disorganized breakfast and developments ramblings

It's a tea and marmalade-on-buttered-flax-bread sort of morning. My main task today is to catch up with myself.

I've been so busy, which has been great, but it has also meant that I've left things behind. My recycling is out of control (need to call the alderman, as my area seems to have been left in between systems--blue bag or blue box, and we don't have the new boxes, so I have to haul my recycling elsewhere). I'd like to get started with worm composting, though that may be a task for after I join #psone and thus have handy access to a drill so I can make my own enclosure rather than buying one.

I've already started a small pre-worm composting bin and am tossing my grapefruit rinds (have I mentioned that I've been re-addicted to grapefruit?) and used tea leaves in there. It's sooo nice to toss the tea somewhere I know it will be productive, rather than in the trash where I know it will be plasticized and then take up space in a landfill.

Oh! And just before May Day, I planted a little herb garden and some peppers (and re-potted the spider plant Marty gave me cuttings of) for my porch. The fact that it's enclosed is handy here, but it still gets a ton of light. Though we're already getting those fake ladybugs inside it. I hope they won't become a problem.

But back to breakfast: I picked up the tea last night in Chinatown, after learning that I can walk there in a terribly reasonable 15-20 minutes. Becoming too impatient to wait for the bus does have its perks.

But back to the tea. It's a peach-infused green which will make an excellent (and less caffeinated) alternative to the peach black I originally got a ton of at P.F. Chang's so long ago that I'm almost out of.

And it complements the apple-citrus sylt (marmalade). Which is, rather sadly, from IKEA, since I haven't gotten up to Andersonville to shop for the real thing yet.

Oh, and my favorite thing about this tiny breakfast this morning--the trick I started using to soften cold refrigerated butter: put the butter on the bread but don't even attempt to spread it until after placing it on top of the water boiler near the steam vent. So much easier afterward.

I've now talked with my landlord: I'll be staying in the aptly nicknamed GoldPeach past July and thus for another year. Which is excellent since I've finally got the furniture the way I want it and he's finally letting me hang things (and thus put holes in the walls).

I also started another professional blog since I've lost access to my Penn State blog space. The task right now is importing and adding backdated entries that were housed elsewhere or that I drafted way back when but never posted. Like the one about Flourish conference that I ended up drafting in an email to the head of the central management team when he asked about it. And I still need to write one about the TLT Symposium.

The oblique reference to #psone needs a bit more clarification, doesn't it? I first found out about it at Flourish, which is a conference about open source. And #psone is very open source-minded, though they work on a membership model. Their events are often open to the public, but usually for an extra fee (which is another way they raise money to support the organization, which is legally a non-profit). They recently started renting a space and are in the midst of the build-out, including the building of a loft space, among many other perks. Here are some pictures I took at one of the Tuesday meetings. Members teach each other what they know: programming to carpentry, press release writing to how to use a scroll saw, juggling to electrical engineering, and anything and everything in between. I might run one (if I join) about making chain maille/chainmail, jewelry and otherwise.

Could also do one on photography, now that I think about it. Friday was full of photography: I shot behind-the-scenes on a taping of Good Morning America in one of our labs. It should run next Friday morning. I've got the photos I could finish and post the half-hour I had left after the (long, exhausting) day up on our flickr account for the college.

I'm now out of marmalade and tea, so I'll have to continue this later. Too much else to get on with today.

Process: one/day

Following Cole's lead, a little reflection about the One Post a Day project.

I agree with him in that it helps focus a concept to the point of sharing succinctly, but the down side I'd share is that I certainly have less time.

In fact, today's the first night in a week that I haven't had obligations other than this post. Well, I do, but they're not as pressing/scheduled as the others have been. Haven't even touched WoW in that time, in fact.

And I also suspect that quality suffers.

From memory, my blog output has generally been best when it's one or two a week. That gives me some time to percolate on a subject rather than just tossing it out there for the sake of having something up for the day.

And in fact, after the obligation of one-a-day is over, I suspect I'll take a hiatus to get things back to normal, and then try to go back to a schedule of that sort.

One a week is manageable. One a day is pressure, and it's not a good kind of pressure considering everything else I've got going on. But I've made it this far, so I'll (be trying to) finish out the month.

Geology and tech: the end is the beginning is the end

I think I prefaced over this last weekend that I wasn't going to have a theme with this entry in mind.

I started college as a geology major. Somewhat obviously, I didn't stick with it, but it's still a great interest of mine.

Some of you know and some of you don't that I have an MFA in Creative Writing. So a lot of my so-called "personal" reading is actually keeping up on that end of things for me.

And to combine both interests, I recently read Threshold, by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's very much in a genre I used to write--a pseudo-magical realism, if magical realism in literature could be divorced from its Latin American roots (which it can't be, really). It starts out gritty, modern, and then wanders gently into science, myth, urban legend, and a particular superstitious nature you find in the south.

