the pod bay door

.: I’ve been busy on two fronts: work, where I am preparing lectures on various aspects of research and information gathering skills for four different classes, three in mechanical engineering, and one in chemical engineering. As well, I am now a column editor for the journal, Internet Reference Services Quarterly, and need to compose my first submission before leaving for NYC on October 7th. Best working title for the column so far is Digital Musings.

At home, I’ve been working on the main floor bathroom renovations: painting as much of the walls as I can before having the toilet removed to finish the job (so to speak), and installing vinyl tile on the floor. I hope to have this finished by the end of the month, but will need help from friends to complete the work.

.: Another new term begins this week at universities and colleges around the world. Tomorrow, I teach my first research skills class to ~175 second-year students in chemical and materials engineering. I have more classes later this month, for which I need to prepare new presentations or revise older ones. I look forward to it all with a mix of excitement and trepidation, with the campus about to increase in population by about 35,000, as the students descend upon us once again.

This is the time of year when summer seems to recede each day with a little more urgency. The leaves on some of the trees in my cul-de-sac have turned yellow or red, and are beginning to fall, and you can feel the cool evening air each night. It was a relaxed Labour Day weekend for the most part, mixed in with my usual anxieties. I didn’t get a bike ride in this weekend, despite encouragement from Tony, who has had better luck with MT 3.2 than did I. I saw The Constant Gardener on Sunday, one of the two best movies I’ve seen this year, the other being Crash. I also had dinner on Saturday night and tonight, at the homes of good friends.

I’m exhausted, all the time. There is always too much to do, with not enough time to do it. The only constant is the number of hours in the day. In the past two weeks, I wasted spent too much time wrestling with Movable Type 3.2. One reason I switched to WordPress (for now, anyway), is that our internal blogs at work have migrated to WP as well. It is open source, which my colleagues support in a big way, and so far, it’s working fine.

Sleep now, I think.

.: As I continue working on a new site format, I have been viewing quite a few WordPress themes on this site. The current theme at the moment is Wuhan Black Letterhead

Eventually, I will migrate the previous PBD entries.

A migration from Movable Type 3.2 is taking place, albeit slowly. Please be patient with me. 🙂

A new test post using MT 3.2, installed this evening.

.: I have been playing with WordPress 1.5.2, and after the usual weeping and gnashing of teeth, was able to download and install it here; note that the default template out of the box is based on the Kubrick template – cool. At the same time, Moveable Type 3.2 was just released, along with a new set of style templates, and I need to upload it and see if it makes any difference to my existing sites.

It’s my understanding that WordPress has great spam comment protection. I wonder if it has improved on Moveable Type. Recently I had comments submitted to STLQ refused because of “questionable content” or something similar. Turned out that the commenter used “analysis” in his comments, and my MT-Blacklist of entries included the substring “anal”. Wonderful. So I had to switch the entry from “Block” to “Moderate”, and to date, of the 169,975 comments sent to my sites, which were blocked by MT-Blacklist, 6,369 of them had “anal” in the text. 169,975 spam comments? I wonder what part of “get a life” these morons don’t understand. We need a new word for spammers, something like spidiots, or spassholes. What about spuckwads?

Regardless, PBD is overdue for a tuneup and retooling, and the opportunity now presents itself accordingly. Stay tuned.

I am scheduled to be in NYC from 7-16 October, ostensibly to attend Jessica‘s wedding on Oct 15th in Summit, but as most know, NYC is my favorite destination, so I’m stretching the trip out to nine days.