apple juice

my deep thought for the day:

how many hours of beautiful fall saturdays have I spent doing house chores instead of enjoying the days?

i should have a calculation for you later today.

i want to move to a condo/townhouse/loft.

I sometimes joke that we live in the urban suburb. i love our neighborhood. we can walk to groceries, the bus, restaurants, our local bookstore, coffee shop and movie theatre.

However, it is not dense. Not dense in a chicago or new york way. but it’s city living as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve also been joking about writing a manifesto lately. things to guide us as “feature-creep” takes hold. things like, we will never buy a minivan. ride your bike as much as possible. the location of any future residence must be no more than:

• 2 blocks from a bus/train line (currently, 2)
• 4 blocks from the grocery store (currently, 6)
• 8 blocks from a library (16)
• 4 blocks from a couple different restaurants (5)
• 2 blocks from a coffee shop (5)

Just as it seems that it is becoming easier and easier to live “in the city”, with a family, and have these things that I consider important, it also seems that most of our friends have moved out to the suburbs.

In a future job, I would like to utilize my considerable SimCity skills. So I read a lot of articles on urban planning, transit, etc.

This one recently caught my attention, Trading Places:

This is the generation that grew up watching “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” and “Sex and the City,” mostly from the comfort of suburban sofas. We have gone from a sitcom world defined by “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” to one that offers a whole range of urban experiences and enticements. I do not claim that a handful of TV shows has somehow produced a new urbanist generation, but it is striking how pervasive the pro-city sensibility is within this generation, particularly among its elite. In recent years, teaching undergraduates at the University of Richmond, the majority of them from affluent suburban backgrounds, I made a point of asking where they would prefer to live in 15 years–in a suburb or in a neighborhood close to the center of the city. Few ever voted for suburban life.

So, I don’t know. How about it, friends? Those of you who grew up in the suburbs, flirted with the city and headed back? How about those who’ve made the jump one way or the other and are not going back?

Sonja and I often discuss where we might live next, and the discussion generally comes down to:

“You can’t have a family in that place…”

“They do it in Chicago and New York.”

So, hence the manifesto. How do you want to live? How do you match your lifestyle with your living space.

northern wisconsin provides excellent opportunities for unplugging from the internet, resting and relaxing. even though, the internet is only a few houses away. high speed internet is spreading it’s tentacles wide and far, so that even outside of minocqua, wisconsin, on a small lake, high speed is available.

i drove from my parent’s cabin to my grandparent’s cabin with my laptop open, just to see how many networks I would come across. eight. this may not seem like a lot, but nearly everywhere on the two-mile trip there was a wifi signal poking out.

but, at our cabin, no high speed. i set out the week with the goal of reading four books. (finishing two that I had already started and then two more new ones.) there have been discussions at school about the effect of the internet on reading, about how reading on the internet does not provoke deep thought and reflection the way that a book does, and even reading in a house where the internet is available provides enough of a distraction that books are read in a way that is shallower than before the advent of internet.

there is a strange allure to having the internet available when reading a book. what’s this word mean? what’s this place look like (look it up on google maps)? who was that person? (look it up on wikipedia)?

well, i’m sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle. it’s probably an issue of self-control, of learning to engage with your mind in a world that provides distractions everywhere you look.

the real challenge I think is convincing young people to let go of the distractions and singularily focus on something. at the NECC conference, I sat at a roundtable discussion about multitasking and it’s effect on learning. i got into a heated discussion with the woman seated to my right. she was on the side of “kids live in multitasking world, and we need to teach to that” whereas my argument was “we need to teach them to think, and that comes from focus”

needless to say, we didn’t convince each other of anything.

as the youngest person at that table by a few years, it was odd to be arguing against the technology-aided multitasking world that we seem to be heading towards.

who knows? but last week at the cabin in the woods on the lake, i finished those four books.

i’m trying to come up with a grand unified theory on social networking. i signed up for friendfeed on a whim the other day, after coming to the realization that using google reader was not designed to keep track of your friends on the 27 different services they use.

