So as I’ve mentioned before, this is the summer I finally get to reap the benefits of having gotten tenure; I’m free to think, to read, to explore as I see fit.  The thing about such freedom, though, is that it can be disorienting, particularly for somebody who has spent the last twelve years in a world filled with deadlines and hurdles.  The disorientation is somewhat chosen, though; I think I might know what direction I’ll ultimately be headed in, but I don’t want to strike a course prematurely.  I want to wander, to figure out what’s out there—to play a bit before setting a new goal.

I’m reading a bunch of crime fiction, and also a bunch of blogs, and I’m sketching out some ideas for a new project in the broadest possible terms.  I’ve learned a thing or two about a couple of software packages, and plan on learning more once I get back to California.  I’ve got a slew of toys to order, and to play with once they arrive.

All of this is good, but it’s leaving me feeling a bit fuzzy.  Unfocused.  I’m certain that that’s a good thing, at least in the long term, but right now it just feels weird.

This has been a quiet week, hereabouts, in no small part because I spent the first four days of it taking the first of the classes I hope to take this summer.  By the end of an intensive day sitting six inches away from an aged, flickering CRT, I had precious little desire to spend any further time online.  I did, however, spend Wednesday night virtually online, in an actual meetup with a substantive percentage of the cast and crew of the wordherders.  I’d met several of the ‘herders before, at various conferences, and it was great to catch up with them, as well as getting to put faces with names and f2f personalities with online ones for the other folks present.

The bulk of the week, though, was spent in class—two days of Photoshop, and two days of Flash.  And I know I’m not supposed to say this.  It’s seriously uncool among the geeky set.  But I cannot refrain:  I love Flash.

Here I’ll begin with the caveats:  not for what’s been done with it.  But for what could be done with it.  Most of the instances (a little Flash-class humor here (okay, a very little)) of Flash on the web are simply annoying.  But that was true of most early HTML, too, which served to prove the rule that simply because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.  But Flash opens a pretty remarkable set of possibilities for the fluid movement of text and images, and makes such movement remarkably easy.

If I’m going to be honest, though, the thing that’s best about learning Flash is its instant-gratification capabilities.  Again, when I was first learning HTML, it was much the same:  Think, “I wonder what would happen if I did this”; open and edit source; reload page; see result.  In a world in which publishing had previously taken weeks, at minimum, to see results, this was breathtaking—I make a change, and the world (or at least the page) is changed.  The changes, admittedly, were small.  But they seemed to mean something.

Flash does the same, in a dramatic fashion.  I think, “I want this to move over there.” I tell the program so.  It does.  Trust me, I know that that’s how computers work.  But there’s something endlessly entertaining about that to me.

Perhaps it’s just the change from the amorphousness of writing scholarship, in which the ideas never behave quite the way that I intend them to, in which there is no explicit syntax that will produce expected results.  But I’m quite in love at the moment, unacceptable (and possibly fleeting) though my object may be.

Remaining:

– 5 graduate Cultural Studies projects

– 22 Media Studies term papers

Not bad.  It’s not out of the question that I could be done by Monday.

As usual, though, the nearness of the finish line is resulting in my slowing down rather than speeding up, distracted by thoughts of what I’m going to get to do once I cross it.  And here’s where I could use your help.  Because I figure if I get the internet to think about this problem for me, maybe I can concentrate on my grading instead.

Unsurprisingly, the problem has a long history, detailed below the fold, for the intrepid.

Read the rest of this entry »

In yesterday’s mail, the following, from Educause:

COMPUTER APPLICATION GRADES ESSAYS
A professor at the University of Missouri has developed a computer application that grades papers and offers advice on writing. Ed Brent, professor of sociology, created the application, called Qualrus, using a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Qualrus evaluates papers based on the structure of sentences and paragraphs and on the flow of ideas. Instructors can specify which factors of an assignment are most important, and Qualrus incorporates that information into the scores it provides. Brent claims the application improves students’ papers and estimated that it saves him more than 200 hours of grading per semester. The tool has been approved for use across the university, but so far Brent is the only instructor using it. Brent is also looking for ways to distribute the tool to other universities and to businesses.
CNET, 7 April 2005
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5659366.html

I don’t know how to respond to this at all.  Sure, I’ve got fantasies of some super hi-tech invention that will get me out of the hundreds of hours I spend grading each semester, too.  But the ironies in this particular version are only highlighted by the article immediately preceding this one in the Educause mailing:

