Nearly end of the week update

08. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

It’s been an interesting week around here. It started with a potential tv show appearance, which those of you who follow me on Twitter likely saw me tweet about. No offense to said tv show, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to do. NPR, 60 Minutes, Bill Moyers, any of those would be good, but a hugely popular but somewhat fluffy show? No thanks.

Despite the drama, I’ve been plugging away at the writing and I will likely finish the first section of my project today. It’s coming in around 70 pages, which is more than I thought it would. Heck it might be 80 by the time I’m done. According to my outline, there are two more sections to write. I’m planning to hand the first section off to Mr. Geeky to read. He’s a pretty harsh critic, so that makes me nervous. But it’ll be good for me, too. My plan is to begin new writing and tackle that in the mornings, and then work on revision in the afternoons. My goal is to finish the whole project by Christmas.

I’m also working on a presentation that I’m giving next month at SLSA. I think it’s going to be a fun presentation as my co-presenter, Anne Dalke, and I are using the techniques I’ve been using with my other colleagues, Leslie Madsen-Brooks, Barbara Sawhill, Martha Burtis, and Barbara Ganley. We make the audience do some of the work.

Last night, I attended the second PTO meeting of the year and I must say, it was much better. One thing I like this year is that the new president insists on introductions at the beginning of the meeting, even though many of the same people are there. It’s a great way to help people get to know each other. This year is a real struggle for the PTO with lots of restrictions being placed on communicating with the families. Membership is down as are our fund raising numbers. The PTO money essentially doubles the amount of money available to the school. Even if much of the money goes to what amount to extras, they are extras that the students wouldn’t have, and not all of it is extras. We do buy books and supplies for the classrooms, for example. So, I think it’s going to be an interesting adventure.

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WoW Wednesday: Heading to the Big City

07. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Day 21: Auction HouseImage by lorda via Flickr

As in most bildungsromans, our intrepid hero eventually travels to the big city where they must resist temptation and navigate unknown territory so that they may learn and grow. Sometime around level 10, your character will be directed to the nearest major city or you may simply venture there on your own. Where you started out is a small town with a few vendors and trainers, but the big city offers everything. Every trainer, lots of vendors, and the auction house.

When I first hit the big city, I must admit I was overwhelmed. I was literally afraid of the auction house. Having heard the term “gold farmers” and read about virtual things selling for real money, I had assumed that only the seediest of virtual people hung out at the auction house. It took me a while to venture in there, but I was glad I did.

Before we get to the mechanics of the auction house, we need to talk about professions. Professions are skills you can learn that will provide your character (and others) with items. There are gathering professions: mining, herbalism, and skinning. And there are crafting professions: tailoring, jewelcrafting, alchemy, blacksmithing, leatherworking, inscription, and engineering. Enchanting is kind of both since the materials provided for enchanting come from disenchanting and not from a gathering profession. Generally, you pair a gathering profession with a crafting profession. So mining can be paired with jewelcrafting or blacksmithing since mining provides the materials for those. You can only have two primary professions. There are secondary professions and you can learn all of these: fishing, cooking, and first aid.

There are two approaches to choosing professions. You can choose professions that would be good for your class. For example, I have a warrior who is an herbalist/alchemist. She’s able to make herself useful potions. I might have also chosen mining/blacksmithing so that I could make my own armor. Or you can choose professions that make money on the auction house. I have never deliberately taken this approach, but I can say that my death knight’s mining and jewelcrafting combo is quite profitable. If you’re playing for fun, choose professions that sound fun. More than likely, you will be able to make money off of your leftover materials. To train for a profession, you need to find the trainer for it. Though you may have run into these in the smaller towns, the big city will offer you almost all possible profession trainers. There are guards in the town that you can ask where things are–very handy. If, when you mouse over a NPC, a scroll-like icon shows up, you’ve found a guard who can give information. They can tell you where the trainers are and where the auction house is. You will need to return to your profession trainer periodically to learn new recipes, but you may also be able to buy new recipes from vendors or you might find them as you kill things.

