I’ve been contemplating the possibility of getting a new computer for home, as my old one is starting to show its age a bit. It’s getting cranky when I send it to particularly demanding web pages, and it’s a little slow when doing much of anything.

So I looked around at what’s available in terms of low-cost systems, and there certainly are a lot of them around. I could easily set myself up with a new computer at this point, and a pretty nifty new system in a couple of weeks.

That does, however, involve going to a 64-bit processor. And SATA hard drives, so my huge quantity of IDE storage would be moot. And the idea of putting a new system together right now simply exhausts me; there’s been a teensy bit of stress in my life as of late.

So I think I’ll try Xubuntu on this system, taking into account that I’m not as fast as I could be due to all the extraneous software I’ve installed in the past few months of Linux exploration. If I like the interface, I’ll do a reformat and reinstall, keeping the system as clean as possible.

Oddly enough, that actually sounds like fun.

There has been a brief blog outage recently, as has been pointed out to me, and I feel an explanation is in order. Either that, or an absolutely astoundingly good post. And since I don’t have much to write about, since there’s nothing much really going on, the chances of me writing anything momentous are pretty remote. Which is, I suppose, ironic , as I haven’t been writing much since there’s really not much to write about.

The past few days have consisted of me winding down from a hypersonic pitch to a state of sloth usually associated with substances held at absolute zero. I’ve spent time sketching recently. I’ve watched stupid television shows that I’ve already seen. I’ve built huge and complex kinetic sculptures out of Magnetix. And I’ve done it all at a pace that would impress escargot.

At some point, I may have things to blog about again, just about the time my life explodes into work-related chaos, so I may or may not be able to blog about them before they slip my mind completely. Stay tuned.

There has been a brief blog outage recently, as has been pointed out to me, and I feel an explanation is in order. Either that, or an absolutely astoundingly good post. And since I don’t have much to write about, since there’s nothing much really going on, the chances of me writing anything momentous are pretty remote. Which is, I suppose, ironic , as I haven’t been writing much since there’s really not much to write about.

The past few days have consisted of me winding down from a hypersonic pitch to a state of sloth usually associated with substances held at absolute zero. I’ve spent time sketching recently. I’ve watched stupid television shows that I’ve already seen. I’ve built huge and complex kinetic sculptures out of Magnetix. And I’ve done it all at a pace that would impress escargot.

At some point, I may have things to blog about again, just about the time my life explodes into work-related chaos, so I may or may not be able to blog about them before they slip my mind completely. Stay tuned.

As often as it’s happened to me, you think I’d be used to it. The work reaches a climactic crescendo, I emerge triumphantly from the chaos, brandishing whatever prize I was after (in this case, a great job and a straight-A semester), slightly battered but rakish nonetheless, to the applause of my loved ones, and then…

Nothing. A night off. Nothing to do, really. No pressure. No deadlines. Time to read, or play chess, or watch a movie.

Or go completely bonkers, thinking there’s got to be something, somewhere that I need to be doing. Something I missed, or something that snuck up on me, something that slipped off my to-do list and lurks out there in the darkness, waiting to take it all away from me…

It generally takes me a few days of rattling around like a lunatic pachinko ball before I settle down enough to actually enjoy any of the usual things that calm me down and make me happy. I’m completely exhausted, thoroughly wired, and really, really ready for some downtime before the next crisis rears its ugly head.

There’s one coming for certain on January 2nd. And hopefully, nothing until then. Any crises show up before that, they’re going to have to leave a message.

At the ripe old age of forty-two, I’ve been trying to learn how to play chess. I’ve picked up some books, a couple of programs, and I’ve been devoting some time to the game on and off for a couple of weeks now.

Partially, it’s just to feel like I’m actually learning something for myself, as opposed to doing something for a grade. Partially, it’s because I’m not a particularly tactical or strategic thinker, and I’d like to avail myself of the mindset that allows a chess player to analyze a board for possible threats, and to plan several moves in advance.

