Blog

some changes

April 25th, 2007

Man. I don’t even know where to start. I’ve been working on a post about the blog for days, and it’s about 12 pages long and completely disjointed. But before I get to that, I have to make an announcement. I’ve made the very difficult decision to temporarily cut back to one new Dykes to Watch Out For episode every four weeks, instead of every two weeks. I’ll be interspersing these new Read the rest of this entry »

spring

April 20th, 2007

Speaking of off topic, here’s a movie I made today–well, now it’s yesterday already, which sort of takes some of the pungency away–of the phoebes who return every year to nest at my house. They usually get here around April 9 or so, but it’s been so wintry, they weren’t showing up and I was growing quite anxious. They arrived at last on Wednesday. Today, Thursday, was a stunning bright blue spring day. You can’t actually see the phoebes in the video because I wasn’t patient enough. But you can hear them. You can also hear the brook rushing. I stole this photo off the Cornell bird site, which is normally really great but seems to have been under construction for a while now.

Today was such a nice day, in fact, that I couldn’t think about blogsistentialism at all.

blogsisential crisis

April 16th, 2007

Here I am shoveling through a wall of wet snow at an ugodly hour this morning so I could drive to the airport and NOT fly to Pittsburgh. My flight from Burlington was delayed so long that I wasn’t going to get there in time to speak tonight, if at all. So I came home.

We’re going to reschedule my visit to Carnegie Mellon for some time in the next month–I’ll keep you posted.

I haven’t been ignoring the recent flap here about my Open Thread idea. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m still working on a coherent response, and will post it soon. In one way, there’s not a lot to say. It was a flawed solution to an ill-defined problem. Many commenters had a strong reaction against it. It’s gone.

But reading your ensuing discussion about the nature of blogs and online communities, I realized that I’ve never had a very clear idea about the purpose of this one, or what my relationship is to it. That’s what I’m trying to formulate.

Coming to Pittsburgh

April 14th, 2007

In case you’re in the neighborhood, I’m speaking at Carnegie Mellon on Monday night. If I get there. I keep hearing about a Nor’easter that’s supposed to hit Sunday and Monday. I don’t know what will happen if my flight is cancelled. Will they postpone my gig or just forget about it?

women and children first

April 13th, 2007

Hey, go buy some books from Women and Children First and help one of the last women’s bookstores in the country to stay open. Here’s Linda and Ann, the owners. How can you resist? Here’s an article about how the store’s struggling and needs more support. They have a good website, I just ordered a couple books I’ve been wanting.

yikes

April 12th, 2007

Talk about flinging a rodent into the cat show. (Thank you for that image, ladiesbane.) I’m very, very sorry to have upset anyone with my misguided attempt to corral the conversation. Let’s just consider the Open Thread a failed experiment, shall we? So far all I seem to have accomplished is to double the number of comments. I just made my way through the 63 on “clustr,” and can’t yet bring myself to look at the 84 on the Open Thread. I’m going to go out for a ski to brace myself. Later, I will compose a formal response.

clustr

April 10th, 2007

Thanks to everyone who’s been pointing out the malfunctioning Clustrmap. I finally figured out the problem. When you reach a certain number of hits, like 583,875 or so, you have to start paying for it. I’ll get on that soon, and hopefully all our globe-spanning red dots will be restored. The map was one of many things Katie and I discussed with our web guy Gahlord at a meeting last week. We’ll be inflicting various other updates to the site soon, now that I have some time and brain cells to spare on it.

One thing I’m giving some thought to is the way the blog has turned into a de facto messageboard. A poster named Cyan pointed this out recently, and I have to say it’s a good point. I’m worried that the familiar, in-group atmosphere here might start to have an inhibiting effect on new visitors, and I’m trying to figure out ways to avoid that. Also, I can’t always keep up with everyone’s comments. And that feels problematic since I’m personally responsible for the blog in the way I wouldn’t be responsible for a messageboard.

My first thought was to actually move the discussion to a messageboard, but that seemed a bit extreme. I like the conversations that go on here—I just don’t want them to become too closed or exclusive. So Gahlord had the idea of creating “open thread” posts at regular intervals, like Daily Kos does. This would be a way of leaving a forum in place for comments and conversations that may not be strictly germane to my posts.

I know this means sacrificing some of the our lovely discursiveness. But hopefully the digressions would continue to some extent on the Open Threads. In the interest of a more focused and accessible blog, I’m going to try this. Uh…heck, let’s just start now and see what you think. It might not work at all.

PS A very belated thanks to Anna for finding the typo in episode 507.

Open Thread (beta version)

April 10th, 2007

(Cake recipe swapping, Favorite Beatle discussions, Mary vs. Rhoda, or anything else slightly off-topic that you care to discuss.)

purge

April 8th, 2007

It’s a very wintry Easter here. Vide snow peeps on my deck.

But despite the weather, I’m engaged in some heavy-duty rebirth-and-renewal type activity. My office has been growing more and more dysfunctional since Read the rest of this entry »

birds

April 6th, 2007

It’s still the dead of winter here in Vermont. But man, I’m so grateful to be at home with my birds instead of flying around the country in a virus-ridden airplane. Here’s a little movie I made this afternoon. First, juncos. Then chickadees. Then a hairy woodpecker having a vigorous bath.