They all look the same to me anyway....

So the announcement by the USFDA that there will be no restrictions or required notifications on cloned meat and milk, has some people north of the border asking questions about what Canada's stance will be on cloned animal products.

Some have suggested that Canada would be wise to require labelling, simply to distinguish itself from US products for people who might not want to eat cloned meat. We really do have an aversion to anything that we don't imagine is naturally made, don't we? Considering how many of the things we use and consume in our lives that have been touched by some kind of technology, some kind of invention that humans have dreamed up to make our lives better, it really is surprising the reluctance we have - as a group - to accept things that have been modified by technology, particularly when those things are animals or human beings. We have less fear of robots than genetically modified humans, less fear of gadgets than we do of cloned animals. No wonder many cultures have had a fear of twins.

Of course as far as I'm concerned, I would eat cloned or non-cloned food - most of it would depend on whether it was on sale or not! I don't even have a problem with GMOs (genetically modified organisms), at least not in theory. I do have a problem with the economics of genetically engineering foodstuffs, like monoculture, patenting and the kind of extortion that a company like Monsanto can get away with.

Some observers have noted that cloning is still so expensive that it is unlikely it will be used for mass production of meat products. Cloning may be used as a breeding tool - to ensure the continuation of genetically superior breeding stock - but it is unlikely that we'll be eating cloned meat anytime soon.

For me, taste and cost are the primary driving factors in my food purchasing decisions, not where the food originated from. As long as the animal is healthy, I really don't care how similar it might be to any other one.

White Christmas... almost

Today, the day after all the festivities, the very relaxing and enjoyable holidays during which I did nothing, it now snows.

But I don't mind. I've never really felt like I needed to have a White Christmas to make it a real holiday. I've also never really felt the need to have turkey at Christmas (though this year I did courtesy of my sister).

Actually, no snow over Christmas was actually pretty nice. It was easy to get around and was warm enough that it wasn't a chore to travel. I like that.

Today, the day that I need to get back to work, it snows. Several centimeters. It seems appropriate that the day back to work is the one where it snows, doesn't it? It also feels really nice to have done pretty much nothing at all for the last two days.

Happy Winter everyone!

(clicking on the photo will show you a satellite image of how the earth changes with the seasons)

Tis the season

Ahhh... the joys of gift shopping... I'm very glad I finished last week.

I've been reading several articles in the paper and online about how popular gift cards are this year. And how they're such a great idea. And how they make your gift shopping so easy.

And I suppose they are an easy gift to buy. You don't have to search for the right size or color, or second guess whether they'll like the gift.

But for a shop-a-phobic like me, the gift card is usually not the gift that I get most excited about. I've received a few gift cards before - some of them have been appreciated because they were places where I regularly shop anyway and it was great to be able to go and pick out something I wanted. I've gotten other gift cards that sit in my wallet for months before I'd find the time to go to that particular store, and then sometimes it took a while to find something I actually wanted there.

The downside is, for someone like me, the time you save shopping for my gift just gets passed off on me. Giving a gift card that you don't know the person will love and use, just puts the burden on the recipient to spend the time you saved.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no scrooge, and I'm not against gift cards per se, but all this talk about gift cards lately has just got me thinking about them. They're fabulous for giving experiences - a trip to the movies, a day on a ski hill, an outing to the local amusement center - and sometimes you just know it's right (like if you gave me a card for amazon or chapters...) But I still like getting actual things.

After all, just imagine a Christmans morning just full of gift cards. A tree stacked with nothing but gift cards just isn't as much fun on the morning of the 25th.

Those Canadians and their computers!

Actually, it's those Canadians and their blogs. Apparently, per internet-capita, Canadians read more blogs than any other country*

Two point touch theorizes that is has something to do with the trust and level of establishment of IT press (with the US having a well trusted print IT press, which is why it ranks lowest):

The equation then becomes that penetration of blogs is in inverse proportion to the trust and penetration of mainstream print media. Common sense, I guess.

But a commenter takes the cultural approach:

To be fair, TheGoodBlogs statistics may not be truly representative of what’s out there since our sample is still relatively small. However for what it’s worth, in terms of absolute visits, US (64%), Canada (18.5%), UK (4.88%), Germany (1.94%), France (1.75%), Australia (1.46%), India (1%) and the rest is less than 1%.

