Great. I just discovered that none of my outgoing mail since late last week, when I updated my operating system has gone out. I thought I re-sent a bunch of it Monday or Tuesday, when I first got a glimpse of the problem, but that was just me, still living under the prior illusion that things were going out. Fortunately I can still send stuff by using the AOL account through my web browser, but until this bug is fixed, my actual program is shot.

I just managed to re-send the stuff I'd written tonight, which was still in the AOL program when I tried to shut it down, popping up to ask, "What about these letters?" So if you're wondering why I've not written you back about such-and-such in the last few days, well, actually I did....

The last few nights, the security staff at the library have been very prompt in beginning to turn off the lights after the 11:15pm announcement of the 11:30pm closing of Memorial Library, with the lights snapping off within a minute of the announcement, since they typically start up on the 5th floor, where my study carrel is. Coming out of my carrel after being surprised and having to pack in the dark, I saw a big, football-player-sized guy making his way toward me in the light of the few 24-hour lamps still on.

"How do you get out?" he asked me, and I pointed out the stairwell door under the light to him, and began to lead the way down.

"Never been up on the 5th floor before?" I said lightly, so that he wouldn't be embarrassed.

"I always work in Raynor Library," he said, referring to the connecting library that is mostly workspace, with lots of large computer clusters, along with Reference, New Journals, Archives and the Reserve sections.

"You never need the actual books?" I said, with a bit of surprise.

"I usually work with online resources," he said.

And I caught myself before replying, "And you got into Marquette?!"

The latest issue of First Things and of America arrived yesterday, but First Things won the "open me first" contest with a minor article blurb at the bottom of the cover announcing "Sally Thomas on why iPhones have consequences." Now, as I've blithered elsewhere, I've been putting off joining the cell phone masses because I've been waiting for the iPhone to make it to its next generation, memory-wise, before I do the cell phone/iPod/internet device thing in one fell swoop. So this title grabbed my attention, for fear that I'd learn some aspect of the moral significance of this Apple device that would make me second-guess my intentions.

The essay is actually about the educational impact of the internet revolution on our next generation of students. And the research seems universally bad. The essayist builds off of Emory Professor Mark Bauerlein's new book, which features the catchy title The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30. The point is that, for all the noise about "the world at our fingertips" online, most students are talking about nothing on Facebook or playing games, and not looking at the collections of art museums on the other side of the world, or reading their way through libraries of world literature. I use the net for an awful lot of fun, too, but I'm also constantly using it as that research tool it's rumoured to be, and in awe of it, even after more than a decade of use.

While yes, this could sound like just another "older generation says the sky is falling and kids today are so much dumber than they used to be" story, it would be the sheer specificity and consensus of the research that seems most worrying (some of the reviews on Amazon challenge this, of course, but some of the terms of the challenges make me wonder), and I've had my own suspicions in seeing hints of this sort thing among my high school students. Back at Saint Joe, P.J. and I were appalled at the universal faith put into computer access by the state, which sent around some demands to us about using computers in our educational process, while we were much more concerned that the high school students grasped and applied the Principle of Non-Contradiction. And, of course, I wonder about the impact on my nieces and soon-to-be-born nephew, though my sister is being very conscious and cautious about the girls' computer use, as well as pro-active about their education and book reading at home. For some reason, the First Things website doesn't have the latest issue online and linked yet, so I can't link that here, but the whole 3-page text was striking.

Contrary to claims that computer use enhances functional literacy, Bauerlein cites research suggesting that screen time actually inhibits language acquisition by limiting exposure to complex or unfamiliar words. Even "software god" Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, dismisses the world of blogs and gaming as "encapsulated entertainment" – adding, "If I was competing with the United States, I would love to have the students I'm competing with spending their time on this kind of crap." So muxh for "digital intelligence," says Baurerlein, if even technophiles recognize time spent at this generation's idiot machines as largely wasted time.

Apparently, I've been partially "saved by the bell" in not just being highly-educated by inclination but by the public access to the internet beginning when I was in grad school, when I consciously decided the summer of 1994 to go over to the computer lab at Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame and to teach myself "how to use the internet" so as to see if I could find my way into the NASA picture files of the Levy-Shumaker Comet. My free access to the internet came well after the need for parental oversight, and so I didn't have the opportunity to fail to develop complex reading habits in the way I see among students who try to write academic papers in the shorthand of Instant Message-speak.

And hmmm... as I glanced at my old AOL homepage to verify my links, I see that AOL is shutting those features down. Part of my life now qualifies as a digital museum-piece.

Here's a tiny bit of LiveJournal fright: I see that three of my userpics now feature pictures other than the one's I uploaded, and that a number of others of mine have the images switched to those of other names. Instead of my picture I labled "Conversation," of me with wry expression in conversation after a Nashville recording session, I have a picture of some sort of anime chick and her monkey. Is that what you-all see? I don't think I've been hacked, but I'd just as much hate to see something accidental destroy any part of my journal as someone evil do so. Once again, I find myself wishing for a LiveJournal function that would let me download and back up the entire database of my journal: entries, comments, pics and all.

Any of you having any similar issues? I don't see anything mentioned in LJ news about it....

