It’s been a lousy tech day, as tech days go.  Either that or I’ve been
face to face with the monitor for too long.  Started at the office
earlier–last indoor home event of the year.  Ph. went along because he
enjoys the games, whereas I’m obliged to be there–it’s work.  While the VB
match was playing out, I was, once again, in my boxy workspace, plunking
away.  I was trying to figure out how to customize the sanitize feature in
Movable Type.  Seemed easy enough.  I wanted to post a comment
yesterday with a couple of pictures, but when I went to post them, MT scrubbed
the img src tags out of the code.  Thus, no pictures.  

So I ransacked the support forum, searched and searched.  Came away with
some stuff about the .cfg file, how to pull it onto my hard drive as an ASCII
file where I could muss the code, FTP it back home again.  Presto! Didn’t
work.  No changes, even after rebuilding EWM, top to bottom.  I wasted
an hour trying to figure it out.  I even considered switching the
MTCommentbody and MTCommentpreview tags to version with sanitize exceptions, as
in mtcommentbody sanitize="approved tags here">.  In the end,
it was much easier.  There’s an override feature under one of the
configuration tabs.  Dumped in the tags I wanted to protect from the
sanitation crew; pics appeared perfectly.  

But the day wasn’t over.  Not even close.  As soon as I went to the
arena floor, both security officers pointed out to me that there was water
dripping on the hardwood.  Uh…where’s that coming from?  See, it’s a
dome, a rounded ceiling (which is also the wall).  At first–when the
building was puffed up four years ago–it was an inflated pocket, kind of like a
balloon, ultra thin.  The construction crews regulated the air pressure,
keeping it blown up while they worked inside, spraying the inner walls with a
fast-drying shot-crete, rather like gunnite.  Day by day they layered the
inside of the air-supported dome, layering a thick shell and fortifying a
magnificent dome.  I don’t know if the dome has a crack in it or if the
skylight is leaking.  I only know that it’s been raining a lot today, and
at work, there was water trickling on the inside.  Can’t fix what you can’t
find.  I was chomping a piece of Trident Original just for leaky-roof crises, but we couldn’t hone in on the origin.

Ph. and I left the gym and hustled to North Kansas City.  Petco or
Petsmart?  Some kind of pet shop.  He needed a new bag of Aspen
pellets for his Russian tortoise.  The tortoise was a Christmas
present.  We already have an aged dog, Max, so we wanted something for Ph.
that wouldn’t seem spry so as to upset Max’s senior years.  A Russian
tortoise is a perfect pet.  It (what, gender?) only needs water once a
month, it maws on lettuce or raisins or whatever, it doesn’t make any noise, and
it’s content in the yard, just walking *slowly* around. Max, who, as I said, exhibits signs of aging, doesn’t notice the tortoise; the tortoise doesn’t notice
him.  Flawless compatibility.

This evening, I was cutting and pasting html into the courseware interface
for into to humanities, reworking a few things, and touching up a prompt for one
of the weekly writing assignments.  One part of the course is a weekly
exploration–a 1-2 page mini-essay responding to issues in the reading or in the
course links.  Students have five chances to complete three during the
eight-week term. I feel compelled to switch up the exploration prompts from time
to time because, now that I’ve taught the course four or five terms, I get this
uncanny sense that I’m reading stuff I’ve read before.  I’m finding that
there’s really nothing to guard against a student in one term copying the full
texts of all course exchanges (threaded dialogue, other students’ assignments,
and so on), then passing it along to a student in a subsequent term.  This
can, of course, happen in face to face contexts, too. And it does.  But in
online courses, where all interchanges take shape in writing, the full platter
is captured.  It’s different every term, but there is no course
beyond the texts that are produced during it–all of which can be archived,
copied and shared. Good reasons for turning things over.    

My variation this afternoon and evening was to put together a prompt that
invited students to think about the points of contact between Simon Frith’s
essay "The Voice," which we come at through Ways of Reading, and Hit
Song Science (via Collin
vs. Blog).  I wrote a masterful prompt about HSS and listening habits,
about the measurable qualities of a song and what it means to quantify our
tastes.  And I usually don’t refer to anything I’ve done as masterful, but
at the moment Windows XP locked me (not responding) away from my work, it seemed
ever more brilliant and irreplaceable. No, of course you can’t tell I’m crying!
Inside, at least.  I worked for almost two hours on the whole lot (which
included some other general course updates).  Lost to a lockup.  You
know that sinking feeling?  I don’t lose stuff often, but I was doing some
screwy copy and past, then edit routine which left me, well, without the better
chunk of my work from the late afternoon.  I slunk back to it after a reset
and sweated out a much less impressive version of the prompt.  It’ll have
to do.