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03 July 2009

The time we interviewed Debra Jane Seltzer and realized, we are so not worthy.

One day, I got this email from my new friend from Brooklyn, New York, Debra Jane. And within minutes she is totally the new Team Small Dog hero. Because Debra Jane takes her pack of 4 small, fast, kick yer ass dogs all over the country in a van to photograph stuff. Stuff like giant milk bottles and 3 story high dinosaurs and motels shaped like teepees. Stuff that is vanishing before our eyes to make way for Old Navy and steam shipped sized boxes of office supplies and beverages. And when the cool stuff is all gone, Debra Jane and her dogs might be the only ones that found it all.

Debra Jane, I haven't even made a dent in all your photo collections, and your websites, and I spent days in there. I am in awe at the sheer volume of your photos, that you only do on your little road trips. Because it looks like a full time job. Seriously. I am getting tired just thinking about it. My jaw is totally dropped in awe. Besides the actual trip where you are the only human in the car and the driving, and the stopping to get photos and turning around to get photos and going back to get photos, is the enormity of your websites.

Which, ok, is a little confusing. Debra Jane is an overachiever. She has a bunch of websites, and you kind of have to go see them all to get what I am talking about here. Go fix a snack.

gripper, fix, sputnik & gremlin

the big ol' website

flickr sampling of the website photos

the roadtrip blog

Debra Jane:
The site is ridiculously big at this point.
(*The site. My god-this took me days to go through ALL the sites*) But I still have huge lists of stuff to get to yet. New stuff that I find out about as well as reshooting stuff taken many years ago with an old camera or in shitty weather. Or stuff that has been transformed over the years -- for better or for worse.

It is more than 40 hours per week I'm sure. Plus, I can usually sneak in about 3 or 4 hours of me time at work (which means website time in some form). Over the years, I've learned to get by on about 5 hours of sleep per night. I work nights (5:30pm-2am) which means the dogs are sleeping while I'm out. Offleash hours are only til 9am so I have to get up at 7:30 to get the dogs out there every morning or I'm screwed. Nik will start removing books from shelves or deconstructing furniture if I don't. So I stumble off to the park on about 3 1/2 hours sleep. Then I catch a two hour nap before work. For like 15 years I've been doing this. Side effects: memory loss, brain damage, ADD but otherwise great health.

And then the technology while you're traveling of batteries and internets and not letting computers get stolen out of the van. Then, on top of it you have all the dogs and you are dealing with them and they need to go on walks and not bark in the motel room and not whine in the van and that it used to also include competing in agility but now just includes practicing for agility? I am like, how does she do this? Seriously? Because jaw dangling on floor right now.

Debra Jane:
It's very organized -- I just follow along with my list and bang things out. The organization is done way beforehand so I waste no time getting lost or shuffling paper.

The dogs are in the van so nobody's messing with it. My van has three cigarette lighters -- enough to charge the cell phone, the camera batteries and the laptop all at the same time! I have backup camera & laptop batteries always ready.

If I get Nik out to run for a few miles each day, several times per day, then I'm pretty good. The seniors (Grip & Fix) are fine with sniffing around & peeing on stuff. Grem I have to be very careful with or she'll take off. If we pass a water source (big river, ocean) then it's pretty much required that I stop. Nik & Grem start "monkeyscreaming" as you call it. By nighttime, they are shot and grateful when the van stops & they can finally get some quality rest. So they don't bark in motels. They are also used to NYC so they are used to loud, idiotic humans, dog collars jangling, car alarms, whatever annoying sounds that life can have.

The practicing agility is a good thing. I drive out to Long Island during a weekday. Have two rings pretty much to myself. So I can do whatever I want. And then there are some nearby trails where I can take the guys afterwards. The hard part is the driving -- tons of traffic usually both ways.

Also, I think what makes this really amazing is that you're preserving stuff that is vanishing. I grew up in the south bay of LA and every time I go back there, all the old cool googie 50's modern restaurants and apartments and shops are more and more and more gone and it honestly sometimes makes me cry. But I didn't do anything about it and I can't go back and get photos of the stuff that's gone. So you are doing very important work here.

Debra Jane:
I'm so glad that you "get it". I spent a few years living in Venice in the late 1970s. Hadn't really spent much time there til last year and was so depressed about how much development has wiped out everything in West L.A., Santa Monica, etc. Also my the town I grew up in, Ventura, used to be lemon & avocado groves -- now horrible malls & government bldgs.

Hey-that Tiki Aparatment building is from Redondo Beach, just down the street from where I grew up! I used to drive by it like every day! I grew up loving stuff like that, and just thought it would be here with us forever.

Do you have any favorite things? You cover a lot of genres, from architecture to signs to weird stuff like dinosaurs and giant lumberjacks to outsider art places. A lot of varieties from cultural production for commerce, plain old cool architecture, and some very passionate and visionary artmaking.

Debra Jane:
That's a tough one. I only dabble in the folk arty stuff. I'm much more attracted to commercial buildings & signs & fiberglass statues. Hard to choose one over the other. I tend towards mid-century buildings -- esp. banks, churches, office bldgs. which still don't get the respect that they deserve and are ripe to demolition. Most of mid-century devotees (websites, forums, etc.) are into houses but I find them pretty boring, plain & redundant. I'm more interested in how businesses brought attention to themselves, how buildings have been re-used, and what survives (vs. what's gone) and hoping to create more interest and therefore respect/importance for what remains so that these things might be preserved. Art Deco buildings have more respectability so I usually don't shoot them unless they are incredible. I am much more into the streamline buildings which are not as "in" -- esp. little ones. I'm sure there is some part of the brain that overlaps with rescue dogs & rescue buildings/signs.

Can I just tell you I am totally jealous you made it to Salvation Mountain? I have LIVED in California my whole life and just can't ever get there.

Debra Jane:
Well, then you must schedule it! I was lucky to be there when no one else was around which kind of accentuated the surrealness of it.

What sticks out in your memory as particularly mind blowing?

Debra Jane:
Stumbling into something that I didn't know about is a rare thing since I spend SO much time researching and prowling on the 'net for stuff. But sometimes I'll stumble upon some freaky UFO-ish 1960s bank or a nice cement church -- or some pet cemetery which I had very little info about turns out to be super great & rips me up emotionally with the photos/inscriptions -- or a neon sign has just the right light on it and I say to it "you're going on Flickr tonight!" Sometimes things that have been in my notes for years and years I finally get to and it's less than expected -- or better. So there are different types of the "unexpected" that would qualify as mind-blowing.

On this most recent trip, this guy comes to mind as "mind-blowing". I had no idea he'd been restored (and I follow this sort of thing so it's strange that I wouldn't know). They did a fantastic job -- but he was missing his Coke cup, paper hat, etc. So it was sad but fantastic. He's one of the super rare, unexplained heads, that were apparently made in Canada.

Another example, I'm very into giant milk bottles & was really looking forward to seeing the Milk Bottle Water Tower in Montreal. I had an intersection & couldn't find it. Asked around in my best broken French & was finally told it had been removed. I was very depressed by the new building that had supposedly replaced where it had been. That night, I looked it up just to torture myself & found photos at Flickr taken recently! Went way back to Montreal just to shoot it. So I felt a sense of accomplishment and awe that even in its rusty state, it lives!

Perhaps my biggest claim to roadside fame is digging up the info about a very special sign -- and even the guy that made them.
This page includes all kinds of details like a map I made of where the signs were originally installed, links & info about all the ones that still exist, videos in descriptions here and there so you can see them operating, and even a few photos of Mr. Milks himself. For a real treat, at the bottom of the page are some "home movies" from the early 1950s that I uploaded to YouTube of what some of his creations in Bossier City, LA (then a mini Vegas).

Does being a New Yorker have anything to do with this? Does living in Brooklyn give you super human powers? I always heard New York was where the super talented and super motivated people went, LA was where the super motivated yet possibly untalented people went, SF where the super talented yet possibly unmotivated went, and Santa Cruz was a black hole that just swallows us up and makes us want to sit around and watch the surf.

Debra Jane:
That's fascinating. Plenty of deadbeats, low-energy people in NYC I'm sure. But yeah, maybe survival makes you stronger, more willful. I always had the sense in Calfornia that years were just melting away. The lack of seasons. Out here, I find I'm racing to accomplish things in warm weather before I never want to go out. I'm deliberately savoring every day right now before it gets too hot and then too quickly fucking cold again. So it's sort of a more panicked way than dogs do of living in the moment. I'm now 51 and feel probably more panicky every year to get shit done & see stuff. Relaxing is not my style so NYC seems an appropriate place to be. If not for the cold and the parking hassles and way too many people. I don't go to movies or plays or museums -- I'm here because of the combination of my good-paying, perky job and my rent controlled apt. When I have a day off, I'm either slaving at the computer or we're off somewhere. I think being back in CA would be good for me & would force me to slow down a bit.