poking around on friendfeed, i started to run through the list of services they aggregate. let’s see, my blog. check. flickr, check. youtube, check, last.fm, amazon wishlists, netflix, twitter, it goes on and on. i tell myself that i sign up for these things in the name of research, to see what application they might have for education. but in reality i’m just curious. i’m on the fringes, really, in terms of being social. i don’t go to that many shows or events, i really just prefer hanging out with my close friends and family more than anything. i don’t really need to meet new people. i don’t need to network.

what’s all the frenzy about then? at necc, seeing people get all worked into a froth about how we need to be twittering with students is kind of funny. (actually, to be fair, i think that died down significantly this year). but certainly the movement exists amongst some in this tech-focused crowd that we all need to be hyper-connected with our students.

and amongst this larger group of people, all the people on friendfeed, brightkite, twitter, pownce, tumblr, etc, etc, there is the implicit acceptance that a large circle of people want or need to know your thoughts and whereabouts.

do they? i don’t know. i do know that i want to stop signing up for services. i think there are a number of problems with all of the current situations:

one set of friends reads my blog, another set looks at flickr, another set is on twitter, a pretty big group is on facebook, there are all of the people on my AIM, Yahoo, Google, and MSN buddy lists, and on and on.

it should be easy to integrate all of these things together and produce one site and one feed that puts it all together? is that desirable? or are the people who look at flickr a fundamentally different set of people than those who want to read my blog and post on my wall on facebook? besides, since I do utilize the privacy features on services such as facebook and flickr, the one unified feed would be pretty tough to pull off.

who cares where i am, what i’m thinking and what i take pictures of anyways?

sorry, i’m getting less clear. maybe if you have a thought about this, leave a comment. help me straighten this out in my head.

i’m just about to pack up and head to la to spend the weekend with matt and madeline. i’m going to try some of the fresh fruit this time (didn’t get to last time) and we’re going to check out record store day (thanks in advance anya!) i won’t be able to buy too many cds because i’m just bringing one bag.

but i think there will be a lot of pictures, a lot of music, a lot of listening and a lot of talking. sounds good to me…

i also heard steve guttenberg may drop by to make it 3 men and a baby. (did you know that leonard nimoy directed? what does spock know about babies?)

(i want to start off by noting that 98% of the time, I love the food at my school. there is a wide variety of soups, entries, salads, and desserts. it’s tasty, and it’s free. this post is in no way meant to criticize our food service, which truly does a tremendous job.)

however, about once a month, horrible rhyming words pop up on my calendar. brunch for lunch.

brunch for lunch consists of: deep-fried french toast sticks, eggs, and sausage links.

i’m sure this combination is wildly popular amongst our youngest students, and i understand why it makes a regular appearance on the menu, but from my perspective, it’s a good excuse to try and take lunch off campus.

even though i had no invitations for a strategy meeting at chipotle, lady luck shined on me.

I left my seat in search of croutons. on days like these, it is important to be creative. since i was only receiving minimal satisfaction from the breakfast items, i also had a bowl of chicken soup. however this soup was lacking something, and that something was croutons.

as i strode towards the salad bar, i immediately became distracted. what is this big bowl of green? i spied a new addition. guacamole!

new plan. grab a bowl and load it up with guacamole and chips before anyone else sees this delicacy.

i returned to the table extremely pleased with myself. steve looked up slowly upon my return. the other members of the table looked over. “what is that. . .?”

without any further words, all six of my table-mates slowly stood so as to not attract attention and headed towards the salad bar. all six returned with guacamole.

i finished the day with a happy belly.

i think facial hair is coming back. 90% of the men in the meeting this morning had some sort of beard/mustache/etc thing going.

i found the tape adapter for my car. hello iPod. mpr, I love you, but you’re bringing me down. with the iPod re-hooked up, i heard aimee mann, gnarls barkley, aphex twin, wilco, clap your hands say yeah and soul coughing. i love it.

“i can’t believe you bought a fucking robot” may be one of my favorite quotes of all time.

at the bike store this afternoon, i was told that there was “an archeological dig” going on down in the region of my bottom bracket.

speaking of bikes, tomorrow may be the maiden voyage for riding to school. this pretty much guarantees that i will be late for work, but it’s all in the name of saving the planet.

video chatting is amazing. i think i initially felt that it was sort of overrated, but now i’ve realized that when you want to really concentrate and talk with someone, video is the only way to go.