Friendster is terrifying. It’s not just the way it smears this junior highschool atmosphere over everything, as Patricia wrote, it’s so unbelievably cliquish. You might come across someone you didn’t know, who has similar interests to you and maybe, with luck, lives […]

Ten enthusiastic students, and it was fun! Hooray!

My wish: that when a university installs a new LMS and insists everyone use it they make sure the servers are fast enough to handle 20000 students and teachers using it (trying to use it) on the first day of a new […]

A message on Fibreculture today asked for links to statistics about Internet usage and there are several useful-looking suggestions in the answers so far. NUA has what appear to be good statistics on how many people are online globally, though they’ve not […]

I have stage-fright. Teaching starts today, you see. I have stage-fright far worse than when I present a paper in front of a few hundred people at a conference, even though I taught all last semester, and loved it, and the stuff […]

Of course The Fray has a story about the blackout and since it’s The Fray they have this wonderful, utterly simple and utterly effective graphic design to frame it. Beautiful.

Technology is hell, people, and this evening I found confirmation of this in a web-published transcription of a conversation overheard by someone else on the other side of the world: First woman: I was doing well for awhile, feeling okay about the […]

What would happen if I fictionalised myself? It would be an inversion of the truth debates. I could tell the truth but safely: noone would believe it because my genre would seem to be fiction. I could still be a serious academic, […]

I’ve already managed to scare myself this morning by rereading my year-old but perfectly preserved description of a colleague’s PhD defence. I was looking for a neutral description of a Norwegian PhD defence ritual to link from my nice new version of […]