You know how sometimes you’re trying to think of a name or a word and it just won’t come, no matter how hard you try, but later that day while you’re chopping onions or taking a shower you’re all suddenly “Judi Dench! Dude, it was Judi Dench!” out of nowhere? So sometimes when you’re trying to remember a name or word that won’t come, you stop trying, hoping to get it to bubble up sooner precisely by not thinking about it?

About six months ago (maybe more), I was having a conversation with someone (can’t at all remember who) about those words that you’ve either only seen in print and never heard pronounced or that you’ve actually heard pronounced but for whatever reason haven’t connected the version you hear to the version you read, and so run around with some completely wrong assumed pronunciation for the word until, at a moment of supreme embarrassment, somebody finally corrects you. And I had the most brilliant example of this, the story of a friend who for whatever reason didn’t connect the printed version of a very common word to its very common pronunciation, and instead invented an entire etymology for the pronunciation he’d imagined for it.

But I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember the word, which kinda deflated the story a bit.

I knew it was a pretty short verb, and a really common one, and I knew the misunderstanding revolved around it being an irregular past participle, for which he invented an entirely imagined regular infinitive form. But beyond that, I couldn’t get the word to pop up, so I stopped thinking about it.

And apparently really stopped thinking about it, both consciously and unconsciously, because only this morning, months and months later, as I was typing a message that happened to contain the word, did the memory of having tried to remember that word return.

This entire blog post is brought to you by my desire to make sure that I don’t forget once again that the word was “misled.” (Pronounced MAI-zld, pp of “to misle.”)

I’ve noticed over the last couple of months that several of my favorite websites were becoming, well, wide. It’s become increasingly common, in fact, for me to find myself scrolling sideways as well as up-and-down when out there browsing, and frankly, it was getting to be a bit annoying.

But with my entry (yes, at last!) into the ranks of those who are getting to play with the Google Wave preview, it hit me: the fundamental orientation of the web is changing. And Wave may well cement that change.

Here’s the thing. Early web pages were composed vertically, in portrait layout, partially because of the limitations of screen width and partially because of the rear-view mirrorism that caused us to think about these new digital forms as “pages.” That concept has proven surprisingly sticky: web “pages” scroll vertically to this day, and very few sites have played with the horizontal axis.

Enter Google Wave, however (and possibly, as its necessary precursor, Google Chrome, though being a Mac user I can’t really speak to that at all).

Its three-column orientation demands horizontality — if the columns are too narrow, you lose a lot of the toolbar options, and everything just feels out of proportion.

So this makes me wonder, if Wave gets the kind of buy-in that the hype suggests, whether we’re seeing the fundamental orientation of the web switching from portrait to landscape — not that we won’t still be scrolling vertically rather than horizontally, but that the basic screen unit will be wider than it is tall.

This has deep implications for contemporary web design, I think, and not least for me; the other Planned Obsolescence works quite well in a wide window: you can stretch the main text and comments columns to be as wide as you would like. But it doesn’t work well here at all, as I’ve been using a fixed-width theme, and that ugly gray background block at right just gets bigger and bigger.

I’ll be curious to see whether this shift becomes — no pun intended — broader. Is the basic assumption of web layout becoming landscape? How do we organize a wider window?

I went to bed last night about 11.30, and got up this morning around 7.30. And inbetween, didn’t receive a single piece of email. For some reason, I’m having a hard time accepting this — nothing from my listservs, nothing from my students, nothing from random spammers. Nothing. Why is it that eight hours of radio silence, over a Saturday night and into Sunday morning, has me convinced that something is wrong?

This semester has thus far not gone according to plan. We’re on the cusp of what is technically the fourth week of classes, and I’ve been in the classroom precisely twice: once on Wednesday, September 2, for the first day introduction and syllabus discussion, and once on Monday, September 7, for an actual teaching day. I had a meeting in New York starting on Thursday of that week, and so had already cancelled classes for Wednesday the 9th, building that absence into my class schedules.

What I hadn’t counted on was developing a cough about 30 seconds after I finished teaching on the 2nd, as noted in my last post. This cough started as what I assumed was irritation from all the smoke in the air from the Station Fire to our west, and then turned into the dry tickle-in-your-throat cough produced by post-nasal drip. Which is what it still was on the 9th, as I headed for New York.

By the time I got to New York, though, the cough had begun to turn — no longer dry but wet and awful, a racking, nasty cough accompanied by an octave-plus drop in my voice which left me sounding like a long-term pack-a-day smoker. I assumed that the cough had turned into a bronchial infection, and when I continued getting worse on Friday, I called my doctor back home and wheedled my way into an appointment on Tuesday afternoon.

