August 09, 2007

Vacation, Day 1: Stranded in Charlotte

Sigh. I knew the Fates wouldn't let me take a vacation unhindered.

Got to DCA this morning, 90 minutes before my flight's departure time, checked in and was told there were no seats on my connection to SFO, but "you're confirmed on the flight." Whatever the hell that means. Whatever else it might mean, apparently being "confirmed" doesn't mean you get to get on the plane.

I got bumped off my connection to San Francisco because US Airways overbooked it and . . . and who knows? I don't know why I got the bump. I booked weeks ago, I checked in a good 3.5 hours before the SFO flight, etc. End result: there are no other open flights to SFO (or Oakland) until 555pm this evening. Booked on that flight, standby on at least one other in mid-afternoon.

Thank god for free wifi. Unfortunately, only about 1 in 5 of the power outlets I've tried in this airport appear to work. I thought my power cord was hosed, but other travelers have confirmed they have the same problem.

So the first day of my vacation gets spent in Charlotte airport, instead of relaxing in San Francisco and joining my friend Tim on his last burrito & bar outing as a bachelor. Bummer.

Posted August 9, 2007 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 16, 2007

Thinking about Virginia Tech

I'd been thinking about starting this blog up again for a few weeks now. I didn't think I'd have something so tragic to write about.

Probably it goes without saying that my thoughts and best wishes go out to the students, faculty, and staff at my alma mater, Virginia Tech, and especially to the families and friends of the victims.

I was working from home today, heads down with all my external inputs (radio, TV, email, IRC, RSS feeds, etc.) turned off, so it wasn't until mid-afternoon that I became aware of what had happened. It has shaken me up, more than I would have expected it would.

It's disconcerting to see a community that you've been part of suffer an event like this, especially when you see so many images on the news of places you're quite familiar with. When I was a student at Virginia Tech, I had friends who lived on the 4th floor Ambler-Johnston Hall, where the first shooting took place. I had classes in Norris Hall, where the second shooting occurred. I know these places. They were my places. It was my community. Even though I've been gone from Tech for a long time, it still hits close to home.

Back in '88-'89 I was one of the editors of the Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech's student newspaper. I've thought a lot about the students working at the Collegiate Times today. What was the biggest story we dealt with back in '88-'89? I think a steroids scandal on one of the sports teams. Nothing to compare to what happened today. What a time it must be for those young, aspiring journalists. How difficult it must be to cover what will probably be the biggest story of your life when you are just twenty or twenty-one. Doubly difficult since it is the slaughter of your classmates that you have to cover. As young journalists they must feel a great deal of excitement at The Big Story . . . and, at the same time, a great deal of guilt and dread for being excited while their friends lay dead. I hope they sense the importance of their role of as the student voice of the Virginia Tech campus more than ever. (CollegiateTimes.com is down, and the server is re-directing to CollegeMedia.com, the parent site for the student media outlets at Tech. And I just noticed that the Collegiate Times Online Editor, who has been posting to http://www.collegemedia.com all afternoon is named Christopher Ritter. No relation, if you were wondering.)

Besides my former professors, I only know a couple of people still at Virginia Tech. None of them were likely to have been in either of the buildings where the shootings took place, but I've dropped them emails anyway. And I've been contacted today by former classmates who I haven't heard from in years. When something like this happens, you start thinking about the people who shared your life then and you want to reach out to them, even if you've been silent for years, because their the only ones who are going to understand your loss in the same way.

The news reports are saying that this is the worst shooting on a college campus in American history. Oddly, one of the other campus massacres that has been mentioned repeatedly was a 1991 shooting rampage by a physics grad student (who also killed himself) at the University of Iowa, where I went to graduate school. My other alma mater. That took place just three months after I left Iowa City, and, unlike today's tragedy at VT, I knew many people who were on campus at that time.

Then a few years back, in the fall of 2000, a student murdered one of his classmates at Gallaudet University, and went un-apprehended for months until he killed again in February. I had worked at Gallaudet for three years and left just a bit more than a year before the murders there. Again, I was gone, but, again, I knew many people affected by this. It wasn't the kind of rampage like at Iowa or Virginia Tech, but it held the campus hostage to fear nonetheless.

