But first, a brief rant:

NPR treated me this morning to a quote from our lovely not-VP, something to the effect of, "This is a war on terror, and we have learned that if we're going to win, we need a commander-in-chief, not a lawyer."

EXCUSE ME?
Am I the only person who's noticed the number of large powers fighting small guerrilla-type forces over the course of history? NO ONE wins those wars. We didn't win the American Revolution, not really. Britain got fed up and left, leaving us in a right fiscal mess with a grumpy army, and ConCon leaves me amazed that we got a country out of it.
It's even less likely that the main power wins. I can't think of a single example in which it has. Maybe parts of the Spanish Civil War. But I don't think we want to resort to that kind of shoot-anyone-who-might-be-a-red and everyone-report-their-neighbors-as-republican-sympathizers kind of control, even if we could manage to create it. And the continued presence of ETA could be seen as evidence that Franco never really "won," anyway.

If this is a war on terror - and I find that terminology problematic for all sorts of reasons - then I find myself returning to George Fox and an early description of the Quakers, "you can't kill the devil with a gun or a sword." If terror is what we're fighting, let's use tools that counteract terror. And me, I think the best one is happiness. Happy people don't blow things up. Happy, occupied, well-fed people don't leave their homes, businesses and families to join terrorist training groups.

Okay, back to homework.

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 . . . )