While it isn’t all that funny (or even punny), I thought I’d get the “word” (ok, ok, I’ll stop) out on this one. If you combine two words which both mean, roughly, “a bad thing has happened,” you’ll get a new word endowed with a more potent delivery of “a bad thing has happened.”
The idea is not a new one, combinations of two words are quite common in the English language. Consider “snowboarding” or “knockout” or “bandsaw.” Thinking up more exciting examples is left as an exercise for the reader. Regardless, the idea is this:
disaster + catastrophe = disastrophe
Unquestionably, this is a great, potentially useful word. Only problem is, nobody knows what it means. I don’t have high hopes for this spreading like wildfire (trying saying it aloud, something is missing or wrong), but perhaps there’s an improvement to it that I am missing.
In the past eight years, this website has evolved from an extremely simple, unchanging outline of an adolescent kid to a dynamic web of text, links, sights, and (at times) sounds chronicling a young adult’s life. All of this extra content has necessitated extra layers of complexity. As sections have been added, I’ve tried to keep it simple, but it has certainly been a challenge — and I haven’t always succeeded. So, for anyone new to tumbledry or curious how it all works, let’s run down the basics.
TumbleTools
Tumbledry doesn’t have a list of “recent journals” or “recent (anythings)’s” like it did before. In this current incarnation, tumbledry only tells you what’s new when, for you, there are new things. This is where the drop down menu (let’s call it “TumbleTools,” — controlled by the arrow (3) in the image below), comes into play. TumbleTools only pops open when two things are both true:
There is something new since you last visited.
You are visiting the front page.
As a result of these regulations, this “list of new things” in “TumbleTools” follows you around the site until you visit the front page again. However, this list is generally hidden, but it’s always just a click of that arrow away. Ah, but there are a couple of more interesting things contained within TumbleTools…
Introduce Yourself
Due to lack of descriptive text, this feature is a little confusing - but it should immediately become clear upon explanation. You provide your name and an email address as a sort of introduction from you to tumbledry (illustrated at (2) in the image below). When you do this, tumbledry remembers you by this name and email address. Just like in the real world, there is no email follow-up or further contact after introduction. Tumbledry just remembers you, plain and simple. The convenience afforded to you by this feature is that you never have to type in your name or email address again. Your info will show up in all relevant forms on the website. The introduction feature is therefore two things: a time saver and a personalization feature. This brings us to our next topic.
Personalization
As you leave comments in discussions on tumbledry, and receive votes (a feature discussed later in this document) on them, tumbledry keeps track of your statistics for your particular name and email address. When you reintroduce yourself on other computers or revisit the website, you’ll receive an update on how you are doing. Your rank and the number of votes you have garnered will be reported. Rank is summarized by the number of bullets a user receives next to his or her name; these bullets are called “irons,” and were explicated quite thoroughly at their introduction. In short, promotions occur at your first 20 comments, and for every 125 comments after that. These stats are an attempt to distinguish veterans from new-comers, ultimately allowing the casual visitor to decide which comments to trust the most.
Search
The search box, another part of TumbleTools, is labeled (1) in the image below, and you can use it in one of two ways. First, try typing your search and waiting. A list of the most recent matches to your search will pop up, and you can click away. In order to display a full, exhaustive, list of search results, just hit enter. Finally, as a shortcut, you can simply type your query directly in the address bar. If I wanted to search for “Hawaii,” for example, I would type this: http://www.tumbledry.org/search/hawaii. It’s a helpful shortcut if you have to find something fast.
Voting
Signified by the heart icon (seen in the image below), voting is the newest feature at tumbledry. It’s purpose is more frivolous than user ranking — it’s a simplistic positive feedback mechanism that allows users to “heart” other comments that they have enjoyed. One vote is allowed per hour, and voting is shut off along with comments after two weeks.
Navigation
Finally, you may navigate sections of the website using the text at the far top right. Note that your options are limited — this is entirely intentional and will hopefully simplify navigation and minimize confusion.
Please leave questions and remarks about all this in the comments, I’ll do my best to explain anything I’ve forgotten and to rationalize any design choices that may initially flummox you.
Mykala: You need a haircut.
Me: You need an attitude adjustment.
Mykala: Do you think I could get one of those at the salon? “I’d like a massage and an hour-long attitude adjustment, please.”
Me: That will be $40 dollars.
Mykala: Ha.
Me: That would be so invaluable. I would pay for that once a month.
Praise is effective when specific - Good, new, peer-reviewed research revealing that praise can be very damaging to your children. Studies suggest that specific praise that is neither overused nor undeserved is the key to doing your part to mold children’s self-esteem into a healthy balance.
Not too long ago, Katy sent me a couple of pictures she had taken, and suggested that I could post them. In an effort to kill two birds with one stone, I realized that I could not only post those pictures, but also roll out a new feature of tumbledry … besides the redesign you see. And yes, I’ll review the new features available to you in the coming days. And Nils will see some of his ideas posted, too. And there will be much rejoicing. And there will probably be some bug fixing.
Now, above you see what you might think is simply a small picture, but it’s actually a thumbnail link to a larger version of the same picture. Shocking, right? Actually, no. In fact, if the description was left at that, it’d be stunningly underwhelming, bordering on criminally boring. But the way the page is set up to show that new image is a whole lot of fun. If you click on it, you’ll get a nice “lightbox” effect, where the background fades out, and a captioned, full size picture animates into view. Plus, you can use the ‘N’ and ‘P’ keys to navigate forward and backwards between the two images in the set.
Granted, the demonstrative content is not particularly edifying (hey, this is tumbledry … we’ll work on it), but it’s still fun to show. I’m happy, Katy’s happy, you’re slightly less bored … everybody wins!
“Ok, so is everybody clear - any questions?” It was a nice thing of my lab professor to ask - I appreciated the fact that he checked in with the zeitgeist of our knowledge midway through our four hour lab marathon. In my mind, I responded: “I do have a question - but it’s of a rather general nature. What’s that? I should ask it? Oh, ok … what the crappin’ heck is going on?”
It wasn’t that the fluorescent antibody tagging system used in FACS was all that complex. You have your cells. You want to know something about them. You have something that sticks to certain antigens on certain cells and lights up while doing the sticking … and there you go. No, the underlying concepts were not the problem. Neither was his explanation of those concepts. It was the practical application: I spent 15 minutes pipetting dye into vials and then into other vials that had been spun down earlier, which had in turn been prepared from the crushed spleen and/or lymph nodes of a recently euthanized and dissected lab mouse. It was only after I was pipetting for 14 of the 15 minutes that I finally realized what was going into what and where it came from. Usually there comes a point in a lab where you hold it all in your head and it makes sense. In this case, though, I’d think I had it and then bam he’s drawing this massive table of antibodies and their addition to tubes. “I am flummoxed,” I said to myself.
Everybody was doing something during the lab, there were a couple of looks around the room of “…?!” and in the end I think folks were doing the right stuff, but my goodness was it random. Later in the semester, we do our own experiments - let’s hope things make more sense then.
