Booyor's BLOGgh!

If you want to see something completely ridiculous, check out the Facebook status updates for Star Wars characters.

That in and of itself could make for a good bloggh post.

But wait! There’s more!

If you want to read articles from The Professional Site, read on:

I had watched a demo video at wave.google.com over the summer debuting Wave. As with any tech thing, my thoughts started racing with how to use it in an educational community setting. Over the weekend I got an invitation to be a part of the limited preview. (Happy Thanksgiving, right?) I’ve been chatting with people about Wave and here are some general questions (before we tackle how to use it in a school setting) I can answer after having used it.

What is Wave?
The best way I can think to describe it is that Wave is what e-mail would look like if it was invented today instead of decades ago.

But I already do e-mail. Why would I use this?
E-mail is extremely linear. When you are e-mailing a simple message to one person, that works. If you start e-mailing back and forth in a conversation, that’s where stuff starts to get cluttered and it’s tough to see the progression of ideas. GMail started the whole “conversation” idea, making it easier to follow who said what. Wave takes it further.

I was able to embed a map, a YouTube video, and a picture into the Wave very easily. That’s a definite plus. In e-mail those resources sometimes don’t come across.

How could it make my life easier?
For me, e-mail gets confusing the more recipients that I have per message. Before replying, I have to sift through what everyone else said. Many times that entails opening up multiple messages and checking when they were sent. With Wave, it’s one message and the responses are shown more like threads or comments at the bottom of a blog post.

How could it make my life more difficult?
First, there’s the “Great. One more account to manage; one more thing to check” problem. I’m hoping that Google will incorporate other services, specifically mail coming in from already-created e-mail accounts.

Next, you can reply to any portion of a Wave. The Wave’s status will show how many replies are unread. You need to scroll through the whole Wave to see the unread replies.

How could it give me a headache?
My friend are I were chatting (Google calls it “ping”…think Scott Westerfeld’s Tally Youngblood series.) and we had to scroll quite a bit. Just like in a main Wave, you can reply to any section of a ping. Think about how fast an online chat goes. Now picture someone posting a reply at the very top of the chat where the ping started an hour ago. My friend and I are decently tech savvy and we were lost. For friends chatting, it’s funny. But I picture a professor I had that did online chats. His idea of a chat was to have everyone type up their responses days in advance and then paste them into the chat all at once. That hurt to read. This will not improve that.

Where could it offend people?
I choose my words carefully. When it’s a really important e-mail, I’ll revise it a couple of times before sending it out. With Wave, my friend jumped in before I knew it and was watching me type my reply, letter by letter, so that before I was done he was already saying, “I thought so.”

Very disorienting. I like to spell things correctly. Typos become even more annoying as someone is virtually watching over your shoulder.

My friend was able to edit what I had said. Google changed it to read that we were co-authors of the reply. I’m glad he can spell well, because you can’t tell who said what after the specific reply becomes co-authored. I didn’t want someone to look through the archives of the Internet to see that I had misspelled a word when in fact it was someone else.

You know, because those things are important.

I also think about how many people write an e-mail angrily just to delete it as a way of venting. Wave records what you’re messaging, so someone could watch the playback and see what you initially said. For people who carefully choose their words when writing to others, you have to do a rough draft in your head. It slows things down and makes it more stressful.

Is it worth it?
Google is known for constantly changing, constantly growing. I think that the tech will change to meet the need and we’ll see more features show up once it’s out of preview mode. Just like any new tech, we’ll see it come out for a year as the people who use tech for gadget’s sake enjoy it. Some time after that we’ll then see the general populous join on IF it incorporates e-mail better.

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Over the weekend, when I wasn’t figuring out Google Wave, I finished Crocodile Tears by Anthony Horowitz. Stormbreaker (as well as Haddix’s Among the Hidden) was the first YA book I read as a junior high teacher and it helped me to see how that market of books has developed over the years. If you remember my review of Ghost in the Machine by Patrick Carman, I made reference to how much I enjoyed Scorpia (my favorite of the series) and how Ark Angel was a letdown for me. (Yes, I’ve read Snakehead.)

