Meeting with my supervisor

Basically we were able to define my thesis question as: A realist critique of social constructionism and it's practice.

Important questions that were raised included:

1. What will we use to cast a critical eye on SC ?
2. What are our theoretical boundaries?
3. Empirical Side of the study ...

A potential outline looked like:

Early Chp's: Doubts about social constructionism
Middle: Policy documents of the department
And/or: Talking to or observing teachers in action

Words that floated into the conversation included: realism, Marxism, Post Structuralism, the structure-agency problem,

Quantegy files for bankruptcy.

Another small milestone of sorts passed by a week or so ago, as Quantegy, the last manufacturer of 2“ studio quality tape filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. As with many people in their 30's I remember when CD's first came out and how much better they were touted as playing and sounding (wow and flutter were effectively unmeasureable) and I vividly remember those impressive scratch/gouge demonstrations. However, the potential demise of Quantegy as a going concern reminds us all that we should maintain some reservations about combining the words "digital" and "archive" in the same sentence. I love iTunes, and iPhoto, and my academic and other writing is very important to me, but I wonder how I’m going to preserve all of my work - turning to photocopies, printouts hardly seems like the solution (especially in terms of space). At any rate, it's a lot to keep track of.

Tape had it's heyday in the period running from the middle of the 1940's through to the beginning of the 1980's. Basically it’s claimed that anything put onto tape since it came into being in the 1930's can still be played back today - often with a high degree of fidelity. It's salutory to compare this with the reality of digital copies and archives and the notion of a "digital master - perfect forever". Perfect yes, but held on what media? Since I started with computers I've recorded data on cassette tapes, 5 1/4" floppies, 3 1/2" floppies, memory sticks, CDR's, and hard drives that I've sealed and stored. Already I struggle to read back copies of data preserved for the moment on 800k 3 1/2” floppies. USB floppy drives won’t read them.

Hopefully Quantegy will be able to get the US$10 million investment that it's CEO, Richard Lindenmunth believes would be enough to save the company.

I've been using MacJournal (MJ) for over a year now - in fact I started using it not long after I bought my 14“ G4/933 iBook; the first 'Mac' I've owned since a Colour Classic 4/16. When I took up with MJ it’s principal attraction was that it was easy to use and that it was free - but not in that order. ☺ Look, I’ll be honest, like most people I *hate* paying for stuff like software which is inherently intangible. I'm certainly not going to pay if it's offered to me freely. However at the moment I'm staggered by the amount of negative commentary flashing around Version Tracker where many people are talking about a supposed breach of trust and so on. However the author, Dan Schimpf, originally released MJ as a freeware application - not an open source application. To start reading on the significance of this difference go here.

Plainly put then; MJ has never been anything other than a privately controlled program, the author's model of development (freeware) has it’s pros and cons extensively outlined in various free/Open-source software websites, rants, blogs, discourses and articles. Now I’m sure that there are plenty of Open-source programs that people could pick up for free and use or build on from and develop. Otherwise there are plenty of opportunities for people to start projects of their own; projects that will always be free if they're defined and licensed as such.

I suspect that this program has a big future in front of it and wish it all the success that it gets.