Sporcle!

For anyone who enjoys testing their trivia skills but has never experienced Sporcle.com, I highly recommend checking it out.  I’m not sure if their original intent was to be educational (well, in fact, their tagline is “mentally stimulating diversions”), but I’ve certainly learned quite a bit over the last year or so.  Most of the quizzes on Sporcle are timed, fill-in-the-blank type quizzes, and they range from traditional “Name all the US Capitals” and “Name all the US Presidents” to “Name all of the current Crayola crayon colors,” “Name all Adam Sandler movies,” and “Name all of the cities that have hosted the Men’s NCAA Final Four Tournament.”  In fact, I can now name–and correctly spell–all of the elements on the periodic table.  One of my friends teaches high school chemistry, and she has recommended the site for her students to practice. Geekiness evident through and through, but not a bad way to pass some time.

Side note:  I was having some blog issues, in addition to the out-of-town thing and the illness thing, but I’ve settled with this one, having moved posts over, etc., and I think it’s working out okay, so hopefully I’ll more easily become a more prolific blogger now…

Inaugural recap (or, Woohoo! No frostbite!)

Simultaneously the coldest and most heartwarming experience I’ve ever had…

Although it’s cheesy to go on about how positive everyone was and how uplifting the whole event may have been, in my experience, both things are absolutely true.  I have a friend who traveled all the way to DC with her family–very likely the only four non-Republicans from the entire state of Wyoming–waited for 2+ hours Monday to pick up senatorial tickets to the swearing-in, got up at 4am Tuesday morning, waited in line to ride a packed Metro train into the city, stood in line to get into the Mall for 4+ hours, didn’t wind up getting in anyway, sat in a Subway restaurant during the ceremony, and STILL raved about her trip and how she would do it all over again tomorrow.

I was wearing hiking boots, wool coat, 2 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of pants, 2 shirts, 2 sweaters, 2 pairs of gloves, earmuffs, a scarf, a hat, and the hood of my coat–and the knock-you-over wind made it feel like I was just hanging out in shorts and a t-shirt, with my fingers and toes firmly packed in ice.  (On top of which, I had just been put on medicine for bronchitis and sinus and ear infections, after being sick for a couple weeks already.)  However, we stood as close to the Washington Monument during the ceremony as was possible (they had a railing barricade just inside the circle of flags), and could see a jumbotron, the Capital dome, and the White House without even having to lean in a different direction.  It was a beautiful day.

Some of my favorite non-ceremonial moments from the week:

• Street vendor #1 yelling, “Souvenirs!  You gotta buy ‘em now!  Or you gotta buy ‘em later!”  …huh?

• Street vendor #2 yelling, “T-shirts!  T-shirts for warmth!”

• Street vendor #3 (my favorite) yelling, “I have hats!  Get your hats here!  Buy two and wear ‘em as mittens!!”

• Had an “Obama Burger” from the Good Stuff Eatery–restaurant opened by Top Chef contestant, Spike.  Cute name, if you don’t think about it too much…

• Sitting in a bar, having a delightfully rum-filled spiced cider, it was wheels-up on former-Air Force One as it carried the Bush family back to Texas — lots of woohoos and claps and waves from fellow bar-sitters.  (seemed much less disrespectful than the booing before the ceremony, in which I didn’t take any part…)

Altogether, it was an amazing experience, and I appreciate my sister-in-law even more for letting us crash in the city for free.   : o)

Copyright geek? Guilty.

So, a good friend of mine was telling me the other day about a piece of software her husband had downloaded that could take clips from DVDs and embed them into other types of media.  My first thought was, “Very cool, but I wonder how much it violates anti-piracy laws…  unless it may fall into fair use…  is it for school, I wonder?”  This is not because I fancy myself a member of the Copyright Police, as I most certainly do not.  But, having worked for a while on a thesis involving copyright in higher education, such thoughts tend to jump up there at awkward moments.  Luckily, this friend is already familiar with this particular quirk, so it was completely acceptable.

I do think it’s interesting, though, to consider how the whole copy/paste, click-to-share, mash-up culture will affect copyright law and practice.  Clearly, a rule governing the allowable audience size for a film on laser disc would be pretty irrelevant in the face of a “viral” internet video, but how will they (whoever “they” might be) balance the rights of creators with the rights of users?  If everyone is Creator and Marketer and Disseminator and User, what happens to the traditional conceptions of ownership?

In educational contexts, traditional intellectual property demarcation lines may be growing even fuzzier; although, perhaps, with the mass confusion, education will ultimately be granted a more open approach to the use of content.  It’s nearly impossible to tell.  And who even wants to define what constitutes “educational” contexts?  Don’t we learn from basically everything we do, regardless of the electronic connectivity?  Everything we read?  Everyone we meet?  If education exceeds the traditionally understood, brick-and-mortar boundaries, and the process of creation and consumption now forms such an interconnected, unentangleable web, I would argue that copyright must also be adapted (and further adaptable), well beyond the scope of its more recent (~10 years) developments.

New(ish) to the ‘sphere…

Well, this is the second blog I’ve officially started, although I posted just twice to the other one, and I think I may have been the only person to view those pages…  I’ve posted a total of 2 status updates on Facebook in the ~5 years that I’ve been a member, and I contribute fairly regularly to a family-centric photoblog, but not to the online world in general.

For years I’ve tried to figure out why I’m so ambivalent to the whole idea.  I’m a near-constant consumer of the virtually written word — news websites and Amazon and Wikipedia and cooking-related sites and tons of discussion boards, etc.  I read read read…  I love reading what other people have to say, whether it’s a profound comment on the brevity of life, or “This product sucks cuz I wanted a pink one but they sent me a red one.”  It doesn’t really matter.  I think it’s all terribly interesting in examining the proverbial fabric of society.  I’m a consummate lurker in a completely non-creepy way…

This, I think, will be an interesting experiment.  I’m so terribly cautious when I write (and not usually because of a conscious effort to be).  Every word needs to fit, even when I know for sure that no one will ever read the product of the toil.  I consider, write, read, re-write, re-read, and re-write everything — even in emails with friends.  Now that I’ve written the last few sentences, I feel uncomfortably self-conscious about it.  I suppose that’s as good a response as any to the “why am I ambivalent toward blogging” question…

I consider myself a digital native, having played Oregon Trail very early in elementary school, learning to program stuff in BASIC on the Apple IIe when I was around 10, and using the internet regularly starting just 4 or so years later.  But even with all of that, I’m unsure of my contributory possibilities in 2.0 Land.  Like in classes or meetings, I speak when I feel like I have something worthwhile to say, and otherwise I prefer just to observe.  I feel like I learn a ton online every day (which makes me think of one of my favorite professors, who reminded us often to “Wonder something, every single day.”), but as a relatively unproductive participant thus far, I’m not quite sure where I fit.