After leaving our local indie bookstore, I realized how appropriate it was to spend some money there the same day the FTC goes after Amazon.

Someone let us go to our local indie bookstore the week that kiddo is recovering from a rough semi-allergic reaction, so now she has a bunch of new stuff to read, and we have a lot more loyalty points.

Welcome to Mysterious Malady Monday, every parent’s favorite way to start the week!

Kiddo just responded to an instance of sexism in the past with a sarcastic “thanks, history!” and I think this should become a standard answer.

I don’t know if I’m pleased or disturbed by how often the classic British political sitcom “Yes, Minister” is relevant to my work in academia.

Unborking my blogging automations has been a pain, but on the upside, changing how I do it in Siri Shortcuts has fixed something small in my linkposts that’s bugged me for years.

One of the Vice journalists currently reporting on the Tim Ballard allegations just followed my (now dormant) Twitter account, and I’m going to take that as validation of my research on far-right Mormonism.

Si vous voyez ce message, j’aurai réussi à refaire mes raccourcis pour poster depuis mon portable.

It’s already indefensible that ClassDojo promises greater access to teachers for parents willing to pay, but these features also translate into letting richer parents put more pressure on teachers. This business model is awful.

If some tea (well, tisane) purist wants to tell me that smores tea shouldn’t be a thing, I don’t really have a great counterargument, but it’s delicious, so I have no plans to stop drinking it.

Another paper, another fight with copyeditors about not capitalizing danah boyd’s name.

Journal copyeditors are great when they fix things, but when they break my sentences and don’t ask questions about “[information removed for blinding]”, I wonder what the point is.

Journal copyeditor changed a bunch of first-person language in our abstract to third-person “the authors,” and I am peeved.

I have seen some unwieldly proofing software in my short career, but the one they’re having me use for my newest acceptance really takes the cake. I’d rather (re)learn InDesign and fix it there.

I often gripe that Markdown doesn’t have as much functionality as HTML, but I just had to hand-convert a short .md document to .html, and it emphasized just how much easier it is to write Markdown on the fly.

I was already enjoying the actual play podcast Worlds Beyond Number, but once the phrase “pro bono rules lawyer” was uttered, I knew I was totally in.

I inherited from my mom a heart rate that just trends low—even lower if I’m exercising regularly. The doctors I’ve talked to aren’t concerned about it, but every morning, my Apple Watch freaks out, convinced that I almost died in my sleep.

Every copyright transfer I sign destroys another part of my soul.

College conversation about investment in GPT-type tech to support research is continuing. I think it’s… fitting that the survey being circulated is clearly using Qualtrics’s auto-suggested Likert responses—and that the responses aren’t quite right for the questions being asked.

Il y a beaucoup de sagesse dans la chanson « Octobre » des Cowboys fringants. Faut que je l’écoute plus souvent.

I’m torn between how much I dislike the idea of a connected car and how easy it just now made it to get a question answered at the local dealer. I guess we wouldn’t agree to all this surveillance if it wasn’t actually useful sometimes.

Je trouve que Paris est surreprésenté dans les mondes francophones et francophiles, mais je me lasse pas quand-même des vidéos sur son métro.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy church, but what really fed my soul today was a family trip to some beloved indie bookstores. And some listening to a radio adaptation of Les Misérables. And, okay, yes, the smores cookies and cream ice cream I snitched from spouse’s cone.

I firmly believe that research is a process of argument—and that statistics are, therefore, a rhetorical device.

I’ve been struggling with putting together a particular document for over a week. It’s like I’ve entirely forgotten how to do academic writing—something I usually feel pretty confident about.

Today, I’m remembering the family friend from a Latter-day Saint congregation I grew up in who heard me in a church settng quote some scripture on the need for the rich to give to the poor and then took me aside to ask how liberal my school friends were and give me some cautionary advice.

Je regrette ne pas avoir réussi (pour le moment) à enseigner le français à ma fille, mais ça reste utile pour parler en secret avec mon épouse.

My college is floating the idea of investing in GPT-type technology to help researchers code text data. This reminds me of my longtime belief that the distinction between “qual” and “quant” is often less important than the distinction between different research paradigms.

It’s four hours into my workday, so I guess it’s time to start doing that writing I blocked the whole day off for. 🙃

This is apparently the second August in a row I’ve complained on here that I’d much rather pay higher taxes than deal with another school fundraiser.

I have loved They Might Be Giants longer than any other artist, and I still feel like I constantly overlook how good they are.

“Welcome to tenure, here are all your new service obligations.”

I was excited last weekend to buy two new teas to add to my growing collection, but these might be the first duds I’ve picked out since starting with tea in May. I know rooibos is a red flag for me from years of herbal teas, so I don’t know how I missed it in the one ingredient list.

Prensky coined the term “digital native” to talk about people my age, but I have a colleague younger than me who is using the term to refer to our undergraduate students. This sums up so much of why I think this term is useless.

Inspired by a sci-fi book I’m reading, I made an off-handed quip this morning about becoming a disembodied simulation. Kiddo responded that she preferred to have a “huggable, play-withable” daddy.

This is an admittedly fuzzy memory, but I was thinking today about the time some unit at BYU brought in a French thinker to speak on the importance of “the family,” but instead of the conservative religious arguments I was expecting, the guy’s talk had monarchist vibes.

Last day of kiddo’s summer, so no matter how behind I am on course prep, we are unapologetically going to the zoo.

Every semester, I give a guest lecture on internet research methods for an undergrad class in my unit. A few days after scheduling this semester’s lecture, I’ve realized it’s the first time I’m giving it after Musk borked Twitter as a data source.

I get why folks in ed compare ChatGPT to Wikipedia, but there are important differences. Wikipedia is entirely non-profit, lays bare its knowledge generation process, can be fixed on the fly, and can’t actively generate problematic content. It’s not just about reliability.

Does anyone have experience arranging for language lessons for kids? I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m reasonably competent as a French teacher and as a dad, but not the combination of the two.

I don’t like the card game War as a game, but I’m increasingly appreciative of it as a way to spend time with kiddo.

J’aime bien la ville où j’habite, mais c’est fort dommage qu’il n’y ait pas d’Alliance Française ici.

We decided to stuff this weekend full (early anniversary dinner and movie, then visit to friends across the state, then family visit to water park) so naturally kiddo tested positive for COVID-19 tonight.

A few weeks ago, I added a tin of tea that tastes like Andes mints to my growing collection, and it’s taken a lot of self control to drink anything else in the morning.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working to digitize journals, letters, and other documents from my past. It’s interesting to see how much of present me is different than past me—but also what’s still the same.

I was exhausted last night when I went to bed, and then I started imagining an argument with someone over research methods where I was pointing out the eugenicist views of early statistical pioneers, and that got me so riled up that I couldn’t fall asleep.

C’était le 1er août (où peut-être le jour d’après) la dernière fois que j’ai quitté la Suisse pour rentrer chez moi. La fête nationale marque donc un rappel d’y retourner un jour.

Lire Guy Delisle en traduction, c’est déjà bon, et je suis content que ses albums sont disponible dans les bibliothèques près de chez moi. Pourtant, je viens de reprende Pyongyang en version francophone, et c’est parfait.

Every interactive object lesson in a purportedly hybrid worship service is a message that in-person attendees are more important than virtual ones.

I don’t want to contribute to the misconception that professors don’t work during the summer (which is hilariously false), but I’m really glad I took advantage of my nine month contract by prioritizing time with kiddo these last few months.

Using Siri Shortcuts and an API, I just made a crude-but-functional Apple Watch implementation for Habitica. Very pleased with myself.

Now that I think of it, that seems to sum up how I increasingly feel about productivity books. I find useful ideas in them, but I also feel like the worldview they promote is broken.

I’m reading a productivity book that has some useful advice in it, but I’m bothered by the running encouragement to find a project I’m willing to get up early or stay up late for. I’ve learned in recent months that getting enough sleep is really important for me—more important than any project.

It’s good to ask whether generative AI is good or bad for students, instructors, or education, but it’s arguably more important for ed. stakeholders to ask who else generative AI is good or bad for. Edtech needs to pay more attention to broader contexts.

Update: I’ve figured out the basics of the Habitica API, and now every feature that isn’t native to the service is a challenge to up my programming/Siri Shortcuts game.

I’ve spent a few days considering switching habit trackers, and now that I think I’ve found one, I’m wondering if I know enough to mess around with the API.

In the spirit of ultra obscure references, I really want to name something “Waughmp Rat,” combining a Homestar Runner onomatopoeia and an unseen Star Wars creature.

I’m not the only instructor out there with an idiosyncratic but very specific mental style guide for LMS content, right? Right?

Quand ma fille demande du pain grillé pour le petit-déjeuner, je pense souvent à une affiche publicitaire Migros des années 2000 où un papa un peu crétin fait des courses en se demandant « Des toasts et quoi encore ? »

In a current side project, I’m using Markdown footnotes for the first time, and I’m really impressed. Writing fully in Markdown is seeming more and more feasible the more I tinker with it.

Slowly realizing that I have no choice but to make generative AI one of the themes of my content management class in the fall.

We’ve had so many severe storms recently that when the weather sirens just went off for their monthly test, I reflexively panicked even though there isn’t a cloud in the sky.

Parfois, quand un.e Dijonnais.e s’en fiche, on peut entendre un bof bourguignon.

When now-spouse met my siblings, we all went to see Spider-Man 3 together in a near-empty theater. My siblings and I mortified her by cracking each other up making fun of the movie (including making Babe jokes when James Cromwell was on screen). Fun memory.

After five years of teaching in an LIS program, I’ve finally had the moment I’ve been dreaming of: Running into a former student during a family trip to a local library.

It just occurred to me that I know the fight song for CGNU (a fictional university from an early 2000s web cartoon) better than the fight song for the university that pays my salary.

After nearly thirteen years of life as a one-car family, we’re buying a second car today. I wish we didn’t have to, but I keep reminding myself this is as much a natural consequence of the systemic failures of American public transit as it is a deliberate family decision.

Today’s the day tenure takes effect; time to change my business cards, email signature, and CV.

I’ve tried to scale back my media consumption recently. My RSS client feels empty, and it’s weird not to check social media as much. Every time I think about stepping it back up, though, it just stresses me out.

It annoys me when a journal asks a reviewer to address specific prompts; it annoys me more when I only realize this after writing my review.

Ce matin, je prends un petit voyage ferroviare entre Bâle et Strasbourg grâce à YouTube.

In further proof that stereotypical plots in children’s media often have some truth to them, kiddo was dreading going to summer camp this morning but wished this afternoon that she didn’t have to leave.

Aujourd’hui, j’ai appris que James Bond avait une mère vaudoise.

Grateful to have a spouse who thinks I like ginger way more than a person should but still buys dark chocolate ginger cookies because she knows I’ll like them. She and kiddo tried them, but I’m the only one who appreciates the burn.

There are Aquabats songs that I like because I know they’re dumb, but there is zero irony in my love for “Pizza Day.”

Kiddo: “I just want to teach cavemen to make pepperoni pizza.”

Just had a long conversation with a student that reminded me that we cannot (and should not try to) assess that which we do not effectively teach.

Currently listening to an audiobook where the British narrator has to do the voice of a German character who speaks in English with a Canadian accent. It’s so convoluted that I can’t tell if it’s good or not.

Big family bike ride today, and spouse and I were trying to figure out why kiddo was struggling so much on a mostly flat rail trail. Get back and learn that her brake pads were broken and slowing her rear tire the whole time.

I did not know that “wholesome Batman” was a genre I needed, but Wayne Family Adventures is a lot of fun.

I work hard not to be a sitcom dad, but it just occurred to me that after spouse left for airport, we’ve basically done nothing but order pizza and play video games, so…

Kiddo, just now: “Are Pokémon even marsupials?”

My alarm woke me from a dream in which I was trying to recruit Latter-day Saint missionaries as pilots for the Rebel Alliance, and I have a lot of questions about that worldbuilding.

Never change, Eurovision.

This afternoon, a DM let me use a firbolg’s “Speak with Beast and Leaf” ability to turn some stolen green onions into a thief detector. Not sure it’s supposed to work that way, but it was still D&D at its best.

All right, black tea, let’s see how we get along.

Update: I’ve been a Kentuckian for 20+ years, but my first time watching the Kentucky Derby was just meh. So much wealth invested in a race that I didn’t really find interesting. Looking forward to family Eurovision next Saturday, though!

We signed up for a month of Peacock so that we could watch the Kentucky Derby today and Eurovision next Saturday. I’m sure that says something about our family, but I couldn’t say exactly what.

I did not know until today how much I needed an Aardman Animation claymation Wedge Antilles in my life.

A friend of mine who works outside academia wrote yesterday to say that she thought my most recent article made for good road trip reading, and I honestly don’t know if anyone’s ever paid a higher compliment to my research.

Heading into finals, campus sent out a message about AI detection tools maybe not being trustworthy, which is great. However, this is in the context of these tools being wrapped into plagiarism detection software we already have access to, so they should say the same about it, too.

I was a big fan of Homestar Runner in the early-to-mid 2000s, but I’m still baffled by how into it kiddo has gotten over the past few months.

This has been a long semester, and it’s not over yet, but I did get notice of promotion and tenure yesterday, so that is making this last stretch more manageable.

I don’t know if anything makes me angrier about my profession than when a student apologizes that there’s been a death in their family at a busy time of the semester. What have we as professors done to make students feel like they have to apologize for and justify their grief?

Starting to get notices about my Twitter API access being suspended. So long, Twitter research: You were an important part of my career, and I’ll miss you.

When I was kiddo’s age, Pokémon didn’t exist yet, so there’s something that breaks my brain about her current enthusiasm for the franchise.

It sure looks like Star Wars is heading toward an Heir to the Empire remake, and even though I know it’s fan pandering, I am really excited about it.

Je n’ai plus souvent l’occasion de me servir du français, et sans pouvoir m’entraîner je crains oublier ce que je savais avant. Ce matin, j’ai eu de l’espoir en lisant une phrase en français que j’avais écrit au lycée ; c’est évident que je sais toujours m’exprimer mieux qu’il y a vingt ans.

Made sure to take some CBD oil before leaving for Easter services, just as the good Lord intended.

I recently finished a relisten of my favorite Star Wars actual play podcast, and now I want to start a Star Wars FATE game.

J’ai appris cette semaine que les transports publics de ma ville sont soutenus par la RATP, ce qui m’étonne pas mal.

