Sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a very friendly glass of Cavit pinot grigio. I'm going to try to describe the experience as precisely as I can. First of all, this is not at all the ideal setting. My beat-up wooden kitchen table is a pale yellowish color, which doesn't allow me to see the color of the pinot clearly. The glass, though elegant, is etched with a lovely floral pattern that again distracts from a proper appreciation of the color and texture of the wine. I've just finished a cup of coffee, and I have a mild headache. The wine should take care of that in a few minutes. In the background, my daughter is in the next room, watching the "bonus material" for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, so my careful meditation over my glass is punctuated by laser blasts and George Lucas' high-pitched overanalysis of the film.

I lift the glass to my nose, swirling the amber liquid more clumsily than I should. There's not too much of a smell to this wine. A hint of must, perhaps a piney aroma. The color of the wine is pale yellow, with not a lot of shape to it--I don't see much difference in color from the deep center of the glass to the edge where there is less wine.

The first sip. I let the wine flow between my lips into my mouth. As it first pools into my tongue, I get my first taste. The pine becomes stronger, overwhelming the must with its crispness. There is also a lightness to it. Slightly sweet, like green grapes, or kiwi, but with a much sharper texture. As the wine slips over the edge of my tongue into the base of my mouth, the flavors intensify, and the wine warms through contact with skin. The wine slides down my throat, with a hint of dryness. Again pine is the most prominent taste.

After about a half a glass, I can feel my headache begin to slip away. This is a wonderful way to take the edge off of a busy Saturday afternoon!

Yo! Just heard Melly-Mel on NPR today. Turns out Grandmaster Flash performed one of the first records to be indoctrinated into Smithsonian's recording hall of fame, which just happened over the past couple of days.

I was fairly big into rap music in high school. I remember not liking Grandmaster Flash as much as Whodini, Egyptian Lover, and L.L. Cool J. But of course what made Grandmaster Flash different is that they covered more "serious" topics such as drugs, crime, etc. in some of their raps, so they are the ones that got noticed by the intellectuals. Compare:

Street kid gets arrested
Gonna do some time
He'll get out three years from now
just to commit more crime

to this:

My radio, believe me I like it loud!
I'm the man with the box that can rock the crowd,
Walking down the street
to the hard core beat
While my J V C vi-BRATES the concrete!

The first is in the Smithsonian. The second set up L.L. Cool J for a career in TV and movies. Sadly, in sync with the lowbrow tastes of the rest of America, I have to say I prefer L.L. Cool J too!

Today I emerged from Fretwell hall to see the first misty raindrops of the month, gently trickling down the red brick pathways of campus. The drizzle was slight enough to just dampen me on my quarter-mile walk to the parking deck, but heavy enough to still feel like rain. This is nostalgic weather for me, reminding me of too many Seattle days waiting for the school bus, or walking to The Cricket for an evening of conversation and endless coffee refills.

Now, sitting in my dusky kitchen, I stare out into my glowing gray backyard, droplets of water glistening on our bare maple. Every so often, a car whizzes by on the road behind the Leland Cypruses, with that familiar sound of tire on wet pavement.

So many times as a child, I woke up to that sound, the only notice that it had been raining. So many times, I walked down dark chilly stairs, onto our squeaky porch, and began unbundling newspapers for dark morning delivery. So many times, I remember putting an old paper atop the stack as I carted them up 75th street, raindrops creating mini supernovas atop yesterday's news.

Here, now, I can only dream about those days. The damp drips are familiar, as are the tires. But the maples and cypruses and sweetgums are not. The cardinals and bluebirds are not. If a mallard or a seagull waddled by, things would seem more appropriate. But there are no papers to deliver on my front porch. There are no mountains behind the clouds. Those things gradually fade into memory, only to be reawakened some other day, drip by shimmering drop.

So. What now?

I think a key to a productive life is simply to not to ever slow down. It really could work--just never stop for a rest, simply move from one tough task to the next. The question is, are we then reduced to the status of automatons? I've just finished grading literally hundreds of student essays. (Okay, it was actually about 40, but you get the idea!) My immediate inclination is to sit down on my comfortable green couch, uncork a bottle of cheap wine, and channel-surf my way into oblivion.