But my main point in addressing the experience of reading this book was the following passage, voiced by our narrator, Chance, who was in college as a geology major at the time:

"Can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I'm learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read the words." - p. 177

It's this urge that drives me, strangely enough, in my current work as well.

I'm learning to read in a larger sense than I've ever read so far. And to some extent this was an evolution: I did, after all, start on email quite awhile ago, then moved to forums, then Livejournal, then Blogger, then Facebook/MySpace, then Twitter, and Google Reader and the big feeds (Slashdot, BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, etc) got stuck in there somewhere too (and I may be skipping steps, of course: on the multimedia end, Flickr and YouTube are two examples, but I'm talking about text here, in the main).

But in terms of an educated and informed community that I can have face-to-face contact with and shares my academic/work interests, this is a first (which might be, I might add, because my college/grad work had little to do with technology). Not just casual friends giving updates on their lives, but I get a touch of friendliness and personality alongside the theory.

So I get these fantastic ideas as well as the context surrounding them: the problems that were faced to prompt them to come up with these ideas. It's good stuff.

But larger than that, and for a longer period of time, I've been learning to read people and their interaction with technology; learning to read the evolution of society due to technology's influence; learning to read how technology is changing our minds and changing our spaces.

I'm reading the future. I've already learned to read the past.

So between geology and tech, I feel like I've got the span of things.1 And while this current tech iteration is more minute than an atom in a drop in a bucket in terms of geologic time, it's monumental for us living in it.

And I get to read it. And better yet, write some of it.

[1]Oroboros.

Spend a Summer Day notes

Writing my first post-a-day blog post in August on my iPhone during gaps in a Spend a Summer Day.

SASD, as we know it and love it for short, is a day-long open house event held at all Penn State campuses. At Penn State University Park, due simply to demand, it's held on six days: every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday spanning two weeks, usually bridging July and August.

August 1st, incidentally, is also the day our new application for admission goes live. Given that and the fact that EVERYONE in the office helps during SASD (our Executive Director was running between the HUB and Schwab Auditorium on Monday trying to fix a problem), to say this time of year is stressful is an understatment.

I've been staffing our table at the information fair during the event pretty regularly so far, and I've noted a difference in style between me and some of my colleagues. Some colleagues push our brochures, despite all the information in a few of them being available online.

If I can make a generalization, these tend to be the older admissions folks who are more used to using the brochures. Others offer options: you could grab this AP brochure to see what credit you'd get for what score on which test, or you can look it up on our website. (for my own commentary, why waste the paper and cost us the money for four scores they could easily look up?)

I've also found that when I offer my AIM handle to students I'm talking to, they get super-enthusiastic. And even their parents start telling me I'm the last word in customer service: above and beyond and all that.

So while this doesn't affect the larger conversation of the newest modes of electronic communication, it does tell me that some folks are picking them up no problem (students, to generalize), some folks are slowly picking them up or recognizing their value (parents), and some folks will print out webpages if the brochure is discontinued (the non-technologically-savvy).

But the thing is, we have to serve them all. Penn State is committed to serving the Commonwealth, and any one of the above could either become a student here or at least interface with the University in some way.

So how do we serve all, even those not comfortable with technology?

I think the idea of engaging the early adopters is a good one (apologies that I don't remember who suggested it right now), and certainly paves the way to spreading the word in a grassroots fashion.

Something else I'd like to explore further, perhaps in a later post, is how technology can help us realize cost savings and green initiatives without leaving anyone behind, especially considering the widespread nature of Penn State's mission.

August challenge

Taking up Cole's challenge of a post a day for August, according to the rules outlined there. Me and Daniel and Shannon so far, as far as I've seen.

Love to say more on the matter, but I've got a meeting in a second here. One thing to share before I go: I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and also was fed a video of Shirky talking about his book by someone in my network (the section about flash mobs is especially engaging: "nothing says dictatorship like arresting people eating ice cream," for example).

And the commentary I'd like to add is that this is, to some extent, what we're doing. Someone has an idea, puts the call out there to see if anyone's interested, and people throw their hats into the ring, cooperatively arranging taxonomies (er, folksonomies, really) to tag and aggregate content, resulting in a pool of information and new ideas being created.

It's what I've seen in action growing slowly over a year, accelerated by the TLT Symposium and Twitter, sparked further by TweetMeets and BS Breakfasts and Bookclub, and burst into full flame (as far as I can tell) in Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State. And I'm convinced that this is the way to do it.

But it's happening this way (or similarly, at least) elsewhere: EduWeb happened recently, and people were Tweeting and videostreaming (alternate) and liveblogging sessions, and it was almost as good as being there, minus a significant amount of in-person networking and fun. But it can be done. I've been caught up in this plus Jeffrey Veen's idea of an audience ombudsman for conferences and trying to figure out how this works in purely-online communities.

And it really goes back to the idea of an alpha user, I think. But the thing is that we've got a bunch of them here at Penn State.

More to develop on this idea. But it will have to hold: I've got a meeting for our campus tour podcast project coming up.