So this is the third time I've watched a campus where I have lived, studied, or worked be victimized by a murderer.

It sucks. It sucks for me, it makes me cry to see a community -- my community -- ravaged, even after I've been absent from it for years

And as miserable and helpless as I feel, I can't imagine how horrible it is for those living through it.

Posted April 16, 2007 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 23, 2006

Yawn! Stretch! Time To Wake Up

Didn't think you were ever gonna see another post here, didja?

I've been on self-imposed hiatus for about a year and a half, but this site is still live, still gets hit from some random search queries, and (at least for a while) still got hammered by link spammers. (More on that later.)

The real news is I'm back blogging, but not here at good ol' Ten Reasons Why. I'm part of the blogging team for Blackboard's new blog, Educate/Innovate. Blackboard is my employer, of course, so I get to blog about educational technology and get paid for it.

Well...really, I mostly get paid for the boatload of other stuff that I do for Blackboard as Associate Director of Research & Development, but we can pretend that some micro-fraction of my salary covers the blogging that I'll be doing on Educate/Innovate. And, hey, guilt-free blogging at work is never a bad thing. No more hiding the blog entry window when the boss walks in my office. ;-)

Anyway, after D'Arcy mentioned that he still had 10RW's feed in his subscriptions, I figured that it might be worth shaking the dust off 10RW to see if anybody else was waiting for me to wake up.

Anybody out there?

Oh yeah...the spam story.

Sometime last year, I was searching the 10RW archives for an idea I'd written down...oh, somewhere between 2000 and 2004, I guess, and was a bit mortified to find that I'd been the victim of link spammers. I started manually deleting all the spammy trackbacks, but quickly realized that wasn't going to work.

A few minutes mucking around in MySQL (thank god for the four SQL statements I know) determined that there were roughly TWENTY-SEVEN THOUSAND trackback spams on my blog. Sigh. There followed some minor MySQL kung fu to get rid of all the entries, an upgrade to Movable Type 3.17, an upgrade of the wonderful MT-Blacklist plug-in, some altering of script names, some closing of past comments and trackbacks, yadda yadda yadda. Apparently, good ol' Ten Reasons Why is relatively spam free now . . . assuming you're not counting my own writing in that category. ;-)

Hugs and kisses. Come visit at the new digs.

Posted February 23, 2006 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 30, 2004

Pet Peeve #73

You're a presumably semi-intelligent businessperson at another company. You're writing me to suggest a partnership with my company, further a relationship, provide a referral, ask for help, etc. One very simple rule:

Put your friggin' company's name in the Subject line!

Maybe you work for a company that has eleven clients and one partner, but I don't. I speak with a couple hundred companies a year, not to mention dozens of our several clients. . When you send me some random email with "Hi" or "Need some information" as the subject line, I'm filtering that right into the trash unless I recognize your name (and with the number of people I talk to the odds of that are slim).

Posted January 30, 2004 06:36 PM | Permalink

January 28, 2004

New Year, New Design

No, you are not imagining things. There is a big pair of stone lips in the header. It doesn't have any significant meaning; it just looks cool.

You might have noticed some other changes -- like just about everything. I started the re-design during the week between Christmas and New Year's with the idea that it would launch on New Year's Day. Oh well. A little bout of insomnia gave me the time over the last few days to get it to a point where I can roll it out.

I had to learn some new CSS stuff and a touch of XSL for the new RSS feed. I don't pretend to be an expert in this stuff, so I'm sure someone much more skilled will recoil in horror at my stylesheets, but it was a fun exercise to learn some new stuff.

One of the cooler parts of the redesign is the new RSS feed. When you take a look at it in a web browser, you might not think it's an RSS feed, because it doesn't look like one -- i.e., it's not a page of unrendered XML, but an XSL-styled page with an explanation of RSS and how to use it. However, it is a valid RSS 2.0 feed.