On the other hand, attractive as a persistent vegetative state may seem right now, in six months I would be knocking myself for having achieved nothing. I find myself thinking that platitude to which I was first introduced reading the "Thomas the Tank Engine" books to my son: "a change is as good as a rest." That's a pretty believable lie! A truer statement: "a rest is as good as a rest!"

Boy, reading over what I've just read, I can think of only one thing to add: Welcome to my aphorism hell.

Man! I'm still not even halfway through. I'm now on number 17 out of 45. Grading is unbelievably challenging because each student has a new set of problems. Some students have mastered the basics, so you need to push them to develop their voice, or find a more unique and interesting way to tell their story. On the other hand, others have so many problems that you just need to pick a few of them for them to concentrate on so they'r not overwhelmed.

Yes, it's challenging, but it truly drains your brain. It's not menial labor, not by a long shot. It's not even semi-menial--it's full-fledged, high-octane, thinking work. Of course the answer, given how little they're paying me, is to drop down the octane a couple of notches. To coast. Unfortunately for me, I have too much respect for my students to do that. One thing I can say for sure is this is the last time I'm going to promise to do all my grading in two days. It's a minimum of a week from here on out.

[Sung to the tune of "rawhide"]

Grading, grading, grading,
Let's keep them papers grading,
grading, grading, grading, away!
Write 'em up, move 'em out, roll 'em up, send 'em in,
Write 'em up, move 'em out, grading!

It's blood and sweat and typos,
It's rolling, dangling participos,
It's incomplete sentencos, grading!

Write 'em up, move 'em out, roll 'em up, send 'em in,
Write 'em up, move 'em out, grading!

Write 'em up, move 'em out, roll 'em up, send 'em in,
Write 'em up, move 'em out, grading!

I'm about 1/5 of the way through grading 40-some-odd essays about "kids these days." Whew!

Daily. Daily. Daily. Daily. As in seven days a week. This is going to require some discipline. I have a good excuse, though. I really do. I was dealing with frantic children. Children who shouldn't have to be personally responsible for their own fates. You see, my kids (age 9 and 11) had to fill out admissions forms for private school yesterday. In ink! If they mess up, they might not get in! Of course, it really wouldn't be the end of the world if they didn't get in. My son, just like hundreds of others, would simply be bussed for an hour an fifteen minutes each way to a remote school for the privilege of sitting in an overcrowded trailer. Somehow I don't think this is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he was advocating a free, public education for all.

I rode a bus to school from the fifth grade on. I guess this would be one good reason for me to support public education today, but I'm afraid public education in Mecklenburg county in 2003 is not what it was in Seattle in 1980. The only class I ever had in a trailer was music in fifth grade. More than half of Bradley Middle school (where my son will likely be assigned) is in trailers. Class size is 35, compared to 20 at the private school we're considering.

But look at the good news in today's Charlotte Observer! Our property taxes will be going down! At least we won't have to pay more for our crappy public schools!

I was looking over last night's entry, and I think I might actually have a semi-decent point there. I wonder why that is? Why is it that I can handle mind-numbingly dull work, but not semi-boring-but-occasionally-interesting work? I get up every morning and fastiduously do the dishes, making the kitchen spotless [all right, if I was truly fastiduous, I'd have done the dishes last night, but I'm on a roll here, okay?], but my home office is a complete disaster area. To clean the office is definitely semi-menial. I need to think about where things go, what I need to keep and what I can throw away, and whether it would be better to neatly arrange all the computer cables or just pile them in a stack behind the desk. That must mean that doing the dishes isn't semi-menial but in fact fully menial. The difference, of course, is that the dishes have become routine. I don't have to think about the dishes--I can think about anything I want while I'm doing them (for example, all the semi-menial jobs I'll need to put off today), so actually, my mind is more engaged when I'm doing the dishes than when I'm paying the bills or cleaning the office. So I either need to be a dishwasher or a brain surgeon, but definitely not an accountant, a hairdresser, or, I'd venture a guess, even a computer programmer. These would all qualify as semi-menial jobs, and therefore they're not for me.

