No Goals That Overtime

I am getting tired just watching.

No Goals That Overtime

Fleury must feel like he's in a shooting gallery.

Overtime

There's nothing quite like NHL Playoff overtime.

I wonder if the Pen's can stay alive.

"Jump!"

So you're watching a fairly middle of the road BSG episode and then, salvaging the entire episode in the last 10 seconds they plug in the hybrid and she says "jump!" and they're gone, poof - like when Boomer capped Adama, I bet you weren't expecting that.

Then a week later you're watching another middle of the road BSG and afterward you read a blog post where they talk about all of the mile wide plot holes there were and you're all like "hey this guy's got a point - how did Starbuck get back to being CAG?" And maybe "In what universe does Lee get appointed President of the Colonies?"

Then continuing that line of thought you say to yourself, gee, and why didn't they just pull the plug on the hybrid and make a reciprocal jump?

And then, like Ripley with Newt, you've made a clean spot and you have to do the whole thing. So you're remembering the excellent sequence the prior week when the Base Star jumped in and nearly collided with all these other ships, and quietly you start to wonder, hey, how is it that the Galactica fleet ships don't collide with each other every time they make a jump. It doesn't look very organized.

But now you've done it. Speculation like that will lead you to stat to question why all the planets on Stargate or Star Trek speak English. And then your head will start to hurt. There must be a sci-fi writer's rule about introducing a problem as a problem that usually they just ignore as a problem - can't make post jump collisions a problem without their always having been a problem.

Now I guess in this case you could argue something along the lines of that the jump calculations take into account the size of the vessel and the space it is jumping into and since they were using a Raptor computer to jump a Base Star that whatever the allowances are for volume of space there were would be off by an order of magnitude.

Geek... geek... geek...

All season on BSG it has felt to me like they are laboring through piles and piles of exposition in order to get us properly lined up for the end. This is the sort of maneuvering that lets Cara come back to CAG, makes Apollo the President, and makes Adama turn his ship over to his XO moments after their having a fistfight over Tigh's fracking a cylon. Maybe these guys should have taken a cue from the people over at Lost and given themselves two seasons to wrap things up so they could take their time (although even with the full extra season Lost feels a little bit the same, but you have to grant them that as they have a few more things to resolve).

Or maybe they did it just fine. Not like I am going to stop watching. Admiral Tigh, gods.

RTP, Email, and Plaxo's Update Contacts Wizard

I am up for review again. Well I am up for review in the fall. This is The Big One - tenure. I have a little while to get the first batch of things together and then most of the summer to complete the rest complete. The first step is an updated CV, position description, and a personal statement. After that comes a list of reviewers, and then a packet of supporting materials. Packet doesn't really cover it though. Last time the thing was three 3" binders when I finished. Actually I am thinking that maybe I would like to cull it down some for this pass.

I have no idea what to write as a personal statement. I never have any idea what to write for a personal statement. Once Mrs. TANBI wrote me a wonderful personal statement entitled "Fuck." But I still don't think the time is right for that to be a submission. I am sure I will think of something eventually.

The most difficult part of doing the binders this time is going to be reprinting like every single page. Last time I did a header that said "David Boevers - Assistant Professor of Drama." After that review, I got promoted to Associate; so now every header is wrong. Maybe that will make a nice precollege job - reprint David's book. Or maybe I will just pay someone out of pocket to do it.
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I did send out a gazillion emails today looking for referrers. I need something like 20 "peers" and 20 alumni/students. Things went pretty well I think. There's only one person who wrote for me on my last review who is now deceased.

If you are someone that thinks I should have sent you a request but you didn't get one, shoot me an email. I probably just spaced you, or didn't see your name on my list, or - most likely - I don't have a good email for you (yes, I mean you Sara Huddleston).

If you're motivated I would love the help. So let me know.
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Oh, and why doesn't David have a good email for you? This really sucks. So for years now I have been using this online service to handle my address book - Plaxo. It's been great. The service syncs with Outlook and with Thunderbird and somewhere along the way learned to talk with AOL, AIM, Gmail, and Yahoo. They even managed to sync it with LinkedIn. Anytime I changed my address book anywhere it would sync with the service and when I logged in at another computer it would sync and it all worked great.

The service also does birthday reminders and eCards, and it also has task functionality but I have never been enough of a geek to use it. Another plus, is that if someone else is a Plaxo member and they update their information it automatically updates in my account and then syncs to my address books. Fabulous.

