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Archives: [+]
Went out last night, for the first time in a long while, and caught Big Smith at a bar in Dickson St. We caught their happy hour set, which was very fine. They're a bluegrass band, of sorts, and they did great versions of some gospel songs that I remember from my youth, including an amazing version of "I Feel Like Traveling On" and a decent take on "Roll in my Sweet Baby's Arms." They also did a great cover of "Should I Stay or Should I Go." Their bassist plays upright exclusively, and he's very solid. When I was playing in The Tares, we opened up for Big Smith once in their hometown (Columbia, MO). But I think they're a bigger draw here in Fayetteville.
Seeing people play music so well makes me want to do more of it myself, though I don't know how I'd manage that right now. I'm still looking forward to doing some home recording. So far I have the software I need, and I'm getting a preamp. But the cool part is, thanks to Vicki, I'm going to have a new laptop that I can use (which saves me having to bum one from the office). I'm very excited about customizing it and installing all of my recording and web design software on it.
This weekend I'm doing revision of thetares.com since the boys are going to be on MTV's The Real World (we still don't know how much air time they'll get, but they're definately supposed to show up at least for a sec, and that could translate into some real traffic. I have a whole CD of pictures to add and I'm going to add a guestbook and some other interactive niceties. We're still looking for an ecommerce solution (to hock CDs). We're now using blogger to do the news page, which means the boys in the band can update things on their own from anywhere with a web browser. (Fresh content is a beautiful thing).
[posted by Wheat]
Back from DC. My flight arrived on time, but Gina (who was flying on a different airline) had to contend with all manner of delays and technical difficulties which delayed the last leg of her return by several hours. We both enjoyed DC a lot. I think Gina would really like to live there, and it's definately something I might consider (at some point in the future, anyway).
I ran the idea of DC by my friend Steve, who didn't think it was as groovy as I did. His main point was that DC is a big, violent city. But that wasn't the vibe I got. And if I ever did find myself living there, it wouldn't be in the rought part of town (wherever that is). In fact, I'd probably live (and, maybe work as well) outside of town. The entire region has a healthy IT presence. With that in mind, I want to work more on my web programming skills. So I'm going to learn as much Perl and PHP/MySQL as I can and then throw in a bit of ASP and Coldfusion for good measure. It might take a year, but that's okay. Other than finishing up my M.A. thesis, I don't have any other extra curricular activities to get in the way.
It's raining today, which is a good thing since we've had such a dry spell this summer. I need to clean house and get ready for my class tomorow night. I also have to run to the store for some things. But I'd really rather read a bit instead. Work will be pilled up when I get back in the office tomorow. But maybe I can finish those orders and get my stuff for the new lab. Over and out...
[posted by Wheat]
Greetings from Fairfax, Virginia. After the office trip to DC (for the Council of Opportunity in Education national conference), I stayed a few extra days to see the city and hang out with my wife, who came up here to visit her friend Amy (were at Amy's right now, in fact. Gina's asleep on the couch). The highlight of the conference was a tour-de-force speech by Ted Kennedy. The low point was the excessively long awards banquet.
A quick litany of DC impressions: for a big city, it's an amazingly clean place. The subway trains are carpeted (no food or drinks allowed, no spitting, no radios). People are friendly. There are book shops (actual shops, not huge book warehouses like Barnes and Noble) and good ones at that. Lots of ethnic food (had some great curry chicken). Lots of gay men. Lots of older men in much better shape than I've ever been in. Lots of dogs. Monuments and sculpture everywhere. Great museums.
The IT market is strong here. It might be a good place for me to wind up eventually (any tips on that are welcome). But I tried to stay away from IT this week. I've only rarely checked my mail and didn't even bring a lap top with me. Mostly, I've been trying to fight off my desire to watch TV by substituting my (rediscovered) desire to read. I'm still working on The Name of the Rose, and I'm liking it quite a bit.