One of these mornings where I hope 2022 Spencer put together good slides, because I have class in 20 minutes and haven’t had the time to review them until now.

Kiddo last night: “please let me sleep in on Saturday!” Kiddo this morning: wakes up earlier than she does on a school day.

Over the past week, I’ve been called “Stephen” in two separate professional contexts by two people who ought to know my name. Starting to wonder if there’s something they know that I don’t.

If ClassDojo can send me “hey, check the new content in ClassDojo” emails, it could also send me that content in the email itself, so that I never have to open the app. Too bad it’s too dedicated to walled gardening.

Kiddo has EXTREMELY low standards for a pronouncement of “Best Daddy Ever,” but I’m grateful for it nonetheless.

Outlook’s semi-new “reactions” are killing me; if it’s not accessible from another email client, it shouldn’t be a feature. Email is one of the few shared web protocols we’ve got, so let’s not ruin it through platformization.

Kiddo is excited to be signed up for soccer, so we’ve spent time kicking her new ball around the past two nights. I’m surprised by how much is coming back to me, given that I haven’t played in ~15 years and that I’ve never been good.

Il y a un terrain de golf non loin de chez moi qui s’appellle Connemara. Je suis incapable de le voir sans penser à Michel Sardou.

Scrabble’s fundamental flaw is that it tries to make language more discrete and managed than it ever has been or ever will be.

Kiddo is complicating our errand to buy her soccer stuff by insisting on hugging all the mannequins in the sports store.

Venmo’s insistence that transactions be accompanied by notes makes me wonder what they’re doing with that data. For several months now, I’ve insisted on replacing any helpful indication with random characters.

If I were a better person, I’d be as rattled by any shooting as I am by the one on my alma mater’s campus. If we were a better country, that wouldn’t feel like such an overwhelming idea.

Now seems like a particular good time to bring up my perennial pet peeve that people treat the terms “UFOs” and “aliens” as synonyms when the whole point of the former is to reserve judgment about the latter.

I hurt myself on a pizza cutter last night—but not even on the blade? Somehow that last detail is absurd enough that I’m more upset about that than the injury itself.

I know Kirby Heyborne as the star of several Mormon B movies, so I was taken aback when he turned out to be the narrator for the audiobook of Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother.” Weirdest Venn diagram overlap of my interests I’ve seen in a while.

One of my academic pet peeves is when people use the word rigor as a validating synonym for something else, like “quantitative” or “giving out lots of Cs.” Rigor is important, but narrow definitions aren’t useful.

If Elijah can make infinite flour and oil happen, demanding that the widow feed him first really comes off as a jerk move.

There’s a great John Finnemore sketch that involves a ridiculous number of nested stories, and I’m thinking of it as I approach the end of Frankenstein (a novel in the form of letters sent by a man recounting conversations with Frankenstein, who quotes other letters, etc.).

Pleased to see that page proofs I’m reviewing have preserved the emojis in quoted tweets. It’s frustrating for this social media researcher how many journal publication platforms do not support them.

I’m sure this is overthinking things, but I have a LOT of linguistic questions about Frankenstein.

The last time I read Frankenstein, I got a kick out of noticing all the Swiss connections. This time, I’m amusing myself by thinking of the title character as a hubristic tech bro.

Petite preuve que la technologie n’existe pas hors culture : Quand un site web américain n’acceptera pas un numéro de téléphone comme « valide » si les chiffres sont séparés par des points, comme j’ai pris l’habitude de faire. Faut des tirets, comme un vrai Étatsunisien.

First Gloomhaven session of 2023 yesterday. Tough scenario, and we might have lost either way, but my Leeroy Jenkinsing with a squishy Spellweaver certainly didn’t help.

Il faut une version de la chanson « Sacré Charlemagne » qui se plaint des responsabilités de la vie adulte.

Another Saturday, another bout with guilt and anxiety sparked by my general ignorance of home maintenance.

One of our newest family traditions is kiddo watching a Homestar Runner video during her bedtime snack while I do some dishes and see how many of the lines I still remember verbatim.

Tonight, I suddenly remembered my sister’s BYU roommate who insisted on calling ketchup and mustard “toppings” because saying “condiment” would require her to say “condom” along the way.

Ce matin, j’ai préparé du muësli fait-maison au lieu de faire des corrections, et je n’ai aucun sentiment de culpabilité.

The desire to “enhance” or “improve” learning is a noble one, but I’m increasingly convinced it gets too much attention—and distracts us from as (or more) important questions about education and technology.

I think one of the most endearing nerdy things about our marriage is how in our texts, we still use the Can Haz language from the meme culture of when we first met.

In the Canvas LMS main interface, it describes analytics reports as based on “near real-time data.” In documentation, it specifies that “near real-time” is “may be delayed by 40 hours.”

Canvas: “You can draw conclusions about student participation with our analytics!” Also Canvas: “Mobile page view data aren’t exact, and our analytics only update every 24 hours, so don’t draw too many conclusions, lol.”

Reading through the data available through Canvas analytics, I’m reminded of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s argument (in their excellent book “Data Feminism”) that structured, “clean” data is most necessary for “strangers in the dataset.”

My tenure dossier has passed all the college-level steps, and I just finished reading the kind letter my dean wrote. Now off to the Provost’s office for months of waiting!

Is there any way to complete a CAPTCHA without providing free labor for ML/AI developers? Makes me angrier every time I have to do it.

One of kiddo’s library books right now is part comic and part choose your own adventure, all wrapped up in a solo TTRPG adventure. It’s a bit too old for her, but we’re both loving it.

Jon Sciezka and Julia Rothman’s “The Real Dada Mother Goose” is a real delight. It’s not often that kiddo checks out books that are homages to Dada, Oulipo, and other things I studied as a French major.

Une vraie amie, c’est celle qui visite Bruxelles en vacances, trouve par hasard une librairie avec plein de BD et t’envoie un message pour te demander quel album tu veux qu’elle apporte aux États-Unis pour toi.

Just checked the Wayback Machine to see if my old, long-deleted LiveJournal ever got archived. It wasn’t, but I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a disappointment or a relief.

It’s been a long day at the end of a long week, but it ended with an “are you working on anything interesting so I can write about it?” message from a reporter and a kind compliment from a grad school friend, so all in all, not too bad.

Hier soir, j’ai été sage en me couchant à l’heure. J’ai même réussi à vite m’endormir ! Logique, donc, que j’ai été réveillé bien avant l’heure prévue.

Remembering the time some trollish critics of research I’m doing with a colleague grabbed the audio from a YouTube video of our conference presentation and remixed it into a song they posted to SoundCloud. It’s supposed to be mocking, but I find it funny.

I’ve seen jokes about the supposed irony of having to fill out a CAPTCHA to use ChatGPT, but it’s actually pretty consistent: The purpose of CAPTCHA is also to mine the fruits of human labor to train ML/AI that can replace human labor.

There’s a lot I love about using Hugo for my website, but one of the best bits is that since posts are stored as text files, it’s remarkably straightforward to write a script to do bulk edits.

Survey respondent mistyped “Infinite Campus” as “Infinite Camus,” and now I’m looking for a French existentialism punchline.

Looking for help from people working in or familiar with ed and ed tech: Do you know anything about an LMS, student information system, or other software called “Reef”? It’s showing up in survey data, but I can’t find anything on it.

The pure joy kiddo showed when getting her first library card was exactly what I needed just now.

Nothing says unwarranted optimism quite like the big pile of books I brought home from campus in case I had time to work on “that manuscript” over the break. Lugging them back to campus tomorrow morning.

Dreamt this morning that I was applying for PhD programs. It wasn’t until dream-me began reviewing my research record that I remembered that I already have a PhD and am actually applying for tenure right now.

It’s been so long since I stayed up to welcome in the new year that there was a brief moment last night where I honestly couldn’t remember if you’re supposed to do that on December 31st or January 1st.

I have never needed to write a recursive function in any of my (admittedly quite limited) professional programming, but when messing with kiddo’s robot today, I remembered the concept from a Java class in college and pulled it off in block programming. Pretty happy with that.

Today, kiddo is rediscovering her set of Story Cubes. I had forgotten her insistence that the comedy and tragedy masks on one cube face are actually Grey-style aliens.

Even on my second read-through, it’s hard to believe how good the 2016 Flintstones comic actually is.

Steven Peck’s “A Short Stay in Hell” gets better each time I read it.

Kiddo’s uncle is teaching her the Pokémon TCG, which is pretty delightful.

I am skeptical about heavy emphasis on STEM as educational policy, but watching my kid learn to program with her new robot today was a real treat.

Doing some Christmas Eve Geoguessr, and I think I ought to make this a tradition.

I’ve been trying to put words to an idea in my head for a few weeks, and I think I finally have it: A secular Christmas is still definitely Christian in the same way that Homer Simpson is still definitely a white dude.

My reputation as an uncle is increasingly becoming associated with tabletop RPGs, and I’m not upset about that at all.

I’m normally a big “break is break” advocate, but family illness meant being behind on work, which meant taking over my father-in-law’s WFH setup today to finish a syllabus and course shell I needed to prep so other instructors could work off them.

Skipping my congregation’s candelight service today. Can’t go in person because of family sickness, and they’ve made it clear that they aren’t going to make huge efforts to make it Zoom accessible. Bummed to miss it, but playing Mario Party with kiddo instead is pretty fun.

I was really hoping to make something special of Advent this year, but the past three weeks have just kind of sucked, and I don’t know if the next one will be any better. I don’t know that I have a takeaway from this, except that maybe it’s okay to have a sucky Advent.

I think it would be dumb to name my next TTRPG character “John Mastodon,” but I’m not sure that will stop me.

In the Greenhalgh home, Mommy’s been sick for over a week, which means Daddy’s not gotten a lot of work done recently. Final grades are due tomorrow, though, so kiddo might get a lot of screen time today.

a-ha’s “The Living Daylights” came up on a playlist just now, and it made me want to play Axis and Allies. I received the game the same Christmas my brother received a CD of James Bond music, and the two will always be associated in my mind.

Lundi dernier, sachant qu’il serait une semaine difficile, je me suis offert du vrai gruyère suisse. Il y a eu des jours depuis où ce n’était qu’un petit bout de ce fromage magnifique qui m’a permis de continuer.

This semester, my efforts to trust students feel like they’re backfiring. I ungrade, but they don’t take work seriously. I never use plagiarism checkers, but I still have to deal with a last minute case. Not saying I’ll stop effort, but still sucks.

Family has been sick for the last week, and it’s been a struggle to keep up with grading even after cancelling nearly all my other commitments. Thought I was in the clear this morning, only for the first final project I opened to turn into suspected plagiarism. 😩

I got my job largely because I can work with Twitter data, and my tenure application is built on the premise that I do good Twitter research. I probably shouldn’t take as much pleasure as I do from watching the platform fall apart right now, but I was ready to move on anyway.

Je viens de découvrir que les CFF vendent de petits oeuvres d’art faits à partir de vieux afficheurs à palettes. C’est qqch que je cherche depuis longtemps, mais on ne livre pas jusqu’aux États-Unis. 😭😭😭

Streisand Effect must be real, because I’ve never cared this much about a single plane in my whole life.

It occurred to me this morning that one could build Tales from the Loop RPG characters based on Homestar Runner’s Teen Girl Squad, and now I really want to try it.

Je ne suis pas le foot de trop près (ni aucun autre sport, à vrai dire), mais cet après-midi, j’allume RTS La Première. Hop Suisse !

Bien content d’avoir découvert le Calendrier de l’Avent de noelenbd.fr (même si je suis deçu d’avoir raté les premiers jours). Encore plus content qu’Izneo ne défend pas aux non-Français de profiter de l’offre.

This weekend, I read Kate Beaton’s new graphic novel memoir, “Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” in a single sitting. It was excellent and really got me thinking.

I’m about to set up a Graceland University login because I’m registering for (non-credit-bearing) courses at Community of Christ Seminary. I know I’m not the first person in history to enroll at both BYU and Graceland during my lifetime, but it still tickles me to think about.

Pretty windy this morning, which will add another dimension to bike commute safety.

Our family does NOT have a ’too many books’ problem. We may, however, have a ’not enough bookshelves’ problem.

As my tenure application continues to make its way through that process, I’ve thought a lot about how grateful I am that my unit is the right size pond for this fish.

In a training last week, we discussed the trend of journals’ checking manuscripts with plagiarism software. People shared examples where editors couldn’t accept perfectly good reasons for authors to reuse material unless a certain software score was also reached.

Boosted kiddo’s motivation to help put away the dishes by convincing her to think of it as a magic trick (making the dishwasher’s contents ‘disappear’). Boosted my own by remembering it’s now legal to play Mannheim Steamroller Christmas music around the house.

One of the highlights of this week’s family gathering was teaching my cousin’s kids to play the all-ages TTRPG Magical Kitties Save the Day. I didn’t make a firm commitment, but I did suggest we might be able to revisit our game sometime over Zoom.

The Black Friday email I got from ClassDojo today is representative of everything wrong with the ed tech industry.

In recent years, my faith has become less literal, my marriage has become mixed-faith, and we’ve both committed to letting kiddo choose her own future as she gets older. This has meant revisiting family ritual and tradition for end of year holidays, but it’s kind of fun!

Feeling better today, so we’re joining the family Thanksgiving gathering about 20 hours later than planned. Looks like our holiday plans will retain their general shape despite yesterday’s disruption.

Woke up feeling lousy, so now I get to spend the next few hours figuring out if it’s the sort of thing we need to update (i.e., cancel) our Thanksgiving travel plans for.

Hearing Black Friday commercials on French radio reminds me that I’m totally fine with the secularization of religious holidays and that the real problem is the commercialization of our holidays, whether always secular or originally religious.

Le « Black Friday » est déjà désespérant quand il est limité aux États-Unis. Quelle tristesse de me rendre compte combien cet évènement stupide est maintenant répandu ailleurs.

Growing up, I was taught to graze at religious texts, focusing on anecdotes that supported what we already believed. One of the great pleasures of my adulthood has been learning to read them more critically: wrestling with their problems and learning deeper lessons.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’ve reached the season where my colleagues (and students) think I’m crazy for continuing to bike commute. Despite sometimes achey fingers, the cold itself is usually easy to deal with. When I get worried is when there’s ice on the roads.

I sometimes wonder how I’d react if I were put through a ‘Peggy Sue loop’: made to repeat an earlier part of my life with all my knowledge of how things turned out. I have major disagreements with my past self, but I also owe him a lot, so there would be difficult decisions.

