Tag: SitRep

Christ I haven’t done one of these in a long, long time. Let’s do this thing.

We got a dog. A “Whoodle” (a cross between a Wheaten Terrier and a “Moyen” Poodle). She’s amazing and wonderful and a terror.

No goats yet. The garden and the dog and the transition back to in-person school and work were enough of a change that adding a pile of farm animals to the mix seemed a bit much. Still on the long-term plans, but need to do a shed and pasture fencing and whatnot first.

New garden was good- with more improvements to come. Larger, better use of compost and water, and more variety still. Corn! Herbs! More flowers! More fruit trees! Berries!

“New” bike is excellent. Walt was a pleasure to work with during a very difficult time, and he built a bike that was everything I could ask for. It was built for the type of riding I like, and boy does it excel at that. I’m still learning how to really exploit what it can do on the trail, but I’m also trying to shift to riding in flats on that bike.

I’ve been spending more time listening to music during work, and that means starting to spend time paying attention to the both the music I have and how I listen to that music. Short version: I’m going through my records and I have record players out again.

Here’s the quick update on the state of things around here:

1. This site is still being hosted at WordPress.com and I’m waiting for my web guy to install WordPress.org onto my server so I can be self hosted again, and so my email will start working. Taking more time than I’d like, but there you go.

2. I’m headed to Uxbridge on January 17 to train some of the lovely folks there on iPads- my focus is to be digital publication, as that seems to becoming an increasing focus in my life. Though my background has more to do with printed medium, I’m finding the shift towards ePubs to be (generally) a good thing, especially when we’re talking about texts in the classroom. More on that in a bit.

3. Apple (supposedly) is having a big event on January 19th regarding textbooks and schools- which seems like it might be the event they interviewed me for. I don’t know anything about this here- and it’s not that they’ve got me with some huge ugly NDA or anything. I literally don’t know. They set up an impressive rig in my classroom and I talked with an interviewer for something like an hour and a half about… stuff. How I got into teaching. What I like about it. What’s frustrating about it. Philosophy of teaching. And so on. So there’s this chance that I’ll be in whatever videos are associated with that. Or not.

4. There are two upcoming post for here I’m currently working on. The first is a product review of some samples that were given to me by a very enthusiastic CEO. The stuff looks interesting, and I can’t wait to try it out. The second post is about the class I taught on January 12th via a Google Video Chat. That’s a more complicated thing, and thus the post is a little longer. Again, soon.

Ah, yes.

An update.

This blog/site is mostly up and running, and I’ve even been slowly pushing older material from other blogs to here. So that’s good.

Bad news is that my email is still broken- it’s a matter of MX setting being funky and WordPress not playing nice with custom email solutions. Good news is that my former host and domain provider will happily run WordPress.org on my server, which means I can be self-hosted again and have my email work. Bad news (more!) is I’m going to have to migrate. Again. For the second time in a week.

Insert groan here.

So if things get a little lumpy here for a bit, I’m sorry. Try not to mind the dust on the floor and the paint cans scattered around- we’ll be back to normal in a bit.

Thanks!

t.

Here’s where I’m at with all this transitioning:

• My About page is nearly done- though the email I’ve listed isn’t working right now
• My Current Projects page is up, and is, in fact, current.
• My twitter feed is showing the five most recent posts, in near-realtime.
• My banner at the top of the page is from me, and not some stock image

All of which is good. Sadly, the list of things that remain to be done is longer:

• Content, content, content
• Email up and working
• Rotating banners for pages
• Migration of my content from other hosting sites to here

And it’s that last one I’m not sure about. Over the years, I’ve moved from platform to platform, trying to find something that works well, but in the course of that leaving my work strewn across the web like some angry toddler. I aim to move all (most?) of that content here. The drawback is it might seems as though I’m double posting old stuff. The solution to that, I think, is to selectively move the relevant stuff all to here, and in the process of that update it as I can to keep things current. I also have decided to not remove the older sites I’ve used- I’ll leave them there, untouched, in the meantime. That way, if people want to see what I was thinking about an issue at a specific time, that record will still exist. Seems like the only fair way to do this.