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Archives: [+]
We've had a shooting here on campus at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (my alma matter and the place where I work). Press coverage is sketchy at best (and web coverage, save this post, nonexistent) but it's been confirmed a murder suicided at the moment. No names have been released. It happened in Kimpel Hall, where I spent most of my undergraduate life, as it is the home of, among other things, the English department.
It's a very sad thing. I feel physically ill from it. Fayetteville is a peaceful place. It's sad that people think of violence as the only solution to their problems, and it's sad that the gun lobby and it's voicebox, the NRA, has done such a good job convincing people that we all need to carry hand guns to protect ourselves. Of course it takes more than the gun. It also takes the will to use it--the incredible lack of vision that is necessary for someone to carry out such an action. But having a handgun at the ready shortens the distance between thought and action.
It's a sad day here. We wait for further details...
[posted by Wheat]
After reading his excelent piece on "Style vs. Design," I emailed Jeffery Zeldman, one of my web design heroes, to thank him for such good work and appologize for ripping off most his design ideas. Much to my surprise, he wrote me back about an hour and a half later (not just a thank you either, but a real email). I was floored. What a cool guy.
Since 1995, when I started grad school, teaching has been a big part of my life. I taught for the English Department at the U of A and then for the Educational Technologies program at the same university. I've also taught web design classes at the Jones Center (a non-profit in Springdale, Arkansas). This fall (starting tomorow), I'll be teaching an information technology class for the Social Work program at the U of A. It will cover MS Office and some basic web design. I'm excited about it. No matter what I do for a living when I finally grow up and decide on something, I hope I can keep the teaching component. It's one thing I do well.
Back in 1990, when I was playing bass for a band called Punkinhead, I taught my first private lessons to young, aspiring bassists. I'm back at that again too. I currently have two students and I'm thinking of doing a little advertising to find a few more. My students meet with me for a 30-40 minute lesson once every two weeks. My newest student just started two weeks ago. The other one has been around for a few months. Both are doing very well and I'm proud of them.
I really should get some sleep, but I'm resisting it for some reason. I've been surfing aimlessly for a while now. The web used to seem like a vast place to me, but it feels smaller these days. There are more sites, of course, but there are fewer sites I have any use for. These days, my daily reading is often confined to zeldman.com (though I read k10k.net once in a while). For geek humor, segfault.org is good. For music-related stuff, harmony-central is the old standby. Google is the best search engine on the net (and it runs on Linux). I use it whenever I'm looking for something, and I'm rarely dissapointed with it. Other than those sites, as in my off-line life, I don't get out much.
Anyway, as I said, it's time bed and all that, so I'll end this entry...
[posted by Wheat]
Today is the end of a busy week. I've been in and out of lots of meetings and there's been a lot of moving around at our office. Some good things have come of it all. The Mac G4 is now here in the lab instead of being off in what was the conference room. Now that I have it handy, I'll get to play with it more and will probably do some more design work. David and I worked on some of the lab PCs, and now we have three up and running. I think the others are ready to be surplused, and we're going to order six brand new ones, so it's no big loss.
I've been trying to move past all the sysadmin work and do some design, but it's been hard. The U of A rolled out a new email "solution" which has led to lots of work on our end. Almost every time, it's been the new mail server at fault (and nothing on our end). But it still takes time out of the day to have to check it out every time it goes down and our staff can't get at their mail.
This is turning into a lot of bitching, which means I should probably find something else to do. :) Not much else is up....
[posted by Wheat]
It's been a little while since I've posted anything, so here goes another round. For the moment, I've put the PHP/MySQL thing on the back burner. Right now, I'm looking at more global projects. The first of these is getting the backup working and designing sound backup policies. I've done enough reading and think I'll be able to do a simple cpio backup tomorow. That's a good start. The other issues is the organization of the samba shares. I've inherited a baroque system with lots of shares, none of them with any clear purpose. I want to simplify these by reducing their numbers, naming them appropriately, and restricting them to specific content (i.e. more policy work). I created a test share on Friday. Tomorow I'll try mounting it before the other workers show up.
But I'm trying to focus my life, even outside of geekdom, on things broader and more important. First, Gina and I both need to live healthier lives, and that's going to take a daily commitment. Second, I need to keep working on my computer skills (sysadmining, web design, and web programming). Third, I need to finish some unfinished business, especially my M.A.
[posted by Wheat]
Blogger keeps posting two versions of everything I enter. So this is just a test post....
[posted by Wheat]
I love blogger, but it does some really stupid things sometimes. Just a minute ago, when I tried to resize one of the windows on the post screen, it lost my entire post. Oh well.
I got MySQL installed and working (finally). I couldn't remember how to grant permissions to users (it was working as root, of course, but I couldn't add myself as a user). Fixed that. Got PHP4 configured. But I ran into problems installing, so I poked around on the net and finally joined the PHP mailing list. One of the developers told me the problem is with the RPM which was used to install Apache.
So now I've downloaded the latest Apache tarball distribution. Monday (not today, because if I screw it up, my server will be down all weekend) I'm going to try to configure and install a new version (we're a little behind the times anyway. Our current version of Apache is 1.3.9. The new version I downloaded is 1.3.12). So, I hope that will fix it, because I'd rather spend my time learning PHP and designing web sites with it than trying to get packages configured and installed.
I'm not a sysadmin, I just play one on TV
[posted by Wheat]
I'm not much of a hardcore geek. I like Macs. I like GUIs in general, though I like having the option of the command line, and I often prefer the command line. I edit my webpages with simple text editors and web editors that colorize the code (though I have started using Dreamweaver to code rollovers). But the one instance in which I am a hardcore geek is in my love of Pine. Everytime I try a GUI email client, it manages to 1) not work and 2) take the contents of my inbox down in flames with it. On linux, I've tried Kmail and Mahogany. Both suck. So I'm sticking with Pine. It may not be feature rich, but at least it's reliable.
Today I'm going to work on getting MySQL and the latest version of PHP to work on my server. If there's any time left over, I'll try working on the new MathSci homepage or some graphics for the same.
[posted by Wheat]
Today was a much better day. I finished lots of things at work and started a new web design project (creating a page for the Upward Bound Math/Science program). I'm still working on the backup issues in our office (found Kdat, a KDE tar interface), but I'm making progress. I found some cool web design tools for linux. One is a web-safe palette program (Safecolor). The other is a command-line program that converst hex to RBG or vice versa (handy, since Safecolor only gives you the hex and GIMP only understands RGB). Of course, on the Mac, you have ColorPickerPro. I'm still looking for options on the PC (I'm trying ColorPick! right now but it is, like most Windows shareware, a 30-day limited trial. And I'm sure they want $50 or something equally outrageous for it. Can you believe anyone would pay $50 for a screen shot utility? That's just not right).
I exchanged some cool email with Vicki and my other regular correspondents.
I didn't cheat on my diet! Day two and going strong. Unfurl the flags.
I created some new graphics for the BassBook. And it has long needed them (especially after the crash). That site will be the death of me. It really needs a massive site architecture rethink and a lot of graphic design, sound, and flash work. I could be a really viable site if I had a solid year to work on it. It went from not much more than a single huge text file to its present form while I was living in Philly (mostly unemployed and definately unhappy). Now I'm too busy to mess with it, but I've been hankering to lately, especially since I have a new bass guitar student. Maybe I'll finally put some time into it.
I'll be teaching an information technology course for the U of A social work program this fall. It's a senior-level class that covers all the basics (MS Office, telnet, FTP, HTTP). I need to order some books for my students. It starts in less than a month.
[posted by Wheat]
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