I’ve been glued to my computer since Monday. I’m pulling together a paper for next week’s APSA conference and have already gotten the "where’s your stupid paper" e-mail from the chair of the panel. It’s now a tradition. I must wait until I get the "where’s your stupid paper" e-mail before I kick into high gear and finish off the thing. I really must get a new tradition, because this week has been crazy.
The plan is to write the conclusion tonight. Edit all day tomorrow and send it out tomorrow night. The problem with writing papers during the last weeks of August is that the kids are home full time. Camp and daycare are finished. So, I’ve been letting them play as much video games as they like with the vague hope that Tim Burke is right and I haven’t permanently scarred them. So what if Ian has started calling us names from Super Mario Brothers? Jonah is Bowser and I’m Kirby.
In addition to writing the paper, I somehow got sucked into Facebook. On Sunday, I followed a link in my sitemeter referrals to Facebook. Facebook wouldn’t let me see the page until I became a member, so I decided to sign up. Henry Farrell said that he signed up on Facebook this summer, because as an academic who specialized in technology and politics, he really had to know about such things. Sounded like a good reason to spend my time this week when I had oh-so many other things to do. Yeah, it was for work.
Really strange this Facebook thing. None of my friends from outside of the blogs are on it. I think only one person out of the 250 from my high school class has signed up for it. Only 12 from the college class of thousands. Yet, most of the academic bloggers are on it, which feels a little redundant. I find the whole asking people to be your friend thing a little freaky. It’s the eighth grade dance all over again and nobody wants to dance with me. I have to admit spending some time reviewing other peoples’ friends and monitoring the degrees of separation.
Then I just watched the McArdle – Drezner bloggingheads show. All sixty of minutes it, while the boys pretended to be characters in their video game and beat the crap out of each other in the next room. "Quiet down, kids. I have to hear what Megan and Dan have to say about sub-prime mortgages." I have to admit that I really liked it. Haven’t been a huge fan of the bloggingheads show in general, but I think that bloggers are getting the kinks out and things are getting fun. My theory about blogging is that new players are no longer coming into the system, but the old ones who stick around are getting better and better.
OK, I’m going to do another post on the McArdle-Drezner blogginghead episode later tonight. They covered a lot of topics that we’ve been talking about around here, but haven’t made it to the blog.
Apt. 11d 