Odds and ends Saturday
It’s been a while since an omnibus post (or really since any kind of regular post except tracking my running). So what’s up?
House-wise, nothing is up; it’s all down. We just got our floors refinished by Dan Ayer–and they look fantastic–so everything is in the basement, including me. Lots of stuff is in boxes. It’s like moving, except we’ve got wires running everywhere so we can hook up a computer and some other stuff. Until the floors cure, and we paint upstairs, we’ll be down here.
“We” means “me” for now. Madelyn and Erin are in Florida; we didn’t want the girl to deal with the dust and polyurethane fumes or the inconvenience of living in One Big Room. And of course Erin’s mom and dad are always glad to see Madelyn.
On the research front, Jeff and I recently finished reviewing proposals for the Tag A book. We had quite a few very good proposals, though we also had some which just didn’t fit the framework of the text, and I was sorry to have to reject some very interesting ideas. In addition to some nice work with tags you’d expect to see, like style and div, we also got proposals which dealt with PHP, a piece on CamelCase, one on . We’re looking forward to reading finished essays and getting this sucker into print.
Last night Mark Grieve came over with a CO2 tank, and I kegged the India Pale Ale for Jeff’s and Jenny’s wedding. We had a pint: it was darned good. Clear and copper, with a very nice hop aroma. It’s full-bodied and bitter as heck. I’ve got 20lbs of CO2 on it now, so it’ll be force-carbonated for next week.
At school, I have a new student assistant, Jacob Davis. I’m very pleased with his work so far for a variety of reasons. Jacob is an English major, and very interested in computing, so he’s eager to try new things with the web. He’s learning 2350897 things at the same time–wiki, XHTML/CSS, PHP, and MySQL, not to mention the names, faces, and customs of 80 faculty, staff, and graduate students.
Good news from two graduate students this week. Janet Francisco, who is writing a thesis about assessment and critical pedagogy, has a full draft completed already. And I heard from former student Chris Hazlett, who is settling in to PhD work at Florida.
I’m supposed to play football tomorrow. Today, college grid is on tv all day; I’m folding laundry, going over some paperwork, and doing some filing. Time for a day off after a busy week.