I am totally wondering, what does her house look like inside? Is it so carefully catalogued? Are there millions of equally cool roadside souvenirs?

Debra Jane:
Very boring space. I don't collect stuff. There is a huge Muffler Man head (long story) and a few other things (postcards, photos but not really tshochkes). Otherwise, it's office-like. Tables, files, big screen TV that never gets turned off while I'm "working". Horrible marathon crime documentaries on right now -- murders, cellblock life, whatever -- titilating enough to look up once in awhile but not enough to get suckered in. I'm into neat and tidy and organized. Dirt and dust don't bother me. Clutter freaks me out.

What do Brooklyn dogs do when you are at your investment bank job?

Debra Jane:
Got that one already. Grem wears her bark collar & snoozes in a crate while I'm out or she'd get us evicted. She tries to get Nik to play which gets everybody barking. I don't feel bad for her though. She gets tons of exercise during the day & it's just her regular routine. Everybody else behaves & sleeps. It's dark soon after I go to work.

And is it weird to have an investment bank job when investments are falling apart all around us?

Debra Jane:
I've survived five rounds of layoffs -- but maybe not the next one (December?). My company is one of the more conservative and European-based so they didn't have to get bailed out and didn't do skeevy things. It's businesses buying/selling businesses or parts of them. Things have definitely slowed down. What I do is make presentation books look "pretty", make graphs, tables, simple graphic-y things, some editing/typing. A mix of Word & PPT & Excel. The stuff the bankers can't do themselves. Lately, the bankers have been doing more and more of it so the books look like shit. But in these times, they aren't making the millions that they were so nobody care how things look I guess. I'm like a chef working at McDonald's right now.

Does this listmania and archiving skillset affect your dog training? I am thinking you are a super good dog trainer. Gripper has been a big champion in USDAA and NADAC, and they are all well behaved enough to travel around in a van and be behaved on all these different locations while you are running around shooting photos

Debra Jane:
I took boatloads of seminars and went to camps with all the greats in the first eight years or so. But I had no good trainers in my area. So it was always a mix of seminars/camps & then doing the actual training on my own in rented spaces. So I got used to winging it and experimenting and my dogs did damned well. So somewhere between what I learned from the pros and what worked for my dogs got us along quite well. I never had driven Border Collie or Sheltie types that LOVED the sport. But had to develop working relationships that mattered & motivated my dogs.

I know I lectured you about the barking on the teeter technique. I liked your approach to group teeters! Anywhere that you can insert novelty into training is a good thing I think.

Um, most people would not describe my dogs' van behavior as "well-behaved". Every nearby motorcyle is cause for mayhem. Toll booths. Gas stations where they pump your gas (NJ and OR -- I do all I can to avoid them). So lots of situations that are noisy, not pretty, with dogs thrashing against the glass. Grem goes off barking at any dog she sees. She sometimes smells them before she sees or hears them. I've seen her jump up from sleeping to find them. And she's a real earsplitter. Nik also brings me bits of anything he can find in the van -- a one inch scrap of paper or plastic will do & puts it on my shoulder & starts whining or bumping me to throw it. I indulge him sometimes which is a big mistake. Or he somehow busts into the strapped-up toy bins in back & brings up a squeaky. So there's always lots of amusement/annoyance to keep me from dozing off.

Where is your next trip going to be? How do you figure out the routes you're going to take to avoid all the Home Depot's and Walmarts that are becoming so ubiquitous now? Do you have an inner radar devloped now that helps you find stuff when you're traveling?

Debra Jane:
Much more unromantic than that. The routes are really the most efficient paths between destinations. But on a major, old commercial strip thru a town, I will have a drive around sometimes to see what's there. I haven't been to the Midwest in awhile so that's where headed for the month of August. So I better not have any rain! My Ohio & Missouri shots are about five years old and pretty ugly. Parts of IN & IL I still haven't gotten to. KS & IA I've only covered part of. So for the past couple months & for the next six weeks, I'm frantically working on my lists -- printing maps for each destination & organizing the piles. As well as key word searching the crap out of google & flickr so I miss as little stuff as possible in the states & cities that I'm heading to. I always find out about some neat gas station or sign when I get home that was just blocks from where I was -- painful!

Do you meet people when you're on the road that help you find things to see?

Debra Jane:
Nah, I'm the antisocial type. No time to chat. And 95% of what I see is preplanned. But I do sometimes have get-togethers with people that I've become buddies with at Flickr that like the sorts of things that I do. Usually a couple people on each big trip. Always had good experiences.

Do the dogs ever do anything naughty on the road that puts you into a tight spot? IE, bad for life, good for story?

Debra Jane:
Daily! See blog. Grem scares the crap out of me daily even when I'm home. I can't count the number of times she's crossed busy roads. Running across the desert in NM was one of the worst experiences.

Do all your dogs love each other equally or do you have pack dynamics?

Debra Jane:
Not so much. I'm not even sure they love me! They are true terriers -- self-sufficient, not at all clingy. Nik & Grem play together sometimes in the house -- terrier chawing on each other type play -- but never outside. Grip & Fixie do withers dances -- posturing and barking nastily at each other -- a lot. Female dominance crap I'm told. But it never goes anywhere -- just looks bad. Nobody cuddles with each other. Maybe they're all the products of broken homes & dysfunctional families. But with all their park experiences with hundreds of different kinds of dogs offleash, daily, they have perfect social graces. Can keep their space without getting into fights. Can handle obnoxious, pushy dogs with ease. Have some patience with puppies. I've had friends who claim they have dogs with aggression issues -- but have introduced my dogs to them with nobody losing it. The owners are always shocked. My dogs know how to say "stop it" and "leave me alone" in a serious but not insulting way.

Introvert or Extrovert? Do you ever travel with another human, or is it only with the dogs only?

Debra Jane:
I don't think anyone could bear traveling with me or the dogs! I'm manic, they're nutso. Introvert I guess. I'm manic, they're nutso.

So there -- that oughta keep you busy. Damned life story! Grip is pacing and barking and spinning and digging on me and her full water bowl (practically speaking English) -- indicating that it's time for dinner.

Take care,

So really. Scroll back up to the top. Go to Debra Jane's websites and see all the stuff she's found out there. Go see some of it yourself, and find more. It's all going to be gone someday. And don't call her Debra Jean, or Debbie. It's Debra Jane.

Elayne said...

I LOVE Debra Jane's Roadside Architecture site. I was furious with myself when I first discovered it because I too spent hours/days perusing it (with a dial-up connection!). I keep taking photos of buildings and things to send her and forgetting to send them or I decide they're not worthy or probably both.

I've seen her run her dog at a couple of NADAC Champs many years ago-he is the coolest!

artdecobuildings said...

I really enjoyed reading this post. The mention of art deco and streamline buildngs pricked up my ears but I fell in with the whole post. I love the Montreal 'Milk Bottle' because I saw it several weeks back but my photo is nowhere near as good as this one.

Jen Lindsay said...

Very interesting read. And her rat terrier is gorgeous.

Erika said...

i work with debra jane -- we argue all the time about the techy side of the interwebs (i'm a romantic / new gadgets are cool person, she's a smart realist)....

but i want to say that on a day-to-day basis this interview most excellently captures the dedication and insanely hard work that debra does.

i still think someone should pay her to do this full time and publish a book or three. debra jane is doing a service in documenting disappearing americana. the fact that she does it with four awesome dogs in her van sparkle, well, it just makes me smile.

debra jane is one of my biggest sources of motivation. i wish i could be as focused and laser-like and obsessed (in the best possible way) like her!

Rick said...

DJ was in Florida earlier this year and I hoped we might cross paths, but her schedule is crammed full and we couldn't make it happen. What she does is amazing and we are all richer for it. I consult her site before I travel anywhere so I won't miss something amazing!

Simba said...

I've been a fan of Debra Jane's for years! Even tried to plan my own road trip with Simba...hasn't happened yet tho...

Awesome interview!

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I really love reading and following your post as I find them extremely informative and interesting. This post is equally informative as well as interesting . Thank you for information you been putting on making your site such an interesting. I gave something for my information. Cigarette Lighter Novelty


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Thursday, July 23, 2015

Vertical Replenishment of Chinese Aircraft Carrier Using Robot Helicopter

Greetings from the 10th International Conference on Computer Science and  Education (ICCSE 2015) in Cambridge (UK), where Ben M. Chen from the UAV Research Group at the National University of Singapore is speaking on "Unmanned Systems Research and Education". He showed a video of a competition in China, where the UAV helicopter had to pick up a load from one moving platform and transfer it to another moving platform. What got my attention was that this was intended to simulate the transfer of material from a supply ship to an aircraft carrier. This vertical replenishment (VERTREP) application is one still carried out with pilot operated helicopters in most navies. His paper "Development of an Unmanned Helicopter for Vertical Replenishment" provides details. It would be interesting to know the view of Australia about Singapore assisting China with its ability to project naval power.

