It's been a short, but stressful week. Using WebCT makes me so angry, it's become hard for me to check my classes. I find myself putting it off (partly because it causes my web-browser to crash whenever I log out, so I lose all of my open webpages and tabs). On Monday, I was triple-scheduled for meetings in the afternoon: I had to skip one meeting and leave early from another to go to the third. And at the TA meeting, I got the usual pressure from the TAs to tell them the answers to the problems they're supposed to help the students solve. Randy has given up: As far as he's concerned, if the TAs aren't prepared to be able to solve the problems independently, we should just drop that part of the lab. At least half of the problem is that he's never bought into using the explicit models of genetics to teach the simple problems: If you're familiar with the models, the difficult problems are relatively easy, because they largely involve relatively simple transformations of the model: change "2 alleles" to "3 alleles" and then rebuild the model appropriately. But it's pretty clear its not going to happen with the current climate among staff and TAs.
While Lucy was visiting Philip, Daniel mentioned he was interested in playing Eternal Darkness. I had gotten a copy of Eternal Darkness when Daniel was younger, played it through to the end, and sent it to Philip. Phil didn't really find it to his taste. So, since Lucy was there anyway, I asked Phil if he could send it home with her, which she did. Phil calls it "Eternal Darkness of the Spotted Mind". So I have come to call it "Eternal Sparkness of the Dotted Mind".
So Daniel asked me to help him get started with Eternal Darkness, but it turned out "helping" him, meant playing the game while he watched. Or, at least, sat in the room with his eyes mostly covered.
We've been having fun with it and are about half-way through.
I've been building sites with Drupal. I just finished building a site for the 
Amherst Democratic Town Committee and am working on a draft site for the Esperanto League for North America. Drupal is really interesting. It has a much better administrative package than most of the other packages I've worked it, especially in terms of providing access to logging and status information. I had originally built draft sites using my OpenBSD box at home, but I found the mysql package is unreliable. I don't know what the problem is, but I keep getting errors that it can't find table files. I even grabbed a fresh copy of the source and recompiled and still got the same error. It isn't a catastrophe, because we can get the drupal site installed on my home server to work long enough to grab the pages, etc. But it's pretty inconvenient. I'm once again considering getting a new root drive and installing FreeBSD, which has the benefit of having SMP working.
I've made huge progress in building a satisfactory theme for the EUSA site. The themes are interesting combinations of PHP and CSS scripting (there is also an engine that uses smarty, but I'm staying away from that). My current goal is to get the primary and secondary links to show up as tabs and then to have tertiary, quarternary, and kvinternary links as well. I'm about half-way there. A good, fun challenge to work on over the long weekend.
StevenBrewer