I bought a French novel at a used bookstore last week, but I’ve felt burned out on reading lately, so it’s gone to the pile of books I keep meaning to read but keep skipping in favor of Minecraft or something else.

‘Kiddo, I’m glad you’re a part of our family.’ ‘… the weirdest family?’ I will never tire of her developing sense of humor.

I’m a teetotaler, so some of my microbrewing grad school friends once declared that I would make a good “beer eunuch”—I could be trusted to hold onto a barrel (or whatever—I don’t know how this stuff works) without abusing that trust.

chenséliser \ʃɑ̃zelize\ (verbe intransitif) : se balader à Paris comme touriste

J’aime quasiment toutes les pistes sur le nouvel album de Stromae, mais j’apprécie surtout « C’est que du bonheur », où il parle en toute franchise des hauts et des bas de l’expérience d’être parent d’un jeune enfant.

Hearing about Kevin Conroy’s death (😭😭😭) has me reading about Batman: The Animated Series, which has me reading about various “ages” (golden, silver, bronze) of comics. Was there ever an aluminium age? If not, what would it have looked like?

Is to adopt a new religious identity necessarily to leave the old one behind? Many—justifiably and understandably—use that language, but it’s never quite fit my own experience. I feel like I’m nitpicking when I try to explain it, though.

I’m currently on a train where you can’t adjust the seat in any way. As tall as I am, that means the head rest digs into my shoulder blades if I sit up straight. No wonder my posture is lousy.

Yesterday’s conference presentation went well, but despite a nagging suspicion that I’d prepared too many slides, I didn’t take the time to trim and wound up skipping a chunk of the talk. Alas.

Doing a research presentation at a conference today. The slides are essentially a fancy HTML doc (thanks to remarkjs), and I’m proud that I figured out how to get Font Awesome SVGs to display in-line with text.

Over a decade ago, when I was discovering British TV, I imagined a ridiculous hypothetical crossover of all my favorite shows. For example, Sir Humphrey from ‘Yes, Minister’ turned out to be the Master from ‘Doctor Who.’

In 2022, I joined the prescription sunglasses club. It’s great, but it requires making certain I’m packing any glasses I’m not wearing. That failed yesterday, so I’m wearing old, scratched indoor glasses until I can get my good ones from work.

Looking at the haul of new library books in our living room today, I realized that we’re both a family that buys a lot of books and a family that saves huge amounts of money thanks to the library.

Sounds like my tenure application has completed unit-level review and is on its way to college review. I guess there’s time for a sigh of relief before I start holding my breath again.

I love that I got to vote early this year, but it also means I keep forgetting that today is Election Day.

Le mec sur RTS Option Musique dit que Johnny Hallyday a fait une version française de « Sweet Home Alabama », et je ne sais pas comment réagir.

A mentor in Community of Christ is encouraging me to attend the April 2023 World Conference—and even to register as a voting delegate. The idea of a church conference that asks for bottom-up consensus is very different than my previous, top-down ecclesiastical experience.

Kiddo is coming with me to class this afternoon, which is fun—but complicated by the fact that my lecture today is the most controversial and ‘adult’ of the semester for this class. Still, maybe a kid will have important insight on controversies surrounding content moderation?

I worry about how often events in my country seem to echo the Dreyfus Affair of late 19th/early 20th century France. As one author put it, truth and justice were set aside by those who perceived them as threats to their vision of the country.

Kiddo after waiting and watching patiently while I filled out ballot at early voting: ‘I have to admit, that was pretty fun!’

I feel like I am constantly fine-tuning how I do assessments in my classes. I want to trust students and avoid policing them, but I’m frustrated when they respond to this approach by acting like it exempts them from attending class and participating.

Finished reviewing my ballot for early voting tomorrow!

Hier, je voulais identifier une chanson française dont je me souvenais. Je ne savais ni son titre ni son auteur—juste que le mot « admiration » figurait plusieurs fois parmi ses paroles. Grâce à DuckDuckGo et pas mal d’effort mental, je l’ai trouvée ! « Bidon » de Alain Souchon.

Ce matin, j’ai couru mes cinq petits kilomètres sans écouteurs—un évènement rarissime. Je dis pas que je vais faire comme ça tout le temps, mais je suis content de savoir que je peux laisser les podcasts et la musique chez moi quand je veux.

Among my least typical but most cherished souvenirs of the time I lived in Europe are the legal and quasi-legal documents I picked up along the way. In my campus office, I have a French residency permit, a Swiss driver’s license, lots of public transportation passes…

Je suis en train de ranger et numériser de vieux fichiers, lettres, et souvenirs. Après la numérisation, j’en jette la plupart, mais le reste va au travail pour ajouter un peu de nostalgie à mon bureau. Et c’est donc pour ça que j’ai un permis de conduire suisse au travail.

To get my current driver’s license, I was asked to take off my glasses for the photo and told it had something to do with facial recognition. That terrified me, but my hope is that since I ALWAYS wear my glasses, the software is going to struggle matching me to that photo.

Just made a pact with an academic colleague that we wouldn’t hold back from telling each other that it’s time to retire and make room for new faculty.

This morning, I am remembering the officially Wendy’s-branded tabletop roleplaying game ‘Feast of Legends,’ which is preposterous but also seems like it could work if you really wanted it to.

My parents are hosting (almost) everyone from my big family for Thanksgiving this year. Given growing numbers of food preferences and restrictions among us, I wonder whether we’ll have a big inclusive-but-non-traditional Thursday feast or whether dinner gets balkanized.

The best figure I’ve ever included in a scholarly publication was a screenshot of a joke I made in a tweet and was especially proud of. The screenshot happened to demonstrate a Twitter feature I was trying to explain, which seemed justification enough.

It is fun to see all my neighbors’ Halloween decorations tonight. It is less fun to see how many of them have Ring doorbells capturing my comings and goings.

I am rereading through old FoxTrot comic strips and bookmarking all the tech ones I think I might use in lectures next semester. Wish I’d done this years ago.

Using the Stardew Valley soundtrack as a chores anthem seems to get kiddo more excited (or at least less resentful) about helping out around the house.

I liked the She-Hulk finale, but one thing that’s been irritating me is the way its gimmick reinforces the locking in of content to streaming subscriptions rather than letting people own content. Can you even buy Disney+ stuff on disc?

The fediverse is great and all, but for me, it won’t be complete until there’s a Mormon instance of Mastodon at curelom.social.

Especially proud of kiddo’s growing sense of humor when it involves successful wordplay. Tonight, she went from ‘my legs are wobbly’ to ‘my legs are wallabies,’ and it was great.

Est-ce qu’il est possible de « feuilleter » un document électronique ? Où est-ce que le sens est trop lié à l’expérience physique et non le sens général de vite parcourir un document ?

Kiddo’s response to our complaining that we’re also tired: 🎶’When you’re a kid you get to sleep, but now you don’t, now you don’t!’ 🎶

I’m taking the lead on the format and details of a small academic organization’s first online conference. I’d love to hear from folks who have attended successful, truly international online academic conferences about what made them work! All advice welcome!

I put in an earbud an hour or two ago so I could listen to music while preparing class readings, and I’m only now realizing that I never hit play.

Cet après-midi, je fais des corrections en écoutant ma collection de musique francophone. Après une quinzaine d’années d’effort, je suis bien content de ce que je peux écouter quand je veux.

It’s my students’ Fall break, which means I’m naturally busier than a normal Monday.

Pretty sure the sermon I heard this morning had undercurrents of British Israelism in it and 😬😬😬

I’ve had a several moments this week where it’s felt okay—and not like failure—to acknowledge that my life and my self don’t match the idealized vision of the future I had when I was younger. I’ve been learnng this lesson for years, but this week has felt like a big step forward.

This morning’s freezing bike commute has me dressing like a double-balaclavad bank robber with a love for fluorescent yellow.

Generally, I discourage my intro to data science students from tackling questions they can’t answer at their level of programming, but sometimes I get so interested in the question that I end up writing the code for them so I can see what they do with it.

Apprendre à reconnaître la voix de Johnny Hallyday, c’était une étape importante dans mon apprentissage de tout ce qui est francophone. Jean-Baptiste Guégan (sa sosie vocale) pose donc problème quand il chante à la radio.

Going through old things and found a letter from my grandfather. It’s all typed except for a signature and a handwritten line at the very top: “All errors, be it spelling, grammar, etc., are fault of computer!!”

Quand j’étudiais le français au lycée, on s’amusait beaucoup à imaginer que tout prénom terminant en « -er » (comme le mien) puisse se conjuguer comme un verbe du 1er groupe—et que le nom Beyoncé était donc un participe passé. C’était tout bête, mais ça faisait marrer.

I think one of the most important things in learning to do research is understanding that it’s a process of argumentation more than a process of discovery.

I tell myself I won’t work nights and weekends, but every semester, there comes a point where this principled stance gets me so behind that I have to work nights and weekends to catch up.

Je n’ai jamais mangé chez Quick pendant mon séjour en France, mais hier, je me baladais virtuellement à Grenoble, et j’ai vu un resto Quick que j’avais souvent vu et qui avait été transformé en Burger King, et cela m’a donné une tristesse bizarre.

Three years ago today, I visited a mental health therapist for the first time and immediately wished I’d done it a decade earlier. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, and I can’t recommend the experience enough.

Yesterday, my spouse asked why my Apple Watch was named GTS Centaur, and I faced the difficult choice between saying it didn’t really matter and launching into an explanation of the 1999 space sim Descent: Freespace.

Guy de mot-de-passant.

I’ve been skeptical of writing manuscripts in Markdown or LaTeX for ages, but today I found myself asking where the “code editor” was in Word, so maybe it’s time to give it a try.

Thanks to a French Burger King commercial, I’ve just learned the French translation for “Paw Patrol.”

Just wrote in an email that the worst part of academia is when my breaks from school don’t line up with my kid’s. I wrote it flippantly, but I don’t think I’m too far off.

It’s September, and we’re on our second cold of the school year. 😩

Kiddo’s classmate thinks our ridealong setup (which attaches a third wheel and second seat for kiddo to my normal bike) should be called a tricycle. I love it, but it enrages kiddo for reasons I don’t get.

I think one of the cutest American customs is the little wave drivers give cyclists after almost driving them off the road. Looking at you, UPS truck.

Dunno why Canvas took blockquoting out of their WYSIWYG editor, but joke’s on them, because I know where the code editor is and what the right HTML tags are.

This afternoon, kiddo tried to walk out of the library to the car without stopping her book, which makes me optimistic about her development as a reader.

Grâce à une conversation avec une amie (celle qui m’a donné une pièce de 5 CHF), je me suis souvenu ce matin de l’émission RTS « Gare à vous ». J’en profite pour découvrir Romanshorn en rangeant la maison cet après-midi.

I’m currently on a search committee for the new director of our School of Information Science, and it’s kind of neat that academics get to hire their own bosses. My students’ minds were blown yesterday when I explaned this.

Ma fille se plaint quand on écoute « La marine marchande » des Cowboys fringants parce qu’elle ne comprend pas le français, mais si elle comprenait le français, je n’oserai jamais écouter cette chanson devant elle !

Je viens de recevoir une pièce de 5 CHF (la meilleure pièce de toutes les monnaies du monde) d’une amie qui a visité la Suisse cet été. Quel beau cadeau et souvenir !

I’ve long written in my journal kind things people say about me. I used to think of that as vanity, but since recognizing my imposter syndrome and other mental health struggles, I think of it as storing up confidence for hard days.

There was a brief period of publisher generosity early in COVID times where I snagged so many PDFs of books my uni library usually doesn’t have access to. Still making my way through them.

Currently reading John Turner’s excellent biography of Brigham Young, and I keep wanting to highlight passages and then send them to Brad Wilcox.

I just got paid by a journal after they accepted one of my papers, and as happy as I am about this, it is so far out of my normal academic experience that I feel disoriented.

It’s been an existentially and emotionally tiring weekend, so the “person man” verse of TMBG’s Particle Man is hitting in a way it hasn’t before.

‘If there was a dimension where they didn’t brush teeth, I would want to live there.’

Je viens de payer une facture assez chère pour faire entretenir et réparer mon vélo, mais la facture annuelle juste pour le droit de garer une voiture chez mon travail coûterait deux fois ça. Je sors donc toujours gagnant.

Today’s email from ClassDojo claims that they are proud of my kid and that the message is sent with love. I get that this is a thing that marketing departments do, but I find the cynicism appalling.

I’m very glad that figuring out my office phone is not a prerequisite for tenure, or else my application would be in real trouble right now.

When I was in school, I’d frequently get stressed about whether I was sick enough to warrant staying home. The idea of making a “wrong” choice in either direction was frightening. Anyway, it turns out that anxiety extends to making that same decision for my kid.

It’s a work from home day, but I put on real work clothes to meet with a student, only for them not to show. I think it was genuine miscommunication rather than irresponsibility, but still grumpy that I’m in a button-down shirt right now.

The parent of one of my (college) students this semester was previously the (early childhood) teacher for my kid. Funny how these things happen!

J’ai mis un autocollant SNCF sur mon cahier pour le nouveau semestre. Je voulais signifier que je suis francophile et ferroviphile, mais comme je suis bien en retard quant aux préparations pour mes cours, j’avoue que l’autocollant peut avoir un sens double.

It is the first day of kiddo’s school’s fundraiser, and I would much rather pay higher taxes than have to go through any of this. Boggles my mind that not everyone feels this way.

Listening to the NPR audio adaptation of Star Wars emphasizes just how important John Williams and Ben Burtt are to making that universe work.

I’ve been getting “Welcome to Canvas during this difficult time, here’s some documentation” pop-ups for nearly 2.5 years now. Only way to dismiss it is to accept a cookie, and I use relatively locked-down Firefox, so I may just see it for eternity at this point.

Besides explaining Star Wars stuff, one of the greatest perks of parenting is pulling out board games I haven’t played in years because kiddo wants to try them.

‘What’s going on in the movie when this [the Imperial March] is playing? Are the Stormtroopers trooping?’

The more time I have spent writing web content, the more I have come to loathe WYSIWYG interfaces.

We had a short unit retreat this morning, and then I spent more time catching up with colleagues after the retreat than the retreat itself lasted. Both remind me that I work with great people.

Got happy news this morning that a paper that may be one of the most important research projects I’ve worked on has been accepted into an open access journal! Making it hard to focus on my semester prep.

