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Two down and one to go: I forgot to mention that Dr. Wilkie read my thesis and gave it a clean bill of health. I haven't seen his comments yet (since they're in Fayetteville and I'm here). But, based on the email he sent me, everything looks great. I'll just have to fix some minor things and print a fresh copy. I still haven't heard from Dr. Stephens at this point, but it looks like the April 27th deadline might be a real possibility. I know it probably little more than a self-esteam boosting resume stuffer, but I may finally be able to tack M.A. onto the end of my name after May of this year (now if I could just tack RHCE after it, life would be grand).
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All is quiet. I'm in Greenville, South Carolina. This is where Gina's oldest brother, Rick, lives with his wife, Lori, and 16-month-old son (and nephew [or nephew-in-law depending upon how much a stickler for detail you are] of mine), Zach. Okay, all is not so quiet, I just heard Zach let out a cry. He's having trouble sleeping. We're house and baby sitting here for a week while Zach's parents take a much-deserved vacation. And this stint of house and baby sitting serves as our own much-deserved vacation (if you can believe that). Time will tell how relaxing it turns out to be. So far, Zach has been pretty easy to deal with. And just being away from work is probably vacation enough (not because I hate my job or anything, but because it's nice to live the life of a diletante and not have to go to work).
When I haven't been playing with the kido or watching TV, I've been working on some web sites. One ongoing project is to create custom 404 error pages (i.e. the page you see when you request a page that isn't really there) for all of the sites I maintain. That not a hard task, but it is harder than is sounds. First you have to create the page, of course, but you also have to create a file letting Apache know where to look for it. You also have to tweak the Apache config files a bit, which I've been doing a lot lately. I've gotten much more comfortable administering Apache in the last few weeks.
Besides the 404s, I've been working up a new page for Nancy, the band for which I play bass. I'll be uploading it when I get back home.
Earlier this week, I was in San Diego, which is an amazing place--full of sun, tropical vegitation, music, and culture of all sorts. I really enjoyed it. I should include a full write-up of what we did, but I'll save that for when I'm back in town.
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Today is the last day before my big trip to San Diego, which will also be my first trip to California (or most anywhere that far west). I don't think it's entirely dawned on me that I'm going to be away from the usual grind. But it'll have to soon. I'm leaving Saturday. So today I'm trying to make preparations. I'll be doing some backups and other not-so-fun-but-necessary tasks.
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It is finished: I turned in my thesis today to the members of my thesis committee. The director has already approved it. So now the committee (two people, really) will read it and probably make a few comments. Then we set up the oral defense and (assuming all goes well) it's all over. It's been a long train coming.
Now I need to apply for graduation and see what other deadlines there are. It's entirely possible that I won't graduate this term, but I might as well fill out the forms and get things rolling in case it's still a possibility.
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For various reasons (it's a resource hog, it's slow even on a fast machine, it's made by the devil), I always avoid firing up Microsoft Word. Most of typing is done via a text editor (EditPad, if I'm on a Windows machine, Kwrite or Pico if I'm on a Linux box). But for certain things, I need a little more formatting. So I went to download.com today in search of a lean word processor that would write rich text format (RTF). What I found out is that AbiWord (a great Microsoft Word clone I used to use on Linux) is available for Windows. So I downloaded and installed it and it is perfect for my needs. The earlier version that I used to use on Linux was pretty fragmentary, but this project has come a long way in a short amount of time. Download it and try it. You might never have to launch Word again. While I'm at it, here's a brief point-by-point comparison of AbiWord and Word:
| AbiWord | Word |
| is free | is expensive |
| is open source | is proprietary |
| is fast | is slow |
| is small | is huge |
| uses little RAM | uses lots o' RAM | launches quickly | launches slowly |
| is made by a non-profit collective | is made by the devil |
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I have a feeling today is going to be a near-perfect day. My bosses are both on vacation (along with all of the student body and most of the U of A staff), so I can have hours of relatively uninterupted time to work on scripts and other projects. I got here early today, so I've already got my email and to do list tasks out of the way before the day officially starts. This is great. It's silent here. The parking lots are almost empty. Fayetteville becomes a ghost town when the students go away.
So I'm going to work on my big list of things to do and I hope to cross all of them off before the day is over. In conditions like these, it can be done.
Movie update: I saw Almost Famous and Wonder Boys this past weekend. Both were very good. I also saw (for the first time ever, oddly enough) La Femme Nikita which was okay (I'm not a big Luc Besson fan. He's a little melodramatic for my tastes). I had seen the American reworking of it, Point of No Return, several years ago and everyone had told me what a pale imitation it is of the original. But that really wasn't my experience of it. The remake suffers from many of the same problems as the original, though I can't remember it in enough detail to give you a point-by-point explanation of why I think that's true (not that anyone would--watch them both and draw your own conclusions).
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It's been a pretty good day. I made some progress on a press kit for Nancy. Yesterday, I mailed out workshop handouts to 126 students who missed our February technology workshop. One of the parents called me today, concerned that her child might not be attending regularly (false alarm--it was the only workshop she had missed). We got some cool new gear today: an InFocus LP340 digital projector. It rocks. It projects nicely even in full light, it has a nice remote control that doubles as a USB mouse. It even comes with some software to let you do web simulcasts of your projections, not that I'll ever need that. It's a good piece of gear. I'm glad I requesitioned it.
I just spent the last half hour tracking down some laptops. Keeping track of who's got what gear at any moment is not an easy job around here. Neither is making sure that cables and other important components don't get lost. I'm going to create a PHP/MySQL software/hardware check in/out program next week and start using that to track things. It's just gotten overwelming. We're a fairly small program, but even a small program can accumulate a lot of gear (and loose a lot of gear if no one keeps track of it).
