Tag: software

Changeling

/ Derek Mueller

I spent the better part of today finally finally finally after years converting from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve run EWM on Movable Type since 2004, and the blog has in part as a result of its cumbersome platform dwindled, faded, crept quietly into an idle corner of the web. If I don’t write into it or visit, why would anyone.

The changeover was easy enough, since I’d upgraded Movable Type in early January. That upgrade was necessary for restoring the blog to logging in. Once I could login, I could back it up. Once I could back it up, I could export it, do a little dance.

I’m at the end of a four-month research leave, with a few days to meander before closing in on the last two chapters of the book I’m working on. And with this meander, I’d like to dust off the various websites I keep up, especially this blog and my landing page for the CV and teaching dossier. I’m discovering the limits of my having kept up with HTML5, the limits of letting weeds creep in and not especially paying much attention to the interplay of various javascript modules and snippets from elsewhere.

I have a couple of IFTTT recipes I’d like to chisel free, and maybe this will spur new or different energy for Twitter, or for posting here and relaying it to Facebook. I pose this more as possibility than prediction and publish it with a shrug, a maybe, a glance out the window reminding me that it’s springtime and won’t for all the rest of the days between now and summer’s end be raining quite as steadily as it is today.

Reinventing the Wheel

/ Derek Mueller / 5 Comments

Despite an abbreviated work session this morning, I found time to download and
install the latest version of CMap Tools, an
application I grew fond of during coursework and then inexplicably uninstalled
twenty months ago, just after I used it to map the dissertation I’ve been
working at ever since. About the latest version: what’s not to love?  I thought
about it in the first place because I had a few ideas for a new map-sketch, the
raw start to an article I intend to draft before summer’s end.

I’ll say more about the application and the article another time, perhaps,
but all of this is a roundabout way of getting to the more pressing issue:
because I re-installed CMap Tools, I also rediscovered an old, forgotten
myscot wheel
folder.  The myscot wheel is an idiosyncratic cluster of mascots from programs where
I’ve worked and studied, a wheel because the figures are arranged in a circle.
For just over two months, since mid-February, I’ve had cause to add to it,
celebratory cause. 

Myscot Wheel (update)

The new, improved wheel gives it away. As the culmination of my
job search, eight weeks ago I accepted a position for this coming fall as an Assistant Professor of
English at Eastern Michigan University. 
In addition to being so warmly welcomed by great colleagues and preparing for a
job I look forward to starting, the move to Ypsi-Arbor later this summer also means something of a homecoming for me. I
grew up in Michigan and have always referred to it proudly as home.

As tempted as I am to gush on, I’ll refrain for now and instead
loosely commit to a series–eventual entries on the position, on the courses I will be
teaching in the fall, on the market and anything worth sharing about how I
approached it. But there you have today’s circuit: CMap Tools, an updated myscot wheel,
and an upbeat announcement about joining EMU.