Integrating Fragments

I haven’t really posted in, heck, almost a year. So much for my good intentions about becoming a blogger! In truth my thoughts had been to post about my progress in my PhD, and what with one thing another (well, actually several things) that pulled my heart and time away, I feel as though I am still where I was a year ago. Actually, now that my preface was hands down rejected by the grad committee, I feel as though I am even further behind than I was this time last year. Lack of understanding (theirs in terms of the goals of my project, and mine in terms of the field I want to go into) coupled with the ever present politics has made for a road-block or two. Throw in to the mix several unique opportunities from my Medieval contacts, and I begin to wonder what the heck I am doing.

I know the answer is just simply to play the game their way until I can get past my QEs, but a part of me feels like the texts I am being asked to prepare are a colossal waste of my time. Ok, that’s a really proud and arrogant statement from someone who isn’t even officially a ‘PhD candidate’ yet. But when I look at the reading list of my peers at other universities who are doing the kind of work I want to do, I feel like I’m being asked to become proficient in a field that seems so far from what I want to be in.

I know, I know, another really arrogant and proud statement from a mere grad student. But that’s the way it feels.

Hopefully tomorrow things won’t look quite so bleak.

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I’m constantly amazed by people, both by their goodness and generosity, and by their lack of morals and ethics. Last week, a lady from my Webkinz forum (yes, yes, I’m addicted to Webkinz!), out of the generosity of her soul, sent my kids $30 worth in charms and Webkinz stuff. It was unlooked for and unexpected, and purely out of the kindness of her heart.

This week, I have been amazed at the lack of ethics and scruples of some people. Someone close to me and mine is having a major bi-polar episode. At his most manic, the someone managed to buy a brand new car, a $3000 computer and a pair of $250 boots, even though it was clear to everyone around him that he was mentally unstable. None of the businesses will take the items back or refund the money. After being hospitalized the someone called a lawyer from a town 100 miles away, who then proceeded to visit him, thus allowing him to charge the someone an obscene amount of money. The lawyer refuses to lessen the bill.

Now, it could be argued that the lawyer and businesses were just selling their wares and weren’t sure if the someone was normal or not. However even when faced with medical and police documentation, the people in question still refuse to change their minds. Their lack of compassion and ethics astounds me.

I guess there is no great or insightful point to this post, except to in some way memorialize one woman’s generosity and a handful of people’s callousness.

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Well, after having gotten fairly comfortable with Word Press and pretty comfortable with Drupal, I thought I’d venture out into Movable Type. I’ve been toying with this for a while, and thought I’d put my QE notes on a blog ala Derek. For a while now it seems that anytime I find a blog with the features I really like, they have all been MT based. So this past weekend I tried it out, and all I can say is…holy cow.

It was a nightmare right from the start! Virtual directories, Window vs Linux servers, cgi-bins, static files, executable properties…I still get the shivers thinking about it! Brian had to come in and save me, and we did get MT 4.0 set up at last. But 4.0 is the newest version and is still in the Beta stage. Of course there are no real themes for this version yet, and I have to have my pretty themes (Sorry, but I’m a girl and pretty themes are important!) If I find one I like I can tweek the css file, but I’m not good enough yet to create one from scratch. So I convinced…well, begged actually…Brian to install 3.2 instead, and things just went from bad to worse. I realized that the changes made from 3.0 to 4.0 are HUGE in terms of user/admin interface, but they are no where near the level of user friendliness that Drupal is.

Anyway, we deleted everything and reinstalled MT 4, and now I have that up and sort of running. I still haven’t found a good theme yet, but at least in MT 4 I can play with it by myself and not have to rely on my DBA husband to come and rescue me. And Brian is happy. He has one more chapter to add to his book What Happens When English Majors Play with Computers.

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I haven’t posted for a while. I was trying to develop the habit of posting every other day (roughly), and so going this long without a post was a little frustrating. But in truth, I’ve been setting up my websites for this fall semester and they have been sucking up all my online time. Once again I’ve set up Drupal, and like just about every semester that I’ve used it, I’ve upgraded drupal to the newest and shiniest. So there are all sorts of new things to figure out, favorite modules that haven’t yet been upgraded to the new version, and new themes to choose and tweek.

Of course I don’t have to upgrade, but so far I have mostly because I’ve never really been satisfied with the way my sites turn out. Oh, their fine and do what I want them too. One semester I even got an enthusiastic thank you for setting up the site for the students to have access to (and she wasn’t one of my usual kiss-up students!). But for some reason the look isn’t quite right, or (in the case of last time) I tried out a set of modules I ended up not liking, and so I changed.

