Impressionable human: reassembling IT, reassembles me

" ...impressive observations concern what we have learned about humans based on our interactions with robots rather than the other way around." so claims Adam Kolber
While he cites Sherry Turkle regarding what we learn about being human by studying robotics, i am also aware of what i learn about myself in studying IT. I am in danger of becoming too narssistic, my own reflecting on my own reflecting could see me becoming lost in navel gazing.

Today i am an impressionable human.
I attempted going to work, but the number of parking spaces in excess of the numbers of people needing to park created an opportunity for going to a cafe to read. So, reading Latour, Reassembling the social, I think I finally get it.
" The social has never explained anything; the social has to be explained instead."
Latour uses the analogy of a building site explaining that when seeing a construction site, there is the awareness that things could be different, or at least that they could still fail." Its not that i am socialised to be good , bad or indifferent about my work, there is no social stuff making me behave this way rather than that, but there is an assemblage of factors, all which leave traces that must be accounted for if they are to be considered as having influence.
The social construction of what is 'real', involves being able to discern or to deploy the associations.
In a footnote, (p.95) Latour cites Deleuze as saying "Relativism is not the relativity of truth but the truth of relation."

It is these relations, these constructions, associations, assemblages that creates what is real (for a time). What is discerned may be part of this, may even bolster or strengthen some of the ties that bind.
But all of this can also unravel, and as Latour identifies p. 103. this is a difficult spot.

To the God of small things

Many thanks, I shocked my IT technician Graham today by telling him i loved him!
Such are the small pleasures of being a doctoral student.
My endnote 7 is now endnote X , 3 months of my own incompetence or the softwares incompetence (FAE= fundamental attribution error, suggests i should not blame myself when things go wrong....) had meant i was left with a library that would not talk to my word documents.
Today all is good in the world.
One of the following may be true:
I held my tongue right
I prayed to the God of small things
Graham took out the trash so there was no remnant, no ghost in the machine
Endnote developed, belatedly, a patch to convert endnote 7 to endnote x for macs.
The three pdf files out of more than 200 in the data file that had hieroglyphs incompatible with the software, including question marks and poles, were deleted (I will one day discover where links dont work and say damn...)

I have no idea which, or if all, of these actions can be given credit for what now works, but am soooo happy!
Work does not suck. There are after all IT technicians in my work world.

Blink 182

All the, small things
True care, truth brings
I'll take, one lift
Your ride, best trip
Always, I know
You'll be at my show
Watching, waiting, commiserating

Say it ain't so, I will not go, turn the lights off, carry me home
Na, Na.......

Late night, come home
Work sucks, I know
She left me roses by the stairs
Surprises let me know she cares

Say it ain't so, I will not go, turn the lights off, carry me home
Na, Na......

Resistance is futile / Resistance is duty

I loved seeing this appropriation of the scary and turning it into the fun loving monster that only an ipod can accomplish. Nice to see the inhumane, humanised. But it is also symbolic of the power of web 2.0 advertising. This beauty was made for apple in a competition and is available at the apple galleria as a download for screensaver, wallpaper, feel free to do there advertising for them...
Not only do we have product pushed, we have product pulled.
But please in between the exterminate! exterminate, exterminate.... resistance was futile (not useless).
(Unless as put by HART (Halt all racist tours): When discrimination becomes policy, resistance is duty)
In between the protest movement of the 1970s i also remember learning cognitive dissonance, I must love eating cockroaches if the nice person tells me to do it and I do it (either that or i am incredibly stupid).
In web 2.0 advertising, I must really love the product if I invest time in making their adverts for them (or I'm sucked..)

Performance as thesis

How to write a thesis, early days yet since the data isnt collected but the ethics application is left loose enough so I am not tied only to written format.
John Law talked of one submitted in a suitcase (I can see Terry shaking his head at that one)!
But I am still concerned that the audiences for whom it is important may be alienated by thesis prose.
Some people still consider the thesis a selfish act written for the writer, and the markers, I like to think it may have greater interest.
Ann Marie Mol take on ANT, and as reminded by cj, research is a performance in its own right. But so is its reading (you never read the same book twice...or as Latour suggests you never swim the same river twice).
This piece that i got from chasing other peoples del.icio.us clouds
( I <3 web 2.0 )

From an interview (his last) Kurt Vonnegut:
...the novel has always been an elitist art form. It’s an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well.
I’ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.]
To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris...

