Awesome, thank you! Once again, AskMe delivers.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 1:59 PM on July 18, 2008

Hey, I'm back. I'm now in the middle of my third trip up here, and am totally used to it. Heck, I came in February when it was -40 ambient all the time.

Thanks for all the good advice (including the one to send myself a bottle of whiskey with my gear, that's come in mighty handy after a frigid day out and about). I won't go on about the gear, but suffice it to say that yes, layers are the key to everything.

And this is an amazing, amazing place.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 1:44 AM on June 28, 2008

PlaceboToes
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 4:46 AM on June 18, 2008

FWIW, I've been working on it for 2+ years and still get thrown for a loop; I love Drupal, but it takes commitment and you might be better off with Ning or Joomla
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 3:50 PM on June 14, 2008

The best overview CD of a wide range of border music is Smithsonian/Folkways Borderlands: From Conjunto to Chicken Scratch
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 3:48 AM on June 12, 2008

You could consider the PhD in anthropology; you can read all the same stuff, but then apply it (and see how far it actually takes you) in real world ethnographic research, and test some of the more out there literary theory against more testable bodies of social thought that does not assume all the world's a text.

You will soon realize that the world of actual human practice and cognition is far more complex than anything Ziszek ever wrote, and that... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 3:55 AM on June 11, 2008 marked best answer

Thanks everyone
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:46 PM on June 8, 2008

Sorry, I should have been clear: guitar strings and accessories, not CDs and records!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 1:54 PM on May 27, 2008

Awesome, thanks box!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 2:57 PM on May 27, 2008

Following up, you won't believe this, but I got strings and picks at a WalMart off the interstate headed north -- you never know
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 2:03 PM on June 8, 2008

caddis has it I think

but if saving an hour is that crucial, I sure hope you aren't planning to fly to where you plan to rent the car, because the odds are you'll be more than an hour late before you get to the Hertz counter
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:12 AM on June 7, 2008

You need to go back and check it out Help -- the UWS is a lot less "detached" than it used to be, and you are exaggerating travel times terribly with words like "forever"

Many of my students live in Brooklyn and get to Morningside Heights on the 2/3 to the 12 in 30 -45 minutes, depending on time of day; I get there from the w village in 20-25 minutes

However, the advice to never stop in the middle of the sidewalk is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:15 AM on June 6, 2008

As I understand the clinical diagnosis, PPD "proper" has a duration of no more than a year; sustained clinical depression after a couple of rounds with PPD doesn't sound out of the question, but still chalking it up to childbirth rather than the longer horizon of parenting in the present seems like a counterproductive idea.

I agree with matteo; if the sexes were reversed people here would be calling the angry, depressed, rageful husband an ogre and telling the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:40 AM on May 22, 2008

This is a vexed question; the only realistic software option you have if you are serious about this is MacSpeech's Dictate, which (finally) is a port of Dragon Naturally Speaking's algorithms to the Mac, but you may be SOL, since it requires an Intel Mac, I believe, and it is still, like all Speech Recognition software, far from perfect and in need of lengthy training to your voice

You will pull your hair out using any prior solution, trust me - I've been following this... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:27 AM on May 17, 2008

Any old digital mp3 recorder will do, by the way; the better the mics, though, the better the SR

I would not use anything less expensive than a Zoom H2 (about $200); I've settled on the Edirol R09 as the best pocket-sized unit for most purposes however (about $400); there are options from Sony, Marantz, Nagra, M-Audio, and others out there, but forget the old Olympus unit you've got
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:29 AM on May 17, 2008

Back to point out that speech recognition requires good audio quality, so that's why I am saying to abandon any hope of playing the audio from an already crappy micro-cassette recorder into the mic on your laptop -- the loss of signal quality will be so egregious that nothing will be recognized by any SR application; you need a direct upload of a well-made audio recording, and by definition micro-cassette is crap anyway

iListen is a waste of money and effort; like... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:06 AM on May 19, 2008

Strings are so personal; I play a D28 and always come back to regular Martin bronzewound strings (not the Marquis or S&S lines) as the right sound and feel for most purposes

I like the D'Addario phosphor bronze strings too, but always found them too boomy in the bass for recording purposes, and less long lasting than the Martins before intonation became a problem

But again, all any of us can do is say what we like; there is no best string... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:34 AM on May 17, 2008

Goodnight Gorilla by Peggy Rathman was a huge favorite in my house in the first year and a half or so - it has no text (almost) but it tells a fantastic story with wonderful pictures that allow you to make up details and voices