What does seem to correlate though is if I apply the absolute numbers against the number of internet users per country (obtained on www.internetworldstats.com), it shows me that Canadians with Internet access is almost 2.5 times more likely to visit blogs than their US counterparts. I found nothing to that substantiate the other countries like Spain etc.

Anecdotally, (tongue-in-cheek of course) I think it means that the US have better alternative channels of entertainment like better cable and satellite TV, more online shopping opportunities, better shopping malls and recreational distractions than us poor sods up north! We rely on keeping each other company online when we’re snowed in and frequent blogs in the hope that someone will be our friend!

I tend to think the commenter is closer to the mark, simply because I don't know whether the US has a more well trusted IT press than Canada. The argument does shift during the post from theorizing about IT press to mainstream press, which I would imagine are worlds apart. At least when it comes to mainstream press in the US (which I have more experience with than the IT press). But it's an interesting piece of trivia.

*The countries included in the analysis are: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the US

Much better

My earlier post trying to share the presentation I made wasn't working - Geocities kept rerouting you to a different page than the one I asked it to send you to - so here it is in all its glory (or not!)

No pulse?

Usually when we say someone has no pulse, we're using figurative language to indicate an individual who is unemotional, or reluctant to express any passionate emotion, but I would imagine that this man, who literally doesn't have a heart beat is actually pretty excited about his new heart.

Happy anniversary

As I was running today, it occured to me that right about this time (well, maybe November) is my tenth year running anniversary. Hooray for me! Since the traditional tenth anniversary gift is a tin or aluminum item, I guess I won't be buying anything to celebrate it... after all, metal and running don't really seem to go together, do they?

I had quit smoking earlier in the year - which means this year is the tenth anniversary of that event too - and I was putting on the pounds. It wasn't pretty and I figured that I was getting old enough that my regimen of eating whatever I wanted and sitting around wasn't going to work anymore. I had to actually do something now to maintain my weight.

I remember my first run. It was about 300m and by the end of it, my lungs were on fire and I felt like throwing up. Yeah, I was in horrible shape. But despite that horrendous first attempt, I went back the next day. This time I stopped at 250m and the burning wasn't quite so terrible. I gradually began working my way up the distance, usually trying for a continuous run rather than the walk-run-walk-run that they usually recommend for beginners. (Part of this was because I didn't know of this wisdom, and part of it was because it felt like cheating to me to walk part of the time.)

But the thing I kept thinking about as I was running today was that ten years is an awfully long time and I really haven't done anything worth writing about during that time. Sure, the first time I ran a 10k (took me over an hour!) I was pretty proud of myself, and I've run more than one of them, but I really haven't gone the distance, so to speak. I'm not talking marathon here - I don't know that I could manage one of those - but something that stretches me a bit more might be a good idea.


Thing is, I've tried to increase my distance and frequency at various times before. And I find I can't do it. It's not so much the time it takes to do so many runs, though they do require a significant commitment, but it's the exhaustion. When I try to run farther or faster, trying to build up to something more than my 2-3 runs a week, I end up so tired that I spend more time sleeping. And even when I'm awake, I find I'm exhausted enough that I can have difficulty concentrating. Concentration is not something I can give up. I can't afford it.

So I feel stuck at this level of exercise. I still enjoy it, and I notice that if I don't go running for a while I start to feel out of sorts, but I'd like to take on a new, longer challege - maybe a half marathon - without disrupting the rest of my life. Problem is, I don't know that I can accomplish that.

So I feel good that I've been running this long and am still enjoying it, even though I feel like I could be doing more. Guess I'll just have to be happy with that.

Customer Service... I do not think that word means what you think it means...

Two stories of customer service - one good, one bad. Which one do you want first? The good one? Too bad, it's my blog. You get the rant first.

Last week, I spent a rather frustrating several minutes on the phone with my cell phone company (at least calls to them don't run up my minutes). I was requesting - for the third time - a copy of my first two bills on the account.

