For Mac: Tweaking iTunes

MacDevCenter.com — Tweaking iTunes—some basic information on how to take control of iTunes, in case it ever gets out of line.

Depression: NPR’s "The Hardest Work You Will Ever Do"

Heard “The Hardest Work You Will Ever Do” this morning while getting ready for work. It’s one of the This I Believe essays on NPR. It has some really good description of what depression feels like. The part where she talks about how it felt to have other people doing things, that’s how i feel. Course I have no one doing things for me. But anyway, I think that’s the best description. I know that I do hide a lot, even when I ask or pay people to do things for me. It feels wrong, and I feel stupid and foolish for not being able to do better. I don’t have problems like the author of this essay; but it really is a close description. So close, that I really don’t want to listen to it again, but I want to keep the URL handy.

Daily Work: Writing, Cleaning, Sleeping

Watched Empire Falls while I continued work on the Hopper and Carver lesson plan. On breaks, I cleaned the kitchen a bit. There’s something so wrong with my life that I can’t get my kitchen clean. I have to work in stages and I still don’t seem to make any progress. At least I did get the dishwasher loaded and run.

I think I may be getting sick. I have this odd dry and scratchy throat that I can’t really figure out. I woke this morning with the problem. It felt like it was so dry that the parts of it were sticking together, and it’s still not right. I’ve tried everything I can think of. It’s not exactly sore, but it’s clearly not right. It feels like my throat constricted or something and all the part were stuck to each other when I swallowed. Maybe it’s swollen? Now I am feeling sort of dizzy and lost. bleh.

Sharon, Lisa, and I had lunch at the Courier. I had the usual—the Famous Courier Reuben. mmm. When we got back, I dug out the Cartman Bop Bag that I bought for the office at Christmas and blew it up. Every office needs a bop bag for days when things go wrong.

After work, I went to Target and the grocery store. Worked on interactives for the lesson plan that pairs Hopper and Carver this evening.

Got a phone call from mom. She’s gotten another poodle, a white, little boy puppy that she has named Baden (after Lord Baden-Powell, since her white girl poodle is Daisi, after Juliette Low). The phone call was freakly. She left a message that I couldn’t interpret and I thought that something was wrong. Turned out that it was just that she took Daisi to the groomer’s and one of the people working there had a puppy that she was looking for a good home for. My mom cannot resist poodles.

I was late to work . . . again . . . as usual :(

NCTE has a new file server today. Well, actually, I guess they had it days ago. They just gave us all access today. The end result is that we all have to rearrange everything that we keep on the network to fit this new arrangement that IT came up with. I think the system is reasonably sensible. I just wish there could be more conversation about what people need.

We had our team phone call with IRA this afternoon, and I worked on various lessons and such. I was finally able to get into the interactive tool, so I have the Comic Vocabulary tool nearly done. I hope to get that lesson live tomorrow.

On the down side, literally, I tried to install patches to the ReadWriteThink server, and SQL crashed. Again. I have followed all the instructions that I’ve been given by the MCI engineers, and it still fails. I wish we could come up with a real solution. In the meantime, I’m waiting for someone from MCI to help get the site back up. Going to bed early. I’ll have to be in the office very early to deal with all this :(

For some unknown reason, I woke up at 6 AM and was wide awake. I got a drink of water and wisely convinced myself to sleep till 8:30.

We ended up with some problems with the ReadWriteThink calendar this morning. I seem to have accidentally lost some entries that out vendor was to work on. Now that I’ve found them, we have too many for this work period. Feel really stupid about it, but it seems to have worked out. The lost one is for March, and we really want to have it live. Fortunately, they are kindly doing an extra one this time, and the next phase will be one short.

Today has mostly seemed like a day of meetings. I did get a little work in on a lesson plan that pairs paintings by Edward Hopper with short stories by Raymond Carver. But we also had a team update and a huge multidepartment meeting on Google Analytics, which they’re using on the NCTE site to try to do more targeted marketing.
I know that they are doing e-mails now to people who click through on certain things, and I guess there’s more to come. The tool isn’t compatible with WebTrends, so NCTE won’t be using any information on ReadWriteThink.

