Month of August , 2004

Why are telecoms so behind the curve when it comes to the web? AT&T Wireless' website is a horror -- mMode services are handled separately from other wireless services, a query I once made on how to access my voicemail from a landline got dozens of separate results for how to access voicemail wirelessly from every model of phone AT&T services (this despite the fact that the phone I actually use is recorded in my profile -- and despite the fact that on every phone the answer is "press and hold the '1' button"), and so on. I ended up googling up the answer, which I found (fairly easily) on a non-AT&T site.

Right now, I've been up all night transferring services from my current address to my new address, or starting new services. I've started Cox cable high-speed Internet and Southwest Gas services (my current place is electric-only), and I've transferred my Nevada Power account as well. So all that's left (other than change-of-addresses with my bank, renter's insurance, and wireless) is to transfer my Sprint local service and cancel my DSL (which my new landlord tells me will interfere with the alarm system in the new place). So I head to Sprint's website (which doesn't work with Opera, so I have to open IE) and look up FAQs on customer service. The answer to all FAQs involved with moving, changing, or cancelling Sprint services online is the same:

This feature is currently not offered online. Please call the Sprint Local business office at 1-888-723-8010 for assistance.

So while the power utilities totally get the web, not one but two telecommunication companies are totally lost. Which isn't very heartening, is it -- after all, the Internet is a freakin' telecommunications application!!!!!

Sigh.

Not for lack of desire, but this is a crazy week for me. Classes started yesterday, and though I'd asked over a month ago, I found out in my first class that we're moving on to a new edition of the textbook (as an adjunct, I don't get to choose my textbooks), which means lots more prep time as I suss out the differences. On top of that, I'm moving on Friday, which means, as you know, crazy packing all week. Plus, today's my father's birthday, and Thursday is my birthday. So, I'm a little busy.

I hope to continue my blog-a-day (plus vitamins!) project next week, along with whatever else crosses my mind.

In my previous post, I noted the predominance of Cub Run Elementary School projects on the National Reconnaisance Office's NROjr website. A quick snoop of my own (via Google) turns up the Cub Run Elementary School's "Business Partnership" page. Turns out the NRO is a "business partner" of the school (how creepy is that designation? Not "sponsors" or "teaching partners", but...). Here's the skinny:

As volunteers in our school, over 100 NRO employees devote more than 1,000 volunteer hours each year. They act as tutors, mentors, role models, and guest speakers. They also participate in various clubs or after school activities such as the Chess Club, Writers Club, Computer Club, Science programs or Math and Language Arts enrichment and remediation.

Joining the NRO in this illustrious role is the Outback Steakhouse in the Union Mill shopping center. You know the one. In addition to providing catering for fundraisers, "Periodically, Outback offers free meals at the school for the Cub Run Staff. This is a wonderful way to pull the staff together for an enjoyable time of socialization."

Incidentally, it seems the NRO website itself is down. So I haven't been able to find out much about the wonderful agency behind NROjr and it's almost interesting content.

Via BoingBoing via Joi Ito comes news of the National Reconnaissance Office's NROjr. The NRO is in charge of our nation's battery of snoop satellites; NROjr is their child outreach project. What they could possibly hope to gain from this is beyond me. They claim that "Our hope is that the various activities will spark an interest in your child to learn more about space", ostensibly by inspiring them with the love of science and technology and driving them to excel at math and other academic skills.

The thing is, it's easily one of the most boring and downright crappy sites I've ever seen -- and Im a big fan of Web Pages That Suck. Start with the awful, Muppet-esque voiceover that sounds when you hover your mouse over a menu item. Add some of the lamest games in the universe, some purely awful stories (admittedly, by students -- though how those three students (all from the same school, Cub Run Elementary) got chosen I have no idea) with titles like "Proud to Be American", an art gallery (mostly models of satellites made by students from -- wait for it... Cub Run Elementary), and a few kinda ok projects (making models of satellites like the kids at Cub Run Elementary), and you got one suck-ass website. The questions it raises are so numerous: Should we embarassed to have a 'gov domain name of this low quality? Why hasn't the site been updated in at least a year? Where's the "Satelline Rescue Hero story" (yes, the NRO misspelled "satellite") we were promised would be up by October of 2003? Why is the Flash section in a frame that cuts off the menu in Opera? Why is their no "back" navigation in the Flash parts? Is this really the best online experience that one of the most technologically advanced agencies of the richest, most powerful government in the world can provide?

Finally, given that this experience is soooo poor, are they actively trying to make kids dumber?!

Hugh MacLeod over at gapingvoid has set out the following rule for his life:

Seek out the exceptional minds, avoid everyone else... I am interested in the exceptional mind. I am utterly uninterested in the non-exceptional mind... I will spend the rest of my professional life working with visionaries. I know who they are, they know who they are.

