Blogger is getting so popular that logins during popular times of the day can take forever. They should use a little of that venture capital to upgrade their servers. :) I spent most of the morning working with 8th and 9th grade students in an area school. One of them was an very talented artist (she had a notebook filled with her pencil sketches). Some of her stuff was hip-hop oriented: kids hanging out in exageratedly large pants and huge platform shoes. It was well done. I did some one-on-one counceling with a kid interested in medical school and what sort of degree you need to get in the door.
Visited my father Saturday. It went better than I thought it would. We went grocery shopping (he likes that) and then visited a friend of his. They sat and shared stories about their ailments. I think it was a comfort to them both.
Our new Apple iBook arrived today. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s big and blue and kinda heavy. We’ll see. I need to integrate it into the network and install some software onto it. But I did so much of that Friday that I’m really not in the mood for it right now (plus, there’s no where to put it in this tiny lab). I don’t really have any big projects until the new server gets going (should happen sometime this week). One of our servers crashed back in July (lithe.uark.edu) and it wasn’t a priority to fix it, with so many other things to do. So I just sat it in a corner and worked on other things. But now the software on our main server (ubets.uark.edu) needs upgraded, so it will be nice to have a second server where we can install the latest stuff and test it out without crashing the main server (and bringing the office to a standstill).
Once the new server is going, I’m going to work on my PHP and MySQL chops. I’ve been doing a bit more with Perl lately, and I need to hit that as well. But the big thing on my mind at the moment is my M.A. thesis, which I hope to finish up by the end of November. I just loaded it onto my laptop the other day (in an effort to minimize the range of possible excuses for not working on it). And there it is: sitting on yet another hard drive.
When I started my the thesis, I was using Macs exclusively and I began writing it using MacWrite Pro (if you can remember that far back). Now MacWrite Pro (the successor of MacWrite II) was out of date even then. It came out, I think in 1991 or 1993. I still used it because I hated Microsoft Word (MS Word 6.0 for the Mac was such a disaster that MS had a free downloadable plug-in that would let you read Word 6 files in Word 5.1. Everyone I knew who used Word and upgraded to 6.0 eventually downgraded back to 5.1–which is still a much loved version on the Mac platform). Furthermore, MacWrite Pro was the the only small wordprocessor on the Mac that had style sheets (well, to be fair, so did Nissus Writer and Wordperfect, but I didn’t like either of those). Using an antiquated word processor wasn’t as big deal because I could cary it with me on a floppy or two and install it wherever I needed it.
But after Word 97 came out, I had a change of heart. That was the first Microsoft program that I found useful and pleasant to use. In fact, I’ve liked Word ever since the 97 version. So I moved the thsis to Word 97 (for Mac) and kept it there for the remainder of grad school. It was also there while I worked on my ETEC degree (since we had a lot of Macs around). Now I’m running Word 2000 on a Windows 98 laptop, so I’ve migrated across platforms and up a few version numbers.
I’d like to finish this thing before Word 2001 or Word ME, or Word.Net, or whatever they’re going to call it comes out. :)