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Steven D. Brewer's blog

Snowpocalypse

Once again, it was pretty clear that they would ultimately close the University due to the weather, but we went through the farce of going there only to be told they were closing at 12:30. Once again, I was grateful that they didn't wait until my class was actually meeting before they closed.

The storm is impressive. I was covered in snow after just the short walk back from the bus stop. By late afternoon, the snow had mostly stopped, but round two will start sometime over night. I don't think I've ever seen such deep snow -- it more than half way up the fence and we're supposed to get another foot before the storm wraps up tomorrow night. I expect that tomorrow the University won't try to open up.

Alisa went out into the teeth of storm to make sure we were well supplied with various necessities (or, at least, donuts) so we're set to ride out the storm in style. Now as long as the roof doesn't collapse and oil doesn't run out and the wires don't go down, we're set to survive the snowpocalypse.

Mysql Dump Splitter

I saw that several people had already written things like this, but this is the one I wrote.

Some people love perl and some people hate it, but for certain things it works pretty damn well.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
open(DUMP, "<freakishly_large_dump.sql") || die "can't open\n";
while () {
if(/^CREATE DATABASE.*/) {
if($db) {
close DB;
$db="";
}
($trash,$db,$trash) = split(/\`/);
open(DB, ">${db}.sql");
}
if($db) {
print DB;
}
}
close DUMP;

Drupal Camp Awesome

The Western Mass Drupal Camp came off without a hitch. I was the "key participant" because I had all the keys. I spent the first hour running around opening doors and helping people get everything we needed. But, after that, I was mostly just a participant: I attended several interesting presentations, I gave my presentation, and then it was over. I ran around to make sure everything was locked up. And then went to the after party at ABC.

It was great to see everyone I knew: Buzz and Tom and Andy and Beth and everyone else. And great to meet so many new people. I'm not as good at meeting people as I really ought to be. My instinct is to go sit quietly in the corner -- I'm much more comfortable there. Luckily, I had people come and join me, so I wasn't just alone the whole time.

The best part was that I think everyone had a good time: And I don't think anyone felt so overwhelmed that they wouldn't be willing to do this again some time. And now that we know we can do it, it might be fun to experiment with some other kinds of activities. Having talks is fine, but it would be fun to have people actually work on projects. You learn a lot more when you actually do something.

Another snowstorm

We've had snowstorm after snowstorm during the first week of classes, closing the campus again this morning. The snow banks next to the driveway are so high, I can barely shovel anymore. But since the campus is closed and it's still snowing, I can take a few minutes to take stock of the past few weeks. I've been busy.

I've spent the past two or three weeks shepherding the migration of resources on the BCRC server to new hardware. I had wanted to do it immediately after grades were due, back in December, but with everyone's schedules, it didn't happen until early January. Since then, I've been putting everything back together and then building new resources for the spring. It's been an incredibly time-consuming process, but nearly everything critical has been done. At the same time, I needed to get my course set up and prepare for my presentation at Western Mass Drupal Camp.

We had a snowstorm on the day of my first class meeting. It looked to me like the University shouldn't have tried to open in the first place, but they did. I came and worked on getting ready for class. I checked every few minutes to see if class was really going to happen, figuring they'd probably close just after we were supposed to meet. But they surprised me and closed two hours before class. When you're class only meets once a week, missing a meeting is a big deal for the schedule. But I think we'll be OK.

I'm really excited about Drupal Camp. I think it was Kelly Albrecht who first proposed organizing the camp. My main contribution was to organize the venue: I made a pitch to the dean and the chair of Chemistry to let us use the new Integrated Science Building at UMass: we've basically taken over the entire building for the day. And it looks like the weather will push on through today and we'll have good weather tomorrow for the meeting.

I'm presenting How to Say L10n and i18n in Drupal. I tried to come with a topic where I thought I might be more of an expert than most of the people there. My knowledge about Drupal is broad, but shallow -- I'm not really an expert in anything. But I think I'll know more about localization and internationalization than most of the people there and will be able to say something interesting about how to do it, having recently gone through building libroj.bierfaristo.com as a multilingual site. At least, I can identify the basic tools and some of the pitfalls.

Facebook and Twitter Communities

Chris Hoffman mentioned that I was a follower he knew, which inspired me to go off and actually check some statistics that I've been curious about for a while: To compare the communities of people I interact with Facebook and Twitter.

I currently have around 387 "Friends" at Facebook. Of these, 162 are people I know from "real life" (surprisingly close to "Dunbar's Number"). These include family, friends from school, cow-orkers, and people in the local community. The other 225 are Esperanto speakers that I either know in real life (around 114) or who have added me as a friend, in spite of my not knowing them (the other 111).