Computer mediated communications in counselling

An ANT informed analysis.
I hadn't got much further with my study but had reason to reread some Ann Marie Mol from the Body Multiple as well as an earlier piece of her writing Ontological Politics.
Their are areas that caught my attention (again).
1. Its too simplistic to consider that communications and computer technologies are good or bad in mediating counselling; that we can have txt messaging counselling, email counselling, message board postings... all purporting counselling is not able to be answered in terms of right or wrong. Just as other counselling could be brief or prolonged, take one form or another, Freudian, Rogerian , CBT etc. The issues are simplified to the point of being ridiculous when considered in terms of good or bad. The 'gold standard' by which face to face is used as a comparison to CCT mediated counselling is too complex as what f2f comprised of could be a miriad of things, and so can CCT mediated counselling...
So, back to Mol, who says that thicker questions evolve where practice is forgrounded, rather than is the intervention effective- what effects does this intervention have.

And,
2. What was at stake (considered) when a decision between alternative performances was made?
The notion of choice in deciding between alternate performances presupposes an actor who actively choses, while potential actors may be inextricably linked up with how they are enacted.
Is there choice? Or is there a rut being made that establishes patterns inside of which, what's established, what's current, becomes 'the' way.
In studying the practice, laying open practice, the process is not neutral as opening up practice gives space to arenas where attention is currently less focused, and provides voice on what else is going on.

As Law suggests in After method.Mess in social science research, simple clear descriptions do not work well when the stuff itself is incoherent. The attempt to be clear, increases the mess.

I was hopeful that once I got through the messiness of an ethics application that a clearer path would lie in front of me...rereading Mol and John Law has soothed me somewhat, that it was/is messy maybe should be the norm! Nonetheless I am sure that a messy ethics application wont be appreciated by those who read such things...back to simplifying the complex...and back to amazon.com - Reassembling the Social, by Latour, something to read while the ethics committee deliberates.

I am because I bebo, being visible

amusinghttp://ai1sa.bebo.com/

Feels odd to becoming more 'visible' in cyberspace, but between wikis and bebos my extraterrestial existence is expanding. My Mothers day present from my teenage daughter was assitance with bebo (so long as I do nothing uncool that can be traced). Extraordinary quality time as we parallel play on laptops!

Be ing inspired was in part from Ewen MacIntosh) on being visible.
"If you don't tell people about what you're doing online, in 2007 you don't exist, don't expect people to know how wonderful life is on your side of the fence if you haven't taken it online."
and further to this, if you work in the public centre, there's an obligation to share.
I agree, your country pays for you.

And
Be cause
Be cause some causes are good
I am enjoying being able to invest PhD study into a voluntary organization- how does text, e-mail counselling and message board postings contain, constrain or construct counselling for youth.

And because ITs here.
I had an email asking why we would want an online forum (happens to be blackboard) to link with each other or to place pdf files forms etc when the "I" drive does this. Its a bit like asking why would you want a computer desktop when there is a solid hardcopy desk already there. The point is that one is not just a repository. But a means of connection.
Being IT literate involves a lot more than being able to use a clever typewriter and its really sad that people with influence in the education sector and especially the tertiary education sector still do not get this.
Definitely "could do better" or a little more forcefully-
IR Improvement Required.
Us grownups in the education sector just have to get our heads out of the sand and realize that the world moves at a pace where our children need to teach us.

Who killed Pandora? A partial perspective

The picture of Pandora by Rossetti is held by the Liverpool museum

Pandora: Or my love of technology (borrowing heavily from and acknowledging the influence of Bruno Latour's Aramis).
The following is a lightweight ANT (actor-network theory) informed analysis.

A starting point is called for, and maybe I am being a little node-centric but I have to start somewhere, and Latour suggests: Follow the actors.