Saturday, though, as I made my way through the subway, Penn Station, the NJ Transit train, the AirTrain, the Newark airport, the Houston airport, and so on, it started to become clear that Something was Wrong. My voice was almost shot, my cough was getting worse and worse, and I was exhausted, easily winded when walking, and just generally felt like crap. I got home that night, expecting to spend all day Sunday in bed assessing whether or not I could teach on Monday.

Sunday morning I woke up with all of the same symptoms as Saturday, plus the addition of horrible abdominal cramps, cramps which started just under my ribcage and twisted down through my muscles and organs without — well, without producing any of the expected resolutions involved in abdominal cramps. It was at this point that I started thinking, okay, what if this bronchial infection has turned into pneumonia, and what if it’s spreading into some more systemic infection?

I live alone right now. And so I had to get myself to the urgent care place while I knew that I was in reasonable shape to drive myself there, and to drive myself back. So I set about the process of getting permission to go to the urgent care place: I called my doctor’s office and left a message with the answering service, who paged the on-call doctor, who called me and said yes, she was worried that this was turning into pneumonia, too, and that I should go to the ER or to urgent care.

Nothing is simple, of course: the medical group that I’m assigned to under my HMO is in a dispute with the nearest hospital, which is now refusing to provide service to us based on the HMO’s refusal to pay a sufficient percentage of what it owes them. And I’ve never been to the next-nearest hospital — honestly don’t even know where it is, and didn’t feel like this was the moment to try to find out. So I ruled out the ER and started trying to figure out if a nearby urgent care place accepts my insurance; happily, they did, so I was on the way.

On one level, it turned out to be a good choice: Sunday around noon, the only patients in there were me, one guy with a lower-leg injury, and one guy trying to get a vaccination of some sort. So they took me right back, were able to do a chest x-ray then and there, did a pretty thorough examination, and wound up both giving me a prescription for antibiotics and high-end cough syrup and swabbing me for H1N1.

Here’s the downside, though; as of this morning, nearly a full week later, I still didn’t know the outcome of that test. The lab picked the test up on Monday, and I was told I’d have the results by Thursday, but I’d called every day since then to no avail. One key difference between “urgent” and “emergent” is, I guess, the speed of the lab results.

In the interim, though, I basically operated under the assumption that this was in fact H1N1. The antibiotics helped some of my symptoms very quickly, but not all of them, by any means. And the more I saw about H1N1’s onset — dry cough, followed by a brief period of feeling better, followed by wet cough and a sudden turn into feeling much, much worse — the more familiar it all sounded.

But I just got the results — 11 am, Saturday — and they’re negative. Which means I’m back to assuming that this is bronchitis, probably of a viral kind, since the antibiotics helped but did not entirely clear up the problems. And I think I may have bruised a rib with all the coughing, as one spot on my rib cage has just been killing me since yesterday.

When it might be swine flu, my course of action was clear: stay home and away from everyone until the coughing goes away. But now… it’s not swine flu, and the coughing’s not going away. Is the course of action the same? I was able to manage staying home last week — how, exactly, I’ll discuss in the next post — but I’m not sure I can do it again.

The semester started here just shy of a week ago, but because my classes fall on Monday and Wednesday, today’s my first real day of teaching. Labor Day. Usually (where “usually” = about 4 out of 10 years) classes here start the day after Labor Day; when they start the week before, we still start on Tuesday, and then teach on Labor Day. Which continues to make no sense to me at all.

I wouldn’t even mind that so much — I’m really fired up about my classes, which include a seminar on Marxism and Cultural Studies that I haven’t gotten to teach in several years, and a new class on television authorship; I’ve got piles of work ahead of me, but it ought to be great fun — except for the fact that I managed to get about two hours of sleep last night due to the stupid cough I’ve developed from the lousy air quality out here in the wake of the fires to our west.

The annoying part is that I’m actually getting better, just as I’m feeling worse. Last Wednesday afternoon, just after classes ended, I suddenly felt as though I’d chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes, and my lungs griped and complained for several days after. Now, my lungs feel more or less fine, but that incessant tickle deep in the back of my throat has set in, probably a sign of healing tissue or something, but it’s driving me batty. It will not let you not cough, though coughing of course aggravates it. It will wake you up out of a dead sleep to make sure you know you need to cough. And no combination of cough drops and throat sprays will calm it down.

This is not what I want to be thinking about right now, but the combination of non-stop coughing and lack of sleep have me unable to contemplate much else.

