been a long time

Yes it has.

Anyway, two things.

One: Tonight we recorded a demo of "Only Living Boy in Turlock" (words by Lauren, music by Chris, with special unsolicited, unwitting, and were it witting, certainly unwelcome assistance from a Mr. Simon of New York). We did a couple others too, and as usual I'm fussy about the sound quality, etc. The energy on this is good, though. I'll restrain myself from carping.

Two: So, I was sitting in my office, reading Spinoza, prepping for my Intro to Philosophy class tomorrow morning, when the phone rang. I had earlier left a message for Lauren at home, and figured she was calling back. It wasn't. No indeed, it was someone identifying herself as a student employee of a polling group housed at CSU San Marcos, calling to gather 15-20 minutes of my responses to a survey from the CSU Chancellor's Office concerning educational technology use, preparedness, and needs of faculty and students.

Cow State Santa Claus, like other CSUs, has an office of instructional technology. We also have a faculty committee on mediated and distance learning, another on academic technology. We survey ourselves continuously, both formally and informally, both quantitatively and qualitatively, about our educational technology use, preparedness, and needs. We survey ourselves silly. The Chancellor's Office collects data from campuses on educational technology use, preparedness, and needs. But apparently this isn't enough, and the Chancellor's Office has decided to survey faculty over the phone.

I didn't particularly want to participate, because I'm suspicious of Chancellor's Office initiatives, and because it seems redundant. Mainly, I didn't want to interrupt reading Spinoza, who's hard enough without phones ringing, and intriguing enough that once started I tend not to want to put him down.

The student surveyor seemed intent, and didn't take my initial no for an answer. She wanted to reschedule. Since I tend to use my time on campus intensively, I didn't want to have her call tomorrow, or Friday. So I asked if I could just take the survey online. This seemed reasonable to me.

But no, she said, there's no way to do the survey online. "That's ironic, isn't it?" I asked. The irony wasn't apparent to her. She asked again to reschedule, and split the survey up into parts. I asked her to mark me down as declining to participate.