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Dad seemed a lot better yesterday. He took a walk with me to the end of the hospital ward. I made him use his walker and he did very well with it (and cut a pretty mean pace for an 83-year-old man). He's getting better. There's talk of discharging him from the hospital wing to the rehab wing, and that would be a good thing.
WheatBlog (my open source web journaling application) is nearing its first beta release. I hope to have a demo up very soon.
I still haven't finished my thesis revisions, even though the thesis itself was approved by the director. I'm going to do that tonight and tomorow, so I can hand it off to the other members of my thesis committee (though they'll probably not read it until after spring break). So there's an offhand chance I'll graduate this semester, but it won't happen unless I get on the ball.
My sixth wedding anniversary is next Wednesday, though we're going to put off celebrating until the weekend (when we'll be in San Diego).
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I really hate the freshmeat redesign, but the new php.net redsign almost makes up for it.
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Nancy played three shows this Friday (one with BE, one with Johnathan Richman, and one by ourselves). So we had fun and made a little money (enough to cover the practice space rent and a few other expenses). We also have a live recording on minidisc that I'm going to convert today. I hope there's some stuff there we can use for a release (at least an mp3 release). I'm taking my amp into the shop today...
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My dad is in the hospital. He was complaining of chest pains and his attendant (a woman named Bonnie who comes by every weekday to care for him) thought he might be having a stroke. They sent him via ambulance to Springdale. Gina, my sister, and I waited in the emergency room for four hours before they finally decided to admit him (though noone ever said exactly what was troubling him. I only found that out yesterday (If anyone from Springdale Memorial Hospital is reading this, you should consider sending everyone who works at your hospital [save one orderly I met] through some basic customer service training. The lack of communication between staff and family members is pathetic).
My Dad is 83 years old. He has quite a few health problems. This time they noticed that he was severely dehydrated, which tells us that, despite having meals on wheels (a fine program, BTW) and an attendant dropping by to make sure he's okay, he still manages not to eat or drink enough to stay healthy. He's going to need 'round the clock care from here on out, I'm afraid. Setting that up isn't going to be particularly easy. But no other options have presented themselves at this point.
All of that ordeal, plus life's regular stressors have made the past week very difficult for me, but I'm holding together fairly well.
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Back when blogger was having a lot of technical difficulties (which is why I ended up creating this new blog in the first place), I toyed with the idea of rolling my own blogger-ish web publishing/journaling solution using PHP and MySQL. I finally decided to try it out and after two days of coding, I have all the basic functionality. I'm going to release it (maybe next week) as an open source project. I've already set up an account at SourceForge and invited my friend Steve to consult on the project. So far, what I have is a tool useful for maintaining a personal blog on your own server using Apache, PHP, and MySQL. It's cool. I'm working on the authentication system right now. I hope to have a demo out very soon.
The point isn't to replace blogger (I'll probably continue to use it to keep my personal blog for some time to come), but to make a similar application that will work using only open source tools. If blogger ever shuts down or goes commercial, there will be another option. That's my main goal at this point. The nice thing is that the same core functionality used in a blogger-type program can be used as the cornerstone of lots of web applications. For instance, as soon as I'm finished with the first public beta of this blogger-ish project, I'm going to use a modified version of it as an online technology work-request form. The guts of it will be, for the most part, the same, but I'll add some other elements (like the ability to prioritize jobs and sort them by priority) to better suit the app to its new purpose.
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I now have a fully-functional, open source, web server on my laptop. I don't use it to serve files to the outside world, but I do use it as the localhost so I can test all of my pages and make sure they're functional before I upload changes to the production web servers, which are running Redhat 7 (GNU/Linux). My laptop is a Windows98 box (though if I had a bigger hard drive, I turn it into a dual boot machine. There are still some Win32 programs I like to use, so I can't go to a fully open source box yet). But, luckily, the same tools are available for it, too: Apache, PHP, and MySQL. That's more than enough firepower to do most anything you'd care to do with a web server, and it's all free. The windows version even come with friendly installers that make setting things up fairly easy (you'll have to edit some config files to get Apache to parse your PHP files, but that's pretty easy and something you'll have to get used to if you're going to run Apache--and you are going to run it because it's amazingly powerful). Installing the same stuff (and getting it running well) on the Linux side is a lot tougher, which is why I use NuSphere MySQL. I've also heard good things about Apache Toolbox, a Perl install script you can get at freshmeat.
Now that it's going, I'm learning how to create web interfaces to MySQL databases. And that's actually very fun, even when it gets frustrating. Now that I'm using PHP includes (similar to SSI but, like all things PHP, easier to do) for the headers and footers of everything (and also for modification time/date stamps and hit counters), it's a real blessing to be able to edit pages on my site and preview them locally (instead of having to FTP them to the server and *then* check them out). If I'd known how easy this would be to get going, I'd have done it a long time ago. So, if any of you out there are in a similar situation, do yourself a favor and spend an afternoon or two setting up these programs on your design workstation. You won't regret it.
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Nancy picked up the Norhwest Arkansas Music Award (NAMA) for "best new band" last night. The event was held at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville and was actually quite a big affair. We're very happy to have been recognized. (Now if all of you would write me in next year for best bassist, I'd really appreciate it). :)
In other Nancy news, Sean and James Katowich rerecorded the vocals on four cuts that will be on our new album, tentatively titled Solace Kid. Since we've written so much new material lately, and since all of the tracks we have in the can now feature previous bassist Eric Johnson, we've decided to do some more recording and release an album that is a mix of these songs and the new material. I'm really excited about this and am looking forward to being back in the studio.
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