By Any Other Nerd

b So for those that do not know or have not figured out, I’m a big fan of books.  No, I’m not a full out bookslut nor would I call myself a bookwhore and I’ve worked extremely hard not to be a book-hoarder .  Yes, I have lots of books.  In fact, I recently treated myself to two ginormous bookshelves for them (see below).  Two 7 feet tall by 4-feet wide bookshelves from The Mill Store .  Worth every cent!  So in the end, I’m a big fan of books and have accumulated a good amount. Whenever I’m about to criticize someone’s collection of hub-cabs, pez-caps, etc, I look to my shelves and say; am I really any different?  Sure, I can make the argument that my books have “knowledge” and “stories” and have taught me a great many things.  But often, that is the case with any collector.  I could argue that I only keep the “really important ones”; which is amusing since I have hundreds (I’m afraid to actually count and discover that number might even...

Synchronizing Technology, Classrooms, and Material Frequent Flyer adjuncts can feel like their life consists of repeatedly having to bring the mountain to the people.  Synchronizing information, technology, material, and communication across multiple schools can be next to impossible since most schools have no interest in doing so, thus Frequent Flyers are left to their own devices for maximizing their resources to reduce the amount of redundancy in their world.  But in the digital age, adjuncting can be much easier. Copier technology has become a god-send and all those copies I used to have labor to make (fighting off other faculty tooth and nail for the copier) and lug about from campus to campus are bygone days.  Many of the new copies allow you to scan to email.  They operate as mass scanners in which you can turn those handouts into PDFs and put them online.  Nowadays, I hand out the syllabus at the beginning of the semester and all other material can b...

Well, it’s been a year since I started this blog; so go me for beating the odds and being among the blogs to actually survive beyond the 6 months.  I’m also congratulating myself on managing to be somewhat reliable and post a few a month (most months) and manage about 60 blogs in the first year—that’s just over 1 a week.  I’m hoping to improve that in the next year, but who knows.  And ultimately, I shouldn’t be too proud of that since a reasonable portion of those posts were repostings of things published elsewhere.  So how has blogging been for me?  Fun, frustrating and rewarding.  Fun . I’ve been enjoying having a forum to put together semi-coherent thoughts and put them out into the world for people to read.  I’ve always enjoyed writing and this gives me a means of writing about things that grab my attention and feel I can talk about with some level of intelligence.  When I get into a post that I’m thinking about, I find myself smiling an...

We’re all aware of them (and I say that at the end of the week when Charlie Sheen has for all intents and purposes gone off the deep end; who knows by the time you’re reading this, he may be an uber-celebrity or you may be asking “Isn’t that like saying Britney’s gone crazy or Lindsey’s got arrest?”—it’s a bit ubiquitous).  For many of us—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—we experience these moments of popular culture “history-in-the-making” that we in some part internalize or feel to be a part of us.  We mourn the passing of a celebrity, attend a major film on opening night, attend ritual event that grants us access into a particular event, or are witness/participant to some other event.  Some of these events become over amplified through media outlets while others stay upon the fringe but still captivate fans.  Ultimately, these moments are part of our individual narratives, yet also shared with many others.   These moments are as numerous and diverse a...