rustypants speaks

stupid in a really funny kinda way.

i should clarify what i meant in the last post concerning twitter and excessive self-aggrandizing and the like:

• i realize that twitter is, for the most part, a social networking tool / micro-blogging site – as such, personal posts will be the norm
• HOWEVER: when i’m following 80 people and ONE person posts 25+ posts a day, most of which seem like text messages to only a few people who will “get it” (or give a damn), this is a waste of my time.
• and the same goes for folks who ONLY use Twitter to toot their own horn (such as: “hey, i just blogged about blah blah blah and you know you need to read it!” or “hey, why aren’t you reading my blog?” or (insert tinyurl misleading me to something i don’t care about HERE).
• there are no “rules” for twitter, despite what some of these so-called “social-media experts” and others would have you believe. and “Netiquette” as we used to know it is out the window.

i love reading the personal posts! seriously! but i hate excessive monopolization by a few people. i’ve even ditched a couple professional groups because of this same thing. if you’ve got that much time on your hands as to be a “professional twitterer” (thanks, @duebber), more power to ya. there’s obviously an audience out there for you, it’s simply not me.

and again: i’m not bitching here about Twitter or specific Twitterers – but the nature of Twitter grates on me as it is (sometimes) and this type of behavior only serves to make it worse.

the solutions are obvious:

• un-follow folks who tweet mindlessly
• block those who shamelessly self-aggrandize
• get the hell out of twitter all together

i love technology. i love that we’re struggling to figure out how to continue to integrate technology into our personal and professional lives even as the pace of technological growth far outpaces our ability to keep up with it. i’ve even set up a second twitter account and am trying to figure out how to incorporate it into my classes next year.

fear not, friends! i’m not weeding my twitter following list because you mention the fact that your dog likes to eat its own poop, or that you love The Bachelor.

just don’t mention it 25+ times a day, eh? :-)

lots going on, lots coming up – time for another stream of consciousness, eh?

• finished reading two good books in a row -Â The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon;Â Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. the first is a story told from the viewpoint of a fifteen year old with autism – fascinating to me after working with profoundly autistic students for many years in DC and Maryland. the second won the Pulitzer for fiction back in 2000 – it’s a series of short stories and very enjoyable.
• i’m currently reading Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. both are good so far.
• my contract was renewed at PFHS for next year – this was FANTASTIC news, both because having a job = good, and because i have come to love working at this school! very excited for what next year will bring.
• as school finished up last week, i’ve been searching for things to keep me busy this summer. too much time off is dreadfully boring. have a meeting with a department at my district tomorrow to discuss my developing Moodle pages for this dept’s training sessions, and helping with other technology related things. couple days a week, couple hours a day, maybe.
• our beloved Canon S2 IS bit the dust a couple months ago. a stunning blow, as we rarely leave the house without a camera in tow. we knew we wanted to move up in the digital camera arena, but didn’t have the money to do so. after some scraping and a lot of research, we ended up getting a killer deal on a Canon SX10 IS and we’re having a blast with it. the pictures are crisp, the response time on the camera is quick, the 20x optical zoom is over the top, and the flexibility is great. we’re still learning the nuances of this camera, and i have difficulty in a couple areas that are probably lack of photography knowledge, but we’re working on that!
• i’m enjoying Twitter more as i’m finding professional uses for it (mostly networking and idea-sharing), but i have to admit: i’m getting very annoyed at folks who use twitter like text messaging and/or simply to show off. now, the beauty of twitter is: even though everyone and their mothers have a “how to use twitter” tutorial, the truth is, there are no rules. and my bitching about folks who use twitter one way or another – it comes down to this – i stop following them so i don’t have to partake in their pointless and excessive self-aggrandizing or all the silly personal chatter they produce. it’s been bothering me a bit – thanks for letting me blow off some steam about it (and no offense meant to anyone who has been un-followed or recognizes themselves in this description – i still love you, just not that much).
• and in the interest of full-disclosure: i don’t frequently have a lot of intelligent things to say on twitter – but i do keep the meaningless posts to a minimum.
• the juan sebastian elcano is docked at pensacola pier – we went down and took a stroll around – pretty impressive ship!