[posted by Wheat]
I'm off to Bentonville today, to do another recruitment. I think I'm going to have to take this purchasing stuff with me and do it at home late tonight. Otherwise, I'll never have it ready to go by Friday. I'm excited about the new gear we're ordering. We'll have seven nice Pentium III's; an external CD-RW (for backups and such); some Wacom graphics tablets, Intel PC Cameras, and VXI headsets (for our distance education efforts); a new Kodak digital camera; and a decent video projector. There are a few other things besides, but that's the bulk of it. With this gear, we can set up a decent lab for training and distance education. I'm excited about the possibilities, but filling out all the order forms is a nightmare.
[posted by Wheat]
Okay, my long week keeps getting longer. I was ranting about it here, but I forgot to post before flipping over to my other blog, and so I lost it (I'm sure the world will keep on turning). Maybe, this time around, I'll try to focus on something good. I started reading again. I really haven't read much fiction for pleasure in the last year or longer. So I pulled a nice copy of The Name of the Rose (which I bought years ago) off the shelf and dug into it. So far it's great. I've never read anything else by Eco, other than some short essays, so it's a treat.
Finished up some web projects today (and learned a cool new trick), but mostly I've been working on purchase requests for lab hardware. So I've been trying to track down vendors who have the stuff I want at decent prices. We're going to have a really nice lab, gear-wise, once this stuff comes in. I'm also going to set up a non-production server, so I can experiment with database backending. If it goes well, I'll make it the dedicated database server. That will take some load off ubets and give me more room to play around without risk of bringing the entire office to a grinding hault.
[posted by Wheat]
End of the long day. I'm about to head out of the office and walk home. I'm afoot because the battery on my truck is dead, but it's a welcome change and I can use the exercise. I spent part of the day in Farmington, a small town near Fayetteville, recruiting for ETS. The rest of the time was spent working on reports. The only coding I did was to clone the guestbook script from the academy page and create a second guestbook which I temporarily called "Discussion Number 1." On the Academy site, we're going to create an entire series of guestbooks on various topics for the students to access, read, and reply to. I'm trying this guestbook-as-forum instead of a traditional discussion board, in hopes that it will be simpler to use and administer. Eventually, I may try a full-fledged, database-backended solution (like phorum or one of the many other PHP-powered ones). But for this first stab I stuck with Perl/CGI in the interests of simplicity.
Time to go. I'm not looking forward to teaching tonight, which is odd for me...
[posted by Wheat]
Busy morning here, but nothing out of the ordinary. I took a look at the updated schedule, and I'm going to be in the schools three days this week and two of those will be all day affairs. So it's going to be hard to get much accomplished on my various computer projects. Oh well.
I sent out invitations to the SCWK blog and I'm eager to see my students log in and contribute to it. I'm always excited about using the web for learning and collaboration. I'm hoping to spread that enthusiasm to my students and to other educators that I meet. This fall, I'm going to try to network with the technology coordinators in the twenty-seven area schools we serve. I've like to visit each one of them, check out their gear, and try to convince them of the importance of opensource and web-sites as collaboration tools (rather than just as electronic brochures). That's a big project and one I can't even start on yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
[posted by Wheat]
Well, after that last post, I got productive and did a couple of useful things: 1) I created a blog for students of my Social Work class, information technologies for human servies (infotech, for short). 2) I archived all of my blogger entries. So now I can stop displaying all of them on the main page (which should speed up the page generation, as well as the viewing). Now I really should get some sleep...
[posted by Wheat]
I tried going to bed a little early tonight, but I had too much on my head to think about, so I decided to purge it by posting it here (most of it, anyway. This is a public forum, after all, so I can't say everything I think). I've been thinking about work and feeling guilty that I haven't had time (or made time) to do anything with Macromedia Authorware, which I convinced the program to buy, and which is an amazing program for authoring CD-ROMs. I'm no expert at Authorware, but I have coded a few things with it, and I wouldn't mind learning a lot more about it. But it's a very time-intensive thing, and I haven't found the right project to use it for yet. I prefer the web to CD-ROMs, though there are some things that can be done more easily with a CD-ROM (serving up lots of video clips comes to mind). The other thing I've been guilty of not using much is Coursebuilder (also from Macromedia). It's a nice little tool that lets you do interactions (similar to those in Authorware), but they run in a browser and don't require plugins. In fact, it does everything in JavaScript, so it's functional even with older browsers. I'm going to crank that one open tomorow (it isn't stand-alone. It's an extension to Dreamweaver) and try to work up a quick quiz for the Academy web site. Then I'd feel less guilty.