Since I've written about the bad interface for RSS before, I'm glad to be able to demonstrate a different approach.
Kudos go to Dave Shea of Mezzoblue who described this approach in Plugging the RSS Usability Hole. I've totally cribbed from Dave's code, since I know squat about XSL. A shout out also goes to Brad Choate for a non-funky RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type

There's still some sprucing up of the style to take place and I might apply the same approach to the RSS 1.0 and the new Atom 0.3 feeds if I get a bit more comfortable with XSL. But it's better than raw XML.

Anyway, for the most part, I think I'm about 85% complete on the redesign.

I know that the comment pages (e.g. the pop-ups and the previews) are still styled wrong. I'll get to that in the next day or two.

The content column (this white column) looks a little hinky when the content is shorter than the sidebar on the left, which only happens in a few of those categories where there aren't many posts. Not sure what to do about that. CSS gurus? Any ideas?

Also, my primary browser is Mozilla Firebird. I've checked the site briefly in IE and noticed at least one error in the comment form on the individual entry archive pages. I'd love to hear more feedback from IE users on Windows and Mac and as well as Safari and Mozilla users on the Mac. (And I suppose Konquerer et al on Linux, but don't expect to be a priority!)

I'm sure I've forgotten or missed some other stuff, so pardon the incorrectly styled comment pages and tell me what you think. Suggestions, feedback, constructive criticism -- all welcome.

I'm going to bed now. Nothing like coding CSS to cure insomnia. Sheesh.

Posted January 28, 2004 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

January 21, 2004

By Way of Explanation

I don't really have a good explanation for the recent hiatus. It began with the flu and then got exacerbated by the holidays and then I started a site redesign that I've never finished then things got crazy at work with special projects I can't talk about and in the middle of all this I remembered that I really enjoy laying in bed reading novels (which is suddenly possible again because the radiator in the bedroom got fixed a couple weeks ago) more than I enjoy futzing with Movable Type templates.

Anyway, the are two reasons why I'm posting today.

  1. Apparently the lack of activity here on Ten Reasons Why is quite distressing to my officemate. That, in and of itself, is kinda strange for two reasons:
    1. It's clearly not a concern for my safety. She sees me five days a week and knows that I am healthy -- or relatively so if you don't count a sort of lingering low-grade sniffle and the limp from last week's curbside backflip precipitated by . . . well . . . the precipitation. Of course, for all that the rest of you dear readers know I could still be lying in that gutter on Massachusetts Ave. slowly starving to death. Thanks for staying in touch, you uncaring toads. :P
    2. It's clearly not for lack of witty banter. A full thirty percent of my job responsibility is entertaining my officemate with witty banter. And sixty percent is annoying her with an assortment of muttered curses, grunts, sighs, and other exhortations induced by crappy software or our totally opaque and impenetrable phone system. The remaining ten percent has something to do with educational technology, I believe. ;-)
    Anyway, I think she just wants a shout-out. Attention hound. Witty banter for thirty percent of an eight-hour day isn't enough for you?!?
  2. Bob Mould has started a weblog, which I can't let pass without acknowledgement, not so much for the quality of the blog but for the quality of the Bob.

    For those of you not in the know, Mould was the frontman for the seminal 80's punk trio, Hüsker Dü, then went on to release several solo albums, and found another band called Sugar. He dropped out of sight for few years to become a scriptwriter for the World Wrestling Federation (no joke) before re-emerging here in the District, of all places, with an album of electronica and a regular DJ gig at, first, the Velvet Lounge, and now the 9:30 Club.

    Mould's 1990 album, Black Sheets of Rain, has been in high rotation on my CD player for over a decade now. It's about as tight of a punk-pop recording as you'll find, but its high profile in my playlist probably has something to do with seeing Mould solo -- literally solo; just Mould and a twelve-string guitar -- at Gabe's Oasis in Iowa City, Iowa, on the '90-'91 tour to support Black Sheets. That still ranks as the the best club show I've ever seen; that one guy sitting in a chair with a guitar blew me away thoroughly with the heart he put into playing for us.