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A bright idea

Look, Ma, no streetlights.

A British entrepreneur has taken the kind of stuff in glow-in-the-dark toys and devised a luminescent coating for ground surfaces. It’s so “smart,” the treated path will store energy during daylight and sense the amount of blueish glow it needs to release as is grows dark, the Innovations blog at Smithsonian magazine reports.

Sounds like sci-fi street lights.

“It is quite a cool thing,” Hamish Scott says of Starpath. “Until you have seen it, you can’t really comprehend it,” he tells the Fairfax NZ News.

The City Council in Cambridge, England, has used Scott’s invention on a historic pathway, the Daily Telegraph reports.

You can see how Starpath works on YouTube.


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Downsizing my Time Warner Bill

On September 16, 2008, in Technology, Vendors, by Mike Waldron

In my recent effort to reduce expenses at the Waldron compound, I took it upon myself to call Time Warner to see if it was worth downgrading my services. I was contemplating changing my Road Runner service from Standard to Basic (-$10) and removing a secondary cable box in my bedroom (-$10).

What I have with TW Cable:

  • Living Room HD DVR box
  • Bedroom HD Cable box
  • HBO, Cinemax and HD NET
  • Road Runner Standard

After talking to the customer service rep, he took about 5 minutes dissecting my bill to see if I could save money with my current subscriptions. Turns out he was able to bundle the services for a year with a savings of $25/month. On top of that they gave me a free HD DVR to replace my bedroom box. Not bad for a 20 minute phone call.

Moral of the story: Call Time Warner at least every 6-12 months to make sure you aren’t getting screwed.

UPDATE: 10/2010:  I’ve moved to DISH network after TWC refused to cut our bills down.  We actually have more stuff for less with DISH and are quite happy.  Funny, because when I went to remove the TV services and give back the cable box in the local office, the nice lady discounted my cable-Internet at $30/yr for a year!

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Fotógrafo de bodas Finca San Bernardo Guatemala

Fotógrafo de bodas Finca San Bernardo Guatemala y Hotel Vista Real: Rodolfo Walsh de Walsh Wedding Stories .  Conozco a Joseph desde chiquito y es una de las personas mas encantadoras que se han cruzado por mi vida. A Goldi tengo mucho menos … Continued

Wedding engagement photos Antigua Guatemala

This has been the funnest wedding engagement photo session I´ve ever photographed! Melanie Pinetta Bollat is from Guatemala and Vaughan van Dam is from Durban, South Africa. When Vaughan proposed he used the phrase LET´S BE ADVENTURERS and adventurers we … Continued

Wedding photography at Casa Santo Domingo and La Reunion Golf Resort, Antigua Guatemala

I´ve known Marce since she was a baby and it was truly special when she asked me to be her wedding photographer.  She´s a  very special person and a beautiful bride, as you may see in the photos.  I haven´t known … Continued

posted in: wedding photography guatemala | 0

Steve and Dana came from Canada to celebrate their wedding in San Jose El Viejo ruins in Antigua Guatemala.  It was an elegant and relaxing wedding and we had a great photo session in the streets of Antigua.  Thanks for … Continued

Wedding photography Guatemala

posted in: wedding photography guatemala | 0

  These are some of my favorite photos of recent weddings. Thanks to all the couples who allowed us to capture such beautiful moments.

Meson Panza Verde, Antigua Guatemala mayan ceremony wedding

posted in: wedding photography guatemala | 0

Samantha and Scott came fron California to celebrate their destination wedding in Antigua Guatemala with a beautiful mayan ceremony. The set up at the patio of Meson Panza Verde was breathtaking. A very special wedding and a truly special couple.

Fotos bodas San Bernardo Guatemala -Juan Pablo y Gaby

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Estas son algunas de mis fotos favoritas de la sesión de fotos de pareja de Juan Pablo y Gaby en San Bernardo, Guatemala.


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Digital Catalogue: compilation of all your stellar sample itineraries in super-efficient format that’s as easy to access as child’s play. In these 4 simple steps a DC will distribute your content like nothing else on earth and distinguish your brand from mere mortals.

1. One Link conquers all

Whether you have 2 or 10 sample itineraries in your portfolio, build them into a DC and instead of 2 or 10 links to send, just use 1. Imagine how much of your sales/marketing material you can distribute in one go. Fast, easy, deadly. Check this out.

2. Today your computer, immediately the world

Quick to set up in your Itinerary Builder, all that’s needed is to clearly categorise itineraries according to your chosen theme and name the various Racks, Chapters and Catalogue(s). Any update or change reflects as instantly as you save it, wherever you’ve sent that link.

3. Any device, any time

Your DC has the digital mojo to be accessible on any device, 24/7 – smartphone, tablet or laptop. A busy exec in mid-Uber commute can use the time to plan his family’s next holiday by perusing your catalogue on the comfort of his iPhone. Awesome.

4. Embed widget onto website

As if a single link to all your content isn’t genius enough, the clever widget puts it all onto a website – yours or a 2nd/3rd party site. It’s tech simplified: just copy some code onto the back-end of the site. Another way the world can get its hands on your DC.

Like every superhero knows: while you are its source, the true power of your content is in how it serves the world. Go forth, build & distribute.

It’s not who I am underneath… but what I do… that defines me.

Batman Begins

In Wetu terms, that’s you getting more done in less time. Need a hand? Consult this doc.

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Enterprisey beta

For those of you looking to do a larger deployment, the new beta should be helpful. See the release notes. Comments are most welcome.

One new feature is the ability to restrict which filters users can see. For example, if you have a requirement that you can only log work against issues in specific states, you can ensure that users only ever see the filters corresponding to these states. This is in direct contrast to the current behavior which is to use whichever filters the user wants.

About this blog

We strongly believe that tracking your time properly is the first step to deterministic software development. If you feel that you have been guessing or you can't be bothered to remember to log time, Worklog Assistant might be for you!

Give it a try!

Please download a free 30-day trial today by clicking on the link below: Download


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Ask The Writers: Overcoming Writer’s Block

Writer’s block.

Two innocuous looking words, responsible for a lot of misery.  What is writer’s block?  In some ways, writer’s block is like procrastination.  You may be reluctant to work on a writing project because of fear:  you are unsure whether the project will succeed, or you are apprehensive about tackling a mountain of intellectual complexity.

You may also be procrastinating because you don’t feel motivated to write.  I’ll be the first to admit that writing is hard work: it’s natural to wish, sometimes, that you could watch a Bruce Lee marathon instead.  If your writing goals are not dictated by hard deadlines, it may be even harder to work steadily at the task, no matter how important you think it is or how much you enjoy it.  It’s all too easy to defer the things you want to do in the course of the things you have to do (or think you have to do).

In some ways, though, writer’s block is different from other forms of procrastination; staring unproductively at the blank page is different from ignoring that linen closet you should organize.  Many times, a writer wants to write but can’t get the ideas to flow.  Because it’s inherently creative, our writing is imbued with ideas about who we are.  Following the writing process means confronting ourselves, and sometimes that can be a tricky proposition.

So today, I’d like to ask you — the writers — to share your techniques for dealing with and overcoming writer’s block.  What do you do to get those ideas flowing?

What strategies work for you when you have to get it done?  When you want to get it done?

You all have some amazing ideas: I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

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3 Responses to Ask The Writers: Overcoming Writer’s Block

  1. marmelade says:

    so … i’m not the only one. well, i usually have days when i write 5-6 pages a day, even more, and i have days, or weeks, when i can’t even begin to write. usually when i’m starting to doubt myself. so what do i do? i do stuff that make me feel good, until i can actually get in the mood for writing. or, but i wouldn’t recommend that, i force myself to write, even though i don’t feel inspired, telling myself that i’ll revise the chapter later. the only thing you gain is that you move forward with the story.

  2. loren says:

    Hi, Marmelade — great point. Moving forward with the story is sometimes the only thing we can do. Of course, it’s also the most important thing we can do: writers write, right?

    If you haven’t already, I hope you will become a regular reader by subscribing to Writing Power’s RSS feed. And be sure to check out Writing Power’s Writers’ Circle for some great support and feedback!

  3. Elfkiller says:

    Most of the writing that I do is for role playing games, writing character background and plot twists, things like that. I have a game every week that I run, and I usually only have one night, sometimes only a few hours to create the meat of the story. Starting up from scratch, like I’m attempting tonight, is very difficult. However at other times the ideas come flowing out at such a pace that my hands can’t keep up. I grab every scrap of paper and spew forth content in a short hand that I can barely understand myself. Often, the ideas are for my current story line. Other times, I get great ideas that are useless to me this week. However, as I type this, a stack of ideas is two inches from my left hand. I will pore over them and pick up what I can to kick start that flow that will bring out interesting new character and story line to enjoy this weekend.

