Just a little note here to let yas know that I'm leaving for Berlin today. I'll still be online and working during the typical EST workday times, but my US phone number will only accept voicemails (no SMS). I'll have a German phone number and Skype for those in the know.
The rest of the time, I'll be flaunting about doing Berlin-y things. A bit of travel with my mom is in store as well, yippie! Check back here and in the lifestream for updates and pics.
See you New Yorkers on May 27th!
Just a quick note of announcement here (especially for you RSS people that never come to the site, haha): I've updated the design of dz.com to reflect a little more "practice what I preach." Why yes, look at that fancy new sidebar, with my lifestream, where else you can find me online… oh, and is that a tag cloud? Yay. Tag clouds are just about my favorite thing in web 2.0. Also, ye RSS peeps: you'll find now that there's two feeds to choose from: one with just my blog posts (same ol', same ol'), and one that will give you my lifestream (blog posts plus twitter, digg activity, what-have-you).
In addition to being a little bit more practical and up-to-date, this will also serve as some public documentation of my upcoming month in Berlin and other parts of Germany, so stay tuned for news and enjoy!
For the last few years, I've been struggling with where I find myself on a political spectrum. Sure, I'm on the left. I call myself a progressive and feminist. I know that I've grown more than distasteful of electoral politics (which once interested me fairly significantly), and that Hurricane Katrina was the moment that I threw up my hands in complete frustration and rage at the general state of affairs. I've dabbled in arts activism, local community organizing, sociolinguistics education, feminist activism, tech empowerment, you name it. None of it seems to singly suit me anymore, and most of it angers me. I'll say it: I have anger issues. Hello, my name is Deanna, I have anger issues. (That one was for my therapist, everyone wave at her– she's back there in the corner, waving back at you all.)
More than anything, I've been a bridge-builder for most of my political career. I come from working class, conservative roots, and I have been fueled in the past by a passion to build understanding between worlds that don't talk to each other. A lot of that has to do with the tight relationship that I have with my folks; I find myself wondering how they would react to things that I'm working on, or how a particular issue is framed. Far more than I do now I often used them as guinea pigs: Pop's the hard-line conservative, Mom's our swing voter.
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I'm not-so-slowly and very-surely running out of hard drive space on my little laptop, which is the central nervous system of all things DZ– especially now that I have a killer camera and am taking gianormous photos. WhatSize tells me the main culprits of space usage are my old mail archives (obsessively retained since early 2005, when I first went Mac) and of course, my pictures.
So, I'm wondering: what kinds of parameters are folks using for moving things to archive versus keeping on a running machine? The OCD-pack-rat in me likes having my entire world at my fingertips whether I'm home or not, but obviously this isn't sustainable. (…she says as she's downloading 7GB of pics from aforementioned camera.)
Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, to twitter me, or to drop a line.
Shameless self-promotion, because I'm honored to be included in an article with so many stellar women of the media world — check out Adele Stan's fantastic writeup on women making media: Thanks, We'll Make Our Own Media.
no no, thank YOU, Adele!
A crazy time here in Deannaland. I was in Cambridge this past weekend for the annual Best-Conference-Ever: Women, Action and the Media. I did double-presentation duty once again, sitting on Jenn Pozner's panel about women, feminism and blogging, and then did my workshop on "Empowering Online Communities." (See the presentation and the followup materials here.)
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