Archive for April, 2007
Flowerblogging
April 29th, 2007
One of the greatest things about living in the rural southwestern wasteland of Pennsylvania is that I’m surrounded by blossoming things, both wild and cultivated. I’ve been an avid gardener/flower-photographer since I was seven years old. When the other local boys were running around like rabid little weasels, wrestling in the dirt and tearing up their lawns, I was quietly digging in the soil with my hands, sifting tiny seeds between my fingers, snuggling bulbs and tubers into cozy little holes. While the other kids were throwing oddshaped balls around and/or hitting them (and each other) with sticks, I was uprooting weeds, trimming shrubs, harvesting beans and peas and onions, and poring over seed catalogs. I anticipated the arrival of the new season’s Gurney’s and Burpee’s catalogs with the same glee as I anticipated the JCPenney and Sears Christmas catalogs. As soon as the weather broke in the Spring, I was begging my mom to go for walks with me into the surrounding woods so I could see what wildflowers were blossoming to celebrate the end of Winter.
To this day, I’m an avid gardener and wildflower enthusiast. Today I spent close to two hours strolling around the woods with my camera looking for Trilliums, Violets, Spring Beauties, Chinese Houses, Dutchman’s Breeches, and all the other common April visitors. I’ll be posting the photos as soon as I get them properly processed and photoshopped to look their best!
As the Summer unfolds, I’ll be posting photos of the various botanicals in my different yard gardens, and, of course, keeping a log of planting and harvesting my vegetable/herb garden. This is actually the first year in quite a few that I’ve planned to raise vegetables–my health the last few years just hasn’t been good enough for me to deal with the amount of work necessary for maintaining a produce garden. But this year is different!
So, if you’ve an interest in wildflowers and/or home gardening, keep an eye on this site in the near future.
hey txt me yr ppr kthx bi!
April 26th, 2007
Txtspk–a.k.a., “Aimspeak.” Is it the tool of the Antichrist? A weapon destroying our students’ ability to write “normal” sentences? In a word: no. Y’see…as a collegiate English instructor, I’m fully cognizant that language is not a universally fixed, stable medium: at best, it’s metastable in the short run (if it weren’t, word meanings and usage would be so chaotic that communication would be nigh impossible), but changes greatly over time. And this is a good thing! Language simply must change because it always needs to stay relevant and provide an adequate, powerful means for any two given humans to be able to communicate concepts to one another; times change, new concepts are invented, old concepts are rethought or recast in more contemporary terms, and, as a result, language is always mutating. But, like I said, a certain amount of order is always necessary–which is why we have different types of language (consisting of different sets of vocabulary, usage rules, and so forth) that are applicable in different situations and for different people. These different types of languages are often called jargons. And you’re all familiar with them. Computer g33ks have their own jargon, scientists have their own, teenagers have their own, old folks have their own–language subsets that are self-consistent and help specialized groups communicate amongst themselves.
Txtspk is a jargon with its own sophisticated structures designed to compress a lot of meaning into a small amount of characters, thus saving time and money when firing SMS messages back and forth over the cell nets. Academic writing is just another jargon: it has its own usage and vocabulary requirements that are accepted anywhere and everywhere that students write research papers. On the first day of any class, I inform the students that academic writing comes with its own set of rules and requirements that they, the students, will need to learn in order to do it properly. And then I tell them that if I find any trace of txtspeak or AIM shorthand in their papers, they will immediately fail that assignment.
But…wait a sec, Pegritz. What’s up wit da harshness there?
Simple: many students are not aware that jargons do not mix. Oh, in the longterm development of language, they certainly do–after all, how many average folks today know the terms “google” and “upgrade”, words once common only in the jargon of computer geeks? But in the short term, mixing the rules of two different jargons naturally produces internal violations of either jargon. In short: txtspk and academic writing simply do not mix–and this is something that many students are not entirely aware of. So they need to be taught. I’m a teacher. Ergo….