    So, my advice is to always keep a pen and a few scraps of paper with you, and stop to write down those ideas. Sometimes I’ll even write a few key words on my arm or hand, because the ideas that fire off my creativity are just that precious.

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Digital courting TV ad dollars: An epic timeline

Digital courting TV ad dollars: An epic timeline

Digital appears to have finally reached a tipping point in being able to attract brand budgets away from television. According to IAB data, in 2015, digital continued to gain share and close in on the total spent on all television (broadcast and cable).

Critical audience mass, ad formats that can tell brand stories, and measurement capabilities that brands and their agencies can use to compare performance to television, and the rise of mobile have all contributed to digital’s ability to slowly but surely chip away at TV ad spend.

Here’s a look back at the pieces that came together to make this transition happen. This timeline isn’t exhaustive, but it aims to capture significant milestones in the efforts of Google, Facebook and Twitter to bring brands and television budgets to their platforms.

Why these three companies? Well, Google and Facebook dominate digital ad sales — estimated to capture 85 percent of every dollar spent on digital in the US, according to Morgan Stanley. Twitter’s ad revenues might pale in comparison, but the company was a pioneer in marketing itself, not as a competitor, but as the “second screen” complement to television, and as such, it was as a natural partner for broadcasters and brand advertisers. What about Snapchat? Though just getting started, Snapchat earns a couple of mentions, including Monday’s news that it’s opening up to third-party buying and expanding ad placements to run between Stories.

Here we chart the many steps to getting brands to spend more online:

October 2000

October 2006

  • Google acquires YouTube (also the year Time selected “You” as the Person of the Year).

April 2007

  • Google launches Google TV Ads in AdWords “to bring digital buying and measurement technologies to traditional TV advertising,” as it was also aiming to do with radio and print advertising.

August 2007

  • YouTube launches overlay ads. In lieu of traditional pre-roll ads, Google launches video overlays that show up as a semi-transparent banner 15 seconds into a video, displaying for up to 10 seconds and closing automatically. Launch advertisers include Fox, “The Simpsons Movie,” BMW and “Hairspray.”youtube-overlay-ad

November 2007

  • Facebook debuts Facebook Ads system for businesses to promote brand messages with Facebook Social Ads targeted to when users take actions. Mark Zuckerberg told ad executives, “Now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.” The company launched over 100,000 Facebook Pages for brands and other groups.

November 2008

facebook launches fanbox

August 2009

  • Google renames YouTube Sponsored Videos Promoted Videos and expands placement offerings to include spots within the “related videos” section.

September 2009

  • Facebook partners with Nielsen to run BrandLift polls to measure ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration of desktop display ads on the social network.

November 2010

  • Twitter starts testing Promoted Tweets in the timeline with Hootsuite. Targeting is based on factors such as who people follow.

December 2010

  • Google launches skippable TrueView Video Ads for YouTube, sold on a cost-per-view basis after 30 seconds, or when the video ends if shorter. GoPro is among test advertisers. (Promoted Videos become known as TrueView in December 2011.)

April 2011

  • Google announces Google Display Network Reserve, bringing programmatic guaranteed buying on bundles of “brand-safe” sites within the Google Display Network. Aimed at driving awareness for brand campaigns and extending the reach of  YouTube home page or First Watch buys.

August 2011

  • Facebook and Nielsen partner on Online Campaign Ratings to track ad performance and audience demographics on ads served on Facebook and other sites around the web. Anonymized Facebook demographic data — as well as data from other publishers — is combined with Nielsen impression data to give insights of the sort that Nielsen offers advertisers for their TV campaigns. (OCR became known as Digital Ad Ratings in 2015).

January 2012

  • Facebook starts showing Sponsored Stories in the desktop news feed for brands to target fans.

February 2012

facebook sponsored stories appear in news feed

April 2012

  • Facebook buys Instagram, reportedly for $1 billion.
  • The first Digital NewFronts are held in New York with AOL, Google, Hulu, Microsoft, Vevo and Yahoo presenting to tout the value of digital ads — video, in particular — to traditional media buyers.
  •  Google

August 2012

  • Google shuts down Google TV Ads, stating, “ [V]ideo is increasingly going digital and users are now watching across numerous devices. So we’ve made the hard decision to close our TV Ads product over the next few months and move the team to other areas at Google. We’ll be doubling down on video solutions for our clients (like YouTube, AdWords for Video, and ad serving tools for web video publishers). We also see opportunities to help users access web content on their TV screens, through products like Google TV.”

February 2013

  • Twitter acquires Bluefin Labs, which helped brands measure and connect social media conversations with TV shows and commercials. Twitter says Bluefin Labs will help it “create innovative new ad products and consumer experiences” in social TV. (See July 2013)

April 2013

  • Google’s MRC-accredited viewability measurement solution, Active View is not just for measurement anymore. It will be used for viewable-impression buying, allowing advertisers to pay only when ads appear in-view rather than on an impression-served basis on the Google Display Network and DoubleClick.

May 2013

June 2013

  • Facebook launches 15-second video recording on Instagram and reports that Instagram has more than 130 monthly active users and 16 billion photos posted. Sets the stage for supporting video ads.

July 2013

  • Twitter rolls out TV ad targeting in US to advertisers running national television commercials, thanks to the acquisition of Bluefin Labs. Advertisers can target conversations about shows on which they advertise. With the rollout came a new set of data in the TV Ads Dashboard for TV ad-tracking analytics.

August 2013

September 2013

  • Twitter officially launches Amplify ad platform. In partnership with broadcast networks, advertisers can run pre-roll ads on video replays in near-real time for sporting and major live events, as well as clips from shows and other content. Revenues are split with the networks.
  • Facebook

October 2013

  • Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings launches. The Twitter-Nielsen partnership gives television broadcasters and advertisers the first standard metric for measuring second-screen viewership.
  • Google nabs its biggest upfront deal yet with Publicis shop MediaVest worth tens of millions of dollars in guaranteed premium placements on YouTube, the Google Display Network and mobile networks. “In many ways, the deal confirms the tremendous momentum that we have on YouTube and the importance of online video to brand marketers,” Torrence Boone, Google’s managing director of agency business development said.

November 2013

  • Instagram launches ads with Michael Kors as the first brand to advertise on the network.

first instagram ad michael kors

  • Google
  • Twitter launches TV conversation targeting, an expansion of TV targeting, so networks and brands can promote tweets to users who engage with specific shows, whether or not a brand is running a spot during the program.

December 2013

  • Facebook starts testing Premium Video Ads with Summit Entertainment and Mindshare to promote a series of videos for the film, “Divergent,” in the news feed on mobile and desktop.

February 2014

March 2014

  • Facebook

    • Launches Premium Video Ads out of beta: 15-second spots for brand advertisers. The ads auto-play on mute in the news feed and are bought on Targeted Gross Rating Points (TRP), like TV ads, and measured by Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR, now Digital Ad Ratings).
    • Instagram scores its first upfront agency holding company deal with Omnicom, reportedly worth as much as $100 million in spend from brand clients.
  • Twitter starts testing native video in cards, starting with Amplify content partners like the NBA.

April 2014

  • Google launches Google Preferred to sell guaranteed ad buys against the “top five percent” of YouTube content that is packaged into channels for brand advertisers. Beta testers included Johnson & Johnson and Heineken. DigitasLBi is first agency partner as part of an bigger upfront deal.

May 2014

  • Google announces ability for advertisers to measure interest in their brands based on YouTube searches.
  • Facebook and Publicis announce multi-year upfront deal reportedly worth $500 million. Carolyn Everson, VP of global marketing solutions at Facebook, said, “This is the first time we have all of the different elements that will allow clients to reach a significant scale of 100 million people a day in the US and [specific] audiences within the 100 million the client wants to reach.”

June 2014

  • DreamWorks Animation launches DreamWorksTV channel on YouTube.
  • Facebook
    • Debuts “video views” ad type to target users that have already seen a marketer’s other videos to drive awareness and affinity.
    • Adds Reach and Frequency capabilities for managed accounts looking to hit specific reach and frequency goals.

August 2014

  • Twitter launches Promoted Video ads as an extension of Amplify in beta with a cost-per-view model.

September 2014

October 2014

December 2014

January 2015

February 2015

  • All of the major networks have joined Twitter Amplify, with the final holdout, ABC, coming on board for the Oscars that year.

March 2015

April 2015

  • YouTube says it reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds on mobile than any cable network, that the number of people visiting YouTube daily has grown 40 percent year over year and that four of the top 10 trending videos from 2014 were from brands.
  • Facebook launches Anthology to produce branded video ad content for the news feed with a group of video publishers like Funny or Die, Tastemade and Vox acting as creative agencies, along with the Facebook Creative Shop, taking a page from BuzzFeed.

May 2015

  • Twitter launches Auto Amplify, bringing self-serve automation to the premium video Amplify ads and giving any video publisher on Twitter the opportunity to run six-second pre-roll ads against their content.

