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Archive for December, 2005

Your tax dollars at work

Posted December 9, 2005

Everyone has those favorite examples of ‘your tax dollars at work’. Those silly little things that our elected officials find time to do when they should be figuring out other things. Such as:

The war in Iraq
The environment
The budget

Well, here’s my favorite new example. It’s barney cam (realplayer). Oh my goodness. Watch this video, and think of all the people that took time to participate in this foolishness.

Seriously, they probably sat down to storyboard that thing out! There are about 15 different people in the first 2 minutes! Who has time for this? Who has time to blog about this 😉 (it only took 2 minutes to type this out, I promise)

Recharging

Posted December 4, 2005

Comments(2)

My long-time readers of this site will have noticed a decrease in the amount of activity on this site in the past 6 months. I started a new job this summer, and for a variety of reasons, posting to my site has been pushed lower and lower on the priority scale.

Time, obviously, has been a factor. Whereas I used to have a more regular flow in terms of productivity and I could tune into a website or read about the latest political or science news for a few minutes, my new environment is such that instead of 1 or two projects… now there are 25 different things on my whiteboard. Instead of answering to just a few people, there are hundreds of people that may be knocking on my door at any time. It is very exciting, it fits my personality, and it doesn’t leave too much time for browse and comment activities.

The main reason, though, is more difficult. Sub-conciously, I’ve been stuck the past few months trying to figure out how this site plays into my life. What outlet does this serve? If it’s to tell funny stories, scream frustrations about Bush, and relate the weird things that I see in the world (like the lady I saw yesterday with a leaf blower, trying to clean off her sidewalk, but really just blowing snow all over the freaking place)… Well, a lot of those stories now need to pass through a filter, and I’m very conscious of that.

Luckily, I had a minor revelation yesterday. The tagline of this site is “A blinding flash of the obvious”, and this would fit right in. Yesterday, I was at a workshop with Tim Wilson, who is the technology integration specialist at the Hopkins schools. The topic of the workshop was the “read/write web”– blogs, wikis, etc, and how these technologies fit into education.

It was a great workshop. I didn’t learn any new technologies exactly, but I went in with the hope that I would learn a bit about how to talk about these exciting things, get pumped up a bit and forget about all the little things that you can get bogged down in. Kind of a recharge outside of the daily bubble… and I got that. I think instead of seeing a slow decline in the amount of things I talk about, you’ll begin to see a couple of new categories show up… things that I work with on a daily basis now. There will still be geeky little posts about my car or politics or some new CD I got, but there will be some new things as well.

Anyways, why am I writing all this? Like I said way back at the beginning, this site is really just for me. The fact that other people read it is an added bonus.