We signed up for the service at the beginning of September, and got a rather annoyed call at the beginning of October from the company asking why we hadn't paid our bill. We responded that we hadn't received one, paid the amount requested, and confirmed our mailing address with them (they'd written it down wrong).

The next month, we again had an annoyed call asking us why we hadn't paid our bill. Now we were annoyed as well and told them that yet again we had not received our bill and could they please send it.

Then at the end of October, I spent several minutes on the phone convincing someone that I had never received my bills for the previous months and they needed to send them. The lackey on the other end acted like he was doing me a favor by not charging me the $8 "bill reprint" fee. He did however do me the favor of at least telling me what my account number was, so I could sign up for online billing. (I would've known my account number and signed up for online billing in September if they had ever seen fit to send me my bill.) Now the power over the bills was at least in my hands though it wasn't retroactive.

Last week when I called, the second lackey I talked to told me the post office must have lost my bills and he would send new ones out but charge me the $8. Now $8 ain't much - good cup of coffee and a biscotti - but I hadn't been the one screwing up here - it was either the cell company or the post office - and I didn't think it was right that I should pay for someone else's mistake. He argued. I lost it and cussed. Then I asked for his supervisor. He finally told me I wouldn't be charged for the additional bill.

Who in the world authorizes staff to argue with a customer over $8? Especially when I've got four phones I'm paying for. What kind of customer service mentality is this? It's not like the $8 was gonna come out of the lackey's pocket! And even though I'm not paying for it, I'm unimpressed with this service provider and am seriously considering switching after only a few months. Was it worth it to them to lose a customer? Especially one with a blog? You notice I haven't mentioned who it is, but if they pull another one like this, you bet their name will be emblazoned across a post!

The good one? My hubby ordered an item off ebay. When it arrived, it was the wrong version. He emailed the seller. She looked at it and said, yep, oops, that was my bad. I posted the wrong version.

THEN. She went out, BOUGHT the version she'd promised, is sending it to him, WITH a SASE to send the wrong one back!

Now THAT's excellent customer service! My cell phone provider could learn a thing or two from her.

Learning then teaching

I've been learning a new software program for work, and I figured the best way to figure out all its features was to create something with it. It's a multimedia program that allows you to produce video clips, utilizing camera input, sound recording, images, and existing sound clips.

So I created a brief clip about the thing I think most about these days: cyborgs. It's a brief intro to the term and some of its common uses. Perhaps someday it might be actually be useful to my teaching.

If you want to see it, click here. It will download to a temporary file on your computer - so if you don't want it to do that, don't click, but if you do download it, it will run on RealPlayer or Windows Media Player.

I had a lot of fun putting together. Hope you enjoy!

Finally moved in?

I've decided that acquiring, and cooking our first meal on a barbecue constitutes "all moved in"... and boy! was that a great tasting steak!

I like grilling a lot, so finally buying a barbecue - half price! who says it's crazy to buy summer equipment in December? - is the end to a quest that began the week we got here. It's not the exact same model as the one we'd first eyeballed, but it's got all the same features. And did I mention it was half price?

It cooks like a dream! People who have been to my house in real life and had barbecue anytime in the last several years may have noted the flame-like nature of our old barbecue. Not this one! Even in winter weather - chinook weather, mind you, but winter nonetheless - it produced a nice even heat that cooked everything just perfectly. And it's got one of those cool side burners for a frying pan or a pot as well!

Helps being in cattle country too - the steaks were an outrageously low price because we bought bulk and the quality was fabulous. Shout out to my sister for telling me about the place. I love it!

Steaks cooked on our new grill + beer I brewed myself. That was an awesome meal!

Valley of no left turns

Been away from the blogsphere for the last few days because I've been spending less time in front of my computer. Went out to a mountain resort over the weekend, which was fabulous! We had no schedule, no agenda, no kids, no email. Nothing but beautiful scenery, fresh air, hot springs and good food.

I needed that!

The valley we travelled through to get there - the valley of no left turns - is the only place I had previously seen a moose. Shortly after telling everyone in the car that, we saw one! Which was kinda cool.

Coming back meant there was lots of work to do that had piled up while I was enjoying myself instead of working, so I've just been trying to whittle down the to do list. Sometimes it feels like it will never go away. Losing our internet connection yesterday didn't help and it took almost two hours just to get ahold of someone at the company who could tell me what was going on!

