pedablogical

I come to you this evening from the Hyatt Regency in lovely
Chicago. Tomorrow I am to attend sessions and whatnot. This evening we had a ReadWriteThink team dinner at Spiaggia, which was wonderful but so expensive. Nothing like food architecture to set off a meeting. I still don’t know how they cut the pancetta into little tiny curls for the pasta course. I would love to figure it out. It was remarkable. I wish that could have been my entire meal. Sadly, chefs do as they please.

My drive to Chicago was uneventful for the most part, except for the section when I drove by the Aurora/Joliet exit on 55 (yes, I took a very strange route, but I avoided all the construction). When my eye found the hotel that I met my father at when he was helping shut down an arsenal in Joliet, I teared up and wept in the car.

I was listening to the audio version of Don’t Think of an Elephant, which really doesn’t go well with weeping. Still there was a point in listening to the book where I thought that I might understand Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a system of reframing, and I thought that perhaps if I could just find the right freakin’ frame I wouldn’t be crying constantly when random things like a Comfort Inn in Joliet come into view.

Erasing your cell phone data – Lifehacker—given that my two years are up and I can get a new phone soon, I figured that I better save this.

Line56.com: Tag Literacy—now tagging is important and all, but I’m not sure that it’s a new and different literacy.

Rip a CD as one continuous MP3 in iTunes – Lifehacker—while I am not trying to rip an opera to my iPod, this could still be quite handy, especially for some partitioned audio books that I have that always want to play out of order.

I’ve watched the companion DVD to the Elephant book, How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff, several times this evening—for lazy reasons, as it seemed much easier than slogging all the way through the book and I needed to feel like I was accomplishing something. The video is really to short to be very helpful. It’s as if Lakoff decided to read the outline to us. Very little explanation. I was hoping for more, especially for what I paid for it. Oh well.

Still much to figure out, and I’ve pulled a number of books off of the shelf. At some point, I acquired The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media by Raymond Gozzi, Jr., and apparently I need to skim through it. Ir worries me too that I don’t know how Media Ecology fits into my A/B scheme. I keep running into it,and it feels as if it’s just beyond what I’m doing. But it troubles me that it keeps coming up. How can I possibly work anything else into this craziness?

NRVToday.com – Beeks reading program is a success—from the world of strange things from my hometown. Apparently, a bearded dragon is a lizard. While I’m sure that kissing such a lizard is harmless to the human, I do wonder what the hell that poor lizard thought.