Recently, a study conducted by the State Examination Commission in Ireland seems to show that “[t]ext messaging, with its use of phonetic spelling and little or no punctuation, seems to pose a threat to traditional conventions in writing.” It further mentions that incoming college student writing is “unduly reliant on short sentences, simple tenses and a limited vocabulary.”
But does this necessarily mean that txtspk is to blame? In my experience, most Freshman writing by default is “unduly reliant on short sentences, simple tenses and a limited vocabulary”–because these students just are not experienced writers! Back in the day, a thousand years ago, I, too, was reliant on short sentences and simple tenses, too, and my vocabulary was mostly measured in expletives, slang, and terms associated with arcade games (”Fuck, man, you got the high shore! BAD-ASSED!”). As I grew older, studied under good instructors who showed me how to build up my writing skills, and just wrote more and more papers…well, naturally, my skills improved. My vocabulary grew and grew. Now, I am fortunate that I have a natural aptitude for language and a voracious love of words; no doubt, my progress was more rapid than others. But I’ve seen students who, as freshman, could barely string together the sentence “Furthermore, I like dogs because they are loyal” graduate with master’s theses containing some extremely sophisticated language.
Many incoming freshman are fluent in txtspk. It is their jargon, because it makes communication between them easier. VERY few, once I set forth my pronouncement on the verbotenness of txtspk in academic writing, ever commit the crime. Why? Because I carefully point out to them the difference between txtspk jargon and academic jargon. To be honest, most of them are already aware of this different, having had teachers in highschool who also addressed the same problem of jargon-mixing. All it takes is a good, staunch reminder to never let your fluency in one jargon interfere with your fluency in another…and it’s just not a problem.
In my experience, txtspk does not, in any way, harm (or, for that matter, enhance) a student’s academic writing ability. People become fluent in jargons through usage, through actively writing within that jargon (and most students spend 50% of their time texting their friends on their cellphones–sometimes during classes, which is a whole ‘nother issue entirely). The reason why students often perform poorly when writing within the academic jargon is simply that they don’t have much experience in it.
I do not doubt the validity of the numbers produced by the above-mentioned Irish study–but I do greatly doubt the conclusions drawn from it. One cannot blame txtspk for students’ inability to write good, clean academic prose. One can blame faulty secondary education that does not provide ample opportunity for students to learn how to write within academic jargon.
It’s important when teaching to understand how your students think and to attempt to understand their academic backgrounds. This will always help instructors identify why their students aren’t so great at academic writing…and will hopefully minimize the urge to blame bad writing on a completely separate jargon.
Offensive Content Warning! OH NOES!
April 24th, 2007
Well, shit the bed!–looks like 80% of blogs contain “offensive” content! As Ars Technica fuckin’ reports,
Blogs are known to be a free-for-all for “expressive” content, but according to a new report by ScanSafe, a vast majority of blogs host content that is considered “offensive” and potentially “unwanted.” ScanSafe’s Monthly “Global Threat Report” for March 2007 says that up to 80 percent of blogs host offensive content, ranging from “adult language” to pornographic images. The company suggests that businesses should be aggressive about preventing users from accessing some or all of this material. And of course, they’d hope that you’d use their products to do so.
Naturally, this “report” is no doubt little more than a fuckin’ baiting tactic that ScanSafe, “The World’s Leading Provider of Web Security-as-a-Service,” hopes to use to lure in more corporate customers–but that doesn’t mean that the fuckin’ data they’ve accrued is necessarily fuckin’ suspect. After all, it’s simple enough to draw up a list of naughty fuckin’ keywords and compile a list of how many fuckin’ times those words appear on various motherfuckers’ blogs. And, judging from my experiences in the blogosphere, I’d have to say they’ve got a fuckin’ point: some of these motherfuckers can’t seem to say five fuckin’ words without tossing some manner of fuckin’ expletive into the mix.
But…what’s the problem here?
Ars Technica quotes:
ScanSafe’s larger focus is not necessarily on single instances of offensive content, but overall security and liability for employees who might get caught with undesirable content on their computers while at work. “The content on blogs and other sites powered by user contributed content is constantly changing. As a result, Web security solutions that rely on Web crawling—or periodically scouring the Web for threats—rather than actually scanning the URL each time it is requested, can leave users exposed to malware and unwanted content,” Nadir [ScanSafe’s Vice President of Product Strategy] said.