Why is it that the good times are inevitably followed by the bad?

It's a good feeling...

...when you accomplish something really hard. I got this letter today:

Dear Novelist,

You did it.

Despite everything else going on in your busy life, you managed to pull off the creative coup of writing a 50,000-word novel in just one month.

When the going got tough, you got typing, and in four weeks, you built vast worlds and set them in motion. You created characters; quirky, interesting, passionate souls with lives and loves and ambitions as great as yours. You stuck it out through the notoriously difficult middle stretch, and pressed onward as 80% of your fellow writers dropped out around you.

And now look at you: A NaNoWriMo winner. And the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript. It's an amazing accomplishment, and we're proud to have had you writing with us this year.

I'm pretty proud to have done it! Now I'm going to take a bit of a break from it, then I'll have to take it up again, finish off the last two chapters (at least I figure it will just be two more chapters), then return back to the beginning and smooth out the rough edges. That'll be the labour intensive part.

But it feels good to have set myself a challenge and to have met it, even when at times I felt like giving up.

Record breaking

Why does it have to be that the year we come back, we start breaking records? It hasn't been this cold here in ten years!

UPDATE: We set a new low -30.1C last night. Coldest it's been since 1896.

The response from either side seems to be "this is ridiculous!"

Ran across this obscure new item: a man was ejected from a gym for grunting during his workout. Much of the internet reaction to this story has been cries of 'ridiculous!' from hard core bodybuilders, but I find the ridiculous part of this story to be this patron's reaction to having his membership revoked - he's suing for defamation of all things because people are making fun of him for getting kicked out.

Now, I had a membership at Planet Fitness. I've had memberships at several different gyms, and been a guest at several others. I've worked out in university gyms, women's gyms, hard core gyms, and Planet Fitness. And I've got to say that Planet Fitness was one of the best gyms I've ever worked out at.

Why were they one of the best? Because they lived up to their tag as a "Judgment Free Zone". I'm not one to be intimidated by the big muscle-y guys in the "guys" weight room. I plow on ahead and enter, moving the pin waaaay back up on the machine and pulling the seat all the way up, but it took me some time to muster up that kind of courage, to enter the "muscle" zone. (Mostly, I think of how much money I'm paying and how much I want to use the equipment I'm paying for and that gets me over any reluctance I might have to tread on sacred masculine territory)

But when I first started going to the gym, those big muscle-bound guys were intimidating. Many of them seemed to hang out just to try to intimidate anyone who didn't have as much muscle mass as they did.

Now I can respect that someone might choose to spend hours in the gym every day to get their body into peak performance. I also can respect the person who simply wants to go in once or twice a week, do some light toning and exercising and spend the rest of their time doing other things. But that respect isn't always evident in gyms, and I've been given the annoyed look for coming in and messing up the place where "real" men are working out. I've just learned to live with it.

What Planet Fitness is doing is trying to create a gym that makes casual exercisers comfortable. They're very upfront about it. Their policies are all over all their material and their website. You walk into a Planet Fitness and you immediately notice that there are more ellipticals than free weights. That tells you something. There are plenty of gyms out there where the emphasis is on weights and you know it the minute you walk in.

What I think is a bit ridiculous, is for someone to walk into a Planet Fitness thinking it's a Golds Gym. They're not the same. And if you want Gold's Gym, you should go there, not the Judgment Free Zone. Crying foul because you thought you could tranform one into the other strikes me as just plain ridiculous.

Reflecting on Writing

After reading the latest issue of Reconstruction, blogging is on my mind again.

Always when discussions of the use of blogs, or the appropriateness of academic blogging makes its rounds through the blogsphere, or emerges in a journal issue like this, I am reminded of the Tribble-like concerns that so often get expressed: that blogging is a waste of time; that it's self indulgent; that it does little to further one's career and can in fact damage it; that scholarly blogging has no merit because it isn't peer reviewed etc. etc.

