When I first started blogging, I was confused by all the options to moderate comments. I didn’t realize that blogs were actually targets for spamming… until I received 20 nonsense comments in 3 days. Gah. Does anyone else have this problem? Is there a way to avoid it from happening in the first place? I catch all of them before they get published to the blog, but I’d like a way to block them entirely.
Archive for November 2005
After spending a lazy Thanksgiving, I realized what I was truly thankful for - new blog entries! I’ve been a definite slacker, so it’s time for me to start making up lost time. When in doubt, I find food makes a good topic, yeah? So here we go.
I spent Thanksgiving in Houston, and I had some interesting culinary experiences there. One night, my mom and I went to a cajun restaurant. Taking a bit of advice from my friend Dave, I asked the hostess what her favorite dish was. “Alligator. Hands down.” Yeah… note to self - I won’t be taking Dave’s advice anymore. Actually, I’m glad that I did - Alligator was actually quite good! It… tastes of chicken!
My parents’ friends also invited us over for dinner, and the guy prepared wild duck. He shot it himself, which gave me a bit of pause… but… it was really good! I’d had duck before, but this stuff was awesome. No doubt, though, it had to do with the jalepeño stuffed inside and the bacon wrapped around it. Oh well, it was good! Did anyone else have something interesting for Thanksgiving? I heard a Turducken was prepared here in Pittsburgh…
I have a dog at home named Lulu. She tends to need a fair amount of attention (even in her old years), so my aunt would always humor her (as if Lulu could understand) by saying “Lulu! You are the cuuutest dog in this whole house!” It’s easy to be the best when you qualify it that much - which is fine for helping my dog’s self-esteem. Not so for advertisements though.
Today on the radio I heard a spot for that new show Commander-in-Chief, encouraging me to watch “the best new show on Tuesday nights.” At first I thought, “What? That’s surprising… oh.” After all those qualifications… are there any other new shows on Tuesday nights? I mean, hey, it was pretty easy for me to earn Best Senior Debater when I was the only high school senior in debate. (I was good though. Honest.) Clearly they couldn’t get away with calling it the best show (Veronica Mars!). They probably couldn’t get away with calling it the best new show (The Closer, definitely). And at that point… is it really saying anything?
One of the courses that I’m TAing this semester is Writing For Multimedia. I mentioned it in my earlier post on blog usability, but essentially, my role is to teach the students how to use Flash, so they can explore their own Multimedia writings.
The deadline for the first of two major projects recently passed, and looking at the results, I’m so thrilled. To set the stage, the majority of these students hadn’t used Flash before, and this was the first major project that they had done with Flash. And let me say – my first project in Flash was not nearly as cool. You want to see it? Too bad! I will show off some of my students’ work though.
The assignment was to turn an elevator speech into a multimedia piece that encouraged the user / viewer to think, ask questions; something that would challenge the viewer’s assumptions… draw the viewer in. I thought everyone did a great job, but I just picked two to share:
LeeAnn Baronett: Spork
Marisa Mangione: Lost
I thought these two were more on the abstract side, so I thought everyone would get a kick out of them. Enjoy! And congrats to all my students for doing such great work!
This morning at 2am, my building’s fire alarm started wailing. I of course woke up immediately, and turned off the tower fan at the foot of my bed. I’m not entirely sure why I thought the noise was coming from my fan, but apparently it made sense at the time.
Anyway, I finally snapped to it, threw some clothes on, went down eight flights of stairs and out the building. I was impressed (or concerned?) to find that I was one of the first 15 people outside. If you don’t know, I live in a 10 floor apartment building with about 20 rooms per floor, give or take.
Registration starts tomorrow, so I’d like to remind everyone to sign up for my class! Check it out!
Even though I’ve been TAing this course since I’ve been at CMU, this is the first time I’ve been on the course schedule before registration. How exciting! If you are a CMU student, you can even check out my FCE’s. If you aren’t… trust me when I say they’re good.
As referenced in an earlier post, I’ve been preoccupied lately with filling out belated loan applications to cover this year’s tuition. While accessing a promissory note, I encountered a particularly bad design:
I go through all this trouble to log in, and this is what I get! Where do I click for my promissory note? Any ideas? No instructions around, nothing that indicates promissory note on the page. Well, apparently, this site indicates links with bold text rather than underlines or colors. I won’t dwell on this, so I’ll come right out and say it: Bold text doesn’t work for links! Every logical person uses bold text for some sort of emphasis, which is why they aren’t used for links! Gah!
When I was watching Meet The Press this morning, that wacky company BP had a commercial asking people if they knew how big their carbon footprint was. Nobody did. So they told the audience to find out on their website.
I usually ignore ads that force the audience to do work for any information, but for some reason I was feeling motivated today. I went through the carbon footprint calculator, and apparently, my carbon footprint is size 19. And you know what they say about people with large carbon footprints…
I actually found the exercise a bit frustrating. Most of it had to deal with the fact that I’m a grad student living in an old apartment building with old appliances, so there wasn’t much I could do to lower my score. But what was most frustrating is the fact that air travel contributes substantially to your carbon footprint (almost half of my score); yet, the site doesn’t mention anything that can be done to reduce your footprint in that area. On the upside, it was an interesting 10 minute diversion.
Sorry for the delay in posting. I spent four days sleeping (seriously, that’s all I did), and lately I’ve been a bit preoccupied with issues related to Student Loans. I learned recently that the whole “You need to pay for classes thing” isn’t just a polite recommendation: CMU doesn’t let you register for the next semester until you do (and here I was hoping to avoid the issue until graudation). Oh well, I digress.
In a couple months, the MHCI lab will be moving from its luxurious space in Wean Hall (also known as the giant cement block of CMU). While I think the new space might be equally cement-block-ish, the interior promises to be a lot nicer than our current space. I’m excited, even if I won’t get to reap the entire benefit of the new space.
Another Pittsburgh Autumn, and the weather is starting to get crappy. At the start of Fall Break, Dave, Carol, and I (well, I was mostly a passive observer) had some fun with the lab’s RoboSapien. I promised Dave I would post the results so check out the video. No poking fun - reaching Fall Break without going crazy is a huge accomplishment, so we had to have some fun.
I tried to compress it to a smaller file size, but apparently my digital camera doesn’t encode the audio such that it is recognized as a separate track by QuickTime, and the audio is so important. I hope you enjoy it.
