Wednesday, January 24

 

 

It had snowed hard all night and Sunshine went into the garden for less than two minutes this morning, before racing back to the door and howling for someone to let him in. I left the house with the wind blowing snow into my face as it continued to fall.

At Arcada I began by grading an assignment for two students who needed their grades on their school records in order to claim grant money. I also peeped ahead at the rest of the assignments to see what I would find myself grading next week.

I had a first thesis tutorial with a student who wanted to do a thesis about something to do with interactive storytelling. He had no specific idea, but during the conversation he mentioned Westworld, we discussed that, and he landed on the idea of analysing the storytelling techniques and the dramatic structure behind the series, and relating that to possible narrative techniques for video games. I agreed that this sounded interesting and he went off to think about it. He promised to get back to me next week.

At 12:00 I met Ben, Buster and Jokke to have another go at getting the WordPress-based Buddyschool site up and running. After about two hours, and a phone call, Ben argued that we couldn’t do it, and would never do it, because of the unusual way that Nebula have set their service up. We went through the logic of his argument and I accepted it.

I suggested that we build a working version on a new Linode instead, as a proof of concept. If we got that to work then we could clearly demonstrate that the fault did not lay with us. I set up a Linode and left them to it.

Less than two hours later they had built a fully working site that needed one small tweak before we declared it 100% finished. We agreed to do that on Friday afternoon.

They leave and I go for a short walk before meeting Jutta. I look out at the weather. I can see a snowstorm in action, and everything looks blurred and out of focus. I take a picture which, of course, looks blurry and out of focus. Not me, mate: blame the weather.

I will go upstairs to the coffee lounge and spend forty minutes with Jutta making sure that the new syllabus for the Structuring Information course in Period 4 segues nicely from the end of Web Design into the start of CMS next autumn. We have known each other so long that we can map things like this out very quickly, without much discussion.

So it goes: after thirty something minutes we have a course outline broken into five modules with content we completely agree on.

We snow will begin to ease up as I leave for home and have more or less stopped when I arrive.

We will have another evening of mountaineering on Everest and absurd sleuthing in Miami.