Slaving away

Okay. I've been slaving away on a holiday. So far today I have:

1. posted (finally) the second part of my online lit students' "getting to know you exercise"
2. responded to their introductory posts (something personal for each student, don't you know)
3. finalized Task #3 for my 101 students
   
4. begun a draft of Task #4
5. thought seriously about how much of Odyssey I have to read tonight to stay up with my mythology students (yikes). Never mind that I've read it before. They expect me to read right along with them.
6. downloaded "A Connected Life: A look a mobile strategies for schools, colleges, and universities" from, of all places, the folks at Blackberry. (BTW, when filling out their "form" to get access to the above, I noticed that in the field for department, they don't offer any academic fields except engineering and the like, and under "job description" professor isn't listed either. What? They don't think anyone except engineers will use mobile devices in teaching? Hmmm.)

Now it's time to run over to the fair and pick up my premiums. I won a blue and two red ribbons in photography. Hurray! I'll get maybe $4. That's okay, though.

After that, a BBQ and water party with Arringtons. It's pretty chilly in Twin Falls today. Is it too cold to swim? We'll see.

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?