No more waiting for Fantastico’s obnoxious 2-week turnaround times; I downloaded WPAU and used it to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3. It looks so far like nothing broke, I think. Now to figure out tags…

So, I did the math last night…as it turned out, $50,000 in student loans was a low estimate. With interest up to now, I’ve got $65,465.48 in student loans right now and a net worth of approximately -$65,086.79. And I haven’t paid next month’s rent yet (I’ve got it in the bank; just gotta write and deliver the check). Gotta find a way to make some of those loans go away…

Overhead projectors should have a tube coming out and going waaaaaay up so that the hot air goes up to the ceiling, where it stays because heat rises.  Thus says me.

As of Monday, when it clears the bank, the balance on the smaller of my two credit cards will be down below $250.  Another month and I’ll have it paid off, and at this rate the other’ll be paid off by the end of the year.  After that I’ll be zapping the higher interest student loans as fast as I can; I’m shooting for zero net worth in or before the year I turn 30.  That’s only seven years out, and I’ve got probably close to $50,000 in student loans (I really need to actually sit down and do the math on that and other money stuff), but it’s such a nice round number.  I thought about 35, but twelve years sounded too easy.  Maybe I can find a summer job I like, to speed up the process.

First of all, I’d like to go on record as saying that I still want it to be possible to give a subcategory multiple parents.  Some of my subcategories could easily go with more than one thing.

For those who haven’t been following the insane details, Wordpress 2.3 is about to come out, and it’s going to have categories and tags.  I undoubtedly will install it, since there’ll also be security patches and bugfixes, of course.  I’m still figuring out what the heck I’m going to do with it.  Are categories tags?  (That’s how Wordpress has handled things so far…)  Are tags categories?  (That’s what Technorati says…)  But categories are hierarchical and tags aren’t.  Or maybe categories are like the table of contents and tags are like the index.  Or…something.

The one thing I’ve figured out so far is that there’s no definitive way of using tags.  So, at least in not knowing what I’m doing I’ll fit in.

Staples has a display of Christmas cards and festive printer paper.  All I can say is UGH!!!  It’s…not…even…October!  This is why Christmas bugs me; not only is the meaning buried in commercialism, but the commercialism starts more than three months early.

Calculus with Analytic Geometry at one or the other of the local community colleges. It looks like a night class in spring semester will be an option. It’d only be about $300.

The positive aspects are mostly obvious…it’s math. It’d be fun. I could show my students what I’m doing now and then, point out some ways that what I’m doing uses what they’re doing. I’d be able to continue to further courses. This is the kind of course I would have taken as an undergrad if I hadn’t been trying to fit myself into WOU’s mold. And of course the intangible part: I really want it.

However, I’m already going to be retaking Tech for Teachers in spring, if I can find it. By the way, here’s the official blog announcement about that: I got stressed, I had too much going on…I messed up…I got behind, too far behind to fix it, and got a grade that I can’t count toward my degree. So, it’s a do-over if I want to graduate. Which I do. I want the degree, I want to not be a screwup, I want to get that $4000 pay column bump next year. Teaching is my top priority, Tech for Teachers would be second. Throwing another class on top of that might be more than I can handle, especially this soon after getting out of full-time school.

Wishful thinking says I can handle it. Self-doubt says wait. I don’t know which one is telling me to do something that’s reasonable for the actual real situation. I have a suspicion that getting stuck in acting out of fear is not in particular any better than screwing up again. I think I might be able to handle it…

I’ve been thinking it over for a whole day, a day in which I needed to be doing other things, and I’m still no closer to figuring it out.

For those who need to know how much a link in my blogroll costs…five thousand dollars a day sounds fair.  Must not be porn.  Your link goes live when the check clears.

I was asleep. My cousin was watching something else, I don’t even remember if she said what, when the channel cut to live coverage of the first plane, and then the other plane hit the second tower.

My cousin woke us all up. I went (walked? ran? I’m not sure) from the motorhome to the main house, not bothering to change into day clothes. It was just family and my nightgown covered plenty. I can’t remember moving from the couch all day, stuck to the TV as news came in.

That doesn’t happen here, I remember thinking, that happens in other places. Along with why? A realization that we are, in fact, not bulletproof. Or at least not 747-proof.

The thing I find crazy is that people are forgetting. The magnetic remembrance ribbon is just another shape of bumper sticker, even I had to do a “wait, what? oh” when I noticed flags at half-staff, and kids my students’ age–the 12-13 range–don’t really know what 9-11 is. They were school-age when it happened, so I don’t understand them not knowing.

In a few years, though, as far as the students are concerned it’ll be “history,” not anything within the students’ lifespans, therefore not anything that they think effects them. I could be wrong, but if the kids here are anything like the students I worked with in Oregon, I don’t think they know much history. Lots of Ancient Cultures, a little bit of Old West and Oregon Trail and Slavery is Bad, all on a fundamentally trivial level, little or nothing since 1900. They probably don’t remember the Y2K bug either, though that might be because it turned out not to matter.

I’m not blaming the students. Or the parents, even. It’s this culture. Six years is, what, eight cell phone generations? Six years ago I was still using my first laptop (I’m typing this from my fourth). The world is getting faster, true, but there’s also something unsettled and insubstantial creeping into most things. When I was four I used paper and pens to make little books; now I cause a machine to arrange zeros and ones, and call this self-expression. I can change it, and with a little work delete it from any of the places where anyone’s likely to look; I can always just not save if I don’t like my changes; there’s no risk; it’s not a fixed real thing like ink on paper. When I was nine I had one actual friend and some “friends-in-law,” her friends who tolerated me, and we played hide-and-seek at recess; now I have a handful of actual friends and several more people who are high on the friend ladder, but none of the main ones are in the same state as me. I don’t remember what I doodled in class, though I must have done something like that with how bored I was, but my students now draw cell phones. And if I see another txt-speak “idk” pop up in the room…

Slow down for half a second.

Think about it.

What are we doing?

There’s a field in Pennsylvania that wouldn’t have had a plane fall into it if the people onboard had been thinking about saving their iPods. Those people did what was right even though it was by definition going to suck for them, because it was right for someone else.

Do we remember?

Or does the sacrifice go forgotten, chased out by higher priorities like duo-core processors?

They say (no, I don’t know who) that the best indicator of someone’s values is what they act on. How valuable are the values we’re living by?

It turned out to be a problem in FileZilla (which had previously worked on this computer), which I found out by installing the latest version of FileZilla not on their advice but out of desperation to try ANYTHING and disgust with being told the same thing repeatedly (or in one case, something inaccurate).  It wasn’t even a case of different support representatives not staying in contact–most of my so-called support was from one rep, who must be getting paid by tickets closed because JEEZ.

Transcript to follow shortly.  Goodbye, MySiteSpace.  I got started with you guys on a free account and traded up when they went away, and I learned a lot here about how to make websites, but I won’t tolerate “service” that ignores a problem.

I’m now officially looking for a different host.  Feedback is welcome in comments (i.e. ad comments for hosting services will be considered on-topic, not spam).  Expect another update shortly.