Thanks to Reddit and Wikipedia, I learned this morning that Cincinnati has an abandoned, partially completed subway system. Grew up just south of Cincy but never heard this until now.

I hate myself for creating a ClassDojo account, but kiddo’s school is going all-in, so not sure I have the choice. First observation is how confident the app is that it can make me pay extra for free software I don’t want to use in the first place.

I spent most of the summer working from home, so I’m working in my campus office for the first time in over two months today. Nice to be back, but I also didn’t realize how many software updates were waiting for me!

Impossible de regarder une vidéo sur les trains des CFF sans fort ressentir l’envie de retourner en Suisse.

Spent part of this morning reviewing proofs for a chapter-length autoethnography that is not going to add much to my CV but may be the most personally important thing I’ve ever written. Really excited to see this so close to print.

Really leaning into ethics and justice elements of data science in my fall class, and I’m wondering how much pushback I’m going to get. I’ve taught about racism, sexism, and colonization in games in another class with very few complaints, but this feels different somehow.

When I was a teenager, I would sometimes spend a weekend setting up Axis and Allies and then playing the better part of a whole game against myself. I got pretty good at opening moves this way, and I kind of wish I had the time to do this again once.

Kiddo is encountering face cards for the first time and is incensed that Kings rank higher than Queens. “Why can’t they be equal?!” Proud that she recognizes sexism at her age.

There’s lots I love about our family, but the 1.5 bike-to-person ratio is near the top.

Malgré avoir grandi au Kentucky, je n’ai jamais éprouvé un grand amour pour la musique country. Ça m’étonne donc toujours quand je constate son influence dans la musique francophone.

Happily rediscovering Jonathan Coulton’s discography this morning.

My issue with computer science education isn’t the idea of computer science education—it’s that it’s overwhelmingly driven by workforce and economic concerns instead of concerns related to citizenship and democracy.

Grâce à une épisode de Culture BD sur France Culture, j’ai décidé de lire (enfin) Corto Maltese. Content de trouver des traductions chez ma bibliothèque locale, mais il faut que je trouve plus de moyens pour lire la BD en français, quoi.

I’m not a big fan of journal metrics, so I hate myself a little for including them in the research statement for my tenure dossier.

Trouble is a dumb game, and I will never own a copy, but if it kills some time with kiddo at Grandma and Grandpa’s when I’m too tired to play anything more imaginative, I guess that’s fine.

Ce n’est pas souvent que j’ai le plaisir de commander un kebab-frites aux États-Unis. C’est donc un déjeuner réussi aujourd’hui !

Je sais que nous, les Américains, nous avone une longue tradition de massacrer les mots empruntés du français, mais je ne comprendrai jamais pourquoi on dit « crêpe » comme « crépe ». C’est insupportable.

I feel like I should love Catch-22, but even though I got a lot more out of it this time than the first time I read it over a decade ago, I just don’t think it’s as funny as it’s famed to be. 📚

I will never grow tired of hearing kiddo say “sand hanitizer.”

I have been making efforts to introduce kiddo to both Mario Kart and ABBA, so I am very proud that she now makes the Koopa Troopa / Super Trouper joke on her own.

Saturday morning dad biathlon: Solo walk and run for latest couch to 5k session then 7 mile roundtrip on bike (kiddo on ridealong) to play at local playground.

Cet après-midi, je prépare mes cours d’automne en écoutant Indochine.

I have done more blogging this summer than in the two preceding years, and I love it. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up this rate once the school year starts, but I want to keep up consistency.

One of the most prominent joys in recent parenting has been discovering that the same Jon Agee who was writing palindrome and wordplay books when I was a kid is still at it—and watching kiddo enjoy them even more.

If I were allowed one religion-related time travel shenanigan, I would go to the late 1960s and arrange for very left-wing RLDS apostle Charles Neff and Bircher LDS apostle Ezra Taft Benson to be in the same room, just to see how things would turn out.

The amount of data collected by TikTok is more concerning for the possibility that it could be fed to Chinese state officials, but it would be just as concerning if it could be fed to American state officials, and still pretty concerning if only fed to corporate officials.

I broke my site a few days ago without realizing it, so kept remote posting to it. Fixed site this morning, and now thinking about how nice it is that Micro.blog weaves the new posts into the timeline by the original timestamp instead of mass posting them.

Content de voir le retour de Culture BD sur France Culture !

Pour un album censé être féministe, il y a bien trop d’essentialisme dans Mesdames de Grand Corps Malade.

I don’t really understand what the Publons platform is, I’ve always been skeptical of it, and the more journals try to convince me to sign up for it, the less I’m likely to change either of the first two things.

This summer, I’m remixing an alternative textbook for my Fall intro to data science class, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how helpful Creative Commons-licensed journal articles are proving. Shows that “open access” is only part of license’s benefits.

This morning’s RSS issues seem to be a problem with NetNewsWire’s standalone functionality, so as much as I love the app, it’s time to find a new one. Now taking RSS recommendations for iOS/macOS.

Je suis deçu de ne jamais avoir réussi à enseigner le français à ma fille, mais je suis quand-même content que cette langue reste un moyen de communication secrète entre mon épouse et moi.

The biggest upside to my failed efforts to teach kiddo French is that I can still use it to communicate secretly with my spouse.

In happier morning news, I am now restocked on my favorite Coconut Cocoa herbal tea thanks to a recent visit to Cincinnati’s best international/odds and ends market.

Belatedly realized this morning that I haven’t been getting RSS updates from local paper for… a while. Don’t know if issue is on my end or theirs, but I’m a faithful subscriber, so I’d like to get this fixed.

I often read two books at a time, but reading Thomas Merton on contemplation and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather simultaneously is… quite the combination.

May I never become as self-important as this professor emeritus who can’t respond to a simple email without making claims about how many global conferences he’s organized and belittling the organization I’m writing on behalf of.

Kiddo and I are getting back into the “Magical Kitties Save the Day” TTRPG, and she keeps asking me when we can play next. Feels like a win!

I always tell my students that you can learn best by just diving in and tinkering, but it blows my mind that I was just able to make some SVG icons do what I wanted by making educated guesses about how their code worked.

Just sent proofs for an article I’m pleased with to a bucket list journal, so it’s been a pretty good day.

I always found the Inhumans stuff the least interesting part of Ms. Marvel comics, so I’m digging the reimagined parts of the TV show.

Comme je reprends la course à pied, j’augmente aussi le nombre de podcasts que j’écoute; il y a des podcasts fancophones à ne pas rater ?

Après presque deux ans de pause, je reprends la course à pied. Mon dos va mieux, j’ai de nouvelles chaussures, et je suis bien impatient de recommencer cette habitude.

Heard a kid crying in the background of a company’s help line and realized it used one of those often-exploitative work-from-home customer service networks. That made me more mad than issue I was calling about.

Prepping a Fall class and feeling torn between wanting to make a lot of improvements and not wanting to burn myself out by reinventing wheels from previous semesters.

Setting up a Canvas course gets meta when you’re doing it for a class on web content management.

Francophones, quelle est votre traduction préférée du mot « tag » dans un contexte technologique ? J’ai des applis qui disent « étiquette » et d’autres qui disent « mot-clé ».

The more I work with WordPress site builders, the more they annoy me.

Logging into Zotero for the first time since (early) grad school reminds me why I don’t like reference managers.

Yesterday, we picked up a ridealong bike someone was giving away, so a daddy-kiddo ride is absolutely on the agenda for Father’s Day 2022.

Whenever my parents come to visit, we buy our local donuts because my dad likes donuts, and they bring down their local donuts because we like donuts, and we wind up with huge amounts of donuts.

I have some regrets about being a week late on this article review because I took my kid camping—but not a lot, to be honest.

I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks how to best add commenting to my Hugo static site, and it just hit me that I could embed Hypothesis and use that as a social layer. Very excited about this idea.

Solid thinking by researchers I respect and admire. I especially appreciate the point that no solution exists outside politics. link to ‘The Silver Bullet of Anti-Shooter Educational Technologies — Civics of Technology’

J’ai découvert un podcast sur le jeu de rôle en mileu Star Wars (que j’aime beaucoup) qui est en français canadien (dont j’essaie d’améliorer ma compréhension). Ça tombe bien !

We’re building quite the little collection of junior versions of classic Eurogames, and they’re ranging from “almost as fun as the original” to “this is Candyland with higher production values.”

Kiddo catches a glimpse of the ref list for the research statement I’m preparing for tenure: “Why does it say Greenhalgh so many times?”

Very excited for this show. I hadn’t been all that concerned about the changing of Kamala’s powers, but this article brought up some good points about how that changes some of the messaging behind the character. link to ‘Ms. Marvel review: Kamala Khan’s new series feels like the MCU’s future - The Verge’

Just this weekend, I was trying to figure out if I could do this to improve some video quality. Neat! link to ‘You’ll soon be able to use an iPhone as a Mac webcam - The Verge’

Kiddo believes that Star Wars stormtroopers are robots, so she started singing beeps and boops to the tune of the Imperial March (which she learned from a yoga video??).

This kind of social media surveillance has been bothering me for years. I’m happy it’s getting some attention, even if the impetus for that attention is such a tragedy. This is edtech and our discipline needs to treat it as such. link to ‘Software to detect school threats online is costly but mostly ineffective.’

There’s a SomaFM internet radio station that plays NASA recordings of Apollo missions over calm electronic music. I don’t listen to it often, but I love it when I do.

Reviewer 1 has missed the key argument and main throughline of my paper, and even though the editor says I can ignore them, it’s still making me SO MAD.

Kiddo was worried about today’s medicine because box described them as “tablets,” and she thought that meant chewing up something shaped and sized roughly like an iPad.

Il y a plusieurs années, un ami m’a prévenu qu’il y a tant de jeux de mots dans les albums Astérix qu’un Américain ne les comprendraient jamais pleinement. Les chansons Stromae me donnent maintenant la même impression.

Woke up to a They Might Be Giants song stuck in my head, which I choose to interpret as a good sign.

Listening to The Aquabats tonight and remembering how I pegged the Mormon connection when I was first listening to them because of subtle allusions to food storage and pioneer hymns.

Not really interested in the new Stranger Things, but it does make me want to get serious about a Tales from the Loop campaign (surtout avec le supplément « La France aux années 80»)

Why can’t we just learn to assess differently? There’s so much about proctoring software that ought to be worrying us. link to ‘Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met - The New York Times’

Very happy to learn that the whole run of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is now available through my library. I am several years behind and eager to catch up.

Kid just called me out on a No True Scotsman fallacy, which makes me feel a lot better about all those episodes of Smash Boom Best we let her listen to.

I am, technically speaking, a STEM educator, but the reason I get so cranky about STEM hype is that these disciplines cannot on their own address the problems I’m most worried about right now.

Recently bought a used ABBA greatest hits CD for next to nothing, which has led to a comically difficult effort to get access to an optical drive so that I can actually listen to the music.

Today’s dadding: hidden pictures during Zoom church, making homemade muesli while kiddo’s chicken fingers were in the oven, and introductions to Bananagrams and the 1951 Alice in Wonderland.

Il y a un an, j’ai regardé ma première Eurovision, Je l’ai ratée cette année (conflit avec un anniversaire en famille), mais j’espère y retourner en 2023.

Just used the phrase ‘hashtag ontology’ in a draft manuscript, and I think that will keep me happy the rest of the day.

Il y a trop peu de monde qui aime les podcasts et apprécie aussi RSS pour d’autres fins.

Je suis impressionné par le nombre de BD francophones disponible aux bibliothèques du Kentucky, mais c’est quand-même hyper decevant de lire une BD francophone en traduction.

Voyage pour le boulot qui s’approche, et j’essaie donc de proposer un trajet mi-avion, mi-train. C’est vraiment le trajet le plus efficace, mais comme j’habite dans un pays ferroviphobe, il me faudra de la chance…

Trying to convince employer that a combination of flights and rail is best way for me to get to upcoming conference, wish me luck!

The more I mess around with hacking my Hugo site, the more qualified I feel to teach my content management systems class.

The more I learn about and work with the DNS, the more impressive and frightening it becomes.

After coming with us for primary voting this morning, kiddo has announced she’s setting up her own voting booth as this morning’s imagination play.

Messing around with my Hugo static site between other, draining tasks may be the only thing that got me through today.

In addition to cheating being flat-out wrong, students should also consider just how much regulation-reading and paperwork it creates for their professors.

Selling kid’s pedal-optional balance bike today because it’s just been hanging in garage since she outgrew it and graduated to a full-on pedal bike. Proud of her for skipping training wheels.

Nice day out with the family yesterday; only regret was not getting home in time to watch Eurovision.

Do other internet researchers find themselves citing journalists to explain things like memes? Or am I just not reading the right scholarly sources?

Today’s writing music is Manu Chao, whom I was surprised to discover in the 2010s was a real musician, not someone my 1990s-era high school French textbooks had made up for sample dialogues.

Would like to give teaching the kiddo French another try this summer and would be happy to receive advice. Have an app and some videos in mind—may also add some light TTRPG elements to efforts.

It’s a testament to Apple TV+’s adaptation of Slow Horses that I am now reading the whole book series and that I can only imagine the characters as the show’s actors.

This is my first summer not teaching since beginning grad school, so even though my to-do list is still long (including, y’know, a tenure dossier to put together), I don’t know what to do with myself.

J’suis pas hyper doué en cuisine, mais comme il reste rien à manger demain matin et comme j’ai une recette pour le muesli fait maison, je suis en mode Farmer Croc, là.

I think it’s funny (but delightful) that my secondary area of research has gotten more media attention than what I was specifically trained to do.

Developing automations for posting to my website and microblogging platforms is one way I deal with my insecurities as an ed. researcher turned ICT instructor.

Tentative de publication depuis mon site web.

Now checking that the tagging system works fine.

Testing a new Siri Shortcut for remote posting to Hugo.

Local farmers market has garlic chocolate chip cookies, which I love and no one else in my family likes. Suits me just fine.

Reading about Mike Lee’s attempts to interfere with the election reminds me of the missionary companion who dreamed of rising high enough in the FBI to be ready to help Salt Lake carry out a coup if needed.

I think I like to listen to the Interstellar soundtrack when I’m feeling anxious, but the truth is that listening to the Interstellar soundtrack makes me more anxious, so I gotta stop doing that.

À propos of nothing in particular, I’m looking into how to set up a Mastodon instance, and it’s not as hard or expensive as I thought.

