Random Thoughts Anew

[downer]

Do you ever look at the latest academic journals' table of contents, shake your head, and think, "what a terrible waste of time!"?

[mamselle]

Naw.

More often, like, "What can I do to be one of those people?"

M.

[AmLitHist]

Do you ever look at the latest academic journals' table of contents, shake your head, and think, "what a terrible waste of time!"?

My MA advisor and friend referred to this 20+ years ago as "slicing the baloney awfully thin."  It's only gotten worse in my discipline since then.

[downer]

I called out one of my students for using ableist language this week.

They used the phrase "blind devotion."

It's a phrase I use often myself, so I felt some cognitive dissonance. But I think I'm preparing them for the world.

[mahagonny]

Nothing makes a nation stop bickering and start trying to think together like an external threat.

[apl68]

Reminiscing about how my recently-deceased uncle taught me how to drive a backhoe excavator and a dump truck years ago.  He gave me some pointers on each of them one summer when I was working for him and then turned me loose.  My brother has a similar story involving our uncle and a bulldozer.  He was putting a lot of confidence in us.

Mind you, if he had some serious work to do with earth-moving machinery, he'd do it himself.  They say he could set a Mountain Dew can on the side of an excavator and operate the machine so smoothly that the can wouldn't fall off all day.

[downer]

I recently aquired a new Windows laptop with full Office and Office 365. Quite an expensive one.

I hadn't had a new Windows device in a long time. I have been using cheap Chromebooks mostly.

I am struck by how once you get used to these Windows devices, you find out how really awful they are. The Chromebook I use is literally 1/10th of the price of the Windows laptop I use, and for most purposes it is better -- faster, simpler, more convenient. The battery life is significantly better. The one thing I like about my new device is the background lighting on the keyboard. The screen is also a bit better. It is a miracle that Microsoft stays in business.

[mamselle]

As noted elsewhere, thanks to an illustrious career as an academic/corporate EA in the not-all-that-distant past, and to my fun-loving decision not to take down my resumes for those jobs from the Monster-Indeed-LinkedIn world, I get headhunter emails for such positions. Regularly.

My pet peeve du jour is their tendency to go on.and.on.and.on about the company, its brilliant culture, and the drug it's developing (not even sure they should be naming it in a supposedly "unlinked" email--I could oh-so-easily go look it up and apply directly based on the COPYRIGHTED NAME of the drug itself, thus skipping the middleman agency fees...) and then never say WHERE the hiring site is, of it's local or remote, etc.

No, I don't usually plan to move cross-country for a 6 mo. temp-to-perm position without at least knowing where that might be. (It also bugs me to see the horrendous language errors in these emails--I think I know where some of the English Comp. students discussed on these boards found post-graduate employment...)

So, while waiting for my 5.30 student...I replied in a more sanguine tone and told them so....

M.

[Juvenal]

I got a note today from AAAS that, in recogniton of my being a member for fifty years, there was a complimentary life membership at my command.

Yeah, well, the honor probably will be short-lived.

But maybe they will never know I've checked out?  And Science will still baffle my heirs?  The widow of a long retired, less recently dead colleague, still has her address/phone as that of her father, dead over fifty years ago.  Is that creepy?

[mamselle]

My sister got the phone co. to re-assign the long-standing family "home phone no." to her, which I, too, found a bit odd.

She's at the far end of a state away, so the area code doesn't match, and I couldn't figure out how it was useful to have all the crazies who look up funerals and try to scam widows/ers calling her, but hey, whatever.

M.

[downer]

Does any use Skype any more?

[arcturus]

Does any use Skype any more?

Yes, as an alternative to texting (for those who don't like smartphones) and to email (for those whose inbox is always full).

[mamselle]

Does any use Skype any more?

Yes, and for calling friends in Europe whose phones either don't work well with mine, or charge them for international calls, even if they didn't originate the call. Somehow, my miniscule charges on Skype get around those.

At Christmas, for example, we did a four-way family call with Liege on Skype--my cousin without a camera, the rest with--then we went to Zoom after her portion of the call ended.

We could have just stayed on Skype, but another family member hadn't installed it, and had Zoom, so we went with that.

I also found it invaluable once when my wallet and passport had been stolen in Barcelona--it was the only way I could contact my bank and other entities to start resolving all the issues the theft brought on.

I haven't liked the way MSW has tried to "fix what ain't broken" about it, but it's still a useful resource, to my mind.

M.

[downer]

Why is it "deductible" rather than "deductable"?

[mahagonny]

1. Best time to turn the clocks ahead: during the faculty meeting.

2. I keep getting reminders on Facebook to wish happy birthday to dead people. Eventually there will be more deceased members than living ones.