Arrived home from MLA via Detroit on Thursday. Since I've surrendered almost three full days to gluttonous lazies: home-made fried chicken, NFL playoffs, afternoon naps, a nightly Wolavers' oatmeal stout, a breeze through Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, and darn near nothing else. Today I can feel the low, resistant grind of changing gears--from no gear to anything-chug productive. Spring syllabus is due tomorrow--or Wednesday, depending on who you ask (this would be easier if I didn't read *all* of my email). I'm penciled in for a section of WRT205: Critical Research and Writing, a course that more or less picks a topic (invention by topoi) and then gets on with research a la "critical inquiry", which I take to mean "examined" or "deliberate" inquiry: self-reflective... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

(via via)... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Thanks to McSweeney's, I came up with the perfect holiday gift for my nephews.... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Dog-eared in PrairyErth, a book I was reading last summer: But the stories didn't work very well for me, and I walked on, the sky dimming like my mood. Then I remembered that in the little rucksack I carry on my tramps, somewhere among the notebook and pencils, binoculars and magnifying glass, camera and canteen, field guides and raisins, was a thing I'd bought a few days earlier and still had not used: a truck side-mirror, the small convex kind you stick on. I'd recently read about an eighteenth-century traveler's device called a Claude glass that served to condense and focus a landscape and make it apprehensible in a way direct viewing cannot. When the English poet Thomas Grey first crossed Lake Windermere, he reserved... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

In typical C.I. fashion, a list: Is. asked to play this song over and over and over today.  And at lunch she kept saying, "Tee-ka-lee." Grades. Check. To cap the semester, a meeting tomorrow and a mock in-person interview on Friday. Mock: I am to sport a turtleneck and then all of my questioners heckle me about the answers when it's over. Kidding aside, I'm grateful for the simulations. In the spring I will be teaching an online section of WRT205 associated with University College.  I have some decisions to make.  Today I've been thinking about a focus on attitude: worldview, manner (a split of Burkean agency), and so on.  I saw something about Carol Dweck's Mindset, but it also could tie in with a... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Any word on what the blue tastes like? (via).... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

How about a spiffy floormat as a gift for the academic job seeker(s) in your life? Of course, at more than $600 US, it had better come with the black boots and a magic spell for a round trip carpet ride to the SF MLA later this month. (via)... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

So that the sweet tooths of the house (my own included) would stop gnashing at me about how little we have on hand to please (and also to rot) them, I boiled together three half-batches of rock candy early this afternoon: peppermint, anise, and cinnamon. Can you tell from the photo that I've never made rock candy before?... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

If you can spare five or ten minutes, Ph. is working on a school project for his Government class. He has been asked to develop an argument concerned with public policy, and he has been thinking about a focus on smoking in public places: specifically about recent changes in smoking bans in public spaces, indoor and out. This afternoon we spent some time together getting his questions set up on Survey Monkey. Basically, I'm just trying to help him get word out on the survey, which you can complete here. If you can spare five or ten minutes.... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Over at ReadWriteWeb today, I caught this entry about EtherPad, a collaborative text-authoring web app. One conspicuous difference between EtherPad and the other word processing web apps (Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword, Zoho Writer, etc.) is that the changes to the text are nearer to synchronous. Contributors see each other's writing almost immediately. Even better: EtherPad does not require an account; no sign-up is necessary. The site provides this demo. It's easy to imagine using EtherPad for drafting a conference proposal or something, although Google Docs has proven adequate for that sort of thing. Where I see EtherPad's greatest immediate use (in my world, anyway) is in the online consultation appointments we've been offering lately in the Writing Center. Right now I use any number of... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Help me out: web site or website? Or: Web site or Website? This morning, I was reading while the Element was having its oil changed and its rear differential freshly gooped, and I found a few variations of web site, Website, etc. I'm inclined to prefer "web site"--two words and lower case. What about you?... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Number of tow truck drivers I kidded with about the snow on Monday morning: 1 Number of blocked shots I hope to tally at this evening's weekly pick-up game: 8 Number of WC consultations earlier today that had me wishing our table had a dish 'o mints on it: 1 Number of students who probably thought it was me who needed a mint: Same Hour of the day Is. decided everyone in the house should start their Tuesday, Deepvember 18: <6 a.m. In epoch format: 1226988000 Students missing from this morning's class: 3 Number of meetings I've attended this week: 2 Number of those meetings where pizza, sodas, and salad were provided: 1 Number of people on campus who today asked me about being on... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