Okay, I admit that wasn’t it. I also took down the lingering Christmas lights and put up lots of heart decorations in the office. It seemed like time for the change, and I was tired of the overhanging, but never turned on, lights.

I wrote the Inbox that will go out tomorrow, and working ahead, wrote the Inbox for next week as well.

I finally grew completely exasperated with the stupid chair mat at work. Around the 11th, they put chair mats at all the desks. The problem is that our carpet has no pile, but they bought the kind of spiky mats that should settle into the mat. As there’s no pile, instead, we have mats up on little stilts. Everyone has been having problems rolling chairs on them. Because I am exceptionally large and heavy however, mine chair ends up stuck in indentations. Wherever the chair sits, the mat gets pushed down. Then when I try to move, I can’t. I’ve nearly fallen out of the chair several times. Today, I decided I was fed up with it. I took the mat out from under my chair. Eventually someone will notice and make me put it back; but for today, it felt amazingly assertive and so much better without that horrible, cheap mat. Every time I tried to roll on it, I had another remind of how big and fat I am. It had to go.

Technology woe of the day: I bought a refurbished wireless keyboard and mouse, but I can’t get it to work. Try as I might, the two of them won’t connect to the computer. I finally gave up and packed the thing back up. I spent very little money on it, so it’s not a great loss financially. It does bring up an ongoing problem for me through. What am I supposed to do with the technology graveyard of junk that I have collected? I feel so guilty just throwing things away, but I don’t know what else to do with them. The stuff ends up piling around in the way. What the world needs is a thrift shop for outgrown technology. Someone would probably be overjoyed to get some of this junk, and it’s just causing me to feel unhappy and wasteful.

Installed Download of the Day: TaskBlaze, mentioned on LifeHacker. I always have trouble keeping track of when I’m working for NCTE at home. I usually make my best guess, and usually I underestimate because it’s so hard to tell for sure. This little tool is basically a stopwatch that you can start and stop at will. When you stop it, the tool exports the information to your Outlook calendar. It looks as if it will be very useful. I end up with clearly marked blocks of time on my calendar for when I’ve been working. You can enter a title for your task, which is exported to Outlook as the title of the appointment. I’ve added it to my Start Up folder, so that I remember to turn it on when I’m working.

Since I’m stuck on the interactive, I spent most of the day working on my own political cartoon lesson plan. Found some cool stuff to link to. We already have one political cartoon lesson on the site, but this one will be different because it’s looking at style while the other one focuses more on interpreting a cartoon.

The sad and unfortunate part of all this, however, is that I was writing and concentrating on the lesson plan and I totally forgot about the laundry till just now. I have no idea what I’m going to wear to work tomorrow, but I can guarantee that it won’t be any of my favorites. I just hope I have something clean that also fits.

I’m still in love with the TiVo. I watched the playoff games, and at one point I missed a controversial play and realized that I could back up and replay without those crazy TV broadcasters. Then I realized that I can pause the commercials and then fast forward all of them more quickly and less annoyingly than actually watching them.

Continued work on the comic vocabulary images. I’m having a hard time optimizing them so that they are small enough for the tool without losing detail. They keep going pixellated and looking rough. I think I have to just keep tweaking them.

Out of the blue, I decided to make Monster Cookies. I think I just suddenly wanted sweets. I have something like four dozen, even though I cut the recipe. I’ll have to take some to work on Monday.

Watched Oliver Twist, courtesy of the TiVo. This is clearly my favorite new toy. Very handy indeed.

We had the monthly lunch meeting today, the Lunch Bunch. Yummy broccoli-potato soup. Spent most of the day working on the comic handouts and images for the comic book lesson plan. I finished working on the lesson plan, but I still need to do the interactive. There’s still no access to the tool. I can get in, but I can’t upload images. Maybe by Monday. Did the grocery shopping this evening, and generally got little else done. Watched Lord Jim and Hurricane.