Thursday, October 25

 

 

The temperature dropped in the night and it felt like winter when I woke up. I felt cold for the first time as I cycled to the metro, and I imagined myself having to retrieve my winter jacket from the shed at the weekend.

Jutta arrived with a first class flu and I wandered in and out of the classroom during the morning delivering mugs of Finnrexin to her. In between I worked out some final exercises for the CMS students before they embark on the big project making a site for the Arcada Student Films.

I had a talk with Fred about this because Leila has not yet produced any actual acontent for the site and I will need it for the students to prevent them designing sites that look great with the dummy content but won’t work with the film students’ actual movies.

I had a listen to the local recording that I made yesterday. Sophie sent me her local recording and I listened to parts of that. I then set up Audacity and began to put them together. This proved much easier than I had expected. Moreover I found that I could eliminate ums and ahs very easily. I even managed to make the entire business of Sophie going offline and then reappearing online vanish without trace.

I left this at 13:00 as Jutta finished her course, and set up the computer in A303 for the CMS course.

Irma works late tonight doing something with Palmu, so I leave as soon as I can, once the students have understood their instructions and have begun to think through the process of transferring their sites from Foundation to WordPress.

Sunshine races out into the garden as soon as I open the door and once he has gone I notice the glass box on the white bookshelf in what we used to call Naa’s room. It looks nicely dull in a classy sort of way. The shadows on the wall, and the accompanying reflection please me for some reason.

At 19:00 I will watch the third episode of the new Doctor Who series and conclude that it has changed focus in a very interesting way. This episode took place in Montgomery, Alabama, the day before Rosa Parks refused to get up from her bus seat to let a white person sit there. It featured a racist from the 70th Century who had travelled back in time to try to change history by stopping this happening in the belief that this would stop the civil rights movement from starting. Doctor Who and her little gang had to stop him from doing this.

The story will prove more concerned with race relations in America in the fifties, seen from the perspective of a young black man and a young Asian woman from the twenty first century, than the business of outwitting the villain. The villain will serve as a MacGuffin to enable their visit to Montgomery have develop some sort of plot.

I will like the episode and the new focus on human relations.

Irma will arrive back in the middle of the evening with news about her project getting invited to the Milano Tricentenial next Spring.

Gosh, I will think: she goes from strength to strength.