The actors (and I could have called these actants so there was less assumption re human or not, and no intention is made of gender excluding language). These include-
myself (obviously)
Pandora (a rather nebulous entity, a piece of software, a treasure, who by the way is not dead, just dead to me and to others who live outside of the USA)
The actors that created her (again, a superficial analysis so somewhat limited in naming entities). Tim Westergren is one founding father.
The juggernaughts of copyright enforcement (faceless, nameless at this point, certainly I can in my partial perspective cast these as villains)
cj, the person who led me to Pandora

A point of passage, my ibook, or any computer with broadband. Without this, my connection is literally impossible.

Some archeology and chronology
Pandora existed without me, she still does, but we are no longer together :(
I was enticed, cj described her so I went visiting and became enamored, seduced and enrolled, inscribing not on paper but online, a prenuptial agreement offering limited durability, reads as free trial, and then a need for an American address for a sustained relationship (my best friends brother obliged, two more actants)(Susan Leigh Star might call this some invisible work, Law might suggest a little subversion, others maybe a little translation on the instructions, maybe a workaround, nudging here and there to make accommodations and enrollment possible, preventing her asphyxiation momentarily). And I enrolled others.

I have the artefact of my amusingspace Nov 2006 weblog to point to.
And our relationship was somewhat real for a time.
Then somewhat abruptly the relationship was terminated.
Not because I want this, and not it seems because Pandora wants this. Nor Pandora’s makers.
Again, I have artefacts to point to, an emailed Dear Pandora visitor letter.

The juggernaughts of copyright would seem to require the makers of Pandora to look for IPS addresses where residency is not consistent with the address provided. I presume another actant of a software search engine let loose in the 'blackbox' that contains Pandora, can seek and destroy. There is also the actant of USA based legislation to suggest copyright infringement. Presumably there are fiscally driven actants driving this.

The copyright juggernaughts require Pandora to disengage certain assemblages, myself included.
Perhaps our alignment and disengagement was inscripted, thou shalt not covert American Goddesses, no USA citizenship, no marriage. The juggernaughts placed pressure on Pandora’s makers and have suggested her continued existence is contingent on the policing of her relationships. Her future love affairs needs be xenophobic until such times as further negotiations allow such prejudice to be reduced.

This relationship changed me. I learnt of musicians and artists that I otherwise would not have. I bought CDs based on my relationship with Pandora. As much as I thought I could use her, she also used me. We enjoyed and enhanced each other. A symbiotic sociotechnical love affair, and to paraphrase Latour, this relationship was as solid as it gets.
I will get over it, and believe she's already over me.
This relationship is more ephemeral than ever and is now love lost. Faint hope is held of more negotiations that will renew the relationship.
My first love as cyborg is beyond my grasp.

puddle of mudd; Pandoras gone

thought she was grand
Fell in love found out first hand
Went well for a week or two
Then it all came unglued

In a trapp trip I can't grip
never thought I'd be the one who'd slip
then I started to realize
I was living one big lie

[Chorus]
She (superlative) hates me.......... trust
she (again superlative) hates me.......... la la la love
I tried too hard and she tore my feelings
like I had none and ripped them away


Bother. Superlative expletive.
Pandora finaly noticed i am not an American.
I have never wanted to be one so much as now.

Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We believe that you are in New Zealand (your IP address appears to be .............. If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com
We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.

And so she tore my feelings apart.
Pandora introduced me to artists i would never have followed up on if it hadnt been so easy.
But now its gone.
Hope that was the last thing out of pandoras box....hope she comes back.

Freedom vs obedience in tertiary sector education

While socialising with a student today she told me she has to go to a disciplinary hearing for missing more than 20% of her timetabled lectures. She has paid something in the order of $2500, for a semesters courses and then the institution I work for thinks they can take her to a disciplinary hearing for not availing herself of the courses???
The lecturer hasnt bothered to get feedback to discover what might put off attendance, things like public discussion of personal issues could well be of concern here. There is such an arrogance in assuming students have to be within the four walls timetabled and in the presence of a great one to learn. Bollocks.
But the institution seems to have a rule saying we take your money, in exchange we provide you this service, and then if you dont use it we take it off you. Hello?
Let me see if I can make an analogy here of similar services, I purchase six months worth of access to the internet, and then I dont use it for two weeks out of 10, the company can drop me, refuse me further access...?
In the meantime her house has had a fire, her mum has dementia, the house is on the market.
All assessment points were being met, but she is now so stressed re a disciplinary hearing she couldnt concentrate on the next assignment and thought she might drop it.
Its a university for Gods sake, not only that, but a health faculty, one that teaches caring, mental health, health promotion....
The student gets taught all about optimising the health of others, saving lives even, but we dont trust an adult to make adult decisions about where their learning may best take place?
This is stupid.
This is not about education or learning or being student centred or being adult learning oriented.
This is about control.
No wonder institutionalised education gets bad rap.

