A Matching Tragedy

The next time a bunch of people say that my plans are crazy, I might listen to them. I’d thought I could do a full courseload and teach half time and finish this Internship That Will Not Die, and I figured wrong. Some of it’s that my brain has jumped the tracks from “student” to “teacher” and I’m left going “But I don’t want to write this paper!” because what I want to do is figure out how to present the next awesome subject to my students, or catch up on the infinite pile of grading.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks in terms of getting anything done. That seems to be changing – this weekend seems to be fairly efficient – and I’m going to try to get back into the rhythm of doing homework, but this is unlike anything I’ve done before. When I’ve worked and been a student before, it’s been a job, not a career. When I managed the bar in England, I wasn’t also inviting people home and serving them drinks at their convenience.

Gwen did suggest the idea of email office hours, though, and that’s helping too – I don’t have to respond right away when the email comes in, I can wait till the next day when “office hours” hits. Otherwise I’ll go nuts. But between that and the fact that the part of the quarter where half the class who have not been listening at all have just disappeared is where we’re at now, my inbox is actually quiet for once, which is nice.

Also, I’m no longer dealing with e-Socrates’ death throes; I set up http://www.onthefrequency.com for my CTN 160 course, which I’m going to at least offer to Al Boss when he returns to teaching next fall. God love Dreamhost’s plug-and-play approach; I told Carol that if she hosted one of these internship sites on Dreamhost I’d figure out how to make a registered-user side that has phpBB installed. And I figured out how to force Moodle’s cron to run appropriately. \o/

For the final project, I’m thinking of the straight PHP version of the site I did in Flash over the summer – my thought towards the end of the quarter there was to create a social networking site for urban decay enthusiasts, and combine my PHP and Flash final projects into one thing (and I got over halfway through the process before I realised: I was creating an application.) It failed miserably because I waited till too late to make that connection and because I didn’t really have good resources that I could find for figuring out how to hook PHP and Flash together (the one book I could find in-store specifically on the subject was for ActionScript 2 and Flash CS4 uses ActionScript 3, so.)

I think it’ll work, though, at least relatively well – for the list/view there’s images of Detroit, I can mock up a database of users in a simplified form (or I might go back and add in some of the other things I was thinking of for the Flash version). I changed the look and feel of the site in major ways, because I wasn’t specifically thinking of doing more with Detroit, but I think that’ll work all right in the end.

One cool thing, with the functional includes assignment – I used the dynamic navbar, which is AWESOME. I know it’s not really cognate, but jeez, everything I love about working with external style sheets is present in PHP, and that is so cool. The only thing I couldn’t do there that I wanted to was set up the title tag to give both the title from the meta_include file and the page name from the actual page, so that it would say City Of The Straits – Contact.php or whatever. Preferably, actually, Contact – City of The Straits. I’ll look into “this”, but I think that’s a JS function (in fact, I know it is) and I don’t remember if there’s a cognate function in PHP.