11:20 on a Saturday night. Almost forgot to do the journaling thing today. Just finished watching the U.S. Figure Skating Championship. I just have to say, the U.S. Men are a bunch of complete wusses. The first guy up falls down after about 30 seconds and quits. The next guy breaks a little ribbon on his pants and wants a do-over. Meanwhile one of the ladies in pairs opens up a gash in her knee requiring several stitches, and she gets up, finishes her routine, and wins a bronze medal!

After the men fell all over each other trying to lose the national championship, the women got in their and laid down one awesome performance after another. You could almost make a legitimate case that Michelle Kwan and Sarah Hughes could have split the title, they both skated so perfectly. That's what sweet Peggy Fleming said anyway. Don't make me laugh, Peggy. Michelle skated a flawless routine, and Sarah lumbered through an easier one, just barely avoiding mistakes all the way through.

Today I spent nearly the entire day in front of the computer, either recording student grades or paying bills. Basically, I was an accountant for a day. There's one career to scratch off the watchlist. Talk about dull!

Actually I don't mind doing menial tasks on the computer--it's the semi-menial ones that truly bug me. I could do data entry for hours on end (and I did, in college--that was my work-study job). But recording student grades is a pain because you have to kinda semi- pay attention to what you're doing. And you need to make sure you don't skip anybody, and you have to sort through e-mails asking for tonight's homework, etc. etc. It's a semi-menial job. Same with paying the bills. You have to at least pay enough attention to remember if you paid that bill last month, or what you spent $46 on at Target last month. Then you really need to pay attention when the checkbook doesn't balance, or you put the wrong bill with the wrong check or something. Classic semi-menial job. Give me straight data-entry or word processing over that stuff any day. Either that or hard core, serious, to-the-bone thinking. None of that inbetween stuff for me!

Home.

Happy to be here after a rough first week of classes. Martin Luther King, I am eternally grateful for you having been born in early January. No class until Wednesday! I think mainly the teaching is what's exhausting me. I can handle taking several classes, but teaching them truly wears on my soul.

That said, I think I'm becoming a better teacher--more demanding of my students, but more understanding of what they're going through.

All this journaling has me writing more than ever. Commontext Blog, this blog, posting on kairosnews. I don't know if I'm saying much of importance, and I don't know how long I'll keep it up, but for now it feels good.

Now this will be my personal journal. Instead of posting my pontifications about slashdot, I'll simply use this as a space to record my deepest, darkest, inmost secrets. Well, maybe not those, but it'll be a place to speak my mind. Not that I don't do that anywhere else I happen to be online. Okay, in all honesty, I'm doing this because a journal is a requirement for my English 5104 class, and this is the most convenient place to keep it. Nonetheless, I expect it will be a fun project.

Where to begin? I'd say the beginning, but I've already written about that elsewhere. How about just describing my day so far? The day started off poorly because the wife and I stayed up too late last night. No, we weren't doing THAT! Get your mind out of the gutter. Actually we were watching a really bad movie from 1988: "Satisfaction," with Justine Bateman, Julia Roberts, and Liam Neeson. Guess who got top billing? Hint: it wasn't Julia or Liam. I have to admit I had a mighty big crush on Justine in the mid '80s.

Anyway, we were being "good" and turned the TV off at 11:00 (halfway through the movie--don't worry, we've got the rest on TIVO), but then we sat talking and drinking wine until past midnight. At 35, I can't get by on just 6 hours of sleep anymore, so when the alarm rang at 6:15, I got up, woke up my son, and instead of going for the usual morning run, went straight back to bed. By 7:15 the kids were up and dressed. We ate breakfast with them in our bathrobes.

Since then it's been work, work, work. If you want to see what I've been up to, visit the commontext blog.

In addition to the "seemy underbelly" trolls, many slashdot trolls are subtler. Regular slashdot contributors have identified certain biases in the slashdot community: Anti-Microsoft, Pro-Apple; Anti-copyright, Pro-open source; Anti-Establishment, Pro-individual liberties; Anti-newbie, Pro-technophile. These biases are so pronounced that even a well-formed argument that flouts the basic biases of the community will be regarded as a troll. This comment is an excellent example. While it's well-argued, it's also a comment that has been posted several times, to several different slashdot articles. It's there to "rock the boat," and many readers have taken the bait and actually responded to the comment. At the same time, it's been modded down to a "-1 troll."