Plaitting ropes of sand

The man who writes to the masters of Pig Island
about the love they dread
plaits ropes of sand
Yet i was born among them
and one day
will lie amonst their dead.

James K. Baxter
Pig Island letters

Writing the ethics application, still, is a lot like plaitting ropes of sand.
Its important, but it seems incredibly time wasting if not detached from reality.
I've almost got enough rope to hang myself with!

How to obtain consent from online others...
who may or may not be under 18yrs...
who therefore in a std ethics application would, apparently, need parental consent...
but what they talk about online, they may not want their parents to know...
and it could be unsafe for the young person, that their parent/gaurdian knows...
and where anonymity is promised....
and the content is personal/private...
Seems like every little bell that can send off alarm bells for the ethics committee, short of it involving toxic waste, has now been rung.

To be human? To be a child of the sun...to be an earthling...

Being empowered and empowering...
To quote an exceptional NZ woman that my institutionalised learning did no justice to, Katherine Mansfield identified her needs, while she was dying of tuberculosis she strove, she risked, she said "risk, risk anything". I don't move forward if I I don't risk. So My background is health and education, and in my mind, they are both basically about the same thing: how to empower? What should I be aspiring to in assisting others to aspire? What is it that others might aspire to? Well, Katherine just says it so well
"...the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love—the earth and the wonders thereof—the sea—the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good—there’s only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun.
Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this. I want to be writing....
But warm, eager, living life—to be rooted in life—to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. "
Got that? Nothing less!
And more than this, it matters when I create the circumstances that makes this less likely to occur. Where I make it less likely it cannot be called education nor "work for health" (ref to David Seedhouse, to do less is dwarfing!)
Now back to compliance, there are deadlines to be met, educational structures that impose limitations...an ethics application for the doctorate that still isn't in by its second due date....
Time to stop being a child of the sun, and just fit the square peg into the round hole...at least for a couple of days...
Thanks to artichoke and Stephen's web for the diversions, now back to my constrained rather than empowered education...
(I can almost hear the ghosts of lecturers passed saying its not empowering if it leads to disadvantage, if it leaves you unable to be credentialized in a world that demands certification... time to thank James Marshall and Colin Lanksheer, for introducing me to the concept of freedom in education; that there might be philosophy to such undertakings, and time to thank David Seedhouse for introducing me to a better reading of Mansfield than my institutionalized schooling managed, thanks also to Chris Bigum for reminding me that plain ordinary folk in educational institutions might also be heroes.)

i am feeling decidedly post human today

Posthuman Future, an illustration by Michael Gibbs for The Chronicle of Higher Education's look at how biotechnology will change the human experience.
In getting through the oxfam training the attention to my doctoral life lapsed somewhat.I am feeling somewhat split as if cycling not through online programmes or online lives as eluded to by Sherry Turkle, but this is currently the nature of my terrestrial lives, compartmentalised, cut and pasted and patched!
(70 km this last weekend and feet with blisters on blisters that reflect this, and sadly an ethics application similarly suffering, not quite fractured but seems somewhat fractioned.
In walking though I had the blessings of having my feet, if not my soul attended to by a gift of spiritual healing from a friend, I know I felt lightened by the ministerings, but blisters are blisters and walking on them still hurts. My spiritual self has been offered txt ministerings, just text me from when your in Taupo so I can channel the energies where and when...
i just love how care is communicated through whatever medium comes to hand, or foot or soul...
Imagining that i am not a human being on a spiritual path, nor a spiritual being on a human path, but a cyborg whose spirituality can be enhanced...