As I began Crocodile Tears, I thought, “Can this get me back from ‘I enjoy the series’ to ‘I rave about the series’?”

I love how Horowitz starts out the novels with an opening scene much like a James Bond movie. We see minor characters involved in some sort of trauma, introducing a sliver of the main conflict. We also don’t see Alex Rider, for the most part. Chapter one gets you hooked with a disaster at a nuclear power plant. A charity swoops in to help immediately and we are instantly suspicious that the charity may have known ahead of time when the disaster was going to happen.

I was nervous, at first. I’m a huge supporter of helping out wherever you can, even internationally, so I was hoping that Horowitz would not paint a jaded view on aid organizations. There’s a great conversation where Alex Rider is defending people who donate because it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re playing some kind of game.

Desmond McCain is a good villain in the spy movie sense. There are some times where the cheaper, easier way to win would be to just kill Alex and be done with it. Nope. Just like it’s mentioned in Pixar’s Incredibles, the villain monologues and explains the plan, trusting the henchmen to finish the job. Not the most logical way to enact your evil schemes, but it definitely fits the style.

A student and I had debated on whether Alex Rider had actually killed anyone in his books. The villains pursue him to the “Captain Ahab” level of obsession to their own demise. In this one it’s pretty clear: bad guy is going to kill Alex, Alex kills him first – but it’s under a spy code of morality.

1. You point a gun at someone and shoot, you’re an assassin.
2. You create an elaborate plan to watch the person die, you’re a supervillain.
3. You create an elaborate plan using just what’s on you at the moment (perhaps feeling a degree of remorse), you’re a super spy.

Alex is angst-ier this time around.

Something that I had lost sight of is that the entire series has just been one year in Alex’s life. In other words, he has missed a TON of school. Crocodile Tears highlights this; the adults finally realize that this 14 year-old should probably attend a full day of school from time to time.

It’s definitely not the end to the series. There is still room for Alex to grow throughout the years. Crocodile Tears is an enjoyable read. (I’m still biased towards Scorpia, but I’m excited to see where the series goes.)

Not the official title, but I hope they’ll consider it…


I’m curious if the new applicants to the Evil League of Evil will show up in the sequel.
Thanks to Mike for the Facebook message.
Full of awesome:

For the past couple of weeks, no matter what the venue, someone had commented on how huge my beard had gotten. I’m just thankful that my students had not commented on my appearance. That always gets to me. Facial hair was just not a priority with everything else going on in my life.

I have shorn my face. I apologize to those who in recent events have rubbed up against my rough personage, in both the figurative and literal sense. Thanks for grace about my face.

Devin opened up the world of Google Wave to me. It is like I pictured it and nothing at all like I expected, in one of those Google paradoxes I so love. I pinged (Scott Westerfeld, anyone?) Vafer today and we both realized exactly how old we are. The conversation took on a frantic, abstract, non-linear quality as we responded to threads at different parts in the conversation, all within one window. It used to be called a form of learning disability, but now it’s required to keep up in a ping flood.

I expect flying cars sometime soon, to be sure.

I’m really digging Pandora right now. I wish it was easier to get it to stream in the Scion. I discovered the soundtrack for Signs today by creating a station of Danny Elfman, Gregson-Williams, and John Barry (the James Bond guy). So much fun to write to.

I make the prediction here and now: if people start accessing Google Wave while driving, car accidents will follow. If instead they pull up Pandora, I think we’ll have a much more pleasant freeway system. Unless, of course, people are too busy thumbs-downing songs. Then horrible misinterpretations in body language occur and streaming media-related violence increases.

My daughter, the Renaissance princess

LCD projector and a giant screen? Most impressive.