POKING HOLES IN MICROSOFT’S GRAMMAR CHECKER
Sandeep Krishnamurthy, associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Washington, is so incensed with the grammar checker in Microsoft Word that he has taken to posting examples of what he sees as the checker’s failings on his Web site. He has also called on Microsoft to improve the checker. Citing egregious grammar mistakes that the tool does not question, Krishnamurthy said that although it

might be helpful for above-average writers, it actually impedes below-average writers’ efforts to improve their writing skill. Krishnamurthy said Microsoft should modify the tool to allow users to select the level of help they need, from basic to advanced. For its part, Microsoft said in a statement that the tool is not intended to find or identify all errors. Instead, it is designed “to catch the kinds of errors that ordinary users make in normal writing situations.”
Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 April 2005 (sub. req’d)
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i32/32a02902.htm

So, in case you’re keeping score:  grammar checkers are useless, but this new software is capable of “evaluat[ing] papers based on the structure of sentences and paragraphs and on the flow of ideas.” Because those are more machine-recognizable than all that complex grammar stuff, I guess.

I’m contemplating a switch from Safari to Firefox, but am hampered by the fact that This Very Site displays crappily therein.  The top banner here is composed of a DIV with a background color of the blue you see at left, and said DIV contains a right-aligned image that fades into the same blue.  The problem is that Firefox for whatever reason refuses to show the background color in a DIV that contains positioned elements.  I’ve searched for a workaround, and tinkered way longer with my CSS than I ought to have, and am officially giving up and asking the Internet for help.  If you’ve got it, and are willing to share, I’d be most appreciative.

And as long as I’m at it:  I’ll confess that I’ve been using Entourage 2004 since it came out, mainly because the IT folks at my institution are heavily invested in our Exchange mail system.  (I know, I know.) Though it’s got some good features (the full integration of mail/calendar/address book is nice, as is the project center, as is the vast improvement in its Palm-syncing capability), I break out in hives every time I contemplate my dependence on such a Microsoft product.  So I’m beginning to consider either reverting to iCal/Mail.app or testing out Thunderbird.  Any thoughts?

Okay, and now I’m really going back to work.

From the logic of Redmond:

This update fixes an error in the AutoUpdate download progress bar, which did not accurately display the progress of the download. While this update is downloading, the progress bar might not accurately display the status. After the update is installed, the download progress bar will accurately display the status of future downloads.

So everybody’s talking about the Movable Type upgrade/fiasco (see also here, and here, and here, among too many other sources to link.

The problems with Six Apart’s announcement of its new release and pricing structure are, as you can see, much discussed elsewhere; my main objection to the changes has less to do with their “sudden” decision to charge for MT (I’d already voluntarily donated, as it seemed to me a product worth paying for) than with the limitations being placed on the number of weblogs and authors each license allows.  Yes, today’s update clarifies the reason:

Why are there limits on the number of weblogs and authors I can have on one Movable Type installation?

One of the biggest criticisms we’ve heard thus far regards the limitation on the number of weblogs allowed at each tier of the new licensing structure. Our best explanation for the tiering is that we feel a personal user who sets up weblogs for 50 of his friends should pay more for a license than one who uses only one weblog for himself.

And yes, as Liz points out in her entry, Anil has assured her that there will be an educational licensing structure that will be reasonable, making my multi-author, multi-blog class projects possibly still feasible.

But it strikes me as an odd precedent nonetheless, as if Microsoft were suddenly to start limiting the number of documents one could produce in Word on a given license.

I do understand the difference—that Word is individually (or institutionally) licensed, and that it is installed on individual users’ machines, while MT is installed on multiply accessible servers, and thus, as Mena points out, users and blogs become the most easily determined metric for pricing.

Yes, it would be complicated, but why not seek a way to focus the license around the user rather than the use?  Once I, for instance, purchased my individual license, I could create as many blogs as I’d like with it, and could be added as an author to other existing blogs (and could likewise add other licensed authors to my blogs).  I’m no programmer, of course, and this would probably be a nightmare to manage, but it would provide a more reasonable system of licensing.  Once I’ve purchased the software, I want to be able to do whatever I want with it, subject to its own technological limitations.

However Six Apart chooses to resolve this issue, I find myself at a crossroads.  I’m about to have to migrate the site anyhow, so it’s a perfect moment for a software switch and a redesign.  I’m checking out Textpattern now, and will decide shortly.

Eek!  I just downloaded and installed IE 5.2 for OS X, which counts among its improvements “support for the new Quartz text smoothing feature.” And boy, do things look smooth.  I’m deeply unsure how I feel about this.  For those of you* who don’t/can’t use IE 5.2 (and good for you), here’s a screenshot of the Quartz-ed up site.

What do you think?  I’m thinking I may have to sans-serifize things or risk looking too much like a word-processed church newsletter.

*This assumes, of course, that there is someone out there.  Which there is… Right?