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Praxis Tuesday

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Here’s Jamie at the 2005 Canadian Down Syndrome Society conference, doing what everybody does at conferences—chatting on the cell phone (to his mother), looking around, playing with his hair.

The CDSS was held May 12-14 in Waterloo, Ontario, and back then I had intended to post a bunch of pix from it—Jamie swimming with a bunch of kids in the hotel pool, Jamie enjoying himself at the conference dance, Jamie at the Kitchener African Lion Safari (yes, you read that right)—but then I decided to have emergency abdominal surgery later that week, as especially dedicated readers of this blog might recall.  Besides, I can’t post all those other pix until I learn how to compress them.  Any tips?  What do you all use to get those million-byte monsters down to size?

Hey, wait just a minute, I can hear some of you saying. We clicked onto your site for another installment of Theory Tuesday (this one on Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams, like you promised), and you’re asking us for advice about how to post pictures of your kid?  Saaaay—what kind of bait-and-switch is this, anyway?

Just the usual kind of bait and switch, I think.  You know the sentence that opens the final section of My Ántonia?  “I told Ántonia I would come back, but life intervened, and it was twenty years before I kept my promise”?  Well, folks, life intervened.  Jamie has been under the weather for the past four days (and therefore home from day camp for the past two), having gotten a sinus infection so nasty that it blew one eardrum.  He’s OK now, and taking eardrops and various other medications like a man.  (Though for some reason it’s getting harder to buy Sudafed around here.  Hmmmm.) He almost never gets sick, and even when things like this happen, he rarely complains.  He is, as the cliché has it, a trooper.  In one way that’s great: he has a high pain threshold, apparently, and a fierce determination to insist that he’s just fine.  On the other hand, his stoicism sometimes lulls us into a false sense of security.  So I haven’t had the unbroken 3-4 hours I need to do one of these Theory installments.  I stole twenty minutes yesterday to do the Roberts-Dobson parody, but even to do that I had to type really fast—and use a pruning knife.  Don’t ask.

Life will continue to intervene for the foreseeable future, I’m afraid.  Something else has suddenly come up in the extended-family-and-friends circle, and the family and I are headed off to be with that EFF circle for the rest of the week.  I probably won’t be blogging again until next Monday. 

The rest of August will be spotty, too.  We’re here August 8-11, then off for our Ten Days of Vacation, where no blogs may trespass.  Then here August 22-23, then off to St. Louis to deliver Nick to college again.  John McGowan still has the keys to the Thursdaymobile, of course, and I’ll pick up the Theory Tuesdays whenever it’s Tuesday and I have Internet access.  I have about 4-5 of these things planned and another 3-4 under consideration, and am willing to run them right into October if need be.  But I promise I won’t make everyone wait twenty years.

And one of these days I’ll post those pix of Jamie at the conference and the safari.  In the meantime, I just want to say that I think Michael Bolton will make a fine ambassador to the United Nations.

Posted by on 08/02 at 03:14 PM

  1. In terms of Bolton, any new hobby that keeps him from butchering old school soul songs is fine with me.  Hope Jamie feels better soon.  My best to you and your family.

    Posted by corndog  on  08/02  at  04:41 PM

  2. This is a spiffy program for converting bunches of photos at one shot:

    http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

    Most screens display at 72 dpi, so reducing the photo to something in the 100 dpi range will be fine for us.

    Thanks!

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  05:02 PM

  3. Now that’s dedication.  I haven’t seen too many apologies for not being able to keep up with a blog—I’m thinking this is your least demanding/important occupation. 

    As a grad student in an english dept, who will be taking theory in the fall, I have to say that I’m pretty caught up by your TT’s so far… and very much looking forward to reading the next one.

    .. and as an older brother-in-law of a person with Down’s, I know about issues with health and communication.  I hope everything is well with Jamie.

    thanks for the readable survey of theory history.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  05:13 PM

  4. In case I forget later, let me wish you a nice capital-V Vacation from blogs and theory, both in the lower case.  (And do I see a bit of Harry Potter in those unruly bangs?  The first sign.)

