Friday, December 8
Pixelache, 19:32
This morning I left in the pouring rain and stood waiting for a 97V which, fortunately, appeared on time. Oh joy, etc.
I got to Arcada and ran through a wide range of administrative tasks at high speed. I answered mails, scheduled appointments for next week, moved some meetings at other people’s requests, forwarded some writing that needed forwarding, and had some chatter that I didn’t need.
I also agreed to print something for the students preparing for Egilgala. This, of course, turned rapidly from a simple task to a complex one that took many goes to complete as they turned out to want the printed material to fit onto the nonstandard cards they had decided to use.
At 10:30 I left with my laptop for Pixelache where Oliver and I had a full-day workshop aimed at finishing off our year’s work preparing a digital toolkit for Pixelache’s use. The process has resulted in us understanding how little most members care about this sort of thing, and how happy they feel talking at meetings about the ways that Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter oppress us while using them all carelessly “because they are easy and simple”. Well, yes, but…
Oliver set up a Raspberry Pi that will act as our communications hub. He set it to log into our Jitsi channel and connect to the microphone and speaker as soon as it starts up. This should prevent the usual thirty minute scramble to get a laptop working with Skype and everyone at a distance logged in.
I meanwhile got Discourse working again, by reinstalling the whole Linode from scratch; a process that consumed considerably longer than the advertised thirty minutes.
At 14:00, when the rain had finally stopped, we walked to Fafa and had lunch: a falafel, vegetable and cheese pitta, in my case, accompanied by some craft ginger beer.
In the afternoon we carried on. I wrote a blog entry about the Feel The Smoothness workshop that we did for the Pixelache Festival, and Oliver started customising the settings on Discourse. Within ten minutes he had done exactly what he did on Tuesday: he had completely crashed it in a way that seemed impossible to fix. We then spent the rest of the day trying to fix that. By the end we had identifieds the problem but failed to find a solution.
More exactly, we found several suggested solutions online but each one fails in one interesting way or another. We at least know that other people have had the same problem, and I now completely understand the installation process and have had a lot of valuable practice with PuTTY. Oliver has to leave at about 19:00 and so I take a screenshot of something I did while I waited for the installation process to complete one of the many times I reinstalled Discourse. I rewrote a small part of the front page of this site in order to show the date of the most recent note at the top of the Recent Notes section: nothing too fancy but a welcome respite from a day of frustration.
Oliver will leave and I will pack up, tidy the room, switch out the lights and lock up.
I will walk to Sörnäinen and a tram will arrive just as I cross the road. I will leap on to take my laptop back to Arcada. I will set it up on my desk, ready for Monday, and then leave again for home.
Hopefully the weekend will start soon.