Favorite Books

Hot Guys Reading Books posted about her favorite books today. Here are mine, off the top of my head.

The Passion by Winterson
Anathem by Stephenson
Middlesex by Eugenides
Howard's End by Forster
Prodigal Summer by Kingsolver
100 Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez

YUM.

I'm looking forward to the winter break and a return to the decadence of reading fiction. These are on the docket:

Linger by Stiefvater
The Replacement by Yovanoff
Tongues of Serpents by Novik
Zorro by Allende

And, because what is reading without some non-fiction thrown in?

Disintegration by Robinson
The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Pantley
Convergence Culture by Jenkins

Maternity leave here I come!

Style Chains, Pioneers, and Modifications

Lately I've been seeing the term "style chain" used on some of the personal style blogs I read. Does anyone know who coined it? I would love to give credit. It seems to refer to when one blogger, (lets call her the Modder), "copies" another blogger's (the Pioneer's) outfit.

Copying isn't really the right term because from what I've seen, it's not that the Modder goes out to Target, F21, and Ebay and buys the exact items she saw on the Pioneer's blog. It is instead the case that the Modder uses clothing she owns to create a version of the Pioneer's outfit.

This is a process that seems like it would be pretty innate to people interested in style/fashion, because isn't that what we've always been doing with the stuff we see in fashion magazines? I use the pronoun "we", because the odds are very good, with income inequality statistics being what they are in the U.S., that you, like I, cannot actually afford the clothes that are editorialized in fashion magazines. Yet I still buy the magazines. My best reason for doing so is to get an idea of the current trends. That idea will be in my head the next time I get dressed and I will probably recreate the trends I like with what I have, or what I can approximate with items in stores that are in my price range. Modding, right? Maybe being in a style chain?

I got the term Pioneer from a couple of guest posts on the Freakonomics Opinion Page on the New York Times site. Here are links to the posts:

Tweakers and Pioneers in the World of Innovation
Geeks and Tweaks: What Computer Programming Contests Can Teach Us About Innovation

Scholars Raustiala and Sprigman use the terms Pioneers and Tweakers, but where I come from a tweaker is a person who abuses methamphetamine drugs. So I prefer the term Modder, which could refer to modifications. 

Just wanted to expand the conversation about copying a bit. I've seen it come up multiple times, and I think these two links make good contributions.

A Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to me! Man, it's kind of insane to think that the last picture I took of myself, baby was only four months along. Was it four months, or maybe less? Well, we're rounding into week 30, 3rd trimester, so this is what the books and websites call the home stretch. Great time to celebrate a birthday!

These are my friends, from left to right: Natalie, pregnant me, Tessa, and Stephanie. The best way to celebrate a birthday is with friends. CK should be in the picture, but he was being chivalrous and taking it for me. What a most excellent man. You know you have true friends when they don't mind eating off of paper plates, and having take-out Chinese food for the celebratory meal. That's the way this party girl rolls.

Here's to 31 years! Hooray!

The Interview Setup

I had some time between interviews to create a post. Probably not quite as much time as I need, since I wanted to include pictures, but it's possible.

So here's a staged picture of me doing an interview. I am actually too busy during a real interview to do this, but this is pretty realistic in terms of what is going on on my end of the phone line if you're being interviewed by me.

And here is my trusty equipment, including the very awesome Olympus digital voice recorder that I use:

There you see my handy phone card so that I'm not putting the interviews on my office's phone bill. Also pictured, the beloved Oral Consent form. Very important.

Lastly, here's a close-up of why I call people for interviews and how they get from the phone to the voice recorder:

See the little black box? That's what patches the recorder onto the phone line so I get a great recording. It's just one extra detail to set-up that makes a world of difference in recording quality.

So yeah. I just wanted to preserve for posterity what my evenings after work have been looking like, when I switch over to working on my thesis research. Good times!

Emily K.

My Renaissance Festival Costume

Last week was busy in two ways. Let's set baseline behavior at working for 40 hours a week. But I always do that. How can we layer on some more?

I emailed requests to many folks in the Personal Style Blogging community to be interview participants. I created a database of contact info, and a database of my interview schedule, and then I started populating both. Thank you SO MUCH to people who have agreed to sit for an interview! This is great!

If you keep a personal style blog in which you post pictures of what you wear, you're interested in being a particpant, but haven't yet received an invite, leave your email address and I'll be in contact.

The next layer was that I worked on my Renaissance Festival costume! I would have loved to use the one I wore last year, but that wasn't going to work with my pregnant belly. So all last week my girl Natalie Parker and I worked out a design, went fabric shopping, pinned, cut, and sewed, and put it all together. Natalie is an outstanding seamstress and made the completely custom mini bodice, most of the chemise and the gorgeous skirt with the complicated ruffle. The skirt has frenched seams! All that I really contributed was making the bloomers and finishing the chemise. Yesterday we took photos and here's how it turned out:


My make-up is garish and the skirt is hiked up because the character I play at Festival is a whore in Madam Red's brothel. It's going to be particularly ridiculous this year with the pregnancy, but what is fun without some ridiculousness?

This costume was so much fun to work on, I really want to make something awesome for Halloween! Any ideas?

So there you have it: work, school, fun. It was a great week!

PSBs and a Baby

I received a sweet comment on my Personal Style Blog Research post from Lorena, offering to take part, but also assuming I was done with my data collection. Though reasonable, it couldn't be further from the truth. I have spent the intervening four months doing tons of background research and not yet interviewing a single participant.

Here's the part that will make you laugh. Right around the time I wrote that post, I was busy getting busy and conceiving my first child. Yup! I'm pregnant! The baby is due 1/11/11.


Now, I could use 1st Trimester trauma as an excuse for why I haven't started interviews yet, but there's an even more practical reason I've lagged. I didn't have my own equipment yet. Equipment! Every good researcher's most important investment! For my pilot project I borrowed equipment to do seven interviews, which translated into a total of about 20 hours of work (seven hours of interviews and two additional hours for each interview to transcribe and sort the data).

For the next phase, I want to more than quadruple the number of interviews. This meant two things. One: I should own my own equipment. Borrowing stuff for 20 hours vs. ~100 hours makes a difference. Two: if I could find a way to speed up transcription, life would be golden. With this past paycheck I invested in the following, currently speeding to my doorstep: the Olympus WS-400S DNS Digital Voice Recorder Kit.

It comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking Software. Speech recognition technology: HUZZAH! If this program saves me even 15 minutes per interview, I will consider it money extremely well spent.

So that's my news. I have a baby bump, and I will be testing new equipment in the very near future. The project is in progress, and I truly need to get my interviews done in August. Naturally, the fun part will be where I get to talk to you!

Finally Leaving Town

OK, that's not really a fair post title. I did get to go on an island vacation in March. But since then it's been all work, all the time. All work.

So tomorrow I'm taking a four day weekend! Heading with my sweetie back to the city where I was born and raised. The good ol' Fresno, California.


I don't think I've seen my parents in... well a year or so if I remember correctly. Definitely more than that. But hey, I bought a house, I finished another year of grad school, and I got a promotion in that amount of time. I even crossed another milestone that I've mentioned in comments on some of these awesome style blogs that I'm always following. Probably yours, if you're reading this.

I do love a good packing post, but I live in a city that's 97 deg F, and I'm visiting a city that's 106 deg F. Seriously I will only be wearing tank tops, shorts, skirts, and tank dresses. That's pretty much it.

Funny thing, my husband is talking to his brother on the phone right now and they just got into a conversation about Norteño music. Now that is very Fresno.