In simpler terms, let’s protect employees from getting nabbed for reading naughty material at work and from accidentally exposing corporate intranets to various forms of malware. I can understand implementing a defense against malware that could potentially damage a company’s systems or expose private data to the World At Large…but protecting against bad fuckin’ language? Gimme a fuckin’ break.
Here’s the deal, folks: I rarely use expletives in my general writings, simply because they’re usually unnecessary, nothing more than “the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter.” I’ve often found those who overuse expletives of various sorts to be gauche and clearly lacking in solid material to discuss–yet it’s their right to write whatever they like in the sanctity of their own blogs. Furthermore, sometimes it’s necessary to throw in a good ol’ “fuck” or a “shit” of two–especially when quoting someone accurately, when using them for humor’s sake, or for rare instances of shocking emphasis.
And who’s to say what words are ultimately offensive or not? I certainly don’t have an attack of the vapors should my eyes come upon the word “cocksucker” in a text; nor do many in the contemporary world. Issues of obscenity have caused more pointless legal troubles than anything else…simply because “offensiveness” or “obscenity” is so incredibly difficult to define.
Which is why I find wanting to block or otherwise restrict anyone’s access to the Web based on something as mutable and as vague as a blog’s “offensive” word content to be ludicrous at best, and a waste of time and effort at most. Sure, most companies wouldn’t want their employees reading Fleshbot or pr0n reviews, but what about…say, Pegritz.com? I routinely post stories of an amusing and occasionally edifying nature whose only subject matter that could be considered “offensive” is the use of expletives here and there when spoken by characters. What about blogs that reference “offensive” words such as “nigger”, “ho”, “bitch” and so forth when discussing the pathetic state of popular hiphop? Would ScanSafe’s software block a website concerning mammograms and women’s health because it used that awful, dirty, pornomographic word “breast”?
Filtering content for malware and potentially deleterious code is admirable, and these days even necessary…but filtering content for a handful of fuckin’ words that some fuckers consider fuckin’ obscene is just stupid, because you’ll end up blocking not only 80% of the blogs Out There, you’ll end up blocking 80% of the entire fuckin’ Internet.
In short: FUCK DAT!
Clip It Good!
April 23rd, 2007
I do a massive amount of research on the Web, involving an amazingly diverse range of subjects–everything from transfinite numbers to my favorite Ed Wood films, the sex lives of mollusks to random lists of archaic words. But what good is information if you can’t keep it? Printing out thousands of pages is certainly the most reliable means of producing an archival copy of an ephemeral webpage…but I’m not about to torture my printer (and my wallet) by forcing it to cough up thousands of documents per day! Bookmarking works to a degree, and I’ve both an extensive local library of bookmarks (kept via Firefox) as well as a more-convenient, searchable online repository of bookmarks. But the problem with bookmarks is: webpages come and go…and what good is an archived URL if it leadeth one to nothing but the vale of 404?
Besides…sometimes, I don’t need to keep track of the contents of an entire webpage. If all I want is the body text of a news story posted on CNN.com, I don’t want to save all of the extraneous graphics and dense-packed text that surrounds it like the rampant muttonchops on a Victorian gentleman’s phiz! I used to use the wonderful Scrapbook extension for Firefox, but Scrapbook exacerbates Firefox’s notorious hunger for ever scrap of free memory a thousandfold and renders the browser so topheavy it makes Photoshop CS2’s resource-hoggery look as benign as Notepad’s. Then I tried Google Notebook, which is a nifty little service that integrates well with Firefox via its own extension and allows you to save snippets of information from webpages…but, despite the fact that it evinces Google’s powerful simplicity very well, it’s actually pretty limited and sometimes confusing to work with. So…what next?