Please be skeptical of anyone who describes platform content moderation as censorship.

Just recognized a song playing on (Swiss) radio as being from Eurovision 2021, and that makes me happy.

Frustrated by the way that blinding self-citations (that aren’t explicitly self-citations) can actually work against blind review. When I’m reviewing stuff in my niche area, I can sometimes tell who the authors are based on that alone.

Pleased with my decision to no longer tackle email on weekends; less pleased with the Mailbox Mondays that have resulted.

I think today demonstrates both the superority of France’s two-round presidential elections to U.S. first-past-the-post BUT ALSO the inferiority of both compared to ranked-choice voting.

Discussing networks in class today, which is as good an excuse as any to show a clip from Battlestar Galactica. Computers without networks is one of the most interesting worldbuilding details in that show.

Recently got a six-month free trial of Apple Music, so I figured I’d try out music streaming for the first time in years. As great as the music selection is, though, my bias toward owning music and listening to internet radio is being strengthened.

Comme il n’y a même pas de métro chez moi, je suis limité à « vélo, boulot, dodo »

Ça fait 10 ans que j’écoute Les Cowboys Fringants, mais je les apprécie davantage avec chaque année qui passe.

We should promote open science practices in social science projects where they make sense but also stop normalizing it in a way that ignores non-positivist paradigms.

There are A LOT of perks to working in the same unit as a Library and Information Science program, but ‘we keep getting children’s books delivered, please take some home’ is high on the list.

The focus on student learning in this year’s AECT reviews is good, but I worry that it blinds us to other important ed tech questions. I’d struggle to describe how surveillance, ethics, privacy impact student learning, but we desperately need that research too-or more!

I prefer not to get into the bad news, but the good news is that I’m learning a lot about how MySQL and WordPress work.

Very relieved to learn that the singer on French radio that I can’t tell apart from Johnny Hallyday started his career as a Hallyday impressionist.

Learned an important lesson about platform dependence today. When I got hired at UK, I went all in on Google Drive to back up all my files; now, our institutional access is going to limit us to about 10% of the storage I was using. Going to be messy.

Latest guest post on official blog of far right Gab platform could have been a Latter-day Saint General Conference sermon. Sure, rejecting truth and embracing evil sounds bad, but there are a lot of assumptions that need to be surfaced and interrogated about what both terms mean.

I will only accept complaints about gas prices from people who also bemoan our failure to invest in public and alternative transportation.

Behind on grading, but today’s victories include a thank you note from a high school English teacher for a book I sent b/c it reminded me of him and my kid’s insistence we read through a D&D sourcebook together (complete with beholder impression).

Long week ahead, but there’s a new Stromae album coming out Friday, so I already have some self-care plans in place for the end of it.

Remembering the time that the only person at church who understood my dissertation research was the one who worked for the state of Michigan doing social media surveillance of social justice movements.

City council member responded to my concerned email by basically telling me I should have spoken up before the vote happened. Feels harsh but fair—want to do better about showing up and speaking up.

Rewatched the Pixar movie Soul while going through old letters and mementos, and that’s quite the combination.

Every selling point on this cold call email for an ed tech product is a reason that I would never consider using it.

Just explained something I learned from studying far right spaces in Mormon social media to collaborators on a project studying queer spaces in far right social media, which is not an experience I expected when starting grad school in ed tech.

Grumpy about DRM today. So much content I’ve purchased but am forever beholden to Amazon to access.

Jim Hacker is in The Prisoner???

I think concerns about being dependent on technology are valuable, but I also note that no one is ever talking about technologies like, say, language or agriculture.

I wonder how many people right now believe both that university instructors indoctrinate students and that they shouldn’t be allowed to do so online because it wouldn’t be effective.

Is NaNoTwiMo a thing? Every time I assign Twine to my students, I want to spend some time doing something big and beautiful with it.

I have not (and do not care to) read a lot about the Spotify thing, but podcasts are meant to be a platformless, open medium—one of the few left on the web. If you’re going to make one exclusive, you absolutely take responsibility for content moderation.

I got to teach counting in binary today, and it might be one of my favorite things to teach. Not every day you get to deconstruct and reconstruct your students’ understanding of numbers.

One of my favorite differences between European and Canadian French is the subtly different way they each pronounce words and names in English.

I was born into the dominant language of research, I’m reasonably fluent in a second language, and there’s still so much literature beyond my reach. Bring back langauge requirements in U.S. doctoral training.

One of my favorite students will always be the undergrad from a few years ago who expressed outrage when I explained that researchers frequently have to sign over the copyright to their own studies.

Going through old files and throwing out notes from a French phonetics class from over a decade ago. I recognize that I don’t need them anymore, but there’s still something hard about it!

Paid a visit to Cincinnati’s Union Terminal today. The building makes for a gorgeous museum, but how cool would it be if it were still the busy train station it was designed to be?

I have been joking since March 2020 how desperately we need a new Stromae album now, but I could have never anticipated how perfect Multitudes is going to be for this moment.

There are worse times than three days before the start of the semester to realize that you were preparing the wrong modality for a course, but not many!

Is it too late to exchange this 2022 for a new one? We’re within 30 days, and this one clearly came broken.

Angry at myself tonight for not noticing spousal abuse perpetrated by someone I worked with regularly while it was happening. Angrier still at those I know who were aware of it and did nothing.

I wish Nintendo would translate the French release of Mario Kart as « chariot de Mario » because it’s very fun to say.

Our school district is surveying parents about moving their spring break to align with my employer’s, and I am SO on board for this.

One confirmed fever in the family the day before we’re supposed to drive to family holiday gathering, just in case anyone was wondering if COVID anxiety still sucks.

I have a professional interest in the far right, follow the news pretty well, and still sometimes forget how bad Jan. 6 was just because life is crazy. Shame on those actively encouraging us to forget out of cynicism and self-interest.

Dreading all the terrible takes about people not deserving federal help because they vote the wrong way. It’s a universally bad position.

We were already planning to watch The Muppet Christmas Carol today, but on such a hard day for the Commonwealth, we especially need some goofy puppets preaching social justice and spreading Christmas cheer.

It breaks my heart to hear from a student explaining they’re going to a funeral and in the same breath asking what documentation they need for it to be officially excused. I know there are bad actors out there, but why do we do this to our students?

Grâce à YouTube, j’ai appris au sujet des « speakerines » aujourd’hui. J’étudie le français depuis vingt ans, et il reste des tas de choses à apprendre.

Initial Dungeons and Dragons pizza plans have fallen through. I have pointed out that there’s a LaRosa’s nearby and am now swelling with an unexpected amount of Northern Kentucky pride.

I traditionally get a mild cold every beginning and end of semester, which has always been a pain but has become anxiety-inducing these past two years.

I am about a decade late to Joanna Brooks’s beautiful memoir, and I know I wouldn’t have appreciated it fully in 2012, but I am so, so glad to be reading it now.

I dream of a world where IP laws are liberalized to the point that libraries can provide their own, publicly-funded streaming services.

Guess who responded to a recent House censure by joining Gab a few days ago?

It has been a long week, and tomorrow is looking just as long, but it’s been a beautiful Sunday that I plan to cap off with the new videos from the French train nerd YouTube channels I subscribe to and maybe even some Stardew Valley.

The more Grammarly ads I see, the more my skepticism of them grows.

There are certainly overblown claims about games and learning, but I don’t know if I’ve seen my kid less failure-averse than when playing Mario Kart or more willing to read than when trying Stardew Valley.

Just finished two phone calls that I’ve been dreading and putting off for weeks, and both were fine. I’m relieved, but it’s also a stark reminder of how high my anxiety has been this semester.

It is flannel shirt, heavy gloves, and balaclava season for this bike commuter, and I couldn’t be happier.

Thanks largely to traveling, I powered through my first Franco-Ontarian novel over the past few days, and it was delightful. Some of the best Francophone books I’ve read have been purchased used for about $5, so hooray for used bookstores.

Just finished Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface, a few months after reading Little Brother and Homeland. It is the addition to that series we need right now.

Why did no one tell me there’s a new Stromae single???

One of my data science students just did a t-test to demonstrate that evil-aligned monsters in D&D 5e tend to have lower Armor Class than good-aligned monsters. This course demands a lot of effort, but moments like this make it worth it.

grad student, immediately after entering my office: “Wow, you really like Star Wars, huh?” me: “Yes, but have you also noticed all my cool train magnets?”

Two years ago today, I visited a mental health therapist for the first time and immediately wished I’d done it a decade earlier. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, and I can’t recommend the experience enough.

Here I am, refreshing local news to get sports updates—not because I care about the game, but because I want to know when my neighbors will stop yelling at their TV.

I feel a lot of anxiety about being a parent, but at the end of the day, I take comfort in knowing I’m trying my best—and that I’ve done my part in introducing the next generation to Queen’s Live Aid performance.

Dreamt that despite having a PhD, I had somehow never finished my BA. Had to explain a lot to employer and was trying to transfer to Centre College to make completing the degree earlier.

On one hand, I am worried about the platformed internet. On the other, I realize that the phenomenon of “in cab” train videos probably wouldn’t exist without a centralized, problematic behemoth like YouTube, and that would make me sad.

It amazes me how many people there are who think it’s acceptable to ride a scooter or a skateboard the wrong way down a bike lane.

What if our collective disdain as education researchers for learning styles is the result of an overemphasis on efficacy and improvement and a corresponding undervaluing of accessibility and equity?

Teaching R for the first time, and many students are first-time programmers. I’m reminded of teaching French in terms of how easy it is to take for granted things that aren’t obvious to beginners.

Something feels characteristically Utah about this Park City company trying to turn graham crackers into a rugged frontier food while conveniently omitting its origins in the temperance movement.

I brought up the federal German elections in class today to make a point about WordPress; I’d say it made sense in context, but I can’t promise that was true for the students!

I think you can be glad a villain got unmasked but uneasy that Batman’s the one who did it.

I have finished the article review I was a week behind on, so now I just need to tackle the two-weeks-late and six-weeks-late projects on my plate. After I get the course prep done that I was hoping to do yesterday.

Unsatisfied with the Intro to Data Science textbook I’ve inherited. Fortunately, an earlier version is Creative Commons-licensed, as are some other fantastic resources. Guess who’s going to remix himself a new textbook for next Fall!

Looks like the NSF is now using the term STEAM, which just makes me dislike the term even more.

I know I’m going to make plenty of mistakes teaching Intro to Data Science for the first time, but one thing I’m already proud of is teaching my students to use tags to format code and output in their Canvas posts.

Currently reading Hervé Le Tellier’s « L’Anomalie », and it is so dang good. An English translation (The Anomaly) is coming later this year, so I’m going to go ahead and recommend this book to everyone.

This weekend, after over a decade of off-and-on attempts, I finally read the entire run of Y: The Last Man. Turns out the upcoming Hulu adaptation was a good motivator.

I was made aware of an unexpected generational divide today when one of my first-year students announced that as far as he was concerned, there were only six Star Wars movies.

If there is a better way to end the first week of classes than Ted Lasso and Marcel Pagnol, I don’t know what it is.

I often think of Nel Noddings’s argument that while increasing women’s participation in STEM is a must, we haven’t achieved victory until we’ve also increased men’s participation in historically-feminine fields.

A great way to insert a bit of hesitation into your next viewing of Firefly is to think about how among all the other Western tropes in there, Mal and Zoe are essentially coded as former Confederate soldiers.

I just had to annotate a class reading to explain first that “AIM” stands for AOL Instant Messenger and second what instant messaging was, all because I wasn’t sure my students would understand either. This makes me uncomfortable.

Beginning of semester stress dreams, Fall 2021 edition: Dani Rojas is enrolled in my content management systems class but is refusing to comply with the mask mandate.

I am up late on the busy week before the semester starts trying to write an Alfred workflow for generating Hugo blog posts and a Siri Shortcut to support a new approach to linkblogging, so…

Is there anything sweeter to a professor’s ears than “I use what I learned in your class all the time”?

I know it’s an obvious choice, but including « Gentleman cambrioleur » in the soundtrack for the Lupin finale was just perfect.

You would think I’d have stopped being surpised by anything posted to the Gab blog by now, but “actually, platforms should be held responsible for content they host, but none of our content is problematic” is still a take I wasn’t expecting.

Please also give me the confidence of an Apple exec explaining how scanning all your photos is “an advancement of the state of the art in privacy.”

Give me the confidence of a FB employee wringing hands about researchers’ allegedly “put[ting] people’s data or privacy at risk.”

Small sample size (and very non-representative), but my summer students seem to be on board with treating internet access as a public good. Hope for the future!

I am offering the name Marky and the Lafayettes to any group that can make good use of it.

Having poutine with goetta, which is like the food at the center of the Venn diagram of my life.

Microsoft Word spellcheck (set to U.S. English) is offering the English “television” and the Spanish “televisión” as corrections to the French “télévision” in my manuscript. Great example of algorithmic values.

It never ceases to amaze me how much more helpful a screenshot is than just a text description when trying to solve a tech issue.

Looking forward to the “speed limits are government overreach, we need to rely on drivers’ personal responsibility” phase of the culture wars.

It really bothers me when browsers hide anything after the domain name in a URL. Sure, it’s cleaner, but there’s so much important information (and low-key surveillance) embedded in a URL, and I want to know about all of it.

Je relis de vieux plans de leçon cet après-midi pour un projet, et je repleure donc l’assassinat d’Ahmed Merabet.

It is a coincidence that I’m visiting my local independent bookstore the same day Bezos went to space, but it’s a happy one.

I have a burner reddit account (for research purposes) that I only access through Tor, so the “communities near you” that pops up whenever I log in is consistently both amusingly wrong and genuinely (if not completely) informative.

Big parenting milestone today: kid’s first tabletop RPG character. Glad that there are game designers with this young an audience in mind because it was already hard to wait for this age!

Just booked family Amtrak tickets and I’ve never felt so alive.

Spent my morning commute today thinking about how U.S. Christian nationalism and French laïcité (secularism) sometimes end up serving similar functions.

I have Doug Forcett on my mind, and it’s not even noon on Monday. Looks like it’s going to be an existentially demanding week.

There are a lot of joys in teaching, but there’s something awesome about being able to assign students to watch a scene from 1992’s Sneakers—the world’s finest hacker movie.

I have just learned that “leapfrog” is called “leapsheep” (« saute-mouton ») in French AND that, by extension, a “sheep-leap” (« saut-de-mouton ») is the name for a particular kind of railway junction. Don’t know which delights me more.

