Month of February , 2008

So my partner, she works at the state health lab. Her team does the outbreak investigation and labwork, and all the bioterrorism stuff. So you can imagine how soundly I sleep at night!

This week saw the release of information on a case they've been following for a while, which has turned into the largest notification in US history: 50,000 people are being notified that they might have been exposed to hepatitis C, hepatitis B, or HIV when they went into a popular clinic for colonoscopies. You can imagine all the bloodwork!

A few weeks ago, Alex Shalman, one of the guest contributors at lifehack.org, asked me to contribute to his "Happiness Project", a set of interviews with prominent bloggers about their definitions of happiness and what they're doing to increase happiness in their lives.

A while back, I mentioned that I was putting together some material on writing and technology and thinking about launching a new site around it.

I decided to go ahead with that project, and am well into getting the site up and running. The site is called The Writer's Technology Companion and will be launching sometime in March at www.writerstechnology.com. There's a launch page there now, where you can sign up for email notifications or subscribe to the RSS feed so you'll be informed when the site officially goes live.

Simpleology, a courseware provider, is offering a blogging course free to people who link to their site. It looks like they're beta-testing it to see whether they can sell it. I figure, I'll try it out and see what it's all about. What's the worst that could happen?

Update after the break

Here's what they think I should say:

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.It covers:

Every semester, I spend a lot of time explaining the term paper assignments to students. I talk about them when I hand out my syllabus, I spend a good half-hour discussing the assignment about 3 weeks into the course, and I revisit the topic several times up until the last week before the due date.

Every time I bring it up, I ask if students have any questions. The questions I get are always about teh same damn thing: formatting. "Does it have to be typed?" "What size margins should I use?" "What style do you want the references in?"

I can only imagine that other professors and/or high school teachers hammer students over formatting, without paying much attention to their ideas -- which are, ostensibly, what we assign papers to help students get at and express.

One of my colleagues at Savage Minds posted the trailer for the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, drawing special attention to the last line. For all the part-time teachers out there, this one's for you!

Last August, I wrote about the high price of textbooks and what I feel is an exploitative relationship between authors and publishers on one hand and the students we serve on the other. An officer of the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA), to which I belong, came across the post and asked me to write up my argument for the TAA Newsletter. The piece is coming out in print next month, but is already up on the TAA website. The post itself is in the member's only section of the site, but I'll post it to my portfolio once it's out in hard copy.

I have a cheap laptop with Vista Home Basic (VHB) on it. VHB doesn't include the fancy interface, Aero Glass, that is the hallmark of the Vista OS. Which is fine, I don't need that -- I think I'm more comfortable with the way I've been using Widows since '97, anyway.

Here's something strange: When you're writing an email in Outlook 2007, you'd think the "text format" setting would be under the "Format Text" tab, right?

You'd be wrong. It's actually under the "Options" tab. According to Microsoft engineers*, this is strictly to keep you on your toes and prevent you from becoming complacent.

*Note: The opinions expressed herein may or may not represent the opinions of actual Microsoft engineers, none of whom were consulted in any way other than presumably in the writing of this post.