I’m back!

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.

NOOOO TIIIIIIIME!

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.

Sometimes random chance just up and kicks you in the face

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.

Zeke

My sad and pathetic thanksgiving

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.

Another frantic day

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.

Speaking in St Cloud

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.

Your assistance is needed

I woke up this morning with an awful, miserable head cold: there is a great wobbling blob of snot atop my shoulders today, and there are grisly, bubbly, phlegmy noises coming out of my mouth. It is not good. It is kind of gross.

So I would like you all to pray for me.

Oh, wait, no! That never works! Don’t do that. Instead, there’s only one thing that might give me some psychic assistance: money. Yes, a small pile of money would really help right now.

Only not for me. Send it to Skepticon. Would you believe they got a rude surprise this week? The venue is demanding an unexpected and rather excessive sum of money right away, or they’re going to cancel the whole event. It’s like learning that someone plans to steal Christmas, on top of having a brain that has turned into a flocculent, foamy fluid today.

Skepticon is in urgent need of donations, fast. Those crazy kids…it was suggested that maybe if they charged a nominal admission fee, like $5, that would be enough to cover the shortfall, but noooo…they’re sticking by their principles and insisting that this conference will always be free of charge.

So make a cranky old sludge-brained man mildly less dismal by throwing a few dollars at some idealistic young’uns, OK?

I’m home!

I made it back, scudding ahead of the oncoming hurricane! Actually, I saw no sign of it: everything was calm when I left Tennessee and North Carolina this morning, and all my flights were on time. I know some of the east coast people were seeing flight cancellations, but I think my timing was just right to be well ahead of it all.

I hope it all dribbles away quickly, but otherwise, best of luck to those staring Sandy’s landfall in the face…and better yet, best of preparation.

My day

Let me tell you about my day.

I’ve got a full schedule of labs, classes, and meetings today, and it’s advising week at UMM as well.

Late this afternoon, when my last class lets out, I’m bolting out the door and running for my car, and then in a squeal of burning rubber, racing for the airport. We had our first snow today. I estimate that I’ll arrive in Minneapolis sometime around the tail end of rush hour. I’m cutting it close.*

I’m flying to O’Hare. I arrive at about 10:30pm. My connecting flight to Nashville leaves at 7am. I have no idea what I’m going to do for 8½ hours. Maybe rewrite my talk.

I arrive in Nashville at 8:30am. I’m giving a talk at CSICon at 11:15am.

I’m explaining a difficult and fundamental topic in evolutionary biology: the role of chance. I just noticed that I have to do this in a half hour. I think I will be rewriting big chunks of my talk.

At 11:50am I intend to collapse somewhere.

The good news, though, is that finishing up my obligations early means I get to mostly relax and enjoy the weekend, and I really really need that. Except that I’m also bringing a stack of grading with me, and also have to prep a lecture for Monday (fortunately, the topic for that is regulation of cell division, and I know that stuff inside and out.**)

Anyway, all that just to let you know…posting may be light for the next 30+ hours. You can cope, right? Also, bonus: partying Friday and Saturday night, so maybe I can compensate with mildly inebriated posting (no drunk posting for me, I’m too old for that crap anymore.)

* But have no fear, I won’t compromise on traffic laws. I shall get there safely or not at all!

** Wait, I know everything in this class inside and out — I still suffer in fussing over all the details.

A reminder of my email change

In an effort to prioritize and clean up my flood of incoming email, a while back I announced an important change: I’ve partitioned my email so everything sent to myersp@morris.umn.edu (my university email account) is handled on one machine, and general messages are dealt with at pzmyers@gmail.com. My university email account is intended ONLY for work email, so if you send stuff there and your address doesn’t end in “umn.edu” or “hhmi.org” or something similarly specific, it’s going to get shunted off into a slush folder and I’ll deal with it once I’ve managed all the other official stuff that piles up, i.e., probably about never.

If you send it to pzmyers@gmail.com, there’s no guarantee I’ll get to it quickly, but at least it doesn’t get immediately drop-kicked into a deep dark pit of neglect first. So, really, if you aren’t one of my high-priority students, or a colleague, or a university or grant administrator, don’t try to contact me at the umn.edu address.

I’m only mentioning this because my umn.edu account’s black hole seems to be getting larger and larger, and I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to look in there and try to rescue any messages. I might never escape.