Week Notes for May 4th 2025

• Finished my essay for a book on teaching that will be published probably in a few months in Italy. I'm thinking it is ok but could be better. 
• Wrapped up the spring term. That means that this fall will be the start of year 19 of working as a professor. 
• Started working in earnest on my summer projects, which include two big video lecture series. We'll see if anyone watches them. 
• My essay that is over a year old came out in Argumentation & Advocacy What a long process that was! Taylor & Francis isn't interested in being a good publisher, they just want to make free money off of academics. We let them!
• Read Jefferson Fisher's book The Next Conversation and I'm going to make a YouTube video review of it. Spoiler: It's terrible.
• Starting to read the most recent biography of Alexis de Toqueville

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/man-who-understood-democracy-life-alexis-de-tocqueville

Here's this week's Music Listening see what you think. Obsessed with Ariana's new album. 

https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/week/17

The second time you do something is hardly a tradition, but it is definitely a step toward a tradtion!

Week Notes for April 27th

This week's listening stats.

• Listening is always off kilter due to how Last FM does the listening tracking (Thursday to Thursday) but maybe it will catch up one day? Who knows? This is just through the 24th. I definitely need to shut down the Google Chrome plugin for Last FM as it's ruining my stats by putting in interviews and other non-music choices I make on YouTube. 

• This week's listening brought to you by the Coachella YouTube live feed, nice weather, new porch furniture, a bluetooth speaker, and oh so affordable Kirkclaws (Costco branded whiteclaws). 

• I have been sick since Tuesday night. I think I got some viral bug from one of the many children who were at the house on Easter. The incubation period holds up and I didn't follow my rules for eating at an event where children are present, so that's a great way to catch something.

• I took the week off to recover plus I didn't want to be "that guy" who gets everyone sick the last week of the semester as the stress for finals starts to ramp up. People are going to be wrecked anyway; why contribute?

•  I'm trying to figure out how to address these new and decidedly poorer quality students that we are bringing in these days. They have been well-trained to be incapable. I'm starting to make a summer to-do list already for my fall courses.

• I finished moving all my files into a decent order on my NAS and started cleaning out duplicates and broken files. There are a lot. As of today the total storage of the NAS has changed from 8.2TB to 7.9TB. That's significant and shocked me once the NAS wiped the recycle bin. A little goes a long way. My strategy has been to delete about 10 or so things whenever I'm taking a break at the computer. 

• Finding all kinds of great old images I didn't know I had! Here's a sample! 

  

  
• Finishing an essay I've had months and months to work on as the deadline keeps getting pushed back. I'm still not happy with it but I really only have today and tomorrow to finish it up. Been typing away on it during the week.

• Playing a lot of No Man's Sky, amazing game always

• Reading an interesting book on Translation and Henry Giroux's new book on teaching

I have spent a significant portion of being sick with a cold watching some of these playthroughs of the games that defined my sense of what a video game should be. Sierra games!

All of these are worth watching.

My friend Alan clued me in to the new trend of posting week notes on a blog just to make a list and talk through what you did. It's sort of a throwback in my mind to the earlier days of blogging when the writing was an "open diary" or "open journal" rather than what it is thought of today - a form of publishing. The vibes are very different between the two. This practice is a recovery of blogging's origins as a "web log," an online journaling practice that just allows you to dump everything that happened, everything you did, and everything that can't easily be classified between the two.

There is a humorous timeliness to the recovery of this kind of post thanks to Elon Musk. But this is a reduction and a simplification of human effort and experience. I don't think the Week Notes is meant for that. Instead it should be thought of as a way to reflect on what you did, tried, didn't do, etc. It can be expansive and constructive rather than an account, testimony, evidence, or proof that you are worth something to someone, anyone. That dark way of thinking about accomplishments pervades our lives. Maybe actual blogging, week notes, can chip away at that. 

Here's my first attempt!

Last Week's Soundtrack is down from the previous week mostly because I wasn't listening to a lot of music! I only listened in the car or the gym. Last.fm is very good for seeing your music habits in the micro and the macro.

I moved all of my files off of my 5TB OneDrive provided by my university after I realized they would probably claim ownership of my writing, or delete it, or mess with it if they felt like it. This was a huge ordeal. I did clean off a lot of duplicates and now I'm in love with the Synology interface and software on my NAS more than I thought was possible. 

