Full stop

The unreality of academia always strikes me at the end of the semester. There is a crescendo of frenetic activity of the students that suddenly comes full stop with the end of exam week: the students evaporate, the campus is empty, and everything is quiet. Except for me: I have a million things I need to do and suddenly there's time to do them. Things I've been putting off because of the constant interruptions become possible and there's time -- time! -- again to work on things in solid blocks.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon putting up the videos from the Zamenhof Symposium. The symposium was a positive event: interesting, thoughtful presentations to a surprisingly large and diverse audience. It was a long drive down to the NYC and hard to make the time during finals week, but I was glad I was able to facilitate the trip by our local group, including three students from Hampshire College. And I got to wear my new hat.

I came away with an appreciation for several things I hadn't thought of before. Esther Schor talked about the motives that Zamenhof had -- and how his motivations changed over time. I had always rather simplistically seen Zamenhof as focused on Esperanto as an end. Although I had known of Zamenhof's interests in homaranismo, yiddish, etc, I had never developed a more nuanced perspective of Zamenhof in which Esperanto was a means to other ends in Zamenhof's life or how those might changed over his lifetime. It was also interesting to hear Humphrey Tonkin speak about how Zamenhof is being used today in Bialystok. All of the presentations were good.

Posting the video was a bigger challenge than I had imagined. I had assumed I would just put them up on Youtube, but it turns out you can't post any videos longer than 10 minutes anymore. And all of these were longer (mostly around 25 minutes). So I installed the video module at Esperanto-USA and posted them there. Except the video module wouldn't work. I dug into the code and eventually found that when it called the "theme" function to call the function that would display the video, it wasn't working. So I commented out that line and just called the video display function directly. It's working, but at some point I'll need to go back and sort out the actual problem.