All the pix from the trip to San Francisco are now online. I used Web Album Generator, a free program, to create the gallery. There are no captions in my gallery right now, but the program makes it very easy to add them if you so desire.
Hey there, Mikey D. here, taking over G’s blog for a few minutes.
One of the supreme pleasures of academic life (how many are there?), it seems to me is that you can marshall your few opportunities for travel in such a way as to get a chance to see your best friends now and again. This is exactly how I have ended up in KC for a glorious two-day hang out with L and G.
I was in St. Louis for the national Writing Across the Curriculum conference and took a train from there to KC–an almost six hour ride–4 of which were without air conditioning. Sweltering heat complimented with the voluminous, innane ramblings of some drunk-ass yahoo on his way to “Jeff City” (that’s Jefferson City, MO, yo) to go fishing. I’m no great fan of Jeff Foxworthy, but a line of his came to mind: if you’ve ever been too drunk to fish, you might be a redneck. Case in point.
My car had no air conditioning, and yet not so the other two cars behind me which I was not allowed to move to, for they were transporting a gaggle of young white Christians to God knows where (stipulating for this purpose that there is a god, of course).
[Edit: the following is a rhetorical ploy:] It turns out I have a serious, life-threatening heart problem. It’s probably genetic, as members of my family on both sides have had a similar problem. However, I’m not going to consult a doctor. I don’t trust the American Medical Association insiders with their fancy “medical degrees,” and their slick rhetoric about “health.” I want someone who knows how to connect with the people, who’s not an elitist, who hasn’t been tainted by the AMA, who isn’t afraid to break some rules instead of always doing what some committee tells him to do. It might surprise you to learn that I’m consulting a faith healer, instead. Granted, there are no studies that demonstrate faith healers actually do any good, but those who ask for such empirical evidence are not the kind of people I want to associate with. I question their commitment to my wellbeing.
Jason‘s the Shepherd for the Wordherders, and he’s already posted an entry on how the changes in MT’s payment schedule will affect our multiple blogs.
However, I also maintain a bunch of blogs over on Jeff‘s CHLT server, so I thought I’d describe how I use MT there and whether these changes will push me to adopt another content management system.
First of all, I’ve adopted Liz Lawley‘s brilliant MT Courseware hack for my classes. I’m sort of confused as to what the new pricing scheme is for MT 3.0, but my understanding is that the free version will allow for one author and three blogs. I like to leave my course websites online even after the course is finished, however, and so I’ll hit the three-blog limit pretty quickly if I upgrade.
Additionally, I have frequently assigned a game of Ivanhoe, using MT as the game platform. This requires me to add, temporarily, all 30 or so students as authors to my MT installation. I don’t think I’d be able to do this at all under the new rules.
For the above applications, two tasks are very inconvenient using MovableType. First, adding thirty new authors to the Ivanhoe games takes way too long; I’d prefer an HTML form that allows me to enter all thirty at once in a grid, rather than clicking my way through the same one-author-at-a-time form thirty times. Second, adding all the content for Liz’s MT Courseware takes way too long; again, a grid that allows you to enter multiple entries using one form would cut back on a very onerous task.
As long as MovableType was free, I was willing to put up with these inconveniences on the backend in exchange for the elegant beauty of the frontend. But if I’m going to be asked to pay, I’d have to think twice about whether such shortcomings were acceptable.
This guy seemed to want to check in at our hotel.