Sysloggin' one day at a time.
By Jim
This looks entirely too awesome! I’ve been toying with Gallery2, and obviously already have WordPress going. The combination of the two will be a lot of fun, assuming setting it up isn’t too great a headache. :)
WordPress Gallery2 – WPG2 Main Page
WPG2 is a WordPress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within WordPress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into the WordPress Sidebar and Blog entries. The current version of WPG2 is RC2, released on August 22nd, 2005.
By Jim
Just finished upgrading WordPress to 1.5.2 from 1.5 and I have to say… I must love pain. I’m sure it’d be a breeze if I didn’t have much, or any, customization. But, as you may be able to tell, I have a Freakin’ Load(tm) of them. No customizations: upgrade in 5 minutes. With all of mine (all plugins; no personally coded hacks): no less than 3-4 hours.
And, as you may also notice, the hover text that says how long ago things were posted (under the Recent Activity sidebar) is a wee-bit broken. Once you get past the first 3 or 4 items it gets sane again. I don’t feel like debugging it. :P As it is, I’m amazed I managed to get as much working as I did.
By Jim
Have I mentioned lately how awesome the Creating Passionate Users blog is, in particular how much I agree with their teaching/learning methodologies? They rock, man.
Excerpt:
Creating Passionate Users: Foo Camp: ad-hoc learning
A lot of adult learning environments (including colleges) do have scenarios in which the students/learners are asked to help evolve the course itself… including taking turns presenting some of the material, but these kinds of activities are the exception, when they should be a key component. I’ve argued with instructors for years over this–as they claim, “Students didn’t come here to be taught by other students who don’t know anything–they came here to get the facts from ME, the expert.”
Oh really? If you drill down, you’d find that most of the students/learners are there to learn. They may have been conditioned through tradition that this means the student listens (and does the occasional “lab exercise”) while the expert dispenses facts and knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly what most learners want. They want to learn.
And surprisingly little real, deep learning comes from sitting in a chair listening. Think about it… you often learn best (or at least, most memorably) when you’re suddenly thrown in the deep end of a situation where you must figure something out in order to keep going or fix a problem. We learn from doing, and we learn from interacting and discussing with others.
But we often learn best that which we have to teach.
It’s only when you have to explain something to someone else that you really find out how little you understand. And that realization motivates you and points to the right direction for getting the rest of the story.
By Jim
The article itself is interesting but I love the line I’ve excerpted below. Nothing sexist intended; I just find it humorous that “educated” people continue to view women as any less capable than men in any characteristic, psychopathic or otherwise.
Quiz: Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
…research suggests psychologists have underestimated the psychopathic propensity of women.
By Jim
I’ve been catching up on reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Book One: Quicksilver the last few weeks. During last night’s reading session there was a conversation, between two of the characters, constructing an analogy between a heart pumping blood (both in and out of itself) and certain other characters’ excessive letter-writing with each other, the implication being that the act of writing, and the writing being read, is like pumping blood to and from the vital organs. All of which led me to construct this:
Writers are the heart pumping, circulating blood through the body; their writing is the blood being circulated; the readers are the vital organs and, for that matter, the entire body.
There’s a symbiotic relationship between the blood and the body it travels throughout, including the heart (don’t get too empirical on me here); there’s an identical connection between the writer and the reader. Neither can exist without the other. (I’m not including those who write privately without reading their own work as they write it. Minority that they must be; or, genetic anomaly, to stay within the metaphor.)
It occurs to me just now that this gives new meaning to the phrase “written in blood”.
What do you think?