James Rohal

A gripe that I have with Blackboard is its lack of RSS feeds. Minimally I would like to subscribe to my Announcements, but that appears to be impossible. The only type of feed I could even find in BB is in the podcast section.

BlB also makes it difficult to include RSS feeds into course modules. I am not sure whether the RSS module with descriptions is the solution to my problem or would even work on Miami’s BB server. The only reason I would want to implement something like that is so I could aggregate the course’s announcements and posts from the course’s brand spankin’ new blog. Currently I use Google’s AJAX Feed API to grab the WordPress feed and put it in a permanent announcement.

I was going through some old documents and ran across this little gem. I’m not sure when I wrote it but I was definitely young.

When I was little, I always thought that dust bunnies were little bunnies made out of dust and they were gray. Everyone use to laugh at me because only I could see the bunnies that hopped under my bed and they couldn’t. I would look under the bed and say, “Hey bunnies, how are you doing?” Even I thought that my mom and dad thought that I was a little cuckoo, but I wish that they would use their imagination and think what I thought.

Once my friend played a trick on me and hid under my bed. When I asked how they were doing, they answered back, but it was really my friend. When he came out, I was surprised and mad that he didn’t imagine.

When I am really bored, I crawl under the bed and talk and play games with the dust bunnies. The dust bunnies and I played a story telling game, and we raced from one end of the bed to the other. I met the mother of all the bunnies and I asked how she could manage all of them, and what they ate.

Sometimes the dust bunnies crawl into my bed and make me sneeze, they follow me to school and back home. Wherever I go, they go. When I go on vacation, the bunnies can’t follow me, but when I arrive at my destination, I meet new dust bunnies and make new friends. Whenever the dust bunnies are sleeping or away, I make up new ones, and they don’t make me sneeze! My new friends are different from the other dust bunnies because they have an imagination of their own. They help me imagine new places, like flying in space or turning a snowy day into a journey across the North Pole. The dust bunnies are from MY imagination and I can control, but it is really fun hen they follow me outside into the snow. I bury them all with snow, but they come back and knock me into the snow.

I can make up other friends but the dust bunnies are my best friends. They help me through the dull days and without an imagination they would never exist. If everyone would use their imagination all the time, everyone would understand what everyone is thinking.