Actually, Microsoft OneNote 2007, which can be purchased separately or together with various implementations of Office 2007. OneNote is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the most handy research tool I’ve ever used. It allows you to save, organize, and easily search snippets or entire pages’ worth of information taken from websites or any other highlightable text source such as documents, PDFs, emails, and so forth. Best of all, it saves But my purpose here is, surprisingly, not to extol the seemingly endless virtues of OneNote…for two reasons:
1) It’s designed to work seamlessly only with Internet Explorer 7, which is okay if you use Internet Explorer 7. (I don’t, obviously.) Some of the page-saving functionality that makes OneNote so powerful only works right if you’ve opened a particular webpage in IE7.
And 2) It ain’t free. Nor is it particularly cheap.
Admittedly, I use OneNote a lot. Because I have Microsoft Office 2007. But c’mon, folks…you know you’d much rather do your clippin’ and savin’ for free, right?
That’s where Clipmarks steps in.
I discovered Clipmarks via Lifehacker a few weeks ago, and have been lovin’ up on the service ever since. The best way to describe Clipmarks is that it brings together the best aspects of social bookmarking and Scrapbook. Much like Google Notebook, Clipmarks allows you to select different parts of a webpage to save as “clips” to your account–but unlike Google Notebook, Clipmarks offers you a wide range of options for dealing with that clipped material. Witness!
I’m looking for information on Antarctica–specifically, the region of Antarctica around the Ross Ice Shelf–for a short story I’m writing. The Wikipedia page for “Antarctica” is jampacked with information, only a small amount of which–a paragraph’s worth, basically–I actually want to keep. So, once I’ve set up a Clipmarks account and installed the handy Clipmarks Firefox extension, all I need to do is click on the Clipmarks button in the toolbar. A little temporary toolbar appears that allows you to click on various elements of a page (say, the paragraphs containing info on the Ross Ice Shelf) and then save those highlit sections to your Clipmarks account. When the save window appears, you have a number of options:
- You can save the clip publicly (which means it can be searched for and viewed by other Clipmarks users) or, of course, privately. Public clips have a ceiling of 1000 characters per saved clip (so they can easily fit on the public “Recently Clipped” pages), but private clippings have no upper limit.
- You can assign tags to identify the clip. Wouldn’t be a Web2.0 site if it didn’t feature tagging, though, would it?
- You can assign the clip to collections, which are, in essence, folders in your Clipmarks account to add a further level of organization to your clips.
- You can add your own personal remarks to the clip, to summarize it or complement it with your own insights.
- And, further, you can bookmark the clip’s originating webpage to your del.icio.us or mag.nol.ia account, post the clip to your blog, email it to your friends, print it, or select to have it queued up at Arecibo to be beamed to nearby stars as part of SETI’s “Wikipedia Gallactica” project (the latter not yet fully-implemented, alas).
The truly interesting thing about Clipmarks is that the site is, naturally enough, a social site as well as a private site. It encourages users to share their clips and to comment on one another’s material. In my short time using the service, I’ve discovered how handy being able to search others’ clips can be: doing a quick search of “Antarctica” reveals an breathtaking variety of material clipped from various sources around the web detailing everything from life on Antarctica to plans for terraforming Antarctica and making it habitable for human life (which is the gist of the story I’m researching)! Best of all, if you really like the material that a particular “clipper” has been posting–perhaps someone with interests very similar to your own–you can add them to the usual friends list and have a direct feed of their output delivered right to your Clipmarks doorstep.
Now, Clipmarks is not for everyone. If you’re an outdated privacy freak, you may find the site suspicious because it stores all of your research and posted clips on a nonlocal server and allows others to browse your stuff (unless, of course, you tell Clipmarks to save all clips privately by default)…and if you don’t happen to have access to an Internet connection when you need to find a particular clip, you are S.O.L. But at least take the site tour before writing it off; there’s a LOT to like about Clipmarks, especially if you’re a research-mad infovore like myself.
That said, I still do like to keep a local record of my researches that I can easily back up to CD-R periodically. Which if why I still use Microsoft OneNote in conjunction with Clipmarks. It’s trivial to cut’n'paste clipped material from Clipmarks to OneNote, after all, and between the two applications, I need never again worry about losing carefully researched materials!
