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 definit

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 "

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!

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

It seems a bit silly to be posting this to slashdot, but according to the methods described by Geertz, it's a fundamental step. Geertz's method relies on "thick description"--careful description of even the most seemingly benign aspects of a community.

After 10 years as an editor and writer of college textbooks, I have decided to return to the fray: I'm now back in graduate school, as a master's candidate in rhetoric and composition. In graduate school, you are asked to do bizarre things like "ethnographic analysis." Since it is one of my favorite communities, I have decided to do an ethnographic analysis of Slashdot.

Jazzman's cafe at UNCC has already started playing Christmas music. Nonstop. In November. What used to be a cool hangout now isn't much better than a mall. What a grinch I am!

Another permanently recorded, immortalized, etched in stone journal entry. Better make it profound!

Time to test my journal. This will go down on my permanent record. oooh. scary!