The last student has turned in the last final exam of this semester! I’m done!
Wait, what’s this?
A pile of papers?
I have over a hundred exams and term papers to grade now.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
NOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
<curls into fetal position, sobs pathetically>
This video is going around twitter among the usual suspects right now. It’s by Reap Paden, and it’s about how I’m not a feminist. Well, it’s also about “hypocrisy…and a dream”, but it never gets around to showing either. And while it’s by a known idiot, it really is just clips of me and Rebecca Watson at Skepticon 3, with titles that say more about Paden than either of us.
Hmmm. You could argue that I’m a bad comedian, but there’s nothing anti-feminist in any of those clips…that is, unless you think that humor and joking about sex are somehow incompatible with feminism.
It gets worse, though, and Paden left it out — I did have that woman come up on stage so I could have sex with her. Of course, it was in a talk about sex and genetics, where I used a deck of cards to illustrate recombination, so it was a little less provocative than you might think — we swapped cards for a bit. Lasciviously.
And the clip with Rebecca is a bit that John the Other didn’t understand, either — it was Rebecca yanking JT’s chain, and the handler she was “abusing” was in on the joke from day one.
It’s revealing when this is the worst dirt he can dig up on us, isn’t it?
I gave a final exam today. I’m grading it. I’m giving another one tomorrow. I’ll be grading it then. I am straining to put this semester completely behind me by Friday…so my appearances here will be intermittent.
I know. I’m no fun at all.
I thought poutine was poutine until I visited Canada and every single person at the restaurant ordered a different kind. Larry Moran and I were caught in the act; also, he reviews my talk.
I staggered home last night at about 2am, fresh from Eschaton 2012. It was a very good conference from my perspective (and probably everyone else’s, too!). There was a familiar mix of good friends from Freethoughtblogs — Natalie Reed, who was given a well-deserved award from CFI for her social justice work, Hank “Beta Culture” Fox, Ian “Zombie Slayer” Cromwell, Ophelia “God Hates Women” Benson, and me, who bored everyone to tears with a primer on some very basic principles in population genetics (why do these people keep inviting me?). Then there were some familiar big names: Larry Moran, Chris DiCarlo, and Eugenie Scott. And then what I really look forward to: meeting new people who either are, ought to be, or will be big names: Veronica Abbass (why haven’t I been following Canadian Atheist before?), Dear Ania, and of course people like Heina, Eric MacDonald, Udo Schuklenk, Vyckie Garrison, and Jeff Shallit. There were others I missed; it was a surprisingly diverse and ambitious conference with two parallel tracks so you couldn’t see everything. That was a cunning ploy, I think, to whet our appetites for more so we’ll come to the next one. I learned stuff and had good conversations and that’s all I really ask of a conference.
Now, unfortunately, while I’m physically back in Morris for a good long while, I have to warn you that this is the last week of the semester and the chronic distractions of a heavy workload are about to flare into acute intensity: this is the week I have to give and grade the last unit exams of the term, grade term papers, advise worried students on their status in my courses, and do a bit of essential committee work, too, so I’m not going to be able to do much blog writing for a bit, despite positively aching to get a bunch of science and atheism stuff hammered down in words. The blog has to wait a bit longer while I deal with my top priority teaching.
But the end is in sight! These demands on my time (really, I’m looking at staying up much of tonight trying to get a stack of exams graded promptly) will begin to ebb around mid-week, and then finals aren’t that bad — they’re like the last paroxysm before the fever breaks. I shall persevere. You’ll have to bear with my boringness for a bit longer.
It’s happened. I’ve looked at my schedule and discovered that today I have negative hours free (adding a 3 hour drive to the airport to the load just destroys my entire schedule.)
There are a few things I wanted to scribble down here today, but they’re only going to happen if I can find a way to do a few things simultaneously. Need more tentacles. Need this semester to end.
I’ve got a long weekend coming up in Ottawa. I may have to spend much of that hiding in my hotel room trying to recover enough to stagger through one more week of classes.
I’m in the process of moving my blog Coyote Crossing to a new home. As a result, I’ve been spending odd 20-minute spans in between tasks over the last few days importing archival blog entries into WordPress. WordPress is pretty good at importing other content management systems’ data, but my blog had been run on ExpressionEngine, which is not at all good at exporting data. That’s just one of the reasons I’m abandoning the software.
As it turns out, I am not the first person to make the decision to leave ExpressionEngine. And because of that, there are a couple well-established work-arounds for importing your data from EE into WordPress. The one I chose was to adapt someone else’s template which output blog entries into something close enough to Movable Type export format that WordPress will happily gobble it up.
It works okay, but due to memory limitations and the fact that I’ve got almost ten years’ worth of blog entries on the old site, I’ve had to do it in chunks. One such 2-megabyte chunk just refused to import, no matter how often I made sure there weren’t any trailing spaces or odd characters in the text file being imported. The new database just found that file too hard to swallow.
I figured out one of the posts in that chunk had been slightly corrupted — a bug that comes up with EE now and then having to do with the database record for the URL title. I got the entry number and went to fix it. I found the post, one from January 2007. Swallowed hard and cursed to myself.
It’s safe and sound on the new site now.
I need a drink.
I cancelled my Thanksgiving this year — I just have too much work piled up on me right now. So Mary went off to Madison to visit my daughter Skatje today — we had a small bowl of pad thai together for our feast, just before she left — so I’m home alone all weekend. I got all my grading sorted out into six stacks, though, and finished off one of the most difficult ones, so yay.
My dinner tonight was a bowl of rice, and I’m going to celebrate by kicking back with a glass of wine and something on netflix — anyone got any recommendations? It’s my one bit of fun for the weekend, so make it a good one.
Tomorrow: complete two stacks of grading.
I’m still grading. I have to review my lecture for today. I have meetings scheduled. And then at 3 I’m scurrying out of my office to race down the road to St Cloud to give a lecture at the St Cloud Public Library at 7. Then zoom, straight back home to do some late night prep work for tomorrow.
But it’s a 4 day weekend coming up! Yay! I’m kind of desperately crawling my way forward to just finish up Wednesday.
My travel plans are slowing down a bit, fortunately: Skepticon this week, then a break, and then I’ll be speaking right here in central Minnesota at St Cloud State University on 19 November…where, by the way, my oldest son attended college, so I have connections. So come on out to lovely St Cloud two weeks from today!
Oh, and to cap off the semester, it’s Eschaton 2012 in Ottawa. Then the world ends and we all get a nice rest.