Damn. Michael tells me that all of the music and poetry recorded from the Wyoming Retreat jam sessions last month, a weekend featuring:

Michael's “Love”
his "How We All Are One."
Kevin's John Denver covers
Kev's "Indiana"
my "Tunisian Blue"
Scott reading Tennyson's "Ring Out, Wild Bells"
my "On My Way"
Michael's riff on Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are"
his covering the Kingston Trio's "MTA,"
"Where Have All The Flowers Gone,"
and "Tom Dooley,"
as well as John Denver's "Country Roads,"
and then Jim Croce's "Time In A Bottle"
and Denver's "Leaving On A Jet Plane"
and "Annie's Song."
the spontaneous jam "Dingo Dance," (which, honestly, probably saves me some dignity in being lost)
U2's "Bad,"
Scott and Kevin doing Art Garfunkel's "New York"
my covering U2's "Running To Stand Still"
my "This Romance"
and "Made In The U.S.A."
Michael doing Billy Dean's version of "We Just Disagree"
and Vince Gill's "I Still Believe In You"
a touch of the Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane"
Scott reading Tennyson's "Ulysses"
my "Listen To You"
Kevin covering Ellis Paul's "King of Seventh Avenue"
Scott lauding beer from Houseman's "Poem 62" from A Shropshire Lad
and reading Tennyson's "The Poet"
and #50 from his "In Memoriam",
my "Wish I May"
and "The Right Dreams"
Michael's "It's Only Me"
and "Humility"

all vanished. Every single mp3 recorded from the sessions somehow deleted and unrecoverable from his laptop. It happens, even to a pro like him, but it completely and totally sucks. I was really looking forward to having a new spontaneous album of this sort: "warts and all." That's what makes these things fun.

I just watched the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address by Steve Jobs, from the ad I got for the new (and mercifully cheaper) iPhone coming out next month. Watching this detailed conversation and demonstration between application developers just mercilessly reinforced for me just how comfortably medieval the art of teaching is compared to the details of such coding and innovation, and the turnover rate in such programming from one stage of capability to another. A far cry from the basic building of a computer that I learned in high school.

Oi.

On the flipside, given the decline in prices, I'll probably finally pick up an iPhone and go mobile, while trying to make a point of staying medieval in my capacities for ignoring the device and actually talk to human beings, and even using complex non-technology thoughts.

Kind of a lame couple of days. My vague temptation to tag along on the Marquette bus with my track team student Erynn for her meet at the University of Missouri today was tempered by the fact that I not only had to teach today, but that an inexpensive visit to Emily that way wasn't possible anyway as she was in Portland for the national 18th Century Brit Lit conference. And anyway, I've had these uncomfortable cramps on and off again for the last 48 hours, now, just some gas from something I ate, I suppose, but enough that I'll constitute a treaty violation at some point down the line. No fun.

I bailed on a dinner invitation yesterday with the Lloyds because I was uncomfortable enough that I knew it was just going to make me distracted and wishing that I was at home. (My baby-whisperer work with Owen has even expanded to Dan holding the phone to Owen's ear and me telling him to calm down and go to sleep, and Amy said they'd like to treat me to dinner in gratitude for their own resulting good night's sleep.) For me on the other hand, this thing keeps waking me up about every hour and so I've been a bit foggy, though I think I managed today's lesson on the dense and difficult Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Human?) by Anselm reasonably well. I spent about eight hours prepping thirty pages there, which gives some sense of how loaded a text it is. I am dismayed when I think of the 40 or 50 pages the students are reading for Tuesday: I don't know that we'll cover those as completely as I'd like, but this is all a first-time effort for me.

The high point of the last two days thus ended up being my student Jessica dropping in to talk during my office hours yesterday. Jess jumped from Biomeds to Theology and Philosophy after taking my Intro to Theology class last year, and thus is one of those students you kind of feel slightly amazed around in realizing the concrete effect you can have on another person's life and vision. She's heading down to Notre Dame for the weekend, taking in the Edith Stein conference with friends with whom she formed a Chesterton-reading society here at Marquette, and we talked about Notre Dame's campus and sights to see: it got me a bit nostalgic. My chief recommendation was her walking around Saint Mary's Lake: walking around Saint Mary's Lake was where I did the bulk of my Master's walk. Too bad it's still too early for those cute little turtles to be out....

I see that Adobe released a free online service version of their Photoshop program today, to try to compete with those kinds of basic service. Naturally, this comes as I'm waiting for my pre-paid copy of next Tuesday's release of Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac. I've been without a Photoshop program since I upgraded to this new computer and had to leave my OS 9 Photoshop behind for good. Tonight that leaves me restless as I'm in that vague and distracted mood where I like to putz around with graphics for fun, something that requires some creativity or thought, but not enough where I'd be alert enough to do school research. It's been frustrating not to have that outlet for the last several months, so I'm eager for April 1st to roll around and that new software to arrive. I can't even do something as basic as a LiveJournal icon as well as I'd like to, leaving a few new ones I've added a bit fuzzy-looking to my eye after using the LJ icon-maker. Still, I think I'd done a number from favourite movies or such since I last put a pile of them up for grabs here:


I wanted to call Grace today to let her know that I finally saw my first robin of spring. Actually, there were a group of seven of them outside of LaLumiere after my first class this morning, just as our unwelcome snowfall was beginning. The eagle-eyed Gracie had beaten me to the punch by a full two weeks, crowing about having seen on Friday morning as she headed out to school when I was down babysitting her the other week. I was secretly pleased that with no prompting at all – at least from me – that she took it to be as important a sign of the coming of springtime as I do, as I look forward to that first recognition of the birds each year.