Now, on the one hand, it seems like more of the typical CEO-worshipping, chest-thumping, neo-Social Darwinst, self-congratulatory BS we've come to expect in our economy. But!

On the other hand, my father's told me the same thing, more or less: find the person in your field who is the best and bind yourself to that person. Seek out excellence at every turn, becuase it will rub off on you. Mediocrity will rub off on you too.

Of course, I never take my father's advice.

The real reason I decided to write about this is because of the conversation that ensued. I was thinking that, as a teacher, I don't really have the option of turning my back on the unexceptional -- that would make me a total failure at my job, career, and vocation. There I am, thinking this, when I come across a comment (CTRL-F, "Nia") saying:

I am/want to be a teacher. I'm going to be the one making exceptional minds, or at least directing minds towards the fields where they'll be exceptional.

Yes, I thought to myself (as I generally do). But how?

I'm on the cusp of a new semester -- classes start Monday. Every semester I imagine myself striding purposefully into class, setting down my bag, unpacking my books and syllabi and notes and water bottle and other crap with great deliberation, and proceeding to open young minds to the wonders and beauties -- and horrors and brutalities, which are wondrous and awesome in their own right -- of the world of culture within which they are all suspended. Then I get there. And... for the most part, excellence does not occur. Yes, I'm a newbie at this -- this will be my second year, my fourth semester, teaching -- and I actually think I'm pretty good at it, but by 3/4 through the semester I'm just pleased if I get papers that aren't plagiarised, ecstatic if someone makes a comment or asks a question in class. At some point, it becomes "work" -- often rewarding work, but work just the same.

I have excuses. I'm teaching community college, and the students are (for the most part) not the super-students who go on to prestigious universities but the "second rank", the bright but not exceptional who have managed to satisfy the requirements of the system without breaking a mental sweat. They are poorly prepared for college-level work. My class (Anth 101, Intro to Cultural Anthropology) meets a social science requirement, so most of my students are there not because of any particular interest in anthropology, but because it sounds more interesting then Econ or easier than Soc. They're young and undisciplined; they're working adults and unmotivated.

My excuses are all lies.

The real issue is that, so far, I've not hit upon the way to induce excellence, to draw it forth and capture it in my classrooms. I've modeled myself after my own best professors -- and judging by my evaluations and by the growth I see over the course of the class, to more or less good effect -- but maybe their way is not my way?

So, I ask a question of whoever might be visiting this site and reading this post: how do we inspire excellence in others? How do we build that feedback loop, where the excellence around us draws forth our own best selves, which in turn pushes our intelocutors to even greater heights? I'm sure it can't just be a matter of "be excellent all the time and those around you will be inspired". We are not solitary creatures, but instead are enmeshed in networks of sociality, and are shaped by them at the same time we shape them back. Especially for teachers and other leaders, how do we urge our students towards excellence and away from mediocrity? Because ultimately, that's my job -- not to teach them who Franz Boas was or the difference between structuralism, functionalism, and structural functionalism, but to teach them to be excellent.

I'd really be interested in seeing how other people work through this problem, this challenge.

Connie Rice (not to be confused with Condi, though they're apparently cousins or something) has an article on NPR's site comparing US policy in Iraq with policy back home, based on statements made by our Illustrious Leaders. See how the imagined future of Iraq stacks up against progressive visions of a kinder, gentler America. For instance:

(9.) "There's no physical security without economic security."

Who would ever have thought this version of "no jobs, no peace" would come out of the mouth of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld? Someone needs to Humvee him down the street to his backyard, and give him a mike -- so he can repeat this to the underclass of Washington, D.C. The new Republican call to action: No jobs, no peace!

Take a look at the whole list, it's all there: affirmative action, gun control, freedom to protest, even the recognition that downtrodden people occasionally erupt into violence. This is not your father's Republican Party!

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

A collective of uber-geeks brings us a daily dose of the neat, weird, sexy, sassy, and just plain awesome. The daily gossip sheet of the techie counter-culture. Better living through technology. If you're turned on by toasters, this is the place to be.

BoingBoing always seemed a little familiar to me, and I couldn't put my finger on it, until sudenly it dawned on me that somewhere I have a book of articles collected from the magazine of the same name. Some post or another suggested that the website and magazine were one and the same, and I had a lightbulb moment. But it really doesn't matter -- BoingBoing is on my daily visit list, and it's updated often enough that I often visit more than once. One innovation that I've always been rather cold towards is their Guestbar, a sidebar blog written by a guest blogger. It never really impressed me -- never, that is, until Rudy Rucker took the side stage and set the bar impossibly high for all bloggers everywhere. Essentially, Rucker bebopped a whole book for our edutainment. It's still up, at least the last post or two (they're much longer than the main column's content!), and something tells me it'll be a while before the Boingers find someone with nerve enough to follow that act!

