TITLE: Blogging When the Gifts Are Good
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 10, 2007 6:55 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Maybe if I had big companies
bribing me to blog
I would make more time in these busy days?
The one sort of freebie that faculty tend to receive are
examination copies of textbooks. Some publishers, especially
the smaller ones and the highest-scale one, tend not to send
unsolicited copies and expect you to return requested exam
copies if you don't adopt the text. But some of the major
CS-oriented publishers are quite generous. Sometimes you
have to ask, either on-line, through a rep, or at a conference,
but sometimes unsolicited copies flow freely. The most recent
impetus was the advent of the Java intro and data structures
texts. I long ago lost count of how many such texts I've
examined, both requested and unsolicited.
As Spolsky points out there is an ethical question at play.
I think I've maintained a pretty healthy relationship with
the textbook reps I've known, and I know some pretty well.
A couple of my local reps have been serving my university
for a long time, and some of the reps that work conferences
such as
OOPSLA
and
SIGCSE
have been on that circuit for nearly as long as I. As long as
I approach texts as potential adoptions, I can accept a copy
for examination. As the text moves away from my core teaching
areas, I begin to feel guilty about taking a book. Sometimes
I feel a bit guilty even when a book lies right in my area of
teaching -- if I really want the book. Somehow,
getting something I really want for free seems wrong, even if
there is a legitimate professional reason. Must have something
to do with how I was raised.
Of course, working at a relatively small school, I don't have
much to offer publishers even if I adopt a textbook as a result
of some gift or other freebie. If I taught 500-person sections
at Mega State, then maybe... but my 35-person sections, even
as an annuity over several years, don't amount to much revenue
for anyone. Nor have I blogged many book reviews (or
book crushes),
and the size of my readership hardly makes me a target of Massive
Consolidated Publishing.
The one way that I could enrich myself in a meager way from
all the unsolicited books is to sell them to one of the many
book re-sellers than now troll our halls and inundate us with
e-mail. I would never do that, because I want neither to gain
financially from the books nor to encourage the book reseller
business. If I do anything other than keep the book, I give
it to a needy undergrad or grad student looking to do some
extracurricular work. Someone can gain from the book that
way. Perhaps I should return the book to the publisher, but
I don't feel much of an incentive to spend my time undoing
something that the publisher did on its own. My time is
scarce enough as it is.
I do have one book review that I plan to do sometime soon, on
Chris Pine's
Learn To Program.
This is intended as an intro book -- the first? -- using Ruby.
When I hesitantly sent Andy Hunt of the
Pragmatic Bookshelf
an e-mail asking for an exam copy, he sent me one immediately.
We haven't had a chance to offer a Ruby-based intro programming
course yet, so I couldn't adopt the book at the time. But it's
interesting enough to talk about in public. If I do blog on
it, I will be fair and as objective as possible. I owe you --
and myself -- that much. And I think Andy and Chris would
want that to.
In closing, I will recommend a piece of software, and the
recommendation will expose me as an OS X guy. This probably
eliminates whatever small chance I ever had of receiving,
like Joel Spolsky, an offer to blog about a complementary
"loaded Ferrari 1000 courtesy of Windows Vista and AMD".
That is a risk I am willing to take.
I send a lot of e-mail. I send a lot of e-mail with attachments.
I cannot count all the times I have sent a message that said
"Attached is ..." or the "See the attachment." and yet forgot
to attach the file. Until a couple of months ago, this was
an increasingly frequent and frustrating behavior of mine.
The I discovered James Eagan's free
Attachment Scanner Plugin for Mail.app.
Problem solved. It recognizes every variation of "*attach*"
that I've ever used, and every time it reminds me to attach
the file if I haven't already. Paradise.
The plug-in solved a major problem for me. It is free. And
to top that, Eagan wrote a
fine tutorial
on how he decoded Mail.app's private plug-in and wrote his
plug-in. That's more than I could have asked for!
Mr. Eagan did not pay me to say that.
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