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Lots of grading this weekend, but I’m almost through it now. Just in time, too, since I have a couple projects that are otherwise on my mind. I’d much rather be working on them, I’m afraid!

One of my colleagues brought this story to my attention today:

GENEVA – A well-known prostitute who campaigned for the rights and dignity of sex workers was given an honored place of rest on Monday, in the same cemetery where Protestantism’s John Calvin is buried…

Apparently, this high honor is causing no small amount of angst amidst some very conservative folks in Switzerland.

Terrific basketball game tonight: an overtime win over Appalachian State. The crowd was in good form, and I even caught a t-shirt thrown into the crowd.

I promptly tossed it to a kid sitting nearby.

I just found out that I have a LiveJournal feed thanks to that writer/programmer/wunderkind Eric James Stone. So anyone who wanted to read via LJ and didn’t already know about it, here you go:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/mikelivingston2/

Thanks, Eric!

One of my first orders of business after returning to Charleston from cold but beautiful Colorado was to craft up some syllabi for the new term. I’m happy to say they’re done as of two minutes ago. I’m teaching Composition and Literature II (again), but more exciting is my upper-division Chaucer class (always awesome) and an Honors course on Tolkien.

The latter is something I’ve lobbied to have taught here at The Citadel, since I so enjoyed teaching it at Rochester. Here’s hoping it goes as well here as it did there!

The finish line is in sight, though. Just a few more days until their all in and we’re jetting off to Colorado for a week or so with family. I can’t wait, though it’ll be strange to need a coat to go outside. It’s currently 57 here.

Yesterday was my last actual set of class meetings. We’ve still got finals yet to go — so the grading is far from over — but at least the class-time is down. As usual, I really enjoyed the teaching and the students especially, but I’m glad for the break. Just wish it was longer!

The new computer is up and running, and I’m quite pleased with it so far. Fast and silent and small. That’s a good combination right there.

Vista has some interesting quirks, but I’m liking it overall. I installed Word 2003 so as not to fiddle with the horrid redesign of 2007. Most “old” programs are working like champs. In fact, the only really bad issues were with the installation of Vista itself, which locked-up in mid-install and wouldn’t let anything happen when it rebooted, instead giving me a blank, black screen of death. Quite strange. Via the internet, though, I came across some terrific guidelines on how to fix the problem by some kind geeks. I was able to solve the problems, therefore, but I must say that I’m disappointed that a clean install on a brand-new machine forced me to go into the BIOS to temporarily whack things to get into a DOS device manager to temporarily whack all the video drivers so that Windows could finish its install. Luckily I still know how to do these sorts of things given some rudimentary guidelines, but how many people can say the same? Not enough to warrant the existence of the errors, I suspect.

Microsoft’s help, naturally, was of no real help in solving what seems to be a common problem.

Anyway, the computer is working. I’m pleased. Now if I could just finish all the grading…