This is almost as bad as William Hung's Vegas show (the lucrative deal that he was offered but turned down because he had better offers from other people).

I'm dying to read it; I just have to make the time to do it, really:

...or is it "Oops, I Did It Again" in fugue? Anyway, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! If he'd worn a lab coat, it would have had a cool hint of the Dharma Initiative orientation video about it, but it's still masterful.

...on the internets! Lesson 1, lesson 2, lesson 3.

Vote for your favorite science cartoon in Science Idol: the Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest. Here's my favorite:

And this one gets an honorable mention despite the somewhat heavy-handed pun. You can probably guess why.

It went without too many hitches, but I've decided to hold off a while on a new site design. As you can see, you can now browse my archives by date, and you can see a tagcloud generated from my categories. You can get a printer-friendly version of every post, and those are COOL; it keeps track of where the links are and where they go. The things I haven't been able to get going yet are:

The pathauto module. On Kairosnews, for example, the URL of each post is generated from the title, like so: http://www.kairosnews.org/microsoft-forces-changes-to-higher-ed-report I've installed the module that is supposed to do this, but I don't have permission to change the settings on the module to enable it. Which leads me to my next, bigger problem...

Access control. The access control part of my admin panel is nowhere to be found. I have no idea what to do about that one, or how it happened.

I also would like to get freetagging going, like on Kairosnews where you see under each post, "tags: cccc, higher education, ncte, open source" and you can just type in words as categories when you're posting instead of selecting categories from a menu. I'm not sure which module makes that happen.

Then there's the taxonomy_image module, which, if I understand it accurately, will let me categorize posts under both words and images. But I haven't been able to get it working either; when doing test posts, I don't see categorizing the post under an image as an option.

Finally, I haven't been able to get the service_links module to work. This is the one that will enable anyone to bookmark links to any of my posts on del.icio.us and the like. I guess most people use the bookmarklets for that anyway, though.

Edited to add: Anyone notice how my posting dropped off around October 2005 and hasn't been the same since? That is, I believe, directly attributable to the job search and the mad dash to finish my dissertation. Things are going to pick back up again, however.

Jonathan is supervising the upgrade of my site to the latest version of Drupal. So when my site is switched over to a plain, default theme, and when a bunch of the stuff on my sidebars disappears, you'll know why. We'll try to get it all back, and with a new design!

As seen at Geeky Mom, New Kid, and Workbook.

Teaching:

• Make things easier on myself by speeding up my grading turnaround time (which isn't bad, but it could be better). Plus, I think I heard somewhere that student evaluations are higher the quicker the turnaround time. Anyone else heard that, or found it to be true in your own experience?
• Get lots of people lined up to observe my classes
• Keep a teaching journal so that when I write up my reflections as part of my personnel action dossier (PAD), I'll have a lot to work with
• Enjoy it! I can already tell that my students are creative and enthusiastic. I've hailed Celebrity vs. Thing before as a really clever and interesting writing exercise, and I've been wanting to use it in my writing classes for over a year now. I'm pleased to say that students have taken it and run with it, to wit: Tom Cruise vs. MySpace, Michael Jordan vs. Playstation, and Simon Cowell vs. The Alarm Clock. Ha!
• Whip up some compelling flyers for the courses I'm teaching next semester, which include (unless something changes) an undergraduate introduction to rhetorical studies course and a graduate seminar in research ethics. I've always thought creating flyers to advertise courses was a little sad, but at the same time, I understand that the title of a course in the catalog might not describe it accurately and that a flyer is a good way to get the word out about a class.

Research:

• Send that rejected grant proposal, the one I coauthored with esteemed colleagues, the one I haven't mentioned here so you have no idea what I'm talking about, right back out after getting some good feedback and revising it
• Be aggressive about asking people to read manuscripts, proposals, etc. before I send them out (the worst they can do is say no)
• Send out two articles based on my dissertation*

Self:

• I'll go with everyone else and say "exercise," but I need to figure out a gym situation first
• Worry less about money
• Use all my stockpiles of stuff before I buy more (this means shower gels, facial cleansers, lip gloss, lotions, and hair care products), no matter how cute/good-smelling/innovative the newer stuff is
• Go out to eat less often; I don't do it much anyway, but I'd like to do it less

* Yes, they will go to PRINT journals. Also, what's a good goal here? I tried to be realistic and say that the goal is to send out two article manuscripts, and that's for the year, not the semester. Is that enough?