Semester begins with a snow day

The first week of the semester has come to a full stop in the middle with a snow day today. It's fun to watch the snow coming down when you don't have to go out into it. I have many memories of having to go out into cold and snow. It's more fun to just watch through the window. If it changes over to freezing rain and we lose power later, that might put a damper on the fun. But the snow is pretty, even though I don't look forward to the shoveling to come later.

It's the first semester in years when I haven't had to teach. I enjoy teaching and I will look forward to being back in the classroom next semester, but for a change its great to have time to focus on technology. I've been trying to learn the ins and outs of ldap for the BCRC and department computers we support. I spent a lot of the day yesterday trying to get ldap over ssl working and, by the end of the day, I think I have a working set up. Now I have to figure out how to make the MacOS part talk over ssl to the server. There are a lot of things I really like about MacOS, but -- from a unix standpoint -- its really frustrating when you find perfectly functional and transparent parts of the system replaced with an opaque black box. My ldap connection works fine in plain text and doesn't work over ssl -- even though the command-line ldap tools work fine on the same computer. Argh.

The Governor has released his budget projections. The University has taken a $27 million dollar cut from this year's budget -- this year, that's already half-over. Next year isn't going to be any picnic. Tomorrow there is a General Faculty Meeting where the chancellor seems likely to lay out his plan. I am hopeful that Obama's economic stimulus package will help the state and the University. The University has been cut so much over the past ten years that there really isn't much spare to cut.