A Happy Marriage of ...

Pop culture and space science:

Facebook

OK, so according to my stats, somebody's linked to my blog from facebook and readers are coming here from there. That's fine, I think. Publicity is good.

But I just want to put it out there that I am not on facebook -- not now, not ever. I would love to be having conversations with people who might be interested in the topics I post about. C'mon over here and leave a comment if you like. I don't bite (well, most of the time).

I'm way past the point of criticizing facebook users. It's whatever. Do what makes sense for you. Personally, I got pissed off years ago when people (both friends and relatives) I used to exchange emails with regularly got on facebook and basically stopped talking to me. Not out of ill will or anything. Rather, they were just too busy on their facebook pages talking to their "friends" to exchange a personal message or two that they (or I) might not necessarily have wanted the whole world -- even just "facebook friends" -- to read (and really, the fact that "friend" has become a verb is a little unnerving in and of itself).

I get why you people like it and can appreciate some of its uses (my band used/uses it for publicity), but the way everyone just jumped on that bandwagon -- "Why are you on facebook? Duh! Everyone's on facebook!" -- gets under my skin. No thanks.

If you've been reading this blog for any little bit of time, you know that a big part of how I was able to extricate myself from academe had to do with resisting the herd impulse, doing something just because everyone else was doing it -- because "it's what you're supposed to do" if you want an academic career. I'm supposed to watch everyone else's Sisyphean adventures in academic career-land year after year, and then, when my turn comes, just DO THE SAME THING? No thanks.

Not exactly directly analogous, I know. But my point is about thinking for yourself. Whether it's facebook or academe, make your own decisions. Don't let the herd decide what makes sense and what's going to work best for you.

Link to me all you want from facebook, but I won't be meeting you there anytime soon.

Via

Arrrgggggggggghhhhhhhh!

I broke my Kindle.

Have an iPad with Kindle app, but I like reading on the Kindle screen. So I'm getting a replacement.

Aaarrrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhh.

If my eyesight weren't as bad as it is, I'd totally be one of those people against the e-readers. But, holy $hit, I can enlarge the text on these things and read without straining my eyes, and you have no idea how awesome that is!!

I'm sold.

I got the Kindle first, right around the time I was finishing the diss. Everybody talks about how nice it is to be able to read for pleasure again, at least for a little while, after finishing the diss. For me, with the Kindle, that was true on a whole other level.

Unwittingly, the tech industry invented something they hoped to make money off of from the general public but also ended up with something incredibly useful for a minority population.

No complaints here...

Power Company Blues (Or, a Mystery Concerning Electricity)

I shouldn't be thinking about this on a Saturday since it is work related, but the ongoing billing dispute we've had with the power company -- complicated by crazy and frivolous landlords, the elderly and slightly senile dance teacher who has access to the meters, and the slightly shady chiropractor across the hall who, quite plausibly, has been stealing electricity from other tenants -- has reached the limits of everyone's patience. We've either got to resolve it soon or move to a new office.

Which would be terrible because A) moving sucks generally, B) I like our current office, and C) this is the dumbest reason ever to move. We should be able to resolve our dispute.

But -- I don't know -- I think we might need Nancy Drew or something. Here are the facts:

• Power Company has been overcharging Think Tank for over a year, since Think Tank moved in. My predecessor finally got them to refund about $5,000 right around the time I started, but then, after a month or two, they started overcharging us again. By a lot.
• It's hard to agree on what they should be charging us because access to the meters is restricted. They are located in another tenant's space (slightly senile dance teacher), who is never there during normal business hours. Power Company comes to read the meters, but they can't get in and so they estimate. But the estimates are all over the map (literally, ranging from $16.66 to $1,414.87) and seem to have no basis in what you'd expect reality to be (we expect our actual bill should be between $200 and $300 per month).
• Slightly Senile Dance Teacher, whom I finally met in person the other day, is upset because her power bills have doubled within the last year and she doesn't know why. You'd think this would prompt her to be available to let Power Company do the readings. But no. They only get in every couple months. Do her bills say that her usage has increased, even if she hasn't done anything differently? Not sure. She has to check her bills. Even weirder thing, though, is that her bills aren't all over the place like ours, just consistently about double what they used to be.
• She tells me, too, although I haven't verified it, that at least one of the other tenants has had increased bills without an increase in usage, and has had an ongoing dispute with Power Company.
• As if all this weren't bad enough, Shady Chiropractor moved in right around the time everything started. Shady Chiropractor has a state-of-the-art video x-ray machine, which probably makes his electricity consumption per month greater than anyone else's in the building. Yet Shady Chiropractor has never been billed more than the minimum charge of $16.66. Shady Chiropractor is very handy with tools, too. And, Shady Chiropractor has keys to Senile Dance Teacher's studio. Why? Because he asked the landlords for them.
• Senile Dance Teacher is not happy about this and is not too senile not to start connecting the dots. Not sure why she permitted it in the first place.
• The landlords are no help whatsoever. They are silly, frivolous creatures who inherited the property and do not take their responsibilities to their tenants seriously. Moreover, tenants are welcome to do whatever they please to their spaces and the common areas, as long as they pay their rent.

