Author Archives: ghw

how to buy a new stereo

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I haven’t won the lottery or anything, but it is with a great deal of shock that I realize more than twenty years have passed since I purchased non-portable equipment for playing music. Needless to say, that equipment has since gone on to the electronics hereafter. When, over the past few months, I have made forays into stores that I thought would sell decent stereos, I did not have much success.

I therefore call upon the wisdom of the blogosphere to recommend particular models of stereo equipment, including (but not limited to)

  1. Receivers
  2. Record Players
  3. CD players
  4. DVD players
  5. VCRs
  6. Any combination of 3, 4, & 5
  7. Speakers

Clap! Clap!

Let the advising begin!

what to do in new york

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Among the things I’d like to do while on our brief trip to New York next week is see a play. Peter Marks and Mel Gussow review Caryl Churchill’s latest in today’s Washington Post and New York Times, respectively.

Hey! A revival of Sheridan’s 1775 comedy The Rivals is reviewed in the Times.

darkness visible

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For Rana, and the rest of us who fight this particular fight:

london.calling.jpeg And I have lived that kind of day
When none of your sorrows will go away.
It goes down and down and hit the floor,
Down and down and down some more.
Depression!
But I know there’ll be some way,
When I can swing everything back my way,
Like skyscrapers rising up.
Floor by floor, I’m not giving up.

I’ve been beat up. I’ve been thrown out,
But I’m not down. I’m not down.
I’ve been shown up, but I’ve grown up.
And I’m not down. I’m not down.

how to f’ up higher education…

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…and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.
This is truly outrageous news from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Education Department has canceled its annual grant competition for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education because Congress has earmarked the bulk of the program’s $163.6-million budget for pork-barrel projects.
The program’s budget, set in the spending bill for the 2005 fiscal year that Congress approved last month, contains more than 400 pork-barrel projects ranging in size from $25,000 to $5-million and costing a total of $146.2-million. That leaves only $17.4-million to continue support for existing grants, which means that Fipse program managers will not be able to finance any of the 1,530 preliminary proposals that have already been peer-reviewed.

What kinds of things has FIPSE paid for in the past? Well, for one thing, The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture. But now, instead of paying a few thousand dollars for an educational resource (and perhaps a few dozen others every year), built by world-class scholars, that can be used the world over for free, Congress has decided to support projects like the $5 millon Strom Thurmond Fitness and Wellness Center at the University of South Carolina? (Is that a joke? What’s next? The Jayson Blair Center for Journalistic Integrity or maybe the Charles Manson Center for Peace Studies?)
Apparently Congress is getting its porky fingers on the FIPSE money because the tax cuts and the war in Iraq have drained the budget of a good bit of discretionary money.
See, and y’all thought I was just being sarcastic when I made fun of Bush during the debates.

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movabletype, you broke my heart!

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Dear MovableType,

The ‘herders recently dropped $100 on getting the latest version of you (and I paid another $40 to get my own higher education version to use on CHLT), and now we’re starting to think that what we have now is actually worse than what we had before.

Your comment function doesn’t seem to work right. The TypeKey authentication system, which ought to be easy peasy, is confusing and apparently buggy. You encourage people to download and install MT-Blacklist, but when it doesn’t work (and trust me, there are lots of problems), you respond to questions with “We don’t support 3rd-party plugins.” Note that this particular plug-in is only available on your site. Why would you tell people to download and install something from your site and then refuse to help them when it doesn’t work?

If I were just starting out blogging, I’d be dropping you like a hot potato right now and asking for my money back (and perhaps going with Expression Engine or WordPress) because your software looks like it sucks: it’s not working right, the instructions are inadequate, and your customer support abdicates responsibility. Back when you were free, I was understanding, but we paid money for you. What happened? I have hundreds of blog entries stored in MT format, so I’m hesitant to switching to something else.

However, I’m not completely opposed to the idea, either. So are you gonna help us out or what?

Sincerely,

GHW

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