I've got to write quickly as I've just started drinking (on an empty stomach) and will be shit-faced blurry drunk in five minutes. So good-bye and hopefully I'll see some responses to this post tomorrow or the next day when I sober up. Or the next day. Or next week.Inspired by the movie thirsty last week....
I love my iPhone. You might, too. Or maybe you love your Android phone or whatever they're called. The apps are [insert superlative that you sober person can think of].
Q. What's the one app that has changed your life as a proffie for the better?
A. ________________________________________
Be honest, dammit.
Angry Birds. Makes proctoring exams so much less boring.
ReplyDeleteI have more than one answer:
ReplyDelete1. iBooks. jesus h fucking christ, I probably have a thousand articles and papers stuffed into this little thing. It's like having a library with me at all times, even when I don't have an internet connection.
2. texting. On iPhone, it's called Messages. This makes senseless fucking committee meetings more bearable because I can send/receive texts with a friend on the other side of the table/room: e.g., "This meeting blows unicorn rainbows."
3. My son likes Stack the States today. Or yesterday. So I have been playing it some, too, and learning about states. This has nothing to do with proffiedom, but I am drunk now.
Splashtop. I bought it before they started charging a regular fee. It cost me $3, and now I can access my school computer from home and my home computer from school.
ReplyDeleteThe AKM.
ReplyDeleteEasier to work with than the original AK-47, fires bigger bullets than the AK-74. Folding stock version is the best.
Attendance. Makes it dead easy to take attendance and will generate charts and such.
ReplyDeleteI loved that thing for the 2 weeks I used it before my university's FOI officer and my Chair told me I couldn't use it because of "security" and "privacy" issues; issues they could not actually articulate, mind you.
DeleteWTF "security" and "privacy" issues? I have not told my FOI officer or chair I use it. But as long as you keep your phone passcode-locked, nobody else will get the information, so what is their problem?
DeleteBubba! How's it going? (That's not a casual question, as you posted some serious ennui not long ago.)
ReplyDeleteAlarm Clock Xtreme for Android helps me manage class time -- very helpful at my college, where class start and end times seem to be random due to a shortened semester.
I use alarms with different ring tones for
- 15 minutes before each class (to help me get out of hallway conversations and down to the classroom);
- class start time (loud and funny, good signal for students);
- 10 minutes before class ends (subtle and quiet, to alert me to finish up and make announcements);
- class end time (loud, appreciated by students);
- 10 minutes before office hour;
- END OF OFFICE HOUR (loud phone ringing);
- Hit the Road! (so I can catch my train)
Aside from Twitter (I swear they are not paying me to shill for them) (and seriously I Heart Twitter even if it seems inane to pretty much everyone else), I have just started using iAnnotate to read my PDF files on ye olde iPad. It was recommended to me by a colleague, and I'm still playing around with it, but I appreciate how it syncs up to whatever online storage you run (Google Drive, DropBox, etc.) and how it makes it easy to mark things up.
ReplyDeleteSunday is not a viable day for an Early Thirsty. Thirstys posted on Sunday must have a spiritual angle.
ReplyDeleteNobody gives a shit about the thirsty rules, and Cal is somewhere nursing a hot rock in his stomach because of that.
That is all,
Leslie K
But it was already Monday where I am. And it's already February in New Zealand, isn't it?
DeleteGoddamn, I get so aroused when Leslie K gets her knickers all twisted and issues an edict. It's like a heroin rush pulling me away from my Alan Strangian affection for horses and pushing me towards an Ellen Jamesian cutting-off-of-my-tongue-and-fingers so that I might not ever again violate the rules by saying or typing the wrong thing at the wrong time.
DeleteI don't know if I can resist this unholy desire to please Leslie K. If I deny this craving, this need, I will surely burn in hell. I feel like I'm high on crack and toting a machine gun. I don't know what I might do. What would you do if you were in my place? Look, if you had one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted--one moment--would you capture it or just let it slip?
That's where I'm at. I can hardly breathe. All I ever wanted to do--in my entire life--was please Leslie K. In this moment, I don't know what to do. The whole world is upside-down. The drunken madness of it all.
