And because I didn’t feel like working today: I managed to find a way to export my content from ExpressionEngine and import it into WordPress. And I’ve found a theme I rather like, and futzed with it until I like it even better. And I’ve gotten just about everything working the way I want.

Except for my permalinks, which are completely hosed. Now to attempt to teach myself mod_rewrite, to see if this is salvageable, or if I’m going to have to manually fix all my internal links and use a general 404 page for everyone coming in from the outside…

It’s pretty much been a non-MLA, due to complete and total physical collapse. When I arrived in Philadelphia, after the shuttle bus, the first plane, the shuttle bus, the second plane, the “air train,” the real train, and the cab, I checked into my hotel room, put my stuff down, checked my email, and got a phone call from a former student who’s here interviewing. I wanted a drink and something to eat before bed, and so went down to meet him in the lobby bar.

At some point during our conversation, I did the math, and figured out that as I’d awoken at 3.30 am in Prague, that meant that I’d gotten up at 9.30 pm the night before, local time-wise. And I was clearly not at my sharpest, because while I had a fantastic time over what turned out to be two drinks with the former student, I somehow forgot to eat, and hadn’t eaten anything since the second plane. But, I figured, I’m so tired now that I don’t even feel like eating.

Not the best decision, I don’t think. I went up to my room, completely crashed, and woke up three hours later, ravenous and unable to go back to sleep. I drank a bunch of water, read a bit, turned the light back out, turned the light back on, read a bit more, made another assay on sleep, and then finally just gave up and sat at the computer, hoping to get some work done.

And, in fact, I did! But I did it the very, very hard way. My intent was to use yesterday morning to record the audio track for a video presentation of one of the talks I’ve given this fall. I’d planned on using ProfCast, which records both your audio and the content and transitions between your slides as you play them. The problem is, however, that I need to see the notes from my slides in order to record the audio, and thus I need either to print out the paper and read from that, or I need to be hooked up to an external monitor so that Keynote will default to the “rehearsal” view on my own screen. And as I am without printer or external monitor, that wasn’t going to work. So I recorded the audio track in Audacity, imported it into iMovie, exported my slides to jpeg, imported them into iMovie, stretched them out to meet the appropriate transitions in the talk, et voilà!

Except. When I compress in iMovie 5, the sync between audio and video slips. The more compression, the more slippage. So a “reasonably sized” (i.e., only ridiculously large 10MB) .mov file plays fine for the first couple of minutes, but then the slides start refusing to change, even as the audio marches ruthlessly on. I’ve exported a “full quality” (i.e., 87 MB) .mp4 file, which is perfect. Now I just have to (a) figure out how to compress it enough to have any hope of a reasonable web distribution for it, or (b) find a way to print my paper and do the stupid thing over again in ProfCast.

In any case, that little morning adventure, pleasant though it was, apparently took every bit of energy I had for the day. I’d room-serviced a huge breakfast, and so thought that despite jet lag and lack of sleep I’d be fine. I met my friend Cyrus for lunch, though, and about halfway through, it suddenly became really, super evident that I was Not Fine. I somewhat hastily excused myself, went back to my room, and spent the next three hours attempting fruitlessly to take a nap. (Can someone explain that to me? How is it that you can get yourself to the point of nervous collapse from exhaustion and then find yourself unable to fall asleep?)

Finally, after a room-serviced hamburger, I took one of my big-gun sleeping pills, and completely crashed. Slept through until 6 am. Which I think is the first full night’s sleep I’ve gotten since leaving California.

And thus ends my first day at the MLA!

Today promises to be more conferency, all the way around. My schedule:

8.30 - 9.45 am:
Everquesting: Digital Learning and the Humanities
Liberty Ballroom Salon C, Philadelphia Marriott.
Presiding: Priscilla B. Wald, Duke University
–Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California
–Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University
–Anna Everett, University of California, Santa Barbara
–Douglas Thomas, University of Southern California

12.00 noon - 1.15 pm:
Textual Materialities
Grand Ballroom Salon I, Philadelphia Marriott.
Presiding: Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland, College Park
–“Save As: Textual Studies and the Challenges of Born-Digital Literature,” Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland, College Park
–“Picture Criticism: Textual Studies and the Image,” Kari M. Kraus, University of Rochester
–“Textual Studies and the Book,” Peter Bigland Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania

1.30 pm: lunch with editor and co-editor.

3 pm: coffee with scholar I’m very excited about meeting!

7ish pm: drink with former colleague.

8.45 pm: blogger meetup. Assuming I can stay awake that late.

I’ll hope to see some of you there!

You might not have noticed without my pointing it out, but several of the links at right have changed. I now have my very own subdomain for networked teaching projects, machines.pomona.edu, and so I’ve migrated my old projects (including the MarxWiki) to the new space. If you’ve linked to or bookmarked any of those projects, please update the URLs; the older versions will go away shortly.

Two posts this morning, the first of which makes the second one possible.  Post the first:

Back in December, I think, when I first got my Verizon CDMA RAZR V3c, I found a discussion board post with information on how to edit iSync in order to link up with the phone via Bluetooth and synchronize contacts and calendars.  This was made possible because Verizon had failed to do its usual job of disabling OBEX on the new phones.  I followed the directions, set up my desktop computer to synchronize, and promptly got all my contacts and calendars linked up.  But, for whatever reason, I never followed this by setting up my laptop to sync.

And, in the meantime, Apple released iSync 2.2, which theoretically enabled synchronizing with the V3c, but which in practice actually disabled what I was able to do before.  So I did some tinkering this morning, and managed to get things working again.

I post this both for the benefit of anyone else trying to sync to a Verizon CDMA RAZR V3c, but also so that I can remember what I did in the event the next release of iSync re-disables actual synchronizing.  I make no promises about this working, however; if you tinker around with this stuff, you do so at your own risk.

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Hey—how come none of you guys told me that all of my category links in the archive menus were broken?

Well… they’re fixed now.

You know what’s crossing my mind these days?  Attempting to migrate this here blog over to WordPress.  WP is both faster and lighter, and is much more integrated with a number of other services (like Technorati, for instance) than my current blogging engine.  There are at least a couple of problems that immediately spring to mind, however:

1.  I don’t want to break every incoming link I’ve got, so I’d have to find a way to get WP to use the permalink structure that I’ve already got in place.

2.  WP has no documented system for importing from my engine, so I’d have to do a generic RSS import, which seems risky to me.

And then there’s the fact that it’s bound to be a big pain in the rear.  But I keep finding myself thinking about it, nonetheless…

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.)

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.

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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Sigh.  When I began this here blog, it never occurred to me that I’d find myself, three and a half years and 680 entries down the line, desirous of a better organizational system.  I had this cutesy tag line—novels, networks, and some stuff inbetween—and I thought, well, there’s your categories right there.

But now I long for real categories.  Categories like “teaching.” Like “running.” And so forth.  And I’ve created such categories and gotten them all ready to use.  But here’s the rub:  there is no way, at least as far as I can figure out, to do batch category changes in ExpressionEngine.  And what that means is that if I’m going to change my category structure, I’m going to have to do it one entry at a time.

The mere thought of this is enough to make me start contemplating an engine change.  And a site redesign, while I’m at it.

None of this could have anything to do with the batch of papers I don’t feel like grading, could it?