I have no doubt that neuroscience is making important contributions, but I will never not be annoyed by its fetishization by individuals, media outlets, or academic disciplines.

Reading or listening to other countries’ coverage of U.S. news has long been helpful for me. For example, I like using what the Swiss deem important enough to report on in American politics to gauge what I should pay extra attention to.

I am generally not a sports person, but one of my favorite memories ever is seeing Geneva celebrate after Switzerland beat Spain in a 2010 World Cup match. Would have loved to be back there last night.

I have twice bought a Francophone book based on the title, and both were winners. « Vers Saint-Gétorix » was as enjoyable as the pun, and « Kiffe kiffe demain » delivered on its promise of a story from la banlieue.

The sudden ubiquity of ad-delivering screens on gas pumps feels like a subtle but firm step toward dystopia.

Dear authors of children’s books: If you want the book to rhyme, please fully commit instead of leaving parents confused about how to read the dang book. Also, rhythm is just as important as rhyme and a big part of the problem.

Turns out a great way to get distracted from a Disney+ show you’re enjoying is to think “this franchise should be in the public domain by now.”

Listening to the 1940s anti-KKK Superman radio serial while cleaning up lunch dishes.

Experiencing the best of being a peer reviewer today. Article is genuinely good, and I really want to see it get published, but I also know specific things that will make it stronger before it gets there.

Won a $25 gift card to local indy bookstore from local library. Went to bookstore and wound up spending an ADDITIONAL $50, so it looks like everybody won this round.

PhD programs can be different from each other, but so many PhD students and their instructors believe that everyone will understand their particular lingo and milestones if they just throw them around.

Just got a phishing email that was subtle and well thought out enough that I almost didn’t recognize it. Those are the scariest kinds.

Today is “change my files and folders scheme and see what software breaks” day. Grateful for here::here() so that I’m not terrified of implications for #rstats.

One of my pettiest of peeves is the conflation of the term “UFO” with “aliens” even though the entire value of the term is in acknowledging the unidentifiable without reading any more into it.

Got stitches in a pinky finger last night, and adjusting my touch typing, while annoying, has gone surprisingly smoothly. May help that I had a thumb in bandages for most of my first semester of college.

Il paraît que j’ai choisi la bonne année de commencer à regarder Eurovision ! 🇫🇷🇨🇭

The New York Times is liveblogging Eurovision, which I find surprising, delightful, and genuinely helpful.

This afternoon, we begin what will hopefully become an annual tradition of watching the Eurovision final.

If dozens of CAPTCHAs are any indication, Google’s working hard on traffic lights, crosswalks, and fire hydrants today. So proud of all I’m contributing to AI without compensation because it’s the only way to access this site.

Just got one of those emails that makes me very glad I gave a student flexibility no matter how inconvenient it was for end of semester. It’s helpful to remember that many students are dealing with way more important things than my class.

I know someone who apparently agreed to review three articles the same week as final grading, and boy does he look dumb staring back from the mirror.

Looking back, I owe a lot to the semester I took both “Intro to CS” and “History of French,” which culminated in writing a Java program to help with a “invent your own Romance language” group final.

Was not expecting the S2 “For All Mankind” finale to influence my feelings on nuclear disarmament that much, but here we are.

Today I learned that if you replace code that’s held together by other code serving the role of duct tape with actual good code but forget to remove the metaphorical duct tape, the good code still doesn’t work.

What is the most soothing form of digital data collection, and why is it forum scraping?

Special thanks to Google Drive for breaking the iframes I’ve been using to set up annotation-enabled readings in Canvas this semester… during the week that students are reviewing readings for their final papers. Really appreciate it.

I learn a lot of ggplot2 responding to reviewers’ suggestions about plots and a lot of CSS helping students with their questions about Twine games. Turns out I only learn code when I have a project that forces me to.

I learned today that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is « La servante écarlate » in French, which provokes a lot of thoughts about translation.

Spending four figures on bike stuff and trying to remember it’s still cheaper than a second car.

It seems to me that if you’re going to make the (already weird when you think about it) choice of gendering numbers and letters in a kid’s book, you ought to go ahead and make sure it passes the Bechdel test.

Saturday afternoon online conference presentation means a bunch of fiddling with lighting in my home office on Saturday morning!

I have discovered r/trains, and it is bringing joy into the chaos that is the last few weeks of the semester.

Proposing a new syllabus on department’s class on fundamentals of hardware and software, and I’m adding reflections on equity, society, culture as they relate to ICT. Tech isn’t just technical.

Just reread “Superman Smashes the Klan” after a day that involved checking up on Gab for research purposes, and I believe more than ever that this is one of the best and most important comics of our time. 📚

Even though emoji are regularly part of my research data, it still feels weird to include them in a journal article manuscript.

Working some this week on doubling down on RSS. Switching apps, trimming feeds, continuing to use it as my Twitter and newsletter interface, and trying to get more into Micro.blog and reddit by integrating them into my RSS “readflow”.

Thinking today about all the people who have more impressive qualifications than I do but are less secure professionally because academia isn’t fair.

Five flats between two bikes in six weeks (four in the last two) can’t be a world record, but it’s a personal best that I’m not interested in beating anytime soon. Wishing the bus came closer to my house, even though that commute is even longer.

I get that people associate being tall with perks, but I’m more likely to remember things like how this “which standing desk converter is right for you?” quiz has only two options for someone over 6’1”, one of which may still be too short for me.

I turn in a frustrating number of reviews THAT I’VE ALREADY WRITTEN ON TIME a week late because the system’s “please confirm before submitting” page looks an awful lot like a “thanks for submitting, and here’s what you wrote” page.

Just because you can topic model something doesn’t mean it actually tells us anything (and please don’t ever describe computational text analysis as “objective”).

I never mind paying fines at a library, and I never grumble about a bill at a bike shop. Both institutions deserve all the money they can charge me.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the distinction between “qualitative” and “quantitative” isn’t all that useful and that what we actually mean is usually better expressed in other terms.

Despite the underlying problems with the Barabbas story, this seems like a good Friday to remember that we shouldn’t prefer violent insurrectionists over those wrongfully killed by the state.

You cannot understand online Mormonism without understanding Mormon feminism. The more I read, the clearer that becomes.

I know that Stromae has had good reasons to be taking a break these past few years, but I can’t think of anyone better qualified to put the feel of 2020 to music, so I’m still hoping for an eventual return.

The thing with any tech that promises to insert citations for you is that you still need to check the cites for mistakes and know the citation style well enough to catch the mistakes, and at that point, why bother using it in the first place?

Spent a good chunk of today getting a battery replaced and some stitches removed, so if my laptop and body would agree to stay in good shape for the next while, I’d really appreciate it.

Small parenting victory of the day is kid’s reaction to watching The Magic School Bus: “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever watched!”

Spring and fall have the best weather in all respects except for figuring out what to wear for one’s bike commute.

A word of advice: If you’re going to fall and split your chin on a Friday morning, don’t do it by passing out first. Hard to answer doctor’s questions when you can’t remember much of what happened. 😂

Can anyone recommend a good video essay, blog post, etc. on the absence of networks in the Battlestar Galactica reboot? Need it for a class. (Also frightened by the possibility that BSG is “too old” for my undergrads to know about).

I am frustrated both by journals who don’t employ copyeditors and by journal copyeditors who introduce errors into my articles. Hard to say which is worse.

Free tip to people reporting/writing on Gab: Don’t talk about “Trump’s account” as though it’s actually used by the man instead of populated by Gab to give the impression the platform has his endorsement. Plays into their hands.

One of those afternoons where I’m auditing someone’s analysis code, but it’s an analysis of 4M rows of data, so I’m also doing spurts of grading while I wait for code to execute.

Looks like it’s “I’m going to need some banana bread and chocolate chips to make it through the rest of this response to reviewers letter” o’clock.

Whenever I step on a scale, a voice in my head sings the numbers as though I am a radio station being advertised between songs, and my weight is the frequency. Don’t know how this started or how to make it stop.

No paper could sell me on Vygotsky (and sociocultural theories of learning generally) as much as being a parent has.

Thinking today about how much I owe professionally to the generosity of mentors. Not only am I “standing on the shoulders of giants” as a researcher, I only got up there because other giants lifted me that high.

It is only just now occurring to me to check for an emoji of the flag of La Francophonie, so I am not surprised (if still disappointed) that it does not exist.

Got on a bike today for the first time in months. COVID has shown the flipside of tying my exercise so closely to my commute.

My calendar account has started doung this neat thing where it doesn’t show all of my events on all my devices, so now whether I miss a meeting or not depends on what screen I check that morning.

There is a 1976 song by a French artist, the lyrics of which are sung from the perspective of a dolphin that is upset because children are afraid to go swimming because of the recent success of the movie Jaws. It is so weird, but I love it.

Sometimes I don’t realize how ridiculous a phrase in English is until I’ve heard its literal translation into French. The first time I heard Bugs Bunny’s catchphrase as « quoi de neuf, docteur ? », it felt like my world was being turned upside down.

Thinking about how D&D has druids, bards, and magic potions and wondering if anyone has ever done an Astérix-themed campaign (or, preferably, actual play podcast).

First time I’ve read this much into Inauguration Day happening around the same time as my birthday.

I hear Italian PM Giuseppe Conte’s name fairly often on Francophone radio, but I nearly always hear it first as José Piquanté and then fix it in post.

Thinking today about all the faculty performance I could do with the time it takes to do data entry for my faculty performance review.

I do not have any data to back this up, but it sure seems like Francophone news outlets have transitioned over the past two years from translating “impeachment” to just using it as a loanword.

Remembering Governor Andy Beshear’s comments from last May: “You cannot fan the flames and then condemn the fire.” I can think of lots of people who need to hear that this morning.

I had a friend in Michigan with whom I disagreed on a great deal but who was still an important and supportive mentor for me. On November 9, 2016, we had a very tense conversation where he told me that I would see: The candidate’s bluster might be worrying, but he wouldn’t actually act on any of it. I haven’t talked to him in a few years, but I’m wondering what’s going through his head today.

One of the biggest perks of teaching in an ICT program is the ease with which scenes from the fantastic 1992 hacker/heist movie Sneakers can be worked into one’s lectures.

A Star Wars recap/remix from my house this morning: “The piggy galactic emperor wants to rule space so he can stop astronauts from going into space! But we NEED astronauts so that we can study space!”

First line of this morning’s France Inter news broadcast: “A phone call worthy of an American crime novel.”

The Georgia transcript reads like a student calling after I’ve submitted grades but before the registrar’s deadline has passed, arguing that he’s earned a perfect score but is willing to settle for my bumping him up a couple points to get an A.

TIL that Star Trek’s “warp speed” is translated as the vastly inferior “distortion” in French and that at least one French news outlet has therefore adopted the translation “Operation Lightning Speed” for the U.S. vaccine effort.

Just minutes after complaining that Harry Turtledove works so many recaps into each book of the series I’m reading, I discovered that I’d actually skipped a much earlier book. I hadn’t noticed because the recaps were so helpful in catching me up.

I recently ordered a book directly from a French publisher, and thanks to COVID, watching the FedEx tracking updates is the closest thing I’ve had (or will have) to vacation travel for a long time.

Reading about the Dreyfus Affair is spookier in December 2020 than it was back as an undergrad in French Civ II.

The stress I feel when assigning final grades is compelling evidence that I would never make it as a judge.

Weird Thanksgiving. 1st since 2008 w/o family (b/c COVID) and 1st since 2013 w/o a morning run (b/c return of chronic back issues). Still so much to be grateful for—but also conscious this year how much “being thankful” isn’t quite enough. It helps me better appreciate what I have but doesn’t change what others lack. I could stand to do better with the former, but I have much more work to do for the latter.

TIL that if you find out your content management students aren’t accessing the LMS course in the way that you told them to (some only check “to do” page, not main course page), you can at least turn it into a review of course material!

Will they take my PhD away if I admit that I never talked about my dissertation in terms of “chapters” and that I don’t understand fully what that means?

I am not sure what I was expecting when I started looking for Mormon* content on Gab, but “we should get the missionaries on this platform” wasn’t it.

One underrated affordance of writing a journal manuscript in Google Docs is being able to have two identical copies of the manuscript open simultaneously. Really helps for checking consistency across paper or comparing two sections.

Answering an email from a colleague is requiring me to look through undergraduate courses offered in other colleges on my campus, and now I want to take a bunch of them!

A year ago today, I visited a mental health therapist for the first time and immediately wished I’d done it a decade earlier. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, and I can’t recommend the experience enough.

The artwork on the “cover” of a Kindle book has been updated since the last time I read it. It’s a relatively minor change but reminds me that you never truly own an e-book you buy from Amazon (and why I now try to buy hardcopy).

Peak Fall 2020: Sending an apology to my students in case the person I ejected from a family Zoom gathering as soon as I realized it wasn’t a sibling (but before I could fully process the face) was one of them looking for help on a Sunday night.

Having my students post a weekly report on what they did that relates to each course objective. When it works, it’s the best kind of assessment—it assumes that there’s learning always happening and that we just need to notice it.

Marvel, I get that WandaVision is intended to be trippy and demonstrate Wanda’s reality warping powers, but unraveling my world by using a song that I’m only just now learning is the basis for the Skyline Chili jingle was a step too far.

This morning, I learned that my kid believes that Batman is Batgirl’s sidekick, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s now canon.

Lunchtime conversation: “Daddy, how long have we lived in this house?” “Well, we moved in right before the sickness, so over six months now.” “No, Daddy, it’s been nine billion months. I’m right.” “… Yeah, you are.”

One of the biggest things that the pandemic is teaching me is how much of good pedagogy is just treating your students like human beings (and how much of bad pedagogy is not doing so). Knew this before, but this semester is really driving it home.

A local library offers access to a fourth-tier music streaming service with a limited collection. Don’t know why most people would bother, but me and my ultra-niche music tastes are doing great.

Sick family member, so I moved my blended class to 100% asynchronous online this week. Almost definitely not COVID, but it’s a slower week in class, and this seems like the kind of semester to be overly cautious.

It amazes me that we all agree autocorrect spectacularly and regularly fails and yet believe that we can trust fundamentally the same tech to do harder work like grade homework, flag content, and suggest prison sentences.

Madeleines are to Proust what theme songs from James Bond movies are to me, except I couldn’t write an entire book about how they remind me of playing Axis and Allies with my brother.