Good conversations these last few late nights, but reminding me of the everyday miracles we've learned to take for granted, and which my nieces will just assume as a matter of course. First Kate, sitting in her bathrobe in front of the fireplace, having our first face-to-face chat since I visited Victoria in the summer of 2004, but this time now enabled by her and Paul having finally hooked up the house to the internet and the two of use talking via our new computers' webcams and videoconferencing capabilities. I did an image capture of her laughing at one point (but, as I said, in her bathrobe having just gotten out of the tub before I called and before we switched over to the computers) and threatened to post it here, but I'm opting on the side of kindness/fear of her one-upping me sometime farther down the line. Her new job as the Executive Director of The Queenswood Centre for Spiritual Growth was one major topic, and I spoke to little three year-old Sophia before she went to bed, who is much less shy about talking on the phone than my own nieces, and she told me important things about frogs. Islam, multiculturalism and Kate's scheming to get me a teaching position in British Columbia all made an appearance in the conversation, too.

And then tonight there was a long conversation with Kevin, who is currently on vacation with the family, all of whom had already gone to bed. He was talking to me with crystal clarity on his BlackBerry from Seven Mile Beach on the west coast of the Grand Cayman Island, sitting out on his balcony overlooking the ocean. I could hear the waves in the background. And we laughed about family, culture psychology and theology in his current project and in my research, the feelings of new love, and old memories of hanging on another beach – double-dating at the Indiana Dunes after he had passed his doctoral exams. We're both wired with anticipation for gathering a crew together in May for our latest do-it-yourself men's retreat, with steaks, music, conversation and prayer, although he broke the news to me that Camille is leaving Nani's before I arrive, and since we're opening our gathering with dinner there before heading out to our cabin near the southern gates of Yellowstone, I'll have to hope that the new chef is as good as she is, even if not as hip. McGlinn is bringing some kind of portable recording rig, and so the jamming will be immortalized: it's the best inspiration for practicing guitar that I've had in a while....

And thus my miracles.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call

– Paul Simon, "The Boy In The Bubble"

A computing disaster, as far as I'm concerned. Once again, the more innovative product is overwhelmed by Microsoft. I thought it was dead last year, and was starting to admit to myself that the warnings I was getting about my outdated browser from various websites like eBay would have to be bowed to. But then they came out with the lovely Netscape 9 in August or so, and I thought that the underdog would keep carving out a niche for itself. No such luck. My product loyalty goes back to 1994 with this puppy, with U of I's Mosaic, back in the very dawn of the contemporary internet. So... the choices will be to further integrate with my Apple system, which I'm normally quite happy to do, though there are a few pieces of functionality that I'd miss, or to check out this Firefox business. Any opinions for my drama?

December 28th 2007
End of Support for Netscape web browsers
Posted by Tom Drapeau

AOL has a long history on the internet, being one of the first companies to really get people online. Throughout its lifetime, it has been involved with a number of high profile acquisitions, perhaps the largest of which was the 1999 acquisition of the Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was known to many as the thought leader in web browsing, and had developed a number of complementary pieces of software that allowed for a rich suite of internet tools.

At the time of the acquisition, the Netscape team had begun working on converting their flagship product - the Netscape Communicator web suite - into open source software, under a new name: Mozilla. AOL played a significant role in the launch of the Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser that was released in 2000 and continued to solely fund the development and marketing efforts of Netscape-branded browsers. In 2003, an independent foundation was created to support the continued development of the open source web suite. AOL was a major source of support for the Mozilla Foundation and the company continued to develop versions of the Netscape browser based on the work of the foundation.

While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.

AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL's current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.

Done!

Grades are in, after being due at noon. I was down to the wire this time, mostly thanks to Julie's birthday party on Saturday and the necessary recovery. And then I discovered just how many faculty turn in their grades at the last minute when the system kept dropping out from under me and crashing. I wasn't able to log in and enter the grades until ten to two. But I am mercifully finished. Time to bathe.

(No one needed to know any of this, but it feels very dramatic to me.)

Well, I'm just about "caught up" in the new machine. Transferring only became complicated in the detail: trying to transfer personal settings and the like, passwords and bookmarks in my browser, and that sort of thing. A few programs I had to download again, although it's so blazing fast on this machine, I barely noticed. On the other hand, it still took me two hours to download the whole of my 230 GB on my external hard drive, but by that point I was incredibly hungry and so I made some pork tenderloin and mashed potatoes (with those so-flavourful Gold potatoes – Yukon Gold? Idaho Gold? I can't remember the name of the breed? version? whatever you call 'em, now) and called friede and talked about computers, 18th century literature, architecture, family, the politics and social realities of privilege, and department politics while I ate. A good break. When my transfer was done, it was time to send Emily to bed, anyway, and I got back to it.

Now it's after three, Caffrey's Pub has been closed for an hour and the straggling freshmen across the street seem to have finally gone in, so it's getting quiet at last. All of this has been on Mac's OS 10.4 ("Tiger"), with the new lauded operating system, 10.5 ("Leopard") included on discs. That probably was more to my advantage, since I knew my way around this format, and I didn't have to try to hunt things down and straighten things out while also trying to figure out any new formating for the system.

