Category: Journal

This week seems to be shaping up as a pretty good one, possibly due to the refreshing weekend I had while attending a conference in Austin, Texas. Being my first time in Austin, I had a lot to see and managed to see a lot of it. I stayed at Brendan and Mary’s with Mary because Brendan was out of town — fortunately his trip to LA for a job and unfortunately it meant he didn’t get to hang out with me too much. But, Mary and I had a fun time lady hangout weekend. We spent most of our time with Tom and Beth and occasionally Katie who presented on the panel with the three of us.

My weekend can best be summed up by noting that all of the scholarship and museums turned my brain back on and I feel re-invigorated about the pre-starting job ideas I had for what I might do at my job. Not that I’m not invigorated, or haven’t been, but there is a certain amount of overwhelmed that one feels when she starts a new job and a few weeks ago just having a clear vision of what is going on around me was a great success.

In addition to the brain activity, I felt noticeably better when I ate Austin food. Austin is known for being a good town to live in which has to mean it’s a good town to eat in. Now, consider that I live in a place where Dairy Queen is a culinary oasis in a sea of pizza. Oi. Fried foods make me sluggish. Luckily, Austin had plenty of tofu and mexican and thai and french to keep me happy. I think my favorite meal with a crépe I had at a downtown café on my way out of town. Smoked salmon, capers, herbed boursin, heirloom tomatoes, and delicious. But the thai was also great because I require thai food to live and I currently live 55 minutes from a thai restaurant. The closest restaurant that serves thai food is in the next state! So even if I thought the pad see euw was missing the flavor of a well-aged wok char, it was still better than Dairy Queen.

Good news! Kyle got a job. On an awesome kind of coincidence, he’s taking a one year contract at Northwest Missouri State to be a full-time professor of communication. It just so happened that he e-mailed the department chair to inquire about adjunct positions back in May when I was first invited for this job. About three days before we moved, he got a response, hearing that it was likely that they’d have something available for him. It turned out, they had a position available because a professor was possibly leaving a post. We got confirmation that the job was open and they needed Kyle to fill it this past Monday and Kyle went in to fill out paperwork the very next day. It’s so quick to adjust to him having to work, but it’s fantastic news for us and I know he’s glad to be there.

I’m still really liking Savannah, but now that I’m used to working 8 hours and then having the evening or weekends ahead of me, I’m looking for a new hobby. By which I mean, I most likely need to revive an old hobby. Or I guess I could learn to sew. But given that I knit, design websites, geek out on design, et cetera, I need something to occupy my time a little better. So far, I have been reading a little (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon) and Kyle and I have been enjoying the end of our summer tv shows, but I need something that keeps me away from a too-early bedtime.

Plus, I’m a firm believer that if your job title is the coolest thing about you, you’re doing it wrong. And my job title is “curator” so that’s a lot to compete with.

We’ve been in our new house in Savannah for exactly two weeks today, and I’ve been making appearances as an official employee of my museum for two weeks tomorrow! I think we’re settling in pretty well. I really like my job a lot. I still feel like I spend most of my day running around trying to find the time to get something done, but things should be calming down a lot now because my high school and middle school volunteers are going back to school and I’ll only have the high school volunteer in on Wednesdays after school beginning this week. Hopefully, I’ll have some time to get things sorted out and start feeling like I’m working and contributing to the museum more than usual.

The good news is that I feel pretty qualified to be working this job. So far, all of the many many many future tasks of the new curator that have been thrown at me seem manageable and like something I’m really capable of doing. But, it’s still a little overwhelming. There is so much to do that I can’t quite always figure out where to start. It seems pretty clear that the museum’s theory of collections for the last little while has been to tell people that we don’t have a curator and so the donor should wait until their was a curator. Sound advice, but now I’m flooded with donations. That hypothetical in grad school where “someone walks into a museum with a box” is my every single day. I’m hoping that slows down for a while until I get a collections management policy written. Gracious.

In other news, the dog I posted about in the last entry was kept at the vet’s office and adopted a few days before we moved! She’s living a good life out in Matador, Texas!

