SQUIRREL!

On September 18, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, TeachingLeave a comment

I live in the future now; I’ve upgraded my two iThings to iOS 7, which means that for right now I’m fascinated and playing with the NEWSHINY and very soon I will be crying about battery drain and other horrible things and something I liked will stop working. (My prediction for the first gripe: while I like the new Control Center, I’ve already activated it accidentally several times while swiping around on websites. This is going to be a problem. Also, the battery drain on the phone is so horrendous that I’m predicting I already know what the first thing they address with an update is going to be.)

I also have iTunes Radio now, which is going to be a Pandora killer, I think. Then again, I created an Atmosphere station first off (my favorite Pandora station) and right now it’s playing a song called “My Dick.” Which is… something. For sure.

(The song contains the line “We got dicks like Jesus,” by which I assume they mean circumcised, and I immediately forgive it.)

It’s been an uncommonly good couple of days at school, and my two biggest dickheads both got suspended today, so it ought to be a decent few more days as well until they come back. While this year has been pretty high stress in terms of things not involving my classroom, I’m continually amazed at how well the Don’t Yell at Kids policy is affecting my actual teaching. I almost never raise my voice in the classroom anymore; it’s amazing. And it’s not just that I’ve got better behaved students this year, although that’s part of it– I don’t have to raise my voice in the morning class either, and that group, pound-for-pound, ought to be worse than either of my groups were last year.

Not much else right now, I don’t think, although I plan on gluing myself to the computer once the boy goes to sleep later– I need to get working on my two grant applications and there’s no good TV on tonight. Plus iTunes Radio needs a good workout. We’ll see if I find it superior to Pandora or not.

I almost forgot– add this awesome person to your blogroll and start reading her immediately. Because I said so.

Oyster review, sorta: On libraries and ebooks, part 2

On September 15, 2013September 15, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

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It is surprisingly difficult to find a good-looking picture featuring oysters.

I got my invitation email for the Oyster app a couple of days ago. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out both the link on the phrase “Oyster app” back there (man, is that how the Interwebs work?) or take a look at this post from last week. They got my invite to me within a couple of days, so at least right now there’s no Mailbox-style queue of six million people in front of you when you try to sign up for the service. It may get longer as/if they get more popular but right now it’s no big deal.

Signup was relatively quick and easy. There’s no way to just do a trial run on the software– if you want to use it at all you have to pony up the $10 for the first month’s access– but at least signing up was relatively painless. Once you’ve chosen a login (it used my email address; I don’t know if you can change that and do a username) and a password it prompts you to create a profile and offers to hook itself to your Facebook account. I declined both opportunities, so right now all the program knows about me is my email address and password. Oh, and my credit card number. I don’t know what it tries to do for you if you hook it to Facebook; I don’t plan to find out.

At that point it takes you to a screen with maybe fifty or so books on it and asks you to choose five you want to read. It’s pretty specific that it wants you to choose from those; I don’t think you can search yet. I decided on one book that is on my Amazon wish list and is therefore likely to be purchased by me sooner or later (Time Reborn, by Lee Smolin) and four books that have crossed my radar at some point or another but that I’m not ever going to actually buy unless they’re great: Life of Pi, by Yann Martel; Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen; Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin and Game Change by John Heilemann.

I didn’t actually try to read any of them.

I decided the other day I wanted to reread Lord of the Flies. After pawing through my bookshelves for a while I decided that I didn’t own it (I was pretty sure I didn’t, but figured it was worth looking) and figured that I’d use it as my first Oyster book when the app finally decided to let me download it. So after it downloaded my first five books, I searched for Lord of the Flies.

It’s not available.

“Huh,” I thought, and looked through the first few pages of Rosemary’s Baby to see how the books actually looked. You can choose a few different skins, change the text size, and change the brightness. There’s no immediately obvious way to save the page you’re on, so I assume it autosaves that when you quit the application or switch books. I closed it and downloaded it on my iPad (there’s no native iPad version but you can still use the iPhone version) and discovered that it does remember your books that you’ve downloaded but doesn’t actually save your page across apps. While I won’t be doing much reading on my iPhone, even compared to the minimal use an ereader will get on the iPad, this is still a dumb omission. There’s clearly some sort of cloud-based account saving going on somewhere or the second app would have no idea what books I had on the first one. Page numbers should be included too.

And, other than opening it up to get author names for this post, I haven’t opened the app since. Maybe if it had had LotF I might have read that by now; maybe not. Clearly I still don’t like ebooks very much.

(This is why it’s “sorta” a review, by the way.)

As the weather gets colder I’m doing more and more of my grading at OtherJob, since there are fewer customers this time of year. Our gradebook software basically demands that I have my laptop with me for this– there’s an app but it absolutely sucks and the spreadsheet style of the gradebook program kinda demands a laptop-sized screen.

My laptop is starting to shit out on me, and this is incredibly annoying. I don’t understand how I can get four or five years out of a desktop easily but it’s a miracle if a laptop lasts longer than two or three. I can afford a new laptop right now in the strictest sense of the word “afford” but it’s a really stupid idea and I don’t want to do it. Do not do this to me, technology. I’m not in the damn mood right now.

In which we’ve created a monster

On July 1, 2013July 1, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Parenting1 Comment

So the boy has figured out that there are pictures and videos of him on those little objects that Mommy and Daddy carry around and look at all the time. If you look at my Instagram feed, there are two videos on there already where basically all I’m doing is pointing the front camera at the kid and recording his reaction to it. He’s gotten into the habit of crawling into our laps and insisting on being shown videos of himself. Over and over and over and over.

“More Kenny! More Kenny!”

“You’re right there. You can look at yourself!”

This remains unconvincing. Mirrors don’t work either; he wants to see himself moving on a screen, and nothing that isn’t a screen will do. I can’t wait to see what he does the first time I mirror my iPad to the television in the living room with a video of him.

We’re raising a narcissist.

(That said: it bugs me how often we have our phones out around him; if anything, this will end up curtailing that behavior a bit, which is probably a good thing. I don’t mind him seeing me with my nose in a book all the goddamn time. I’d prefer he not grow up thinking your cellphone is how you interact with the world.)

The pulled pork didn’t quite work out as I intended, unfortunately– not to say that my family didn’t devour it with great gusto and insist that it was wonderful, but I would have expected something substantially spicier with the amount of seasonings and the entire freaking jalapeno pepper that I put into it. It ended up with barely any kick at all; I was openly adding sriracha to my food by the end of the meal. (Sriracha makes everything better, including, now, barbecue and cole slaw.) What little is left– of, again, nearly five pounds of pork, so it ain’t like it was rejected– was buried in barbecue sauce and put in the fridge; I have high hopes that marinating overnight will lead to food that’s better on Day 2 than it was on Day 1. We’ll see.

I have a to-do list today as long as my arm, featuring the full gamut of Things That Must Be Done: some parenting (handing the boy off to grandma for part of the day so I can do the rest of this) some shopping, some cleaning, some intellectual work (I have an essay that I must finish and some other writerating that I ought to work on), some teacherly planning stuff, and a fair amount of physical labor. And then OtherJob at 5, and it’s going to rain again. Who wants to bet that I spend the whole day on the computer but don’t actually get any of the computer-based stuff done?