ARRRGGGG!!! Okay. Calming down. Here's the scoop: on my limited grad-student budget, I hate spending big money. I can spend far more small units of money than I can afford, if I'm not careful, but when I have to make a large purchase, I hem, I haw, I second-guess and double-take, I hesitate, I consult. And then, with all the drama of chopping off both my hands at once (very tricky, when you think about it), I finally execute. Which is what I just did. Finally. After thinking through options and variations for an hour or two longer than necessary, given how much I've already thought about this over the last few months.

Ambrose, me old iMac 700MHz G4, is now the oldest in-use computer I have ever owned, being a six year-old model I've had for five and a half years. I bought him in April of 2002, for starting Doctoral studies in August of that year. My previous computers had been bought at the start of Master's studies and at the start of my high school teaching career, respectively. All of these coming at a turning point academically, made me want to hold off on buying a new one until the start of my first professorship, just for symmetry's sake, and because I am dorky that way. But waiting another year is unrealistic at this point. As I said, Ambrose is now old. I've maxed out increasing his memory, and am on my second external hard drive, but these are now maxing out on space. The internet itself is so media-saturated, that that is slowing down his performance to annoyingly slow levels at times, and the other month I experienced my first hardware failure with one of my Macs, as one of his USB ports suddenly just died. I'd budget more with an eye toward a car this semester, but with the suspicion that the computer issue was going to creep up on me, I held off, and am spending in this direction instead.

So, time to upgrade. friede helpfully contributed the rationalization that I really ought to have considered candidacy – passing my doctoral exams and becoming ABD – as a significant-enough shift to warrant an upgrade. I had never thought of that, and, in both being retroactive and coming from someone else, makes the rationalizing quality of that move all too painful for me to invoke. So, I'm changing computers without really changing my academic placement, but these are crazy times.

All right. That's the end of my freaking out that I just spent as much money as I did. I custom-ordered a new iMac 24-inch, Duo 2.4GHz Intel Core processors, with 2GB of 667 DDR2 SDRAM, and a spacious 750GB hard drive. I'll try just to think "shiny!" instead of about the cash involved in my new investment.

An obscure but interesting little piece of computing history.

Prank starts 25 years of security woes
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer Sat Sep 1, 2:33 AM ET

NEW YORK - What began as a ninth-grade prank, a way to trick already-suspicious friends who had fallen for his earlier practical jokes, has earned Rich Skrenta notoriety as the first person ever to let loose a personal computer virus.

Although over the next 25 years, Skrenta started the online news business Topix, helped launch a collaborative Web directory now owned by Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape and wrote countless other computer programs, he is still remembered most for unleashing the "Elk Cloner" virus on the world.

"It was some dumb little practical joke," Skrenta, now 40, said in an interview. "I guess if you had to pick between being known for this and not being known for anything, I'd rather be known for this. But it's an odd placeholder for (all that) I've done."

"Elk Cloner" — self-replicating like all other viruses — bears little resemblance to the malicious programs of today. Yet in retrospect, it was a harbinger of all the security headaches that would only grow as more people got computers — and connected them with one another over the Internet.

( Read more... )

Never in my life, I realized with a shock, had I seen a deployed soldier before. Oh, sure, I'd seen ROTC students saddle up for weekend, or the National Guard on summer training manuvers, but an actual, armed, deployed soldier? Never. Not until I reached the age of 27. And when I realized it, I was suddenly grateful and amazed to have reached such an edge in such security, when I knew how different so much of the rest of the world was. But there they were: two British paratroopers, crossing the park in Armagh, Northern Ireland as I was setting up a photograph. I thought, "Oh, that's to be expected," as I watched them looking back and forth as they walked, and then it hit me. A day or two later, standing in the drizzle in Derry, I watched as the armoured personnel carriers went by on their patrol, where even the A.P.C.s went in pairs for safety.... It's great to see it have come to an end.

The other stories I added are just amusing.

British Army Ends NIreland Mission
Jul 31, 1:07 PM (ET)
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) - The British army marked a milestone of peacemaking Tuesday as it formally ended its 38-year mission to bolster security in Northern Ireland.

The military's longest-running operation officially was ending at midnight. But the symbolic moment came months after the reality - no British troops have been on patrol on Belfast streets for two years.

As of Wednesday, all 5,000 soldiers remaining in this long-disputed corner of the United Kingdom will be committed to training for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere overseas.

( Read more... )

Church Offers Text Messages From Pope
Jul 30, 9:43 PM (ET)

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Organizers of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Austria next month are offering the faithful a foretaste: daily cell phone text messages with quotes from the pontiff.

The Archdiocese of Vienna said the service, which began Sunday and will continue through the pope's Sept. 7-9 visit, will provide free excerpts of his sermons, blessings and writings.

( Read more... )

237 Reasons We Have Sex
Jul 31, 5:54 PM (ET)
By SETH BORENSTEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) - After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why people have sex, researchers found that young men and women get intimate for mostly the same motivations. It's more about lust in the body than a love connection in the heart.

College-aged men and women agree on their top reasons for having sex - they were attracted to the person, they wanted to experience physical pleasure and "it feels good," according to a peer-reviewed study in the August edition of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Twenty of the top 25 reasons given for having sex were the same for men and women.

( Read more... )

Brilliant.

Researchers Turn Web Blather to Books
May 24, 8:58 PM (ET)
By JENNIFER C. YATES

PITTSBURGH (AP) - A few simple keystrokes may soon turn blather into books. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a way to enlist people across the globe to help digitize books every time they solve the simple distorted word puzzles commonly used to register at Web sites or buy things online.