June 2015

  • Twitter launches auto-play video and a new measurement standard for viewable video. A view is charged when an ad is 100 percent in view on the user’s device and watched for at least three seconds.

September 2015

  • Facebook

    • Launches Video Carousel Ads to give marketers the opportunity to show more video — for example, an automaker could show national and local ads spots in the same carousel.
    • Adds Brand Awareness ad objective and optimization bidding for brand ad recall-driven campaigns for managed accounts.
    • Starts supporting viewable impression buying on all ad units and third-party viewability verification and measurement for video ad views and view lengths provided by Moat.
    • Releases data from a Nielsen study that shows when TV and Facebook were combined, advertisers saw a 19-percent increase in targeted reach versus TV alone across 42 campaigns; 37 percent for Millennials.
    • Partners with Millward Brown on mobile campaign polling to measure brand awareness, ad awareness and other brand lift metrics.

November 2015

December 2015

  • Twitter announces advertisers will have the option to extend Promoted Tweets and Videos to logged-out visitors on desktop — an estimated 500+ million people a month.

January 2016

twitter conversational tweet ads launch

February  2016

  • Facebook

    • Completes Moat integration for video ad analytics and viewability verification.
    • Adds seven publishers to Anthology program for branded video development and syndication in the news feed after adjusting prices from a reported low “millions” of dollars to one million and beefing up audience data insights for brands.
    • Launches Canvas ads, a full-screen, multimedia mobile ad format aimed at brands. Wendy’s, Lowe’s, Coca Cola, L’Occitane, ASUS and Burberry are among launch partners.

facebook canvas ads wendys

April 2016

  • Facebook rolls out TRP buying for TV buyers and planners to extend reach of TV ads (“[P]lan a campaign across TV and Facebook with a total TRP target in mind, and they can buy a share of those TRPs directly with Facebook”), adds DMA and daypart targeting and offers tips for brands to optimize TV ads for mobile video. Verification is handled by Nielsen Ad Ratings.
  • Google launches unskippable six-second Bumper ads to extend the reach of TrueView campaigns on YouTube. Audi and Atlantic Records among the pilot testers.

May 2016

  • Twitter renews upfront deals with three major agency holding companies in Q1, reportedly with a 40-percent increase in spend commitments.
  • Google
    • Seals upfront deal for Google Preferred YouTube inventory with Interpublic Group’s buying arm, Magna Gobal, valued at a minimum of $250 million between October 2016 and December 2017. Instead of coming from other digital budgets, Interpublic says the spend on Google Preferred will come from clients’ TV budgets — clients like Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
    • Announces Google Preferred Breakout Videos ad packages to target fast-rising videos on YouTube.
    • Says YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds during prime time than the top 10 TV shows combined, and the number of hours spent watching YouTube on TV screens doubled year-over-year.
    • Makes deal to include all NBA footage in the Google Preferred ad network.
  • Facebook
    • Says it will shutter LiveRail video ad tech platform it bought in July 2014, puts focus on Audience Network, which launched in April 2014 with app-install ads.
    • Expands ad reach on Audience Network to non-Facebook users on other sites and apps — primarily in native ad units — with Custom Audiences and lookalike targeting.

June 2016

  • Google releases early findings that eCPMs on ads on AMP-enabled content are higher than on non-AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) content.
  • Facebook brings brand-friendly 10- to 30-second pre-, mid- or post-roll video ads to Audience Network and Instant Articles with cost-per-view or optimized CPM pricing to hit view goals.
  • Twitter strikes deal with Univision and Fox Sports to syndicate video clips of the Copa America soccer tournament through the Amplify program. The video highlights will include six-second pre-roll ads from seven global advertisers. Twitter says it has run 300 Amplify programs since launching three years ago.
  • Snapchat says it will support programmatic buying from third parties by making its Ads API available to companies like Adaptly, Amobee and TubeMogul, will start running Snap Ads between Stories and is partnering with creative agencies to help brands produce Snap Ads.

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Thursday, May 29, 2008

Two for the Price of One

There are few things more enjoyable than coming home from a long day in the lab, propping my feet up, and imbibing from a book while sipping a cold drink.  And it's all the more enjoyable when the book and beverage are paired appropriately.  For Mark Twain, whiskey seems like the suitable drink, particularly an American whiskey like bourbon or rye.  A cosmopolitan seems appropriate for Oscar Wilde, cognac for Stendhal, and a vodka martini for Tolstoy.  So when I sat down for an hour with "Bleak House" this evening, I naturally fixed myself...a margarita!  Now, I know, Dickens is not a Mexican author, and frankly I doubt he ever made it to Mexico.  Who knows if he could have even pointed out Mexico on a map.  Yet, the margarita seemed so appropriate to me.  You see, the margarita is a unique and wonderful drink.  It's tangy with lime, sweet with triple sec, and yet has that salty rim that's such a delightful contrast.  And this reminds me so of "Bleak House".  This is a novel that's quite funny, with an oddball collection of the most, well, oddball characters around.  And yet, it's not just a barrel of comedy jokes.  It's also biting political satire, a poignant tale of human frailties and failures, full of the sorrows of dashed hopes and dreams, and an affirmation that today's often biting and cynical views of lawyers were also prevalent 150 years ago.  Like the margarita it offers up a colorful cornucopia of flavorful delights:  the sweetness of love and family, the sour bitterness of failed dreams, and the salty, tumultuous seas of human foibles.  Or maybe I just felt like having a margarita and now I'm trying desperately to justify it all.  Whatever.  My head's a bit woozy with tequila.

I have one further note on "Bleak House", brought up in the comments to the previous post.  There are two narrators in this book.  One is your typical omniscient, third person narrator.  The other is Esther Summerson.  The novel's chapters jump back and forth between the two narrators, which is pretty cool.  But I've been pondering why Dickens does this.  When I think about it with my rational, scientific mind, I realize that the omniscient narrator is essential to the story.   There are so many characters, with so many hidden secrets, that a first person narrator like Esther just could not have told the story.  The converse is not true...I don't see that Esther being a narrator is essential to the story.  The story could have been told entirely in the third person.  So why does Dickens use Esther as a narrator for parts of the story?  I think there are two reasons.  Well, at least there are two reasons that I can come up with.  The first is that Esther helps obfuscate the story.  This is a confusing tale, with lots of mystery and unknowns and fog and lawsuits that drag on so long that no one seems to remember what they're about.  And Esther adds to all of this.  She's clearly an unreliable narrator, and she also clearly covers things up sometimes.  I can't remember the exact passages now, but there are a couple of times that she starts to describe something and then stops and says something to the effect of "oh well, never mind, it's not important", when truly we can tell it is indeed important to her.  She also lies about her feelings, but not well enough so that we can't guess as to what they are.  In short, a recurrent theme of the novel is murkiness and confusion, and she helps add to that.  The second reason for having Esther narrate is to add a human element to the story.  Despite her unreliability, the reader bonds with her and feels for her, especially over her obvious despair at being hideously scarred by smallpox.  She makes the story more poignant.  Without her, the story's eccentric characters would be more to the foreground, and the reader might not have anyone to identify with.  There wouldn't be an anchor, and the story would lose some of its effectiveness, I think.  Or is that just the tequila talking?'s late, and I just can't tell anymore.  Sometimes I think that...oh, never mind, it's not important.

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Thursday, November 04, 2010

Pornographic challah

Those who have been following this blog for a while know that I love extraordinary challahs.

But there's extra-ordinary, and then there's x-rated.

Yup, pornographic challah. Bet you've never seen that before. (Sorry, this is a family blog - I'm not posting the picture - you'll have to click on the link...)

The backstory (allegedly - this has all the makings of an urban myth): the ad, belonging to a chain of food stores, appeared in a local advertising magazine distributed in a religious part of the Jerusalem suburb of Ramot. The magazine claims it was "human error", with the picture being taken from an internet site about bread rolls (by a blind person???). The store claims that it saw the draft ad only in black-and-white, and didn't notice the picture.

Either way, I'm guessing it wasn't a best-seller....

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Thursday, December 6

Report from the field: Hindu Temple Charrette

AFH MN member and charrette participant Maureen Ness has this report for us:

Members of AFH MN and members of the Hindu Temple of Minnesota convened on the evening of October 12th and morning of October 13th to engage in a design charrette for a Garden of Remembrance for the burial of the icons damaged by vandalism last year. On Friday evening, AFH MN toured the temple and met with the priest to learn more about the Hindu religion and appropriate guidelines for the burial of damaged statues.

On Saturday morning, AFH MN conducted a site analysis and then broke into two design teams to develop conceptual ideas for the Garden. In addition to the burial place, the teams were asked to include a flower garden for flowers to be used in worship and a vegetable garden for food to be ate at Temple meals. The two design concepts will be presented to the Temple Executive Committee at an upcoming meeting this winter.