And let's not even talk about the unidentified troll with what I think is an AV business who moved into the sub-basement around the same time Shady Chiropractor moved in upstairs. They're pals, I think.

Fun, huh? You'd think a think tank would be able to think its way out of this.

What would you do?

32,000 Years Ago

Our ancestors etched their impressions of the world on the walls of caves. They relay their messages to us across almost unfathomable gaps of time:

Via from the Chauvet caves in southern France as filmed by Werner Herzog in Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Today we rely on digital media. Our technology is exponentially more powerful in what it can do in the moment, but it becomes obsolete in no time at all.

Via

Their lives were as ephemeral as ours, but their art has lasted. Will ours?

How to Embed Links in Your Blog Comments....Or, Isn't Learning New Stuff Cool?

I realize I may have sounded a little bitchy in a few recent posts, but better on one's blog than in Real Life, right?

Also, even though I'm a total technophobe, it really is cool to learn new techy stuff when you motivate yourself to get around to it. I just (perhaps stupidly) assume it's the same for everyone else, too. Hence my ranting about certain people not knowing what Google documents are.

To illustrate that I'm not just blowing smoke, here's something I just learned (see comments to this recent post) that I thought some of my fellow humanities-type, possibly technophoic blogger/readers might appreciate (because, of course, you like learning new stuff, too!):

I never knew how to embed links in blog comments. I thought it was magic. Simple code, yes, I knew that, but that still seems like magic to me. I'm one of those annoying commenters formerly guilty of copying and pasting long URLs into comments that aren't even links. Readers would have to copy and past them into a browser (if they cared enough to bother, that is). How annoyingly asinine of me!

Especially when the magic code really is so simple. And so, if you ever wondered, too, here's how you do it.

In our comment, just type this:

<a href="the URL you want to link to">the text you want people to click on in your comment to get to that URL</a>

The code is in yellow. The URL is blue. The text is purple. And, obviously, you don't color code it!

So, if you've never done it before, leave a comment with a link to your blog (or somewhere else, if you prefer). It's magic!

Can I Just Say...

*Updated below.

There is something wrong with you if you work in an administrative position that requires you to "coordinate" with people 700 miles away doing MS Office-type functions YET YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT A GOOGLE DOCUMENT IS!

Holy stupid cow!!

I know I don't have to explain this to readers, but, in case there's someone out there even more technophobic than I am, a Google document is an online document that you can "share" with others. All you need is a Google/gmail login, and you can create, edit, upload, download, and share documents that you create in Word, Excel, and other programs. I forgive anyone in academe who doesn't know this, because we don't often "share" our work this way, but in an office environment? When you work with people halfway across the country?

Here's how Google documents can be useful in this setting: There's an event coming up that your organization is hosting. Would-be participants can RSVP and register by sending their info to any one of several people. All of this registration information needs to go into a very simple chart, but it can be a challenge to manage the chart if multiple people are constantly adding to it. Every time you add something, you have to forward the file to somebody else, who then has to do the same thing when they add something.

Pain in the a$$, right? More to the point, it's an organizational nightmare because (some) people constantly forget to send their updated files -- or forget to check that they received an updated file (remember this post from the other day?).

So, Google documents provide a really simple solution. Everybody shares the file. Everybody updates the same online file. It's there online in real time. There's no sending back and forth of emails necessary. You don't have to remember to send everyone else your updates. And you can always download it at any time and save a copy to your computer (you know, in case you think Google is going to crash or something).

Duh. All you need to do is know what a Google document is and login. Don't have Gmail yet? It'll take you less than five minutes to create an account, which you don't have to use for anything else. And I'm the biggest technophobe ever. If I can figure out how to use this thing, anyone can.

Instead, here's what my coworker 700 miles away wrote in an email today: "In our last email you sent me a link or something to download the_______ from google and it wanted me to create an account, I don’t want to do that. Please just send me the list as an attachment."