The word puzzles are known as CAPTCHAs, short for "completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart." Computers can't decipher the twisted letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated programs are using the Web sites.

Researchers estimate that about 60 million of those nonsensical jumbles are solved everyday around the world, taking an average of about 10 seconds each to decipher and type in.

Instead of wasting time typing in random letters and numbers, Carnegie Mellon researchers have come up with a way for people to type in snippets of books to put their time to good use, confirm they're not machines and help speed up the process of getting searchable texts online.

( Read more... )

Totally annoying. I mentioned earlier that in idle moments, I've been noting my travels and other such places from my life on my copy of Google Earth. Just a while ago, in such a mood, with my evening's plans with Diane canceled (which wasn't overly tragic, as we'd gone out at the last minute last night and ended up talking until we closed down Harry's Bar and Grill up toward Shorewood), I headed out to tweak a few things in my notes on Geneva, where I had traveled this summer, visiting Erik during his stint at the World Health Organization. I saw now that the satellite photography of Geneva had been updated, which I thought was a fine thing, especially if it made it easier for me to find a few places I had visited, which it in fact did. It looks like a bright, spring day there, I'm guessing: with brilliant green grass (I had thought of Geneva as in the Alps, but it's not) but with the leaves still not having filled in on all the trees, giving everything such a bright look that this picture looks more like an artificial computer graphic than a photograph, at first.

The only thing was, they had also managed to move everything in Geneva several yards to the west, thus causing all the work I had done in marking my journey to now be all off-target. Totally annoying. So, with no way to "select all" and nudge it to the west, I had to move every single piece if I wanted to keep my accuracy, which given my historian-ness, just wasn't an option if I was going to bother doing this. So while the markers are all tagged with incredibly precise longitude/latitude coordinates, I now see that this is perhaps more decoration than scientific precision if they can shift their material that far while updating. I wonder how many other users are a bit pissed.

Just in from the library. Again. I was starting to go a bit stir-crazy after some hours of grading and such. For some reason,* Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" started playing loudly in my head, and I was facing a growing temptation to go all Christopher Walken on the table I was sitting at. But, since I was hungry, I decided to walk home to the Ledge instead and make a pot roast. It's been a few days of crazy pace, with finishing writing the Final Exams, review sessions for the Final Exams, random questions and spontaneous tutoring sessions for the Final Exams, and actually administering the Final Exams. (I know I owe major responses, nimoloth, but that's got to wait 'til the term is completed.

Add to this that I finally put 2 and 2 together yesterday and realized that, no, my external hard drive was not "having problems," it was on the verge of utter collapse, and that I couldn't just keep "rolling with it." Since this would lead to catastrophic data loss – in particular my music collection, some of which isn't backed up since the point of the external drive is that Ambrose the iMac has a 40GB memory while the LaCie drive had 160GB – this necessitated an immediate bus sprint out to the Apple Store (I'm so happy to live near one) to pick up another hard drive. After the night's review session, it took me a couple of hours to coax the old drive into actually mounting, but it finally did, and I was able to copy everything over. (And now I have an extra 85-odd GB on the new 250GB drive – I wanted the 320GB for only a listed $20 more, but they didn't have them – to grow with.) The old drive is quite possibly only "mostly dead," and so I'll probably file that on my Mom's bookshelf over Christmas break as another form of backup.


* The truth being that saralinda's comment the other day had me looking back at an earlier Tag Day entry about music videos and I revisited the old list – the rankings of which I may not agree with anymore – and I added links taking advantage of the videos on YouTube.

The good and the bad.

I am currently maddened. Not "totally insane" maddened, but just "aggravated" maddened. I decided to try to tame my computer lust and to not upgrade my computer system yet, and to try to squeeze another year or two out of my current system. To that end, I've been trying to be aggressive in reclaiming memory space in my external harddrive, and to invest the smaller amount needed in order to add to my clearly-inadequate RAM on my computer, which I had long ago confessed was thoroughly overtaxed once I upgraded to the Mac OS 10.4 operating system. The major slowdown in performance was obvious from the moment the new software had been installed. So, I bought the largest RAM chip I could install into the available slot (giving me another 512MB). I received it yesterday and installed it last night.

No function. I've checked instructions, avoided all static potential, done all that I was supposed to do, and despite an easy installation process: no dice. I have repeated the process a few times tonight and still no function from the thing, and no recognition from the computer that it's even in there. So I've written to the supplier, as instructed, and wait to see what the next move is. I worked like a dog Sunday to finally restore full functioning in my calendar, so at least there's that....

So that's the bad, along with a sad conversation with a friend on Tuesday night who wanted to talk with me, among other things, about the sad news of her marriage coming to an end. I've never actually had a friend go through that, I realized, and that was a big part of our conversation in Starbucks as we caught up after not seeing one another during these last two months as I've been running amok with teaching these new classes and designing lessons.

The good. Well, what can I say that sounds good after that? I've had some fun with various former students getting in touch over Facebook the last several days. It's the kind of small surprise that just puts a big smile on my face when I suddenly see a name in my mailbox that I've not heard or read in years, and it's a blast to see what folks are doing with their lives.