If I read it once, I read it 1500 times, and it never got old; it makes me very nostalgic even to think about it - my favorite baby book of all
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:11 AM on May 17, 2008

Also, Montano and Coffin's Coyote in Love With A Star is a wonderful, little-known choice; Coffin's illustrations of a story told in the style of a Native American myth are magically beautiful and suggestive, and the story is simple and profound; the only sad part is that it ends with Coyote getting a job at the world trade center so he can go up to the roof at night at serenade the star with whom he has fallen in love, and post-9/11 this seems very poignant, but I was reading it in 2001 and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:22 AM on May 17, 2008

Supposedly, the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin burned through all the pages of the only copy of a now-lost book manuscript while he was exiled by Stalin in some godforsaken gulag in Kazakhstan or thereabouts. One page at a time, he used his book to roll cigarettes until it was gone. Very romantic.

But he didn't have a deli on the corner selling Bambus for 75 cents, dude.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 12:24 PM on May 12, 2008

You could also dig up a gravesite and make yourself a nice skull bong -- apparently it works!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:46 AM on May 13, 2008

At the top of the market, your teaching experience is almost irrelevant by comparison with the originality and quality of your dissertation. Not quite irrelevant, but I would never recommend seeking out a heavier teaching load, all other things being equal.

I've had extensive dealings with both schools you're considering (and I am mightily surprised by the terms of the UW offer, which sounds very good to me based on what I know about grad student support there, which is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 8:17 AM on May 4, 2008

Didn't process your last part -- that's going to be hard, I think, but good luck.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 8:17 AM on May 4, 2008

Yes, you will make the UW people angry if you change your mind after accepting, because there is a good chance *they* can't roll that offer over to someone else now; not all departments or graduate schools use a waiting list system. They won't hate you forever, but forget about changing your mind again and coming back in a year or two. I know I'd look dubiously on that, as a director of a grad program myself.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 10:02 AM on May 4, 2008

From the point of view of sociolinguistic speech act theory, all acts of speaking are technically "speech acts," actually - but Austin and Searle would call this particular kind of speech act a "performative" utterance. See wikipedia
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 8:21 AM on May 4, 2008

I would just call it "The Wiz," but you might have had to live in NYC in the 80s to get it
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:04 AM on April 26, 2008

There's a brand called Tara Guitars that makes a halfway decent 1/2 size children's guitar that is not a toy, but not something you'd worry about breaking, etc I think the basic nylon string 1/2 size is about $100; it's not a real instrument but it is far better than the ones on the shelves at toy stores, the best of which used to be Hohner

I'm sure they can be ordered online; I bought one for a small-sized child about the same age as your kid a while back, and it was... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 8:16 PM on April 23, 2008

Also, I think a bass guitar will be tough; even at a small scale, the strength required to press down bass strings and the limited ability to accompany yourself singing will likely be discouraging
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 8:18 PM on April 23, 2008

Greenstone Digital Library Software is an open source tool for digital asset management that scales to large library collections; it's being used for a number of music archiving projects

I don't know it well, but I've been meaning to look seriously at it for a similar solution
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 8:05 PM on April 23, 2008

(Which leads me to ask if anyone has experience with Greenstone as a piggyback on the thread)
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 8:09 PM on April 23, 2008

You've got a hell of a child custody case on the surface facts alone; she sounds out of her freaking mind!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 7:34 AM on April 22, 2008

Straight simple advice from a director of a grad program and an adviser of about 10 dissertations in any given year:

If you cannot obtain *full* fellowship funding to attend a PhD program in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences (excepting maybe economics) you should not get a PhD unless money is an irrelevant concern for your whole life (because you were born rich, or plan to inherit a lot).

I'm sorry to say it's that simple.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:08 AM on April 19, 2008

Things are a little bit field dependent, always. Life is far rougher in the largest humanities fields like English and History and Philosophy, where being unfunded in grad school is almost a sure sign of a second-tier or worse career in your future. I am aware of something of a revival of classics going on, but am not sure what the job market looks like. Some fields (like my own, luckily) are growing and there are a lot of jobs in the immediate second tier (tenure track, but at liberal arts... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 4:56 AM on April 20, 2008