A quick entry: It's getting late, and I teach in the morning, then spend two hours in the WC, and after that, a meeting. Plus, I just looked out the window, and it appears that we live in the snowy part of Syracuse, so chances are I'll have to remember where I last took off my winter boots back when last it snowed in, what, May? This weekend I stumbled onto a few limitations for Movable Type and Delicious mash-ups I'd been thinking about for some time. I'd been plotting for a few weeks a plan to export all 1000-some entries from EWM into a standard bookmark format. After the export, I was going to upload the full index (complete with keywords, notes, and timestamps)... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Fifteen minutes of re-make digression, perhaps best--liveliest--between 9 minutes and his "tidying up" of Jackson Pollock around 12:20.... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

We're experimenting in the WC this semester with consultation by discontinuous email. Students can upload up to five pages of whatever they are working on, the draft then zigs and zags (taking two lefts and then a right?) through the internet to a listserv account where five always-on consultants take turns commenting and returning drafts, usually within 24 hours after the draft is sent. The system seemed to be working fine until recently when we realized a flaw in the design of the upload form. Basically, the form allows students to 1.) upload a file or 2.) copy and paste a chunk of text into the form. 'Submit' The form then calls up a PHP script, which, when there is an uploaded file, puts the... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

An email message this morning asked about Flickr Creative Commons and citation: "How do you handle it?" I'd planned to address this in the class I am teaching on Tuesday morning, so it was more or less on my mind already. I responded that I prefer one of two methods for presenting the citations indexing the images used in a slide show: 1.) bookmark all of the images and any other web-based content using a unique Delicious tag and then present that one URL on a slide at the end of the presentation or 2.) provide a series of slides (as many as necessary) at the end with full citations for all of the sources used in the slideshow and in the talk. I used... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Back in the back porch, Is. now rides loops on a loaner tricycle--a "loaner" because we have generous friends whose two kids are margins older and younger than Is. such that they bookend the "age of trikes." The three-wheeler's a Radio Flyer Fold-n-Go; we'll return it just before we leave town next summer, just before their youngest is ready, just about the time Is. levels up to a small bicycle with training wheels. In the meantime, she rolls self-powered over the pile. Plus, one less thing to load with the other hybrids when we Fold-n-Go. In addition to this newfound locomotion (i.e., something like "motion out of a locale" or "located/emplaced motion"), our conversations have continued to take flight, too: "What sort of bird is... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

A couple of months ago, D., Is., and I were out strolling around the streets of Syracuse, along Colvin Ave., in fact, huffing up the big hill. "I think it's time to cut the blog loose and set it out to sea, put an end to it," I said. I went on to explain why I was thinking this way, although today I can't recall what were the reasons so clear to me at the time (realizing recently that "chicken" won as the Big Word of the Month at EWM in September was a sobering reminder of the conversation). This is just to say that merciful blogicide has crossed my mind. It's not like the blogosphere of 2008 has half the pulse it did for... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Allen Iverson's a Piston for the season. Huh. How about that? And Detroit plays Larry Brown's Bobcats tonight. I'm not sure whether this puts Detroit in a position to re-take Boston as the East's elite team. Maybe, just maybe, it'll give the Pistons some new kick, new spark. But it also gives them a encouraging degree of free agency flexibility next summer if the Iverson-for-Billups/McDyess trade doesn't pay off in the short term. At the very least, it's a reason to pay closer attention to the Pistons at a time of year when the Lions are no longer watchable.... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu

Yes, Ph. carved, following a template from yeswecarve.com (else where). In the spirit of bipartisanship, of reaching across the aisle with pumpkin-goo-covered hands, we would've notched up a gourd for the McCain campaign, but the second pumpkin took to rotting before we could get to it. Seriously, it was really rotten. To rebound from the disappointment, D. assisted Is. in markering a Dora face on one of the miniature pumpkins out front. We picked up the pumpkins a week ago, Sunday, at Critz Farms in Cazenovia--a trip worth making for their apple fritters alone.... dmueller http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/ dmueller@syr.edu