Keep a local backup of anything important you’ve entrusted to online services. There’s no guarantee that, years from now, those services will honor the terms you agreed to. Backed by new investors, including singer Justin Timberlake, Myspace (after dropping the capital ‘S’) has been rebranded as a music-streaming service, with a new sleek interface, and…
Penn and Teller are involved with this story. Worth a read. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995. The game remained a curious rumor until September, 2005, when Frank Cifaldi, a freelance…
Judge: Apple conspired to fix eBook prices. #ethics #books The Federal lawsuit claimed that Apple, led by then-CEO Steve Jobs and senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue, conspired with HarperCollins, Hatchett, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster to drive e-book prices up from the $9.99 price point Amazon had established. –readwrite.com Similar:Thornton Wilder’s…
RT @spj_tweets: How TV could suffer the fate of newspapers: @alanmutter shares the second installment of his two-part blog – http://t.co/l… Similar:Maybe I'll just delete these QUARTER OF A MILLION spam comments.Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in …CybercultureIt's been nice knowing you, iPad3 It’s been nice knowing you, iPad3, but…TweetsHow hate and misinformation go…
RT @DepressedDarth: Dear J.J. Abrams, If the new Star Wars is bad, you will forever be known as Jar Jar Abrams. Sincerely, Star Wars fans Similar:Typeset In The FutureWhile watching classic science fiction f…AestheticsStar Wars: The MusicalThe Walls are Closing In It’s all …DramaContagion (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 11)Picard faces aggressive Romulans and…
I really like MailChimp’s “Social” plugin, which not only publishes a WordPress blog entry to Twitter and Facebook, but also collects responses from Twitter and Facebook users and collects them as WordPress comments. Today I installed a different plugin, Twitter Tools, which is really just a single tool — it lets you create a WordPress…
Habits for happiness: tips for looking on the bright side of life. At bedtime, in order to avoid a nightly litany of complaints, I ask my glass-is-half-empty-and-I-hate-the-pirate-glass-and-there’s-a-bug-in-it tween to list three good things, two neutral things, and one sad thing about her day. Sometimes if she needs to share more than one sad thing, I…
While researching my obligations for #juryduty Thursday, I came across this “Juror’s Creed.” The gender-specific reference to men, the instruction to reflect upon the virtues of democracy, and the instruction to respect the judge’s education all hint at a historical context for the creed. Institutions never put their creeds into writing unless they feel those…
Spent a productive work day doing nothing but optimizing my blog. Added a very nice plugin for displaying thumbnails of related posts. Similar:How to Keep Students Writing in the Age of AI Tools In a writing-intensive class, studen…AcademiaBless thee, Carolyn, bless thee! Thou art translated — into a 22 year-old woman. I remember when we…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original ''Adventure'' in Cod…Because so little primary historical wor…AcademiaR Grammar Gaffes Ruining The Language? Maybe Not : NPRMatthew Gordon, a linguist at the Univer…Culture"What Teachers Make" Sequence of AssignmentsEvery year I rewatch Taylor Mali’s passi…AcademiaBlender…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:Amazon may well be the most evil company in techLast week, I had a hardware emergency. A…BusinessApple's iPad turns 5: Has it lived up to Steve Jobs' 2010 keynote?[Jobs] was right to leave out the produc…BusinessMultimodal Composition: Every time a student submits a narrated PowerPoint,…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:My older brother falls to my son's chess skills.PersonalOn Her One Free Day Between Two Shows…[View the story “On Her One Free Day Bet…Design#AugustWilson #CenturyCycle Three week intensive course (whew!) All the students…
While I am uncomfortable with the whole “classroom as marketplace” metaphor, since it’s pretty much gamifying without the fun, I am nonetheless interested in this strategy for encouraging students to collaborate by having them attach a value to the artifacts they present to the class for sharing.. We shop for everything from apps to ideas.…
The researchers found that each singer’s heartbeat was linked to the song’s melody – i.e. the speed and structure of the music. They also found that when the choir sang together, their heart rates tended to increase and decrease at similar times. “As soon as the singing begins, (the hearts) start following each other,” Vickhoff…
We live in an elegant universe. The cosmos is like a string symphony. Genes are selfish. There is an endless battle between thermodynamics and gravity. Do you love these statements, or hate them? The reading world gets pretty divided over whether or not it’s okay to apply metaphors and similes to descriptive science writing. It…
Literature majors and students otherwise drawn to literature courses can be an introverted bunch. Students overall can at times resist course projects that fall outside the expected parameters of a given discipline. Yet my class proved my assumptions wrong. Many of the students were nervous, to be sure, but overall they seemed to enjoy the…
Let’s start at the end point: what you’re doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication web filled with people and machines. You do this by pointing and clicking, tapping a few commands, organizing your thoughts into symbols that can be read and…
Feeling productive. Hammered out eight scripts for training vids (3-5min each). It helps that I had an outline & know the content well. Similar:Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever CreatedPenn and Teller are involved with this s…BooksI asked my geekling whether she was ready for bed…I asked my #geekling whether she was rea…AmusingOverheard at…
So, the correct quote from “Miri” is actually “No ‘blah blah blah’” not “No more ‘blah blah blah.’” Classic Trek trivia I did not know. Similar:My Minecraft-obsessed tween made this blocky foam pig at art camp. Next up: Stage Right summer musical th…AestheticsShe doesn't have keys or a phone or an ID. Why does my…
For me, summer vacation means spending hours modeling shelves full of antique books in Blender-3D, so that the library adjacent to the bridge in my steampunk ship-of-the-line looks more lived-in. Similar:Pater Noster Passenger ElevatorsSome 50 years ago, my father took me to …AmusingWe're enjoying the intensity and also the (surprisingly appropriate) humor.PersonalTwittering The MachineI’ve never…