A lot of my reason for trying the game, though, is the mysticism that comes with it. The history, the legends who’ve created the image of the game in the popular mind, the image of the game as representing a genuine meeting of minds. The feel of the chess pieces, the hunt for the perfect chess set, the iconic quality of the pieces… it all seems to play right into my sense of the mysterious. And that’s before we get into the encyclopediae that have been written just to catalog opening strategies.

Plus, Lewis Carroll and Lord Dunsany played. Though not, to my knowledge, each other. That would have been something, though.

Once the semester ends, I know I’m going to spend at least two weeks of my four weeks off wondering what it is I’m forgetting that I should be doing, then remembering that I don’t have any schoolwork due.

So now I’m spending the last couple of weeks of the semester wondering what it is I’m about to forget. Hopefully, that will prevent me from spending too much time missing the homework that I don’t want to be doing anyway.

Less than fifteen hundred words to go. Not counting these, of course.

There are actually a few good reasons why my blogging has been more than sporadic of late. One of them is obviously the fact that my life has been completely consumed by full-time work and full-time school. But beyond that, I just don’t want to jinx anything.

The new job is almost too good to be believed. Not only does it pay well, but the atmosphere is downright Sorkinesque. I’m working with a diverse group of people who are amazingly capable, in a situation where professionalism is tempered with oddball humor, while being led by a leader whose capability and understanding are truly inspiring. And the team is attempting the impossible, under difficult conditions.

There’s an adolescent part of me that can’t help comparing this to joining the X-men.

It’s almost the end of the semester, and I can count the number of papers I have left to do on about half of one hand. I’ve got an A in one class, an A in another even with one paper left for them to grade, and a third where I have to do two or three little essays to break that A barrier. The last one needs one last paper, but depending on the grade I get for the one I just submitted, I may just need to pull a 50% on that one to nail down my final A. I just have to keep myself focused for a few more days…

Every so often, I like to go to the deli at the local supermarket and order a quarter pound of everything. Ham, roast beef, turkey, salami, pepperoni, two types of cheeses, some salads, whatever catches my fancy. It annoys the heck out of the deli guy.

Then I bring home all the goodies, along with some mustard and lettuce and a big loaf of bread and some chips, and we make sandwiches. Really big sandwiches.

It’s amazing how happy this makes me.

In between one job interview and the next, at the end of what will hopefully be a straight-A semester (both yet another straight-A semester, and my first (at my new university), in the middle of the first part of the last part of the year of my job, and I’m vibrating at a frequency that makes me, I’m relatively sure, invisible to dolphins. Weirdly, I can feel life arcing back gracefully towards normal, a hyped-up fireball of a 747 barrelling to earth to come to a peaceful stop in a rolling meadow, and by January I think I’ll find a pace that will serve me for another year or two.

It’s a strange and gentle convergence towards a subtle but marked climax, which will be reached, I think, Monday. In a suit. I’ll bring cookies. I’ll cement my reputation as the overdressed guy, but I’ll have brought cookies, so it will be all right. They’re very good cookies.

Meanwhile, I’m learning to play chess. Which is going swimmingly. I’m just a bit too wound up to play right now, so I drew things while listening to The Lesser Birds of Paradise. And now, I should go to bed.

Two more classes to go this semester, and in both of those I have a massive margin of error, so it looks like I’m headed for straight A’s again. Which would be nice. Installed KDE on my Ubuntu installation, and I’m liking it a lot. Picked up Super Mario Galaxy, and I love the two-player option. And tomorrow, I interview to see if I can make the job I’ve been doing on a temporary basis, permanent.

For which I’m wearing a really snazzy suit.

Here goes.

Tonight, dear readers, I write to you from a Baptist church, where I’m helping out a foster care organization conference thingy. Which is nice, and now at least I’ve found out for sure about the whole bursting into flames issue.

