I've graduated from creating teacher documentation for Moodle (for non-Smithies, it's an online classroom forums-and-other-stuff program) to creating admin documentation. This means that I've lost much of the problem-solving aspect (how the heck do I phrase this enormously simple concept so that technilliterate professors who have none of the requisite knowledge can understand it?), but also has a number of upsides, including not having to phrase things so that people who don't have a clue what I'm talking about can understand me (in fact, everyone who might possibly use this probably knows more about it than I do), having crazy admin powers (mind you, I can only use them in a specific set of spaces in order to fulfill my tasks, but admin powers are like keys; it's not necessary to use them to feel happy having them), understanding a whole lot more about how Moodle works (it's pretty cool, actually), and making cmoore very happy (she said this morning that it's been kind-of freaking her out that she didn't have any kind of organized documentation about any of the things she's changed from the out-of-the-box Moodle. I agree with her that backups and documentation are a Very Good Thing).
I'm also getting further into the land of Why-is-Moodle-behaving-in-this-crazy-way-in-instance-x-but-not-instance-y, which is rather fun. I don't always know how Moodle works well enough to understand the fix (or even the basics of the resolution-category), but sometimes I do. And I have a certain talent for breaking programs/finding spots where programs are broken. I think that my methods are unconventional enough that I come at problems from angles that the programmers didn't expect and so can find holes. And I'm sure that having lots of points in Spot Check: Moodle Not Working the Way it Should is an important life skill.

( As for books . . . )

Those of you who have been reading your Smith e-mail this past week will be aware that there was supposed to have been a power outage at 5:00 this morning, with power back on at 5:30 and lots of other stuff (like internet) down throughout the day as we update to co-gen.* My alarm clock has a battery so that it doesn't reset in instances like this, and I didn't notice anything unusual this morning. Turns out, the word on the street** is that whoever was supposed to turn the power off at 5:00 this morning didn't show, and so the whole thing has been called off. And while I'm glad that there aren't going to be freaking out people on my shift this morning, there will still be freaking out people at some point in the future, and since we did all the anticipating for today, it would've been nice to just go through with it and get it over with.
Ah, its/status says that it was canceled due to a family emergency.

It is officially summer. I took my first cold shower this morning and it was marvelous.

It's been quiet today, aside from the lady who wanted to print something and couldn't because the pay-for-print computer was having problems. Either she the computer was asleep and she turned it off instead of waking it up or someone turned it off over the weekend in preparation for the power outage. Either way it won't reconnect to the Pharos server, and the lady was not happy about it. I have to say that I'm really puzzled by these people who come down to print and say that they're in the middle of class and just ran down to print something. I mean, printing doesn't take that long if everything works, but it's still longer than I'd want to step out of class for. Of course I must admit that on at least one occasion I've cut my printing pretty close too, but I managed to be in class with my paper by the time class started.

I finished The Arm of the Starfish yesterday. ( Cut for maundering about books and religion. )
Next on my reading list: A Ring of Endless Light and And Only to Deceive.

Pharos is working again. Whoot.

Em and I went canoeing yesterday, but turned back almost immediately because it was thundering ominously.

I think that's all for now.




*I would like to state that while I entirely approve of co-gen, I fully expected today to be hellish because people often don't check their e-mail/don't think ahead and then bad things happen and they freak out at the nearest person who looks to be vaguely in control of anything: probably me, since I have a shiny nametag and sit at a special desk.

**And by, "word on the street," I mean, "as I was told this morning by the chatty library lady who gives me my keys every morning and whose name I don't know and should probably ask sometime."