One student, commenting on my music, made me look at my distribution setup, which I just had to give up on with the load that school was. It was crazy to produce a CD in the middle of doctoral studies to begin with, then moving toward doctoral exams and getting so sick as I was back then made me just have to put the music mostly aside. It really did take a daily commitment to be pursuing the marketing and tv/movie placement opportunities that I was supposed to be doing, and it had to give: the studies were obviously more important. So I took care of a couple of things that my distributors had been sending me emails about, and found that they were actually pretty easily resolved. As a result, the digital marketing setup is a lot more clean than it used to be, and the best part of it is that Life and Other Impossibilities will be available on iTunes in a few weeks. Now, granted, that and a lot of people buying it will mean that a lot of people buy it, but it'll be nice to have it so easily available.

A long day of working in the apartment. I was very conscious of the light today, watching the angle of the shadows arcing across the campus like a sundial from dawn over the lake, through the afternoon and until sunset and the fading of the light to general, then diffuse, and then gone.

I'm still thinking about upgrading as I deal with maxing out my speed and my storage (even with the addition of the extra harddrive last year). Storage is obviously critical. Recording's frequently nightmarish in its maxing out my system. And Ambrose is pushing a half-decade old here. I'm not sure how long he'll be supported for much of the new material. It's tough enough now. It's weird to look back, though, and remember that I used to do it all on a 40 megabyte harddrive. Hell, when we started programming, those Commodore 64s gave us all we needed with 64K of memory! It's been a fun ride, this revolution and evolution:

Beams reveal Archimedes' hidden writings

By TERENCE CHEA, Associated Press Writer Sat Aug 5, 2:28 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO - Previously hidden writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being uncovered with powerful X-ray beams nearly 800 years after a Christian monk scrubbed off the text and wrote over it with prayers.

Over the past week, researchers at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park have been using X-rays to decipher a fragile 10th century manuscript that contains the only copies of some of Archimedes' most important works.

The X-rays, generated by a particle accelerator, cause tiny amounts of iron left by the original ink to glow without harming the delicate goatskin parchment.

"We are gaining new insights into one of the founding fathers of western science," said William Noel, curator of manuscripts at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum, which organized the effort. "It is the most difficult imaging challenge on any medieval document because the book is in such terrible condition."

Following a successful trial run last year, Stanford researchers invited X-ray scientists, rare document collectors and classics scholars to take part in the 11-day project.

It takes about 12 hours to scan one page using an X-ray beam about the size of a human hair, and researchers expect to decipher up to 15 pages that resisted modern imaging techniques. After each new page is decoded, it is posted online for the public to see.

( Read more... )

It has been really good to hear the freshmen across the street coming back into McCormick Hall again today after a week's absence. The University just doesn't seem to be alive without the students, and I find that even though I love a certain amount of quiet, I miss the pulse of their life animating the school.

Well, this was as about as low-key a Spring Break as I could have pulled off. I mean, Spring Break is more an undergrad thing than a grad school thing, I suppose. Most grad school breaks I've had--and I still mourn that Marquette doesn't have a full week's Fall Break like Notre Dame did--have been opportunities to "catch up," with a little relaxing thrown in on the side. I did more with my high school teaching Spring Breaks, I think, than with my graduate school ones, taking in Rome, Tunisia, England, Wales and Ireland over the years. In fact, the only people to even ask me what my Spring Break plans were were both undergraduates--undergraduate women in Theatre, to be exact, now that I think of it, which makes me wonder about the optimism of that particular demographic. Of course, they both guessed that I'd blow the break reading, so maybe they're more perceptive than optimistic.... Actually, I had intended to visit my Mum a bit in there, too, but she announced that she was off to visit my sister, Jim and the little girls on the weekend I intended, and though I thought of then just going down there myself and joining up with them, it was clear to me that my sister wanted to get some one-on-one time, per se, with Mom, which I totally understand, so I stayed out of the way.

My first duty was really to finish my DDO: my Doctoral Dissertation Outline. Professor Fahey had really wanted it by the end of February, but it took me too much of February to realize that I had over-committed myself with extra work, like the massive amount of reading needed to participate in the seminar on Augustine's De Trinitate. I'm still sitting in, but I had to give up being able to keep up with the reading or else the dissertation ended up coming in third behind it and the undergrad class on the Theology of Martin Luther for which I TA and have to keep up on all the reading. I got the bulk of the Outline done in that timetable even so, but then there was so much going on at the beginning of March that it seemed I could never sit down with it, whether the Luther class or random events like the Kelly Lecture, and the like. Time just went >poof!< So that was good to finish up in the first day or two of break, which was all I needed. Now I just have to catch Fahey so that we can go over it and whip it into final form for the various committees. I guess he's out traveling: I sent him a note Tuesday and haven't heard from him yet.

