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Strange weather: It's snowing again here in Fayetteville. We decided not to take a planned trip to Tulsa because of snow and ice there (who wants to get stuck in Tulsa?). So Gina and I have been staying close to home. We had some friends over last night for beer and pizza. We go back to work on the 2nd of January. I'm dreading it, but the time away should make it better.
Books: I finished Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope, which is a great introduction to his thought. Finally finishing that puts me in the mood to read more (perhaps that should be a new year's resolution). Gina and I put all of our book in alphabetical order yesterday (which makes the first time they've been in order in a few years). And seeing all of the books I've read, intended to read, or started but never finished got me on this reading kick. I'm in the middle of two books right now, one by Peter Burke on historyography and Eco's The Name of The Rose (which I started earlier in the fall but put down for some reason). I think I'll begin there and work my way outward.
Sites: I've been doing a lot of thinking about bassplaying.com lately. I've found a slashdot-style PHP/MySQL message/news board program that I might use. I've been brainstorming other ideas to make the site the ultimate place for bassists looking to learn more about playing their instruments. There are some good sites out there right now in the same veign, but I want mine to be the best. If I can make it really good, I might even solicit advertising (small square boxes down the left hand margin, not big banners across the top). But that's a big move, as all my sites have been fairly non-commercial up to this point. And I certainly don't want bassplaying.com to be a corny portal with blicking adds in every direction. I've seen it done tastefully. And that's what I want to do, if I do it at all.
Plans for the new year: The great thing about the site will be that I can use it to sharpen my PHP skills. And that is a resolution. If I ever want to make a better life for myself, I have to increase my income and the only way I can do that is by growing my skill set. Call me a yuppie wanna-be, but I've been poor long enough to know that poverty isn't a virtue. When I was still in high school, I decided the goal in life was to find a way to get paid for doing what you like and what you'd do anyway. At the time, I thought that meant making it in the music industry. Then, I thought that meant making it in academia. Now, I think that means making it in the computer/technology industry. I'm hoping the third time in the charm. Of course, some of these things have substantial overlap. I think bassplaying.com will be a big deal (either in itself or in it's value as a portfolio piece for me). And it's still possible that I'll one day--a long time from now--do a Ph.D. in educational technology and take a job teaching at a small university some where (my advisor here at the U of A told me he'd be happy to hire me if I'd go do a Ph.D.). Right now, much as I love teaching, that's not what I want. I want to work in the industry and keep up to speed on it. That, for me, is the exciting part. When I think about how far web design has come since I threw together my first homepage (back in 1995), I'm amazed. Most of the technologies I'm most interested in now didn't exist then.
Dealing with my weight will be another likely resolution item. I'm quite unhappy being this heavy and I've kept in better shape in the past. I know what to do. It's just a matter of doing it. I'm starting that today. And I'm starting with exercise. After I begin to establish some good habbits there, I'll work on the diet issues and whatever else comes up. I'm fairly confident that I can be in great shape by the end of the year. And I'm sure I can lose some weight and be healther by my birthday (in May).
Other than getting/keeping up to speed on geek-things and getting into better shape, I want to focus on domestic things more (keep the house clean, walk the dog more, you know), and do more recording. I finally have the software I need (Acid Pro) and Gina bought me a nice preamp (Midiman Audio Buddy) for Christmas. So I'm set. I could still use a decent compressor, but I'd no excuse not to spend some time recording music (both my own stuff and audio examples for the bassbook and bassplaying.com).
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This is my first post in a while, so I'll try to update you, gentle readers, on everything of note that's taken place lately. It's still uncommonly snowy and (worse) icy here in Fayetteville, but I'm finally getting used to it. Our trip to Dallas to visit Vicki was snowed out as a result of it. But Vicki is going to try to visit us on the 26th for the Nancy show (our first headliner).
Christmas was very good to me this year. Two tech-presents of note are the Palm IIIxe (thanks Vicki) and the Midiman Audio Buddy (thanks Gina). The Palm is an electronic organizer (you knew that). So far I'm using it for my calendar and todo list, though I'd like to find an etext reader for it so I'm never without a book. The Audio Buddy is a two-channel preamp for use with digital audio. I'm going to use it mainly to get music I play on my bass into my laptop (and into Acid Pro) without having to mic a cab. This means I don't need a decent mic and I can record in the middle of the night w/o offending anyone. There was lots of other cool stuff under the tree, but I've tested your patience already.