Thanks Maureen! Here are the two conceptual site plans the team came up with (click to see full version):

We'll keep you updated with new developments as they happen.

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Water babies

22 February 2013 , 4:52 PM by Rob Minshull

Water Babies

Being able to swim and enjoy the water is not only a rite of passage for many Australians, it is a way of life.

Of course, it's a good thing to teach children about water safety from an early age, but a recent Queensland study has shown a clear link between early childhood swimming and learning development.

The lead researcher on the project, Professor Robyn Jorgenson from the Griffith Institute for Educational Research, is talking to Warren Boland.

You can read the report by clicking here.

Download audio

Photo courtesy of Rob Minshull

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Stocks to Watch
News and commentary about the stocks you need to know about today

General Electric: Should Investors Get Excited By Consumer Lending Spinoff?

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that General Electric’s (GE) was planning to spin off its unit which offers store-branded credit cards to consumers. JPMorgan’s C. Stephen Tusa and Drew Pierson explain why they remain unthrilled by GE’s prospects:

Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg News

…press reports suggest that plans for a potential IPO of PLCC are moving forward but we still don’t see portfolio actions as a “silver bullet” to the sum-of-the-parts, and the fact that smaller spins/sales are still being considered highlights the challenge of driving a clean exit of a business this large (though keep in mind that there remains a range of options outside an IPO). For the stock, shares have lagged since the 2Q earnings relief rally (-6% versus group -2%, S&P -3%), which increases the chances of another “not as bad as feared” rally later this year, but we don’t see enough incremental good news on either Industrial fundamentals or GECS portfolio actions to change our relatively more cautious stance near term – we remain Neutral.

Barclays’ Scott Davis and Michael Stein are far more optimistic. They write:

We have long argued that GE Capital (and PLCC in particular) were under-valued assets in the GE portfolio and would be better served under different ownership. PLCC stand-alone could be an intriguing asset for the right set of investors and timing of exit appears to be a win/win. Additionally, as GECC earnings become a much smaller piece of the pie, GE stock can reasonably fall into the asset class bucket of late-cycle industrials still at market troughs in key businesses – in this scenario, we could see the market move away from a sum-of-the-parts view of GE and toward an all-in multiple, in line with multi-industry peers…

GE has gained 9.5% this year after falling 0.7% to $22.98 today, well behind the SPDR S&P 500 ETF’s (SPY) 15% gain and the Industrial Select Sector SPDR’s (XLI) 17% rise. United Technologies (UTX) has risen 25% this year, while 3M (MMM) has advanced 22%.

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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit


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« Is Intellectual Courage the Key to Great Teaching? | Main | The Courage to Be College-Bound »

Intellectual Courage: Making Professional Learning Matter

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This post is by Cheryl Becker Dobbertin, the Director of the Teacher Potential Project at Expeditionary Learning.

Imagine this scene. Several students are huddled up over a workspace, taking steps to solve a real world problem. They are questioning, probing each other's thinking, seeking resources, and using feedback to check their understanding and refine their approach. Is this a high school physics class?  Nope, it's a professional development session.

This kind of active and engaged professional learning is standard practice in Expeditionary Learning schools, where I work, and in hundreds of Deeper Learning Network schools all over the country. It happens when teachers display the same kind of intellectual courage that they desire in their students--the courage to take the risk of admitting that there's always more to learn about teaching; the courage to share, discuss, seek and reflect upon feedback; and the courage to reject "sit and get" PD.

Cheryl Photo 1.jpg

Admitting our vulnerabilities as education professionals takes tremendous courage. As a teacher, coach, and leader, I have been on the frontlines of this change for the past two years, helping teachers develop, use and adapt Expeditionary Learning's Common Core-aligned ELA curriculum. When we first learned about the Common Core, we, like many, thought adjusting our work to meet the rigor of new standards was not going to be difficult. After all, we had a 20-year track record in providing teachers with professional development that put them back in the role of learners and in developing engaging and rigorous curriculum. Boy, were we wrong.

The best thing we did was to admit that we had a great deal to learn. We dug in and took on the challenge of change. Our learning curve was steep and sometimes a painful intellectual climb. Our own experience exemplified what Carol Dweck has named a "growth mindset." It's one thing to have a growth mindset about the things we all find challenging, like Organic Chemistry, but another to maintain the intellectual courage to confront what you deeply believe to be true about your own capacity to be good at your job. So much of what we do as teachers involves our hearts and our instincts. When we acknowledge that we have new things to learn, we are actually saying we are finding new ways to be. That's hard. That's courage.

Opening ourselves up to continuous, deeper learning is just the first step toward making professional development meaningful. The next test of our intellectual courage comes in the actual act of professional learning. The human brain learns in the same uncomfortable way throughout our lives: by seeking to resolve cognitive dissonance through additional input. Teachers engaged in high-quality professional development experiences see their work as a cycle. The cycle moves from dissonance and disconnection to learning, to integration of new ideas and practices, then back to dissonance as the next challenge arises or is identified.

This cycle is put into motion when teachers take the risk of sharing their particular and unique "sticking points." Naming them out loud is often a humbling, yet necessary, act. When a teacher can move from naming the general sticking point to the specific, it can be a simple but transformative act of courage: "I am pretty good at establishing a productive classroom culture (general). I establish expectations well and my students know I will follow through (specific). What I could do better is give more precise directions (specific)." It is the hallmark of a good teacher to name and pursue precise professional learning goals.

Cheryl Photo 2.jpg

What we often forget or overlook when participating in professional learning that we only become the best teacher we can be when both the mind and spirit are deeply engaged. In fact, we have to participate, not just attend. Deep engagement for adults looks much like it does for children. Learners are active--their minds, their mouths, their hands are all about the work. They feel safe to take risks in public, to make mistakes, to try challenging tasks and be able to critique themselves and others.

As professional learners, just as with students, we must summon our intellectual courage to apply what we have learned to our practice. Often we confuse what happens in a "PD workshop" with what happens when a professional seeks and uses feedback to improve his or her practice. Workshops may improve our knowledge, but meaningful learning involves integrating that knowledge into some kind of decision ("I will write out my directions before giving them") and getting feedback on that decision. ("Before I wrote out my directions, students asked as many as 10 clarifying directions about what they should do. After I wrote out my directions, the number of questions ranged from zero to two.")

Over time, professional development has earned a troubling reputation as something to be stoically endured. We have all had that "bad PD" session where the leader of the work talked instead of modeled, where a PowerPoint replaced a protocol-based discussion, and where compliance and "PD hours" stood in for real learning. Let's insist on working together--with the guidance and support of an "expert other" some of the time--to solve authentic problems, to question and probe, and to seek and use feedback in order to refine our work and in service of students. Let's find the intellectual courage to insist that real learning--the kind that invigorates and supports us all--be part of every education professional's work every day.

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« Solidarity Forever: Let This Principle Defend our Schools | Main | Teaching Controversy where None Exists: The Fight over Evolution and Global Warming »

What Does a "Good Wife" Do When a "Stern Father" Becomes Abusive?

I am going out on a limb here with some experimental thinking that was provoked by a recent commentary by a Berkeley professor of linguistics, George Lakoff. In this post, Lakoff offers a way of understanding the recent turmoil in Wisconsin, in the context of the conservative world view.

He writes:

The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don't have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

In the past I have written about a sort of feminist understanding of the way teachers have been disempowered historically. We have a profession that is 80% female, working in schools where the principal is more often male, reproducing in some ways the authority structure of the home. If a student gets in trouble, off he is sent to the principal's office for discipline - the school's version of "just wait 'til your father gets home!"

In this context, the teacher has become a sort of "wife." And there is pressure on her to be a "good wife." The "good wife" must subordinate herself to the authority of the father, and enforce the rules the father has set forth. The rules are embodied in the tests the students must pass to gain official approval, and those who rebel are pushed out of school or have diplomas withheld. And schools, teachers and principals unable to coerce students to perform are likewise punished. While some teachers have raised moral objections to the test-and-punish regime set forth by No Child Left Behind, the profession - and our unions - have largely complied with federal and state mandates.

But what happens when the stern father becomes abusive?

Lakoff was writing about the situation in Wisconsin, where teachers and other public employees are being "disciplined" by Governor Scott right now. The stern father has crossed the line and is seeking to subordinate the wives completely, by destroying their ability to even advocate for themselves through collective bargaining.

Teachers in Wisconsin are in danger of becoming "bad wives," who defy the man of the house. To that, I say it is about time. And as long as we are pushing back, let's go all the way, and reject our federal government's stern father mandates in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top as well. Some of us rebels are putting together a protest march in Washington, DC, this summer to Save Our Schools. Want to come?

What do you think? Are teachers too accustomed to being "good wives"? Is it time to break some dishes?

