Thursday, October 9, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Email transition followup for student GL. Chatted briefly with Scott about voting, learned that SPUR has a voter guide on its website. Content capture and delivery meeting. Websteering lunch: Crepevine. Julie had news to tell. I had a garden burger, grilled potatoes, side salad, plain water—about $10. IT services meeting: 2nd annual state of IT. Applied a Stop Theft plate to Chris's laptop. Email transition followup for student GL: gave up trying to get this issue resolved, sent an email to Heidi S and Opinder B for assistance. Helped student AY with listserv questions. Requested all listservs I own to have notebook=yes, which (I believe) effectively enables RSS feeds. My secret plan is to pull the School out of the interweb dark ages and into roughly 2002 by showing them all the cool things you can do with RSS: follow mailing lists without opening an email client!, view archived messages on the web!, combine mailing list traffic with your other daily news! It's going to take me about 12 years, but I am confident I will succeed. Blogging followup with Susie, Lisa, Eric D, and Sue: how to deal with comments. Flickr followup with Eric D and Susie: realized we need to tell faculty and staff more explicitly what legal responsibilities they have when posting photos and the options they have for posting stuff. Forwarded Cindy feedback from nursing on orientation. Reported wiki problems to Jilian. Updated current student news about the forthcoming Teaching and Learning Center at the library. Followup with student CL: in order to use the global address list in Entourage 2004 or Entourage 2008, you need to be connected with VPN and Network Connect. (This is yet another way in which Entourage does not have feature parity with Outlook—Outlook users have no problem with doing this without VPN.) Dinner at home with Patrick: fettuccine with Italian sausage in marinara sauce. Watched Heroes Season 1 episode 15 on Netflix DVD with Patrick. After reading Short Shrifted today, I wrote the following: I remember shopping once in I think it was Nordstrom's for a dress jacket and all the smaller sizes were on the upper rack (which I couldn't reach) and all the larger sizes were on the lower rack, presumably because someone thought it looked better that way. I simply walked out. I wouldn't care if the store manager were my best friend—a store doesn't get my business if they make it that hard for me to shop there. For a long time I simply stopped shopping in meatspace stores because it's not easy to even tell if they carry small sizes, and when I ask more often than not I am told, "Sorry, but we have your size online..." My measurements fall pretty much at or just below sizes you find in mens departments and often too big for boys departments, and I find that most department stores have this huge gap between boys and mens sizes. If they have anything at all it's severely oversized and styled too urban for my taste. It's much easier to find, as Josh says, a vintage tie—or anything really—online where the dimensions are stated exactly or where you can ask the seller a specific question on dimensions and get a specific answer the next day. Even if meatspace stores carried my size, they still don't organize from the customer's perspective. Why can't they put all the clothes that fits me on a few racks next to each other rather than sorting it by what makes it easy for them to stock? I want to be in one area and be able to pick out a complete outfit where everything fits me rather than go to the boys pants, find my size, go to the mens shirts, find my size, go to the boys belts, find my size, go to a different rack in mens shirts, find my size—I don't have time for that. I got a bit back into shopping after I discovered that the boys department in H&M has a lot of things that fit me, but unlike the mens and womens sections, the boys department at H&M does not change much—I feel like I only need to go 2 or 3 times a year and I can still see everything that comes through the boys department. So it's a mixed blessing—yes it fits, but instead of new looks 52 times a year in the mens department you get only 3. And you still have to ignore the stuff that has soccer balls and dinosaurs on them. H&M boys is the only serious meatspace clothes shopping I do anymore simply because H&M doesn't sell online and because I no longer trust other stores to deliver anything in meatspace I can use. To bring me back will require a revolution. To me, that means: (a) shop by size (like I can do increasingly online), (b) no separate boys and mens departments—just run everything together instead of creating an arbitrary dividing line between XL 18-20 and S (and that will make the size gaps that much more obvious), (c) stop presuming that XL boys also means heavier. I do not anticipate that such a revolution will occur anytime soon, but I hope I am wrong.