I visited my father over the holidays and he seems less and less able to function. Just following (even in the most abstract way) a conversation is getting to be very difficult for him. I fear that he won't be able to live on his own, even with assistance, much longer. On the good side, when he was tuned in to his surroundings, he seemed in uncommonly good spirits and even cracked one of his corny jokes. :)
My first show with Nancy went very well. Many people commented that it was good to see me back on stage, and I enjoyed being there. We're in the process of getting some files into mp3 format for the web page, so you'll be able to hear them soon. I'm also working on converting some samples of work I've done with other bands to mp3 (which, in most cases, requires lifting it from cassette). That's non-priority, but I'll do it eventually.
Our server problems at work are over for the moment and things are much faster as a result of the server rebuild and the new Samba setup. Now I can start working on PHP again, I hope, but now w/o getting a new backup system going first (...pausing to add this to my todo list). I'm going to get the tape backup to do automated backups of the most important files and try using weekly (or daily) CD-ROM backups for the rest. We don't have that much stuff on our server, so this should work. But, since I'm on holiday, I'm trying to keep my mind off work. So that's all I'll say about it.
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The snow has stopped but there's still plenty of it (and plent of ice) on the ground. Getting around town in a car is fairly easy, but walking is no fun at all. We had two days off work last week due to it, which makes it hard going back today.
I practiced with Nancy for several hours on Sunday. This was my first real practice with them. We have an opening gig on Friday and one more practice between now and then. I'm excited about it. And it's got me thinking about music again. I hope to find time over the break to do a little recording. I have all the sofware I need for now. It's just a matter of finding the time to use it.
I've been busy working on bassplaying.com, a site I'm going to launch early in the new year. It will be a new place to host the BassBook, but also a place to add new articles targeted to specific subjects. If the BassBook is something of an encyclopedia, this will be more like a journal. The focus is on theory and practice, which should set it apart from sites that are mostly about players and gear (though I'm sure we'll have some of that too). I want to use a lot of PHP on it. But right now I'm hard coding everything.
Abort, Retry, Fail? I'm working on Gina's Dell Inspiron 3500 again. Now it's consistently booting to DOS, which is easier to work with than a blank screen, though not much easier. It has hard drive problems and the VFAT system keeps getting corrupted. I think I've reinstalled it three times now. Scandisk sometimes crashes while trying to fix things (like right now. Please excuse me while I reboot). I'm hoping I can get it to boot to windows (I managed that once before, after fixing the VFAT thing) and move everything over to my Dell Latitude via a crossover cable (not that I know how to do that, but I'll figure it out). I think I'll have better luck with that than with trying to do the same thing with her box running DOS and mine running Windows.
Things seem to be progressing, I managed to make it through scandisk w/o a hang. Now I'm doing the surface scan, which probably won't turn up anything. Then I'll try booting to Windows again and watch it bring up a blue screen.
We've been very lucky here. Snow started comming down Tuesday evening and the University was closed all day Wednesday and Thursday. So we had a bit of a vacation with pay. And Fridays are always cake, so I'll probably get to work on server issues and not have to deal with human beings. :) I want to put all of this server stuff behind me so I can work on my PHP and MySQL skills (and earn my way into a better job in a better place). That's a far off goal, but I hope to make it there.
No word from Dr. Bennett on the thesis. That makes me a little edgy, but there's nothing I can do about it. And that's a bit of a relief. I think Dr. B and I are going to clash a bit on the definition of modernism. He thinks of it as the culmination of Enlightenment skepticism. I think of it as the ossification of the same. I think of it as the point at which the Englightenment started reading its own press and mistook itself for a new dogma rather than a way of thinking beyond dogmas. In some ways, I see postmodernism not as an anti-enlightenment movement but as an attempt to make the enlightenment more self-conscious.
