oneman's blog

One Man's Opinion is back -- for now.

Beginning in October, I started taking on about 1 gigabite of server traffic a day, mostly from referrer spam. My first host shut down the site when it began destabilizing their servers, and to add insult to inury, deleted my files. I'd tell you to stay away from them, but it looks like they just got taken over. Anyway, don't use MaxiPointServers, and if you see their IT guy around the neighborhood, kick him in the shins. Hard.

I transferred the site to a new host, hoping that the couple weeks downtime would have discouraged the baddies. It didn't. 5 days later I maxed out my month's allotment of bandwidth. I took the site down. I tried again in December. 6 days later...

So here I am again. I've got a monster of a .htaccess file between myself and the baddies, and I've set the site up so that the old domain refers to my CV site. I've tried to set it up so that old links will redirect to the new site, but it doesn't seem to be working, and I can't remember how all the old URLs were configured so I couldn't redirect them all anyway. And since the old webhost deleted files from the several months when, unbeknownst to me, my hard disk was failing so I was backing up corrupt data, I lost a lot of posts. And most of the comments. I've tried to reconstruct as much as I could from Google's cache, but... I lost some opinions.

I'll be keeping an eye on traffic the next few days; hopefully, the precautions I've taken will let me keep this site online. Since I couldn't use this site, I've started a new site called ThinkNaughty, exclusively dedicated to material relating to research on sex and gender in the US, for a project I want to start when I clear my plate of my existing work. And I'm still busy at Savage Minds, the anthropology blog. For the most part, this site will be an archive of past work, while I focus myself on more academic pursuits -- but who knows? I may find myself needing an outlet for thoughts that don't have a place at the other two sites.

Bitch PhD noticed this anti-blogging article at the Chronicle for Higher Education. The author, a recent search committee member, reveals his (her? She's pseudonymous, but claims "Ivan" as her first name) and his fellow committee-member's distaste for what they found when they looked at their candidate's blogs. Dr. Bitch does a good job of exposing Ivan's pettiness, but I wanted to add just a couple of things.

For instance, while Ivan clearly reserves great scorn for applicants who include their blog addresses in their CV, when applicants didn't include them, the committee went looking for them anyway: "In some cases, a Google search of the candidate's name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn't fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances...". See, they felt compelled to Google the candidate, even though Ivan (and his fellow committee members, for whom Ivan accurately and reliably speaks) feels "... it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process."

This suggests that the real response to the knowledge that small-minded committee members may read your blog is not to write one -- because even if you are strictly careful not to complain about your job or your colleagues or your students, Ivan and his crew are going to assume that you not will be so careful in the future, anyway. The mere fact that you have a weblog is enough to scare off the weak-hearted among the search committees.

>>

Ivan puts it this way: "The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world?" And then proceeds immediately to answer his own question: "It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses." Kind of like, oh, I don't know... teaching, academic writing, the use of committees of faculty members to select new faculty, and the Chronical for Higher Education, right? It's not hard to imagine positive uses for these activities or institutions, but it's also not so hard to find negative uses.

One of the things that so exercises poor Ivan is the permanence of blogs. After all, "We've all done it -- expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we're giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person's attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off." What Ivan is saying here (let me parse it for you) is that we the members of your search committee really don't care if you say idiotic things in class because the only people that might hear you say them are your students, and teachers don't exist for the benefit of their students. We your search committee are more concerned with what you might do in your "off-time" that could potentially embarass us (as pseudonymous Ivan must have done for his school in writing his Chronicle article).

Stop and think about that. The ramifications of an idiotic post outweigh the ramifications of faulty teaching.

What Ivan is really arguing for is less efficient search committee-ing. "We all have quirks," he writes. "In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction." Because without this kind of deceit, how can a search committee hope to choose the kind of idiot that will retain his/her most idiotic ramblings for the classroom? Given the honest appraisal of a candidate's quirks a blog makes possible, Ivan would rather go with the candidate who of course has quirks (because "we all have quirks") but who keeps them well-hidden until he has the job.

And if that isn't the best way to run an academic institution, I don't know what is.

Is it just me or isthis animation of a woman's body falling through an infinite field of floating spheres just a tad on the offensively mysoginistic side? And why is she wearing a g-string bikini?!

Talk about yer lack of agency!

(Found via BoingBoing.)

Let me be clear: I love MoveOn.org. I am thrilled at the ways they've found to mobilize people through the Internet. But somehow, when they mess with popular culture, they come off as just incredibly lame. The first time was when they suggested that we could use the awful movie The Day After Tomorrow as an opportunity to raise awareness about global warming. Why they'd even want to be associated with that piece of dreck is beyond me -- especially when the Right is doing its damnedest to discredit the science behind global warming. Why on (a rapidly warming) Earth would you interject Hollywood schlock-science into the debate?

Anyway, now MoveOn has come to us with a new hope: that Lucas' latest blockbuster (which I'm going to be seeing tomorrow) about a Senator who, "seduced by a dark vision", seizes power and transforms a democratic republic into a nightmare vision of fascism and unfriendly aesthetics. Their latest effort, Save the Republic, is a TV ad using familiar Star Wars imagery to present Sen. Frist as the Dark Emperor leading an army of robotic judges (which they call "clones" -- come on people, this isn't rocket science!) set on destroying the "fabled order" of peace and justice upheld and protected by our "fair judges".

Oy.

The project has a kind of geek charm, I suppose, but is this really going to galvanize anyone? Do we really want a movie which, if the last 2 (or, really, the last 5) are any indication of the quality of the new one, will be filled with stilted dialogue, shoddy science, and an incredibly unsubtle approach to politics (let alone the nature of evil) to be our entry in a debate which, however it ends up, will have lasting repercussions on the state of governance in the United States for decades to come? C'mon, MoveOn: changing the nomination process is Bad News, and demonstrably so -- is Lucas' fantasyland vision of politics really our best argument?!

There's an eye thing. Lauren at Feministe picked it up from Rana at Frogs and Ravens who caught it from jo(e) at jo(e)'s page. "Let's see your eyes," they all said. Well, here's an eye:

Interestingly, the real colour of my eyes (mostly green, but not the neon lime green you can make out in places in this picture) does not appear in this image. I took this with my new Canon Powershot A95 (well, it was new a couple months ago when I took the picture), a gift to myself and a commitment to get more serious about photography, which I seem (when I'm feeling especially generous to myself) to have some small talent in. You know the drill -- you get a new camera, it's all set up and ready to go, but it's 2 in the morning and what are you gonna photograph? Hmmm, wonder how good this macro function is? Let's just get that really close to my eye and *bang* whoa, let's try that again without the flash. OK, look at the screen... hmmm, that's boring. But boring pics is why the Powers That Very Likely Do Not Be gave us Photoshop! A little too much saturation here, a lot of desaturation there, burn that in, dodge that out, clone stamp a bit around this area, crop like so, and presto-chango -- the frightening, 1984-esque image above.

According to Google, this site is the #1 site on the web for one on one man to man sex. Suck on that, Rick Santorum!

And Mama always said I wouldn't amount to nuthin'!

Some weeks ago, the B-Log referenced some comments I'd made on the Anthro-L listserv in an excellent post on -->

I am now group blogging with the other Savage Minds over at Savage Minds. I'm not sure whether I will be cross-posting my posts to both blogs or what, so for now, keep an eye on both spaces. And be sure to check out the other Savages there with me!