    Fast forward six years past that show, and I've just moved to DC and am trying desperately to find a place to live. I respond to an ad in CityPaper for two guys looking for a third housemate. As I'm looking at the house, I notice they have a Hüsker Dü poster on the wall. We get talking about Mould and the conversation reveals one of them was at that same Gabe's Oasis show in Iowa City six years earlier. Kismet is declared, I'm accepted as a housemate, and 7+ years later those two guys are still two of my best friends. So thanks, Bob -- for the music and the friendships that arose from it. :-)

Anyway, I'll be back blogging when I feel like I have something I want to say again. I doubt I'm gone for good; I'm way too opinionated for that. ;-)

Posted January 21, 2004 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

November 17, 2003

For the Record, Two

Hmm. Haven't posted anything of substance in more than a month. Guess that means I'm on an indefinite hiaitus.

Posted November 17, 2003 08:54 AM | Permalink

October 23, 2003

Just For the Record . . .

. . . I'm not dead. Just really busy with preparing to go to Educause and to move into my new condo within the same week.

It's making me very grumpy. Pity my poor officemate who has to spend eight hours a day with an extremely cranky Greg. She's not happy about it.

I'm also having some severely wacky dreams regarding the homeowner bit. I would expect some anxiety dreams about things going wrong with the place I just bought, but the crazy part is that well-known actors show up in the dreams to notify me of the impending problems. So far Christopher Walken has told me water is leaking into my walls from the unit above, Alec Baldwin alerted me to rats in the basement, and Brad Pitt (as Tyler Durden from Fight Club, which I saw again last week) broke the news that my movers lost all my belongings. At least he didn't kick my ass.

Clearly I'm grumpy and insane.

Posted October 23, 2003 06:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

September 11, 2003

Cash Flow

There's nothing like spending a couple hundred thousand dollars on a condo in Capitol Hill (about six blocks east of the Capitol, four blocks north of Eastern Market) to make me learn how to use the Microsoft Money application that came with my Dell Laptop.

Now I have a pretty graph that shows exactly how poor I'm gonna be for the next year.

But I'll own a home. :-)

(Okay, okay, Wachovia will hold the title, but you know what I mean.)

Posted September 11, 2003 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

August 28, 2003

The Word and The Body

Leslie Orchard, in a comment on the previous post, reminded me of the Future Culture mailing list, on which I used to be a very frequent participant, starting from around 1993. FC, as we abbreviated it, was a pretty critical component of my technology education, particularly in thinking of the sociological impacts of technology, but also in just introducing me to new technologies (Linux? What's that?!?).

For a creative nonfiction workshop I took in 1995, I wrote a long piece that was rooted in my early experiences on the Future Culture listserv, particularly about my first meeting with an online acquaintance and the first death of someone I only knew online.

As you read it, remember the time it was written. This was before Netscape, Amazon, before eBay, before broadband. The Internet was email, IRC, Gopher, and Archie. The web was all text and we used Lynx to browse it.

My how things have changed. . . . and stayed the same.

Here it is: The Word and the Body.

Posted August 28, 2003 11:29 PM | Permalink

August 15, 2003

Nyah nyah! I have electricity!

Someone emailed to ask if DC was affected by the blackouts. We were spared, of course.

In fact, as I sat at home yesterday evening, after riding the Metro home, reclining on my couch drinking a cold beer from an icy mug, air conditioner going full-blast against the 95-degree, 80% humidity sauna outside, watching those poor NYers schlep home across the Queensborough bridge on my 35" TV, with my laptop plugged in and resting on my belly, fat from just having microwaved leftovers for dinner, I thought "Holy crap, I'd bloody well kill myself if the power went out right now."

Then I turned on all the lights in the apartment and danced with the running vacuum cleaner to revel in my freely-flowing electrical power. Thank you, Edison, my hero!!

Clearly, I live alone.

Posted August 15, 2003 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 07, 2003

Hangin' with the A-List

Just got back from the Supernova Conference Bloggers Party at Casablanca in Old Town Alexandria, VA (just outside DC). I had a crummy day, so I wasn't feeling super social, and, frankly, I nearly copped out and didn't go. In retrospect, I'm glad I did.

DC Blogger turn out seemed slim. Most of the partygoers seemed to be there to attend Supernova. I did chat with Derek from The Scoop, Tom of Off the Top, Jeff Gates [no relation] of Life Outtacontext, and Bill Kearney, creator of Syndic8. I know I talked with some other locals, but my memory for names sucks big time.

