May 15 2007
Smashing Pumpkins to begin touring again - no James Iha though.
Also, ate cheese curds twice today, as well as Ethiopian food and grill-your-own steak place last night. Then I spilled a whole cooler of melted ice on my crotch in the car.
May 03 2007
oh my.
So, yesterday was pretty fun, as I rode to Georgia Tech from our house for the first time (about 4 1/2 miles via the coffeeshop). There was this thingy from the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture’s Digital Media…department? at Bonnie’s school and I went to it and saw people we’ve had drinks with before (Judy’s friends Manu and Will) and talked about collaborative protest quilts with mandala-like qualities. What do you think about a digital media project where you can upload sound clips or video clips or pictures that would then reassemble randomly with all other contributed content to create a continuous video/flash stream? And in order to get around liability things, as things were assembled and played it the content would be destroyed, a la Philip K Dick’s idea of the biographical video that relatives could watch after the passing.
Anyway. They had this kiosk set up where you could do onsite registration and it would immediately print a label to affix on your badge. I was delirious by the end what with all the technology flying about and reconditioned my badge at the now-unsupervised kiosk despite Bonnie’s threats. Coincidentally, using “a” as your university and “student” as your occupation was very convenient. I am very pleased with the following:
Then, that evening, as I was conferring with RR, we heard 5 distinct gunshots near our house. The dog went crazy and Heather continued to sit on the couch and said it was prolly a car backfiring. About 2 min later we hear the first sirens and see the blue lights reflecting on our white painted porch railing. Indeed there was a shooting - and actually 2 that night about 5 blocks away for each! So we’re not sure if it was this or this that was happening at that moment.
Mar 21 2007
…in theory if other things work out this will allow me to turn off comment registration stuffs too…
Mar 17 2007
This is something I figured I’d send out so that people could rtfa first:
I leave Seattle on the 21st of March for Thailand for my grandmother’s funeral
I arrive back in the US (first DC) on the 30th of March
I leave for Mongolia on June 1st.
Mongolians speak Mongolian, which is in the Altaic language group, which is related to Turkic, Siberian, and sometimes Korean and Japonic groups. I’m a bit vague as it gets into linguistic things after that.
I go into 3 months of training in-country, which includes homestay, intesive language and culture training, and stuff. I then get placed somewhere, partially depending on how I do in the training, I believe. So, I only know that what I will be doing will be health-related, but not much more than that. Speculatively, I would hazard that Mongolia + Health could include things like nutrition, rural health care, alcoholism (though I hear this is a taboo topic), and HIV/AIDS, but I’m not sure. Women’s status there is relatively good (compared to my last placement attempt in Turkmenistan), so I am feeling ok about this one.
If you are interested in what other people are doing in Mongolia or pictures already there, here are a few links that I’ve been following on and off: flickr photos from Khovd (West), the flickr person’s blog, and another blog.
Believe I will make this both a blog entry and a page so that people can refer to it easily 
Mar 12 2007
Just sayin’ - though it’s all on me, and I’m ok with that. On the other hand, due to the excessive amounts of news I’ve had to read for my news media class, I think I will be forking the blog a tag - one for personal/random, and one more towards public health. Stay tuned…if I figure out how to upgrade wordpress while maintaining lj syncing, I may turn off comment moderation finally and allow it to flap hither and to in the wind the way it’s supposed to…
