Fall 2008 End of First Week Status

  • ART 115 (Art History II)- Everything seems to be OK. We are doing an introduction assignment at the moment, I have to pick an artist that has a K at the beginning of their last name to discuss, and I’m still working on that. This evening our syllabus was recalled (to be reissued Monday), because the bookstore and the instructor didn’t agree on text, and now everyone has the wrong text, and the instructor is going to adapt the course to what we have.
  • ART 281 (Sculpture I) – REALLY PERKY Instructor. We will be working on making our own personal staffs, or at the very least the head of a staff and its stand. I have no idea what objects represent me, so I’m having a hard time with this project so far, but a sketch is due Monday.
  • ART 288C (Ceramics Studio) – Same PERKY instructor as Sculpture. There is a similar project for this course, it is a personal totem, or micro-garden totem… whatever that means. The instructor and I have discussed how I want to work with the course. Because I have had no formal handbuilding instruction, the instructor wishes for me to work at the same pace ask her ceramics 1 (handbuilding) course until I am ready to break off and do my own thing. I think she wants me to get a feel for the studio. On Monday we will be making CLAY! Open-mouthed
  • CSC 153 (C# Programming) – I have completed the first two assignments, and will likely work through some of the others this weekend. The course is self-paced, so I will mostly use it to fill gaps between the other courses. The instructor is a complete nerd which makes the course even more of a fun event.
  • ENG 131 (Literature) – This course is being taught by Wiki. I don’t know how I feel about this, but I think it could be interesting. Our first assignment is pretty much to read the first part of one of the books for the course, and be prepared to talk about it. We aren’t doing much yet. This instructor likes to do a lot of integrating of multimedia, so I will have to storyboard an idea for a short (60 second) film about the book we are reading and things like that. There was also something about selecting music to put behind Robert Frost poems and such. Nothing really accomplished in the course yet, but it is promising.
  • HIS 131 (American History I) – So far it is dry and boring. It has mostly been reading so far except for the instructor’s video introduction. The instructor plans to use video and podcasts to teach the course in addition to the text, so this may be very interesting. The course structure looks to be laid in such a way that it will be a very interactive course. There are a lot of papers in the course, but it doesn’t seem like it will be something that will totally destroy me like my high school AH course did. I have completed my "orientation quiz" as well as submitted my paper introducing my goals for the course. Nothing else is due and the course structure isn’t really apparent as far as assignments, so I may just have to pick out some key words and get to reading and just kind of go with what I can at first until I get a grasp on what will be expected on the quizzes. I suspect the textbook website may be of some help for the preparations though.

I thought 6 courses would be a lot to deal with, but so far I can summarize them all and look back up at the summaries and ask myself "Is that all?". This might turn out to be a very fun and productive semester. None of my instructors seem to be too normal about anything, with the exception of maybe Art History, and well.. that’s just the way that things go sometimes. I’ll sweat through it and be glad every day of the course that my instructor is not Dr. James Frakes.

My Day (Synopsis): August 20, 2008

  • Woke up
  • Had enjoyable time in sculpture
  • I think I will enjoy my new sculpture/ceramics instructor
  • I came home
  • Went hiking at Crowders Mountain
  • Reached Pinnacle
  • Returned
  • Exhausted
  • Sleep

What contract?

In the last few days I’ve been working with an individual at my old high school on some problems related to the DNS of the schools domain name. Today one of the emails included the following line:

"I know this goes beyond the scope of your contract with us, so I just wanted to let you know that I do appreciate the help!!!"

Its funny in so many ways. There is no contract first of all. I do what I do because I for some reason still care about the school. Second, my only relationship now with the school is that I am the reseller handling the registration for the domain through Enom.

This person has no idea what she is doing when it comes to the domain name, or the web presence of the school in general.

In June she received a email telling her that her hosting provider needed her to change DNS servers for the domain because they were changing "platforms" and their robot picked up that the domain didn’t transition. After receiving the email she contacted hosting support, and they told her the domain was registered with Enom. Enom promptly informed her that she had to deal with PCFIRE Domain Services (thats me smile_regular) to get the change made, since she didn’t have web access to the domain. Funny thing here is that she DID and unfortunately still DOES have access to the domain from the web console. She tried emailing me at an address that dropped her directly to SPAM and she called me in a panic trying to get things working. I checked my voicemail 2 days later. I was given very little information about the change that was needed, so I decided to blindly make the change for her and let the burden of DNS rest completely on her. I warned her several times that there may be unpredictable side effects from doing the change.