Ça fait plusieurs mois que je fais (presque) tout sur mon smartphone en français, mais aujourd’hui, je me suis demandé pour la première fois si je préfère être tutoyé ou vouvoyé par une machine.

Bike commuting today for the first time in 5 months, Also, commuting today for the first time in 5 months.

The apparent significance of particular numbers is largely a factor of culture and our choice of number system—that is, more arbitrary than actually significant. That said, this is still a bummer of a summer for a tenth wedding anniversary.

Rewriting a syllabus + recurrence of a particular, ongoing personal anxiety + general pandemic stuff = some high levels of pre-semester stress today.

Pandemic parenting is full of frustrating moments—but also gems like this morning’s inventing games using the pieces to Ticket to Ride while listening to Indochine.

Lots of talk right now about students dissatisfied with online teaching. While those voices shouldn’t be ignored, I’ve also already had three students (of thirty) in my fall hybrid class specifically ask to take it fully online.

My brain has decided to treat me to an unrequested Serge Gainsbourg/Hamilton mashup, and I’m not sure what to think.

One of my earliest publications has been added to a research anthology without my knowledge or consent, since publisher owns copyright. Not necessarily opposed to end result, but still miffed about lack of control.

The NPR radio adaptation of Star Wars is just as great—and just as terrible—as you would think. Totally worth a listen.

Victoire du jour : apprendre que la FNAC fera livrer des livres jusqu’au Kentucky. 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻

Late fines start to lose some of their teeth once you start reframing them as new opportunities to financially support your local library.

Resolved, that watching a clip of the first Enterprise vs. Reliant fight from Wrath of Khan shall be accepted as a legitimate reason for staying up too late.

The more tired I am, the more easily I cry, so maybe staying up late last night and running 10k this morning were not great choices prior to introducing my kid to Up.

Currently reading Superman Smashes the Klan, and it is the epitome of what a Superman comic should be. Can’t recommend enough.

One of my favorite things about university libraries and ILL is that they’re officially there for research, but no one will stop you from reading the books just because you want to.

Is my brain mush right now because grading is hard? Or is grading hard right now because my brain is mush?

Every day that goes by in this election cycle just makes me more frustrated that we don’t have ranked-choice voting.

One of the best things I did as a brand new faculty member was to decide on a standard files and folders scheme. Still thanking myself for it.

The thing about getting in the habit of reading privacy policies is that it sometimes changes your behavior, but it ALWAYS ups your anxiety about the impossibility of ever changing your behavior sufficiently.

Just figured out a regex solution to something in under ten minutes. Watch out Friday, nothing can stop me now.

This afternoon, a career in academia looks like working from the kitchen table, playing a French 80s radio station, and fuming at Reviewer B’s complaints about my using the journal’s template like I was asked to.

I just finished rereading Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America.” It is really good—in ways I didn’t appreciate when I first read it in high school and that I couldn’t begin to articulate now.

One of the greatest joys I experience as a veteran of a decade of French classes is whenever I discover that a song we used to listen to in high school is an actual song, not just something made up for class.

Hearing a lot of things today that are reminding me why I find utilitarianism totally unsatisfying as a moral philosophy.

Not sure what I expected less today: To explain the concept of death to my kid or for my kid to grasp the concept well enough to burst into tears.

Listening to public Swiss radio (as I do) and got chills when I heard a new, prerecorded gov’t COVID-19 safety message played before the hourly news update. Felt like I was in disaster fiction.

Perk of having ed tech degree/experience in the era of COVID-19: I’m currently walking my mom through Zoom to allow for possibility of her offering distance piano lessons.

Was there a moral panic about radio? My kid is enjoying podcasts, and while parent-me feels like that’s somehow better than TV, tech researcher me is wondering about history.

TIL that if you don’t keep an e-bike adequately charged, all of that fancy-but-heavy pedal assist equipment is as much of a liability for your commute as it usually is an asset.

Trying to collect tweets from a very-new account, but advanced search with “from:” doesn’t seem to work. Has anyone ever had this happen before?

Is there a word for “the uncanny valley” but for British actors doing American accents (and, presumably, vice versa)?

35 GB of data is a lot to begin with, but when it’s 35 GB of CSVs? That’s when it starts to really register.

If Charles Xavier is looking for a copy editor, I’m pretty sure my mutant power is noticing unnecessary spaces between words in a manuscript.

I have been a fan of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a while, but I’m just now discovering how useful it can be for internet research 😍😍😍

Despite a really intense week (important work meetings, closing on a house), the 30 minutes where we thought we’d lost the kid’s beloved stuffed animal easily takes 1st place for stress level.

Sometimes I don’t realize how excited I am about a study until I write the conference proposal for it… which then just makes me more nervous about getting accepted.

The only bad thing about having volunteered to maintain the Global Mormon Studies website is that every time I update the program for the 2020 conference, I am increasingly disappointed that I didn’t have anything to submit myself.

Preparing a talk on social media and ethics for tomorrow night, and I believe I’ve found a way to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite bands.

My experience with my office’s snack cache is suggesting the uncomfortable possibility that protein bars are their own state of matter.

I can appreciate Le Carré’s shocking twists over and over—because he is also good at the inevitable-but-gripping and because he uses them both to create compelling tragedy.

Highlight of the morning: Hearing a translator for the interviewee on a France Culture show about comics struggle to remember the French neologism for “spoiler.”

Quick thought post-Mando and pre-TRoS: What Star Wars has given me a world in which to tell stories—not just movies. I played RPG campaigns that made the prequel trilogy look good, because the world held up even when the movies didn’t.

It must be called two-factor authentication because the app never works the first time.

I have just learned that there is an Etsy shop dedicated ENTIRELY to producing and selling magnets in the shape of trains and subway cars, and it’s restoring some faith in the internet.

A personal philosophy that I need reminding of today: To make fun of others’ typos or grammatical errors (whatever criticism they otherwise deserve) is nearly always a flaunting of privilege and therefore unnecessary.

Maybe the Cylons were a prescient metaphor for all that is terrible about the Internet of Things, and we ought to be adopting the Colonies’ aversion to networked technologies.

Currently completing my annual review, which has me thinking how much of my career I owe to more senior academics who have been kind and generous to me when they didn’t have to be. Hope I can follow that example myself.

If only I had known as a middle schooler who was uncool for not knowing who Eminem was that one day I would be explaining a “Real Slim Shady” joke in an academic research paper about how Mormons use Twitter 😂🤷🏼‍♂️

My dual monitor setup relies on my using my standing desk. Since I’m under the weather today, I’m working from a chair instead and trying out the new Sidecar functionality for my iPad. Pleased with it so far!

Seven years ago, I was applying for grad school, wrestling with the idea of leaving French teaching behind. The longer I spend in this career, though, the more I believe my experience learning and teaching language and culture affects my work.

Libraries are beautiful places: I just left one with four volumes of Star Wars/Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comics and a copy of Dr. Wil Gafney’s “Womanist Midrash.”

I had my information literacy and critical thinking students annotate the Wendy’s roleplaying game with comments about how it functions as a persuasive document, and the results are delightful.

The hardest manuscripts to review are the ones that promise something that’s legitimately needed in the literature but then fail to follow through with that promise.

Attention thinkpiece writers: My young kid is now requesting avocado toast for dinner. I am now taking bids for the right to interview us and complain about millennials and their kids in your column.

Today, my kid grabbed a TPB of Ms. Marvel I had checked out from the library, hugged it tight, and announced that she loved it, so I’m feeling pretty good in the parenting department right now.

Yet another Grammarly ad has me thinking… I think my skepticism about AI is not so much the mistakes it makes so much as it is the assumption that human experiences are so well-structured that they can be reduced to an algorithm.

Starting to wonder if Solomon’s “wise” suggestion to cut the baby in half was actually his editorial summary of the advice provided by three conflicting reviewers.

Just learned that there’s a French cover of “Raindrops Falling on My Head,” and now I want to know if they use it in the French dub of Spider-Man 2.

I feel subversive (but absolutely justified) whenever I argue for interpreting “quantitative” data through an interpretivist lens.

Completed a flat-tire-halfway-to-campus bike commuter’s biathlon today.

Gonna start spelling GIF as /dʒɪf/ to make my feelings about the pronunciation clear.

I keep getting automated emails from work that I shouldn’t be getting, but I’m an edge case of what the inclusion criteria are. It’s frustrating, but also a good reminder of need to reflect on variable definitions in computational research. 😂

Just had the surprising experience of seeing the term “NPC” defined and explained in a responsible conduct of research training.

I know some people have strong feelings about split infinitives, but if it’s good enough for Kirk and Picard, it’s good enough for me.

I set up a private Slack group for one of my classes today, and within 15 minutes, they had turned my face into a custom emoji. 😂

When it comes to macaroni and cheese, the spoonfuls I snitch from the pot while serving my kid lunch taste better than any of my own childhood memories of it.

I hope the Disney+ Ms. Marvel show will have an episode set in France where Kamala fights a local super who believes her burkini-based costume to be « une atteinte à la laïcité »

In the years since its release, I have begrudgingly accepted that the 2005 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is not that great. The hardest part of that acceptance, though, is how amazing some of its constituent parts are.

I just misread an email from my professional organization of choice as announcing the creation of a number of “research submarines.” Turns out they’re just working on “summaries.”

Beginning of semester dreams: I have written a not-great paper with my wife and the interim dean. We got feedback from Lyon-based bloggers (who like my Olympique de Marseille reference), and the dean wants to submit it to a top chemistry journal.

For the first time in our relationship, we both felt like we needed to ask “So, what would we do if there were an active shooter at this event?” while making Saturday plans. Didn’t feel great.

I am generally a fan of responsive design, but it’s frustrating when a website’s menu goes into mobile mode if I have my browser open on “only” half of my not-small monitor.

Flipping through an old notebook in my office, I found my notes for my campus interview here at UK (nearly two years ago now), including lists of now-colleagues’ publications and phonetic alphabet spellings of names so I wouldn’t mess them up.

Responding to reviewer who has a specific picture in their head of what “good” edtech research “should” look like. Thus, they’re confused by things in my paper that I’m sure aren’t problems—but don’t fit that picture.

I cannot read the word “poignant” without remembering that it is etymologically related to the French word for “fist” and, by extension, to the French expressions for “punch” and “brass knuckles” (literally, “an American punch”).

When I taught keyboarding, students complained about HTML lessons, asking what it had to do with typing. I explained that if you mistype things, you break things… I’m sure they laugh now every time I bork my website w/ a misplaced line break.

What I love about having ~15 years of personal journals hanging around is that if I ever run out of anxiety rooted in the present, I can go back and remember all the anxiety I felt in the past.

I am pleased to report that in the ~4 weeks since moving into my new office, I have only tried to enter the old one once.

Old favorite thing: Finding BBC Radio 4 shows on Audible; new favorite thing: Finding BBC Radio 4 shows on the Internet Archive.

I want to live in a world where I can travel by train from Cincinnati to Chicago without it being a 9-hour trip that leaves at 1am.

The Empire Strikes Back soundtrack just came up in iTunes; it’s good to occasionally remind oneself that Star Wars owes as much (if not more) to Williams, Burtt, and McQuarrie as it does to Lucas.

Toggl has an amazing API and disappointing native apps. If it weren’t for the first, the second could be a dealbreaker.

Unexpected topics in research meetings: The difficulty of choosing English translations for French swearing in your data.

I have now successfully migrated all of my “following” to Feedbin’s Twitter-to-RSS service. Weird way to keep up with tweets (and costs me a monthly fee), but I’m really enjoying it so far.

Totally blanked on bringing work clothes into the office today, so I’ll be working in the t-shirt and shorts I wore biking in. The t-shirt has an anti-imposter syndrome message, though, so that’s helping.

Teaching a summer class that includes fundamentals of computer hardware. Peak so far was this morning, when a student came in excited that she’d been able to follow along watching someone replace a server motherboard.

Question for more experienced parents: is it normal for young children to believe they can make obvious falsehoods true simply by asserting them (and whining if I don’t play along), or is that a consequence of growing up in the context of this presidency?

I am more invested in the FRA - USA match going on right now than I have been in any other sporting event this year. (Then again, that investment manifests only in occasionally checking the score, so you can see I’m not a sports guy).

Trying to do revisions on an article that isn’t my best work and that I don’t really love is haaaaaaard. I’m committed enough to the core idea to see things through, but I’m also tempted to tell the reviewers that they win and I’m out.

I am incapable of listening to Devo without remembering that they get a shout out in Watchmen.

Sapiens is a challenging book, but that’s also why it’s a must-read. As much as its focus is on science & technology, I ultimately read it as a reminder that we need to ask ?s from the humanities to safely navigate our present and future.

They need “pairs well with” recommendations for children’s clothes so that you know what food stains will go with the intended color scheme.

My first rule as a low-budget Twitter researcher is to collect interesting data first, ask (research) questions later. I have a lot of data I’ve never used, but I’d rather deal with that than a missed opportunity.

In jury-rigged standing desk news, I have replaced the MacBook box my monitor was teetering on with a Yeti microphone box, and I think I’ve got the monitor at the right height now.

Bike commuting adventure of the day: Finding all the places in my office where I can discretely hang up wet clothes from a rainy commute (thank goodness for my closet full of dry work clothes).

I tried to explain to my kid the premise of “Guantánamo Kid” (a comic about the innocent 14-year old Mohamed Al-Gharani’s incarceration in Gitmo). Her response: “A little boy shouldn’t be in jail!”

Just finished the 2006 “Life on Mars.” Fantastic premise, and some amazing individual scenes, but not quite enough connective tissue between the two.

Does anyone know of research on social media surveillance by school districts? Some local news stories have me thinking of a potential future project…

Just had a paper rejected from a special issue, but the journal has been such a pain to work with over the last 8(!) months that I’m frankly just glad it’s over.

When Twitter first gut-punched third-party apps by limiting their API, I was afraid not being able to check “likes” through Tweetbot would make it unusable. Now, that’s actually the appeal.

Central Kentucky libraries apparently have summer reading programs for adults, and I can’t remember the last time I was this excited.

I got a reminder today that I do the kind of research where something as hilariously unintuitive as telling a program to treat long numbers as “words made up of 0-9” is actually a critical step to making sure you get the right results.

I love learning more about regular expressions except the part where it’s always in response to some mistake I’ve made.

The welcome surprise of finding that a book I checked out for personal reading will be helpful for research outweighs all the guilt I felt about using my university’s interlibrary loan to request books for personal reading.

