Being Watched

Nobody really knew it until it was almost done. But nevertheless, it was happening. We were being watched.

Laurel alerted me to this fact about a week ago. College students from Alberta, Canada have been reading her blog, and Jay's, too.

Professor Robert Runté of the University of Lethbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta, gave the following assignment to his Social Context class this semester, worth 20% of their grade:

Blogs provide us with a unique opportunity to unobtrusively observe the private lives of a selection of (articulate) students. Links to a selection of adolescent blogs is provided in WebCT. Choose one set of ten blogs and read them regularly over the term and analyze their content. Your analysis should answer the following questions:

• How important is school in the lives of these students (as reported in their blogs)?
• What is their view of teachers and school? Positive? Negative?
• What is their view of your major (i.e., sports or languages)?
• What is the dominant theme of their blogs? (Dating? Annoying parents? Sibling conflict? Sports? Shopping? Travel? Drugs? Teenage Angst? Joy? Humour?)
• What are some of the minor themes that you could identify?
• How would you characterize these students' self-images? What role is the blog
  serving in the development of the student's identity?
• Are there any patterns that you have observed in your sample of blogs? Do you notice anything about language usage among these students? Any gender differences? You may organize your analysis as you see fit – e.g., by blog, by theme, by age, etc.

Please note that you are NOT to contact any of these student blog writers.

Wow. That's amazing. Jay and Laurel being selected to be a part of Set 7 just for being, well, normal teenagers!

Granted, this could be considered an invasion of privacy, a concern that one of Laurel's acquaintances brought up. However, these blogs are public, so I guess they took that risk.

Nevertheless, Laurel's blog's traffic jumped in the second half of February as a result. In fact, she only found out by investigating the referring URLs to her blog from Canada. I mean, wouldn't you wan't to investigate how random Canadians were getting to your blog?

All I know is I only got one Albertan hit from this whole thing...one lousy hit (22 February 20:44 ET). They came through Jay's blog, and only visited my homepage. Oh, well. I guess I'm not a normal teenager. But then again, we all knew that.

Friday the Seventeenth

Well, Friday the Seventeenth came and went, and nothing major happened. Yay.

Maybe it was because I didn't have any school?

Falling Off the Face of the Earth

When I went to my Google personalized homepage this morning, I was shocked to see the weather module as shown to the left. Apparently, while Bradford and Pittsburgh are going to have chilly weather on Saturday, Girard is simply going to fall off the face of the earth.

So, I guess I'm moving. Somewhere. I don't know where yet, but since Bradford and Pittsburgh are safe, I guess I'll go there.

Maybe the same sort of thing happened to Los Angeles, home of Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. Their main site, dictionary.com, hasn't had a word of the day since Tuesday. They say that the new one is posted at 00:00 PT each day (03:00 ET). We're now approaching afternoon and there isn't even one for yesterday yet. Oh, well.

Actually, the whole reason for the Google glitch was because they're forecasting a chance of snow showers for Girard on Saturday, with a high of 21° and a low of 11°. Apparently, because it was the only one of my three selected cities with a double-digit forecasted low, it was too big to fit in the module (just by a little bit). Google, being "smart," decided to leave off the entire day rather than cut off the low temperature.

You'd think it would just leave off Saturday altogether...

Day 100

Yesterday was the 100th day of school here at Girard High, which means one thing: only 80 left! And it's not even really 80 because that figure includes parent-teacher conferences and all half-days as if they were whole.

Oh, yeah, and yesterday was also my cousin Laurel's birthday. Happy birthday.