Monday, August 4, 2008

Avoiding work

I'm pretty sure that I could really keep an excellent blog (in terms of posting every day) if I used the excuse of avoiding some other thing I don't want to be doing to get to the blogging. You know what I mean?

Here I sit, in my office at the college, staring at a stack of papers 564 sheets high. That stack is the manuscript of a textbook that I agreed to review for a national publisher. The review was due last Thursday. I've read most of the manuscript (scanned, skimmed, read chunks in detail, whatever), and what I have left to do is write the review. What am I doing instead? Updating my blog, of course.

To be fair, the manuscript is really to blame. I'm rereading part of chapter 7 which has ideas for students about how to create and use a blog as an academic writing aid. One of the items on that list is "keep it current," so naturally I thought of how inconsistently I've been posting here (though I've been doing better of late, I think).

Another item on the list is "be informative." That begs the question of what I might post that is informative. Let's see... what do I know anything about....

How about photography? What do you want to know about photography? Everybody is a digital photographer these days. Even if you don't own a stand-alone digital camera, your phone likely has a camera built in. So how do you use it?

In fact, maybe that'd be a good survey. How do you use the camera on your phone? How is that use different that how you use your dedicated digital camera (if you have one)?

Keri and I saw a cute bookcase the other day, and she said "Dad could build that. Take a picture so we can ask him to built it." So I snapped a picture.

I saw the most outrageously dressed woman in Fred Meyer a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't resist the impulse to take her picture (on the sly, of course).

When we visited the Twin Falls temple grounds recently the sunset cast such a beautiful glow across the sky that I wished for my camera. I had my phone, so I made do with that. Not a picture I could print or anything, but good enough to post here (see my July 14 post).

So... while I get back to work on that review, tell me how you use your phone/camera/MP3 player/whatever?

2 comments:

Peetiedy said...

Well I love all my camera's. There are times I miss using my 35mm. It needs new Battery,but I still love it. My Digital goes with me almost everywhere. Sometimes I take it forget I have it and then wish I would have used it. Mostly I use mine to document and remember the fun things my kids are doing. I also love pictures of Nature. Just the other day while swimming in one hour I think took over a 100 pictures. That is the best thing about digital. You don't have to worry about running out of film just space. Phone camera mostly for quick things that I don't think will last while I grab my digital. But they are still a lot of fun to look at.

Unknown said...

You're right, Peetie. The beauty of digital is that you can take bunches of shots and only keep the good ones.