But talking this kind of vague b.s. is the main reason I got out of literary criticism and moved on to something less vague but more useful (to me and to others). I'm glad, I truly am, that we live in a culture where we can afford to pay people to read and think about these things. And, to a certain extent, I enjoy that sort of speculation. But my enjoyment of it (and my skill at it) has its limits. I think I can do more good in the world (for other people and for my own family) by designing good web pages than by splitting hairs over the nature of (post)modernism. So, while I think I truly deserve this degree, I'll only be a little upset if Dr. B. tells me the thesis is shit and that I have to give up on it. I guess I can always take the friggin written exam, though that would take more reading than I'm up for right now.
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All is transitory. Despite getting Gina's laptop to boot (and even to boot windows) it crashed again. And now I can only get to it from DOS. I managed to grab all of her important files, but some others it would be nice to have are too big to fit on a floppy. I bummed a crossover cable from Steve and am going to try to move those over to my laptop.
Working with Gina's crashed machine forced me to learn a little DOS. I come at DOS from a Unix background (for most people, it's the opposite way: DOS first, then Unix). There are tons of pages on the web that map most of the commands for both, usually to help DOSers get up to speed on Unix. Maybe I'll write one tailored for Unix/Linux users whose wives DOS/Win laptops crash. :) But for now, I'll like to note a few here (the bare essentials):
| Unix | DOS |
| cp | copy | ls | dir or dir /w | | more | /p |
| cd | cd |
| cd .. | cd .. |
| man | /? |
It's threatening to snow. Everyone is taking work home so they won't have to claim vacation time. As long as the phone lines don't go down, I'll be able to telnet in and work on the server (which is very nearly ready for prime time. We almost have Samba working the way we want it to and Dave says the IP masquerade is working again).
Man, that's it. I'm ready to go home...
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I'm amazing; there's no denying it. Being a complete DOS idiot (and, as a Unix non-idiot, rather proud of it), I still managed to fix Gina's laptop and am now in the process of backing up her files to my server (which, at 56K, is taking forever). Turns out the problem with her machine had to do with the VFAT device (which stores long file names). The solution was to boot from a floppy and extract a new copy of the ifshlp.sys file from the Win98 CD-ROM via the extract command, which looks like this:
extract /a e:\win98\win98_21.cab ifshlp.sys /l c:\windows
That bit of ugliness means "dig around on the Windows 98 CD-ROM and find the cab file that contains ifshlp.sys. Then install it onto the hard drive in the 'windows' directory." Isn't DOS hideous? Unix doesn't have cab files. But if it did, the line to extract them would be a bit more elegant, I should hope.
Anyway, Gina's laptop is (for the moment) fixed. In fact, I'm posting this from it. And I'm going to back up every relevant thing before the drive decides to go down again. I've lost whatever mystical faith I had in the stability of hard drives. I've become a firm believer in the necessity of skeduled (daily, if possible) backups. That's going to be one of my new priorities at work--to back up mission critical files daily and to back up everything on a regular schedule.
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Well, I feel better. After three installs that, for one reason or another, didn't take, the fourth one worked and now ubets has an OS. I installed NuSphere MySQL and restored all the web files that we had been serving. The next step is to get the fileserver going. That means learning a lot about Samba, but I've needed to know that anyway.
So I'm relieved that a few major problems are solved. There's much more to do, but at least we're on our way. Right now, though, I have another problem. My wife's laptop won't launch windows and she has tons of files on there that I need to get off. So I'm poking around, using what little DOS I know, trying to find a way to boot up windows from CD or something, so I can FTP her files somewhere save before I wipe the thing.
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As I suspected, the install from yesterday didn't work, but the problem was a bug in the installer. So this morning I did a new install from scratch and it worked. Diskdruid did a much better job of allocating things this time. And even though it's not perfect, we're going to go with it. We're now having an odd problem with the primary ethernet card. It's functional, but sometimes the system hangs when trying to take it down (during a reboot). That's a problem for another day.
I'm not one listen in on other's conversations, but the three 20-something men at the booth next to me at lunch (Taco Bell--I should be ashamed) were louldy joking about "English majors" and why anyone would bother being one. I think they were engineers, probably working at their first professional jobs (one of them questioned someone else's "engeneering skills" which doesn't seem a phrase a non-engeneer would use). As a person with an undergraduate and (very nearly) a master's degree in English, I was offended, of course. I wondered if they thought the world would be a better place if no one were around to teach writing or literature.