I'm leaving for D.C. this Saturday. I need to do some laundry or something. I also have to wrap a lot of things up before I head out of town. I have two friends who want me to stop by and help them with computer problems and/or do some computer training for them, and I compelled to do that. So there's an evening or two gone. Plus I teach a class on Monday nights and bass lessons on Wednesdays (though only every other Wednesday). I should work up a program homepage for my class. I could have used it this week myself, since I left the syllabus up in my office and didn't want to go get it (the first educational use I ever made of a web site was to post my syllabi and handouts to it when I was teaching freshman [sic] English back in the Fall of 1995).
Working for a non-profit puts you in the position somtimes--especially in election years--of justifying an existence based on tax proceeds. I've even run into this from middle school students, whose parents no doubt bitch about paying taxes and may or may not realize that a lot of good things come from paying taxes (I like to remind them that having paved roads is quite a luxury and they'd all be toll roads w/o taxes. The internet itself was developed by the US military. And even if the purposes we make of it today are different than the original goal--the creation of a means of communication that could survive a nuclear blast--it's still a fine example of a tax-funded project that has come to be an essential part of many of our daily lives).
But yesterday, I thought through the problem from another direction. The assumption, at least in libertarian and conservative circles, is always that private sector enterprises should have no guilt in taking your money because you volentarily fork it over for goods and services that you've decided to purchase. On the other hand, government services are based on coersion (the assumption being that no one would voluntarily pay taxes). In the most staunch of libertarian circles, taxation (with or without representation) is nothing more than theft. But both cases, as is typical of arguments of this sort, are oversimplifications. To take the latter first, taxation comes through debate in legislative bodies of elected officials who can be ousted by their constituants. Taxation w/o representation, as that famous phrase goes, is tyranny. Taxation with representation is a legitimate function of democratic government. But not take the first case: the idea that we freely give our money over to corporations and businesses because we, rationalists that we are, have deamed their products worthy of our income. Smell anything fishy there? Every heard of advertising? No matter where you go, you are not free from the grip of advertising media. Unless you live alone in the arctic circle, you cannot escape a continual bombardment of images, sound, and text design (with the help of psychology) to create desires in your dark little heart for products and services you can surely live without and which you would not even know of (much less construct as objects of desire) if it were not for the relentless assult of the advertising industry.
My conclusion to the little delima sketched above? Neither for-profit nor non-profit goods and servies are truly free choices. The for-profits motivate a good percentage of their profits to create and intensify desires in consumers for their products, causing people to buy things they neither want nor need (since advertisers learned many years ago that the virtues of the product or service itself were never enough to create the sorts of profit margins they dreamed of). The non-profits fund themselves off tax dollars, generally in the form of grants, and are kept in business so long as they can show some level of productivity and on favorable terms with the legislature. You can knock them out by putting pressure on your representatives or by ousting them in favor of others who promise not to fund this or that. It's a slow process, but it's the best one we've tried so far.
There are a great many wonderful non-profit programs which do great things. But in election year, all we hear about is how bad a system welfare is (and it really is a bad system) and how bad it is to have to pay taxes. It's a sick cycle. And I wish the American public were not so stupid as to buy into it every four years. But we do, we have, and we'll problably continue to do so.
[posted by Wheat]
I've had a crappy day or two. My wife is under a lot of stress and I've just been down in general. I hope the weekend will take care of it. I got the guestbook up for beta testing. I think it's going to work out fine. I need to add one to my bassbook site. Maybe one would be cool for the tares as well. We used to have a discussion board there, but it was a crappy one from insidetheweb (back in the days before I discovered perl or had a server where I could host cgi scripts).
Zeldman redesigned the front page of his site, which keeps mine from looking like such a rip off of his. :) I like the new look. It's nice. All of his stuff is great. The only thing I don't like is the jazz radio site. That one just seems cold to me. But whatever....
Maybe I'll tweak some scripts...
[posted by Wheat]
I found a decent, simple Perl/CGI guestbook script at a popular archive. It's simple enough that I can focus on customizing it to the needs of my site. I have a test version up right now, but I have to work with it more before I'll link it up to anything. I'm trying to crash it and plug whatever security holes might be in it. I should finish it tomorow and add it to the Academy site. Then I'll try to find a decent buletin board script.
