not quite january

December wasn't too bad up here snow wise. H kept saying that we'll get it all in January. Today we have about three or so inches of heart attack snow.

Heart attack snow

When we lived in Utah, we rarely got the wet, heavy, good-for-snowball-fight snow. I remember once when we did get an unseasonably wet snow. I watched a friend talk up a female co-worker in the break room -- small talk to avoid doing anything productive. He was from Kentucky and babbled on about how he never had to shovel snow that heavy... about how he now knew why they call it "heart attack snow." Our female co-worker looked at him unimpressed and told him her dad had died of a heart attack shoveling snow a few years ago. She was from Wisconsin. I don't know if she was telling the truth (I thought everyone in Wisconsin owned a snow blower), but it had the effect she was no doubt looking for. My friend stopped talking to her for a long time.

feeling good

The Giants lost, New England didn’t win. And that’s all I have to say about that.

A new year is just the other side of the door. Another year older. I remember when Grizz finished his master’s degree and told me he didn’t feel as smart as he should be for a guy his age. He was probably in his early 30s then. That was just about twenty years ago. I wonder if he still feels that way with a lot more life experience behind him.

I don’t feel 42. My body has been dropping me small hints for the last couple years, little reminders that things are changing. There was a stretch in my mid- to late-30s where I really let myself go. I was pushing the top side of 200 lbs., had trouble sleeping, and was a miserable son-of-a-bitch to live with. I don’t know what life event made me snap the hell out of it, but I’ve been relatively fit for the last five or so years. The older I get, the less concerned I am with being a certain weight. I’m more motivated to feel good. And that’s something of a holistic feeling good. It’s why I started taking classes again; why I applied to the CCR program; why I like stretching the boundaries (only slightly) at UC. It’s why I’m going to go to the gym in a few minutes with H. She’ll run her 5 to 7 miles and do 20 or so minutes of weight training. I’ll struggle to stay motivated through the same routine I’ve been following since my first year in the AF, but feel good when I’m done. I’ll feel good when H and I do a post-work out stretch together and talk about the kids, work, how we should spend more time doing all the right things.

Another year older, though not necessarily wiser. Happier than I was last year, and the year before that. Feeling good about this year, and better about the next.

suffering and faith

The Giants just scored the first touchdown of the game. I’m a long-suffering New York Football Giants fan. It was harder when I was a kid. I still hate Joe Pasarcik – fellow long-suffering Giants fans will understand. A good friend of mine was a rabid fan. In fact, every member of his family were fans – they waited something like 25 years on a list to get season tickets. If you called their house on a game day, they wouldn’t pick up. If the Giants lost, the kids went to bed hungry. I'm making that last part up, but they were all crazy, God-fearing Giants fans.

I was living in Colorado when the Giants won in ’87 – a great place to watch Phil Simms’ Captain America impression in the second half. H and I were dating at the time. She watched in amazing disgust as I took the entire second half to verbally hammer a Broncos fan who showed up at the house wearing a blinking Denver logo hat. He was something of an oddball anyway (and not because he was a Broncos fan). We were living in Germany when Norwood handed the Giants the trophy in ’91. H was rooting for the Bills because she’s a native CNYer and a couple of her brothers love to whine about how Jim Kelly is the Charles Barkley of the NFL. We were here in CNY when the Giants didn’t show up for the game in 2000. Those same brothers (and a couple more – there’s eight of them in all) smugly sat in my living room, drinking my beer, eating my nachos, and forgetting about Ray Lewis' criminal past.

Being a Giants fan here isn’t quite as lonely as being a Met fan here (of which I am also long-suffering), but it’s still not the same as watching a game just inside the odor ring that circles Secaucus. Tonight’s game only matters to New England. For me, it’s a long shot, but you gotta believe.