I spilled about a pound of fancy coffee all over the floor one night before bed and my auto-delivery scale didn't trigger, so I'm drinking my emergency Costco coffee - and it tastes great! Is it quality or is it just change?

I edited the PR copy for my forthcoming book and suggested an alternate subtitle for it. Still considering re-writing the conclusion but why mess with what works? The word count is tight and I just know that if I were to do that I'd be at least 2k over what they want. I can just wait for the second edition, which they seem to think will happen. They know better than me! The second edition would be in 2028. 

I sold my PS5 to my good friend and shipped it off. It didn't feel weird at all; it felt good! I realized that in a shared house you can't play a TV dedicated console ever. Plus the only thing I used it for was playing Fallout 76, a prior gen game. Once No Man's Sky allowed cross save, I moved everything to Steam and said by to it. Maybe I'm too old for consoles? I am eagerly looking forward to the new Pokemon game on Switch though.

Regularly making two 45 minute podcasts a week and it's fun. I realize I can just kind of chat about ideas and it is pretty good quality. You don't really need much in terms of a producer role. Podcasts are conversations!

Ok well that's the first attempt. Let's see how this next week goes. I wonder if I should arrange them around the Last FM conception of a week (Friday to Thursday). Kinda weird. Thoughts on this welcome!

Support the blog!

http://stevellano.voicenotes.com

I have been using the Voicenotes app for a while now. It's really great, and a good way to not lose track of ideas when they pop into your head while you are doing something else. 

Today they launched a blog service - is it a blog? - where you can post voicenotes directly to a public website. This strikes me as something I was missing from the old LiveJournal days, where you could call a phone number and make a voice post. I doubt LiveJournal still has this feature (it's almost completely taken over by Russians anyway) but it was so amazing. I loved it and haven't found anything really close to it. 

Voicenotes might be considered a podcast but perhaps it's more like a blog that is only audio posts. Not sure what to do with it just yet but I thought I would share the link and see what people think of my early efforts.

Of course my real podcast is where it's at: In the Bin

That one slaps already. Not sure what to do with this new one but it is fun to play with. 

https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/month/3

March was when I was obsessed with Pvris. Excellent albums; why was I so unfamiliar? 

I'm listening to her still (her, I think? It seems there's a band but most of what I read says it's her, like Nine Inch Nails is to Trent Reznor) but also listening to all sorts of other good stuff coming out. 

I've been getting into ambient music quite a bit and Apple Classical, at least while I have it free for 3 months, is a great addition however it doesn't really appear on Last.fm like it should. 

This video seems to suggest that there's a band? I'm very confused. Anyway, this is my favorite tune from them/her at the moment. 

https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/week

Music listening down since the winter. I wonder why that happens?
Perhaps I listen to more music during the cold days. Maybe I don't notice it? I feel my listening amount has stayed the same. 

Last.fm is so important to me as the data - when I look at it - makes me consider my relationship with music. It raises a lot of questions for me that force me to create explanations and accounts, which is great rhetorical practice. 

I heard this song on the radio the other day and I felt quite sad as I really saw the connection of it to many of the experiences I have been having this semester. Plus, the meta of remembering listening to this song in college and really liking it. Even the like of the song has changed (faded) from the meaning and association I developed at first (shimmer).

Really getting back into pop music this month, but how could I not? There are so many good releases right now. I also have a trial of Apple Music and I'm wondering if I should keep it. It doesn't work well with last.fm however so that's a big strike against it. 

This song is too good. I hope the rest of the album is as good. This song really hits me, I love it! 

In two years I will have been a professor for 20 years. Too long to do anything!

I should have left much earlier; now I don't think I can leave!

It's a bit much trying to adjust to the students' incapability all the time. But what else would a teacher do? 

This term is nearly over, and my run as an authoritarian did not work out well at all. I thought I'd try it as my colleagues get such joy out of this kind of power. I wanted to see what the fuss was about. There's no fuss and nothing about. 

In the fall I shall go totally lax to pay back some of the karma. Not sure it works like that but we'll hope.

Four weeks left of this nonsense then the summer for thinking.

Should I refresh every old computer I work on? Probably.

However I think that if a computer works and can do the tasks that you need it to do, just leave it alone. 

This old Macbook has been backed up and I removed a bunch of software from it that is outdated or no longer working. Seems fine. I think I'll just leave it as a writing machine - one that is distraction free because trying to run a Google Search on it takes longer than it does to make a cup of coffee in the Keurig. A big cup.