Gina is gone tonight (and was last night as well). Her work sent her to Little Rock (about three hours from here). I should have cleaned some house or something. Maybe I can do some of that tomorow (I'm temped to call in sick. I've felt like hell all week). Instead, I watched a movie called The Ogre with John Malchovich (one of my favorite actors). The movie wasn't terrible, but it was a little arty for my tastes (which is saying something, because I'm quite a fan of all things arty).
God, I'm tired. I haven't slept well all week. That's it...over and out...
[posted by Wheat]
People around the office are very pleased with the new campus visit form that I'm developing for the program. I'm pretty happy with it myself. The design draws inspiration from freshmeat.net (the place to go for Linux software) and, of course, zeldman.com.
I spent today at a middle school in Rogers, Arkansas, recuiting sixth graders for Educational Talent Search, the good people for whom I work. We did magic tricks and passed out candy. I hyped the program web site. My card trick worked.
I've been wanting to put a good forum/guestbook/discussion board on the Academy page, but I haven't found a decent one yet. I might have to get out my Perl book and roll my own. If anyone out there has a good reccomendation, I'll all ears. My main problem is that the board has to fit in with the rest of my design, so I'd greatly prefer one where I can tweak the HTML (I'm used to tweaking Perl scripts). I'm also open to using a PHP based one. We'll see.
[posted by Wheat]
Had a cool meeting today with Keith, who works for the Academy. Keith is very excited about making the Academy site a dynamic place where students can interact and learn. We share similar views on the educational possibilites of well-designed web sites and the value of distance education in general. We're making plans to upgrade the site by adding interactive quizes, a phorum, and an easy mechanism for students to upload their work online so that their instructors can grade it at a distance.
To this end, I just downloaded phorum, but I'll save installing it for tomorow. All in all, it's been a fine day....
[posted by Wheat]
I'm up late again--couldn't sleep. Should have taken my meds. Gina has to leave early in the morning for Little Rock, so after she went to bed I worked on a project for work. It's a fillout and printout form (I'd be happy to make it a CGI mail form, but part of it requires a signature, so the emailed info would be of limited value. I still might do a validation page for it, though). Found myself annoyed with a few people at work today, though coding itself was pleasant.
My cat (one of four), Lenny, just stopped by to say hello. I guess he can't sleep either.
I emailed my thesis director earlier tonight, and I hope he's still on board through xmas, when I hope to complete my M.A. thesis. He's retired now, so I won't blame him if he chooses to enjoy his life rather than read about Julian Barnes, postmodernism, and the nature of historical writing. If I manage to finish the thing, I'm going to do a nice web version of it (and not just a crappy export from Word using the "Save as really bad HTML..." option). It's 85 pages long right now (not counting the bibliography, which is probably another 10. But, as they say, length isn't everything. :)
I get down on myself sometimes, but since I've started working at ETS, I've done some really good things. I've taken a bad joke of a program homepage and turned it into something hip and useful. Just recently, I created the Academy page from scratch and also created a new splash/intro page to our three web sites (two of which, I maintain. The one I don't maintain is the Upward Bound site, which has problems that need to be worked out, but the designer is aware of them--he just is too stacked up with othe work to overhaul it right now). I've leaned a lot of CSS since February, and I'm in the process of converting all of my old sites (like the BassBook) over to CSS. I've done some Perl/CGI scripting to create interactive quizes, forms, and discussion boards. I've started to learn PHP, which can do the same sorts of things much more easily and intuitively. Along the way, I've also learned a tremendous about about Linux systems administration (being put in charge of a deparmental server will do that to you, whether you like it or not).
