I've entered approximately 105 books of our library so far. As I noted below, my goal is to enter around 30-35 books per day. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 books (just a guess). My office has seven more 35 book shelves to go, representing 21-28 shelf feet of books. The living room has another 40-50 books. Then there's the basement. I'm dreading the basement books, some of which are shelved, but many of which are just piled about.
*sigh*
Here's a random sampling of the library:
I began using LibraryThing to catalogue my personal library today. I'm not sure how many books I actually have, or even what all of them are, and this seems a decent solution to the problem. Today I added just those items that came close to hand (i.e. they were on the desk next to the computer). The widget shows the five most recent additions.
The current Serenity/Firefly rumor mill says that there may be a Serenity sequel in the works as a Sci-Fi Channel original deal. If it's done along the lines of the Battlestar Galactica mini-series, it might work. Of course, if it goes the route of Anaconda or Chupacabra, it very well could be worse than no new sequals at all.
Joss Whedon's folks are denying it all, of course...
This semester was downright crazy.
Taking two classes for a second Master's Degree, teaching two sections of Western Civ 1, working full time, and caring for H after her hip surgeries may have been asking a bit much. The stress involved in trying to do it all well (and only partially succeeding) nearly drove me insane. I know it made me unbearable to live with.
The end result of the semester: a 3.5 GPA at FSU, a grade challenge from a student who thought she deserved an "A" instead of a "B", a mostly successful quarter at work, and the feeling that I didn't quite do any of it as well as it should have been.
Oh, and H felt neglected and lonely because I spent so much time doing homework - a feeling made worse because she was stuck at home all day because she couldn't drive. I probably could have handled this a bit differently.
*sigh*
As always, this semester brought new challenges on the teaching front. Each class had its own unique personality. Class "A" was full of whiners - most of them did ok in the course - but they just didn't want to do the work. They felt that it was too much (4 posts per week), didn't like the timing of the work (why do I have to post on different days, why do I have to do work during the week/weekend), or that other students were being too complete in their submissions (like I'm going to tell them to only answer part of a question).
Some of the Class A students had some interesting views on the material, though. One student, of Norse background, felt the Vikings were portrayed in a biased manner because a lot of our textbook's information came from the victims of Viking attacks (who were literate), not the Vikings (who wrote on stone, when literate). I directed her toward some accounts of the infamous "blood eagle", and asked if maybe the people who feared the Vikings had a point, despite the Vikings contributions to exploration and navigation...
Another interesting student continually claimed that people adopted Christianity because it allowed them to be "free" in their religious practice. This was a high school student living in a rural area, and he was quite... devout (or maybe fervent). I realize that we did spend some time discussing the idea that Roman religious practices were more rigorous than Greek practices, but it doesn't make most of the places we studied look like theocracies. Maybe the whole bit about Alexander the Great ordering people to "vote him a God" had something to do with it.
Anyway, for much of the semester, even when we were discussing episodes of religious intolerance from official Christianity (the Roman Catholic Church and state-sponsored Churches), this student maintained that early Christians adopted Christianity not because of the message of salvation and eternal life inherent in Pauline Christianity, but because that way they could be "free".
I'm still at a loss.
The only "interesting" student in Class B steadfastly refused to purchase the correct textbook until just before the final exam. Why? She got the one used by her community college, which left out key concepts like the Doctrine of Pauline Supremacy, because she could just pay for it out of her financial aid. She only bought the actual course text because I informed her that citing her alterbate text would negatively impact her Final Exam grade (The Final is essay-based, and allows the students to refer to their textbooks and the curse discussion sessions. It also requires that they use inline citations).
At least there was no plagiarism this term - a few examples of problems with quotation marks, but no actual plagiarism (that I caught). I'm hoping this was because I forced them all to do an exercise on identifying and avoiding plagiarism this semester.
More to follow....
It's official, Joss Whedon declared Firefly dead, saying that it is just too hard a sell. The $25 million demoestic box office probably didn't help much, but a lot of that can be blamed on Whedon's reliance on viral marketing and Universal's decision not to treat it like a blockbuster. Did they really think they could make money with so little advertising up front?
Of course, there us some dispute as to what Joss actually meant by the word "closure"
BTW, go by the new Serenity DVD, whch may help convince the powers that be that a new movie would be economically feasible.
Ohio moves toward totalitarianism by requiring everyone to carry identification, and approving arrests in public places for no reason...
So, now you can expect a visit from Homeland Security for reading long dead political manifestos. What's next?
BTW, I haven't heard of anti-American Maoist, Stalinist, terrorism in a long time.
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12-05/12-17-05/a09lo650.htm