Of course I make no claims to scholarly blogging. I'm a scholar who blogs, but when I do mention my research, it is usually because I think readers might find it as interesting as I do, or because I'm trying to organize my thoughts about something particular. The primary (or even secondary or tertiary) purpose of this blog has never been to work through scholarly arguments. That should be self apparent to anyone who's read it. Reading the Reconstruction issue got me wondering though if this blog might be a way for me to work through some of the challenges I've been having in my academic life lately.

Some of the challenges I've been facing lately that might benefit from more frequent academic blogging blogging could include:

1. Improving my writing. This is a big one. I have an advisor who tells me my academic writing is stilted and awkward, that I don't seem to have found my own writing voice. I agree that sometimes my academic writing is too strained. Part of it has to do with my training - remove every mention of the personal - and part of it I think with my relative inexperience in writing.

I've been admiring academic writers who can thoughtfully connect their personal positions and identity with their academic topic, and I'd like to emulate that. I'm still not sure about what kind of academic "voice" I have, which makes it difficult to know what I need to be going to develop it. Perhaps writing about academic topics in an open, everyday forum like this blog will help loosen that writing up.

All this practice would presumably make writing an easier process, which would have the added benefit of making my writing tasks easier when it comes to producing them.

2. Providing unity. Blogging more about my academic projects might unite the disparate pieces of academic work in a way that explains their commonalities.

Right now along with the dissertation research, I'm juggling a chapter revision, a collaborative book proposal, a conference presentation, and an organizational committee for another conference. Since each of these activities involves a different topic or area of interest, I'm finding myself compartmentalizing them in a way that I don't necessarily think does me much good. Since they are all academic endeavours, there is a commonality in them, and I think if I could find a way to incorporate them all into one category, I might find fruitful interchanges between them, instead of boxing them each up as a separate activity.

3. Working through the difficult parts of my research. Right now, I'm faced with a research task for the dissertation that I see the value of, but don't relish doing. (Isn't that the way so many things in these kinds of projects, or life in general, are like?) I've made little headway on this aspect right now in part because it pushes me in a research direction that I'm unfamiliar with and I'm having some difficulty figuring out what material I should concentrate on the most.

Perhaps blogging my reading would help me articulate how useful the material is as I work my way through it. A bonus might even come if I have some readers who could help me navigate through the quagmires of the reading as well.

This blog has remained mostly personal to this point because that's what it started out doing. I don't really wish to abandon the personal, since it gives me a great deal of satisfaction knowing that people who I care about stay in touch with me this way. I'm not sure if this blog will work as a combination of academic and personal posts.

Then again, after the Storyworlds post, tw asked if I was going to post some of the Nanowrimo writing, and I've been considering doing that (after I clean it up a bit since it's awfully rough right now). Although the fiction writing has nothing to do with the subjects I study academically, I'm finding the process of writing to be similar. Although I've written a bit of fiction here and there, this is the first time I've written so much in such a short period of time. It has made me much more aware of the writing process itself as I struggle to figure out how to get from one plot point to another, find a new plot twist opening up in the context of trying to write about something else, and taught me that much of writing is simply sitting down and plowing through what needs to be done. Inspiration be damned, just write!

So at the end of this post, as I consider everything I've said so far, I guess all I've done is confirm for myself that this blog will remain fairly eclectic, and given myself permission to make it even more eclectic if needed by discussing my academic work from time to time. I suppose this post itself is a good example of reason #3 above - working/writing through a problem to find a solution. Thanks blogreaders for coming along for the ride!

Plugging Away

Still behind.

But even more so now. I was doing really good coming into 25K - I was even a bit ahead at that point. But then I had a child who was ill, and it scared her. So I spent a lot of time just being nearby. Which of course means a lot of things got put on the back burner. Nanowrimo included.

Now I'm playing catch-up again. I don't think it's impossible for me to catch up, so I'm giving it a try, but it will require a lot more time than I feel like I can afford right now. Work is starting to get busy, my boss is out of town next week, so we want to get some things done right now, and we've just added three new projects to our roster over the next several months. There's variety in my work - which is great - but it means there's lots of it.

But I don't want to quit Nanowrimo. I set myself this challenge. I think I can meet it. I want to meet it. I keep saying I'd like to try to write fiction. Now's the opportunity to do it. With structure. And a goal. And a deadline. These are things that motivate me. So. I'm. Not. Giving. Up.

