Month of December , 2007

Have a listen:

I've scheduled a great week of posts at lifehack.org, including my podcast debut with a new project I'm calling Lifehack Live (because that's it's name). Check it out this week, in between eggnogs and rum balls.

Lately I've been pretty cagey about movies -- at $10 a ticket, $6 for kids, it's nearly $40 for our family of 5 to even get in the door -- then add another $40, at least, for popcorn and drinks. If I'm going to spend that kind of money on a movie, it had better be good.

So I check out MetaCritic when I'm considering a movie. MetaCritic compiles reviews from dozens of papers, assigns them a point value from 1-100, and averages them, giving you a pretty good indication of where reviewers stand.

This semester is officially finished for me!

Portuguese Spanish blog aurturogoga.com translated one of my lifehack posts, Build a Reading Family: How to Share Reading with Your Kids, into Portuguese Spanish. This is a post that I'm particularly proud of, and that got a lot of attention; several people contacted me about using it in family groups and even as a handout in a public library!

Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War isn't out yet (coming next month, I hope!) but already it's gotten some nice press coverage!

While searching for some other files, I came across copies of two posts I made at the very beginning of my blogging career, back in November of 2000. The first post I ever did has been lost to the vagaries of history, but the second and third posts are now up here in the November, 2000 archives. I started blogging because I was upset at the way the 2000 elections were going, and these posts reflect that.

The funny thing is that there wasn't really any blogging software back then, so the pages were hand-coded. I can't imagine what I would have done once I had dozens of posts to keep up with, but I wort of fell out of blogging for a while and didn't come back until 2002, and by then there was Blogger.

I'm testing Windows Live Writer for a post I'm writing for lifehack.org. Check it out tomorrow at lifehack.org.

I very much want to like the Kindle, Amazon's new e-book reader. I am a fan of e-books -- or I would be, if it weren't such a dreary experience to read them on most devices. I used to hang off a subway strap in NYC reading e-books on my Palm IIIe (believe it or not, I used to write papers that way, too -- with my Palm-holding arm wrapped around a pole or through a hangstrap, scribbling furiously with the stylus).

I don't post here very much, not because I don't want to but because I'm busy with so much else. In addition to teaching and doing my own research (currently for a piece on Sexuality, Gender, and Taboo) I have three other active blogging projects:

• Lifehack.org: a personal productivity site where I write about studying and writing strategies in addition to general organization and productivity topics.
• Savage Minds: An anthropology group blog. I'm currently working on a series on academic publishing. I also post quite a bit on the relationship between anthropology and the State, as well as material drawing on my American Indian research.
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