So now that you’re trained up, you can start gathering up stuff for your profession. As you gather and make things, your skill level will increase. And you’ll have things you can use like potions or nice new pants, or you may decide to sell them off. To sell stuff, make your way to the auction house and right click on the auctioneer. The interface that pops up should be fairly self-explanatory. You can browse the auction house to find stuff to buy or you can drag an item from your bag to sell it. When you sell an item, you can set an initial bid and then a buyout amount. You might want to look up the item you’re selling and see how much it’s going for and set your price accordingly. I often set a buyout price that’s double the bid price. After selling things for a while, you’ll get the hang of how to price things. A good add-on* for auction house stuff is auctioneer. It will price things automatically and keep track of your sales and purchases.

In addition to selling materials for crafting like herbs or ores and products like potions or gems, you can sell off items that you loot from things you’ve killed. You may get armor and weapons that you don’t need, but that are green in color, meaning they have some value (white or gray means they have little or no value and are usually best sold to a vendor). If you’re an enchanter, you can disenchant these, but they can be sold usually to be purchased by enchanters needing materials.

You can, of course, buy stuff from the auction house with your earnings. You may need to buy materials for your professions. Sometimes recipes have items that you can’t gather yourself or you just don’t feel like gathering and you have money, so you may as well buy them. You might also buy equipment for yourself. Generally at the lower levels, you can find equipment out in the world that’s suitable, but as you level, you might decide you need better equipment. You can often find better equipment in a dungeon (which I’ll talk about next week), but you can often buy some good things at the AH. Having good equipment can make leveling and questing go a lot faster.

Next week, we’ll talk about dungeons, where things get really interesting and where we’re adding in the element of group dynamics. Is there anything else you’d like to know to get started? Have questions? Let me know and I will try to answer them.Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

*an add-on is a third-party program that enhances some aspect of wow. there are hundreds of them.

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Fun with Money

06. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

No really. Thanks to ProfHacker, I was reminded of Mint.com, a site for tracking your money that I heard about on NPR. The problem with hearing about web sites on the radio in the car: no internets in the car. Last week, I signed up for an account and pulled in all my various accounts. I still have to pull in the retirement account, but am planning on it today. It is soooo much fun and so informative to have all of my accounts–savings, credit, loans, investment–all in one place. I can see at a glance where my money is, what’s coming in and what’s going out. The coolest thing about the site for me was the way it decided on categories based on the name of the company listed in a transaction. It was about 95% accurate. It was easy enough to spot the things that were off and correct them.

Even more exciting are the graphs and pie charts. Here’s an example of one from my account (without numbers):
You can click on each slice to drill down into the category further. So, for example, that orange slice up there, that’s shopping. When I click on it, I get this pie chart:

That’s a thin slice of books and the rest for clothes. Clicking on a slice that has no subcategories takes you to the transaction itself. This is how I found inaccuracies in categories. I would see a huge slice for something like movies and then clicking on that slice would show me that they’d categorized cable as movies or something like that.

I find being able to visualize my spending and drill down to find exactly where the money goes extremely helpful. I know Quicken and other programs like it did this in the past, but the categories often had to be done manually and it was complicated to set up multiple accounts. I felt like you needed a degree in accounting to do it successfully. Mint, by contrast, is dead simple, relying on data your banks already keep. Since we’re down to one income with my own income coming sporadically, keeping track of our spending is more important than ever. I’ve already found some places to cut more corners, and I’m actually enjoying the process of managing our finances. Who knew!

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Waiting for Wave, Playing with Sidewiki

05. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:
Google has launched Wave, a new social media tool that’s supposed to be a game changer in private beta. While I’m waiting for my invite (pick me, please!), I decided to have a look at their slightly older release, Sidewiki. I must say, it’s pretty cool. By adding a simple toolbar, which takes one click, you can add comments to any web site, which show up alongside the site. Further, you can post those same comments to Twitter, to your blog, to Facebook, and more. If a site has comments, you can see them by clicking the little text balloon and voila! find out what others are thinking. Some people have suggested that this usurps commenting on blogs or fractures that conversation, and that may be true, but for sites without comments, it offers a really easy way to make comments. I can imagine lots of educational uses, too. For example, students might be required to comment on a site for class and sidewiki provides easy tools for that comment to be shared, even via email. There are tools that already do this, like Diigo, but with many schools already usuing Google’s apps, this offers better integration with that toolset.