    Yrs, Peter

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  05:35 PM

  5. That’s a great shot of Jamie. He’s a good-looking young man.

    [Insert usual and predictable joke about his good fortune in taking after his mother here.]

    I use the “save for web” function in your basic couple-years-old version of Photoshop to resize my photos for the web. If I was doing a lot at once, I’d probably use Graphic Converter, which is better for batch processing. But Photoshop is scriptable - assuming that you’re doing the same thing to each photo, that can help - and it’s not Mac-only, which makes my comment here theoretically not completely useless to you.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  08/02  at  05:51 PM

  6. Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost recommended Irfanview. I don’t know much about software, but it worked for me.
    It’s always great to see Jamie surface on your blog.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  06:36 PM

  7. Find out if you have any graphics software on your computer (most people don’t have Adobe Photoshop) and go to “Image Size” or whatever they might be calling it in the program. Don’t bother with any resolution higher than 72 pixels per inch, and make it about 400 pixels wide. Then save as a JPG, medium to high quality. Voila! The 700K file becomes about 25k.

    Check out my fabulous blog about San Francisco’s Civic Center if you want an example.

    http://sfciviccenter.blogspot.com/

    Nice to hear you’re taking a break, even though your son’s illness is the spur.

    Posted by sfmike  on  08/02  at  06:41 PM

  8. Ah, the lovely gold couch of the Waterloo Inn. I thought I recognized that. I look forward to the pictures when you get them posted and I hope Jamie feels better really soon. Russell’s tolerance is similar—he used to have asthma attacks periodically when he was young and the hospital doctors were always amazed that he could function with such low sats. He hardly ever complained so it was hard to know he was sick.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  07:32 PM

  9. Picasa, a free download from Google, does all that and will index all the images on your computer.
    http://picasa.google.com/index.html

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  08:18 PM

  10. I’m still digesting that really long post you did on post-modern literature.  I downloaded your essays and various other essays that the first download mentioned. (I went to school to become a therapist, what did I know?) As a result, I’ve started and stopped a dozen or so comments, some so long they was embarassing.  Some so dumb the embarassment would have been fatal.

    So go, go on vacation, see the EFF, enjoy your time off.  Play with new software.  This ancient “student” still needs to cram.

    Posted by  on  08/02  at  08:40 PM

  11. Poor Jamie, I hope he feels better soon.  And that whatever’s going on with th EFF is good, not bad, and if the latter that it, too, resolves itself satisfactorily post haste.

    Posted by bitchphd  on  08/02  at  09:08 PM

  12. Thanks, everyone.  I’ll follow up on the pix suggestions, and yes, Peter, Jamie’s bangs are Potteresque.  You should have seen him two years ago when he was 11:  his hair was darker and his glasses were rounder.  I’m not kidding about this.  It was eerie.

    And Dr. B., I’m sorry to say that the EFF thing is very bad.  It involves a funeral for someone who’s leaving a wife and two teenagers, and who had had, until fairly recently, every reason to expect to live a few more decades, to tell many more hilarious stories, and eventually to greet his grandchildren.  Compared to that, Jamie’s little illness is like unto a hangnail.  That’s all I can say here (I don’t want to violate the privacy of the people involved), but as you can imagine, I’m not thinking of blogging on this trip, and for the past few days I’ve barely been able to think of blogging, or anything else, at all.

    Posted by Michael  on  08/02  at  09:34 PM

  13. Loathe as I usually am to speak for people, I think it’s safe to say that the thoughts of your commenters are with you, your family and friends, Michael. We’ll be here when you get back.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  08/02  at  10:16 PM

  14. Loath as I am to allow anyone to speak for me, I think I echo Chris C. here.  Take all the time you need to sort things through, on whatever level.  The blog is a gift you offer, for which I’m sure I’m not the only grateful person, and it’s rude to expect a gift every day. 

