Answering with Class
Well, Christopher beat me to the punch — I was planning to post about my schedule this fall, but he asked before I posted.
To answer the first question Christopher posed, I am taking the classes at Lindenwood. I doubt most of you have heard of it, but it is located in the middle of St. Charles, Missouri. It started its “life” as the first all girls college west of the Mississippi in the 1820's but went co-ed several decades ago and has expanded with multiple campuses, graduate programs and accelerated courses.
Now, about what I am taking this semester (in chronological order of the times I take them):
Brit Lit I: This class works its way from the middle ages to somewhere after the Renaissance. We've started out with some works of the Old English/Anglo-Saxon period. This includes poems such as the Reed, the Wanderer and the Wife's Lament. We also examined the finest case of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, Beowulf (using the translation from Seamus Heaney). Next, we will be moving on to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. I've never been able to get that excited about Chaucer, but I am hoping maybe this professor will be able to sell me on Jeffrey. This is one of two required classes of Brit Lit for the English major.
Philosophy of Religion: What could be better than spending a semester analytically studying the philosophy of Religion? I can't think of much. Anything that includes Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and the like is bound to be interesting. Best of all, this class features the professor who gets my vote for the best professor around, bar none — Dr. Alan Meyers. This class fulfills one of the needed 300 level classes of the Religion major.
Modern Poetry: This class seems to have promise. We'll spend the semester studying the great poets of the twentieth century, with some detours into the great poets of the last few hundred years as well. It is lead by another excellent professor, Dr. George Hickenlooper.
World Lit II: This isn't exactly one of the courses I'd hand pick, but its required, so that's that. Unlike other World Lit II sections, this one is going to focus a lot on eastern cultures and — since the professor has a degree in religion and philosophy — also focus on the religious aspects of the works. The literature is suppose to be from the Renaissance and onward. Some of the western works included are Hamlet and one of my personal favorites, Voltaire's Candide.
Renaissance Literature of England: If the name doesn't explain what this course is about, I'm not sure what I can say that will. Like Brit Lit and World Lit II, it will have some Shakespeare along with other greats of the Renaissance period in Britain. The professor is Dr. Ann Canale, who is an English professor, but does a lot of courses on mythology and legends of different cultures.
Classy Business
This was a busy, busy week. It takes a few weeks to arrange work so that I can accomplish it effectively while also taking a full-time load of classes (for those tuning into asisaid since last May: why am I taking classes?). Fortunately, my clients did not have too many problems this week, so that made everything a bit easier than it would have been otherwise.
The good is that the courses all look interesting. The bad news was that this week was one of the warmest of the summer and not all of the classrooms have a/c (chalk that up to nearly one hundred year old buildings). Going from an air conditioned room into one that is “enjoying” a 110 degree (F) heat index isn't much fun (that's 43 degrees celsius for my non-American friends). The actual temperature was hovering around 95 degrees for several days, but that was compounded by ninety something percent humidity each day. Yes, that's the weather Missouri is infamous for — and for good reason!
Today, I am sore. My uncle, who lived with my grandmother for most of his life has bought a condo now that my grandmother is in a nursing home, and I spent the day at the condo helping clean things up and with various other tasks needed to get the place ready for him to move in. He just closed on the place yesterday. It's a nice place — it was a display home when the complex was first built, so it has a lot of neat options that normally wouldn't be on a home in his price range.
Hopefully he can move in next weekend — I know he's looking forward to having “his own place.”
Another Busy Day
Sorry to be so scarce lately. I'm hoping to have time to respond to comments and post a meaningful blog entry tomorrow. We'll see if that happens… tomorrow.
QOTW #14: Olympics
Have you been watching the Olympics? Do you think it has been a good one? What is your favorite part?
The Olympics have been pretty good so far, I think. I'm always sad to see the gymnastics portion of it end — that's probably my favorite part of the Summer Games. I'm much more of a Winter Games person, myself, I guess. I'd comment more, but I really should call it a night. Maybe tomorrow…
Question For You, The Reader
I have a question for you, the readers of asisaid. Starting last week, I restarted ChristianSource's Bible Study. We are going through the book of Hosea at the moment. The way it works is that I post a link to that week's Bible reading (one chapter) and a few questions which I cannot promise will be particularly profound or anything like that. It also comes with the encouragement for participants to add their own questions to the discussion
Ok, so here is the question: would anyone not presently interested in being on CS be interested in participating? If so, let me know, and maybe I'll start posting the study here too.
