Telemarketing, Not on My Cell Phone!

Starting December 1, 2009 all cell phone numbers in the United States will be released to telemarketing companies. Cell phone customers will be charged for these calls! To prevent telemarketers from calling your cell phone, register your cell phone number on the national do not call list: 888-382-1222.

 

Informative and Funny Videos

This first video is Speech Recognition for Bloggers — The Ultimate Guide by Jon Morrow. It is a must see video for anyone who is considering using speech recognition software in any medium. Those with physical disabilities will find it particularly useful; maybe even inspiring.

Next, Boy Sees Lobster for the First Time

This is too cute! It has my vote for youtube video of the year.

Last, my own contribution Creating Torn Edge Images….

 

Keegan.

Selling Online ain’t Easy…

This week, I decided to use my website, jgkeegan.com, to make some extra money. For the last eleven years, my graduate research papers and, recently, my master’s work have been freely available for download in PDF format. Much of my work was downloaded consistently. Many of my papers were downloaded over sixty times in a week over several months. With that amount of interest, I thought if I charged a reasonable price, people would pay it. I set up a PayPal account, designed a new webpages to sell my work in PDF format, and charged $2.00 per PDF. My most popular paper during the free download period was Cholera: The Work of William Farr and John Snow, so it is the first item offered in pay per download. The second item is a project Decolonization and Indo-China. For $2.00 customers receive by email a zip file containing PDF of the paper, the in-class PowerPoint presentation, and the presentation handout. Neither item has sold yet.

Graduate level papers are not going to sell like hotcakes, but based on available data, I hoped to make at least one sale week. Is there anything I can do to improve my chances?

The Writing Process…

Does the writing process end? Is an author ever really satisfied with the end product of all his labor, or is that product just what could be produced in the time available? I started researching my masters thesis on the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in May 2008. I thought it would take no more than six months to research and write, but I just submitted my Committee draft eight days ago. So much for researching and writing in six months, and my thesis committee, which consists of three history professors from Millersville University, will most likely require that more editing be done before the final draft will be accepted by the University. When will it end?

I was told some time ago by one of my professors that the entire process would take a year or more. She was right, but I did not believe her. The research and initial writing took a total of about nine months on and off. At the end of August 2008, I had written a preliminary prospectus and put research aside to concentrate on classwork. By January 2009, I was eager to continue research, and in March, I was prepared to investigate primary sources available at the National Archives in Washington, DC. The trip to the National Archives was an exciting and unique experience, which has been one of the highlights of my research. I reluctantly submitted a short paper to the Phi Alpha Theta Conference in April. I was not happy with the paper or my presentation to the conference, but the paper did have some positive aspects, which formed the spine of my thesis.

My presentation was lackluster at best, so I did not receive the feedback I had hoped. However, I sent the paper to three of my friends and their constructive criticism was extremely helpful. By mid July, I completed the first half of the rough draft of my thesis, and submitted a completed draft to my thesis advisor by mid September. After incorporating his suggestions and some other editing, a draft was submitted to my thesis committee on October 1, 2009. The process sounds simple now, but each stage had its own unique difficulties.

The overarching difficulty was and is novelty; I have never attempted a project on such a scale before. Although I have written a previous article “United States, Japan, and Pearl Harbor,” it did not undergo the level of editing and rewriting that my thesis has and will continue to undergo before I complete it. The constructive criticism I have received has improved the work, and I am indebted to my friends and my thesis advisor for their assistance. In addition to novelty, starting was also difficult. Not in the sense that I did not know where and how to begin, or I did not have a general direction, but I lacked a clear and interesting path connecting the topics I wanted to discuss. Hopefully, the Committee draft has solved that problem. I will know by next Friday night. I knew what I wanted to discussing in my thesis by the time I completed the conference paper, which was probably one of the reasons my thesis advisor suggested I participate in the conference.

The next difficulty was constructing an argument. Fortunately, the aftermath of Pearl Harbor provided ample historiography to analyze. At the center of the historiographical debate was whether the Navy and the United States government treated, the officer in command of the Pacific Fleet on December 7, 1941, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, unjustly. Seeking an answer to whether Kimmel was unjustly treated, historians have mined the testimony, exhibits, and conclusions of the nine official investigations into the attack, as well as other sources. Based on that analysis, there are those who assert that Kimmel as Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet could have done more with the resources available to him. Therefore, relief and retirement at the rank of Rear Admiral was fair. Furthermore, posthumous advancement on the retirement list is unwarranted. Conversely, there are others who maintain that Kimmel was made a scapegoat and unjustly punished. Therefore, to correct the injustice of the Roberts Commission charge of dereliction of duty; they argue that Kimmel should be advanced on the retirement list to the rank of Admiral under the Officer Personnel Act of 1947.

It seemed simple enough; all I had to do was determine what aspects of each argument failed to explain what happened in the in the aftermath of the attack and then offer an argument that was in between the two extremes. So, borrowing the main concept of Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America that contemporary knowledge and belief must be set aside in order to understand historical events in their proper context, I found that the argument that Kimmel could have done more with the resources available to him relied on such contemporary knowledge. However, explaining that failing was extremely difficult and led to the construction of the most difficult paragraph to write. I hope the paragraph clearly explains the concept.

I am nearing the end of the process and the well is running dry. I do not know how much more rewriting I can do. I will find out how much rewriting I will have to do next Friday afternoon. My thesis is at the point where there is not much more I can do with it. I am certain it can be improved, but I am not sure how. Now every time I reread a paragraph or a section with the idea of making some changes, I leave it alone. Is it because once on the page is good, or am I just tired and running out of ideas? I do not know which is probably why there it is a thesis committee in the first place. Two sets of fresh eyes and one set that is familiar with the work (my thesis advisor) will help in its improvement.

I chose to write a thesis as part of my masters degree program because I wanted to learn more about the process of writing history. It has taught me that there is a time in every writing project when the author simply runs of steam and that is when the writing process truly ends.

Keegan.

Spell Check Does Not Work in Office 2007—A Fix

Last weekend while working on a particularly important paper, Office 2007 spell check stopped working. After repairing and reinstalling Word 2007, and still not solving the problem. I search for a solution and found the following:

1. Go to start menu|Run

2. Click OK, then the following will appear

3. Backup the registry: file|export
Exported to a folder that is easy to locate and save backup with the date in the file name

4. Make your way down until you see the following at the bottom of the window:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SharedTools\
ProofingTools\1.0\Override\en-US

5. There should be at least two files in the folder in addition to the default shown. Delete all files except the default, which cannot be deleted

6. Close the window and restart the computer

7. Office spell check should work.

Keegan.

Life on Mars? Well, water anyway…

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/

Clearly from this evidence, there was water on Mars. But does frozen water mean life?

Beware High-School Students Bearing Gifts

I found the following by accident, it is disturbing:

http://blog.trutv.com/dumb_as_a_blog/2008/06/brooklyn-bundt.html

Thankfully, this has never happened to me. What kind of a system is it when high-school teachers have to take gifts they received to a lab for forensic analysis before they can accept them?

Keegan.

Evolutionary Observations

Evidence of evolution:

Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”

How will the creationists respond?

Keegan.

Thinking of going green?

Here is an interesting item about the use and conservation of energy. (http://politics.nashvillepost.com/2008/06/17/renovating-the-image-gores-house-steady-guzzlin/). In this particular case, a “green overhaul” resulted in the use of about twice as much energy.

Keegan.

From WebProNews: Who Owns Blog Comments?

An interesting question, Jason Lee Miller has some thoughts.