One of the things that I repeatedly find, and really the point of this rambling post, is that women are not really welcomed in the Drupal community. Every time I change or upgrade my site, I invariably end up with weird errors or problems that I need help solving. And every time I have posted a question or a call for support, I get summarily ignored. The first few times this happened, I just chalked it up to being a newbe. But after a few years as a member, I am arriving at the conclusion that it is because I am female.

When I created the account, I used ‘marykarcher’ as my username and Mary K as my forum ID. So it’s obvious I’m a girl. Most of the time my posts get ignored, which is made even more frustrating when a question posted a few minutes later gets answered almost immediately. Once I pointed out a bug with one of the modules and was soundly flamed by the module’s creator, whose flaming included several derogatory remarks about my gender. With experiences like this, it’s hard to deny the testosterone-laden Drupal community.

Now to be fair, I am not a regular participant in the community. I subscribe to two of their listservs and glance through the posts occasionally, but I am by no means an active member. I also know that there are several women developers who regularly contribute to the Drupal project in one form or another, and they seem to be accepted as ‘once of the guys.’ So I can accept that maybe things aren’t as anti-girl as they seem to be. However as a woman trying to get help and advice about what I really do consider to be a great CMS, what I am repeatedly shown is the sign, written in large letters “No Girls Allowed.”

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Well, it has happened, as I knew it would eventually. I’ve gotten lost in Lost.

When it first came out I knew it was something I would get into, but at the time I was already hooked on ER, Medium and The Closer. I just couldn’t add one more to my weekly schedule and still expect to get any studying done! But this last week I broke down and rented the first series DVD of Lost from the library.

The first night my husband and I watched the two part pilot; the next night 4 episodes in a row; the third night 5 more episodes! We are both completely hooked.

Oh well..I wasn’t getting anything done on my QE reading list anyway…

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This is the one comic I follow faithfully theses days. I can’t take credit for finding this; Jeff pointed it out to me. It’s from the strip Phdcomics. Anyway, today’s entry just hits a little close to home.

How is it that I have hardly touched the books on my QE list all summer, but yet have managed to read 400+ pages of the new Harry Potter book in less than 12 hours?

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Today, the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series comes out. So, in honor of the day I am posting my favorite HP video ala Youtube…

The Mysterious Ticking Noise

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Ok, I’ve been meaning to post these for a while and haven’t. So when I found another video on John’s site (via Lance Strate), then I finally got down to it.

The first one is called The Machine is Us/ing Us and deals with writers being shaped by their mediums (McLuhanesque style).

The second, called Supermarket 2.0 one cleverly looks at what would happen were all the Web 2.0 stuff were to be used in the way we shopped at our local supermarket. Lame explination; cool video.

The third is what I found today. It’s called Animator vs. Animation and depicts what happens when an animation fights back.

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For some reason, I seem to be surrounded by maps these days. I’ve been reading TNN blog and they had a post about maps, which I thought was rather cute. It linked to two of them: a map of findability

and a map of online communities.

The second one came with the roll-over caption “I’m waiting for the day when, if you tell someone ‘I’m from the internet,’ instead of laughing they just ask ‘Oh, what part?’ ”

There is also a lot of talk about mapping the Internet in the book I’m reading right now, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked. It looks at the development of network theory, tracing it’s origins, and puts it all in non-mathematical terms, which is great for me! But Barabasi is repeatedly talking about the practical need to ‘map out’ networks in order to study them.

And of course, at the back of my mind is the question of what to do with Asa Mittman’s Digital Mappaemundi: A Resource for the Study of Medieval Maps and Geographic Texts. He gave a talk in a seminar I was taking, and the project is amazing. Not since Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf has there been anything like this project in medieval academic circles, and Mittman’s project supercedes Kiernan’s by a mile. He has digitally archived as many of the medieval maps in existence that he could get access to. He and his collaborator’s then created a database of all the locations and all the text on the maps and crossed referenced the whole thing. It’s hard to describe, but it is amazing. For me, what’s particularly interesting is the non-linear, hypertextual thinking behind the creation of the databases. The kind of thinking used to create this project is akin to what I would call ‘digital thinking.’ Really fascinating project.

Anyway, I’ve got all these references to maps floating around in my head, and all coming from seemingly unconnected sources. Must be a kind of ‘mystory’ moment!

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