OK, mdn, I think maybe I am coming across as hyperbolic, and I don't mean to condone the "meritocracy," or argue that it is pure, but I do think my point is a bit more than "affirming the consequent." The consequent is a direct consequence of material conditions. As I see it, it's a question of how you spend your time -- working on your scholarship or making money to pay for your tuition (and everyone, even the fully funded at elite schools, has to do a mix of both). I'm... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 4:02 PM on April 20, 2008

Addendum: if you are going to be happy in a quieter and easier path, with more time for yourself, or more teaching and less research, that's fine too. I assume this question is accompanied by a desire to reach to upper ranks of the academic world, which means a tenure-track position at a major research university. If your sites are set on more modest career goals (and a lot of people drawn to academia are in fact looking for this) adjust my advice accordingly.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 4:06 PM on April 20, 2008

And I do have to say that getting a PhD in classics with 90K in student debt strikes me as utter insanity. Sorry. Especially given the huge rate of attrition in PhD programs; what if you never finish and you still wind up carrying the debt? And assuming you do go smoothly on into a tenure track position, to make back that $90K you will be paying off that loan for a good 20 years, at least, maybe longer, while making a salary in the range of 50-70K for 5-7 years, and only hitting the 80-100K... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 4:13 PM on April 20, 2008

I'd say any philosophy program at all where a majority of new PhDs are walking into tenure track jobs right after the PhD is a top program, indeed. The programs I know (mostly at Ivy League universities) don't generally have stats like that!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:19 AM on April 21, 2008

You're looking at a one time trip to the photocopy store with all the legal sized documents, sheet fed at an 85% or so reduction to letter size, and voila, you've got them on letter size paper --- assuming it's not hundreds of pages, in which case you need a legal sized scanner. The scanner doesn't pass paper incrementally over the glass during a scan, and therefore you can't scan something larger than the glass.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 2:00 PM on April 20, 2008

I stand corrected; pretty cool!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 3:52 PM on April 20, 2008

A4 is a British size, by the way, a little bigger than standard US letter.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 3:53 PM on April 20, 2008

Among country musicians, sticking the words to Jambalaya (On the Bayou) randomly into boring songs is an old gag, just saying -- weirdly you can make them fit almost any tune!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 9:08 AM on April 16, 2008

A couple of responses;

1) Benjamin, Lessig, Attali, Seeger, Meintjes, Taylor, Feld, & Demers are already on the reading list. Three of those people are close friends of mine. A fourth is a mentor, in fact. I'm very specifically looking for recommendations that cover concrete cases in the digital domain specifically. And I am looking most especially for cases and conflicts that are significantly *archived* in the digital domain.

2)... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:26 PM on April 13, 2008

To put it differently, I'm looking for "best of the web" resources -- things that MeFites might know about that are *not* necessarily already in the academic standard literature on this topic
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:29 PM on April 13, 2008

The Lethem is a great suggestion by the way; very helpful and thank you umbu! I did not know that article!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:32 PM on April 13, 2008

Bellman, thanks. No I am not Sprigman, nor do I know Lessig (to make the matching game easier!). I will look into his work, which sounds fascinating. I am aware of a number of mostly younger scholars doing interesting work in literary studies and cinema studies, as well as in indigenous cultural rights contexts where my interests are centered. A number of anthropologists are thinking through traditional and non-western models of cultural ownership (and indeed, emergent ones on the digital... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 7:50 PM on April 13, 2008

And to be clear also: music is the focus for pragmatic reasons, to give specific substance to the arguments, but I am interested in the broader questions concerning "ownership" as a cultural system. I am interested in the *idea* of owning "ideas," in general, and the way cultural models of ownership interact with the development of social institutions and the arts in particular (thus Berger's *Ways of Seeing* is one of our first readings, as is the first chapter of Attali's... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 7:59 PM on April 13, 2008

and again, thanks citron for more good stuff
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 8:02 PM on April 13, 2008

Awesome! Thanks Miho, RogerB (definitely using that!), and Kristi! And everyone else too!
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 3:19 AM on April 14, 2008

Express Scribe is free for Mac, Windows, and Linux, and can do what you want. I suspect it will run on a Windows Mobile PDA, though I am not certain.

http://www.nch.com.au/index.html
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 5:45 PM on April 5, 2008

Health department regulations aside, which many wage slaves couldn't care less about,

Nice. I don't make enough money to care about whether my customers get sick?

When I worked as a wage slave in food service, I still washed my hands frequently. I think you're understating the pride even "wage slaves" can take in their work.
posted to Ask Metafilter by fourcheesemac at 6:46 AM on March 24, 2008