Yeah, and you don't know what a comma splice is, either, but, hey, you don't need to have perfect grammar to do your job. BUT IF YOU'D TAKE FIVE MINUTES TO GET YOURSELF INTO GOOGLE DOCUMENTS, YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO DO YOUR JOB A WHOLE LOT MORE EFFICIENTLY. And so would I. And I wouldn't have to waste time venting my anger at you by blogging about your stupidity. Again.

So, one more time, Coworker in a Different City (in case you missed the link to that post earlier), here's to you:

*You don't even need Gmail to access Google docs. You can just sign up using your current email and creating a Google password. How freakin' hard is that?

What's on Tap for You This Afternoon?

There's a bar downstairs from the office. They have a decent selection of beer on tap, vegetarian sandwiches (er, a few anyway), and free wifi. Apparently my predecessor used to hang out here a lot, but this is the first time I've migrated down from the office. Probably won't be the last.

The biggest reason I mostly stay in the office ist that I prefer to work plugged into a monitor. The laptop screen is hard to see (too small, too much glare), and to see it well enough to do anything of a serious nature, I have to hunch myself over in less-than-comfortable ways, especially when typing or doing anything that requires quickness.

But reading? Or, blogging leisurely? Not at all impossible. And on a beautiful afternoon like this, with the bar open to the outside and not much to do workwise except pay attention to the inbox? Well, who cares if it is taking me twice as long as it otherwise would to write this post?

So, what's on tap this afternoon? I'm going to finish my veggie wrap (served with sweet potato fries -- yum!), catch up on blog reading, maybe have a beer while going through the bibliography of a book that's pertinent to my own book project (and get a reading list started for this next step towards book), check my inbox and do whatever comes along (going upstairs if necessary), and generally enjoy the afternoon.

What about y'all out there? I know some of you are heading into summer break and/or sabbatical? What's on tap for you this lovely day?

Disabilities in the Workplace: A Personalized Introduction

This post is the first on a subject I expect I may return to now and again. Since I have a disability and am in the process of adjusting to a new work setting, I’ve been thinking a lot about the subject lately and figured I’d start things off by introducing my perspective and raising some of the issues I want to consider in future posts. Ultimately, through this series of posts, I want to argue for the valuable role colleges and universities can play in creating equal opportunities for people with disabilities, both on campus and off.

Blindness Isn’t What You May Think

Although I am “legally blind,” if you met me at a conference, in a class, at a coffee shop, at a party, in line at the grocery store, or in any number of other everyday situations, you would never know that I couldn’t see very well. I don’t wear dark glasses (or any glasses at all, except when I’m reading or when everyone else is wearing sunglasses, too), don’t use a white cane, and don’t have a guide dog. I can read regular print in books and newspapers and on restaurant menus without accommodations, though my eyes get tired easily and I prefer some type of magnification (e-readers like the Kindle that offer text enlargement are the best invention ever!). While my visual acuity (what the eye doctor measures) is very poor, my functional vision (ability to use what I have) is very good. In most situations, I am able to “pass” as a sighted person, and, as a casual acquaintance, you would be surprised when I told you I couldn’t drive.

Georgina Kleege and Stephen Kuusisto have both written about their experiences as blind people passing for sighted, respectively in Sight Unseen and Planet of the Blind. I could write my own book on this subject (and may sometime, especially since some of my experiences differ from Kleege’s and Kuusisto’s), but there are some situations in which passing is impossible.

To give you a sense of what those situations might be, sit comfortably at your computer. Perhaps it is a laptop? Position yourself at a “normal” distance, so that you can easily read the screen and type. Now, slowly move away. Slide your chair back or get up and walk backwards, resting your laptop on a surface other than your lap but looking at the screen all the while. When you reach a point where you can tell that there are icons and text on the screen but cannot decipher the icons or read the text, you will have some idea of what I see when I am sitting a “normal” distance from a laptop. Cell phones are worse.

Blindness in the workplace

While many options do exist for making technology like laptops and cellphones accessible for the blind, someone who works in academia and has functional vision like mine can entirely evade them by evading the technology itself. I’ve never owned a laptop, because I have a desktop set-up at home that works excellently. With a 21” monitor positioned on a stand over my keyboard and just a few inches from my face, I can work comfortably without the need for text enlargement or text-to-audio software. When on campus, I would occasionally use computers in the adjunct office to check e-mail or in class to show a PowerPoint but never had to work for long periods of time on them. As I said in my previous post, in academia no one cares, as long as you get your work done. My dissertation director, who has normal vision, doesn’t have a laptop, either (nor a cellphone, unless something’s changed in the time since we last spoke).

