Part of today's agenda

Trying to learn TinderBox which “is a per­sonal con­tent assis­tant that helps you visu­al­ize, ana­lyze, and share your notes.” It’s very pow­er­ful, but intim­i­dat­ing as all get out. And I’m some­one who almost never gets intim­i­dated new soft­ware, at least on the Mac. Blender made my eyes glaze over, for exam­ple, although maybe if I had been doing 3D ani­ma­tion for years it would have felt comfortable.

Mark Bernstein, the author of TinderBox, is a casual friend and, while like­able, is  not some­one one can offer sug­ges­tions to, much less crit­i­cize in any way. Which is a shame, because I’m sure I could offer some con­struc­tive criticism.

At any rate, I need a bet­ter way to orga­nize my volu­mi­nous notes which are cur­rently mostly stored in iOr­ga­nize, which I highly rec­om­mend unless you wind up with Too Many Notes That Are Not Organized. iOr­ga­nize is a prod­uct I might well have writ­ten, and I wish I had it on my iPhone, since I absolutely hate the Notepad there. So, alas, Tinderbox it is.

“Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.”

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Another small emergency

One of the “fun” things about cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing edu­ca­tional web­sites is that emer­gen­cies have to be dealt with now. I man­aged to break a cou­ple of things in the math pub­lisher soft­ware men­tioned yes­ter­day, so when Larry was show­ing his stu­dents some­thing about the blog, it didn’t work, throw­ing up annoy­ing PHP mes­sages. Fortunately, it was eas­ily fixed, but Larry had to impro­vise in class while I fixed it. (And, of course, he’s more or less unreach­able while teach­ing, so I’m hop­ing that he knows that it’s fixed.)

I fell into doing edu­ca­tional soft­ware and sites because of Larry, and that was mostly a Good Thing, since it allowed me to feel like I was doing some pro bono work for a good cause. I still have hopes that things that I’ve done for Larry alone — like the blogs — will make me some money down the road, since his suc­cess with what I’ve cre­ated is a great sell­ing point, but then again I just can’t say no to Larry, so I do it even if the money is a pipe-dream.

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One of my many obligations

I main­tain a blog for Larry’s stu­dents, which means mak­ing sure that the plu­g­ins that he uses work. Since he teaches math, that means mak­ing sure that wpmath­pub­lisher, the math plu­gin works. Only occa­sion­ally it stops working.

Click to con­tinue read­ing “One of my many obligations”

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