Not to say that there weren't sufficient little bits of festiveness: Julie and I had a mutual 90-minute window in our schedules on Friday at the start of break, so we got to hang a bit before she left to spend a nontraditional Spring Break visiting her grandmother with her Mom. I somehow managed to spend all that time talking and not getting to any of the things I had flagged to talk with her about: 90 minutes is self-defeating for people with the gift of conversation. So I hung with Mike and Donna for the rest of the night, Dan and Amy being out of town. Despite all the grief that Donna gives us for over-discussing the sci-fi that has long been part of our regular group Friday nights, I couldn't help but note that it was her who have a bit of a shriek at hearing that the next season of Battlestar Galactica wouldn't pick up until October, whereas I hadn't even noticed that part of the next-season teaser. Wednesday was then sort of a rushed Friday-reprise when Dan and Amy got back into town, with a taped group showing for their benefit. There was a great cookout dinner in the hours beforehand with Dan venturing outside in the not-too-cold warmer spell to grill chicken breasts that Donna had marinated in a great Italian dressing/cayenne pepper combo that managed to be very flavourful without being overpowering to the chicken. Group-wide top marks all around. Thursday featured another long chat with Diane at Collector's Edge East until she closed up shop. One fun point was that she's thinking of taking her forensic skills, which is the current focus of her work in anthropology, and applying to the FBI Academy. That ended up being the basis for all sorts of interesting topics, not least of which was her recent acquisition of the physical-performance requirements, and attempting to start to get in shape for them. As a former runner, I found it odd that she wouldn't think anything of walking a dozen miles, but that running more than a few intimidated her out of reason. In the spirit of those "who can no longer do," I tried to be encouraging along those lines. Also on Thursday came the news from Donna's morning ultrasound that it is a boy that she and Mike are having in August. That continues the pattern of "matching babies" between them and the Lloyd's, with Dan and Amy's little Anna only a few months younger than Renee, while the Lloyd's little boy is due in six weeks and so will have a similar lead on Mike and Donna's boy. Fun for everyone in the crew. Donna and Mike also tried to explain to Renee (who is now 21 months) that their names were "Donna" and "Mike." Since she already knows that my name is Mike, they told me that she thought they were being marvelously silly and refused to give their words on the subject any weight whatsoever.

So lots of moments like that provided more than enough entertainment for what was in its form a rather dull week. Now things are more normal: Sunday night saw Mass, a late dinner, laundry and Luther; and the new chest of doors is still unassembled and my living room looks like a woodshop. Probably "normal" is more than dull enough for most people, but it'll keep. I suppose my "New York Times" bit in the middle of the week was unusual enough, as well as getting text messages from my frequently-odd friend Kevin while he was having dinner with President Bush. I'm actually surprised any communications equipment worked. So, anyway, halfway done for this semester: dissertation adventures will commence.

Oh, thank you! Thank you! After two days down, my internet service is back up! Honestly, it was like being thrown back in time to the... the... 1980s! I might as well have stepped into Hill Valley in Back to the Future!

In the Ongoing Saga of the Photographs that I managed to delete from both of my harddrives, I had let some of the work of sorting through of the files I'd recovered sit awhile whilst I tried to focus on the work of my exams, which was going far too slowly. I finished that last night, and did my final assessment. I had recovered most everything that I could think of from 2003. I'd lost everything, it seemed, from about the middle of July 2004 onward. So I had my visit to Paul and Kate Taylor in Victoria, British Columbia in early-mid July, but I had nothing from my brother Joe's wedding to Daniele in Jamaica at the end of the month. Nor did I have our first visits with the new niece Haley, nor her baptism in September. I really hadn't shot anything after that, other than endless series of blackboards for our note-taking in the Holy Spirit seminar in the fall, and those had survived since they were all kept in a publically-accessible set of files. Some hard losses, there.

Then I thought late last night that I might as well do a scan of the computer's harddrive. I had scanned the external harddrive before, because that was where everything seemed most likely to have survived, since I still hadn't even touched half of the 160GB memory. There is only some 6-8GB left free on the harddrive of the computer, and that after exporting lots of material to the external. So I didn't think I'd find anything there, given that I was re-using that open memory space so much. Now, when I had recovered the files from the external harddrive, I had recovered a total of 4700 JPEG files--both those that were still visible on the drive, and those I'd erased, because the program grabs everything it can find. So you can understand why I took some time having to sort through all of them to see which ones I needed. This morning, I woke to find that the computer had finished its work of recovering files from the computer's harddrive while I slept. And had recovered over 18,000 JPEG files alone. Holy Freaking Moses.

I had clip art photos by the hundreds that I'd never looked at. I had seemingly-endless photos in what must be the Mac's help files showing how to use everything Apple puts on these computers or can sell you to attach to it. And I had everything left in months of internet randomness, sitting in the memory caches: everyone's LJ icons, eBay auctions I looked at in February, on and on and on. There was nothing to do for it. The work had to be done now, so that I could use the memory of the computer without losing anything that the search might have turned up at this point. So I just spent the whole day going through all 18,000+ photographs in one sitting.

And then I saw a photograph from Joe's wedding. And another. And then a photo with Grace that I'd forgotten about but that hadn't turned up in the previous search. It was all scattered around with no logic whatsoever: I could look through hundreds of photos and find one from the wedding, and then find dozens clustered together. But I suppose in the end, it made the last nine or ten hours worth it. I found 87 pics from my brother's wedding, nearly 200 of Grace, although I know lots of those I do already have, and a mere 18 for Haley, because the second kid never gets as many pictures (and her Mom just doesn't have much time to send me sets). Haley's baptism is still pretty much gone, then, but Leslie will have bunches of those, too. The wedding is largely recovered, and that was the most important of the lot--I really felt the loss of that--so that makes things much better, and it looks like I managed to get into August of 2004 this time around. A pretty good resolution.