I do have to wonder, though, whether it’s particularly moral to be hijacking the divine wireless signal. But I’m glad that God smiles upon unsecured networks. I guess that being omniscient means you never have to worry about hackers.

Now that two of my four classes for this semester are finished, finito, kerplooey, kaput, now that my email at this particular address is filling up with the nastiest type of spam on a daily basis, junk mail that’s inevitably about my junk, which promises me, and I kid you not, a happy hour in my pants, now that my web site has fallen to the spammers but is still insanely useful for the widgets I’ve installed, the world waits breathlessly to finally find out…

Will I ever blog again?

Tune in whenever I get around to it next…

My film class is getting a bit tiresome, and I’m getting a bit punchy. Here’s my most recent message board posting.

In The Birds, a very attractive woman flirts with a man, then follows him to the small town where he lives, and they’re attacked by birds. That’s the plot. The whole plot. Oh, there are a couple of little plot-like bits, like the man’s mother being resistant to his involvement with women in general.

I’m giving this one a C.

The film had enormous amounts of suspense. In fact, the whole first hour was spent wondering whether anything was, in fact, ever going to actually happen. Edge of your seat stuff. By the time the first gull gets flung at Tippi Hedren, I was firmly on the side of the ornithological aggressors. The film really does take over an hour to build up, and then the payoff is slight. There’s only so much suspense you can build up around a monster that a small child could take out with a good forehand tennis swing, after all. Even our heroine is put in danger only when she suddenly and inexplicably forgets how to use a door. Repeatedly. Hitchcock tries to get suspenseful scenes going in a schoolhouse, a farmhouse, and a rural living room, but the effect was spoiled for me by wondering just how long it would take a thousand birds to peck someone to death in real life. Judging by the fatalities in the movie, Hitchcock’s characters can die due to slight surface abrasions, though, so I suppose for them it must have been terrifying. Without a payoff, the suspense just felt like a tease, like Hitchcock flexing his muscles and trying to get the audience to be afraid of something completely harmless just because he can.

I’m somewhat at a loss as to how Hitchcock might have been trying to avoid cliches in this film. It was as if the director had decided to mire himself in cliche from the very beginning of the film. The characters, a socialite, a mother’s boy, a mother, and a kid sister, are straight out of central casting. They are as flat at the end of the film as they are at the beginning. The setting, an isolated small town and an isolated house near an isolated small town, are likewise genre standards. The scene in the diner where the conveniently-assembled cast of naysayers and kooks deliberate on the attacks was a horror movie given. There isn’t a scene where the blonde heroine takes a flashlight and walks down the stairs to the basement where something terrible was going to happen, I grant you, but the twist on that scene just isn’t enough of a variation to keep it from being a howling cliche anyway.

I can see where someone struggling to make some sense out of this film might cling to the idea that a theme of sexual repression runs through it, manifesting in the difficult relationship between Mitch Danner and Melanie Hayworth, (socialite and mamma’s boy) but we only get to see the first four days of their relationship. Sure, they don’t get any further than a little making out, but reading sexual repression into that is a bit ridiculous. They may not have stripped and put on a show for the seagulls, but some passionate smooching isn’t too bad for the first few days. And yes, these are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, but that comes as part and parcel of the genre; the context tends to devalue the theme.

The biggest suspense for me during this film was waiting to see how the movie was ever going to make any sense in the end. There had to be a reason that all the birds are suddenly attacking people, even though someone rational in the movie explains that it’s impossible. There had to be a reason that they started with this small town. (One townsperson even proposes that Tippi Hedren herself is the cause, which sounds reasonable to me; given the chance, by the end of this movie, I would willingly have flung seagulls at her just to see if I could get some sort of non-wooden response out of her. (Though Hitchcock was unable to, so I guess I’d fail. But I’d love to try. “Tippi!” “What?” “Duck!” “AAAAH!”))

So now you’re thinking, does it all resolve? Does the movie make complete sense in the end? Do we leave the movie understanding the characters better, knowing why they went through all this avian insanity? Do we get a satisfying feeling of conclusion out of all of this? Do we get to the closing credit with even the remotest feeling of satisfaction?

