Saturday, March 27, 2004

Mechanical Memory

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.

Bookmark and Share Posted by at March 27, 2004 10:21 PM to Technologies
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