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Monthly Archives: June 2013

Postcard from the Permian Basin, West Texas and New Mexico

What did West Texas and New Mexico look like during the Permian, 260 million years ago? That’s the question six Tennessee Tech earth science students attempted to answer on a nine-day field trip, May 23-June 1, 2013. Over the course … Continue reading

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Will Major League Baseball and St. Paul deliver? Fans of Neighborhood House’s West Side ball fields holding breath

In advance of the All-Star Game that takes place at Target Field next summer, the Minnesota Twins have asked Major League Baseball for a $300,000 favor. The Twins want the league to pitch in money for a renovation of little league fields behind Neighborhood House and the El Rio Vista Rec Center on St. Paul’s West Side.

“The Twins are awaiting notice from the MLB,” said Neighborhood House director Armando Camacho.

Camacho learned to speak English by playing football on those athletic fields. Camacho, a Puerto Rican who moved to the West Side when he was six years old, went on to play football for two years at the University of St. Thomas, and eventually moved back to the West Side to run Neighborhood House, one of the city’s oldest and most respected community organizations.

Those ball fields — now known as the Gilbert De La O. ball fields after the longtime Neighborhood House community icon who still walks his dog there daily — mean the world to Camacho and the West Side Boosters, who oversee football and baseball programming there. All the more reason, he figures, to tear them up.

The plan is ambitious. He’d like to pour $2 million into a complete renovation, complete with artificial turf, lighting and fencing. Studio 5 Architects has already donated a free design. Two West Side construction firms, PCL and Bolander, have been guiding Camacho through the ins and outs of construction particulars.

“I’ve been working on this for five years, since I came back to the West Side to run Neighborhood House,” Camacho said. “Those ball fields kept me off the streets.”

How realistic is his goal? On Wednesday, he’ll find out. The city of St. Paul’s Capital Improvement Budget committee has recommended that the mayor and city council allocate more than $1.7 million toward the project in 2014 and 2015. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman delivers his annual budget address at noon Wednesday at Matsuura Machinery, 325 Randolph Ave. Camacho will be there, and he’ll be all ears.

“We’re not telling government to fix these fields on their own,” said Camacho, who is keeping his fingers crossed that Major League Baseball will also deliver.


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buy zithromax online usa Buy kamagra oral jelly Blogs for Bands » Discography 0.1.6 – Lightweight Flash Player

Discography 0.1.6 – Lightweight Flash Player

I’ve added an option to the plugin to let you use the lightweight Delicious “playtagger” player on your site.  This will be much faster than the default flash player, but will make it much easier for people to download your music.  If this is undesirable, stick with the default one.

As always, the new version is up for download on the plugin page.

  • John S. says:

    I’m having trouble getting the mp3′s to play, any ideas on what’s happening?

  • Tobias Ross says:

    Am I missing something. Is there a way to get a listing of a single album and it’s tracks on a page? or just albums and songs?

  • Dan says:

    @Tobias Ross: Well, you aren’t missing anything. There’s no way to do that right now. Some or all of it will be coming with version 0.2.0, which I am working on in my free time (what? what’s this thing called “free time”?)

  • Dan says:

    @John S.: Have you since figured it out? They played just fine when I visited your site just now.

  • EcLipsaL says:

    This is a stupid question, but how do you get the mp3 added to the flash player?

    I can’t figure it out.

  • Dan says:

    @EcLipsaL: For now, you just want to put the link to the mp3 file into the “free download link” field. If you disable free downloads, but enable streaming, it will not show a download link, but will include the flash player.

  • EcLipsaL says:

    Thanks dude this is an awesome plugin. I got it working with wp-ecommerce…

  • steph says:

    i’m looking for a demo of this plugin – any links?

  • Dan says:

    Groovelily ( is using it.

  • Kevin S says:

    Hey Dan,

    Really liking this plugin. This is a one of a kind plugin that I’m surprise hasn’t come to fruition any soon than it has. Keep up in the good work!

    However, I’m having some minor formatting issues with it.

    First, it seems like the album covers are overlapping the title bars.

    Second, the albums are butting up against one another (top/bottom).

    Also, here are some things I’d like to see in future releases (I’d even pay for this!)

    * Click on the album cover for a larger image.
    * Have categories be a pull down menu option.
    * Give confirmation on saves/adds.
    * Have each album be it’s own unique page.

  • alton says:

    Hey Dan,
    Firstly, big thankYOU for the plugin. :) . It is pretty neat.

    A little question: Since every song gets its own page, i was wondering how i could add tags to a song?

  • Dan says:

    @alton: Here’s the issue with that request. By default WordPress doesn’t let you add tags to a page (as opposed to a post). If you think it would really be useful (though you might need another plugin to make them show up in tag searches), I could see what implications it would have to do something like I have with the gigs calendar.

  • Please I ask you something very special, I have a Hard Rock Band here in Belém of Pará, Brazil, close amazon forest, and I need so much your help, so I´m sending sites from my band and the release, please read to me and see what you can do to me to help me to spread the world my songs, if there is a chance to sign a deal with some record company. Please help me I need a help to succeed my band ploease. I thank you somuch for everything you can do to me. This band is my life. God bless you forever by everything.

    Burning Brains The Band

    Everything started when, long time ago, when I was 18 years, I formed my first hard rock band called Notredame, showing a nice work that now to the 46 years, I rescue hard rock of 70`s with a band called Burning Brains The Band, with great influences of Judas Priest, AC/DC, Mottorhead, Dokken, Ratt and the excellent Keel band, without a doubt. The songs show the day to day reality, and not forgetting the romantic ballads, that show what a real hard rock band is. Coming along with me my wife Alcyete Caracciolo, who is poet and to song-writer of the band, so she writes the letters in Portuguese and translates into the English. With only two months of formed band we receive an invitation from a great friend called Fred of the Arrepius Store, (store specialized in metal material and rock), to open the show of the DR. SIN, and certainly we accept without a doubt. After two months we opened the show of the band ANGRA here in Belém, what it was a great success. We participate of the program Protótipo from Culture FM Station, and a amazing show at the Store Ná Figueredo (Open Show) and not forgetting it Boteco (Computer Store Bands Contest). We had an interview with the SBT Television and filming of the band in the store Ná Figueredo with 3 released musics, what it can be seen in the photos of the ORKUT, what showed a much more mature band, with good musicians. We have now our first DVD preformed at again at Ná Figueredo Store and another filmed at Cultura TV. We carry through a show in the Coffee with Art, a very good public. Day 23 of May we had been at Culture Television for alive show to entire Brazil and the rest of the world. In this site below, we have ringtones to sell and to divulge the We want to show for the world that the Burning Brains The Band has a rock with quality and harmonious melodies, showing that romantic ballads remains in the good and old rock and roll. The band Burning Brains The Band: Pablo Monteiro: Bass, Antonio Jr: Vocal, Paulo Fernandes: Guitar, Mário Jorge: Guitarra and Carlos Junior: Drums. Our Band is registered in the Notary’s office Chermont Valley and the letters are registered in the sector of copyrights of the UFRJ.
    At this site above we have our songs as a contract signed with Horus Music to Sell our songs.
    You can hear our songs at those site below

  • Andrew says:

    Hi Dan,

    I can’t get this plugin to do anything. None of the SAVE buttons seem to work. I am running wordpress 2.5.1. Do you have any suggestions?

  • Patrick says:

    Hey Dan,
    I am new to wordpress, but am loving it. The only thing is…I am only using the free blog @
    I would like to use a lot of the custom things I am finding for wordpress…sandbox themes, these plugins of yours….but is that only possible with a wordpress page hosted on my own server. I dont see any section to install plugins on the blog.

  • Dan says:

    @Patrick: I thought I had replied, but now I don’t see it anywhere… weird.

    Anyway, as I thought I had said, you can’t install custom plugins on blogs. You have to have your own hosting to install plugins like mine.

  • Robbi says:

    Is it possible to show an album artist and release date along with the other album info on a page, and would it be possible to have songs listed without them having an individual page, for instrumentals??

  • Robbi says:

    Also, sorry for all the questions! Would it be possible to show the album a song appear on on an individual song page??

  • Taylor Dewey says:

    Thank you for taking the time to work on this plugin.. It’s *almost* exactly what I need. I plan on adding some shortcode options to it, but I’m having trouble getting started. It worked okay on a live, not-music-related blog, but I can’t do the dev there. I’ve been working on a new blog using a local install, but there is an error message I’m having trouble getting past:

    Warning: array_pop() [function.array-pop]: The argument should be an array in C:\Documents and Settings\...\public_html\wp-content\plugins\discography\discography.php on line 25

    It also errors on the other lines where the following code is present:

    ereg('/wp\-content/plugins/(.*)/discography\.php', __FILE__, $folder);
    $folder = get_bloginfo('wpurl') . '/wp-content/plugins/' . array_pop($folder) . '/';

    I’ve tried commenting out the ereg function and changing the $folder var to eliminate the array_pop function and instead write …/plugins/discography.php/ — it didn’t work. What am I missing here, or is it just not possible on a local install?

