1. I joined Terra Nova’s World of Warcraft guild and within a week of joining, we had a really engaging conversation on the guild forums about real-world buying of virtual goods.

2. I will not be going to the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) (March, San Francisco) this year… 🙁 but that’s because I’m saving money for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) meeting in Tokyo late September! Furthermore, I’ll be meeting Lisa Galarneau in a few days to see about jointly submitting something.

3. I’m also submitting something to Games Learning Society (GLS) held in mid-July by the folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That should be totally cool, and I’ll get a chance to put faces to all the nice folks I’ve been meeting online thru Terra Nova.

4. My guild is having a convention in Las Vegas late April… hoo boy!

5. I met with my committee yesterday and will be taking general exams early next quarter (and reading stuff this quarter). It sounds like my idea of doing ethnographic work with a bunch of guild members who all work for the same company to compare their work life with their game life is a great one. Sweeeeet.

Haven’t been posting much lately… aaaanndd the World of Warcraft expansion, Burning Crusade, came out today… which means I won’t be posting for a while. 🙂

Lots of stuff has happened in the last two or three weeks. We had a party, we went to Andrew and Yo’s a few times, we played some boardgames and Name in the Hat, some friends were in town, we watch fireworks from a good vantage point near Obie and Michelle’s, I’m considering switching this blog over to Blogger if google adds pages maybe, watched A Bit of Fry and Laurie and been playing Lego Star Wars II with Robin. And now school is here again and my free time is nil again.

Here’s to the new year! I’ll likely be attending a few conferences this year, possibly presenting, and will become a PhD candidate officially by the end of this school year. 🙂

My last Fall quarter related meeting was this morning. Helped a couple of TEP student-teachers out with video stuff and WebQuests at Cupcake Royale/Cafe Verite… What’s funny is that since Denise, another TA/instructor, was there, too, and we were all working on laptops (I think this is the reason), a photographer for the local neighborhood paper (Ballard News Tribune) came by and asked if she could take photos of us working on our computers… Apparently for a story about blogging and Internet cafes. 🙂

Anyway! It’s officially winter break for me now, and I can finally catch up on some non-class/non-teaching stuff. First thing I did was work on my paper and submit it to a journal. We’ll see…

Now I just have to submit presentation proposals to a bunch of conferences…

And… get T-shirts for HW ordered. Look good?

Anyone who knows where I can get shirts like that made, let me know, pls!

Last night I was surfing the web (mostly Letstalk.com) for a new cell phone plan since ours is due to expire in Dec. I’ve been thinking of getting a plan that features more web browsing or Java apps than our current one (and of course new phones to go with). This is mostly due to the fact that I’ve switched everything over to gmail, google calendar, google everything… and I saw a week or so ago that gmail now has a mobile phone app one could download so long as they have a supported phone and carrier…

Anyway…. been looking at Verizon and the Motorola Q and the Motorola Krzr. Only problem is that Verizon isn’t supported by google’s gmail app! But I would still be able to just browse to the simplified version thru the web… So, if I wanted the app to work, I think I would stick with our current Cingular plan but add data features and get a new phone… not sure which phone to get though. And, of course, not even sure I would use the features THAT much since I’ll be getting Opera for my DS Lite in Jan and will be able to get my google stuff anywhere there’s wifi.

But back to why I posted… ironically, maybe subconsciously, I lost my phone on the bus this morning. Realized it while I was walking through Red Square and then ran across campus to a later bus stop for the 44 and caught up with it, and, lo an behold, the driver gave me my phone after playing 20 questions. Whew! I still have 2 months on this sucker!

Here I was trying to figure out whether to publish videos to Google or to YouTube and then recommend something to the TEP class… Well, now it looks like I won’t have to decide. 🙂

Just got back from a trip down to CA. My sister Frances got married on Sat! Grats Frances!

Anyway, I’ll post some photos later. 😛

Well, I made the switch yesterday to gmail and google calendar.

All my email is being forwarded to my google account, and when I hit reply my messages appear to others to be coming from whichever account they sent the email to. That’s handy. Also, I found an app called Companion Link which lets me sync my PDA with google calendar.

Now that my email (and contacts) and calendar are online I am ready for the Opera browser for the Nintendo DS which is slated to hit the US in January. The only question is if I will miss the pdf viewer and, of course, the ability to see my calendar, etc. without a wireless connection.

Anyone who has not seen this movie… I dunno how available it is from rental places or Netflix, but it is worth watching (so is last year’s Crash, btw).

It’s basically the conversation a bunch of ethnically diverse men have during a weekend retreat over racism. It is emotional at times and rational at times. All of the Teacher Education Program TAs watched it today, but we didn’t have much time to discuss what we saw.

One thing I wanted to say was that I completely understand how one of the men felt when he said that he is tired of having to explain things all the time to white folk. It makes me think about how guarded I am all the time in an unconscious way and how when I go and visit my family down in California and we go to a Chinese restaurant and everyone is Chinese, I can almost literally exhale and just relax. Not that I feel much discrimination up here in the Northwest.. not explicitly so, but it is always there, like a shadow from a moving cloud which sometimes becomes very oppressive and other times is hardly noticeable.

I also remember talking to an African-American friend of mine once about how we just know. We were able to communicate a feeling that we had without even saying anything somehow… The conversation went something like:

Him: You know that feeling when… and it is always there… but in the background, sort of?

Me: Yes, I do.

And I’m sorry, but that is about as best as I can explain it to white folk.

But I do still have to wonder how much of the feeling is something I’m bringing to the table? In high school when I was rebuked by white girls, was it because of me or my race? That nagging thing… race is always a factor. I’d like to believe that it was me… or maybe not.. I don’t really know which is worse.