I'm Back
I went down to Branson (although I never went into the main part of town except on the way home) for the better part of three days, arriving home late last night. It was a good — albeit short — respite from everyday commotion. I'll have to post some more about that later, right now I'm catching up on e-mail and everything else that happened while I was gone.
Help Me Keep Outlook Out!
My church's office currently has two users using Outlook, two using Outlook Express and two using Thunderbird. Our new office administrator wants to replace the Outlook Express and Thunderbird installs with more copies of Outlook… and, I think, get a server to run Exchange on. This, obviously, is the opposite direction I was hoping we'd move it — it just means more security issues, and probably more broken systems for me to repair.
So, I need your help, ASAP. Does anyone know of a good groupware solution that will provide functionality comparable to Outlook with Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Calendar? Or barring a Mozilla solution, some other Outlook alternative for Windows. What I mean is that we need shared calendars, shared address books, etc. The server can run GNU/Linux or something else, but the clients must be Windows. It must be as easy to use (or nearly as easy) as Outlook.
Is there such a solution? I don't think OpenGroupware or Kolab work with Mozilla to provide what needs to be provided, but correct me if I'm wrong. I can't imagine having to deal with a Microsoft server and a bunch of easily broken into Windows XP systems at church — that would be a mess!
Help!
GNU/Linux's Missing App for the Masses
GNU/Linux is great. But it is suffering in one area. I realized this when I started using Mac OS X and noticed that this kind of thing existed and worked well. I've now noticed it even more since I moved my mother over to GNU/Linux last week and found out she is not very pleased with this one part of GNU/Linux. What is it I am referring to? Photo organization and downloading tools!
They stink, for the most part, in GNU/Linux. Badly. Bring out the Glade Plug-ins bad. Open the windows and leave the house for a week bad.
iPhoto blasts away the competition, but fortunately, I'm not trying to get Mom moved over from a Mac. I wouldn't have even contemplated a move if she had a Mac. On a Mac things “just work.” But, she didn't use a Mac, she uses (well, used) Windows. She has a “Kodak EasyShare” camera with a camera dock, and she used Kodak's software that automatically downloads the photos and organizes them when you press a button on the camera dock. Needless to say, that software doesn't exist for GNU/Linux.
Linspire (fka Lindows) has been working on something called Lphoto and I thought perhaps that would work well. Mandrake's “dynamic” tool automatically sticks an icon on your GNOME or KDE desktop to launch gtkam or some such, but that isn't anywhere near automatic downloading and gtkam's interface is horrid at best. So, I edited the hotplug config to make Lphoto come up automatically. Kodak had made a poor clone of iPhoto, so I was hoping another poor clone of iPhoto might do the trick. Unfortunately, at least for now, Linspire's clone is worse than Kodak's. A lot worse.
But, it seemed to do the trick. Until yesterday, when I found out that it wasn't working right any longer. I went to check out my mother's computer and lo and behold, it took about 30 minutes to download 177 photos. I doubt I need to point out that such “speed” is pitiful. I tried some various ideas, including checking out flphoto (another gphoto2 based tool, like Lphoto). Flphoto, which has no relationship to Lphoto is way faster, which is bizarre since they both use gphoto2, but it has no way of keeping a list of albums together.
Finally, I've run into digikam, a program for KDE, which seems to run fine under GNOME too. It finally seems like something that is half way decent with some basic enhancement and effect tools and quick downloading. But its interface, like most KDE programs (click to read my editorial on that issue), is cluttered by too many features. Lots of features are nice, but it needs a cleaner way of displaying them, at the very least; iPhoto offers lots of functionality, but it isn't overwhelming even for a newbie. For now, I think it will work much better than any alternative I can find, but it seems amazing that no one has bothered to write a decent photo tool that mimics the iPhoto (or the Kodak Easyshare) interface and actually works right.
Well, maybe I'm being harsh on digikam. It looks like it has some nice stuff, but after one has used iPhoto it is hard to tolerate lesser programs. While Kodak's Easyshare software might not merit critical praise for its UI, my mother feels the same way about her migration from Easyshare to the abyss of Linux camera software. GNU/Linux developers really should quit developing the umpteenth Tetris clone or text editor and instead consider improving gtkam, digikam or Lphoto so that users will actually have a photo tool that the average user can deal with and everyone can enjoy without being envious of Mac OS and Windows users.
I'll post in a week or two if digikam improves the situation at all.