But again, OneNote is nice if you can afford it*–but, truly, Clipmarks is all you really need.
*Or, naturally, if you can…ahem, find it elsewhere on the ‘Net. But don’t blame your unscrupulous piratical exploits on me, bucko!
The Annotated Richard McBeef
April 22nd, 2007
SomethingAwful.com! Thy silliness–and cutting wit–is greatly to be praised! Witness their latest bit o’ comic genius:
I cite the opening paragraph of the new “standard edition” of McBeef as one of the most uproarious and ironically potent examples of contemporary satire:
Richard McBeef, written in late 2006 by playwright Cho Seung-Hui, remains one of the greatest domestic tragedies ever produced in English. Originally titled State of Virginia Exhibit 14-A, Richard McBeef was not accepted by the public upon its completion. Similar to the initial release of Catch-22, it took American audiences a few years to warm up to the complex plotting and rich dialogue of Richard McBeef. Combining the post-modern techniques of Robert Coover and Don Delillo, the suburban theme of quiet desperation from Something Happened and Death of a Salesman, and a dash of Eraserhead, Richard McBeef was met with disapproval by a reading public who preferred books about dragons written by the children of people who own book publishing companies. Even The New York Times, famous for its scholarly reviews, called McBeef “utter pig shit,” with guest columnist John Updike claiming, “The only McBeef Seung-Hui’ll be familiar with after this stinker is at McDonald’s. Because he’s going to work there. And serve beef.” Luckily, Richard McBeef has stood the test of time, and, five years after its original publication, is now taught in English classrooms alongside classics such as Romeo and Juliet and The Giver 2: Give Harder.
Good lord, just go and read it. Particularly if you are either, like me, a member of academia literaria, or merely an English major with a Monty Pythonesque taste for silly intellectualism. This is required reading. You will be quizzed later.
Super Clean(ify) your Gmail!
April 19th, 2007
OK, folks–check it out: I’m not the world’s biggest Greasemonkey fan. Most of the userscripts written for Greasemonkey are pretty…well, pointless–especially those written for Gmail–or downright destructive. Using one of the “persistent search” scripts effectively shut down my Gmail account for almost three days because it kept reloading the page so many times, the site thought I was a spambot and locked my account! But, nevertheless, every once in a while you find a script that is just amazing because it adds useful functionality, removes a petty annoyance, or just enhances a page in some way. Gmail Super Clean is the best script I think I’ve ever encountered, because it does all three.
Fundamentally, GSC is just a different skin for Gmail: a very clean, minimalistic, and more attractive skin than the useful, but admittedly bland, native Gmail look. But the great power of GSC is that it not only prettifies Gmail, it also streamlines the interface still more, making it even easier to use the site. Truly, the power of a stripped-down, ultra-minimalist approach toward webdesign can never be overestimated. In this age of bloated, confusing, overstuffed indices and frontpages, Google’s apps have always stood forth as an amazing example of just how good basic, clean webpage design can be. But, that said…it could always be better. And that’s just what Gmail Super Clean brings to the table.
So, check it out! I’m quite sold on it, and chances are, you will be, too.
Switching Themes
April 17th, 2007
Pegritz.com is currently Under Construction, as I’m switching my blog’s theme to something minimalistic, clean, and easy to read. I am currently adapting the Upstart Blogger Minim 0.1 theme, which is one of the cleanest, nicest, most accessible themes I’ve ever come across.
But it’s also one of the buggiest. To put it simply, the PHP code in this theme is allllllllllllllllllllllll screwed up. Mind you, I am no PHP wizard, and most of the WordPress coding that goes into building a theme is completely opaque to my right-hemisphered brain…but even I can tell that the code is really jacked up here. I don’t know if the theme author originally wrote this theme for an earlier version of WordPress or what, but…it’s going to take a while to fix all the innumerable errors (generally caused by improperly-written function calls in the WordPress “Loop”).