But what if the comment had not been repeated? Does commentary such as this promote healthy debate, or is it merely a distraction from the more compelling issues at hand? If members of the community have a known set of values, doesn't it make sense for them to exclude those who don't share their values? Should a gun-club admit gun control advocates to its membership? The main point of the club in this instance is to share with other gun owners--obviously there is a time and a place for gun control debates, but probably not in the day to day workings of the club.

On the other hand, users rely on slashdot not only for camaraderie, but also for news and answers to technical questions. Perhaps an open exchange of views is important in such a context.

In the end, it's important to remember that slashdot is in many ways self-defined, but it's also still a constructed community. Its editors created the code that runs the sited, including the moderation system itself. Editors select the stories that appear on the slashdot front page. Yet in certain critical ways, the editors have chosen to place much of the control of the site in the hands of its users, making it a very unique community indeed. I hope my analysis has shed some light on the workings of this fascinating community--a community I will continue to be a part of in the forseeable future.

Slashdot has an ugly underside. This is the world of trolls. Trolls come in several flavors. The classic definition of troll is "an electronic mail message, Usenet posting or other (electronic) communication which is intentionally incorrect, but not overtly controversial." FOLDOC makes a distinction between "troll" and "flame bait", which is a less subtle post intended to incite. On slashdot, the idea of a troll has evolved to subsume classic trolls, flame bait, and off-topic posts.

Any front-page story on slashdot will inevitably be bombarded with trolls. Simply changing the moderation threshold to -1 reveals a whole new world of crude, even hateful posts. Many of these are immediately moderated down by the site editors, and others are quickly caught by community moderators, but occasionally such a comment slips through the radar, giving the slashdot community an edge rarely seen in mainstream journalism.

Perhaps the most notorious troll is the hideous goatse link. Someone has apparently registered the domain "http://goatse.cx" and used it to host an obscene image. I won't include a link here, but if you're brave, type the url into your browser address box to see it. Trolling comments would include a link to this site in an otherwise innocuous statement. Venemous flame wars ensued.

Because slashdot makes it easy for anyone to post a comment anonymously, and because of the site's popularity, these acts of vandalism are probably inevitable. Like the red-light district of a city, the world of trolls is an intriguing place to visit. I'll probably spend a few more entries discussing them.

Slashdot uses a unique community moderation system to determine which user comments are most valuable. The basic idea is that each comment starts with a certain "value," expressed in points ranging from -1 to +5. Anonymous posts start with a value of 0, and signed posts generally start with a value of 1. Users can then choose which comments they see by selecting from a "threshold" menu button at the top of the list of comments. That's when the fun begins!

Moderators, chosen from the pool of registered users based on their previous contributions to slashdot, are periodically given five "points" with which to moderate the comments of others. They can use the points to moderate a comment up or down. They can also choose from a set of descriptive words ("insightful," "interesting," "funny," "off-topic," "troll"). Users build "karma" by having their comments rated highly. "Karma" used to be an actual numerical value which was increased for positive moderations and decreased for negative moderations. However, it is now represented only as a qualitative value ("good," "positive," "negative," "excellent"), apparently an effort to reduce the number of users who view slashdot as a "game" you can "win" with more karma ["karma whores," in the slashdot vernacular].

Okay, now let's see how this system works in practice. I've chosen to analyze a portion of a discussion about a news story describing a successful test of a military laser capable of destroying artillery shells in flight. Here's a link to the archived conversation:

Laser Shoots Down Artillery Shell In Flight

The first poster starts off with a relatively interesting question: wouldn't the momentum of the projectile still carry it forward to its target? The first respondent, "kbonin," offers a fairly reasonable response--the laser would cause the explosives within the projectile to detonate, completely destroying it. The next response, by "Anonymous coward" [respondents who post anonymously are automaticaly given this shameful moniker], mentions that s/he has seen a television show explaining that lasers destroy missiles by igniting the fuel that propels them. The fact that this comment was posted just two minutes after kbonin's response probably means that "Anonymous Coward" was in the process of writing his/her own response when kbonin's response was posted.

