Tuesday, January 03, 2006

2006: Hit the Ground Running


Pigalle Morning


Today is the first day back at work officially but I have been reading when able to do so amid the rush and thunder of the Xmas/New Year Saturnalia. Managed to finish two books and start several others. Of interest is Sarah Sloane's Digital Fictions which I first found on Google Print and then requested my university library to buy, which they did. Why is it such a problem for big publishers to have their products online when it really is so much easier to buy the text if it is needed.
As well I borrowed Teaching at University: A Guide for Postgraduates and Researchers by Kate Morss and Rowena Murray which I thought may help prepare me for teaching a technical English course to engineering students beginning 19 January 2006. This will be the first time I teach a ongoing course at university level. I hope it is not the last;-)
Finally what I originally intended to blog here, this first entry of 2006, was this:
In August 2004 my family and I spent 10 days in Paris. It was great with galleries, cafe's, bookshops, music shops, drifting through the streets and just hanging out. I took a mass of photos on a digital camera (since deceased....melted at the 1st May bonfires) and loaded them up to my home computer when we came back to Sweden. I also gave a CD copy of the pictures to my mother, who met us in Paris. A month after we arrived back the hard drive on my computer fried itself and all the pictures were lost. I knew there was a copy in Australia but my mother is not very (to say the least) computer orientated person and she gave the CD to my sister as she has a computer at home. My sister lives in Darwin in the far north of Australia (my mother lives in Toowoomba). Finally the CD returned to us here in the north of Sweden yesterday and I could once again load up the images and video from Paris 2004 to my new(ish) harddrive on our home computer. The power of networked information has saved me once again. Thank you file sharing!
This time I have put many of the best out on the net:

Surrealism and Paris (6 videos)

Paris 2004 (slideshow)

What is ahead from me this year. Much!
The big news is in April I have been given a place at the Terrastock 6 table. Along with other Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood I hope to be playing at the Terrastock 6 festival in Providence Rhode Is. USA April 21-23 2006. Ohh la la.

My family is a source of much inspiration and strength. This year my oldest son starts school....should be interesting for all of us. The younger will probably begin daycare around the same time (September) as both mommy and daddy have much to do.

I present the first chapter of my thesis in February as a seminar: "The Interactive Reader: Reading and the Electronic Text" should be an intense experience.

I turn 37 years old........

nuff said.

One last last thing. A interesting article on grassroots media in the not so grass roots NYT:

"Even when subjects of news stories felt they had been misunderstood or badly treated, they were unlikely to take on reporters or publishers, believing that the power of the press gave the press the final word. The Internet, and especially the amplifying power of blogs, is changing that. Unhappy subjects discovered a decade ago that they could use their Web sites to correct the record or deconstruct articles to expose what they perceived as a journalist's bias or wrongheaded narration."
Answering Back to the News Media, Using the Internet By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: January 2, 2006

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