Ruminate

• Belief-O-Matic — A personality quiz about your religious beliefs and spiritual beliefs :: Save time “Searching” And let Belief-o-Matic tell you what religion you should follow

• The inbox makeover :: Time for me to refactor my mail handling– I made one step in this direction a few months ago, now to finish!

Bud Hunt makes an interesting observation about the potential value of student personal journalling (Xanga, LiveJournal, continuing– for the sake of argument– the idea that a blog and journal represent somewhat different genres) if it is tapped into by the educational system.

But I think that there’s something more important that these journals can be useful for in schools. But not all schools — only those schools that are interested in students as human beings instead of products to be completed or vessels to be filled.

Even without the potential value that this insight into students lives provides, I believe that the acts of blogging and web journalling (even moreso than personal journalling, which is also useful) have an intrinsic value. This is why the aspect of “practice” that Bud quotes from my post is so important to me. I mean practice in multiple senses– as a skill to be learned, and in the Zen manner of a way of being.

Regardless of what we do with/for/to them, the public act of blogging can be an important one. It is a place for synthesis and reflection that has very little outlet in our educational system. It is a practice which encourages understanding ourselves. In my classes blogging isn’t really about the curriculum, it is about learning to be a better learner, a better student, a more demanding thinker unafraid of carving out a little bit of personal space.

If we can tap into that to provide more benefits, that’s great. A single comment from the outside often precipitates the first “Aha!” moment when a neophyte blogger feels the excitement and obligation that comes from being transformed from a consumer of what is given to a participant in the process and community. But tapping into this network in an overt way to create value isn’t strictly necessary…

[ruminate edtech edblogging]

• PostSecret :: postcards with secrets of all kinds…

One thing about being an Alaskan in most online communities: it usually makes me part of a very small group. Add further contrary filters– my politics run left but I’m not generally interested in participating in animal rights or environmentalist communities, nor am I a particularly avid outdoorsman– and it makes the odds of finding another visible denizen of “The Great Land” quite small.

Then I stumble across something like this story about a jazz discussion board member’s online friendship and wonderful memorial created to honor that friend after he died and I get that strange feeling once again about how large and deep these online connections we make are. We so often see only the tip of the iceberg with even those we are close to. [announcement regarding the death of Sheldon 'Dobie' Losben and the SinginSumo Memorial CD Drive for the UAA Library)]

So many stories. The sheer mass of humanity and all the stories that will never be known, left untold or shared only with a few, is awesome in the most classical sense of the term. I imagine the tour buses which ship aging tourists around Alaska to be manhandled for a week or two in between photo opps. Bus after bus after bus filled with people that we usually look upon as– at best– a necessary annoyance. But imagine the stories the fifty or so people on every bus must have… if we just had some way to hear them.

Blogs are another way we get to hear some of these stories. I can’t discount too much the “typical LiveJournal” crowd because those diary style posts so often give back surprising rewards if you just pay attention to them closely enough, or have the patience to read them for a while and get a feel for the very real and individual life underneath.

Throw a dart at a map, pick an address at random from the phonebook, stop a stranger on the street– 9 times out of 10 you will find an interesting tale. It might take some coaxing to get it out, and it might at first seem “ordinary,” but there will be something amazing there for those willing to look.

I enjoy escapist fare and science fiction and the fantastic as much as the next guy, but what really moves me– what I most want to bring in close to myself– are the stories of the “everyday” and the “realist.” The things that we share. The things that make us who we are.

[ruminate SocialSoftware Social Software storytelling]

• NYPL, Video Oral History Gallery :: Selected Clips from the Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project

I have to admit, “buttpuppet” was a new one to me, as in:

“F**k you, Perry Farrell, for selling your band’s greatest song to those Republican buttpuppets.”

And they say bloggers are impoverishing the language…

[ruminate buttpuppet]

• 43 Ideas :: Add your ideas to the growing list of suggestions for 43 Things
• Jazz Drawings by Matt Moor | www.jazzdrawings.com :: Incredible graphite drawings at a ridiculous price…

So Adobe is buying Macromedia. I suppose I should care– I think Fireworks is the shizz-nit for web graphics, Dreamweaver is the best WYSIWYG editor (faint praise, I know), and Cold Fusion is really a great product for a whole range of middle-tier developers. But somehow I just can’t get worked up.

My predictions:

• Adios SVG! We hardly knew you. Flash is your Daddy!
• Adios GoLive (or DW morphs into GoLive)
• Fontographer is finally and truly dead.
• Freehand, RIP, but they won’t tell anyone for years
• Illustrator gets bloated with Freehand bits = Frustrator
• Homesite, RIP, but they’ll continue not telling anyone for years
• Macromedia Bloggers whither away under the thumb of the Great non-communicator

The interesting question is what happens to Fireworks. It clearly trounced Adobe’s “now you see it, now you don’t” ImageReady, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it in the face of Photoshop’s dominance… and the fact that many Photoship afficionadoes prefer to do things the hard way with Photoshop, no matter how much easier it might be in a tool like FW.

The biggest effect will probably be Adobe’s top-heavy corporate structure and top-tier pricing slowing down Macromedia’s already decelerating innovation and adding a luxury tax to the selling price of all their products…

[ruminate adobe macromedia NotABangButAWhimper]

Looks like they have finally succeeded in curing diabetes through islet cell transplantation from a living donor. [see more Google News stories]

I would gladly donate to my daughter regardless of the (small?) potential risk of developing diabetes later on in my life…

[ruminate diabetes]