The conversation really starts to get interesting with ceejayoz's response to Anonymous Coward. "*sigh* Insightful?" is a dig at the moderation of Anonymous Coward's response. Then ceejayoz corrects the factual error in Anonymous Coward's response--we're talking about artillery here, not missiles.

MonadicIQ takes the conversation in another direction with a joke about Captain Kirk. Apparently the moderators weren't as impressed with MonadicIQ's original comment as they were with charlesbakerharris's response: "That's a *phasor*. Lasers are so 2280." But in the end (not the end of the conversation, just the end of the small portion I've arbitrarily selected), the moderators are most impressed with TheSync's observation that missiles kill with shrapnel, which the laser would cause to fall short of the target.

What's interesting about slashdot is that the conversants are aware of the varying levels of expertise of the individual participants, but also that they have enough confidence in the slashdot system that they believe the correct response will eventually be generated. The system works because the participants have implicitly agreed to a set of conventions.

What complicates the scenario for online discussion is that the "discussion" itself is not the same as a normal discussion--rather than two participants, there are thousands, and there is no assurance that anyone is "listening" to anything you "say." Indeed, in the snippet of slashdot discussion I examine here, no one person speaks more than once. What's most striking to me is that even though it's clear that the online discussion is very different from a "real" one, the participants instinctively act as though it is real, and they trust the moderation system to out those who flout the conventions of actual conversation.

In the slashdot community, the concept of "time" is unusual. On slashdot's home page, news items appear at a rate of about one per hour. The "news" for the most part, isn't new at all--it consists of links to news stories previously published on other Web sites. Yet because slashdot's community has come to rely on slashdot as a source of news, readers frequently complain when a story is "old" or a "repeat." The notion that slashdot repeats itself is so commonly held that in today's discussion about the new game The Sims Online, an anonymous reader jokingly complains that The Sims can't actually be like slashdot because it can't "simulate repeat stories."

Another reader, dtml-try MyNick, attempts to point out that this story is a duplicate of a previous slashdot article. The moderators aren't buying this one, however--the previous article on slashdot linked to a different outside news source.

Within the comments section on individual articles, time can be an even more confusing concept. As the default, articles are displayed in the threaded mode. In this mode, the oldest comments are displayed first, which makes some intuitive sense from the reader's perspective. Reading from top to bottom, the comments play out like a conversation. The reader gets the sense the ideas are being built and developed. This chrono-logic begins to fall apart when we realize that slashdot has thousands of users, each of which may be replying to the same story simultaneously. Consider the following three comments, each posted to a story about Microsoft's attempt to preserve the brand name "Windows."

1
2
3

Comments 1 and 2 were posted at 12:17 p.m., with comment 3 posted at 12:18. Certainly the authors were writing their comments simultaneously--each had an "original" comment--yet the third commenter (Captain BooBoo) acknowledges that his comment is already "redundant" in a subsequent post!

A further wrinkle is added when comments are displayed as "threaded." Any response to a comment appears directly below the comment. Generally this makes a lot of sense--then we can follow a "thread" of conversation about a particular aspect of a topic. But what it means for the sense of "time" in the overall discussion is important. I could post a comment at 1:00. Someone else can then post a separate comment at 1:15. Then at 1:30 a third person can respond to my original comment. This third comment actually appears second in the list of comments. Of course, experienced users know to look at the time stamp appearing on each comment, but with often dozens of replies to a single comment, breaking down the timing becomes more complex. The "simple" act of reading through a list of responses to an article becomes more difficult, and what seemed like an intuitively sound way to organize comments starts to look more like a labyrinth than a coherent conversation.

Though readers [and moderators] typically are able to keep track of all this fairly reliably, savvier users (such as Captain BooBoo) above acknowledge the difficulty of keeping track of conversation, and offer cues to other readers: important both for saving face--showing that they understand the "rules" of the "game"--and for preserving the illusion that a "real" conversation is taking place.