What's this blog about anyway?

My original intent was to track my scholarly progress throughout my sabbatical. I envisioned writing in a scholarly style, working through conceptual frameworks or the finer parts of data analysis in ways that would awe my readers -- not that I really thought much about my audience apart from assuming that it might be whoever reads the required (I presume) report. Together with the two published articles I projected, my blog would brilliantly justify the several months I spent away from campus.

So, am I reduced to cataloging events of the day, the company I kept, meals eaten, and a passing acknowledgement of time spent on various (fragmented) projects? Perhaps so.

Does it matter? Only if my readers are not amused -- or even worse, if really I have no readers, and I blog purely to satisfy my own ego.

What would save the esteem of my sabbatical blog? Actually finishing the several research projects/papers I have in various stages of disarray. No! I should say "stages of completion" and pick one to finish as quickly as possible. No more blogging on trivia; next blog on substance.

A great day!

Jack and I spent the morning in our lawyer's office, drafting wording for an important document. It was hard to be bored when the lawyer had such passion for finding language he really liked to express a particular point.

Home for a quick lunch, then off for a walking tour of 10 private gardens in Stonington Village -- Gardens by the Sea. The Stonington Garden Club runs this fund-raising event every three years -- and makes enough money to support community projects for the next three years. Some gardens are tiny, others large; one had only green foliage, another had flowers of all colors. The roses everwhere were in full bloom and very fragrant. The weather was perfect, sunny, neither too hot nor too cold. There were lots of people enjoying the gardens; some were obviously serious gardners , from the questions I heard some of them ask the garden club members stationed in each garden. The tour is on tomorrow too, and I highly recommend it to anyone who can drive to Stonington -- and stop in to see me on Lord's Point.

It gets even better -- there was a nice breeze when we returned home, so welost no time in getting out for a short sail. We went down to nun 4 off of Masosn's Island, and back.

Because today was midsummer's eve, we celebrated "with" (virtually speaking) our Swedish friends -- by enjoying a meal of herring, schnaps, and strawberries and champagne (in US-LP interpretation). We'll miss dancing round the maypole tomorrow!

No computer, so research, no thoughts of SHU. What a great day!

It's taking over my life ...

I can't install my printer drive, can't read my flash-drive, can't find an interactive tutorial for penmanship, can't fiind my Skype contact list .... and that's just a few hours worth of the battle with my new laptop!

I did spend a pleasant and productive morning with Jeanie up at Western New England College in Springfield, MA, laying out plans for "students' discursive constrution of learning" paper for EAM-International in Brazil next June. Another project -- but an interesting one (to me at least! :-)

And I almost got rid of a project! I've finished working with the galley proofs for non-hierarchical power. But I need the printer to make a pdf to send back to the journal publisher in England, and I can't install the printer ...

Circular process. Mary Parker Follett would be amused!

Weird

Describes the way I felt and looked today.

I'm working between time-frames in my Ulla-Jill projects: (1) Composing the graphic narrative for the ESCADE proceedings -- that's irony that began in 2001, culminated with the book publication in 2005, and had a fleeting return last June. Way back -- as SnugAdapters were wont to say. (2) I'm editing the galley proofs of our "dancing with hierarchies" article -- it began in Ulla's Steninge house and traveled to muslim Turkey for Easter 2007. That's Mary Parker Follet who goes back to Ulla's and my early 1990s doctoral student days (and really to the early 1900s). (3) And simultaneously we're writing our paradigmatic partnership piece. It began May '06 in Fairfield and traveled to Florida and Paris in 2008. That one grabs 70's sociologists Burrell and Morgen and hurls them into design management of the 21st century. Research activity today: Medium low. More churn than action.


And if you doubt that I looked weird, take a look to your right! Yes, the sailing conditions dimension tended towards good.


New tablet laptop skills learned: How to work virtually with a techie from the Factory -- Kim used a special link to grab my computer controls and fix my VPN access and the laptop control panel. It took an hour, so I didn't work on any penmanship. Maybe I'll have better luck tomorrow.

False negative

According to the typology I developed yesterady (see post below) today was a Bloody Awful Day! No sailing, no research. But that label doesn't really fit the situation -- The sailing conditions were good but I went to Fairfield to leave my IBM T60 (on left) and pick up my new Lenovo Thinkpad X61 tablet pc (on right) on which to continue writing my scholarly papers (and blogs).







I spent about four hours working with a techie to transfer my files and settings, and already I find that some applications don't work (e.g., my VPN) and I appear to have lost some documents (e.g., my June photos.) Tomorrow promises to be a long day! But by the end of it I hope to have some "creative writing" for your review.

An ironic day

I focused on Bacelona keynote book chapter today -- Eduardo invited Ulla and me to contribute the paper we presented as a keynote at the Narratives and Rehtoric Conference at ESCADE last June to a book he is compiling. We don't have a "paper" -- just the irony book and some intriguing slides. So I settled down to a "graphic narrative" using the ppt on one side of the page and snappy comments on the other. It's a more time consuming task than even I had expected! But I found (with some difficulty) a collection of somewhat ironic postcards to inspire me and set to work. By the end of the dayI had annotated 6 of 15 slides. It's due a month from now so I'll need to keep focused on this task -- beside reading the proofs for the Design Journal article that came in this evening, and on Wednesday driving up to WNEC (Springfield, MA) to work with Jeanie on the paper we expect to submit to the EAM-International Conference in Brazil next June. Not to mention the fact that Diana will be down here tomorrow and probably hot to trot on the two projects we have in process.

As a distraction from discussing binary oppositions and how irony dissolves them, I created one (two actually) of my own as a way of measuring my day. There are two axes: One is Sailing Conditions (from bad to good) and the other is Resreach Activity (from low to high). The four quadrants have suitable descriptors.

Today I said, "Hope for better wind."

The day fell apart when I tried to back up my files onto the small harddrive before swapping out to my new laptop tomorrow. About two thirds of the files copied easily; the rest would not copy. I'll have to go to the session early tomorrow to get help. How embarassing!

And if I don't make a post tomorrow, it's because I can't make my new machine work!

Conference follow-up

Finally, a useful conference bag! OBTS, The Society for Management Educators, has adopted the principles of the United Nations PRIME Global Compact and is developing its initiatives and measurement processes.