My Books

being online for the sake of being online

Ha! Liz mentioned weeks ago that there’s open wireless under the Virgin Lounge (though not from the Virgin Lounge, that signal’s restricted – Varig and elal are open though a little weak) at JFK, and since there’s nothing as cool as being […]

not so authentic?

Apparently, Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl” was not written by a London call girl at all (big surprise) but by a British woman living in New York who has previously published her own erotic memoirs. Not sure it […]

being paid spoils it?

Molly and Liz have stopped blogging for money, saying that it messed up their entire relationship with their blogs as their personal spaces. This is closely related to Torill’s points when the blog sponsorship deals were first announced. I wonder whether Kottke […]

interesting book by Andreas Kitzmann

Andreas Kitzmann’s book Saved from Oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams looks as though it might be useful for studying weblogs and such. The book “focuses on the major forms of self-documentation that have been in use since the […]

academic strategy

Phil Agre’s Networking on the Network, which I’ve mentioned before, is an amazingly thorough article on how to succeed in academia, from the grad student phase through the first ten years, at least, of having a “real job”. One of the reasons […]

“but women don’t want power”

A nice discussion, here, of that infuriating argument that there aren’t many women politicians/professors/video gamers because women don’t want to be politicians/professors/video gamers. Itís nice to try and assume that we neednít change anything. Women who want a part of it, get […]

plagiarism

[Update 30/3: the end of the exposed plagiarist story] There have been a few cases of plagiarism of the cut-and-paste from the web variety by students at our department, and luckily the university has very clear routines for how to handle it. […]

anonymous stereotypes

While I’ve been reading blogs written by anonymous thirty-something year old female academics griping about the sides of the profession nobody warned us about, people of, presumably, every other profession on earth have been blogging their own professional tales of woe. I […]

blogging as ritual gift

Bloggers are tracking today’s earthquake in Asia. Tomorrow there’s a memorial service for Shyrin. My daughter sang me the songs they’ll be singing. It’s good to have a concrete task, something important and defined to give to people, a ritual way of […]

what is the cheapest deal really?

I’ve tried to calculate which mobile phone service would really be cheapest for me, based on my usage patterns, but I gave up in utter disgust at the complexity of it all. Next time I try and figure this out (which should […]