Name:Raymond Roquemore
URL:http://www.funderstanding.com/constructivism.cfm
Site Name:Funderstanding
Rating:3
Comments: My first impression of this site is that it was short, sweet, and to the point. It answered most of the class assignment questions readily. Although it was somewhat short on content i would recommend it to colleagues who needed some surface answers to some constructivism questions.

This was the first California quake I'd ever experienced, despite having lived here for over 6 years. All the previous quakes in CA during my time here occured either while I was out of state or having sex :-) I was so excited about the quake last night! We could even feel the ripple of the earth moving under us. It was awesome to finally feel one out here!

The only other one I've felt was when I was about 9 and living in Indiana; I was crouched down getting dance tights out of the bottom drawer and it knocked me onto my butt :-)

The cats were acting all strange this morning and I got paranoid, wondering if they were trying to warn me about a bigger earthquake that's on its way. Turns out that the ants had found their food dish, but I was having a serious Lassie moment there for a bit.

Edited by author 09-05-2003 06:07 PM
The epicenter was even closer to where I work. My boss said it sounded like the roof was cracking apart, and the whole house swayed. It's the strongest quake I've experienced, but it still wasn't that bad. I didn't feel the second one at all.

Dude, no wonder you felt it: it was practically centered on your house.

(Actually, there appear to have been two quakes, an hour apart, last night. I didn't feel either one of 'em. A couple dozen people here in Mountain View did report feeling them, but those reports were very low-intensity.)

For those not in CA, note that these were magnitude 3.9 and 3.0 -- pretty small as earthquakes go. The USGS doesn't even automatically show a map for anything under 3.5, and humans don't generally notice quakes below 2.5. (It's a logarithmic scale, so 3.5 is ten times as strong as 2.5, but even so, that means ten times as strong as barely perceptible.)

Good to know. Sounds trippy, though. As a kid in Cali I remember earthquakes rolling beds across rooms, cracking windows, and (supposedly) giving our aged cat a coronary.

One of the few things about Cali I don't miss.

Andreas: Yeah, we're fine. We certainly felt it, though -- it made the water heater shake and the pots on the stove rattle.

Tim, just saw there was a quake in your area, everybody okay?

Hey, Mandy! Sure, let's hang out. Maybe this weekend?

Bah. Now I feel horrible for not sending in nominations for anything. "Nominations," I thought. "What good are those? Doesn't everyone already know that Tim is worth reading?" Now I know. I hope you'll forgive me.

Also, while actually being in that area today, I realized the Parkway is farther down than I thought it was, so I think that makes you definitely south of the freeway. Which is almost enough for me to start wandering up and down streets calling your name. :) (Meaning, btw, I'm back, wanna hang out?)

Stinky mean ol' publishers. Though at least they seem interested in helping her build a career.

Rumor has it that she's got another novel that both she and Stee think is better than the first, but the publisher wants her to write another that's more like "Why Girls are Weird". They've more or less promised to publish this other novel as her -third- book, but they're demanding a chick-lit second book first.

Or something.

Regarding Pamie's book -- I didn't find it boring (there were some boring *moments*, but hey, it's a first novel, so I cut her some slack). And I think she did a good job of contrasting LDobler's relatively gentle obsessiveness with the more dangerous obsessiveness of Tess, and with the narrator's own obsessiveness about her ex-boyfriend. I mean, AnnaK writing journal entries as if she were still dating her ex was pretty creepy and stalkerish, too. I thought the book was a nice exploration of the weirdness of getting to know one another via mediated personalities. I also appreciated that it doesn't end with a fairy-tale love thing between LDobler and AnnaK; it's more ambiguous than that. It's a book where most of the main characters are deeply fucked-up at the beginning, and manage to at least get on the road to functional human relationships by the end. I like that kind of book. Seems very human.

MonkeyCon should be in Las Vegas, is all I'm saying.

But you liked Pamie's book? I read the first few chapters and got bored, and I've heard a lot of people say that they came away from the book feeling like the overall message was "creepy stalkers are sexy". I mean, LDobler tells her that he's printed out her journal entries and is sleeping with them under his pillow at night, and she's all, "ooh, flirt with me baby." That was about where I started to lose interest.

Congrats on all those things, as well as your interview up on Ideomancer! Quite cool all the way around.

Congrats on the sale and on the votes! Next year, the Campbell ballot.

See ya at MonkeyCon.

My parents had basic cable when I was a youngster. This was back when one had settop boxes to control your cable channels. They had it about a year before they cancelled. Well, the company never came to pick up the box. Seven years, they had free cable.