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Course Prep Prepped!

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Wow! The entire maga-writing course is updated and online in Canvas, and it only took about five hours! Started a little before lunchtime and was done by 4:30.

By about 3:00 my teeth were grinding, but then I reminded myself that most of the hang-ups were user error, not software issues (as they tended to be with Blackboard).

The most egregious error, which surprisingly was not caught by the department’s hawk-eyed Syllabus Nazi, sprouted from a moment of true stupidity: I failed to change the dates in the calendar that we’re required to install near the end of the 18-page production. So, in the middle of uploading stuff and juggling data around online, I had to drop everything and rewrite that section of the syllabus, matching the due dates against a hard-copy calendar. That was annoyingly time-consuming, and all my fault.

Otherwise the actual conversion from spring to fall semester went pretty smoothly. Canvas imported the assignments and announcements smoothly from the spring semester into the fall course shell. The online course calendar, which the program automatically compiles from the assignments’ due dates, got a little dorked up — but that may have been my doing, because I shifted a few entries that were not assignments around and in doing so probably confused things. That took some time to undo…after the time required to figure out how to undo it.

A lot of stuff from the spring syllabus had to be deleted or rewritten, now that it’s clear there’s no need to have students send their assignments to my e-mail address. Canvas seems to be pretty reliable, unlike Blackboard, so I’m hoping that it does as well this fall, when the whole district goes cold turkey, as it did in beta last spring with just a few of us using it.

But just in case, I’m keeping my DIY course management system up in WordPress. That necessitated a bunch of up-dating and out-throwing there, too. Pretty easy, but still…somethin’ else to have to do.

In the past, it’s taken almost two weeks to update courses in Blackboard, and that’s two weeks of eight- to twelve-hour days. So I sure can’t complain about four or five hours to update content and design for not one but two websites.

Things might have gone even faster if I’d had more than five hours of sleep last night. Up at 3:30. Then off at 6:45 to the weekly Thursday morning shindig. Crawled back in the sack after I got home but couldn’t close the eyes, so after an hour or two just gave up. Have you ever noticed how when you’re really tired you miss stuff…and it seems to take forever to fix the things you discover you screwed up? Argh!

So anyway, that was four or five hours of unpaid time.

Then as I’m about to check out of Canvas, what should I notice but lo! They have me “enrolled” as a student in not one, not two, but THREE of those stupid hoop-jump tutorials they require all their employees to stumble through: one on FERPA (the federal privacy act), one on something called “Consumer Information,” and another on “Employee Access.”

What an ineffable waste of time. You can’t just go and click on the obvious answers to the brainless questions. To get to the questions, you have to plod through each stupid little pitch and then read a long-winded “case” about which the brainless question is asked.

It’s now quarter to seven — it’s taken me at least an hour, maybe more, to get through these three chunks of bureaucratic bullshit. Another unpaid hour of labor.

Did you know that if you have a 14-year-old who’s bright enough to be in college (as many are represented to be — around here, some high-school AP programs simply foist the kid onto a community college to take a course, thereby earning both college and AP credit), and you think the kid is going off the track and, to confirm or deconfirm his progress, you’d like to see his grades, you can’t. Nevermind that he’s a minor. The fact that he’s in an institution of higher education nullifies your rights as a parent.

Jesus Aitch Keerist.

 

Uh oh… Another Boondoggle about to Come Home to Roost?

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Good grief. Take a look at this report on the F-35. I’d heard before that the expensive new fighter jets are generally hated by pilots and not what you’d call a good value for the taxpayer dollar. But it’s much, much worse than I thought.

F-35These things are about to be inflicted on the Valley of We-Do-Mean Sun, as Luke Air Force Base, a beloved boon to the local economy, is a fighter-pilot training base. We’re told the racket they make is magnitudes worse than the F-16’s, whose roar can be heard clear over at my house all the way from the far West Valley. This is one of several reasons I’ve declined my dear friend’s suggestions that I move to newer, more broadly middle-class westside housing closer to her and resisted SDXB’s blandishments to move to Sun City, also under the flight path. At any rate, the noise pollution issue is what originally brought my attention to the new model. It didn’t sound good then, and it sounds a whole lot more dubious now.

Medium.com, the source of this article, is one of several new long-read sorts of sites I’ve recently added to the Web-surfing list. Check out this lighter but right-on post at the same site.

Pro Publica, in my humble opinion, is the emperor of the long-read websites. Funded by philanthropic contributions, Pro Publica’s operators describe it as “an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” And that they do, with élan. One series won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, the first such prize ever for stories not published in print, and an earlier story took a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, the first such award to an online news organization. More recently, a story broadcast with This American Life won a 2013 Peabody Award. Articles here are well researched, well written, and often eye-opening. Here’s one that’ll get your attention, and if that doesn’t, then this series certainly will…

Longreads is a great and reliable place to find something interesting to read. It aggregates full-length nonfiction articles from a wide variety of publications. Like a good detective story? Here’s one from real life. And in the true crime department, Tara of Streets Ahead Living commented on this article in relation to restrictions placed on purchases of ordinary OTC cold nostrums and nail polish remover.

