Happy Saturday. I’m sitting in my pajamas listening to Michael Pollan on a “special encore edition” of Whad’ya Know and catching up on my online life.
First off, special encore editions can only mean it’s fund drive time at Wisconsin Public Radio. Fund drive time is many people I talk to’s reason for not listening to public radio. But, to borrow a phrase Michael Pollan just used (I’ve done that before), I don’t think that argument “passes the 60 Minutes test”; the lack of commercials and overall non-inanity of the programming the rest of the time more than compensates. So let’s all sign-up and pledge, especially in light of the now seemingly annual budget cuts (little shout out there to my old hometown newspaper, which just happened to have the first Google News hit on the subject). And if you take your public radio station for granted, don’t forget about Milwaukee’s formerly great Jazz 89 (RIP).
On a much more uplifting note, it’s International Writing Centers Week, and the UW-Madison Writing Center is celebrating. Among the events I’d heartily recommend are the Podcast Premiere (I heard some early drafts and think they’re going to be great), the Madison-Area Writing Center Colloquium video conference with Nancy Grimm (I’ll be there), and the Writing Fellows Program info session (I’m bummed I’m no longer a Fellow, since the stipend just increased like 400 bucks per semester). If you’re at UW-Madison and have never been to the Writing Center, you’re missing out. I’ve never been part of a more supportive-yet-scholarly community. At the very least, check out the event’s Web page (much to my chagrin, you might spy a picture of me with my old fellow Fellow Shivani).
To zoom in still further to this very URL, I wanted to update you on a few CSC developments. I pushed my web-language abilities to the limit the other day and pieced together (with some help) the code to get the sharing icons you see below each post added to my blog template in a format that hopefully isn’t too obnoxious. Please share any posts you find useful or interesting!
I’ve also, after reading my advisor’s comment on my “News Dump” post, joined del.icio.us and thus exited the dark ages of news sharing (where you just email articles to yourself and blog about them). You can see my del.icio.us tagroll at right, which includes the tag “ToBlog.” That’s where you’ll see the stories I’m thinking of blogging about. Don’t be surprised if the unblogged divergence through this node is pretty high, though; it’s easy to feel ambitious about what I’ll write about when I read the news in the morning but less so when I sit down to blog at night.
Finally, a couple of brief commercial-ish announcements for friends of mine:
(1) David Meerman Scott just announced a “free virtual book tour teleseminar” to promote his new e-book The New Rules of Viral Marketing (with editing by yours truly). It’ll take place Tuesday, Feb. 26 at 5 p.m. eastern, and I highly recommend you join David if you’re interested in learning about how to spread your ideas online. If you are but can’t make it, you should at least join the 42,810 readers who have already downloaded David’s e-book.
(2) My former Wisconsin Engineer partner-in-crime Marty Grasse, who has joined the throng of my friends who have up and moved to the Twin Cities, will be in town Monday and Tuesday to present with his design team at the College of Engineering’s Innovation Days. Stop by and hear about his and the other teams’ inventions. I’ll be there sometime between noon and three.
Update: Marty’s team took home first place in the (lucrative) Schoofs Prize for Creativity competition.