My kid can’t name our street and thinks our city is called “UK” but does know that we’re on Earth in the Milky Way galaxy.

Nothing like the release of teacher course evaluations to remind me how much of my self-worth is still tied to what other people think. 😬😬😬

Paying for my third year of Posteo tonight and not missing Gmail at all. (Still haven’t kicked the Drive/Docs habit, though).

Today is the primary for the 2019 state elections here in KY, and I’m really missing Michigan’s open primaries. Not being able to vote today may be what finally pushes me to declare a party affiliation after more than a decade of not doing so.

Learning that you can request article PDFs through UK’s interlibrary loan has been a GAMECHANGER.

Going to see Endgame tonight, and it occurred to me earlier today that the first Avengers came out when I was still in college, and this one came out at the tail end of my second semester as an assistant professor.

As a big fan of both The Good Place and the French language, I suddenly feel an urgent need to know what substitutes Chidi hears in French when Eleanor tries to swear in English.

A U.S. Rep from Kentucky recently criticized John Kerry for having a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science; I’m afraid he’ll come for me soon when he finds out I’m teaching technology courses despite only having a Doctor of Philosophy.

Being an assistant professor of ICT means a constant fear that I won’t get tenure once they figure out how baffled I am by the copier.

Today I learned from first-hand experience that Latter-day Saint services aren’t the only ones with cringeworthy messages on Mother’s Day. 😤 Not sure whether that’s comforting or disappointing! 😜

Currently in the middle of the long process of purging old tweets from my Twitter account, so my profile page looks weird, as though I haven’t tweeted regularly since 2017.

Super excited that Alfred 4 is coming out this summer. I was just thinking yesterday how the app continues to impress even after years of using it.

YouTube is a great way to talk about personalization algorithms. On one hand, it’s quite good at what it does. On the other, that often leads to my watching more YouTube than I meant to, and I resent it for that.

Repeatedly stopping this afternoon to jot down notes for next offering of a particular course. Not sure if this makes me a good prof (thinking ahead) or a bad prof (I’m supposed to be grading)

Reading Cory Doctorow’s “radicalized,” and it’s great so far. Funny how a story like “Unauthorized Bread” can make me angry in a way that reading news stories and blog posts on the same subject just can’t compete with.

It’s superhero day at the YMCA tomorrow, and my spouse is going to high fitness class as Squirrel Girl after years of teasing me for liking such a relatively-obscure character. Counting this one as a win!

Sometimes I unplug my headphones and give anyone walking by my door the gift of learning about Johnny Hallyday.

I recently finished “Weapons of Mass Diplomacy,” the English translation of a comic based on the author’s time in the French foreign ministry in the leadup to the Iraq War. Loved it, but wish my library also had it in the original French.

Just got a notification that today marks a whole year since I began journaling in Day One. I’ve really enjoyed it so far (even if I have a couple dozen incomplete entries right now that I need to go back and finish).

Returning proofs for an accepted article is always fun!

Il y a une cathédrale magnifique qui brûle, et le président américain se permet de donner des conseils aux sapeurs-pompiers. Je n’en peux plus.

Every year, I hit a point where my productivity system feels constraining, so I give it up for a few days, only to feel like I no longer have any control over my time.

Sometimes, being a bike commuter means spending the first 30 minutes of your work day fixing a spring clasp on a pannier.

I don’t really understand how fraternities and sororities work, so whenever I hear about Greek life, I half-expect someone to follow up with a discussion of “Roman life”, where all the names are different even though everything else is the same.

Today I get to teach about copyright and fair use in class, which is basically an excuse to watch YouTube videos and discuss whether they meet fair use or not.

THERE’S NO ONE CURRENTLY NEXT TO ME FOR WHAT WILL BE A NINE HOUR FLIGHT BUT I’M NOT SURE IF BOARDING HAS CLOSED YET AND THIS IS THE MOST STRESSFUL PART OF THE WHOLE TRIP SO FAR

Highlight of Paris airport this morning is the Scottish “hey Europe, can we still be friends?” ads that I keep seeing.

What I’d really like to see added to HTML are tags.

J’ai déjà atterri à Roissy, j’ai déjà fait le contrôle des passeports et la douane, mais je viens d’entendre le « jingle » de la SNCF, et c’est donc maintenant que je sais vraiment que je suis en France 😍🚉

Just when I thought I had screenshot shortcuts down for macOS, Cmd+Shift+5 reveals itself and blows my mind!

One of the best gifts I’ve ever received was when my mom sent me a copy of The Moody Blues’ “Days of Future Passed” for my birthday when I was a freshman at BYU, assuming that because it was quirky, I would like it. She was 100% right.

Getting in touch with my BYU roots in educational technology by applying for a grant to move to alternative textbooks for my Fall 2019 course.

Objects in my office visible from my webcam when I’m having professional teleconferencing meetings: an Axis and Allies board, a model of the Battlestar Galactica, and some Star Wars fan art.

It looks like I can’t access my institution’s Qualtrics survey when I have my VPN turned on. Is this an anti-spam measure, or is something else going on?

Thanks to my upcoming presentation at a conference in France and the different ways different countries do Daylight Savings, I have the dubious honor of getting to “spring forward” twice this year.

Next flight has no headrests, which is way more comfortable (for me, at least).

Currently on board one of those planes where what is intended to be a head rest for normal people is, for me, a “shoulder-pusher.”

I have been getting emails incorrectly calling me “Dr.” or “Professor” since I was an undergrad with my own section of French 102. Now, it’s nice to get one of those and be able to suppress the instinct to correct the sender.

There’s something about stepping onto a new bus that makes me feel like I’ve stepped into the future. I don’t need jetpacks, just clean seats and an electric motor.

I’m trying to succinctly describe a Latter-day Saint “solemn assembly” in an academic manuscript, and it’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

One of the things I like most about a manuscript I’m currently working on is the chance to visit literature from a few fields that are adjacent to where I usually cite from.

Public library holds and academic library holds are two of my favorite things.

Dans une semaine, je serai à Québec, et j’ai trop hâte.

Have not made as much writing progress today as I’d like, but today’s progress has validated both my use of a structured folder system as a “reference manager” AND my decision to memorize the keyboard shortcut for French guillemets.

This week, I will be putting my nose to the grindstone to meet the deadline for submitting an article to a special issue whose editors have repeatedly blown past their own deadlines. 🙄

Thanks to latitudinal differences, my spring break trip to Québec is happening while there is still snow there but after winter boots have gone on clearance here.

I recently had students modify a “life simulation” as an exercise in examining the values embedded in games, and their collective rage that choosing to read a book increases the “loneliness” score is so satisfying.

I spent most of my morning preparing to give a methods workshop that only one person showed up to… and yet, it went much better than the only other time I’ve given a methods workshop.

My kid just suggested cleaning something around the house so we could put off something she knew she had to do but didn’t want to. Looks like she’s developing valuable skills for grad school.

Emailed my Kentucky General Assembly representative this morning to express concern about a bill and got a personal answer back by afternoon. Way better than responses I get from US House/Senate.

I’m currently phasing in a new “professional picture,” and every time I look closely, I see the compression shirt I had on under my dress shirt because it was freezing outside during the shoot.

Tfw you and a co-author disagree on a question of punctuation, so you text your editor sister for backup.

Today’s writing is powered by The Doubleclicks. Hard to believe it took me this long to start listening to them!

A bug in my macOS mail client has just told me that after years of trying, I have finally reached the elusive “Inbox Negative One.”

Hard to beat coming into the office with a post-bike commute endorphin rush. Doesn’t happen every morning, but it’s always welcome when it does.

Funniest thing I’ve read all day is a tweet in the data I’m working with that proposes a Warcraft version of the French baccalauréat exam.

Approximately 6 months after receiving my work laptop, I have finally collected all of the peripherals I need to use my work laptop at work. Until now, I’ve been using personal computer at work and work computer at home.

I love that I do the kind of research where I have to define terms like “hashtag” and “meme,” but I hate trying to figure out how much of a 1,000-word conference proposal to dedicate to those definitions.

Sure I scheduled a research Skype meeting for Saturday morning, but I attended in my pajamas, so that still counts as work/life balance, right? 😂😭

I’m convinced that the hardest part of any research collaboration is figuring out what software everyone uses.

Question I just asked some colleagues re: teaching a subject I know something about but have never been formally trained in: “How do you turn 100s of Stack Exchange searches into a syllabus?”

I think the hardest part of teaching is figuring out how to explain something you don’t remember not knowing how to do to someone who currently doesn’t know how to do it.

It’s amazing how much French I’m learning translating students’ tweets to English for a research project. Language is so rich, and limiting it to 280 characters arguably makes it more so.

Last week, I noticed that my RSS reader was no longer refreshing feeds from my local newspaper’s website. Today, I discovered it’s associated with VPN use. Anyone know what’s going on?

Finally decided to cut ties with Prime, and then Amazon goes and buys Eero, my router company of choice. It’s like I can’t escape (which is, in turn, exactly why I’m trying to).

Tried to grab my box of Altoids with my eyes still on the article I’m reading, and grabbed a box of thumbtacks instead. Spotted my mistake before popping one in my mouth, though. 😅

Sure, I’m eating cold leftovers (break room microwaves aren’t working), but today’s not a total wash: I got “Religion and Cyberspace” from the library and booked VIA Rail tickets from Quebec City to Montréal for an upcoming vacation.

The cutest part of my kid’s being old enough to make Valentines this year is her insistence on mailing one to herself.

Prisencolinensinainciusol is my favorite song-whose-name-I-can-never-remember. It’s an amazing rendition of what American music sounds like to someone who doesn’t speak English, and it’s worth a listen.

A lot of people are ragging on YouTube these days, so I’d just like to mention one thing it does really well: Consistently pick the least-flattering frames of my class videos for the thumbnail options.

If you’re going to get an article you’re proud of rejected on a Friday, it is comforting for the rejection to be essentially “it’s a good paper but doesn’t fit our special issue focus as much as you think it does.”

Nothing reinforces my professorial credibility quite like the wet bike gear from my rainy commute draped over the chairs in my office.

Quand une fusée temporelle commence son voyage dans le temps, on appelle ça un « décollage horaire »

In June, I purchased an “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue” compilation on Audible that is over 18 hours long. Tonight, I finally passed the halfway point.

Je viens d’acheter des billets pour visiter le Québec (pour les vacances) et la France (pour un colloque) au mois de mars. J’ai trop hâte !

Showing my information literacy class a clip from “Look Around You” this afternoon. Hope I don’t give anyone nightmares about the Helvetica Scenario.

I’m having students in one of my classes mod a game as their assessment for the current module, and I’m as excited about the outcome as I am nervous (which is to say: very, very, very).

Lexington has a sister city in Normandy, so I’m currently applying to our sister cities organization in the hopes it will provide opportunities to keep up my French. 😊🇫🇷

Reading today’s edition of the Lexington Herald-Leader makes me glad I subscribe to a local paper. Lots of holding our state and federal officials accountable; plus, I’m starting to have some favorite local columnists.

Bought a frame today for a nice piece of The Last Jedi art I received for Christmas. Going to hang it up in my office and start using it as a litmus test for visitors.

Over lunch, I continued a new (for me) book on the history of French and decided to email a thank you to a wonderful BYU professor who taught a class on that subject. I think of him often and am embarrassed I hadn’t reached out earlier.

We also looked at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as an example of the deep web. I don’t know how pedagogically effective that was, but the students definitely got a kick out of it.

This week, I had students complete a “human web crawler/ human search engine” activity to give them a sense of how Google works. Room to improve the activity, but I’m reading student reflections, and it seems to have helped!

Last week, I confessed to my colleagues some of my quirky passions, like radio dramas and Franco-Belgian comics. This week, driven by a compulsive need to outquirk myself, I am listening to a radio drama adaptation of a Franco-Belgian comic.

I (an educational technology researcher) have just declined the opportunity to review for the journal “Cell Proliferation.” The weird thing is that it didn’t seem like the spammy requests from journals I sometimes get. Mistaken identity, maybe?

On Monday mornings, I like to give myself a couple of hours to both plan the week and take care of a stack of odd jobs. It lets me ease myself back into work and frees up time to focus on more important things later in the week.

I think my favorite takes on La Marseillaise are the 1812 Overture and that scene from Casablanca.

Currently planning travel to an academic conference in France. Rule of thumb when flying to Paris is always to worry about consequences of disgruntled employees, but this time it’s the American ones I’m worried about.

Reviewer 3 doesn’t understand why my study is important. I’m trying to find ways to articulate that better, but all I really want to do is JUST BOLD EVERYTHING I’VE ALREADY WRITTEN TO THAT EFFECT.

I never know whether to be happy or frustrated when I’m able to respond to a reviewer’s objection by resurrecting a paragraph from the manuscript that I’d previously cut to slim things down.

Oh look, it’s my favorite day of the week: “Welp-those-manuscript-revisions-are-due-today Wednesday”

It’s only taken me five months, but I’ve finally updated my Alfred “search the library for such-and-such an article” shortcut to point to my current institution’s library.

Gotta say, Amazon, the amount of effort you’re making me go through to cancel my Prime membership is just validating my choice to do so.

If anything helps you appreciate Vygotsky (and sociocultural theories of learning in general) more than being the parent of a young kid, I have yet to experience it.

Tfw a seemingly small suggestion from a reviewer actually opens up new insights that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed. Thanks Reviewer #1!

Today’s manuscript revision fun is detangling the results of a coding error that left out 3 hours and 56 minutes worth of tweets from my analysis. Just enough to make some very small differences in reported results.

One of my favorite “not designed for that” uses of the macOS app Alfred is to strip formatting from text when copying from one doc to another—paste it in Alfred bar in between, and voilà!

Reading the news today, I am reminded of last month, when after finishing the fantastic “Believed” podcast, I angrily covered up John Engler’s signature on my diploma with a sticky note. It’s still there.

Currently responding to reviewers of a journal article based on my dissertation. Feels especially difficult to make changes to a manuscript I’ve already had reviewed so many times.

Just misspelled my own name in an email because I didn’t want to be impersonal by using my text expansion-powered signature 🙄

Today, I used the dumb “define a sandwich” meme as a pedagogical activity, so I’m feeling pretty good about my semester so far.

This post is a test of Twitter integration with my new Hugo blog (via Siri Shortcuts).

Hello World! This is a test of a Siri Shortcut for posting to my new Hugo blog from iOS.