Sadly, I took no photos of the local bloggers. (Dude, what's up with that?) Being the starstruck fool that I am, I took photos of people like:

Scott_Johnson.jpg

Scott Johnson, creator of Feedster, getting jiggy with the belly dancer.

halley-suitt.jpg

Halley Suitt of Halley's Comment giving lessons to the belly dancer. Show her how it's done, Halley! (Halley says she has a plan to muscle those ornery Christians outta my way!)

mt-gang.jpg

The Movable Type gang (left to right: Anil Dash, Joi Ito, and MT co-creator Mena Trott) kicking it with yours truly.

Posted July 7, 2003 11:37 PM | Permalink

I'm being social! I'm being social!

Off to the SuperNova Conference Blogger Party, digital camera in hand (well, more like "in pocket," but you get the drift).

Pray that it doesn't rain again, because I have no umbrella with me today.

Posted July 7, 2003 06:04 PM | Permalink

July 02, 2003

Profound Thought Upon Receiving a Cookie From My Officemate

Flour's purpose in the universe is to serve as a delivery vehicle for butter and sugar.

Posted July 2, 2003 01:21 PM | Permalink

June 19, 2003

Verizon sucks

It's not often that I find myself agreeing with Dave Winer, but I do agree that Verizon sucks.

I recently signed up for Verizon DSL and haven't been very happy with it.

I'm not as suprised as Winer that it filled in the Outlook Express email settings and re-branded Internet Explorer. Lots of non-tech folk probably appreciate that (the settings moreso than the re-branding). Doesn't matter a lot to me since I use Mozilla for browsing and email.

I am annoyed immensely by their support . . . or, rather, lack thereof:

(1) Everytime I send an email from Mozilla email, I get an auto-response from Verizon with the title "URGENT: Updated your E-Mail Settings." Of course, my email settings are configured precisely according to their instructions. Note that there's no problem sending email . . . though Verizon seems to think there is. Trying to figure this out started the whole saga with their crappy support processes.

The email contains a link to the support page which contains a link to a form for email support. . . which leads to a dead page. See http://www2.verizon.net/contact/techsup_form.asp for the dead form. It's been dead for two weeks.

(2) Apparently there is no way to get support by email which just dumbfounds me. The only options are by phone (and I've always hung up after being on hold for five minutes) or by the lame-ass "Verizon Online Support Center" which is a Flash-interfaced support app. I don't have time to waste on hold waiting to ask a question about a a non-critical support issues. Why can't they let me submit a real ticket via email?

(3) The Verizon Online Support Center installs some stuff that is arguably spyware (Motive SmartBridge and Visual IP Insight) that I'm not exactly clear of the functionality for. Uninstalled Visual IP Insight, but haven't been able to figure out how to get rid of Motive.

(4) The auto-diagnosis crap built into fails miserably, again telling me that my email configuration is wrong (but not telling me why). It auto-submits a ticket, but I have no way of creating, modiftyin, or viewing what information is contained in the ticket. How friggin' ridiculous is that?!? It's my ticket!

(5) The Verizon Online Support Center doesn't allow you to send email either. It only allows you to initiatie a chat session, but I've never been able to get a support rep on the chat. Leaving "messages" there gets no response. No surprise.

(6) Trying to just send an email to "support@verizon.net" or "help@verizon.net" returns a pop-up alert that those addresses are not valid. It appears that the smtp.verizon.net (or something) is blocking those messages before they're even set. That's simply infuriating.

I'm about at my wit's end. I expect so much more from an ISP support team. I will probably wind up cancelling Verizon DSL because of this.

Of course I'll have to wait on hold for 20 minutes just for the privilege of cancelling my service. Fuckers.

From the technical side, the DSL has been wonderful, it works brilliantly, the bandwidth is great, etc. It's a shame that enjoyment of fine technology is runied by crappy attempts at automated support.

Advice or other experiences with Verizon welcome.

[Update 6:15am 7/19/2003: Comments are closed because this entry is getting lots of traffic (apparently through Google searches for "Verizon sucks") and the lunatics are starting to come out of the woodwork. However, I'm really not interested in having a googlelock on "Verizon Sucks," so we'll let this post age gracefully.]

