Tuesday, October 14

This morning I got to the bus stop just as the 841 arrived, and there was an empty seat at the front. The day started well.

At Arcada I spent most of the morning playing with Underscrores, the official WordPress starter theme, getting to grips with its structure and template hierarchy. I found an excellent tutorial written primarily by Michelle Langston that explains the technical aspects of theme building better than I have ever seen it explained. Even better, she uses Underscores (which she co-designed) as its line-by-line example.

In the afternoon I led the Advanced Web Apps workshop in which the second year began turning their Photoshop mockups into static html sites, before wordpressizing them (using Underscores) in the next block. I am now getting seriously worried about this group. They have almost all extended the assignment into territory covered in the third year, and are enthusiastically managing well. On the one hand this upholds my long-held theory that someone obsessively interested could learn everything we teach on their own in less than ten months. On the other hand it leaves me wondering what courses I will have to invent for them next year.

Next I raced to Suvilahti for the first of the new second-Tuesday-of-the-month Pixelache members’ meetings. We had four questions on the agenda and, by running over by thirty minutes, we discussed them all. We now have a new structure for proposing projects and a new kind of festival which, if it works, will be very interesting. I offered to host the keynote speakers as a one-day conference at Arcada, which was also agreed.

Now I am on my way home, sitting in the bus looking out of the window as it turns left into Itäväylä. I will get home to find myself in the middle of the final stages of what Auo would have called a full blown brouhaha. Certainly it was more than a mere kerfuffle.

When the dust had settled I ate two of Marita’s cabbage rolls and had a shower.