Most people have no trouble with that more pragmatic end (e.g. writing). And most wouldn't have trouble with the passing along of literature either. It's the end of the humanities (especially English and Philosophy) concerned with theory which strikes many people as a useless endeavor. I'll grant that literary criticism isn't the most important field of inquiry. But I think we'd be better off if people were less concerned with maintaining some mystical hierarchy of "things worth doing" and instead accept that while X doesn't interest me personally, it does interest an entire group of people enough to persue it for a lifetime. Engineering doesn't interest me in the least, but I'm glad we have engineers. I wish this particular goup of them could return the favor. Of course, this whole thing could just be bad personal experience with English teachers. When I was a GA, teaching English to the masses, we had special sections of the course tailored to Engineers who, I don't know why, seem to have a very hard time, as a group, with writing.
Somehow, the sort of snobber I witnessed at lunch reminded me of my own undergraduate snobbery toward education majors (a fairly common target for English majors). Education majors mostly take courses in how to teach, rather than courses in content areas. And it's rather amazing to me how few of those content courses you can take and get a degree which describes you as something of an expert in that area. I think, at the U of A anway, you can take two sections of world lit and three literature electives and go out into the world as a high school English teacher. That just doesn't seem enough background for teaching at that level.
What I discovered as I got older is that no major or level of education garantees competence. The requirements for a degree are only the lower-level limit on the preparation needed to do anything well. A high school English teacher who never read more than was required for the degree would surely be uninformed. But it's silly to assume that a person interested enough in that area to pursue it as a profession wouldn't also be driven enough to read outside of the curriculum. At a certain point, my goal in pursuing advanced degrees was to assure myself that I knew something. But degrees don't offer that assurance. They don't garantee that you know anything; they ceartainly don't garantee, for lack of a better word, wisdom.
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Well, the server is still the main thing I'm working on. Yesterday, David installed a new hard drive and we began the install of linux on it. But after a tortuously long time installing, there were still some errors next to the old partitions. So I did it again yesterday evening, this time letting Diskdruid do the partitions automatically. That seemed to work well, so I started reinstalling some things. But this morning we discovered that linux was addressing less than half of the hard drive space on our two drives (a 20 gig primary and a 30 gig secondary). After much reading and tweaking, I didn't find an easy way to extend those partitions. So I did another install from scratch (what is this, three?). I left it churning along when I left work today. But the slow pace suggests to me that there's still something funny with the primary drive (the secondary is the new one).
I'd love to go up there and tinker with it. But I'm going to save that for tomorow.
On the much more fun side, I jammed with Nancy tonight. Their current bassist was also there, so we played in tandem through most of the set, so I could pick up some of the things he's doing. I really don't know why more bands don't have two bassists. We really weren't getting in each other's way and it added a lot to the sound. Since Eric goes for a P-Bass tone and I stick with more a Jazz Bass sound, the tones compliamented each other nicely. And since I was playing the six string, I could drop down for the low C's and D's (I really don't know how I lived for so long without that low D. I love the sound of that). I was happy to find that my Yorkville amp (a 400B 1x15 combo) projected the low notes very nicely. Maybe my Carvin bass is just a better match for that amp. The active pickups seen to fit nicely with it's very clean, modern, SWR-ish sound.
Still making progress on Rorty's book. Trying to score a copy of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I think I'll read next. I'd also like to try something by Hume. I read "On Miracles" years ago and liked it a great deal. Maybe I'll give the Inquiry a shot. I'm trying to broaden my horizons a bit. Now that I'm getting a better grip on Rorty, I'd like to read more of the books that lead him to the positions he now endorses. Of course, I've already got a copy of James's Pragmatism, so mabye I'll stick with that, but Kuhn is definately going on the list.
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Sorry I've been away for a few days. I've been stressed out of my head about our dying server and the lame bookstore/computer store which has failed (again) to deliver the new hard drive we need in order to rebuild it. Tomorow, I'm going to yank a drive out of one of the new Gateways (they're just sitting around in boxes until we get access to the new lab--whenever that might happen). Of course, those are probably crappy Quantum Fireball drives like the one that crashed on lithe back in July and the one that's crashing on ubets now.
