I’ve been meaning to draw this Venn diagram to represent my classification of animals for quite a while. This is the kind of stuff I can accomplish with vacation time at home. Just think of the possibilities…

Notes

1. Goat really is delicious. Try it.
2. So is rabbit.
3. No, I didn’t do this just to piss off animal rights activists, so lighten up.

I don’t often write about the specifics of my work at Blackboard, but a recent challenge at work illustrates some fundamental issues with technology and technology marketing that I would like to explore here. Nothing I say goes beyond anything that you can read about on the Blackboard website.

I run the main software marketing team for the Learn platform at Blackboard and we were starting down the path of refreshing our platform positioning for the coming year. One of the key messages we had to refresh was our commitment to openness because we really have done a lot to support it in the past year and we are doing a lot more in 2011.

Here’s the problem though. Going out to the software market with an openness message these days is like going out and saying your product is ‘enterprise.’ Just what does it mean? Most software vendors claim to be enterprise just as most claim their products to be ‘easy to use,’ ‘customizable,’ and ‘extensible.’ These terms have become meaningless.

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I first visited Berlin in 2006 and found it to be a wonderful city, one whose history was still clearly punctuated by segments of the wall now protected from souvenir hunters by fences. I am sure that I was not the first to contemplate the irony of protecting the wall with fences, but I can see the need. The desire to take a piece home with you is irresistible, “oh this, it is just a stone in my pocket….” I was able to get a piece from an area where there was really nothing but foundation left and it was about to be built over, so I don’t feel so guilty. (more…)

I travel a lot, but I rarely send postcards, probably because they make me stop and assess my trip before it is over. How can I be sure that everything is beautiful and I wish you were here? Tomorrow might suck. I would rather wait until I get home and let you know how the trip was as a whole.

I generally have the same approach to talking or writing about books. When I used to teach literature, I would structure my syllabus so that the course would start out with short stories, poems, or essays. The daily reading wasn’t too hard because there would be a novel looming a couple weeks out and when we started talking about the novel, the students were expected to have completed it. Same goes for the next one. While we are discussing and writing about novel #1, they are reading novel #2. It is challenging to teach a book in chunks and I am not convinced it helps the students value the work. It puts the teacher in the role of tour guide, explaining the meaning of things as we pass them.

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I am now almost a third of the way through Infinite Jest, so I will be careful about spoilers for anyone who is following the prescribed schedule of Infinite Summer. I may allude to things you have not yet read, or even quote lines, but I won’t give any actual spoilers without warning.

As I expected, this is a funny book.¹ I have been doing lots of my reading on airplanes and have found myself laughing out loud on several occasions, silencing my chuckles as fellow travelers peek out from under their sleep masks to see what kind of lunatic is sitting in 6H. The sheer absurdity of some of the situations is amusing, but it is usually the puns that incite audible cachinnation in this jet-lagged reader.

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Interviewer: You are an American author, so why do you choose to write in French? Author: I don’t. All my works are in English. Interviewer: I have read your works and they are in French. They have not even been translated into English. Author: I am the author, who are you going to trust, me or my work?

So I am just past the third week’s milestone in my first reading of Infinite Jest and I have Pynchon on my mind. If you haven’t read that far, don’t worry. I won’t put any spoilers here. This post is more about my reading method than anything in the text.

I got through my first significant chunk of Infinite Jest on a flight to Australia. I was seated on the aisle next to a Russian woman and her twelve-year-old son who was continuously airsick. Sleep was not much of an option for me as the woman got up to dispose of the neatly packaged vomit and stock up on fresh airsick bags about every hour and I had to get up to let her out. The flight was packed. There was nowhere to go.

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Afraid of a big book, not I…

I’ve read Ulysses three times. I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow twice. I read Underworld and Mason & Dixon in the same year. Hell, I read Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors in a single summer. Admittedly, I was studying for my comps and it sucked.

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I love riding on Lookout Mountain. It is close to Denver; it is full of other cyclists, and the scenery is great. I have been looking to extend my climbing rides with more hills though and this route adds two more climbs, for a total of five, to my Lookout Mountain-Cabrini Shrine loop. All the logistics are the same, so I will focus on what’s different.

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Climbing Lookout Mountain is a rite of passage for Denver-area cyclists. It is easy to get to, a fairly small climb by Colorado standards, and has scenic views of Denver and Golden on the way up. I rode up it for the first time this year, after returning to road cycling and now I ride it a few times per week. Many riders just go up to Buffalo Bill’s grave and turn around, but I like to make it a little longer. The ride described here is 21 miles long with three climbs. There is an option to make it 15.5 miles long with two climbs.

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