I've been pretty open about the ideas floating around in my head since an incident in my undergrad years when a group of colleagues realized we'd been thinking the same thing, but each thought s/he was the only one. Blogging has only increased the potential of reaching others, but does so in a fairly non-invasive way. Unlike a megaphone that folks can't get away from, or even commercials that are hard to fast forward through (or used to be), the blog is fairly innocuous. My titles hit Twitter. The title and a first line or two hit Facebook and the aggregators, which means people can decide in half a second whether to skip, scan, or click to read. 

My job as a blogger is to assemble my points accordingly. This is slightly different than what comes naturally to me.

Lucky for me, there’s help through a Writing Center Workshop. I’m signed up.

Here’s the skinny:

Productive and Professional Blogging

And I need to find a job. And I should probably update this site as it’s been neglected all summer.

I should also document the games I created this summer at camp. There were a few pretty good ones I’d like to not forget.

My summer at Flying Moose Lodge in Maine, by the way, was too short, too cold, and too wet.

Pics can be found in this slideshow. There were a lot of mushrooms because of the rain, and we played some cool games, and … well, see for yourself:

[picasa width="600" height="600" autoplay="1" showcaption="1"]http://picasaweb.google.com/regardingjohn/FML20091[/picasa]

Apologies to myself and anyone else for the delay in updating this. Facebook now gets the daily status updates, and I’ve been knee-deep at camp all summer.

Fall is quickly approaching, and I’m writing up the last bits of my dissertation, tightening up what I’ve already written and prepping a bunch of articles to submit to journals. I’m pretty sure I’m not doing it as effectively as I might be, but that’s all in the spirit of “good learning” (ie. from mistakes), right? I’ll get through it all.

The big news, as far as my research interests are concerned, is that the iPhone has a dozen or so Apps for place-based, or location-contextualized reporting. This means that people can start making notes on specific places (geo-annotation). Time flies when you’re having fun, and when you’re ABD. Maybe I’ll be finished just as the whole iPhone craze fizzles (ha! no way, I’m finishing this year!). 

SO, an interesting thing with WordPress is that it only gives me about ten seconds of posting time before it freezes up and doesn’t let me type anymore.

Ok, so this time it’s giving me

The trick, it seems, is to adjust the size of t

[Update: It was the WYSI-WordPress plug-in. I disabled it and can now post.]

I was sad to have lots of SPAM comments. I installed Bad Behavior.

Q: I have been blocked by Bad Behavior! What do I do?

A: In extremely rare circumstances, Bad Behavior may block actual human visitors. Bad Behavior was designed to target robots, not people.

These “extremely rare circumstances” apparently hit a lot of folks (like me) just after my last post. And I’ve finally gotten around to dealing with it.

New posts coming…

Walked into the local St. Vinny “Dig’n'Save” looking for a cheap patio table. Saw a very cool, low-slung, retro, light oak bed frame for $10, and walked out with it. It’s very cool, and I’m thinking it will make a great head/footboard for the platform “trunk” bed I’m planning to make as soon as I find a cheap Hilti 267 circular saw, and get an EZ-Guide system for it (hahaha!).

And I walked out with some Rubbermaid plastic shelves for the (still too wet for wood or metal) basement.

Then I reinstalled the anti-SPAM plugins for this blog because the SPAM-bots have been leaving me lots of oh-so-helpful advice on how to improve my body/finances/sexlife. Which, thanks, but I’m pretty okay with where I’m at as far as those are all concerned.

That was the morning. The afternoon was spent in the Local Games Lab, setting up PDAs for Monday’s game. We’re not at plug-n-play yet. Stayed there until 6. Went home and set up the bed, cleaned/rearranged my room, etc. Needful things.

Thanks to Dastryni at Dreamhost for figuring out the culprit was a plugin. I’ve disabled all the plugins, so the blog now loads. And I’ll begin the process of rebuilding the blog so it matches the rest of my site. If all goes well, that should only take a few minutes (if I can swap files from my backup).

But seriously, I do much of my thinking here, and have felt somewhat lost without it.