Hooray for bad ideas!
Friday, June 25, 2010
I'm going out
Today was my last day at one of my junior high schools, which means I'm slamming a canned coffee and heading out for some middleoftheworldcupnosleepdelirium fun. After three years of avoiding it like the plague, I'm playing pachinko with the boys. What does that mean? Mostly, that I'll be dropping coins into a bottomless pit while doing permanent damage to my hearing and being peer-pressured into smoking cigarettes that will later make me vomit during the 65th minute of the Brazil-Portugal game. Think I'm joking? Tune in Monday to find out.
Hooray for bad ideas!
Hooray for bad ideas!
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Save me, Google
The pain in my jaw is not the result of a right hook. The jittery hands and accelerated heartbeat are not consequences of too many cups of Peet's Coffee this past weekend, courtesy of @henrydreyfus (no he's not on twitter, but isn't this how we're supposed to write names these days?) To the best of my knowledge, I am not on drugs, suffering from anaphylaxis, or dying. Yet.
The source of my troubles, rather, is my impending job search in August. When I moved to Japan and decided that I would explore career opportunities outside of teaching (yes, I knew that my job here still counted as teaching), I took comfort in knowing that my next job search would be at least a year away. When I signed a paper last year saying that I would be staying at my teaching job for another 12 months, the search was pushed back even further. Now, 11 of those 12 short months later, the looming search is pushing back. Faced with the stark reality of the ruthless feeling out process ahead, there is no comfort to be taken. Until now. Sort of.
Last week, after some discussion over my ambitions to enter the seemingly dying field of journalism upon my return to the States, Mr. @dreyfus handed me a copy of The Atlantic. Apparently he had been struck by an article detailing Google's plans to save the print journalism industry and suggested I check it out. I'm glad he did.
Below is a brief excerpt from the article. Written by Jim Fallows, it describes Google's attempts to think constructively about the problems facing print journalism in the 21st century and outlines, though somewhat vaguely, the company's plans for aiding the news business. Whether you'll agree with Mr. Fallows' summation that the future of journalism is bright or not will be up to you, but if I can manage even slightly better sleep tonight because of these pages, it'll be just one more thing to thank the geniuses at Google for.
Check it out.
Read the whole thing here.
The source of my troubles, rather, is my impending job search in August. When I moved to Japan and decided that I would explore career opportunities outside of teaching (yes, I knew that my job here still counted as teaching), I took comfort in knowing that my next job search would be at least a year away. When I signed a paper last year saying that I would be staying at my teaching job for another 12 months, the search was pushed back even further. Now, 11 of those 12 short months later, the looming search is pushing back. Faced with the stark reality of the ruthless feeling out process ahead, there is no comfort to be taken. Until now. Sort of.
Last week, after some discussion over my ambitions to enter the seemingly dying field of journalism upon my return to the States, Mr. @dreyfus handed me a copy of The Atlantic. Apparently he had been struck by an article detailing Google's plans to save the print journalism industry and suggested I check it out. I'm glad he did.
Below is a brief excerpt from the article. Written by Jim Fallows, it describes Google's attempts to think constructively about the problems facing print journalism in the 21st century and outlines, though somewhat vaguely, the company's plans for aiding the news business. Whether you'll agree with Mr. Fallows' summation that the future of journalism is bright or not will be up to you, but if I can manage even slightly better sleep tonight because of these pages, it'll be just one more thing to thank the geniuses at Google for.
Check it out.
How to Save the News
BY JAMES FALLOWSPlummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright.
Read the whole thing here.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Rugby 3.0
That cool breeze blowing across the Pacific this week is me exhaling after finally relinquishing my organizing duties yesterday. The 7th Annual Tokushima AJET Touch Rugby Tournament has come and passed, and while I'm happy to put the work behind me, I'll be sad to miss out on the action next year. The much-improved Su-touch-i squad finished with 26 points and its first ever top half finish, but as always the best moments of the weekend occurred off the pitch and in the company of 300 new friends. Here's a look at what has become far and away my favorite event of the year:
breaking it down before the first game
lookin' like Ryan Grant in the open field
beaten but not finished
giving a pep talk
swapping teams
a tired but pleased Su-touch-i team
breaking it down before the first game
lookin' like Ryan Grant in the open field
beaten but not finished
giving a pep talk
swapping teams
a tired but pleased Su-touch-i team
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