Posted June 19, 2003 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

June 10, 2003

Broadband At Last

I finally made the switch to DSL (Verizon) and, as of tonight, I have officially ditched the old dial-up service.

There was a brief twinge of regret because I've had a mindspring.com email address since c. 1998. Mindspring was a fine service that I never had any problem with . . . until it was acquired by Earthlink. Once Earthlink took over, the dial-up service got progressively worse, sometimes connecting at below 33K, sometimes connecting but without any DNS so nothing resolved, sometimes not connecting at all. I would certainly not not recommend Earthlink, and I definitely didn't consider going with Earthlink DSL for even a second.
We'll see if service with Verizon is better. So far, I've been pleased -- the install kit was brilliantly simple, a testament to user-friendliness, and the bandwidth has been consistent.

Of course, it also means the end to the old Ten Reasons Why. It, and my first weblog, Monkey-Mind, had been at http://gritter.home.mindspring.com since 2000. No more. Just a 404, if you go there. Ah well. Change. . .

Posted June 10, 2003 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Slow as Molasses

June has been (and will probably continue to be) a slow blogging month for me. Not only am I travelling way more than usual this month, not only is work going to kick my butt this month, but I've been miserable sick for the last few days. Too much information? Eh, deal with it. :-)

Posted June 10, 2003 05:11 PM | Permalink

May 16, 2003

Ah, It's All Coming Back to Me Now...

This morning, I finally got around to importing all my old posts from my last two Blogger-powered weblogs, the original Ten Reasons Why and good ol' Monkey-Mind.

You'll notice a bunch of new monthly links in the Archives area to your right (and a new "Uncategorized" category with 389 entries). They don't work yet, because I haven't rebuilt the MT archives. I'm hoping this isn't going to generate an RSS feed tomorrow with 389 new posts. Yikes!

All the internal links to other posts in those imported entries are going to be screwed, of course. Any recommendations on dealing with that are welcome. In retrospect, it probably would have been easier to deal with it prior to import, perhaps. Dunno.

Looking through some of those older posts, I realized how much more personal my weblog was when I first started. Nor did I realize I took almost all of 2001 off from blogging!

UPDATE 4:54 PM: Just got around to rebuilding the site, so all the archives should work now.

Posted May 16, 2003 03:12 PM | Permalink

May 15, 2003

Writing & Learning in the Storefront

Sebastian Fiedler, in Seblogging: Paper Draft for BlogTalk 2003:

"We can observe almost in real-time how individuals use personal Webpublishing technologies to facilitate and feed their own change and learning processes. Watching this rich fabric of learning conversations unfold makes you wonder why people still believe that e-learning is all about content delivery and the production of polished instructional products. People in the personal Webpublishing realm successfully learn outside any institutionally organized system of instruction."

Amen, brother.

I certainly don't keep a weblog for your benefit, dear readers (although I hope at least a few of you enjoy it and get a wee bit of value from it). I keep a weblog because it provides an incentive for me to read and think about things that are of interest to me (like technology in education). It's like a kick in the ass, except for my brain. :-)

However, I do revel in getting a comment or trackback or the unforeseen referrer in my logs. I recognize that feedback loop makes keeping a weblog more interesting than a keeping a journal that just sits on my desk (or my computer desktop). It keeps me motivated.

You may or may not know that I have an MFA in Creative Writing, although I don't do much writing these days. I've often thought that I would like to experiment with writing fiction in public -- not weblog-as-fiction a la Flight Risk, but just working on a novel out there in public, perhaps via a weblog. Why? To see if that feedback loop might jog my creative side as it does my intellectual side.

Harlan Ellison used to do this schtick (and may still) where he would set up a typewriter in a storefront window and crank out a short story while people stood around and watched. Fiction as a spectator sport! Except Harlan didn't solicit feedback from the other side of the storefront window as he wrote; with the Web you could.

Sadly, though, my intellectual side is more courageous and secure than my creative side. ;-)

Posted May 15, 2003 05:49 PM | Permalink

And sometimes...

