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Dance Struggle
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.
--Greil Marcus
Wednesday, December 10, 1997
IE 4 coolness: Would you like to have a web page read to you? Costas Andriotis, a very smart guy, active on the IE newsgroups, has developed an IE4 powertoy that uses the MS Agent control to read a web page out loud, or to read selected text out loud. This man is brilliant!
I've been investigating the newsgroups at sff.net. This is a place that was started when the Genie online service started collapsing. Genie had offered free or reduced rates to science fiction writers, to draw traffic from their fans. When this went away, so did the writers, and many went to sff.net. To simulate the "topics" that each author had, sff.net has newsgroups in a sff.people.* heirarchy. I know some of the people there, so I was checking it out. I was amused that a thread in one newsgroup went from tips for aspiring writers, to "I hear there is a woman on the net with a camera in her room" (that's where I stepped in, to identify Jennicam and note that webcams aren't rare). to the personal site phenomenon, to (what else?) online journals. I was able to turn at least one person on to the fascination of journals (Hi, Mark!).
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My friend Jon Newman, who is in my dance classes at the Century Ballroom, has over the last few days been writing some documentation on the steps we've been learning. (Could you guess he's a developer?) I've been contributing a few notes, too. He said to me tonight, "They are always talking in schools about having to make allowances for people who learn best kinaesthetically. What about those of us who learn best non-kinaesthetically?" It's true, some of us do need the written word. One of our teachers mentioned couples she's taught where they wrote a list of the steps, then the follow taped it to the front of her chest so the lead could be reminded of what they knew. Much hilarity when she forgot and wore the list into the grocery store.
The material covered in Intermediate swing and Lindy is at the edge of my current abilities. I think our teachers are bored with the same old stuff (or are trying to keep more advanced students interested). There are moves we covered in the first lesson in the session that we haven't repeated since!
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