Michael Clarke has argued at The Scholarly Kitchen, that sidewiki means institutions will no longer have control over their message. I think that’s long been true, with blogs and Twitter and other media. But it is true that there’s potential for someone to see what others think right from your site rather than through a Google search that lands them on a disgruntled employee’s blog. Now the disgruntled employee’s comments might appear side-by-side with your slick marketing campaign. Prof Hacker has a good write up and some interesting comments about how good or bad the tool is.

The whole concept is nothing super new, but whenever Google starts doing something, it often becomes mainstream. Whether it’s sidewiki or Diigo or something else, I think the idea of being able to comment on websites and share those comments widely is here to stay.

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Ignore Everybody

05. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Over the weekend, I read Hugh MacLeod’s book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity. He also blogs at gapingvoid.com. It was an interesting book, quite simple and direct and refreshing. There’s nothing in it that I don’t think you couldn’t figure out for yourself, but sometimes we forget the most obvious things. One thing that comes through in the book quite clearly (as you might guess from the title), is the idea that you should have the confidence to pursue your ideas without worrying about what other people think of them.

My years of academic training, even in Creative Writing of all places, taught me to worry about what other people thought constantly. People talk about writing articles that will get published not writing articles that have good ideas. People talk about pursuing paths that are more marketable than others, not pursuing a path that you love. Your work is under constant scrutiny, such that it is difficult to erase that inner voice that’s your adviser’s or the review committee’s or the book publisher’s saying this isn’t going to work, it’s not good enough or original enough and by the way, you’re not smart enough. Now I know some people in academe escape that and just pursue an idea for the love of it. But I think that’s actually pretty rare these days in a very tight market.

I’ve broken some of Hugh’s rules, like quitting my day job (sort of). In part, I did so because I had become part of what he calls “the watercooler gang,” the people who’ve been around for a long time, have become mediocre at what they do, hate what they do, and complain about it with whoever will listen. Being a part of that crowd was soul sucking, but the job itself had no creative outlets for me and I had few outside of the job, so I think Hugh would agree that quitting, for me, was the right thing to do. And, of course, he suggests not following anyone else’s advice anyway, including, presumably, his.

It’s a fun read, and certainly gave me hope about my own adventure, however it may turn out.

And the following cartoon had to be my all-time favorite, because it is so. damn. true.

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A Note About Community

03. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

Suburban sprawl in Colorado Springs, ColoradoImage via Wikipedia

One of the things I wanted to do when I quit my job was to get more involved in the community, in the town in which I lived. It’s not a huge town, about 80,000 people, the same size as the city I grew up in. I felt like I was part of my community growing up. We knew people. We waved to people on the street. And while that happens occasionally here, and I’ve been thinking about why. I think there are differences, obviously between where I live now and where I lived 30 years ago, but I am also living my life differently than my parents did. All of those factors are coinciding to make me feel like a failure at getting involved, at feeling a part of the city around me.

First, the town. The biggest difference between where I am now and any other city of this size I’ve lived in (and I count 3) is that it’s a suburb of a major city. As such, it’s kind of considered part of that city, as are the many communities that surround the town. I’m not used to there being anything but the town itself and then the rural areas surrounding it. The effect of this is that people are splintered. Not everyone works and goes to school within our city limits. And the city isn’t trying to provide enough jobs for that. So, people go off to work in the city or in another suburb or in a town 45 minutes away. And while all the kids eventually filter into the same public high school, being near a large city means that there are lots of other options for schools. There are at least three other private schools in our township alone and in the surrounding area, there must be 10 or so more, and then there are religious schools, Jewish, Catholic, etc. In fact, I don’t know our neighbors across the street because all their kids go to the nearby Catholic school.

Where I grew up and in the other cities I lived in, there were no other options really. In one place, there was a Catholic school. In another, a fundamentalist Christian school. And a handful of people were sent off to military school, usually after something really bad happened. So most of us, whether we lived next door to each other or across town, ended up in school together. Parents got to know each other, even if they just saw each other at the various school events and weren’t going to PTO meetings or running the bake sale. I ask about my old friends’ parents. I remember them well.

Counter intuitively, where I live now is quite insular compared to the similar-sized towns of my past. Here, generations of people grew up and went to the same schools and churches, lived on the same streets. They have cousins three blocks over and their mothers watch their kids for them while they work or when they go out for an evening or even a weekend. There’s no need, then, for most of these people to reach out to neighbors for carpooling or babysitting, thereby creating a connection and perhaps a friendship. There’s also a tendency for people who’ve lived here their whole lives to assume everyone else has, too. I’ve noticed this happening in a number of contexts, and it’s merging with my experience in thinking about audience and teaching students how to think about audience. I’ve decided a lot of people don’t think about it.