I currently have 296 "followers" at twitter. Of them, only a tiny fraction I know from real life. A few are in both Facebook and Twitter, but only a handful. Probably more than half are Esperanto speakers -- it's hard to tell, because you get such limited information about people via twitter. I didn't bother to do the actual count, because both numbers are so low.

Vacation

I have been enjoying my vacation a lot. The past semester left me feeling profoundly burned out. My job has grown to the point where I can't really do it anymore. Instead, I'm constantly satisficing the competing demands, and putting off the difficult and intractable problems. The result is that, instead of healthy structured procrastination, I've started to feel paralyzed, because every time I try to fix something, I find other things not-quite-right (because I didn't have time to do them right in the first place) and end up increasingly hedged in by the hard stuff I've been putting off for a lack of time to address it properly. It's very unsatisfactory. The next few weeks are going to be particularly bad: I have to resolve some sticky problems to migrate BCRC webservices from old hardware to new hardware, and then set up everything for the spring semester. Next week, I'll have to go in and face this. But this week, I've put it mostly out of my mind to do other things.

The only real "work" I've been doing is Esperanto writing. I have one piece out, a piece accepted, a piece submitted, and several more partly done. If I push myself, I'm hopeful to have at least a couple more done before I have to go back to work. But then it will be a long dry spell before I'm likely to have any energy to work on Esperanto stuff again.

The Rise and Rise of Esperanto

I have a new article up at Libera Folio. I saw a note by Renato Corsetti at La Ondo which was talking about the failure of UEA to change with the times. I wanted to expand on a few of the points and drafted a note for Libera Folio. It's wonderful to have the help of other smart people in drafting an article: Istvan Ertl corrected the grammar for me. And Kalle Kniivilä came up with a great title and nice introduction (in which he called me a "konata usona esperantisto"!)

Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo

For several weeks, I've been working on a secret project which I can finally reveal today: I've published a book! Today, you can order Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo, a book of my original haiku with associated artwork in the original Esperanto with English translation.

I checked with a couple of likely publishers to see if someone else wanted to publish it for me, but there's almost no money to be made publishing any kind of poetry -- let alone obscure Esperanto poetry by an unknown author. So I just published it myself.

It was fascinating to go through the process of laying out the book, playing with the typography, and ordering a proof. To actually get the book in my hands was a wonderful experience.

As a kid, I was always fascinated by postage stamps. In this project, I took some of my best photography and got to turn it stamps! For a long time, I dreamed of being a serious photographer. I learned, eventually, that I was never going to be more than an amateur, but it's amazing now what you can do with software -- way better than a dark room ever was.

I did the whole project using Free Software: the illustrations were created with GIMP and Inkscape and the book was laid out using Scribus. I used Createspace to publish the book because they seemed the one that was most focused on enabling people to build the pieces themselves -- the other services I looked at were more focused on having you submit your content in some kind of web-based wizard, that would magically mangle your content into a slick looking book. I wanted to get my hands dirty (in a pixel-stained-technopeasant sort of way).

Maybe in another year, I'll have enough haiku to publish another book. Or maybe I'll make some other kind of book next time. If you make the interior just black-and-white, it's amazing how cheap it is. With full color, I managed to keep the price per book to just under $10 (I make $0.14/copy!) And so if a million people buy my book, my royalties would make me a hundred-thousand-aire! (Before taxes, of course. :-)

Sigh...

I wrote a long blog post about the campus potentially choosing Moodle the other week and accidently clicked the wrong place and lost it all. I was too discouraged to rewrite it all.

I have a secret project I'll be able to reveal soon. But can't quite yet.

I went to a dinner this evening for PHENOM. The speaker talked about how the student loan phenomenon has created a bubble in education: I hadn't made the connection before. In the past, we funded higher education by paying for it. But for the past 20 years, we've forced students to go into debt to pay for higher education (so that rich people can get richer). The net result is that, as the economy collapses, and student's can't pay back their debts, I think we're likely to see a collapse of higher education. Once people realize that higher education isn't a path to success: that it doesn't assure of you getting a job (and just results in you being in debt), the whole house of cards is going to fall. Very discouraging.

Drupal Camp

At the last Western Mass Drupal Group meeting, there was discussion about organizing a "Drupal Camp" -- a kind of regional conference where people can get together and share experience with using Drupal, but with a particular focus on helping people get started. A group of us at UMass Amherst were interested in trying to hold the camp on campus in the new Integrated Sciences Building and today the Dean expressed support. So now I need to mobilize the troops. It should be fun.

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