You re-design the site's style. But you still stress over the color scheme and wind up using your alma mater's for no good reason other than orange is a good color and you realized blue and orange are the colors of that other school.

Posted May 15, 2003 07:55 AM | Permalink

May 14, 2003

So Sometimes...

So sometimes you take a few days off work. And you don't take your laptop with you and you don't check email at an Internet cafe or anything. And then when you come back you're really kinda relaxed. And you don't surf the daily sites. You delete all the posts in your news aggregator without reading them. And you learn to sleep in past 6:00am because (a) you only live two metro stops from work and don't really need to get up that early and (b) the stuff in the news aggregator isn't that compelling. So you don't post anything for awhile. Maybe you'll get back into that habit soon, maybe it'll be a while.

And then you begin to write in the second person. At which point you think, "Man, there's really something different going on in my noggin this week."

Posted May 14, 2003 07:46 AM | Permalink

April 06, 2003

I'm back!

Not that anybody missed me that much. :-) After a roughly six-month hiatus I went out and purchased a domain, got a web host, and have re-launched this weblog. Why? Heck, I just kept seeing things I wanted to respond to and needed a place to do it.

Setting up Movable Type was a snap, but fiddling with the CSS templates until I got it just right took all afternoon. Sometimes perfectionism is it's own punishment. :-/

Oh well. Sunday night. More to come during the week.

Posted April 6, 2003 08:50 PM | Permalink

April 05, 2003

About the Author

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Me: Greg Ritter
Location: Washington, DC
Contact: greg@NOSPAMtenreasonswhy.com
(Remove the NOSPAM before you send. This keeps spammers from scraping my email address from this page)

Why "Ten Reasons Why:" Apparently, I tend to number my points when making arguments (probably stemming from high school debate team days). My colleagues noticed this rhetorical tic, and anytime I'd begin an explanation they'd jump in with "....and here's ten reasons why!" Rather than let that stand, I have subverted their derogation and re-appropriated their good natured ribbing for the theme of this site. :-)

I've been weblogging off and on since the summer of 2000. This site is the second incarnation of Ten Reasons Why, and was begun in March 2003. The first Ten Reasons Why was hosted on a personal webpage through my ISP. There was also an even earlier weblog, Monkey-Mind. All of the Monkey-Mind and Ten Reasons Why v1.0 posts have been imported into this weblog.

Career: Currently Business Development Manager at Blackboard Inc., a leading e-learning company.

In the past I have been (in roughly chronological order from age 16) an Arby's cashier, a summer camp counselor, a stock attendant (aka truck unloader) at a now-defunct department store chain, a Domino's pizza delivery guy, a library assistant, a freelance photographer, a student newspaper reporter, a bartender, a student newspaper editor, a camera salesman, a human guinea pig for various ergonomics engineering studies, a dishwasher and cook at an Italian restaurant, an English department teaching assistant at the University of Iowa, a waiter, the only non-vegetarian cashier for a natural foods store, a freelance PR writer, personal assistant to a minor real estate tycoon and restauranteur, co-founder and associate editor of a now-defunct monthly humor magazine, a data entry drone for an auto financing company, a technical editor for the Federal Reserve, copywriter for travel catalog CD-ROMs, English department faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, English department faculty at the University of Richmond, an only-marginally-successful playwright and short story author, project leader for an Annenberg Foundation grant on integrating technology into the writing classroom, instructional technology specialist at Gallaudet University (the university for the Deaf and hard of hearing), Acting Director of Learning Technologies at Gallaudet University, Instructional Designer/Trainer at Blackboard, and Managing Consultant of Blackboard Learning Solutions.

The Usual Disclaimer: This is my personal weblog and does not reflect the opinions or positions of my current employer, nor any of the other past employers listed above. Especially Arby's.

Posted April 5, 2003 02:30 PM | Permalink

Cherry Blossoms

More fiddling later. It's spring and the cherry blossoms on the National Mall are in bloom. I'm off to wander around outside among the flowers with my girlfriend. :-)

Posted April 5, 2003 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

November 12, 2000

Today I:Had fruit and cereal

Today I:

Pretty typical Sunday.

Posted November 12, 2000 04:39 PM | Permalink

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