So bear with me here. We’ll be returning to our regularly-scheduled broadcasts of invective and lavish hero-worship soon!
Codes of Conduct
April 9th, 2007
There’s no one in the world I hate more than The Obstreperous Blogger. You know…the guy who regards his own blog as the ultimate soapbox from which he can spew thoughtless, kneejerk invective all day and night long. That’s bad enough–I mean, who wants to read three hundred straight entries decrying Wii users as “sissy-fags” or calling for immigrant concentration camps?–but, hey…if you own a website, it’s your sovereign right to bedeck and bespatter it with whatever you like, and if someone finds that content offensive, immoral, distasteful, etc…well, they can just close that tab and never look at your N-word-celebratin’ site again. Right? But the true Obstreperous Blogger can’t contain his vipertongued vituperatives: he has to sally forth and leave little coprolites of his “wisdom” (if using the word “cockfag” sixteen times in a single sentence can be said to indicate “wisdom”) in the comments sections of others’ blogs. That’s when the Obstreperous Blogger truly becomes annoying.
So…what do you do with people like that? Well, here on Pegritz.com, we gots a 100% No-Tolerance Policy for that kind of crap. If you leave a snide, stupid comment–whether bearing your signature or anonymous–it gets deleted. Period. Do not for ONE SECOND think I’m somehow responsible for the blather that others may leave here as comments…but, at the same time, don’t think that I’m going to leave such turd-nuggets on my site to pollute discussion or initiate flamewars.
Recently, Tim O’Reilly has drafted a Blogger’s Code of Conduct to provide the blogging community with a voluntary code by which signatory members could police their blogs for Obstreperous Jagoffs. And, for the most part, it’s a good document–certainly something whose sentiments I agree with. But take a look at this legal dissection of the terms used in the draft code, and…what’s this?
We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
- is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others
What the hell does copyright have to do with an ethical code of conduct? As the Tristan Louis, author of “Blogger’s Code of Conduct: A Dissection,” notes:
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, O’Reilly, AOL, etc… are all trademarks. I have not put a TM after every single one of those trademarks in posts I write on TNL.net, which technically makes me in violation of this effort, from a trademark standpoint.
For the purpose of this post, I am quoting the substantial majority of the post by Tim O’Reilly, which would technically put me in violation of his copyright. However, Tim has a Creative Commons License so he’s granting me some rights. Unfortunately, the rights granted by the CC license also say that you can’t reuse the content for commercial purpose: I run adsense ads on this site, which could be considered a commercial effort so, as such, I would technically be in violation of Tim’s copyright AND CC license. Under the terms of this, quoting substantial portion of copyrighted content would be a violation of the code. This means that blogs now have a choice: write only original content without extensive quoting or don’t run ads. It’s a tough choice for many bloggers.
Tough, indeed. I refuse to host any form of advertising here on Pegritz.com–so that’s not an issue with me…but I quote. I freely quote from sources that I am responding to, and nothing is going to change that. Coming from an academic background, I fully recognize the dangers of plagiarism and misquoting, which is why I am also meticulous about: 1) making sure any quoted material is accurately copy’n'pasted from its original source document, or at least making sure that, if I am summarizing or paraphrasing material, I do so accurately; and 2) that I attribute my source via hyperlinking. Go ahead, check out every entry on this blog–everytime I quote a source, I make sure that the quote is properly attributed and referenced. That’s not a violation of copyright; that’s fair use.
O’Reilly’s Code of Conduct is a decent step in the right direction, but the Code must restrict itself only to issues of interpersonal ethics–copyright issues are not something that needs to be addressed in a voluntary code of conduct…mainly because it’s far too sticky a situation. You don’t want a whole mess of copyfight crap sullying your otherwise-decent Code, would you?
Once that’s taken care of, I’ll gladly sign up. But not until then.
And, regardless, I reserve the inalienable right to call George W. Bush an asshole an asshole, and an idiot an idiot. The day I stop making inflammatory statements willingly is the day I receive a $100K/year teaching position that will obviate my sell my writing online.