    Apache 2.2.3
    PHP 5.2
    MySQL: 5.0.27
    Wordpress: 2.6.2
    Running on a local dev install on Windows XP.

  • marsha says:

    using safari and firefox on macintosh ox 10.5.5 and I can not figure out how to get the songs to show up in the song list. I don’t have a little add sign anywhere. I’ve made pages and put them in media library and everything. help. this is exactly what we need.

  • daniel says:

    i just figured it out, we’ll need to work on the wording a bit but the code is great!!

    thanks dan, i’ll be in touch,

  • Nate says:

    Hey, awesome plugin. Worked like a charm. I just have one question, is there any way for me to edit the visuals, i.e. the black table border? It just sort of clashes.

    Thanks again, you’re awesome dude.

  • Hey man, looks like I need this plugin, but it seems that it is not yet compatible with the new version. Any timeframe when there will be a version of this fine plugin for 2.7?

    Cheers a bunch and keep up the good work!

    //Nemo @ ElektronikMusik

  • marcus says:

    hello guys, im using the discography plug in as a review site. but i like to know if i can show the last 10 “cds ” added to my discogrpahy or review section in the home page with a smal pic of the cd album…

    if some one knows please write me or write here for everyone can use this later…

    • Dan says:

      If you have a little PHP know how, you could certainly pull the data out of the database, or even use my plugin’s data access classes.

    • marcus says:

      thanks for the answer Dan, i will try to use the class that you say. thanks a lot

  • Robbi says:

    Silly question, but is there any way to split discographies between artists??

    I have around 6 artists on my fansite and they have a massive discography and I’d like to split it up a bit =)

  • Robbi says:

    I’m still learning PHP (beginner!) but I’m sure I’ll work it out over the next few weeks. Thanks for the quick reply, love the plugin!!

  • Krsna says:

    Hi Dan,
    You appear to me like an angel to me.
    I scaled the whole damn web and only found expensive php scripts to sell music. But i did not wanna leave the wordpress platform.
    But you know what, i may have been left far behind as i simply cant manage to use your plugin, while for some it is working like a charm.

    I managed to handle several complicated wordpress plugins but i simply cant get mp3s uploaded and make them playable/downloadble using a flash player. fancy or not fancy.

    Since you stand as the messiah for musicians who is so technical as well. Dont you think it is a good idea to have atleast one 5 minute video tutorial or something for people like me. In fact this is my second try after months with discography and i am still clueless or maybe i am loosing patience in life.

    Some help could make me a star. And you could go on to be star makers too.

  • Krsna says:

    Ok Dan I guess, i did manage to crack the ethereal code.
    And pardon me for my rants. As it is, it’s a heck of a task to handle more than 50 VSTs that i use to do my music programming. PHP stuff often gets you unnerving.
    until the next breakthrough i will keep my mouth shut. :)

  • Krsna says:

    Now even when i am trying to put a price tag to a song and the album too, it is still giving me the file to download. How to get it playin on a fancy player instead for a preview.

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text:
24 June 2010

The Gates S1 E1 "Pilot"

Spoilers Ahead

This is truly a golden age for vampire fans. You can't go two minutes without stumbling over another book or movie or TV show. When I think of how many dry spells we've had to suffer through... but no more! The latest addition to the genre is ABC's The Gates, which premiered on Sunday. And you know what? It wasn't too shabby.

I can already tell this show is going to tax my poor note-taking hand (between it, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries, I'm going to end up with a cramping, twisted claw). There are multiple characters of multiple paranormal descents (plus humans) and all kinds of storylines already. And while it was originally described (not by me) as Buffy meets Desperate Housewives, as of this episode it reminds me more of The Vampire Diaries meets Wolf Lake, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

"The Gates" is an idyllic (on the surface, anyway) suburban gated community that qualifies as a character in itself. As we learn through a bit of awkward exposition, the place was built by Frank Buckley (Brett Cullen, Lost)
who spared no expense to make it the most secure community ever. In fact, saying it's prison-like is probably not going too far (the place is covered with sensors and cameras, which the cops monitor from the police station). People move to The Gates to be safe, which is ironic as quite a number of them qualify as the things everyone else fears: werewolves, vampires, and witches.

The wolves seem to be in the greatest numbers. There's a sense that the pack runs things, although not every wolf belongs to the pack. And not everyone knows about the wolves, which seems to be how they like it (in fact, the fewer people that know the better). So far confirmed weres are: (high school football) Coach Ross, leader of the pack's teens Lukas Ford, and jealous boyfriend and lone wolf Brett Crezski (played by Colton Haynes, who's also in the upcoming Teen Wolf).

As far as we know there are only two witches in town: good witch and helpful herbalist Peg Mueller, and bitchy witch Devon (Chandra West, who appeared on Forever Knight and Kindred: The Embraced). Devon has a tendency to lure people into her spa and ply them with herbal potions they don't realize are potions. Peg has an ethical issue with that. Devon also isn't above threatening her fellow Gates residents--even the fanged ones. Characters like this always annoy me, but apparently someone out there enjoys them as they keep turning up in just about every show (bitchy for the sake of bitchy isn't the same as a nemesis).

And then there is the reason we watch shows like The Gates: the vampires. So far there are only two, Claire Radcliff (played by Rhona Mitra, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans) and husband/sire Dylan Radcliff (Luke Mably, 28 Days Later). Luckily I like them both. Claire is especially charismatic, which is unexpected as one of the first things she does is kill a hapless contractor. But Claire is easy to relate to, particularly with her distaste for suburban life, and her struggle to control her vampire nature for the sake of her adopted daughter, Emily. The Gates is the only safe place for the Radcliffs and their daughter, and in order to stay in The Gates, one must conform. Killing people does not conform.

Lastly, there's the humans. Central are the Monohans: Nick (Frank Grillo, Prison Break) disgraced Chicago homicide detective and now Chief of Police in The Gates; wife Sarah (Marisol Nichols, 24) who just wants a normal life; son Charlie (Travis Caldwell, Parenthood) who immediately gets on the bad side of werewolf Brett by catching the interest of his girlfriend Andie; and daughter Dana (McKaley Miller), annoyingly precocious and source of awkward exposition. Other humans include the aforementioned Andie Bates (Skyler Samuels, The Stepfather), formerly of Seattle and love interest of both Brett and Charlie; and deputies Marcus (Justin Miles, The Crazies) and Leigh (Janina Gavankar, Dollhouse). At least, they're human as far as we know.

So the basic premise of the first episode is that Claire kills the contractor, and when her husband finds out they hatch an elaborate scheme to dump the body and make it look like the wolves did it. Meanwhile, the new Chief of Police, Nick, can't ignore his instincts (the same ones that apparently led to him killing an unarmed suspect back in Chicago). When he finds out about the missing contractor, and sees video footage of the guy crashing his truck into a pillar outside the Radcliffs' house, he starts investigating the vampires, both legally (questioning them, trying to obtain search warrants) and not so much (skulking around their house in the middle of the night). When it becomes clear that nobody wants him to pursue this (especially his wife) he decides to drop the case. But when he goes to identify a body and instead of the missing contractor finds the supposedly happily retired former Chief of Police, there's obviously not going to be any sort of quiet, normal life for Nick. And to complicate matters, Devon knows that Claire moved the contractor's truck into her garage [after killing him]. What other skeletons are buried in this place and how long until the entire house of cards comes crashing down?

I can't say the pilot was great but it was promising. Most of the characters and actors are decent, there's enough surprises to keep things interesting, the melodrama isn't too obnoxious, and there's plenty of eye candy to keep everyone happy. There's nothing earth shattering about the writing, cinematography, costumes, or setting (well, the Gates themselves are nice) but that can always come later. There are a few things that definitely need to change: Devon and Dana need to be toned down, and there needs to be more of Emily Radcliff--she's the reason her parents have to hide who they are; viewers should get a chance to actually care about the kid. The writers are also going to need to keep the vampire content fairly high; otherwise, it's just another show about another dissatisfied housewife and her uptight husband.

So, do we really need another vampire show? Probably not, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy it while it lasts.

Fang Files

Appearance: Human, with fangs that descend or retract at will.

Strengths: Heightened sense of smell, hearing. Strength. Can easily jump from heights.

Weaknesses: The sun (need to cover skin completely with a special lotion in order not to burn), blood lust.

Mythology: Not much yet, although the Radcliffs need to assimilate into human society in order to stay safely in The Gates and protect their adopted daughter.

Sound Bites

Claire: (with welcome casserole) Hi. Please tell me you eat carbs.

Claire: (to Devon, in response to being threatened) I could end you, and you'd never see it coming.

Nick Monohan: Looks like a nice little town.

The Gates, Season 1 Episode 1 "Pilot." Written by Grant Scharbo and Richard Hatem. Directed by Terry McDonough. From ABC.

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