Reinventing the Wheel

Apparently, there's an inverse Nobel for literary achievement. This one, though, measures the WORST opening sentence from among several thousand awful submissions. The winner is from DC, this time. (Hometown pride: Represent the horrendous writers of DC, dude.)

School starts...very soon. I've already re-met most of my English colleagues, though. We were sent to an incredibly boring conference on College Summit Training. (So, now how to get kids interested in college, but how to use the website.) The website was actually very well designed, so it was fabulously boring.

The session was prettyt hilarious, though, for all the wrong reasons. First off, if you want to teach people something, the worst possible audience is a group of teachers. We know how lessons should flow and how they need to be paced, so if you botch that, you're screwed. Second, they had a ton of laptops. And they spent an ungodly amount of time on trivial nonsense. So, just hypothetically, if you knew how to doubleclick and how to, well, read, you had a lot of free time and the Internet. So, by the time the poor guy running the seminar finishes trying to explain how to get to the Career Planning section (labeled largely and clearly, and one of four clickable tabs), the most computer savvy teachers have finished all the activities and are now busy abusing the in-site email system.

Hilarious revelation: For a site that's all about forcing kids to look professional and hirable, there are a lot of kinks. I changed my on-site email options to send out emails with a delicately pink-tinted background and flamingly fuschia letters, complete with sunflower icons. Tres professional, no? No.

Other interesting tidbit for the day: Easy ways to comment anonymously. NiceCritic is a website that lets you choose a very cautiously worded phrase that sounds as if it should be read by a very British butler ("Please do not remove your shoes. Your feet tend to give off an aroma.") and send it anonymously. It strikes me as an idea with some problems, but the fun part is that you can see how many times the various complaints have been sent. (There are a lot of people who know their coworkers are surfing the net instead of working. Oops.)

I'm still not sure if that site encourages wussing out on telling someone in person, or actually does promote helpful behavior tips. Interesting nonetheless.