Remaining:

• Four teaching days.
• Seven class sessions.
• One session of office hours.
• Three committee meetings.
• Two meetings with a program administrator.
• One department dinner.
• One faculty meeting (which may be extended to two, but who’s counting).
• One graduate student conference.
• One curriculum revision meeting.
• Four job candidate campus visits.
• Sixteen rough drafts of graduate term papers.
• Sixteen final literary interpretation papers.
• Twenty-five final new media projects.
• Sixteen final graduate term papers.
• One senior thesis draft.
• Two final senior theses.

This list is not getting shorter at quite the rate I’d like.  Certainly not as quickly as the number of days to get it done is declining…

What follows is lengthy, a draft of the ElectraPress proposal that I was circulating before my dean decided that he loved the electronic part and hated the cooperative/open source/open access parts, which were of course the parts that were most important to me.  The proposal (like the Cinema Journal note I linked to last week) is mostly manifesto, long on why something like ElectraPress is needed, and seriously short on the particulars of how to go forward.  But I’ve been in touch with several folks over the last few days, including John Holbo, and it’s clear that going forward is what needs to happen.  So I’m going to cross-post this here and at ElectraPress; I’d love any feedback, ideas, brainstorming, and above all, participation that you out there might care to provide.

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Sunday, I think it was, R. and I were driving back into my neighborhood, and he was asking how my finances were.  I’ve been what my mother refers to as “condo poor” all year, working pretty hard paycheck to paycheck to keep the mortgage and other associated costs of the new place, all of which (being SoCal) are really more than I can afford, under control.  I told him that things were beginning to level out, as they are, and that given the usual rate of salary increases, I should be fairly comfortable in a couple of years.

That is, I said, unless something goes wrong with my car.  Nothing can go wrong with my car for three years.

Monday, my car got hit in a parking lot, and the culprit drove off.

Yesterday, R. and I were out running errands, and stopped by my office building so I could pick some things up.  We were inside for perhaps ten minutes.  We walked back out to the car, climbed in, and buckled up.  And when I turned the key:  nothing.  No whirring attempts at starting.  No radio.  No power windows or locks.  Nada.

It was so beautiful that I almost started laughing:  of course I got hit.  Of course the car wouldn’t start.  Of course.

All things considered, fate was pretty easy on me:  it turned out only to be a dead-as-a-doornail battery.  We got a jump, drove to my dealer, and they tested the electrical systems and replaced the battery for a mere $130.  And even washed the car as a bonus.

And yesterday afternoon I got word from the Claremont PD that they have indeed tracked down the kid who hit me, and they gave me his insurance info.  So I should be able to get those repairs made without damage to my insurance rates.  (Oh, and when I say “kid”:  did you know that people born in 1989 are driving now???)

But let this be a lesson to me:  no more tempting fate by getting comfortable, much less announcing that comfort out loud.  Henceforth, there will be only a guarded watchfulness.

And, today, gratitude that this is for the moment the worst of what I’m dealing with.

R. and I had gone out to have lunch at a place near my office; I’d walked and met him there, but he’d driven since he was planning on running errands after lunch.  Both of us were already grouchy, as things just weren’t going terribly well for either of us, but we had a good lunch, and afterward he offered to drive me back to the office.  Being fundamentally lazy, and in southern California, I naturally said yes.

As we walked back into the parking lot, a big black SUV was pulling slowly through the lot, slowly enough that we had to stop and wait for it to go by.  That’s not the weird part.  The weird part is that there was a guy jogging alongside the SUV, a guy who clearly knew the driver, who was trying to open the passenger door and saying, “Dude, you have to let me in.” The driver was having none of it, apparently, and just kept creeping on out of the parking lot.  R. and I watched this spectacle go by and looked at each other.  “I wonder what that was about,” R. said.

We walked on back to where R. had parked my car, and as we were about to climb in, an older gentleman parked a little ways away came toward us and asked if that—the car we were climbing into—was our car.  I said yes, increasingly perplexed.

“Was that dent in your fender there before now?”

Um, no.  No, it wasn’t.  And it wasn’t so much a dent as a gash.  The guy told us that he and his wife had seen that SUV—the one that just pulled out of the parking lot and was now gone—hit my car and then drive away without leaving a note.

Why, however, yesterday wasn’t as bad a day as it could have been: 

Because the man and his wife had taken down the license plate number of the SUV, along with its make and model, and gave us their names and phone number besides, in case they needed to serve as witnesses.  Because the Claremont PD, apparently having nothing else to do yesterday, showed up within three minutes of R. calling them.  Because the license plate number that the couple had taken down checked out, and because when the police showed up at the driver’s door, he apparently fessed up and gave up his insurance info.

That said, yesterday was still on balance a Bad Day.  Here’s hoping that today improves.  I’ve still got to follow up on the requisite paperwork and legwork necessary to get the car repaired.  And I’ve got several thoughts about CMSs, electronic publishing, scholarly blogs, and the like that I’d rather be thinking (and writing) about instead.