Ooof! I've been looking around trying to find a program that would let me try to recover my last two years worth of pictures and home movies which, as I mentioned the other day, I had brilliantly deleted from both of my hard drives. The highly-touted BinaryBiz's VirtualLab just make my computer have to restart. So much for that. ProSoft Engineering's DataRescue X, however, for free let me do a scan and revealed some 7400 files. Not knowing if these were the one's still in the hard drive, or any deleted file, since there were no file names, I had to make a guess for the one free file they would let me recover. And Hey, Presto! I get one of the deleted files: a thoroughly-unflattering, slightly-blurred photo of me and my Mom of that photograph-yourself-at-arm's-length sort. So now I know I can buy a license and get my files back. For a mere $90. Ouch. I'm just so in debt right now, with no paychecks during the summer while I'm not an active Teaching Assistant and I'm reading for my exams. And I just got an unexpected and un-budgeted-for $700 bill from the hospital. But what's $90 against all my memories, especially of my nieces? I guess that $90 is $70 more than I'd prefer to pay....

Well, if you've ever wanted to see a theologian--or me, in particular--really lose it (or come close to it, I guess), then last night was the night to be here. I dread visiting my Mom's for only one thing: using her computer. She's working off a 233Mhz processor on dial-up, and it is the most aggravating thing in the world when you're used to speed. Or even used to reasonable performance. I logged on to LJ and was able to respond to some notes from there in reasonable time, but when I went to my AOL account to get my email, I got the kind of performance I've come to dread. I had a note from my friend Kevin Fleming, just a cool little thing about his wife and son gone to bed and he now taking a late walk around Central Park in NYC and sitting in a cafe people-watching. I clicked "Reply" and suffered through 75 MINUTES of the thing straining to open the reply window for me. In fact, I gave up at around 45 minutes, and restarted the computer and logged in back to AOL to start over: a process that took only 30 more minutes. In the meantime, I had to convince myself not to go on a killing spree/therapeutic outlet around the Senior Citizens Apartment Complex....

So after a restful sleep (hours later than I could have gotten to bed, I had a cool, quiet, hanging-out day with her: the biggest things we did being Mass and watching that "Live 8" concert. Low-key. Some good talk about music with her, actually. A lot of aging rockers tonight might be a sign that rock and its descendants might be moving away from being strictly marketed as "youth music" and might just become *a* music: that people will listen to quality more than anything, even if it's from a geriatric Pink Floyd. We'll have to see when or if the marketers of the industry really see this.

I just wanted to say "thank you" to everyone who commiserated about my screwing up (I still can't figure out how) and erasing all of my personal photographs for the last two years. I'm amazed at how many of you share that kind of personal woe about data that were very important to you. The fact that I managed to do this with data that were on two harddrives particularly allows me to amaze myself. Some of you had good ideas about how to recover the files, and I'm going to follow up on that when I get back to Milwaukee: I think there may be a good chance of recovering what's on my external harddrive, as that still has 75 or so unused gigabytes, so I doubt the data have been written-over.

But currently, I'm visiting my Mom in the village of Verona, southwest of Madison, Wisconsin. I'm going to be hanging with her for some days, enjoying her company and trying to coach her on using my digital camera. She and my Aunt Pat are about to head off to Ireland, for what will be my Mom's first time back to the the country of her family. We kids pitched together to buy her the trip (or I guess part of it, as she's gone and spent more) as a gift for her [significant] birthday the other year. Even though I've been over there twice, I was always part of groups that weren't making it into the northwest, where the Sweeneys are from in County Sligo, so I've never been able to visit the family over there, but she'll be doing so. She and Pat just asked for a bunch of CDs to give to folks, too, which I happily showered them with.

My Grandpa, Bernard Sweeney, who died when I was one, so I have no memory of him, came over when he was a young teen, I think, with only one of his brothers, the both of them being told by my great-grandfather Thomas that the family couldn't afford to support them any more and that, even though they were still so young, they needed to go to America. I can't even imagine what they had to have felt like. Yes, we coddle and perhaps even spoil our teens, but the extra years of childhood and education pay off with other advantages. It's easy to forget how fast you have to grow up in some parts of the world, and in some periods of our history. So, my closest relative over there is a great aunt, I think, and the cousins descended from branches two or more generations back. I am eager to meet them myself, someday, but in the meantime, I'll have to content myself with my Mom's report. The families share a letter once a year, around Christmas, but I think I'll get a much more detailed "feel" for them from her.

In one other item of family news here, because the development from Madison has been booming so much, the housing has swept out from the city and made it here to Verona. Things have been going up everywhere for the last few years. Now it has come to the far side of town and our little family farm has just sold to developers for $12.8 million! $12.8 million for little more than a slice of hillside! We're all rather amazed. But we'd be more excited if we hadn't gotten rid of it in the 1950s. Sorry. :-) Had to try to play with you on that one....

Two things:

I just finished a great night of talking with Dan and Mike and Professor Barnes here after we saw Batman Begins. The conversation ranged far afield, as it will, although I definitely steered it to spending some interesting time on the Catholic character of the University. But I'm too fried to remember much or to report it here. Barnes said something incredibly funny though, right as they were just leaving a few minutes back, that I knew I had to quote here for everyone: I can't remember what it was, though. Mostly I'm just feeling really good about having been able to host anything for the first time in three years, because I absolutely couldn't when I was back in the studio apartment.

The other thing. I've just discovered that I erased, on both my hard drives, no less, all of my personal photographs for the last two years. I erased all of my personal photographs for the last two years. Words fail me.