• the sunsets continue to blow our minds here in pensacola. the temperatures have been very pleasant (mid-80’s the last couple weeks). tonight we saw a black skimmer fly by just as we were about to leave – very pretty and graceful – this was the best i could get of this one as it flew by:

• recent new music discoveries include: Rosie Thomas; Booker T; and Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul.

be well and take me to task on some of this stuff, ya hear?

heard about the new browser from google? it’s in beta right now and i’m giving it a run. it’s intriguing at this point and it gives me a couple reasons to consider it over firefox (my browser of choice for many years now).

here’s a good article about it in the washington post.

here’s the link to download the beta version.

here’s google’s cool comic book format explaining why you should switch (and the specifics on the technology behind the browser).

in conversation with fellow blogger SWNID the other evening, we enjoyed discussion on the zany search strings that lead people to our writings.

for the uninitiated, when you go to google or yahoo or dogpile and enter a phrase that you want the search engine to find matches for, this results in a search string – the search engine then uses this to determine which websites most closely hit all aspects of your search… and sometimes to hilarious results.

google has a little program that i use called Google Analytics – it looks at traffic on websites and shows very specific information that can be a HUGE help for folks who are trying to track and analyze who and how and why people are visiting their sites. it also shows the specific phrases used in search engines that brought these people to my writing. now, my blogging exploits are mainly fun and entertainment for me (and you?) and hardly warrant in-depth analysis of who’s reading and who’s not…

but it IS fun to see some of this information! it’s even more fun to think, “how on earth did this search engine figure that MY blog matches THIS string of words?!?”

so some of the search strings that have landed people at rustypants.net in the last 45 days include:

• “+18 plus eighteen mad in turkey t-shirt”
• “the longest toes”
• “dogs that like to roll in poop”
• “graduation verses 8th grade you’ve made me so proud”
• “if you don’t go to church do you go to hell?”
• “junk in truck lots of sugar in tank” (this one is one of my favorites)
• “nasty hot pants.net”
• “nudist spy cam.”
• “mittens anti-poop”
• “smart women stripping in bathroom”
• “thick southern accents and teaching phonics”
• “women dancing around propane grill”

and my personal favorite of the last 45 days…

• “why does peter furler wear eyeliner”

certainly, some of these i can somewhat fathom how they related to my writing. anything with “poop” in it must relate to dolby’s poop-eating past. church-going-to-hell would be the sign along the highway. longest toes must be the fehrman sisters. the peter furler search was because of my hatred of the newsboys.

but turkey t-shirts? junk in trunk? nudist spy cam?

and there are about a dozen that i can’t even list on a family-oriented blog such as this (har har).

what has gotten me the most traffic in the last thirty days has been my post referencing stretch armstrong – five to ten people a day are searching for a picture or information on stretch and land here.

useless, mindless information but still a good laugh for the blogger.

hey, maybe if i blog about paris hilton or amy winehouse, i can really get the number of visits up!

our school does 4 20-minute focus lessons daily in the areas of writing, math, science, and reading. teachers are given the focus for each week, then left to their own devices on how they’re going to teach and what materials they’re using.

this week’s focus for reading is synonyms – words that have similar meanings. i put together a couple pages on my SmartBoard (interactive projector that shows the entire class what’s on the computer) talking about synonyms, asking them for their definition, then using the definition found on dictionary.com. i then had them give examples of synonyms and we were having a grand old time.

i made sure they understood that it’s easy to say something like, “Mr. Rust is happy.” but that taking it to the next level, making it interesting for our readers, you need to drop the mundane and use synonyms. i gave an alternate word for “happy” then said, “hey! let’s get on to thesaurus.com and look at all the different words we could replace happy with!”

and i did.

and some of the words made the kids scratch their heads. others made them laugh, like when i said, “if i said, ‘Mr. Rust is chipper!’ instead of our boring sentence using ‘happy,’ wouldn’t that make this sentence more exciting?”

“what does ‘chipper’ mean, Mr. Rust?” was the response.

and being the intelligent teacher i am, i said, “we’re on dictionary.com – let’s check!” and the result was this:

well, this is all cool, right? we’re having a great, entertaining LEARNING experience! woo! mr. rust RULES!! OH yeah!!

so i’m explaining chipper, acting the part, etc. and one of the kids says, “what does ’sprightly’ mean?” and i begin to explain, but then, in my massive intelligence, i thought, “wait!! you’ve got dictionary.com right here!”

so i plug in “sprightly” and this is what i and the whole class sees on the SmartBoard:

and i hit the word “gay” and the class was like…

OMG!! you’re GAY?

haha. i quickly moved on and thought it was over. but then at lunch a student came over and said, “Mr. Rust, someone said you said you was gay.”

and i realized: teaching on the fly is fun but potentially costly.

but i’m still chipper and sprightly.