I’m just going to have to leave you in suspense.

There has been a frenzy of work, an entire long weekend out of touch with technology, another work frenzy, a job application, and various bits of life-related trivia.

Normal blogging procedures will resume as soon as we lift martial law. Thank you for your cooperation, citizens.

Sunday night I finally bit the bullet and put together the bulk of the group speech project by myself. We just had to do the research, the outline, a powerpoint, and a reference sheet, and no one had done anything yet, so I did the research and the outline.

Now the rest of the group is fighting over who gets to do the powerpoint.

Our topic?

How to have effective group meetings.

Gradually, television has become more and more annoying, to the point where I just can’t bring myself to watch anymore. It’s not just that commercials have expanded to fill about a third of the time that shows occupy, or the intrusive ads for other shows that pop up during airtime.

Worse than that, for me, is the way that commercial breaks suddenly jack up the volume by seven or eight notches every time they come on. Every six minutes, volume goes from pleasant to screaming.

I want a remote with two volume settings.

Or a Tivo

Tomorrow, I do my last presentation in my online public speaking class. Which is, I admit, as dumb as it sounds. Presentations are done on video and mailed in. Yes, mailed. In an online course.

Sigh.

Once this one is done, though, I will be about through with the class. Which should reduce my workload significantly.

I’m looking forward to that just a teensy bit.

As you can tell from my sporadic and extended absences, my life is entirely nutty right now. My to-do list looks like the planning memos for the Normandy invasion.

Nonetheless, I am determined to get through the next few days’ worth of chaos with whatever aplomb I can muster, because then we’re off. We’re taking a wholelong weekend to relax and recover. We’re planning on playing tourists in out metropolis to the north, wandering aimlessly through attractions without a care.

At least until I get back and take my final.

If you find at some point that you have a surplus of faith in humanity, if you feel that your optimism about our future as a race and more specifically as a nation is becoming problematic, then I recommend that you take a Sociology 101 class at your local university, and listen to the students’ responses to the question “What do you think of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?” right after you finish spending a week studying the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

The mind boggles, and not in a good way.

Shopping now is a whole lot different than shopping a few months ago was. I walk into a store nowadays, and I’m in shape, well-dressed, and even though I’m as frugal as I was a year ago (a nice dress shirt for ten dollars! woohoo!) if there’s something I want badly enough I can theoretically afford to buy it.

I had a sales staff of three standing around me telling me how great I looked in a leather jacket this evening. At another store, I bantered politely with a clerk (bordering, I admit, on flirting) and got 15% off my purchase.

Either I look really good, or I’ve got ’sucker’ written all over me these days. In any case, it’s good for the ego.

So I’ve got a group project in a speech class, and the group project is about how to hold group meetings. The first step in the group project? Hold a group meeting to address how we’re going to approach the group project about group meetings. Except we can’t seem to be able to get together a meeting at all in which to discuss how to hold group meetings. And we won’t ever be presenting the speech we’ll be working on; instead, we’ll talking about what we would have done if our group project about group meetings had had a group meeting in which to talk about how to hold group meetings.

Soon afterwards, I have to do a motivational presentation. What’s it about?

Stop with the group projects already. Seriously. Sheesh.

In case you’re wondering where my blog has gone… my life ate it.

As to where I went last night, and why I wasn’t (for the first time in memorable history) on the web anywhere, we got hit by a tree. Well, our power got hit by a tree. Or rather, a tree fell on our power. Our power line, that is.

A big branch from our tree fell in a gust, took down our power line, and left us without power all night. The resultant chaos included, but was not limited to, clearing out the freezer and fridge (sacrificing popsicles regretfully), sending Nick off with his CPAP machine to seek refuge elsewhere, getting the tree branch down off the fence, calling the electric company, talking the electric company out of depriving us of power for days and days, and spending the night in the sweltering heat while realizing that a completely dark and silent house isn’t a particularly good place to read a horror novel before bed.

