i’m embarking on a quest to put more raw content on my blog, though not all of it will make the main feed.
here’s a long story about the chain of events that led me to take the plunge (i’ve been taking baby steps for a while), so if you have some time and are looking for a diversion, get yourself a cup of tea and stay a while. :)

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so i think i’m going to change my proclamation about getting up in the morning, at least in an official sense.
i’m going to opt instead for a proclamation about going to bed at night, which is kind of a way of tricking myself, and i think it’s a rather clever plan that should have been obvious much sooner.
:)

you see, i have decided that there are three things which give the grog power:
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so, historically, i’m not much for taking notes in class. it just doesn’t make sense to me. attempting to capture what is being said distracts me from listening to it, which makes it impossible for me to really think critically or ask questions, and i feel that this defeats the purpose. the only class where i took anything close to chronological notes was an excellent sex-discrimination and the constitution class, wherein the professor wrote all of the key points on the board as she discussed them, and did so in such an organized manner that the resulting noteset was an excellent study guide, and it did not take brainpower to transcribe them. this was an ideal arrangement for me in a law class, because the facts are rather important in that world, and so leaving class with nothing more than some geometrical pattern that used half of a pen’s worth of ink was usually a bad plan.
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so i was just called over to the office of the friendly 70 year old math professor who works down the hall. he was having a problem – someone had emailed him a file, and he wanted to change it. he opened the attachment, made his changes, saved it, and then went to open the attachment again and didn’t understand why the changes weren’t there. he wanted to email the new version to someone else, but couldn’t figure out where it went. in his mind, the file attached to the email was the only instance of the file, and he didn’t understand his temp folder, or the idea of making a local copy, or the fact that, to forward his revisions to someone else, he would have to eRase the copy that outlook automatically attached when he hit “forward”and replace it with his new, improved version. i started to explain it as simply as i could, but 5 minutes could not shake his mental model, which told him that the file existed as a part of his email, and always would. and you know what, why should he have to? i understand what happens with attachments, but i run into my own version of this problem all the time. i didn’t notice when word started saving attachments to temp by default, but it was a Stupid, Stupid day, imho. i appreciate that my desktop isn’t cluttered with all the detritus that i may really only view once, and i appreciate that my email has original versions as a record, but that appreciation doesn’t keep me from cursing on those times when i do edit the original, hit save like a good girl, and then realize that i have to navigate through fourteen levels of the computer to find the file again, and i can totally believe that a lot of people have the experience of my math professor friend – the file just disappears. but what is the best advice i can give him? why should he have to save the file to his desktop, or within another folder, when it is already a part of the email in his mind? why should he have to create another email and keep track of them both?

in case you don’t know this, i’m focusing on categorization for my capstone, and the ways that our current computer models don’t align with our mental models don’t align with the potential that computers hold for helping us keep meaningful track of the masses of information at our fingertips. so this was a good random help session for me to be a part of, even though all i could really do this time was do the task for him, help him cobble together a bad, temporary solution in case he wants to edit the file again, and feel embarrased when he thanked me.

i want to make it better, and while filing an email attachment doesn’t seem like all that much in the big scheme of things, i think that it is. i think that as long as people feel like information + computer = jumbled and mysterious, we are missing out on a whole boatload of the ways that information + brains = beautiful. and that makes me sad, and angry, and afraid.

so for all those who don’t know, i pay my way in the world right now by working in the IU Center for Math Education, which is a scarily large NSF-funded collaboration between the Math department, the School of Ed, and 9 school districts around Indiana whose teachers and administrators receive professional development from our workshops/materials/etc.
when i was hired, the arrangement was that i would spend most of my time collecting and organizing files on the “document computer” – a vision that the project director had for a central repository of the grant’s digital life, and creating a simple participant database that would live on the computer as well. quite quickly, however, the lines between the digital and physical realms blurred, my office became a dumping ground for everything, no one had a sense of what to do with it or how to gather what might be missing, and i started to pass some of my time helping the highly overwhelmed office staff in the math department with the processing of payments and the IU red tape that the grant needs to cut through to function.
that is really too much detail for this post, so i will just say that about 2 years have passed, and now we are at a point where my original job is forgotten and an inordinate amount of the locus of responsibility for the authorization of spending nearly $3 million a year lies with me – a part-time employee who is a graduate student the rest of the week, and whose entire understanding of budgets, contracts, and grants has been pasted together on the fly as demands arise.

