I have a new printer! Well, it's not really a new printer -- it's actually quite an old printer. But it's a very nice printer. A faculty member was going to throw it away because he no longer has any computers that will connect to it. (Every month or two, faculty members ask me about buying printers. I always say, "Get a printer with an ethernet interface. You don't want to get a printer that doesn't have an Ethernet Interface. LISTEN TO ME!" But most of them don't listen, or rather, they look at the prices, and decide they can't stand not to get the cheaper printers. But I digress. I couldn't have influenced this purchase anyway, since they quit making it before I arrived in the department). It's a Laserwriter Select 360 -- a venerable Apple laser printer that can accept text and postscript! We have been using an Epson 660 -- a rather miserable ink-jet printer. It was the cheapest printer I could find, but the ink-cartridges eat you alive. It was simple to swap the new/old printer into place. The printer hasn't been used in rather a long time and the drum has a line across it which gets repeated two or three times per page -- I may be able to clean it, with a little alcohol or something. But it will be wonderful to have a laser printer.
I was intrigued several days ago when I noticed that tikiwiki has a slide-show feature. If you put the right wiki markup in a page, you can invoke the page with a filter that renders it as a series of slides viewable from the web. Tomorrow is the UMass 
Junior Year Writing Conference and I'm presenting about using Wikis to support collaborative document development. I had debated whether to have slides at all, or whether to just show some of the wiki pages in current courses. But then I figured, I could build my slides as a wiki page and show them the slides without them initially cottoning to the fact that the presentation is not only about wiki, but in a wiki as well. So I put together a few slides. Not really all that exciting. But it should make for a good talk with a nice little twist along the way. This is all assuming I have a voice tomorrow.
The Governor was supposed to visit campus tomorrow and the word went out for everyone to congregate on the sidewalks leading up to the meeting place to be prepared to ask him whether or not he was willing to commit to signing a bill to fund our contracts. But the word came this afternoon that he's cancelled. It's just as well, I guess -- one fewer thing I have to worry about attending. Still, I would very much appreciate it if the state would fulfill the aggreement it made with its employees and fund our contracts.
Charlie has taken to typing in some of his homework on the computer -- his dreaded sentences. I tried to clean off the drum and get rid of the line, but the next several pages that came out of the printer were terrible: smeary and blotchy. Of course, that was when Charlie's page was supposed to come out. I hear Charlie coming up the stairs.
"Why in the world did you spend money on this piece of junk!" he said.
"It was free," I said.
"Oh. Well, but, I can't turn this in! It's got ink-blotches all over it."
"Try printing it again -- I think it will print better now."
He printed a few more times and it settled down and printed OK. It still has the repeated lines, but at least the angry ink-blotches were gone. I assured him that I would take the heat from his teacher whatever blotchiness there was and promised that we would get a good cartridge tomorrow. Now he wants color, though. Some people are just insatiable.