The machine I was hoping just had bad memory still seems to be cursed. Even with the memory swap its still showing the same symptoms. Something is definitely weird about this machine. Sigh... The day isn't going very well.
I woke up early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I wandered downstairs eventually and found that Alisa was up too. We watched the end of a really terrible movie on TV. I got maybe another hour of sleep on the couch, but not enough, evidently. I came in and promptly destroyed a month of quiz questions for one of the courses that use my web resources. Eventually, I was able to recover three weeks of that, but one week is gone forever (just the questions -- not the records, luckily). I apologized profusely to the instructor, who took it well and sent me a nice note telling me not to worry about it. I replied to say "Thank you" and that I would try to stop kicking myself. I hate it when I make mistakes.
I remember when I was 15 thinking that when I turned 16 I would be "grown up" -- maybe not completely, but pretty much. I think our society has this myth that during your childhood and adolescence, you look back at the decisions you made, realize they were mistaken, and learn to do better, but that when you reach a certain age, that doesn't happen anymore. At least, I had the idea that there would be some kind of qualititative difference in the experience of growing, where I wouldn't look back at past decisions with regret. I thought the same thing when I turned 18 and 21. Around the time I turned 30, I had the realization that maybe you never really get to that point, except through intention. In other words, I found I was still looking back on errors in judgement with regret and it was more satisfying instead to give myself a certain amount of credit in retrospect for having not made better decisions, to tell myself that its OK, that I'm allowed to not have known better. I still hate it when I make mistakes, though.
- Here's a picture of the bloodroot I mentioned a few days ago taken with the new BCRC camera
It's taking me a while to get the knack of how the camera works. At first, I couldn't even tell whether it was taking pictures or not. Now I'm starting to get a feel for the rythyms of the device and I've started playing with some of the advanced features. One of biggest advantages of this camera was that you can manually set speed and aperature. It also has a bunch of advanced focusing mojo. I'm still just trying to figure out how the automatic stuff works.
This evening Alisa pointed out to me where John Silber, former chair of the state board of education in Massachusetts, said that students who receive a graduation certificate without having passed MCAS, the state's high-stakes exam, are receiving "giveaway certificates". I guess this means that everyone who graduated before MCAS was created received only a "giveaway certificate". Can you believe John Silber was even accepted into college with only a "giveaway certificate"?
ButtUgly describes wikis as being like hammers. I have found that there is a trend among some people to see wikis as the solution to everything, like the old statement that if all you have is a hammer, soon everything starts to look like a nail. Although wikis are great for asynchronous collaboration, wiki's have a bunch of limitations. The most obvious is that wiki's suck for synchronous collaboration. If everyone needs to edit at the same time, wiki's won't work for that. Thank you Hydra!! A less obvious limitation is the limited name space: if you need to have a bunch of similar documents, the namespace quickly becomes littered. A savvy userbase can avoid this by using thoughtful naming conventions, but one advantage of wikis is how robust it is for novice users in most ways -- just not in this one. The limited layout capabilities can also be a liability for developing a theme in sets of wiki pages. I've rather enjoyed using phpwiki for my blog, even though essentially no one else adds anything.
Every now and again people correct my typos, though. That's helpful.