i feel that this is fucked up, and there are days where i feel more compelled than others to say so.

last week i was notified that our funding for the new year has been held up because our former C&G officer has changed departments and the new people had a question about something that kept them from pushing the paperwork through. i answered their question two weeks ago, but the person who received the email was out of town, and then the person above her didn’t like my answer. so in the end i had to fax them a copy of a budget that someone else in their office had faxed me two weeks before. [pause to read that one again]
hopefully it is all set now, but i still just have to sit here and wait while the paperwork goes through, and in the meantime we can’t access our account. it is no one person’s fault, and indeed the people i have spoken with in other departments are quite friendly, but it is very stressful, and the whole affair is not my friend this week.
that is the nature of bureaucratic runarounds, and i am tired of it. i am tired of feeling incompetent all the time at something that i never claimed to be able to do in the first place; i am tired of feeling lazy because i don’t have the energy to devise babysteps that i can take to reform bureaucracy in 20 hours a week or less; and, perhaps most of all, i’m tired of realizing that i really am the most qualified person in my office to do this work despite all of my complaints, that i really do know as much as most of the other people around the university who are doing things like the things i do, that a great many large projects are handled at about this level of competency, and that the standards are simply not as high as i am telling myself i should attain…

i don’t know how to process all that. i feel sad and frustrated and relieved all at once. i tell myself to remember that my job is not really very hard, the blessings i receive from it in the form of tuition and stipends are large, and no one’s pretending that i’m going to do it for years to come, and all in all i feel lucky for my job 90% of the time.
but i still sometimes do things like press my forehead into the gel-filled wrist rest below my keyboard after getting off the phone with someone who was explaining things that i didn’t know existed as if i should have learned them in grade school.
i still sometimes get up and close the door of my office, take a deep breath, and whisper the title of this post into the air before going back to the computer to work on my capstone proposal while the university spins its cogs and wheels around my head…

so after a good long while of hemming and hawing, i bought these headphones (the white in-ear ones) a few weeks ago because i’m tired of my cable always getting tangled, and i figured it was worth a shot. there were several things about the retractability that annoyed me, but i had been forewarned by some reviews, and so the main nuisance was that they just didn’t fit my ears all that well.
i have never found a pair of earbuds that fit my ears, but i was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by the “in-ear” concept (which is different than straight-up earbuds… yeah, i don’t know why they bother either). in some ways i actually was impressed – they were far more comfortable than many i have worn in the past, and they sounded really good. they just fell out after a while, especially if i was sweating, and that was annoying.
overall i wasn’t too upset because the core feature – the fact that they retracted neatly when i wanted to put them away and didn’t become a gnarled blob in my bag – worked as desired, and that was really all i had banked on. they worked well enough that i could use them, and i enjoyed several things about the experience, and i could keep my eyes out for a potential upgrade. ok.
but yesterday they broke.
the casing on the right ear just totally separated in two, and i can kind of hack it together to still work but it’s a major hassle, and it pisses me off.
david says i should complain, and maybe i will, but in the short term my major question is what will i replace them with. do i try again for retractables? do i pay more for higher quality in hopes that it won’t break in a month? i don’t like having to deal with this again, but i DO like carrying music around, so what to do?
due to the alignment of the planets, which caused this to happen so soon after the release of the ipod nano, i find myself tempted to make the leap… i can’t totally justify the expense – i’ve been using faith (my pda) to play music and it works well enough – but there are definitely arguments to support it:

• I have filled up my 1G flash card really quickly and would definitely enjoy being able to both carry more music around and have room for the other things that make the portable memory useful – like schoolwork or pictures
• The mp3 software that came with faith is crap, and the software i could get by paying for something new isn’t much better. regardless, i have to buy Something no matter what if i ever want to play ogg files, which is annoying. i just checked, and there are freeware plugins for iTunes that enable ogg support, so that would be another bird with the nano stone (or perhaps the nano ultra-thin pebble)
• it wouldn’t really add anything to what i carry in my pockets because it’s so freakin small, and it has the screen that the shuffle was missing
• i can get $20 bucks off because of apple’s educational discount

And, to tie it back to the original topic of this entry:

• i have to buy new headphones anyway

:)
so we’ll see
i’m just saying the temptation is making itself known…