…but I think I know why Devin beat me in Fantasy Football this week.

It’s not like my guys tried to offer money, right?
Oh.

I hadn’t realized just how many games involve long playtime with a flashlight, but it makes sense when you point the controller at the screen.

Can I add that the scales are imbalanced? For every survival horror game invoking a flashlight, it should be federal law requiring the release of a game revolving around nunchuk combat and/or two WiiMotes being used as John Woo guns.

Other game topics:
Did you see the tonberry cake?

How about the Marriage Program, complete with USB cupcakes?

Oh, semicolons. You make things happen.

Check out these and deformed turkeys at Cake Wrecks.
Makes me hungry for a M Crib. Right, Mike?

Here are two posts from The Professional Site:

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Choose Your Own Adventure books kept me coming back to the public library daily as a kid and I would be willing to bet partly influenced my decision to become a librarian.

A friend of mine sent me this link a while back and it’s taken me until now to sort through all of the analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I hadn’t realized that as the series went on, there became less choices in the books. I have always wondered what it took to organize all of the pages to point to different places throughout the book. (I made a Choose Your Own Adventure radio show CD in high school, so I understand the effort on a smaller scale.) Check out this site for more of the math behind Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Also of note were the Lone Wolf books by Joe Dever. It makes sense that these types of books, ones where you jump around inside the framework of the book, came around during milestones in video game computing. (For my students that know how much I love video games, you should imagine what it would be like growing up on this game. Yeah, no 3D cards, just text.)

The Lone Wolf books were cool because they had a page at the end with random numbers scattered across them. This was to generate a score for your character’s skill checks and attacks. It was a book where you were the main character and it played out like a variation on a video game. You were supposed to close your eyes and point to one of the numbers, but my teacher would always get mad at me during silent reading time.

These books really grabbed my imagination because, no matter how hard I tried to predict where the story was going, it could always take a crazy turn. Some smart authors even put fake endings into the book to trap you if you were just flipping through the pages.

The worlds that these authors created I can still remember. That’s why the samizdat quote is so poignant:

It was the fact that after reading it you understood the logic of Gibson’s world. And that logic was portable to any new scenario you could dream up.

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Justin Bieber got his start broadcasting videos of himself singing on YouTube, getting the attention of a record label. Now Web 2.0 stuff is creating some trouble for that record label. James Roppo of Island Def Jam Records is being charged with a couple of misdemeanors, such as endangering the welfare of children. A riot of fans broke out at a mall appearance on Friday; five people had to go to the hospital.
James Roppo is accused of not helping out the police in handling the angry crowd. Here’s what one officer had to say about it, from the Associated Press article:

“We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message,” said Nassau County Police Det. Lt. Kevin Smith. “By not cooperating with us, we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk.”

You want to do what you can to keep the fans safe. Those are the people that make a star famous. But I’ll admit it’s an interesting step in technology ethics by requiring someone to write a message on Twitter. Is that covered under the first amendment? Is this like yelling fire in a movie theater?

Click on the thumbnail to zoom in on this great word cloud from wordle.net.

Everyone deserves a break sometimes, even if you are the faceless muscle behind the Galactic Empire’s Iron Grip. Here are some of the things TK-421’s friends posted on his Facebook:



Go check out the others on Wild Ammo, like my favorite, the stormtrooper playing keep away with a helmet.
Here’s the full flickr stream.

Make sure you check out Devin’s great news about Chuck.

It makes me want to scream like a Twilight girl at Comic-Con:

Or was that “Oprah Free Stuff”?

I wonder how the tears will look when they realize she’s only going 25 seasons, 2011 being her last year for the show. Then she’ll be able to invest more into her network, OWN. (Yeah, that’s really Oprah’s cable network. She’s buying up the signal for Discovery Health and changing the name.)

To Devin, for your intrepid reporting and endurance of the New Moon “pack”, I salute you.