Clicking through my Google Reader a few minutes ago, I read a TechCrunch article that Meg had shared, which details the increasingly egregious service failures of AT&T with respect to the iPhone. Some of them you probably already know about: their incomprehensible inability to get MMS and tethering up and running in a reasonable time frame, for instance.

But others you may not. For instance: have you checked your voicemail lately? I don’t mean the little badge that the iPhone uses to tell you there’s a message via its visual voicemail system. I mean actually calling your own mobile number and going through the menu, old-skool. I just did, and discovered that I had EIGHT voicemail messages dating as far back as three weeks ago that AT&T had never bothered to inform me of. Two of which were from my mother, who was quite perturbed two weeks ago when I didn’t call her back — but I’d had no indication, no missed call badge, no voicemail badge, to let me know she’d called at all.

iPhone owners, it’s time to collectively raise your blood pressure: call and see if you have voicemail waiting. And then send a note to Apple about it. AT&T not providing new services is bad enough, but failing to provide the services for which we’re already paying, and then not even bothering to let us know there’s a problem, is unacceptable.

Well, I suppose that three out of six isn’t half bad:

• Finish book manuscript review for press.
• Do reading & write letter for tenure review.
• Prepare two conference presentations for next week.
• Outline fall courses and order books.
• Move office.
• Refrain from freaking out over the fact that by the time I get back from next week’s conference trip, it’s pretty much going to be July, leaving only six weeks between me and my Big Looming Deadline.

The office move was overcome by events, or rather by the failure of events to actually eventuate, to wit: the furniture for the new office, scheduled to arrive Monday, where “Monday” apparently = “sometime between Monday and Friday,” actually showed up Friday morning. Or part of it did. The rest will come in next week, while I’m gone. As will the movers themselves, as they were booked up on Friday. Which means that the move will now not be completed until after I return from next week’s conference trip, which is not doing wonders for that last bullet point, I’ll tell ya.

I’m working on the conference presentations today, however, and will continue that work on the plane. I’m pretty sure I ought to be more nervous than I am at my wild overconfidence on that front, but I can only manage so much stress at this point, and the last week just took it out of me.

The coming week of course promises to be a flurry of activity in its own right; I’m heading east early tomorrow morning to begin a week of conferencing in the DC area. The week begins with Digital Humanities 2009, hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park, followed by THATcamp 09, hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I’ll hope to post from those venues, where I’ll be talking about MediaCommons and issues related to digital scholarly publishing; if you’re there, be sure to say hello.

Just utterly tyrannized by the to do list. Once the grading and the thesis drafts are out of the way, there are classes to prepare for, a grant proposal to be written, and a 15-minute presentation to be carved out of a 40-page chapter. Plus a journal peer review, a dissertation report, and a tenure review. And then there’s that little book project of mine with the looming deadline.

All of which is to say that once some of the small urgent stuff gets out of my way, and I can pay attention to the bigger important stuff, I’ll hope to have thoughts worth writing about, not to mention a moment in which to write them.

If you’ve bothered coming round these parts lately, you’ll have noticed that things were loading excruciatingly slowly, a problem for which I was starting to blame my hosting provider. But this morning, for whatever reason, I decided to take a look at my code and see whether one of the scripts I’m running in the background here might be responsible.

And lo but the source code for my index page had a buttload of spam links embedded in it. And so I set about searching through my php, trying to figure out which file was generating these links.

Both index.php and wp-content/themes/MY THEME/header.php appear to have been hacked, and a very long bit of base64 code embedded in them, which was apparently what (a) was generating the links, and (b) was causing the page to load so slowly.

But there are also a few mystery files that have popped up in my directories, about which I can find no information online. I’m waiting on a response from my hosting provider’s support folk, to see if one of these files belongs to their one-click install process. If not, I may have to do a fresh WP installation, just to be sure that nothing else has been compromised.

And of course, the ritual changing of passwords.

So, word to the wise: if you’re running WP, and things seem to have gotten oddly slow, it might be worth a sec to check your source code.

Remember this kid? She, or someone like her, is at it again. Twice in the last two weeks I’ve had my Apple ID “disabled for security reasons,” which happens when someone tries to log into your account with the wrong password three times in a row. Each time, I’ve discovered what’s happened because I’ve suddenly gotten an email message from iForgot with a link enabling me to reset my password. And each time, I’ve reset it. So no real security breach has taken place, but each time I’ve had to propagate my new password through all the bits and pieces on my system that need it, which is enough of a pain that I’m now complaining about it.

Whoever you are: kfitzpatrick at mac dot com belongs to me (as does its relative, kfitzpatrick at me dot com). That’s not going to change. Please stop.