However, when I showed up Friday for the first full day at my new job, it became immediately and painfully apparent to everyone just how blind I was. The laptop I am to use, besides just being a laptop, was configured in the worst way possible (icons and text on smallest settings, distracting wallpaper, transparent windows borders, along with room lighting that made the screen glare unmanageable). In addition to learning about my tasks while adjusting to Windows 7 and Office 2007 (I’ve been using XP and 2003), a modest challenge for anyone, I had to deal with an interface I could barely see.

The whole experience was overwhelming, awkward, and embarrassing.

Disclosure

I’ll end this post by saying that, after spending the weekend reconfiguring the view settings and getting comfortable with the software, I think things will be just fine. I have the option, if need be, of bringing in a monitor and keyboard and plugging them into the laptop and will be able to get a BlackBerry Bold, if it turns out the regular one doesn’t work out.

But disclosure remains a problem. How and when do people with “invisible” disabilities let employers know they might need reasonable accommodations? What if you aren’t even sure what you will need? What if “reasonable accommodations” aren’t possible?

To be continued…

The Most Important Thing You Learn in Graduate School Is Learning How to Learn (Or, Is it?)

If I don’t get fired for being technologically (or otherwise) incompetent the first week, this job may turn out to be OK, at least for the time being.

In my post earlier today, I mentioned that I had some fears about this job. One of them is my woefully behind-the-times tech knowledge. You see, in academe, nobody really cares all that much if you’re using an old (i.e. 2003) version of Office to write your articles, prep for class, keep your gradebook, or whatever, as long as you get your teaching and writing done. Nobody cares if you’ve ever dealt with the calendar function in Outlook, or ever used Outlook at all, as long as you more or less show up when and where you’re supposed to and more or less keep up with your e-mail correspondence. Nobody cares if you’re still using Windows XP or that you’ve never owned a laptop, nor does anyone care that you don’t ever use your old and very basic cellphone, much less whether you have a fancy new one, like a Blackberry or the latest iPhone.

In the nonacademic world, people do care. Of course, there are academic technophiles, but I am not one of them. I learn new software and how to use new devices only on an as-needed basis. Dear readers, I don’t even really give a crap about how the technology running this blog works, as long as I know just enough to cast my words out upon the interwebs (there will be no bells and whistles or fancy gadgets running here) for your reading pleasure. But, as the technophiles among you already know, technology changes. People who work in offices tend to keep up with these changes as a matter of course. In my new role, I will be using a laptop, with Windows 7 and Office 2007 on it, and I have been assigned a Blackberry (although I probably won’t have to use that very often). In my training session today, I was a bit overwhelmed. My tasks are not all that difficult, but it is Very Important that they get done – done promptly and done right. I am essentially the Joan Harris of this office, part executive secretary and part office manager (although the office itself is much, much smaller than the one Joan runs and in a less glamorous industry than advertising). If I screw up the calendar, Very Important Person misses Very Important Meeting. If I screw up travel arrangements, Very Important Person ends up in the wrong city without a car and misses Very Important Conference. If I screw up the expense reports or invoices, people don’t get reimbursed for travel and purchases or, in some cases, paid at all. I still don’t even know where to find all the stuff I need to use in these new MS applications, and I am kind of seriously freaking out.

Now, if you’re still reading, you may be wondering, “Why the frack did they hire this person who is so clearly technologically inept?” The answer is that I have a Ph.D. in English (!) and therefore ought to be able to figure out anything I don’t already know (!!?). How awesome is that?

Truthfully, I don’t think they realize just how utterly incompetent I am, but my boss was an undergraduate English major who had seriously considered going on for a Ph.D. and becoming a professor but wisely thought better of it. The other person who interviewed me, as well as the person I am replacing, were also both English majors and both currently write fiction. The colleague has published a novel. So, it was a good interview. We talked about writing. And critical theory (seriously, we did!), not secretary stuff.

They are going to be sorely disappointed and, if they do end up firing me, will probably never hire a Ph.D. again (sorry, fellow post academics, that I may end up leaving a very bad impression of us on the nonacademic world).

In fact, there is actually more (of a personally idiosyncratic nature) to the story of my technological ineptitude, at least when it comes to laptops and Blackberries, which speaks to the differences between working in academic vs. nonacademic environments, but I will save that for another post. Perhaps tomorrow, after my second and last training day and the Fancy Lunch to be held for the person I am to replace.

This weekend, I get to take the laptop home and will be giving myself a crash course in all that I never thought I’d want to know about the latest versions of Windows and Office. We will find out if it is indeed true that the most important thing you learn in graduate school is learning how to learn.