The best part though was the Update Contacts Wizard. This little web app let me send an email to every single address in my address book simultaneously and ask for a contact update, and then when someone updated it also synced and migrated to all my address books. Fucking Brilliant! On the last day of school each year I would enter the graduating students' addresses in my address book and then run the wizard. I did a sort of year in review note and asked people to update. It was probably the thing I liked most about the service.

So of course they discontinued it.

They said that people felt like the emails were spam. That's probably true from when the service started and you got this blizzard of requests. But I hadn't seen one in a very long time, so I wonder how much that mattered.

The real problem I think was that it was all so Web 1.5 - in that you had to send an email and then the person had to answer. What with Facebook and LinkedIn and the rest Plaxo really wanted to be a Web 2.0 service. Why? I don't know. As far as I was concerned it was perfect the way it was, but I guess they need to keep moving or be passed by. Their substitute is the Plaxo Pulse. Yet another Web 2.0 network. I already have too many of these and now they want me to join another. The Pulse comes with micro-blogging and a sort of Facebookish "status" thingy - mine currently says "David is really missing the Plaxo Update Contacts Wizard" and it tethers to all your other stuff, so if you post a video on YouTube the other people in your Pulse stream can see it. The ultimate downsidw of this is that to play with the service people have to join. One of the best parts of the old way was that you could answer without joining. The Plaxo people said people are more comfortable with joining the service than not. What people? I'm still regretting Myspace and Ringo, and fighting a backfire action against Facebook, and I already have Blogger, Yahoo, YouTube, LiveJournal, GoodTheatre, and LinkedIn. Why would anyone want to join another network when they don't have to? Shenanigans, I call it.

All of which has nothing to do with syncing address books which is why I signed up.

Oh, and if a deteriorating service suite wasn't enough to encourage me to drop my account, the company was just bought out by Comcast. So now the demon spawn of cable has my address book. There's an iron clad privacy agreement, and the terms of the sale leave Plaxo an independent unit, but it still gives me the heebie jeebies.

So now I have to find a way to update my address book without 700+ individual emails. Got any ideas?

Too True

Here's A Fairly Depressing Thought...

We could have colonized Mars with the money we spent on the Iraq war -- what else could we do? - Boing Boing

Well, This Guys Says A Mouthful

Assessment Changes Everything :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs: "“I see the focus on outcomes assessment as a dodge from the real problems with the American educational system: that it is embedded in an inequitable and violent socioeconomic system. The kind of policies that would truly help the students with whom I work are not more hearings, campus visits, and testing but adequate funding for secondary education; child care; a living wage; debt relief or, better yet, free universal postsecondary education; an adequately compensated academic workforce exercising free inquiry and building an educational community; and universal health care.”"

I wonder if Barak Obama will need a Secretary of Education...

Ex-congressman becomes Libertarian '08 candidate

CNN.com: "'We have only 163 days to win this election -- do not waste one single day,' Barr told supporters at the Libertarian National Convention in Denver, Colorado."

How can they nominate Bob Barr? This is probably the most recognizable of the impeachment managers from the circus that was the congressional prosecution of Bill Clinton. I have never heard this man's opinion of anything and I dislike him - stronger than "dislike" communicates.

The only way a Libertarian candidate has any chance at all is to pull independents like me, Republicans, and Democrats. I don't know about other indys or Republicans, but I can't see a single Democrat with any kind of memory voting for this guy.

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the race, also ran, Bob Barr.

Tree Tragedy

Did anyone else hear this?

NPR did a story about an Asian beetle that is eating up all the Ash trees around certain cities in the upper Midwest. I wish I could have found the right pictures to go with this, but I struck out. Anyway, they found the Emerald Ash Borer in Wilmette, IL. I grew up driving down Lake Avenue in Wilmette day after day, and Lake Avenue is probably the prototypical "Tree Covered Lane." There are trees maybe every 30 feet or so and they all arch over the street making a perfect covered path. I always thought this was the coolest thing. Late in my high school career the Highland Park foresters planted trees on Summit Road, near my house, in the same manner. I always thought it was a shame that I would have moved away long before these trees looked like the ones in Wilmette.

I am really just hoping that neither the trees in Wilmette or the younger ones in Highland Park are ash.

That area already had a tree die off. Years ago they lost a whole slew of trees to Dutch Elm disease. They talk about that past in the NPR story. See it seems that after the Elms died many communities started aggressive replanting programs to build up their tree stock. Got any guesses as to the species they selected for the replacements?

Yup, Ash.

So everyone out there cross their fingers that we're able to solve this before they lose all their ash trees too.