I'm not a believer in fate, destiny, or any sort of static (and hence predictable) future. But everything in my life has gotten better since I quit The Tares and stopped trying to be a rock and roll star. Now that I'm bandless, which is fairly rare thing for me, people often ask me "Are you still playing bass?" What I want to tell them is I've been playing bass for fifteen years and couldn't stop any more than I could stop reading or thinking. Playing bass is one of the more thereputic things in my life, and it's a habbit I have no desire to break. The time I spend in bands is always brief compared to the time I've spent honing my skills in private. The sad thing is, I'm almost always more on my game as a bassist when I'm not in a band, because it's only then that I have the time to really practice and stretch out into uncharted territory. I have been jamming with people of late. And a friend and I are working on two recording projects (still in the planning stages). One will be an outlet for guitar-based pop songs. The other will be more experimental and focussed on contraptual bass pieces that I've written with the help of the Boomerang, a digital phrase sampler that lets you loop up to four minutes of music and add harmonies and counterpoint lines on the fly. It's amazing. I wish I'd had one when I was learning. It's the ultimate teaching/learning tool for anyone whose focus is improvisation.
[posted by Wheat]
Our entire office is heading to D.C. from September 16 through September 20. I'm going to stay a few extra days (through the 23rd) so I can visit some friends who live there (or near there). If I had any extra cash, I'd head up to NYC. I love that place. If I could afford to live in Manhattan, I would.
Still sick; feeling worse, in fact...
[posted by Wheat]
It's been a very busy day here, but I've been able to work mostly on web design, which makes it much better than those days when I have to wear my sysadmin hat. Today I've been adding content to the ETS site and the Academy site, which are both offshoots of http://ubets.uark.edu (the main page of the non-profit I work for). I've been tweaking the CSS for better formatting, and I've added some PHP at the bottom of each page to tell when it was last updated. Here's the code for it, if anyone is interested (I'm running PHP3, though this should work with PHP4 and will probably work with PHP2/FI):
<?PHP
print "<p align=center><span class=\"tiny\"><font face=\"sans-serif\" size=\"-2\">";
print "<<last update: ";
echo Date ("M d, Y - h:i a", getLastMod());
print ">></font></span></p>";
?>
Those double-angle brackets (i.e. << and >>) in lines three and five should actually be "& lt; & lt;" and "& gt; & gt;" respectively (remove the spaces). The class called "tiny," that I'm applying with the span tag, is defined in the style sheet like this:
.tiny {
color: gray;
background-color: transparent;
font-size: 10px;
font-family: Arial, arial, sans-serif;
}
You can see it in action by surfing any of the pages mentioned earlier in this post.
I caught a cold yesterday, or maybe it is just allergies. Whatever the cause, I feel like hell and should have stayed home today.
[posted by Wheat]
I had a meeting with my graduate advisor last week, and the good news is I still have time to finish my M.A. thesis without writing for an extension. Many years ago (okay, it was 1995), I started graduate school. At the time, I was pursuing a Master of Arts in English, because I wanted to go on and do a Ph.D. in the same subject and become an English professor (with a specialty in literary criticism). But, times change. The job market for new Ph.D. is amazingly dismal right now and has been for some time. But besides practical concerns, I began to wonder how happy I'd be as an English prof (especially if I had to live in the sort of backwater town where I might find employment). So I, like many of my other friends in the program, switched gears.
Two of my friends who once dreamed of Ph.D.'s bailed and went to law school after securing their M.A.s. One of them is now a practicing attorney. The other switched again and now works as a web developer. I switched to a master's program in educational technologies, which combines my love of teaching with my love of all things web-related. I finished the educational technologies M.Ed. in just over a year, but I was still trailing my M.A. thesis when I switched horses. Part of me wanted to never finish it (it had become something of an albatros around my neck). But now I've decided that it would be stupid not to. Finishing the thesis is all I lack, and I'm close to finishing it.
Right now, I just need a good work schedule. I'm a busy man, but I know the thesis will not move forward unless I devote regular time to it. If I gave it an hour a day for a month, I'd be through with it. The only other thesis-related issue has to do with my thesis director, who retired after I switched degree programs. He, as far as the school is concerned, can still be my thesis director, but I'm not sure he'll be up for it (he retired to get away from this sort of thing, afterall). Still, I'm going to ask him and hope that he says yes.
That's the big news as the moment. Other than that, I've been enjoying the labor day weekend. Gina and I have cleaned the house, done some cooking, and seen a movie or two. I also had time to play some music with a friend of mine, and that's always (okay, almost always) thereputic.
[posted by Wheat]
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