(At least not yet)

Last week, I wrote that it was difficult to get words on the paper, not because I didn't have ideas for the story, but because it was just hard to arrange them. This week, I am running out of ideas. Well, not really running out. I have ideas, I just don't know how to get the story from where it is now, to where I want it to be. Even when I do get words down, I have to still the inner critic whispering - okay, I have to yell to get her to shut up - who I have to ignore and just keep writing. The goal here is to get the words down. After comes the time where I make them into good words. But even with carte blanche for vocabulary, grammar and ANY sense of style, I'm still struggling.

But. I'm. Not. Giving. Up. At least not yet.

Gender bender

I realize I'm not the girliest girl on the planet, but it's a bit disturbing when a celebrity face recognition program shows the highest matches with men!



And who the hell is Christiano Ronaldo?!?!?!?

Shocked

Today started pretty ordinarily. I began work in the morning and took a break a few minutes ago to have some lunch. We recently started getting the newspaper by subscription - I haven't subscribed to anything other than small local papers in years - and sometimes I read it while I eat lunch.

There I was, eating leftover Chinese food, when I turned the page and saw a picture of my former sister-in-law.

She disappeared 16 years ago and they just now charged a man with her murder.

I'm shocked. I hadn't really thought much about her since my divorce. I had only met her once, and briefly, and even then, I don't think she said much more than two words to me. I don't think she particularly liked me. But she was also fairly young when we met, so maybe it was just teenage standoffishness to a stranger, since that's what I was to her. Either way, I didn't really know her at all. She hadn't been living at home for several years before she disappeared, but I remember how hard her leaving had hit her mother.

Even though I barely knew her, reading about this case and being reminded of it, has affected me more than I would expect. I think the thing that makes this feel so shocking is how it will affect people who I care about - my stepdaughter in particular. I hope when this news unearths memories for her as well, it isn't painful, but might provide some relief knowing that there will be some closure with the pressing of charges against the man believed to be her aunt's killer.

Scattered

Too many things.

Too many different things.

Too many things to keep track of.

Too much work to do.

Storyworlds

For my comprehensive exams, one of my areas was narrative theory, which is an area of inquiry that examines the features and functions of narrative. Sounds simple, and in some ways it is, but there are some subtleties that I never would have thought about had they not belonged within this category.

But that's beside the point of this post. My point is that one of the concepts of narrative theory is the storyworld. It's really big in theories that explore the function and interactive nature of video games in particular. If you've ever read a book set in a place that you didn't recognize (which is most books) or played a video game, you've got an idea of what narrative theorists mean by storyworlds.

Rawdon Wilson describes how the axioms of a storyworld contribute to the kind of story you get. He uses a parable of two brothers who tire of reality and reimagine it to describe what happens in the use of storyworld axioms. The first brother creates his world by inventing counterintuitive propositions and accepting the axioms that would grow from them. This is what science fiction or fantasy is often seen to do - to take a proposition and follow it to its logical conclusion.

The second brother employed a code of normality which was interwined with a code in which anything might happen in his creation of a new imaginative world. This is magic realism. These brothers eventually become difficult to tell apart in their creation of new worlds to their followers.

Now, obviously Wilson's definition leaves out the third kind of storyworld, where the writer (a third brother so to speak) reproduces the recognizable world, even if it is part of the world that is unfamiliar to the writer or his readers. But that probably goes without saying.

I got thinking about storyworlds after I had a very strange experience this weekend. At one point, within a small group, we were talking, not about anything in particular, but just the kind of banter that happens when friends get together. Anyway, someone said something, and my first thought was to relate it to the storyworld I've been creating in this novel writing endeavour. I almost opened my mouth, because it made so much sense to me to say what I was going to say. But I stopped myself before saying anything by realizing what seemed very real and logical to me, the creator of this storyworld, would be incomprehensible to someone who didn't know that storyworld. Had I made a comment that made perfect sense for me buried in this world I'm creating, it would have sounded like sheer idiocy to anyone else.

Wilson didn't talk about what happens when fictional storyworlds invade the real one, but it doesn't take much to realize how disastrous it can be when you can't tell the difference between the two.