I printed out two fresh copies of the thesis […I pause to think evil thoughts about the dog barking next door…] and emailed everyone on my committee. I’m taking a copy to Dr. Bennett tomorow. Then it’s out of my hands for a little while. I’ve even avoided re-reading the thing. After a certain point, I’m unable to be at all objective about it. It all starts to look like a foreign language and it seems good or bad depending solely upon my mood. So we’ll let Dr. Bennett decide if it’s good or not. That’s his role in this, afterall.
I spent today practicing some songs for Nancy and reading a bit of Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope. I find that I actually want to read, now that I don’t have to. For years, everything I’ve read has been either: 1) a guilty pleasure, or 2) in some way related to my thesis. Now, chategory 2 is eliminated, and I’m happier for it. I’ve even lined out the next two books I’d like to read: William James’ Pragmatism (James being, along with Dewey, one of Rorty’s main inspirations) and a book by James Lowen called Lies My Teacher Told Me which is about errors and misrepresentations in U.S. history text books. I taught one chapter (on Helen Keller) years ago in a junior English course, but I never took the time to read the whole thing. And now I’m going to.
I’m always reading some geek-books, of course. Right now, I’m reading Beginning PHP Programming (Wrox 2000) which is absolutely great. Once we get the new server working, I’m going back to working on PHP and MySQL.
I’ve given up on the blogger people. I’m going to migrate all of my old archives over to WheatBlog2 and bid farewell to the original blog. I’ll eventually roll my own blog-style solution from PHP and MySQL anway, so it’s no big deal. For the mean time, the new blog will suffice.
Found an interesting site of celebrity atheists and agnostics. I found an older version of this site years ago, probably linked off of infidels.org. But they didn’t have a domain name back then. The design of the site is fairly ugly, but I enjoyed skimming through a bit of it nonetheless. Reading Rorty always makes me think about religion, since his take on that (and on everything) is so interesting to me.