If you can stand its political slant, Mother Jones runs some excellent investigative pieces — and they don’t seem to mind goring their own oxen, when it’s called for.

PopSci has also become a regular check-in. Posts are short, light, and over-simplified, but often amusing to read or watch.

One that’s pending is called Epic Magazine — it’s expected to publish long-form nonfiction on subjects interesting enough to lure movie options, in hopes of creating a market that will allow writers to make a living wage. So far the proprietors haven’t put much up, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the site.

That used to be the function of the Fourth Estate — cluing the electorate to the boondoggles. Alas, with print  journalism dying on the vine, it gets harder and harder for most Americans to get this kind of information. There’s only so much Frontline can do. Recently, though, web presences like the ones above have stepped in to fill the ever-yawning gap left by the death of the metropolitan daily.

Seek them out. Read them. If you can, support them. And let your elected officials you know what they wish you didn’t know.

😉

Image: The U.S. Navy variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C. Public domain.

 

How Much, Really, Should We Be Protected from Ourselves?

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The Brits are reporting that CVS has taken it upon itself to make all its customers provide identity every time they buy a bottle of nail polish remover, and in addition to track customers’ nail polish purchases. This would suggest a) the Brits have as much of a meth problem as we do; and b) I’m dead right in saying Big Brother is not the government; it’s the corporate shadow government.

Elsewhere, once again we’re told that because a few morons can’t figure out that jumping on a trampoline is a fair way to maim yourself, all trampolines must be banned or at least regulated.

Honest to gawd! Obviously, it’s brain-dead stupid to bounce around on one of these things given that we’ve known for years that crippling injuries are common. Should they be banned? Maybe. But a business promoting use of the things is probably akin to a shop selling meth at the local strip mall. How hard is it to simply TELL people that? Then let the user take responsibility for the consequences.

You could say that the only person injured is the guy in the wheelchair, but that’s not so — the parents of the “victim” in the report above are now stuck caring for him for the rest of their lives, his health insurance (if he had any) paid the stratospheric hospital and care bills, and over time various taxpayer-supported agencies will have to foot the bill for his care. He’s harmed not only himself but his immediate family, health insurance consumers who have to pay higher premiums as companies’ bills go up, and taxpayers who cover the bills for people on welfare.

This brings me back to my modest proposal on the subject, advanced some time back: people who OD or otherwise harm themselves with drugs should have to foot the bill for their own stupidity. Let’s extend that to any form of terminal stupidity, not  just drug use.

In the regulation-free universe, if you show up at the ER in a state of self-induced distress, your insurance does not have to cover your bills, the hospital is excused from its obligation to treat you for free, and the taxpayer does not pay, either. If you can’t get your mom and dad to mortgage their home for a few million bucks to pay your bills, then you suffer the consequences.

Think of the things you can’t buy at all or can’t buy without letting Big Brother watch over your shoulder, for no other reason than that other people misbehave or harm themselves or their kids out of stupidity:

• cough medicine that works
• nasal decongestants that work (think Sudafed)
• headache pills in bottles you can get open
• toilet cleaner in bottles you can get open
• just about any cleaning product or yard-care product in bottles you can get open
• cars that don’t nag you when you open the door without removing the key

When you consider that few people harm or kill themselves with household products compared to the number of people who are killed and maimed in cars — in 2010, 8.5 times more fatalities than those killed in the World Trade Center — it’s surprising we’re allowed to drive cars at all.

Another Saturday Morning at the Funny Farm…

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Rescued another little old lady.

It’s not 8 a.m., and I’ve walked Cassie about half a mile, run a tenth of a mile (which is not very far), rescued the old gal, bicycled about two miles, and jumped in the pool. Pretty quick, it’s off to the Costco to buy a pair of jeans that fit.

Yes. By the light of dawn I came across another elderly damsel in distress, trying to make her way along Feeder Street. She could barely stand on one leg and was trying to hold herself up against a wall. Looked to me like she’d had a mild (I hope) stroke.

Stopped and asked if she needed help; she said she was in a bad way but lived right around the corner. I said I’d get my car and drive her, so ran the dog back to the house and picked up the chariot. Asked her if this had ever happened to her before; she said no. I said, “Maybe we should go to the ER instead of to your house.” She said no, her son was at home.

When I got her the two hundred feet to her house, she revealed that her son was asleep and she didn’t want to wake him up. 🙄 I suggested maybe she’d like me to go in and roust him out. She, understandably, wasn’t anxious to have a stranger in her house, to say nothing of one that would create a little drama.

She said she’ll be 80 next weekend. Hope she makes it…still kickin’.

The old gals around here are dropping like proverbial flies. Must be the climate change.

Down to 136.7 pounds this morning! That is 1.7 pounds short of CardioDoc’s announced goal. In theory.