    In any event, no need to rush back with comments on Althusser.  I still have a (regularly rethumbed) copy of E. P. Thompson’s “The Poverty of Theory"-although his coming out of the historical realm might make him unwelcome in the literary field. But Thompson did write intelligently on Blake.  (And Althausser too-I can’t imagine anyone taking L. A. seriously really).

    What a tough little guy Jaimie is, really. Great photo-looking forward to more.

    And I think Michael Bolton is a wonderful example of a new ambassador.  Doubtless he will get along so well with his Irish counterpart, Gilbert O’Sullivan, and return us all to the glory days of the Reagan administration, when the world was simpler, and the music was much, much worse.

    Posted by  on  08/03  at  01:56 AM

  15. Okay, after our last little contretemps, best to Jamie, hope he feels better, have a damn fine vacation.

    And I can’t wait to see the pictures. I am forgetting now, but how did softball go this summer?

    Posted by Chip Beckett  on  08/03  at  03:33 AM

  16. Getting sick in the summer really stinks.  Hope you feel better soon, Jamie. Hope all is well with the rest of the family. We’re headed for Prince Edward Island—stopping at all the minor league hockey towns along the way, of course. Canada is in a celebratory mood these days.

    Posted by  on  08/03  at  10:21 AM

  17. You’re confused.  Michael Bolton is the budget Director.  The new ambassador is John Bolton--apparently this guy:

    http://www.johnbolton.com/bolton/welcome/home.html

    Posted by  on  08/03  at  11:47 AM

  18. Loath as I am to dwell on spelling mistakes, I loathe the one I made above.

    Michael Bolton is the budget Director. 

    Um, you can just call him Mike.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  08/03  at  01:45 PM

  19. For the love of God, please don’t tell me your son is wearing a Chris Weber jersey.  *sigh*

    -e

    Posted by Emil  on  08/03  at  04:25 PM

  20. Image Resizer from Microsoft. (Scroll down, you’ll find it.)Free

    Very simple. It lives right in your Windows right click menu.

    You right click the file, tell it to resize. It asks you small,medium, or large. You’re good to go. Works on batches of files too.

    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

    Posted by Chris Moore  on  08/03  at  04:55 PM

  21. Nice catch, Emil! ‘Course, down here in NC, we have a special fondness for Chris Weber.

    I marvel at how Michael can say anything about the other MB. I feel like Bolton got crammed so far down our collective throats, I may never speak again.

    Best wishes for the return of health and happier days to the whole family--Sian

    Posted by  on  08/03  at  05:35 PM

  22. Blog Smog ! Jamie is the more important thing in your life. Have some nice vacation time!

    Posted by  on  08/04  at  12:06 AM

  23. Emil - Chris Weber might not be your favorite basketball player, but you have to admit he IS friggin’ drop dead gorgeous. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed. : )

    And besides, Jamie looks good in those colors!

    Posted by  on  08/04  at  01:28 AM

  24. I didn’t read through the comments yesterday before posting.  I’m very sorry for your family’s loss. You are all in our thoughts.

    Posted by  on  08/04  at  01:31 PM

  25. Been away for a week-- and tomorrow I embark on a backpacking trip in Mount Rainier National Park.  Blessed disconectedness, for the most part-- but this is serious family, which I’ll miss.

    Posted by  on  08/05  at  02:55 AM

  26. Real, chain saw running, men use Unix/Linux and swear by ImageMagick for image conversion and manipulation. It consists of command line tools which are great for batch processing. There are flavors for Windows, etc, too. Its free for a download.

    Here are just a few examples of what ImageMagick can do:

    * Convert an image from one format to another (e.g. PNG to JPEG)
    * Resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image
    * Turn a group of images into a GIF animation sequence
    * Describe the format and characteristics of an image

    okay, real men don’t use Linux, geeks do.

    Posted by  on  08/05  at  12:55 PM

  27. thank you for this blog http://www.bignews.com

    Posted by Stefany  on  08/19  at  08:02 AM

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