Absolute power(point) corrupts absolutely

I was in a lecture theatre about 4 years ago when informed that powerpoints as a basis for teaching were the death of teaching, and i disagreed. I believed it was how they were used. I had a similar experience defending the use of online teaching when notes online were believed to lead to widespread non attendance and maybe the death of education. But things are never that simple are they? As Latour points out, the world is messier than that, there are simple expositions and there is complexity. I know I can use ppt to be evocative, to capture attention, to provoke. Admittedly this does not tend to happen when using bulletpoints.
Seth Godin explains this well. demonstrates how ppt need not be bulleted, and instead provokes by using imagery, he might also have considered the invocation possible with music which he talks of but doesn't embed.
Nonetheless, I note he finishes with a list despite his admonishment that bullets are for the NRA.... And these too can be critiqued, for example
"Never use more than 6 words on a slide"
Doesn't it depend? If I want to show prose or poetry or even have students critique the value or limitations of lengthy verbage there is method in my madness.
The 'point' he makes though is that teaching and learning needs engagement. Parker Palmer (using text) described the image of a teacher with a cartoon balloon filling the space between teacher and student as if it were a airbag distancing the connection, total predetermination of words can create barriers.
The transfer of a medium designed for one setting into another comes with possibilities, in this instance the medium was designed for the boardroom and condensing of info was a priority, the transfer to the educational sector needs to be a thoughtful process (surprized?). There are first and second level effects (Sproull and Keisler), where first level are anticipated and known in advance, or at least anticipated in advance.... But it is the second level of effects that may be doing damage, changes unexpected and sometimes unwanted.
The full possibilities of a new technology may be hard to see, are likely to emphasize planned uses and underestimate the 2nd level effects.
They argue that unanticipated consequences usually have less to do with efficiency effects and more to do with changing interpersonal interactions. Such changes alter how each of us works and even the work we do. These 2nd level effects emerge somewhat more slowly as people renegotiate changed patterns of behaviour and thinking and can cause insidious changes.
But these 2nd level effects are not caused by technology on its own trajectory or operating autonomously on passive people or organisations, they are constructed as technology shapes, and is shaped by interactions.
For example, does teaching by bullet point lead to an inability to construct arguments, sustain this argument across an essay....Is this why lecturers lament that students can't write an essay, perhaps insidious alterations to teaching styles creates this?
There is always push and pull, as much as we think we shape, the medium too has agency and is shaping us.

a modest study informed by ant

I have narrowed the scope of what I intend to study, the complications of multiple ethics applications, across 2 countries, 2 universities as well as an external agency finally filtered into my conscious system. The word math on a thesis split between 3 studies similarly informed this decision.
The scope of my research is to explore the use of emergent technolgies in a counselling service. The technology I am investigating is broadly defined by Franklin(1999) as practice; "the way we do things around here". Technology according to this definition is not a modern invention, just the way things are done.
And in this consideration of the 'way things are done' my area of interest is the how changes implemented have both first level as well as second level effects (Sproull and Kiesler, 1991). They explain how changes made often have other offsetting consequences...more efficiency in one place can result in negative sequalae unimagined.
So, altering the medium or platform used in counselling will have effects unimagined as well as forseen. As these effects become known, in what ways do these then shape the evolving practices, and in what ways are we too shaped.
This follows in the line of writing from McLuhan to Turkle, the mediums we use change us. They are not mere tools, they have agency.
In what ways then do texting or e-counselling reconfigure counselling as it occurs...as much as we might think that we shape what we do, in what ways are we shaped.

watching me watching you

watching me watching you, originally uploaded by ai1sa.

