Sent by Judy… it is so true.
(From Jeffro’s Anatomy of a Hipster series.)

I just sat down in LUCI for a few minutes to take a break from today’s schedule, only to have Meg remark: “They must be exhausted.” I suspect she meant the prospective students, but I think it could apply to any of us.

Visiting student days are always intense and there is just too much information to process. It is just impossible to describe the immensity of choosing your PhD program. That said, these students look great, and I certainly hope they all choose to come play with us in Irvine. In just a few minutes, they will get to relax as well: We are all piling in cars and heading to the beach.

For today, I leave you with this picture in honor of our prospectives. A baby anteater — fresh-eyed, full of ideas, and ready to do some research! (You can see it, right?)

So cookies basically helped me make it through my thesis. As Margarita and I madly typed, sitting across from each other at her dinning room table, she buttressed herself against the pain with power smoothies while I sublimated it with coffee and cookies.

During a recent dissertation defense, a colleague joked that she was tempted to dedicate her dissertation “to tea.” While every laughed at the ridiculous and endearing joke, a mild horror crept over me as I realized that I, in fact, had mentioned cookies in the acknowledgements section of my thesis.

It was with a fond appreciation of our sweet buttery friends that I began my PhD education at UC Irvine, as well as culinary education focused on cookies (albiet more ad-hoc). It started when one of our admin staff had to do a variety of bizarre tasks to sort out the behind-the-scenes details of my fellowship. I am still not clear on what happened, but as I understand it had a lot to do with too many pockets of money with too many random restrictions. The point is that something was screwed up, and someone worked extra hard to unscrew it. And for this, I decided to make them cookies.

Emboldened by a KitchenAid mixer, somehow the recipe was doubled, and before I knew it I was taking cookies to all kinds of admin staff. Surely it was only a matter of time before they each would do something deserving of edible thank-yous, and so I figured it couldn’t hurt to bank some karma (Tip for grad students: Eating cookies with admin staff actually gives you time to learn a little about them. I certainly didn’t plan it that way, but it is nice to have so many cookie-filled smiles around).

When I told my friend Gabe about the cookies, he excitedly sent me off to try a recipe from the New York Times. I suppose that was the beginning of the end. The recipe, however, while completely fantastic, was not nearly as interesting as the attached article, evocatively entitled “Perfection? Hint: It’s Warm and Has a Secret.”

Interspersed in a cookie-fan-boy narrative were fantastic tips with explanations that made my engineering heart quicken. For example, did you know that it is important to let your dough refrigerate? It turns out that when you mix your ingredients, you are basically wrapping your flour in butter, preventing the eggs from getting through and working their magic. The solution? 24-36 hours in the fridge gives eggs time to work through the butter and work their magic! Of course they say the “proof is in the <cookie-based alternative to pudding>”, and after making a batch (double, of course), I was stunned at how good they were.

Since the NYT episode, I have moved on to other varieties, scouring the web for the same kind of technical explanations of what is actually happening during the cooking process. This UCI oven has popped out peanut butter, chocolate mint, ginger, and most recently, biscotti — cranberry, pistachio, pine nut biscotti, to be precise — and most of them aren’t half bad. I, meanwhile, have learned about letting ingredients come to room temperature before mixing, the awesome power of parchment paper, letting your cookie sheet cool between batches, and (sadly) the horror of doubling everything in a recipe except the flour (cooked butter anyone?).

At this rate “to cookies” may end up earning my dissertation dedication (that, or “the gym”), but until then I am amazed at how amenable cookies are to my geekiness. I am presenting in class today, so I figured I would whip up a batch of cookies for everyone. I thought about the biscotti, and was momentarily tempted by the ginger cookies — but man, those NYT cookies are just amazing.

Check them out for yourself: The recipe, and the play by play. (Oh, and be sure to send me your favorites too!)

Top 10’s were popular this year, perhaps inspired by the end of a decade: Top 10 LOLCats, Romantic Comedies, One Hit Wonders of the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s and so on.

One might almost think top 10s passe, but as one friend of mine explained: “I’ve been loving it! I have been looking at all these top 10 movie lists, revisiting favorites, and catching the ones I never got around to.”

Last year was particularly important for me. Particularly with my graduation from Georgetown, and a move to UC Irvine, a lot has changed. How funny — I just realized that a decade ago (1999) was the year I graduated from high school and moved away to college. New beginnings, new opportunities, I suppose.

Well, without further delay, 2009 in 10 bite size pieces.

1. Carly & Kyle’s Wedding

Early this year, Steve and I flew to Walt Disney World where I was the man of honor in Carly’s wedding. It was not nearly as cheesy as I am sure they can be, and we had the added benefit of great January weather and world-class theme parks.

2. Inauguration Day

It might have been freezing as we walked towards the National Mall on that January morning, but there was something in the air. Gathered with throngs of people from near and wide, Steve and I were there to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama.

3. A PhD Tour

After applying to a variety of PhD programs, March and April was full of visits to various programs to find just the right fit. In the end, UC Irvine was the right place for me. Of course there is a down side to visiting so many wonderful places: I still feel sad that I somehow couldn’t smash all the schools together into some super-awesome-omni-uber-program. Le sigh. I suppose that is what conferences are for.

4. “Intertechnical Bodies” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference

This year I co-chaired a panel at the ACLA conference at Harvard University with Dora Danylevich and Megan McCabe. The conference was great, of course, and the panel and my paper were received well. However, most important were the long conversations with good friends, and the opportunity to see first-hand how some of the humanities approach their work.