PS: Who in America likes Bryant Gumble or can listen to Chris Collinsworth for more than 20 seconds?

typical days

Tom Johnson has a funny and informative posting about the typical day of a technical writer. All of Tom's posts and podcasts are informative. I tend to come away from his site with a sort of longing--recalling the harried and rewarding madness of actually working an information product from concept to prodcution. I also miss the disposition that technical writers bring to their work (this is a broad generalization, I know). Tom's voice and online persona embody that disposition, and his recent post sheds a little light on the activities and details that shape that disposition.

For something really interesting: Check out Apangea Learning's SMART HELP system. The opportunities for online courses and tutoring are obvious and a little exciting. A number of LMS/CMS platforms are toying with this type of technology (notably Adobe Breeze), but the functionality overhead and "live" support component may be restrictive for the most popular systems.

food comas and follow ups

In a silly sort of way, it was nice to see a comment left by Derek. In my mind, he and some other talented, creative, lucid, witty CCR folks are blogging A-listers. If you haven't spent any time being challenged by what you're reading online (and you certainly haven't been here), you need to read Derek's blog.

Christmas was relaxing and fun. A weekend of seeing some of H's old friends back in the 'Cuse for the holidays. Family in and out of the house and another memorable Christmas morning with the boys. My brother, who was with us again, likes to remind me how blessed I am. He's right of course. And it doesn't hurt to be reminded more than once each day.

I did eat and drink too much yesterday, and woke up today with what felt like a food hangover. I made it to Archibold, only to find the fitness center closed until Jan. 1. My intentions to stay on track were modest. I called Rec Services this morning to confirm the holiday hours. I bundled up at 12:10 and trekked up University, over the quad, and into the lobby, stopping to submit my ID and ask the attendant if the "weight room" was open. She hesitated and said, "Yes, we're open until 5:30 today." For the briefest of seconds, I thought to qualify my question, but as usual with these passing sign posts of better judgment, I simply said, "Thank you" and went on into the locker room to change. When I found the big sign on the door at the top of the stairs reading "Closed until January 1," I wasn't as mad as I was upset. Not upset at the fact that I'd missed the opportunity for a nice long workout on a slow day at the office. No, I was more upset that I'd wasted the better part of the front end of my lunch hour -- an hour that could have just as easily been spent mowing down the rest of the chocolate cake that is still sitting on top of the office microwave. It will still be there tomorrow, but I suspect it won't be there for long.

This week will be quiet at the shop, which means I just might be able to get back on track with my exams. Maybe. More on this to come. And that's for certain.

simple question

This is going to sound really stupid: I have a problem with the way the terms "asynchronous" and "synchronous" are used in reference to online learning and course development. Almost universally in the instructional design literature, we see "asynchronous" used to refer to listservs, email, and other push-pull communication technologies. Synchronous is in turn used to refer to communication technologies such as chat, MUDs, MOOs, etc.

Here is where I get confused. From an information technology perspective, synchronous communication resembles something closer to video conferencing or telephony than it does text-based author/submit/read/author/respond technologies. To keep things straight in my own head (because this does come up quite a bit in meetings with course designers and faculty), I've resolved to accept that synchronous communication, in the context of online learning, refers to any direct communication in which all parties are present at the same time.

A pretty silly thing to get hung up on. Yes. But it's the silly stuff that can make you sound really stupid.

back in the saddle

I used to blog. Not a lot. Just enough to feel like I was part of the IN crowd. I was motivated by work in a Comp/Rhet course taught by the humbly brilliant Collin Brooke. After the course, my blogging faded behind completing course work, preparing for qualifying exams that have yet to be taken, work, family, etc. It’s a story shared a million times by a million bloggers on a million blogs.

So what’s different this time? Nothing really. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research lately regarding the nature of persona and the role of technology. The laughable and factually inaccurate “Shift Happens” did get me to ask myself a simple question: “As someone who works with, for, and in technology all day, how is my persona complicated by the technologies I interface with?” OK, maybe it’s not a simple question, but I am curious. Maybe this second time ‘round the blog pole will be more sustained, more rewarding, and a little more fun.