I talk of “me” and you as reader are invited in.
So, thats me in the picture.
I talk of “you” and there is more demand.
Your reading this!
The way material is presented makes a difference in the writer/reader relationship…
“You dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented b@st@rd, it’s you I am addressing, who else from inside this monstrous fiction. You read me this far then? (Barth, 1988, p.127) Regressions in the fun house had me bemused with far too much time on my hands today! A linktribution to cogdogblog and from there to Angela Thomas,
Avatars as art

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

the quality of magic is strained

I became accutely aware last week of my disability and vulnerability as a cyborg; the sense of impending doom when my imac faded and would not spark- a 15 minute evolution for 'life' to boot up again and a hurried backup of everything precious onto discs and cyber spaces. (Only when studying can 'everything precious' take on such weirdness).
And now constrained; no wireless network, a pod involving half a dozen passwords, a samsung pc, internet explorer and blogger seems especially clutsy today. (Could of course be me, a lack of sleep for fear of missing flights and heat that this kiwi is not used to that compounds feelings of flightlessness).
However, one ethics application is well underway and two more will follow suit. An aggragation of things is needed for such change to occur- the absence of 'work' and other such distractors of a real world, allows for a surreal existence more congruent with being a student. I am however twice blessed- not only do i have study in this alternate reality- i also have Melbourne.

Following the actors

My prof suggested a news feed, I couldn’t get it to work, but with the help of a colleague, got a similar one ( I think) up and running. I check it intermittently (gone are the times I check it multiple times a day). Now I attend to the feed a few times in as many weeks, but in doing so I got fed a link to a site with another link to a pdf on an article (I just love these connections to further connections). I might not have read it otherwise. But a 2005 article on journalism by Fred Turner, in Sociology epistemology provoked the following as an application of ant in my own field of study:


Currently most research into communications for health professionals is deeply attached to the (modern as opposed to post modern) notion that health professionals teach health professionals how to communicate. There appears a separation between professional and lay, staff and patients, caring and being cared for. New media however erode these distinctions. By placing an emphasis on actors, actor network theory provides a lens for seeing relationships differently. The ‘actors’ are no longer exclusively human, and the arbitrary boundaries created in labeling become less important as the focus shifts to performance.

I have a passion, or at least an interest in, these multiple performances; how is each performed differently? What happens when a lay population communicates care? What happens when care is communicated to (pushed to) a novice population of health professionals? And what happens when care is pulled down (asked for) by at risk youth?

This doesn’t seem as coherent today as I would like it to be, but if I practice the writng, it continues to evolve…
And to use a turn of phrase from artichoke that grappling without lust might be unethical surely then to grapple (with at least a modicum of love or passion) might just assist in getting an ethical application off the ground....

being us/ed:

Alan Levine at cogdogblog put me onto this video developed by Michael Welsch at digital ethnography (a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.)




The contrast of writing with digital communications is explored. Its a fast paced provocation for exploring how the medium is the message. Titled Web 2.0... The machine is us/ing us.
I am awestruck. And I think I am using the machine, but at the same time...

In the same week I came across an article (that's not the right word, a series of web pages) on the rise of the participation culture It is this participatory nature that grabbed my attention when first I delved into IT as a teaching and learning medium. ITs alive, it sparkles, I can follow what I want to, go where I choose to, add to what's out there as well as adding to my own development. Pushed and pulled. Beautifully captured. This same week I was also touched by an article, new criteria for new media, on how valuing of staff needs to be able to capture the new mediums being used; academia in its PBRF and promotion systems has yet to catch up with forms of dissemination and creating of knowledge that move faster than journal publications, textbooks or conferences. And I am pushed and pulled a little more ... how then to push the boundaries on how the study of an IT application in a doctoral study might be presented back to the academy in a format that sits alongside a thesis. How to have form and function in synch. How to have the quivering of what is brought up from the depths not lose its liveliness in translation to a form that can be examined.
But as a recipiennt of TIME person of the year, 2006, I trust my skills will be up to the task, I just need to continue letting the machines use me...

C@' (catastrophe)

I have just discovered the catastrophic wonders of acute circulatory overload to lower limbs in walking 18km on hilly terrain in approx 26C heat in training for Oxfams trailblazer 100km in 36 hrs. The scalding type of rash around the ankles, a form of cellulitis referred to as golfers vasculitis. This looks angry and ugly, but settles quickly over a couple of days. I had thought it indicative of my own level of physical neglect and found it oddly comforting when other team members were similarly afflicted. C@' as a team is committed to raising $2000 for Oxfam (so not only do we get the joys of personal and team accomplishment, it actually makes a difference in the world. You can follow the endeavours of team C@' on our Oxfam webpage (donating is optional). A special thanks to Carol for showing global interest.