Now that I have a job, we’re on the hunt for a house. They want me to start at the museum during the week of August 9, and our apartment complex wants us to get out of our place here by August 7, so it seems pretty perfect to get moving as soon as possible. As it turns out, house hunting is not all it’s cracked up to be. Too many factors make it difficult for us to find exactly what we want and we’re on such a short time frame that it’s even more stressful.

We want to live in the county where I will work, if at all possible. Unfortunately, this seems to be pretty close to impossible. No one is willing to rent to us in the county with our dog, and besides that, all of the rental properties are apartments without yards and we are definitely looking for a house to live in. Though that stipulation doesn’t seem to matter much at all because not even the apartment complexes will take our pets. We’re also interested in possibly buying, but it will take us more than a few days to get financing together (plus, we would like to see a place before we buy it) and we need to move in August 9. So, we’d ideally like to be able to rent something month-to-month and it would be even better if we could do a super short-term rent to own where we start going on buying a month or two after we move in.

We do have a couple almost-promising leads, so hopefully very quickly I will have some good news and can start day-dreaming about furniture arrangement and interior decorating instead of worrying we’ll be technically homeless come a month from now.

On Wednesday, I decided that it would be a good idea to buy the new MacHeist NanoBundle. I am now the proud owner of licenses to MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, Flow, CoverScout, Tales of Monkey Island, RapidWeaver, Airburst Extreme, Tracks, Burning Monkey Solitaire, and Tweetie. So far, I’ve installed and played around with everything except for Tales of Monkey Island, Airburst Extreme, and Burning Monkey Solitaire. I also already used the freeware version of Tweetie, I mostly just want the license because it provides beta access to the 2.0. I’m interested in the 2.0 because I really hate Twitteriffic (basically because its not skinnable) but I want a twitter app that will nest in my menu bar.

Last night, I spent most of my evening configuring MacJournal to work with WordPress. It was quite the adventure and MacJournal’s documentation for how to configure for WordPress if their automatic configuration doesn’t work is very lacking. Plus, it was only within the last two years or so that WordPress added its unique (i.e., modified MovableType version) API for XML-RPC support so a lot of the blog entries that document the process of troubleshooting if the auto-config doesn’t work are still based on the MovableType API setup in MacJournal. It doesn’t actually make that big of a difference, but it’s enough of one that all of the troubleshooting was complicated.

Here is how the process worked. The first time I attempted to set up I got an NSXMLParserErrorDomain Error 5. This error means that MacJournal is having difficulty reaching the XML-RPC to run the command. After a little bit of research, I discovered that the problem was not totally a flaw in MacJournal or WordPress but rather a problem with the PHP configuration on my server space. To fix this, I edited php.ini with the help of .htaccess in my WordPress folder. I changed the Maximum Script Input time from 60 to 600. Kind of a dramatic change, but I’m glad that I now know how to make this edit with Geek Storage. To do this with GeekStorage, you have to add the line “php_value max_input_time 600” to either the .htaccess file in your public_html folder or in the directory that contains WordPress. When you add this line, it applies to all of the subdirectories in that directory as well.

After editing .htaccess, the error changed to NSXMLParserErrorDomain Error 64. Error 64 indicates that there is some foreign code in the xmlrpc.php file that allows remote posting. Specifically, the code is appearing before the XML signifier at the beginning of the document. There is another code (Error 63, I believe) that indicates that there is code interfering with the script somewhere more random in the document. The process for fixing either error is the same. Also, some WordPress for iPhone users experienced this problem prior to the 2.0 update. Therefore, there is more existing documentation that explains how to troubleshoot this through WordPress. The process is fairly simple: revert to a default WordPress theme and then deactivate all of your plug-ins until you no longer get the error. This seems pretty daunting, but if you go through and deactivate things one by one, you’re more likely to figure out exactly what the problem is. And, in my case, disabling the theme I designed for WordPress fixed the problem. If it does happen to be the theme that is causing the problem, generally the problem is in the functions.php file. In my case, I realized that I registered a sidebar that I no longer used on any layout. When I deleted that function, all of the errors went away.

Configuring MacJournal really was a pain. It took hours to sort through all of the error messages and track down documentation that was related to the problem. Also, MacJournal’s documentation is unclear as to what directory you need to point to if you are running a remote installation of WordPress and have it installed in a subdirectory. I’m glad I finally got it installed and I hope it turns out to be worth all of the trouble.