly be forgotten.

Finally, there is Bernard Gert.  He gave a seminar this summer at Utah Valley University.  He was a smart, kind man who shared the results of a lifetime of scholarship that addressed the question of normative ethics.  Five months later he died of a heart attack, leaving behind family and a lifetime of focused work. If I'm lucky I've got twenty years left to accomplish something meaningful, and quit measuring out my life in status updates and LOLcatz.

Here is a Youtube video of Disneyland from 1957. It is a scud missle of nostalgia and loss.  As noted in the comments, those sleeping toddlers are now grandparents.

Hello.

There are some things I want to write about that really, if I'm honest, don't appeal to anyone I know, including my Facebook friends, and will probably remain unread even after they're published here.