Speaking of poor turnaround time, the good folks at blogger have spent weeks but still not fixed the publishing problem which has haunted many of us since the server upgrade. And, asside from a few posts to the troubleshooting discussion board, they haven't bothered to inform us what progress is being made on the problem.
On the better side of things, I began working up a little webpage for linux enthusiasts. It's bascially an alphabetical guide to Unix/Linux terms and commands, peppered with tips on this and that. It will be an ongoing project.
I'm still reading Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope and I'm really liking it. I've been taking notes. Maybe I need a Rorty blog(!). Today I started a book on Samba (the networking suite, not the Brazilian dance). Once this server evil is a thing of the past, I want to get back to working on the PHP/MySQL stuff. I can't even express to my coworkers how much of a positive impact that duo is going to have on the way we do things.
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I printed out two fresh copies of the thesis [...I pause to think evil thoughts about the dog barking next door...] and emailed everyone on my committee. I'm taking a copy to Dr. Bennett tomorow. Then it's out of my hands for a little while. I've even avoided re-reading the thing. After a certain point, I'm unable to be at all objective about it. It all starts to look like a foreign language and it seems good or bad depending solely upon my mood. So we'll let Dr. Bennett decide if it's good or not. That's his role in this, afterall.
I spent today practicing some songs for Nancy and reading a bit of Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope. I find that I actually want to read, now that I don't have to. For years, everything I've read has been either: 1) a guilty pleasure, or 2) in some way related to my thesis. Now, chategory 2 is eliminated, and I'm happier for it. I've even lined out the next two books I'd like to read: William James' Pragmatism (James being, along with Dewey, one of Rorty's main inspirations) and a book by James Lowen called Lies My Teacher Told Me which is about errors and misrepresentations in U.S. history text books. I taught one chapter (on Helen Keller) years ago in a junior English course, but I never took the time to read the whole thing. And now I'm going to.
I'm always reading some geek-books, of course. Right now, I'm reading Beginning PHP Programming (Wrox 2000) which is absolutely great. Once we get the new server working, I'm going back to working on PHP and MySQL.
I've given up on the blogger people. I'm going to migrate all of my old archives over to WheatBlog2 and bid farewell to the original blog. I'll eventually roll my own blog-style solution from PHP and MySQL anway, so it's no big deal. For the mean time, the new blog will suffice.
Found an interesting site of celebrity atheists and agnostics. I found an older version of this site years ago, probably linked off of infidels.org. But they didn't have a domain name back then. The design of the site is fairly ugly, but I enjoyed skimming through a bit of it nonetheless. Reading Rorty always makes me think about religion, since his take on that (and on everything) is so interesting to me.
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Stick a fork in me: the Barnes thesis (bane of my existance since 1995) is finished! I finished the text a few days ago and I finsished the works cited section about 15 minutes ago. I'm turning it in to my thesis advisor on Monday. If he digs it, it's on to the thesis committee (which only consists of two people, so the term "committee" is a bit of a formality). I really never thought I'd see this day. Last year, I promised myself I'd finish it by xmas or burn it. I did neither, and now I feel okay about it.
I'm paranoid about getting too happy. I have this bad dream that Dr. Bennett will hand it back to me and tell me it's too awful to bother grading. But that's my typical optimisim at work, I'm sure. :)
I'll eventually do a PDF or HTML version of it (if only to stroke my own ego). I hate to think of it just sitting on a shelf in the U of A Library. Besides, it'll be a challenge and my site can always use some more content.
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I spent the past few minutes setting up the template for WheatBlog2, which is why it now has a nice border and sans-serif fonts. I might as well get used to posting here since WheatBlog is still down. I'm losing faith that they'll ever get it back up and running.
ubets is still hanging by a thread. The hard drive that was supposed to be here today won't arrive until Wednesday. The web server is still up, but the file and print services are down. I might move the Academy site over to lithe, since they have new content going up and I need something to work on.
But the really good news is that I have a full draft of my thesis printed out and ready to hand to my thesis advisor, Dr. Bennett. I still need to work on the references pages, but the rest of it is done, or done enough. I'm going to read throug it this weekend and make sure there are no glaring errors. Then I'm handing it in on Monday. If all goes well, I'll finally get my M.A.!
[just got back from fixing a computer problem for a co-worker]
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