BoingBoing is just good. What more can I say?

OK, today is Day 7 of my "Blog a Day" project, and I've learned a few lessons:

• The title is totally misleading! Some days I've written about two or even three sites. With school starting next week (I'm teaching three classes) and me moving the same week, things are liable to get rather more sporadic. Think of the "Blog a Day" moniker more as a sort of Platonic Ideal (though I am generally in no way a Platonist) rather than a real-world condition.
• It's really hard! It's like wondering why I hate tomatoes but love salsa -- who can explain matters of taste? Some sites I like just because of the author's personality, their writing stsyle, a certain je ne sais quai in how they express themselves. Take Burningbird, a site that's on my list for today (or tomorrow, depending on how together I am today) -- for some reason, I just click with the site -- it's got great design, it's well-written. I don't necessarily agree with or even like the things she says, at least not all of them. There's a certain inexplicable something. Here's a better analogy -- why do you love your partner? Other sites, like BoingBoing, also on the list for today, are hard to sum up becuase they're so damn good at what they do -- what could I possibly say about them that isn't already clear to everyone in the universe?
• Attrition sucks. I've skipped a few sites because they hadn't been updated for months and months. The first one like this, action figures sold separately, I reviewed, but after a couple more popped up in my blogroll, I decided it wasn't worth the effort. These bloggers may just be out of the loop for a while, but... I'm removing them from my blogroll, too (although not till I've finished this round of blogging a blog a day). The irony, of course, is that my own site was stagnant for so long -- by my own criteria, I should be removed from consideration.
• Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes.
• This is a damn good way to fulfill some of the promise I see in the social Internet. I write about somoene, they see my site in their referral logs, they visit and see themselves written about -- warm fuzzies all around! Blogrolls are nice, but they're impersonal; I think that writing about why I blogroll someone adds the personal touch on which, as the Cluetrainers might say, conversations happen. So there's that.

Future lessons to be posted as they happen.

Body and Soul

OK, if I had trouble with Alas, a Blog, imagine the trouble Body and Soul is causing me. Let me illustrate exactly how I feel about Jeanne d'Arc's blog: about a year-and-a-half ago, if I remember correctly, Jeanne added my site to her blogroll, which meant, to me, that I had arrived in blogdom. I don't always agree with her -- and have disagreed quite strongly, and quite publicly, on some issues -- but nobody, nobody writes with the pure humanity that Jeanne d'Arc brings to even the most off-hand post. To take an almost random example (her most recent post):

But nearly two months ago, I expressed some concern about the tendency on the left to feed the myth of the noble soldier, and it's bothered me for a long time that Kerry takes justifiable pride in his service in Vietnam, but rarely talks about the courage he showed when he returned from Vietnam and spoke up about what he witnessed, trying to stop a brutal and insane war from taking any more lives unecessarily.

Almost all of us have our schtick -- the right-wingers and nearly-con liberals are prone to chest-beating, Tarzan-style; others to cooler-than-thou hipness or techier-than-thou geekness; others, like myself, to satire and absurdity and (in Steve Bates' case) doggerel -- but Jeanne just says it. A more cynical person might claim that not having a schtick is Jeanne's schtick -- even if that's the case, it works. There's not many blogs that can bring a tear to your eye -- Body and Soul is one of them.

And the crowning factor is this: if Jeanne happens to read this, I have no doubt that she'll deny everything I've just said.

blivet

What's a blivet, you ask? According to the site's author, a blivet is 10 pounds of crap in a 5-lb bag -- a pretty messy problem! In this particular case, though, blivet is the weblog of a Vegas-based archaeologist, buddhist, and co-procrastinator of blog entries. Although blog entries are light, when he finds the time, he says some pretty interesting stuff. Like this post from February, describing his take on the reaction to Mel Gibson's S&M party, The Passion of the Christ:

Judging by the way reactions are to this movie, from yea to nay, it would seem that the rejection of the post-enlightenment world is alive and well in the popular culture of the West. All observations elsewhere of Mr. Gibson (and his father's) politics and faith aside, this work would seem to be the very call for a return to the world of divisive theology. To only lightly reference the central teachings of Christianity such as the Sermon on the Mount while focusing on the final part of the Passion is to advocate a return to that 'good old-time' Medieval faith and a summary rejection of the central teachings that lead to the faith today.

Hopefully he'll find more time to blog in the future, if the freaking heat out here doesn't kill him. People do archaeology in this weather?