When considering “What is an author?”, Foucault describes writers as hollow shells destined to shuffle around drafty apartments, stare vacantly across town squares, and presumably come into the unknowing ownership of a large number of cats.

Alright, some of that is me. He does say:

..it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.

Given the number of papers I am writing this week, I might be putting this to a literal test. However, I just received some exciting news that is deserving of an interruption: Digital Technologies of the Self is out, and along with it, my chapter on craigslist Missed Connections.

Image courtesy of Yasmine Abbas's hand, and the helpful birds on Twitter.

You can find information about it on the publisher’s site, and it has even shown up on Amazon, where you can (as I have – tehe) sign up to be notified when they have it ready to be shipped to your eager hands!

What is the book about, you ask? (more…)

… it will probably be a miracle. Between multiple workshop papers, annotated bibliographies, and literature reviews, all due… well, now more or less, this is a whopper of a week. Thanksgiving in Chicago is on the other side, and I can only imagine I will have plenty to be thankful for. Provided I make it through this week.

In the meantime, please enjoy what I am declaring the cutest profile picture on Facebook:

David Fourel — I have no idea who you are (or how I even ended up on your profile), but bravo!

Tonight Judy Olsen presented in my research methods on what she calls “the ten questions.” Apparently originally deployed on PhD students at the School of Information and the University of Michigan, these ten questions are designed to structure your research and (apparently) make graduation day arrive sooner. While they do structure research into a certain type of academic work, I do like the narrative they create. Without delay, here they are:

1. What is the problem?
2. Who cares?
3. What have people done about it? Why is this not solved?
4. What am I going to do about it?
5. What am I REALLY going to do? (A.K.A., how are you operationalizing this?)
6. What will/did you find?
7. What does this mean?
8. Who cares?
9. Where are you going to publish this?
10. What are you going to do next?

I am not exactly how this might map on to my attempts to problematize identity (ahem), but I am curious to try. Hold on, this might be a bumpy ride…

Driving away from UC Irvine’s campus, you only have to take a couple quick turns onto Newport Coast Drive before you find yourself racing down a hill towards Laguna Beach. Within seconds you will come around a bend, and the hills will open up to reveal an ocean so blue it is sometimes hard to see where the water stops and the sky beings.

This is where I live. Apparently this is my new home. With images like these, so stunning they are almost trite, the whole thing is hard to believe, but this is what it looks like. It is surreal. (more…)

Yesterday day was my birthday, and it was amazing. Rather than any large productions, it was a day of thoughtful generosities.

As midnight approached, Steve eagerly waited for it to officially be my birthday before he produced a gift. Simultaneously the most ridiculous and awesome gift ever, I got the world’s only internet connected bunny, a Nabaztag! (Really, it is kind of crazy, so you should just click on the link.)

After promptly naming him “Peru”, I struggled for about an hour to introduce him to his new Internet-based home (turns out that Airports need some extra configuration – why? No clue.), and then somehow let a couple more hours slip by teaching him to wake me up in the morning, play NPR, read Twitter tweets, and practice Tai-Chi. (You didn’t click that link, did you? You might want to now.)

(more…)

In one month I am leaving D.C. and, as if the city was helping me prepare for the move, my scooter was stolen this week. I walked outside one morning to find that “Gui” was simply not there. I stood there for a moment, as if his absence was a trick of the eye. However, despite how hard I looked at his typical parking spot, or how many times I blinked, he was gone.

Honestly, I think that Steve was more upset than I was. I promptly filed the event under “what can you do?” and “am I going to be late to work?” I then quickly checked my calendar to see when the day’s meetings were, and then my watch to see if I could catch the work-shuttle from Dupont Circle.

Don’t get me wrong, I was upset, but I didn’t really know what one could do besides twitter regret into the cloud:

Scooter stolen. Le sigh. I suppose it was only a matter of time.

On Facebook, my friend George (who seems to always have the best comments) wrote:

DC’s way of saying good bye

Carly was far more… emotive:

total effing crap. screw that city.

This wasn’t a surprise. (Love scooters? Read on…)

Much to my mother’s chagrin, I have never quite gotten into the habit of taking a daily vitamin. Now I am a fairly nutritionally minded individual (just don’t ask my gym buddy); this largely means I know my macro-nutrients, the details of the Krebs cycle, what a ketone is, and drink a protein shake after my workouts (most of the time).

But when it comes to a simple daily vitamin, I have never quite gotten there. Perhaps this the byproduct of a mother for whom one vitamin quickly explodes into a dozen more to supplement the first’s deficiencies. Perhaps this is a Pavlovian response to too much vitamin B dumped on a dehydrated and dancing body, and the inevitable sick stomach and vomiting the occurred to often during my undergraduate days. Honestly, the pills are huge, and they scare me a bit.

The vitamin search continues…

There is a debate at work right now. Granted, it is a bit ideological, but it is one of those classic web developer debates we feel compelled to return to every couple of years:

Should we expect our users to have JavaScript enabled?

Perhaps more importantly, what should we do when they don’t?

Ever since Google Maps ripped open the possibilities of web-based development (with turn-by-turn directions no less), we have been stuck with this bizarre requirement: JavaScript. Sure, it makes the web go round, but I still have nightmares of trying to get the University of Utah labs to upgrade to Flash v7, and our web analytics show a stunningly high level of Netscape v4.

Frogs at risk after the jump…

A lot has been going on lately. Graduations, birthdays (Steve’s), more graduate school on the way, and the summer’s crop of going aways — plenty of reasons to celebrate! It seemed a pity to prioritize one of these events over the other, so we went for the obvious solution:

A birthday party for my cat.

Yes, Minka celebrated her 16th birthday last night, and Steve and I were desperate to make it even more ridiculous than last year’s quinceañera (yes, also not a joke). When explaining the celebration to a cashier at the grocery store we were given a wide-eyed look of disbelief. When she realized we weren’t kidding, she had to excuse herself while recovering from a laughing fit.

In the name of such ridiculousness, I thought I would share a (sassy) photo posted on Facebook by Rick.

“PETA should be called…” commented one of Rick’s friends.

Yup. That is how I roll.

Oh, and by the way, it seems that racing down the street on your scooter with a dozen pink baloons is a sure-fire way to collect a bunch of smiles.

Last week, me and my best colleagues wrapped ourselves up in black polyester, walked across Healy Lawn at Georgetown, and after sweating for two hours in the sun, completed the last requirement for graduation.

I figured you might like some pictures.

See them all after the jump. (more…)