I received no reply from her. A few days ago, another panicked email. One of the instructors couldn’t get to their web page because it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. She emailed me to see if maybe it had something to do with the change she ordered. Hmm…. you think it just might? I checked out the website and discovered that it didn’t seem to matter about the external hosting, so I mimicked her existing redirect configuration (domain is on external hosting, just to be redirected) and replied asking if everything was ok. She was extremely happy. Funny thing is… all I did was move the servers back to where they were before June’s little game.

I suspect I will have to deal with her again in a few days when she finds out that e-mail is not functional for the domain. Apparently Enom stores the domain’s host informations, but not its MX (email) records. I do not remember the server addresses and the email provider doesn’t list them publicly, so I seriously hope when she emails me about that, she is able to provide me with the MX records for the domain. Email was something else she was warned about in June, but I suppose she was just worried about the web presence and not student email, which wouldn’t be relevant until August 25th, in 5 days.

WTF?

A:\CSC153\PROJECTS>dir
Volume in drive A is DATA
Volume Serial Number is DCA1-B951
Directory of A:\CSC153\PROJECTS
08/19/2008  23:39    <DIR>          .
08/19/2008  23:39    <DIR>          ..
08/19/2008  23:39    <DIR>          HelloWorld
08/19/2008  22:58    <DIR>          InvoiceTotal
08/19/2008  22:58    <DIR>          VSMacros80
08/19/2008  22:58    <DIR>          WindowsFormsApplication1
0 File(s)              0 bytes
6 Dir(s)  67,751,673,856 bytes free
A:\CSC153\PROJECTS>cd HelloWorld
Invalid directory
A:\CSC153\PROJECTS>cd HelloWorld
Invalid directory
A:\CSC153\PROJECTS>cd HELLOWORLD
Invalid directory

I really hate that long file-name barrier! It is so easy to go over 8 characters and not even notice.

Nothing worse than foreign porn

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSPAT84665620080818

There is a new pay television station for Canada. It features pornographic films, documentaries and game shows, featuring at least 50% Canadian porn. Apparently there is significant interest in getting "local" porn.

I personally find that the Germans have the best porn. It somehow comes across raw and natural, the way porn is supposed to feel. American porn is often boring (one area where I agree with the Canadians). It is like every American porn ever created has the same plot, or no plot. Also with the Germans, the accent and language don’t hurt at all. The funny thing about German porn is that most times I can understand what is going on in the film more than if I were watching a film in English.

Doc as a web-content format

I love Microsoft Office as much as anyone, but there are limits to its capabilities. Occasionally I end up with an instructor (usually one that isn’t very PC friendly) who decides that Doc is the best possible format to share content with students. I personally can’t stand Word when I have a browser open (exception being research). I do feel that instructors are limited in what they can select, but it seems a bit bloated to use Doc. PDF is much better for web-based course instruction in my opinion. PDFs display in browsers more gracefully than a Doc ever has. Why would a C# instructor select such a clunky format to give class notes in?

Hardest part of every semester

Every semester there is a moment I both look forward to and dread, its the moment I have the full assignment list. While it is nice to know the way things will line up, it is such a pain getting everything into GITI. I have for many years considered writing a bulk assignment addition script where I can enter everything at once, but I haven’t gotten there yet. Every year I think I’m going to do it, and then before I write it, I have the assignments all in manually. Sometimes there are other factors that complicate the process of entering assignments into GITI during the first day of a class, such as lack of due dates on assignments, or instructions that are incomplete.

Overwhelming Syllabi

I currently have two courses open and active, but already I feel like I am a little overwhelmed by the syllabi and the course information stuff. I don’t know quite where to begin with stuff. I suspect it might be my tiredness, but I really want to get started with the courses, but feel too confused to really dive in. Tomorrow after I get my hair cut I will likely feel better and more able to handle getting going on my two courses at CPCC and the one already active at Gaston.

CPCC Courses Open

CPCC Online courses are now open. It seems I have one in Blackboard and one in Moodle… No consistency across platforms this semester (especially since I have one course at Gaston on WIKI!)

Status

I have the status page almost finished, but still not quite right. I am to the point where I am comfortable with it technically, but no where near comfortable with it socially. I don’t know what it should "be". I want it to be a starting place for my personal website. I always feel like my personal websites come across too stiff and static, so starting from a wholey dynamic base might be the right way to go… but am I someone deserving of such a page? Isn’t "status" a little pretentious?