Orchids, pizza, and summer reading

On Saturday I tackled the first in a short list of summer gardening activities at the college. I had been meaning to move Spathoglottis plicata growing in the wild over to the college entrance sign. A previous attempt to move flowers into the planter was undone by the El Niño dry spell from January to February, along with subsequent damage done by weed whackers.

 A couple wild plants were selected and transplaneted.

 One was planted in the north side planter.

The other in the south side planter. This time wire fencing was put around the plants to protect them.

On a hot, humid, tropical summer day a picnic can mean a homemade pizza dinner in an air conditioned lounge.

I just finished reading The Tyranny of Email by John Freeman, a new acquisition by the college library. While a good read, one keeps having the feeling that the focus on email may already be misplaced. The upshot is that email is consuming vast amounts of time while impacting our ability to think deeply and function effectively.

The complication for me is that technology has given me the tools and permitted the development of habits to manage my email. Email is not the technology that I am struggling to manage. Social media is the technology that lacks management tools. Social media is rapidly becoming a place in which I have information to which I later need access. I may be looking for a link I saw, or an image I came across or posted.

Search in FaceBook is horrible. I can search my blog by using a site restriction in Google, but doing the same in FaceBook is not obvious. FaceBook's own search engine does not return information in photo captions, tags in photos, nor can FaceBook search do a search such as "all links posted by my friend Bill that have to with quantum mechanics as a key term."

Accessing old material is painful - one really would like a system like blogs have where there is a timeline you can use to access old information. I might remember that I saw what I want to find in March, but how to get back to what my wall looked like in March without repeatedly clicking "Show older posts" at the bottom of my wall. Painful way to get at one's history.

Subject tags would be useful, but that can only currently be accomplished by misappropriating the "Tag this person" to tag a photo "physical science laboratory." And then how to search for those photos tagged that way? There is no person page corresponding to "physical science laboratory."

FaceBook is the technology that currently provides a critically useful contact point with students, friends, and family, and yet remains a tremendous consumer of my time due to the lack of real management tools, indexes, metadata capability (subject tags), and search capabilities.

Still, The Tyranny of Email is a fun read and on a good page can provoke some thought. I am reminded of why I try my best to get out of the office periodically and talk to people, especially those who seem most uncomfortable with email communication - those who often misread the tone and intent of one's notes.

Now I am tackling Japanese Sports: A History. Eclectic and far from the fields in which I facilitate learning, but on a good day new ideas are stimulated that lead to new approaches in the class room.

Closer to one of my activities, I am also rereading Running & Philosophy: A marathon for the mind. Running distance is an activity that permits the mind to wander. When running alone, there is no ball to focus upon, no opponent to guard, nothing more than the most primitive of activities - falling forward onto alternate feet. Little wonder runners philosophize.

The short break between summer school and fall term is not devoid of all things school. I "decorated" an on-line fall syllabus with an animation that at present is functional only in Google Chrome and Opera browsers, but may eventually be functional in FireFox 4 or possible 5.