[UPDATE, 11.13 am:  Turns out that the actual resolution of the police-and-driver part of this story was a bit premature; we got a message late yesterday that made it sound like it was from the driver’s insurance company, following through on the incident, when in fact it turned out to be from a division of my insurance company, following through on the claim I set in motion yesterday afternoon.  As I told them, I’m holding off on doing anything further until I hear more from the police, because I’d really much prefer it if the driver’s insurance rates went up instead of my own.  Grrrr.]

So after yesterday’s post, and Meg’s going all Nike on me, I just did it:  began the process of starting up a multiply-authored site at ElectraPress.com.  In fact, I’ve started up two such sites, one using Drupal and one using Joomla, both of which are there and available for your registration and participation.

Why two sites?  Because I can’t get either of them to work just the way I want them to.  The Drupal site is easy-peasy, and is doing pretty much what it’s supposed to, but it’s not quite extensible in the way that I’d like it to be, or at least I’m not yet figuring out how to make it so.  It allows for multiple authors and multiple modules; among those modules are a front page that allows any registered user to contribute “stories,” and individual user blogs.  What I’d like, though, is a front page that basically lays out the organization of the content, with glimpses into the various sections of the site, and then a bunch of sections that actually contain the various content elements of the site (such as a group-authored blog, a repository of electronic articles, a collection of links, and etc).  I’m sure Drupal can be massaged into doing what I want, but I’m not up to figuring out how right this second.

On the other hand, there’s Joomla, which is tremendously powerful and lends itself to precisely the kind of organization I was imagining.  But it’s awfully complex, and—and this is absolutely stunning to me—the software does not include a built-in commenting system, and so I’ve had to install a third-party component, which gives every appearance of working right up until you click “send” to actually post the comment and absolutely nothing whatsoever happens.

I’m the teeniest bit beside myself on this, and really really have to get some other work done right now.  So here’s where this multiple author thing might come in handy.  If you are of a mind, and would like to work on this ElectraPress project, in whatever form it winds up taking, visit these two sites and create an account.  Email me if you’d like more privileges than registration automatically provides.  And let’s see if we can be collectively smarter than I can be on my own, right now.

(By the by:  I reserve the right to delete the accounts of trolls, and to change account creation to a moderated process, if I must.  I’m just saying.)

For some months, I’ve had a project on hold, one that I wish I’d had the time, the energy, the funding, and the general wherewithal to push forward much sooner than I have, but… haven’t.  My leave is now coming up, just around the corner, and I’m hoping to come back to this plan, to make it some kind of actuality.  I’ve been spurred into revisiting this plan today by a couple of John Holbo’s posts at the Valve, in which he first clarifies some of the positions that he took in the recent Slate article, “Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs” and then goes on to ponder what a possible future for the academic blog—one in which it is taken seriously as a mode of scholarly publishing—might look like.

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Certainly this is more for my benefit than for yours, but here’s what now remains before the sabbatical begins:

• Seven teaching days.
• Twelve class sessions.
• Three sessions of office hours.
• Four committee meetings.
• Four meetings with a program administrator.
• Two department dinners.
• One set of Ph.D. orals.
• One faculty forum.
• One faculty meeting.
• One graduate student conference.
• One curriculum revision meetings.
• Nine job candidate campus visits.
• Twenty-five rough drafts of final new media projects.
• Sixteen rough drafts of graduate term papers.
• Sixteen final literary interpretation papers.
• Twenty-five final new media projects.
• Sixteen final graduate term papers.
• One senior thesis draft.
• Two final senior theses.

That, and a bunch of packing, in the next month.  That is what stands between me and freedom.  Looking at it like that makes it seem a miniscule barrier, one easily gotten over.  But ask me again in a couple of weeks how I’m feeling about it…

This is just to say that my usage of precious CPU seconds is down from a peak of 7460.44 a week ago to 29.29 yesterday.

Now to reconstruct my embedded templates.

That is all.

Planned mileage for week: 15

Actual mileage for week: 3

Planned number of run days: 4

Actual number of run days: 1

Long run for week: 3

Aches, pains, complaints: Stupid cold.

The good news is, though, that I’m basically recovered, and that I had a fabulous run this morning.  I’m of course now two weeks behind where I wanted to be with my long run, though, so the schedule’s going to need some retooling.  But I’m back at it, and that’s an improvement.

And in case you’re keeping count:  three and a half more weeks of classes.  And four weeks and five days until I leave on my sabbatical.

I’ve spent much too much of this weekend wrestling with a series of thorny and utterly unnecessary technical problems related to various of my websites.  And I’m having a hard time making myself stop and do the things I actually need to be doing this weekend.  Like grading.  This is in no small part because dealing with these technical problems looks like work without really feeling like it, allowing me to spend hours and hours goofing off while still maintaining the appearance of productivity.

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