Wednesday, October 12
Sundo, 09:12
Following yesterday evening’s reminder of the brutal nature of fate, Irma failed to get to sleep and then spent an hour vomiting in the night. I went to her aid and failed to get back to sleep. Neither of us got up at 7:30, and neither of us leapt out of bed sparkling with joy.
I decided to get off the metro at Kalasatama and walk myself awake. Walking past ever-changing landscape around the building works I notice that the traffic lights by Lidl work again. As I wait for the green man I notice a line of enormous cable drums looking like huge toys in the thin bright morning light. A couple of them stood there last week but now that their friends have joined them the hamburger stand behind them has become completely occluded. For a few moments I regard the Case of the Occluded Hamburger Stand with equanimity.
Then the green man will appear and I will carry on towards Arcada.
I will spend much of the morning wrestling with my virtual machine. I want to get the final website for convivial mechanics up and running this week but I will find that I will get no nearer to my goal, even though I will learn a lot about a lot of software issues. I will finally abandon the virtual machine when I conclude that the current version of Scout will simply not work under Windows 7.
Just as I near despair Jutta will casually tell me that one of the Media Teknik students in her current course has told the class about Cloud 9, a cloud-based IDE with a usable free plan. I will try it out and find that it appears to solve all my problems in one fell swoop. Moreover, the Education Plan will allow me to create free accounts for as many students as I want, for an annual fee of $12.00.
I will build a new version of the convivial mechanics website in Cloud 9 and come across one odd problem. I cannot figure out how to get the gulp Sass compiler to work, and I cannot figure out why I cannot figure this out. I spend the afternoon getting to grips with the workspace, which works fantastically well, and leave a post on the community discussion board before I leave for home.
I will go for a very brisk walk in the dark that will take me to Itis. I will remember that Stockmann’s Crazy Days starts today and so I will go in to see it in action. Shoppers will fill Stockmann for the first time in as long as I can remember. I will note that the two pieces of equipment I might want from Power will appear on the shelves on Friday and Saturday.
I will walk down to the last remaining Antilla in the world where the final reductions have begun reducing even further. I will buy a copy of Kate Bush’s 50 Words For Snow cd for four euros, and walk briskly home.
Irma will suggest that we go to bed early. I will get into bed at 21:10 and discover that going to bed too early can make getting to sleep impossible. I won’t waste my time though. I will lay in bed in the dark until about 1:30 with ideas streaming into me from all over the place. I will work out exactly what I should do with the new website and how I should organise it. I will work out a new formula for grading the summer course. I will realise that I should be using BuddyPress rather than bbPress. I will write the text to a letter to the thesis students. I will write a letter to those people waiting to rewrite the cultural democracy manifesto. I will plan the first series of live events for convivial mechanics. I will decide to number them all in order to create a history.
I will remember all of this in the morning.