With tears streaming down my face, my every hope, my only wish, is that Greta's magic will find me so that I might be able
to fly without the aid of
machinery or
fear; or to bring to
life a thought which has died; to
hear the last leaves of
autumn rustling; to
comfort the unrequited;
to bake sourdough bread
with no oven; to
find lost keys, to mint new coins,
to pet three cats at
once, to dance a jig,
pepper a sandwich, fart out
loud, finagle a
sum, remember to
shut the front door and--sometimes--
to bring together
fragments to make a
whole.
or…
maybe, just maybe, to please Leslie K.
Edna might be right. But if she's not, then... dear sweet heavenly Yaro above, I beseech thee to give this Thirsty a spiritual angle.
DeleteAnd that right soon.
Amen.
* CAL * has a hot rock in his stomach. I'm just reporting what I know from previous thirsty come-to-Jesus meetings we've had around the compound picnic table in Oxford and Ogden.
DeleteBubba, from what I hear, I'm not easy to please, anyway, so don't set yourself on that path!
@Greta, while I continue to drink, I am thinking that I wish to apologize to you (if I should)--and (in case I shouldn't) to at least let you know I was contemplating it. I continue to drink. Perhaps tomorrow, with less alcohol in my veins, I will well discern whether or not I should have used quotation marks around your words. At this moment, I do not know.
DeletePerhaps it is a violation of The Rules to hijack one's own post by going off on a tangent like this? Perhaps not.
Sometimes it seems like an insult to the audience (or uncouth or a violation of some other quasi-semiological etiquette) to use quotation marks. Is there universal agreement on this? No doubt someone else here has more authority to make that determination.
A little bourbon seems to bombard my mind with numerous words and phrases and questions. I don't wish to escape this fog yet, but I do now wonder if I should always use quotation marks when writing that a rose is a rose is a rose, or that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
I want apps for all these things.
Meantime, I also apologize to Eminem, Prince, Stephen King, John Irving, Ted Kennedy, and everybody else.
Dearest Bubba,
DeleteVisit/revisit "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plaigiarism" by Jonathan Lethem, and see if it gives you any ideas: http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/
Smooches and bourbon,
Edna
Given the way that some of you Mac people feel about your new iWhatever, you might as well be a religion. I'd say Bubba's Sunday thirsty satisfies the spiritual requirement.
DeleteBookcrawler--I can index my books by scanning the ISBN bar code. Creates a catalog, sortable by the usual parameters of author, subject, etc.
ReplyDeleteCal Academy of Sciences has a penguin cam. This is particularly entertaining at feeding time.
Turbo Scan--iPhone scanner application. Makes a really high quality scan of a document. It's very 007.
Sound Hound. Identifies music.
Star Map and Topo Maps and Peak.ar. With the last one, you point it at the horizon and it identifies each hill and mountain, plus elevation. Maybe not so impressive in Kansas, but pretty cool in my neck of the woods.
And, obviously, the App Store app. How I have stayed sane during some meetings...
Delete@Annie Oakley: If you've thrown away the book jacket, does Bookcrawler require you to type in the ISBN? Or does it use OCR to read the ISBN? I throw away a lot of book jackets (which usually have the bar codes on them).
DeleteAnd I have long loved the penguin cam. It's soothing like Valium. Only wish it had audio. If anybody knows of a good ocean cam I could leave on my desktop, I'd love to hear about it.
Sorry, missed this Bubba. You can type in the ISBN.
DeleteWhoopsie. Someone posted a comment twice, and when I zapped the extra one, somehow the other disappeared as well. In the popular locution: my bad.
ReplyDeleteLeslie K
That was Sarcastic Bastard, who said, "Back to the thirsty (because I don't give a shit about rules): QR Reader. I scan the QR code on a poster in the copy room and I find out what the special is in the main cafeteria. That way I don't have to walk across campus to find it's mystery meat in gravy, again."
DeleteHow is maintaining sanity *not* a spiritual/religious quest?!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad for these suggestions. The only apps I ever use are for the weather!
ReplyDeleteYes, these are good. Thanks, everybody.
DeleteI wrote a great app myself, both for iPhone and Android, called "Shove Smartphone Up Inattentive Student's Ass." So far the beta testing is going great, and I anticipate a release by the end of spring semester.
ReplyDeleteApp? Do I need a cellphone for apps? This explains so much....
ReplyDeleteDropbox and Evernote. Both amazingly helpful.
ReplyDeleteHow could I have forgotten Evernote?
Delete