Whereas CardioDoc thinks 135 is a healthy weight for an old bat of my build, I’m targeting 130, for a couple of reasons. Main reason is that these bright and shiny weigh-ins occur the minute I roll out of the sack in the morning. By early afternoon, the weight has gone up a couple of pounds. So, IMHO, the real weight is two or three pounds higher than the morale-boosting dawn figure.

And also, you know and I know that shortly after I arrive at the goal weight, I’m gonna backslide. So I figure that under the best of circumstances, an ego-stroking 130 pounds at the crack of dawn will mean the real figure hovers around 132 to 134. And if I decide to scarf down a pizza with a couple of beers, there’ll be some wiggle room in the calculations.

At any rate, all my pants and shorts are literally falling off me. Even the stretchy jeans look like sacks held up with a belt. So I need to go over to the Costco and buy a couple pair of blue jeans in a smaller size.

My friend Harriet, who lost her excess weight in the wake of colon cancer surgery from which she has recovered and never gained it back, urges me to donate all the “fat clothes.” Her theory is that if you have nothing in the house that you can fit into, you’ll be forced to avoid gaining the weight back.

However, I’ve found that not to be true. After I lost a comparable amount of weight on the Atkins diet — this was about eight or nine years ago — I got rid of all my size 12 Costco jeans. And that was fine for about 18 months, until I decided I simply had to have some pasta!

Pasta is my comfort food. And I believe it needs to be ingested with beer. Dark beer. Guinness. Young’s Double Chocolate. That sort of thing…

Well. Within minutes, of course, I gained all the weight back and didn’t care because I’d missed my pasta so much!!! I had to go out and buy another wardrobe of jeans, the garment of choice around here.

That was fine when I had a job. But now there’s just no way I can afford to buy a whole closetful of jeans. Two whole closetsful: I’ll need several pairs now, and if I throw out the Gloria Vanderbilt Collection and then fatten up again, I’ll need several new pairs of 12s.

So. My plan is to wash all the baggy jeans, fold them up, and stash them in the garage. Then if this whole project turns into a Fail after a year or two, I’ll at least still have some pants that fit.

In another 15 minutes it’s off to the Costco in Paradise Valley, which a) is upscale enough to have a better choice of loot (and their wine selection is better — got one of the worst bottles of wine ever from the Safeway yesterday…it’s not even good enough to cook with!), and b) is close to a Sprouts, a Whole Foods, and a Trader Joe’s, allowing me to pick up my weekly dose of fresh produce and absurdly coddled meats in the same shopping trip.

Happy Saturday!

 

 

Things You Should Know About…and a Song for George

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Let’s start with something truly wonderful: Kimisho Ishizaka’s amazing open-source Goldberg Variations. You can hear this exquisite music of Bach, download and follow along in the scores(!), and even listen on your favorite mobile devices…all for free.

Moving on to the Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted, I’m sure you read about the replicator hamburger science is trying to foist on us. Yuch. If I hadn’t already adopted the “less meat but much better meat” scheme, this one would have done the trick. The day the butcher counter starts peddling fake meat is the day I turn into a vegan. If you didn’t already have some doubts about the fake food and the chemical-laced setting in which it is served up to us, contemplate the fact that animals in the wild, domesticated animals, and lab animals in strictly controlled environments are getting fatter and fatter, just like us.

Then we have this: if you haven’t read it, you should. And while enjoying that tour de force of investigative journalism, bear something in mind: when someone else’s rights are violated, so are yours. What we see there is an unjust law — if not unconstitutional then certainly in direct contravention of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution — taken to its natural end by blatant official corruption.

Also in the Department of Unconstitutionality, we have the news that not one but two e-mail encrypting services have been shut down, one of them apparently as a direct result of secret government action and the other because its management is flat-out scared sh!tless. Big Brother is determined to read over your shoulder, whether you like it or not.

Ve haff vays of making you show us your mail…

And, my dears, if you’re not scared sh!tless, too, you have the nerves of an old oak fencepost.

While you’re contemplating these things, consider the actions of a man whose actions in the office to which we elected him directly contradict what he promised to do while he was talking us into voting for hm.

And speaking of the frightful aspects of America’s Brave New World, we see that someone somewhere would like to take some action to improve mental health care in this country, given the number of unhappy souls who have taken to the streets, the cinemas, and the schools with heavy armaments. Sounds hopeful, doesn’t it?

But what, really, does it mean? Given the state of organizations, private as well as public, that institutionalize the vulnerable, what really will be the outcome of this? Maybe a new rug under which to sweep sick people? How much hope do you hold out that we’ll do a decent job of reforming mental health care?

Along those lines, we have this little bit of double-think, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so effing gut-wrenching.

The other day, George, my favorite curmudgeon, posted a comment in which he first alluded to and then installed all the lyrics of a Country Joe McDonald song. Make no mistake about it, my friends: if anyone can save what little remains of this republic and its storied freedoms, it will be the curmudgeons, the sinkers of heels into the sand, the angry, and the vocal.

And so, a toast to George and all the curmudgeons of America: keep on truckin’!