We’re back up now, though.

At work, we have two cabinets full of office supplies. We can take, and use, any of them that we want. All we have to do is tell the admin if we take the last one.

I am so tempted to take everything except the last one of each item.

Today, for the first time in my life, I wore cuff links.

All day.

It was weird.

In the midst of a hectic period of adjustment, where I’ve hit the ground running and now I’m feeling like my legs are pinwheeling, cartoon-like, while I hasten to keep up with the initial pace I set. Things are moving blindingly fast, and meetings are cropping up all over the place, and the dialog is witty and fast-paced and there are all these quirky people who are good at what they do and love what they do and I keep looking around to see if Aaron Sorkin is nearby, directing.

It’s good.

I’m caught up in three of my four classes through next Tuesday (that’s not this upcoming Tuesday, which would be tomorrow, which would inspire in me much panic and gnashing of teeth and whatever else can be gnashed but the Tuesday after that) and my other class is pretty lax on the deadlines, so if I spend tomorrow evening deep in study of that last subject, I should be about a week ahead. Which is nice.

My third day at work starts tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to it. I think I’ve done everything that I need to do there as well, but that’s a little more nebulous.

All I need to do now is get myself oriented so that 6:30 am doesn’t seem quite so cruel.

Off to bed, then.

 Posted to my online class, Humanistic Values in a Technological Society, as a journal entry in response to the question, To which values do I attach the most importance, and in what sense are my values relevant to my relationship to technology?

Adaptability. Defined, in this case, as the ability to recognize a circumstance which calls for change, as combined with the ability to plan and implement appropriate changes, either in one’s self, or in one’s environment.

I’ve come to the tentative conclusion, over the course of this particularly chaotic week, that adaptability is first among my values, without any serious competition. I spent a while wondering if I actually valued anything else, but somewhere in the background it turns out that I have some respect for honesty, generosity, loyalty, dependability, and so on. Oh, and there’s a serious pedestal set aside for the ability to love, and the willingness to be loved in return.

I kept coming back to adaptability, though, and how crucial it is to the entire experience of being human, and of being human with grace. From an evolutionary standpoint, of course, it’s the central factor in what led us to becoming human, and what led our species to global primacy. Which would normally be a neat segue into the value’s relationship to technology, but I want to expound for a moment longer on what makes this quality valuable to me on a personal level, or why I consider it to be foremost among my values. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that class size has an impact on interactivity in online courses as well as real-life ones. For instance, no-one can actually read 377 introductory messages from classmates. I guess we’ll see how the actual discussions go, but right now there’s enough messages that every time I try to read any, I just glaze over, and that gets me thinking about donuts, and I wander off to have a snack.

At this rate, I’ll gain all that weight back.

Maybe I’ll wait for the discussions to address something a bit more relevant before I try diving back in again.

The weirdest part of my new job isn’t the money, though that’s pretty damned weird. It’s not the wardrobe, as I find myself surprisingly at home all dressed up. It’s not even the getting out of bed at way too early o’clock.

It’s the fact that I can be totally honest about my ambitions in my work.

Every other job I’ve had, I’ve been there, first and foremost, for the paycheck. At this job, I have an honest to goodness goal, which I’m working towards diligently. And I can honestly say that I’m interested in not only what I’m doing, but what my whole department is doing. And if I spend the rest of my life making a substantive contribution to online education, that’ll be something to be seriously proud of.

It’s pretty weird. It’s actually taking some adjustment in mindset.

In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve gotten a new job and a new car, and done my first day in the career of my choice. In the past four days, I’ve started and gotten ten days ahead in four new courses; a full courseload for a new semester. In the past three weeks, I’ve purchased an entire new wardrobe. In the past eight months, I’ve lost 70 pounds, made straight A’s in both the spring and summer sessions, and gotten an associate’s degree with highest honors.

Just wow.