5. I am an ID, sure, but mostly I am done.

“I am an ID” was the title of my Georgetown thesis. Two years in the making (with one grueling semester there at the end), my thesis examines how the ability to persist our personal data with technologies like databases changes the ways we present ourselves, and perhaps how we think of ourselves as well.

6. Georgetown Graduation

After two years it was time to thank Georgetown, throw a big party, and move along. Don’t we look fancy?

7. The most direct route from point A to B never involves a rental truck.

This summer I packed up my Dupont condo, and moved across the country in a 16′ truck. I-80 in Pennsylvania is not recommended, the people in Chicago are lovely, a stop in Utah was the perfect way to break the trip up, and most importantly, driving across the plains with a cat on your lap is the only way to go.

8. Welcome to UC Irvine

It was my friend Shawn King who drove with me for the last leg of the drive to California. We pulled in with that insane truck, and within hours had unloaded the whole thing and replaced it with a brand new VW GTI — such a sweet ride. Oh, and the school is nice too. See?

9. Apparently what I say matters!

Getting my research on craigslist and Foucault accepted as a chapter hit the top 10 last year, but it has taken until just this month to go through the machinery and hit the presses. It’s on Amazon and everything.

10. Made it through Fall Quarter – whew!

There are a bunch of different things that have happened since I got to Irvine — on their own, they each seem to small for the list, but they are important none-the-less, and so I am placing them here in this catch-all. Since I got to Irvine I have launched two research projects, applied for a fellowship, written a number of conference workshop papers, am halfway done with a full conference paper, and just last week found myself submitting a grant to the NSF with Gillian Hayes, Paul Dourish, and Janet Vertesi – a dream team, I must say. It has been a busy quarter, but it looks like 2010 is already headed in the right direction.

Looks like I am going to Savannah! I received word a couple days ago that my paper on PatientsLikeMe was accepted for the “CSCW Research in Healthcare: Past, Present, and Future” workshop at CSCW 2010. The paper, co-authored with Caitie Lustig and my advisor, Gillian Hayes, is the start of some research engaging with issues around the representation of patients via PatientsLikeMe’s health data system.

The project is still in its formation, but if you would like to read more, you can find information on my personal page, where you will also find a copy of the workshop paper.

http://www.jedbrubaker.com/patientslikeme/

In the meantime, any thing I just can not miss while I am in Savannah?

Upon his death, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) (of Panopticon fame) asked to be permanently embalmed and kept at the University of London, where his corpse “now fitted with a head made of wax, is regularly wheeled into college meetings, where it is duly recorded in the minutes as ‘present, but not voting’” (Hijiya, 1983, p. 356)

Talk about persistence. A-mazing.

I have recently been thinking again about the engineer’s role in reinforcing essentialized notions of identity. This is particularly relevant in the ubiquitous computing space where the focus on sensors explicitly aims to sense the body.

There is a complicated theoretical argument to be articulated, but honestly, I am writing final papers, and Derrida has been keeping me up at night. So, for today, I will summarize my thinking with the following comic from ThreePanelSoul, lovingly sent my way by Daniel.

Enjoy. I’ll see you next week.

“Why do we feel like we need to keep visiting the archetype over and over and over again?” asks Karim Rashid, a New York designer. The camera, for example, which since digital photography’s complete obliteration of film has absolutely no reason to remain a metal rectangle.

Flying back from Chicago last night (and admittedly procrastinating a certain final paper), I threw open on of my favorite archetypes (the laptop) and watched the documentary Objectified. I had missed the chance to see it when it was screened at the Corcoran last summer (tickets were scarce, even for Steve) but decided to make up for lost time.

Objectified considers, well, our objects. It covers the gamut from industrial design, to interaction design, and even touches on the contemporary issues of sustainability and cross-cultural design. Slap it up there with its sibling Helvetica, the designer’s chick-flick where you know the cast of characters, and more or less how it will end. It gets thumbs up from me, but I’ll admit I am a sucker for seeing large pieces of scary machinery pop out friendly-looking industrial designs while listening to smart people talking about the things that they love.

And the love abounds. The documentary features an impressive collection of designers. Some of the favorites, including Moggridge, Ive, and Fukasawa, as well as some with whom I am less familiar.

Like Karim Rashid, who’s perspective was so fresh yet familiar, and for all the wrong reasons; I found myself watching his interview again and again. Rashid describes his work as speaking to a “techno-organic” world and as a “physical interpretation of the digital age.” In his interview he speaks about this relationship through our insistence on frequently expired forms.

We have advanced technologically so far, and yet somehow is almost some sort of paranoia where we’re afraid to really say ‘We live in the third technological revolution.’ I have an iPod in my pocket, I have a mobile phone, I have a laptop, but then somehow I end up going home and sitting on wood spindle… chairs. So in a way you could argue that we’re building all these kind of really kitsch stage sets that have absolutely nothing to do with the age in which we live in…

I find it… extremely perverse…

Watching this movie, you can’t help but think about the objects that fill your daily life and the work that went into creating them. However, I am also left wondering about the future of the product, consumerism, and the role of the “designer.”

Paola Antonelli, Design Curator for the MOMA, has one idea that is both optimistic and probable. Teasing the French for turning to philosophers as the arbiters of culture, she lauds designers for their expertise in converting complex ideas into something more comprehensible. The result?

“I… envision [designers] as the culture generators of the future.”