Spent the day working ahead, so that I have a little bit of a cushion regarding Inbox. I did the pieces for 12/14, 1/4, and 1/10. There’s no Inbox on the 20th because of scheduled maintenance on the NCTE machine that handles the listservs, and I get a break on the 27th because NCTE is closed for the holiday. It’s quite nice to be ahead. One less thing to worry about.

Suddenly we’re having errors that blank out entire calendar entries when the editor/writer tries to work on them. I’m at a loss for the solution. I can’t even figure out what the problem is. He’s working in the online form, so shouldn’t be bad characters copied over. He’s using IE, which works for me. It’s happened on more than one entry. I can’t duplicate it. Sigh.

I did manage to clean up the broken links from today’s report, and we did some work on an online course that we’re developing.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink

I’ve begun the process of baking cookies for Christmas. I created a bunch of red and green pinwheels. More than I could actually finish baking, but I got a start. Can’t really take much credit for these. I bought red and green cookie dough, rolled it out, layered it, rolled it up like a jelly roll. They look pretty. Not your normal sugar cookie.

Wow. Tonight was the NCTE Holiday Party, an excellent opportunity for people watching. Naturally, I won one of the bottles of wine in the raffle. Why can’t I ever win things that I can actually use? The whole event is a bit awkward, since people brought dates and I don’t really have anyone to take. I hate those moments when everyone else is out dancing and I’m sitting alone and stupid at the table. Oh, and drinking water. Can anyone be more stupid and lame?

Finished editing and published the January Calendar for ReadWriteThink.

Unfortunately, I found that the javascript for the titles isn’t really working. It’s great on the pages, but not for the spiders. They’re grabbing the javascript code for the title, rather than the resulting text. Changed everything back so that the italics codes show up. At least that’s still readable. Not sure how to get around this problem. I’m going to let it stil till next week, when we have a phone call with the MarcoPolo folks who handle the WebTrends data. Maybe they’ll have an idea.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
ReadWriteThink

Okay, I did turn in a content report today, but that wasn’t the highlight. Today was PANDA DAY! My niece and my two sisters had tickets to see baby butterstick, and there has been much happiness all around.

why do i do these things?

The Movie Of Your Life Is Film Noir

So what if you’re a little nihilistic at times? Life with meaning is highly over-rated. Your best movie matches: Sin City, L. A. Confidential, Blade Runner

If Your Life Was a Movie, What Genre Would It Be?

Lunch: Chicken Fried Rice
Fortune: “Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure.”
Lucky Numbers: 14, 15, 18, 24, 36, 45

Meaning: You have 14 things to do at work, 15 errands to run, 18 things to do at home, 24 minutes to do it in, 36 minutes before you receive the materials you need to complete the work, and a 45% chance of someone being angry when you don’t get it all done. “Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure”? No shit. You’re dashing around trying to get it all done and bold enough to post that fact online.

So the audioblog posting worked. Who knew it was so easy? I started investigating the idea as an option for the upcoming roadtrip to Virginia. I can post pictures from my cell, but as I was working on the War of the Worlds lesson plan, which required some research on podcasting, I began to think it might be interesting to buy a mic for my iPod and record pieces while on the road. Then when I reached the house, I could upload them.

On the whim of the moment, I decided to see what blogger supported. Behold, they have an agreement with audioblogger for free audioblog postings. Well, free if you don’t count the cost of the phone call; but with the number of minutes I have, it’s already covered.

I’m not sure that it’s something that will really work for me though. I’m a better writer than a speaker. I don’t know that I can say anything really useful outloud, and my travelogues have always been a construction that required a lot of thought and interconnection that I don’t think is possible for me when I’m working outloud. Still, maybe it’s worth a try.

Now that I’ve gotten home and had a chance to look at the resulting post, I’ve realized what the catch to the system is. They store the MP3s on their server. Now I’m techno-savvy, and I downloaded a copy to my machine, which I uploaded to my server. I changed the link to my copy. The copy still exists on their server, however, and I don’t think there’s anyway to remove it. So who owns my intellectual property?

More importantly, there are some pretty strict terms. I apparently agreed not to “upload, post or otherwise transmit any content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, vulgar, obscene, invasive of another’s property, hateful, racially or ethnically discriminating, or misogynistic, or objectionable.” That’s a pretty wide-ranging list, and without any indication of who is deciding how those terms are defined. Much of the info in the list of do-nots is fairly standard—don’t do things illegal, don’t upload viruses, etc.

My favorite may be that I have agreed not to “impersonate any person or entity, including but not limited to a Listenlab official, guide or host or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity.” So much for the blogs of comedians who do impersonations. Now I understand that you shouldn’t pretend to work for the company, but this restriction seems a bit too extensive.

But on to the ownership issue, which isn’t as bad as I had feared:

Listenlab does not claim ownership of the content you place using the audioblogger service; however, Listenlab may provide a link or other access to your content and/or to your blog site to the extent that it is already made public in order to promote your Audioblogger posting and/or the Audioblogger service or otherwise in connection with its promotional, advertising or sponsorship efforts, and you hereby grant Listenlab a royalty-free license to use such materials and affirm that you have all necessary rights in such materials to grant this license. Listenlab reserves the right to include advertising, sponsorship, and/or promotional materials as part of its Audioblogger service.

So I own it, but they may do with it as they like. I imagine tacked on “This audioblog brought to you by Listenlab” kinds of comments. Oh well, it may be an interesting experiment, and I don’t see any information that suggests I broke any rules by copying my file to my server. As long as I can copy the files to my machine, I can edit them in Audacity to remove any advertising nonsense. Free is cheaper than buying an iPod microphone, and it’s probably easier then transferring the files around.

Since you may know the contents of that audioblog posting, I should tell you that I did, indeed, find and secure one “sparkle-butt Santa.” I procured many groceries, but they were out of puff pastry. How am I to make prosciutto pinwheels without puff pastry? There better be some restocking overnight.

Once I had everything put away, I returned to the lesson plan, and finally finished it up. It was nearly done when I left work this evening. It just needed an assessment, and I realized as I was driving that I needed to add a note about using podsafe music and sound effects. Audio Broadcasts and Podcasts: Oral Storytelling and Dramatization is out there provoking the world into Martian-filled panics. That gives us 22 lessons so far. Tomorrow I may try to squeeze one more out before sending in the (late) content report. I need to edit and add 5 new calendar entries as well. Should mostly be a day of odds and ends. I’ve taken Friday off for the oil change and remaining errands (and cookie baking).