The most blatant and kind of sadly funny example was the web site for an event that occurred today, but which I had never attended until today. Go ahead, visit the site. Does it make you want to go? Do you even know where to go? Do you know what kind of activities there will be? It’s there, but it’s hard to find. Who’s this site for? Like most sites, of course, it has multiple audiences, but it’s clear to me that it’s focused on one in particular. This is a huge event, and if you’ve lived here forever, you already know about it. You either enjoy it or not. You go every year or you don’t. If you are new to town, well, the web site isn’t going to help you much. It’s very indicative of the prevailing attitude.

The other towns I’ve lived in had large influxes of new people pretty constantly, so they all tried to make sure newcomers felt welcome, that they knew what the special events were in town, that they were kept informed. One town I lived in had an event similar to the one I attended today and for weeks leading up to it, banners were everywhere that touted the event, giving the date, time and location. In other words, buzz. The local news covered it. There’s no local news here, an artifact of being a suburb.

So it’s easy to not feel a part of the place, and while there are reasons within the environment for that, there’s also my own personal issues. What I’ve found is that it takes a lot of effort to become a full-fledged member of the community. Effort that I find very exhausting. I used to think I was an extrovert, and it’s true I really enjoy being around people, but I’m not the kind of extrovert that walks up to people I don’t know or don’t know very well and just starts up a conversation. If they come to me, fine, but I find it difficult to be the one who initiates things. My mother, completely the opposite. She will strike up a conversation with anyone. So, if she lived here, she’d be fine. Hell, she’d probably be president of the PTO by now.

Part of me longs to be back in one of those other places, where I’d see the same people at the farmer’s market every Saturday rather than the random people I see at the one I go to here. But I wonder if my lack of ability to reach out wouldn’t hinder me in those other places, too. I was younger when I was in those places, and that may be a difference, too.

I’m not giving up, though. I’m just recognizing the factors at work here, and trying to work around them. I’m going to write the township day planners, cause I had a great time today, and it’s a shame I’ve lived here for 6 years and haven’t gone to this event. I’m going out drinking with the PTO moms. I’m actually thinking about having a block party. In 20 years, maybe I’ll have roots here. Or maybe it will be time to give up and move to Florida.

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Friday Fun: Me and the Education System

02. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

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This week is a wash

01. October 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

I can’t quite believe it myself, but the whole week has pretty much gone down the drain. Monday, I did nothing because of Yom Kippur. Tuesday, I jumped back in and then, around noon, started to feel crappy. I forged ahead anyway and got some extra work done after lunch. Tuesday afternoon, Geeky Boy and I had gone to the drug store to get cold medicine. You can’t get anything these days that doesn’t claim to cure 14 different things at once. I tried to find something for sore throat, runny nose/sneezing, and congestion, but everything also included something for coughing, or chest congestion, which I did not have. I was willing to buy separate things, but I couldn’t even find separate medicines. Sure, I could get tylenol or advil for the pain, but then I couldn’t find something that just dealt with the congestion and sneezing situation. I finally settled on Alka Seltzer cold, which had what I needed, but, I must say, it didn’t taste good.

Wednesday, I woke up feeling like crap. Despite medicating myself, I’d spent the whole night sniffling and swallowing hard. I have not felt that bad in a long time. Everyone in the family had been sniffling and sneezing for a week. I figured I was safe since I hadn’t gotten sick yet and none of them had been sick enough to miss school. Boy, was I wrong. So, I spent the day in bed, watching reruns of last season’s Top Chef. I did nothing that required any brain power, canceling a meeting with a colleague to discuss our upcoming conference presentation. I could barely move, much less think straight.

I’d gone to bed at 9:00 on Tuesday, which is how I knew I was really sick. I just fell asleep. Last night, same thing, 9 p.m. bedtime. This morning, I’m feeling much better, but I’m going on a field trip with the 5th grade class, so the day is shot. I don’t get back until 2:00 and then I have to pick up one kid, drop another off, go to a meeting and I probably won’t be back until 8 at the earliest. Sigh.

I haven’t looked forward to Friday this much since my working days.

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