Caravelle

I don't normally use Skype, but I've left it on for a few days since Buzz was suggesting that we use Skype while he was in St. Croix. We caught up with him tonight and the boys and I chatted with Buzz and Jonathan sitting outside Caravelle. That was the cottage we rented when we were there last summer. I wish I could have gone this time, but I really felt I needed to stay here and work on getting the labs in the ISB ready to go.

I've been a bit frustrated that the resources I need still aren't set up. I tried to get the server I need moved over on Monday, then Tuesday. We finally got it over there on Tuesday, but it still wasn't functional at the end of the day on Wednesday. I took a couple of pictures of wahoo making the journey. Hopefully tomorrow, it will be working and I can start doing productive work -- I really can't get much done until it's working. At this point, I might as well have gone to St. Croix and spent the week hanging out on the beach.

I don't mean to complain. The technical staff make the work I do possible. If I had to keep the servers going, I wouldn't be able to do much of anything else. I went to a meeting on Friday where representatives of different units on campus met with OIT to describe what functionality they could use in a content management system. It was striking to see that our technical support in 1996 was better than what most of them had today. And I've had 13 years to build on that. We're already better off than they'll be when they get a content management system up and running.

My next fun thing to look forward to is a trip to NYC on April 11. A group of us in Amherst is going to drive to New Haven and catch the train to NYC to spend the day with an esperantist from Rome who's visiting. We're planning to see all the sights. I mentioned at E-USA that we were planning to see the sights of Esperantujo (ie, Esperanto-land). Someone was very excited to hear about that and wanted to know what they were. I pointed out that since we were going to be in Esperantujo, all the sights would be in Esperantujo. He seemed a bit deflated by that line of reasoning and wondered why one needed to even leave home, if that were the case. I pointed out that, for whatever reason, some of the best sights in Esperantujo happened to be in NYC. It should be a lot of fun.