Spring time news

So, I'm emerging from my lonely general exam cocoon, here's some news:

School

• I passed! Woo hoo, this means I'm now a Phd candidate instead of student. My committee was super fabulous and I ended up learning a great deal (go figure). Now...onto the dissertation!
  
• No rest though, lots of exciting school and work related things going on right now. I'm taking a really awesome studio class in Value Sensitive Design.
  
• I'm also TA'ing a class in Computer Science on Computing for the Developing World. The topic is fascinating and close to my area of interest and seeing the CSE from the inside is also quite a treat in terms of interdisciplinarity. The class is being simulcast at Microsoft and also at Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.
  

Work

• New projects, new clients, familiar challenges, some familiar faces.
  
• Prepping for a talk that we're given at UPA in Baltimore in June.
  

Local and personal

• This weekend is the famous Olympia procession of the species - I've never been but it's supposed to be super fun. According to the web site, "The intent of the Procession is to elevate the dignity of the human spirit by enhancing the cultural exchange that we have with each other and with the natural world..." - a tall order!
  
• The farmers market is open! Yay! We went a couple weeks back but there was hardly any produce - too early still, but rumors abound of asparagus - so we'll have to check it out again.
• We FINALLY got over our narrowband dilemma and put up the cash for satellite Internet. It's not the fastest connection in the world, but it beats the pants off of dial-up. The worst part is there is this punitive penalty for going over your 200MB daily download limit. If you do (or in my case when) the ISP slams on the breaks and slows your connection to a trickle. They call this their "fair use policy" - I call it BULLPUCKY. Although I can't believe I went almost a year without Internet at home.
  
• Also, trying to catch up with folks since I've been one of these the past couple of months:

Five hours

So my flight to New York was 5 hours and back it was 7 and both ways it was pretty much torture. When did flying get to be so crappy? Between cranky flight attendants, screaming children, drunk couples making out next to me, it was all could do to not totally freak out. I did make me contemplate how incredibly long five hours can seem.

Now I'm home and taking exams this week. I have to write four essays on four different subjects. I get five hours to write each essay and let me tell you five hours has never gone so quickly. I swear I'm like an athlete (at the computer). I've got two monitors, kleenex, water, coffee, juice and crackers. And the only time I get up for five hours is to sprint (yes sprint) to the bathroom.

I'm half way through: two down, two to go.

Local and Locale

I know I'm one year late to the eating local game, but I swear everywhere I look, read and talk lately people are talking about eating local (like this guy, this book and a group of colleagues I had dinner with last week).

For our Valentine's diner last weekend, I made a hyper-local meal. The mushrooms for the wild mushroom risotto were local, although the rice was from Italy. But the oysters were about as close to home as they could be. From our house there is a little trail down to the beach. The trail, the beach, and the resulting oysters found on the beach all belong to the Olympia Oyster Company.



So the Oysters are raised and farmed there in our neighborhood and we can buy them from pretty much any grocery store in town. It's kind of nice when most of the other seafood - at least at this time of the year is from Indonesia or China. So we had a ridiculously yummy meal with at least the majority of ingredients from basically our own backyard.



So like eating local, there are other concepts and ideas popping up everywhere I look. I'm in the midst of studying for my general exams, a laborious and time consuming process that involves me reading lots and lots. In the chunk of theory that I'm trying to digest, is Anthony Giddens and his concept of structuration. And one of the concepts that keeps bubbling up is that of locale, which for me is theoretical and as importantly, methodological. Locales are the spaces that provide the settings for interaction, but these setting are nested both geographically and hierarchically. Locales are where we are, this room, this building, this block, this city, etc. ... but locales also the basis for the contextualization of meaning. They become the site for where rules and interactions are enacted to create structure which exists not just spatially but temporally. You can physically be inside and outside of a room, and can also be inside or outside of the actions to exist within that room due to the contextualization formed and re-inforced by rules and actors. So for example, a restaurant is restaurant but the interactions within that restaurant are dictated by the context and its rules: like do you order at the counter or are seated where someone comes out to take your order. Additionally, seeing a restaurant in a certain geographical location and at a certain time, the social order can come into focus, like for example a sign reading whites only dictates the social order and expected rules. Whether or not that sign is there, the contextual interactions therein inform behavior.

So whether its local or locale, I'm getting a nice big shift in the way my world gets contextualized.