Sam Harrelson

CostPerNews jumped the big 300 mark this morning (finally!).

I wish I felt like blogging there more.

I want to move everything here, but that would be a huge pain in the ass.  Hmm… what to do, what to do.

Wow.

What a crazy semester of teaching, blogging, managing programs, consulting, fixing up a house and becoming a soon-to-be dad.

Anyway, one of those is now struck from the list as the semster is over for my Religious Studies 101 class.  All the grades are turned in, all the emails are answered and all the papers are read.  It’s amazing how quickly some things end, especially when you think you have so much invested in them.

Anti-climactic.

You can relive our semester at www.harrelsonreligion.com.  We had a good time, and went out Beatles style with a half played note at the end of Her Majesty.

It has long been assumed that Herod was buried at Herodium, but decades of excavations failed to turn up the site until now. The first century historian Josephus Flavius described the tomb and Herod’s funeral procession.

King Herod ‘s tomb found, archaeologist says – CNN.com

The following short quiz consists of 4 questions and will tell you whether you are qualified to be a professional. The questions are NOT that difficult.

1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?…

A Giraffe, an Elephant, and a Refrigerator (by Jeremy Zawodny)

I was reminded of this post in the feed reader today…

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/008547.html

Basically, Zawodny says widgets are bad because they are hard to skin, they might slow your site down, they don’t pass on value to search engines, they don’t work everywhere and they are not secure.

Hogwash.  You could say that about any online platform.  Widgets break down the html static pages and even blogs to a point where it threatens our own conceptions of ease.

Just look at what the MySpace generation has done with widgets and CSS.  Sure, there are some ugly MySpace pages, but that’s the future.

Did I screw something up on CostPerNews?

I changed the theme but haven’t played with the wp-config.php file or localhost.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Nevermind… everything seems normal now.  Except the new CostPerNews design crashes IE7.  Sweet.

My favorite TV show, Lost, is ending in 2010.

That’s three more seasons.

As if that’s not sad enough (well, everything good has a definite ending… see Ze Frank’s The Show), but the final three seasons will be 16 episode seasons which will run from February to May.  That means no fall Lost shows from here on out.

I hope it sustains the audience because it’s only getting better.

From Miguel Guhlin’s Around the Corner blog (one of my favorites on education and forward thinking)…

“K-12 education, as it’s structured now, prevents the use of Read/Write Web tools like wikis, blogs, and podcasts…and the ability of people to publish at will. Consider how many organizations allow their members to podcast presentations…that any organization might try to STOP people or control individuals publishing shows how quickly the paradigm has changed.”

We’ve got to get over this hump in education. Education should be cutting edge and not afraid of new technologies.  The fact that we try to restrict kids from interacting with social technologies or platforms such as Wikipedia because of teacher and administration ignorance is shameful.

I wonder what it will take to get us over this hump?

I’ve gone back and forth on how I think and feel about things like Google Reader and GMail.

At times, I’ve been the loudest and most vocal advocate for web based apps and the mobile lifestyle it enables.  However, as of late I’ve switched back to using Liferea (Linux feed reader) as my feed reader and Thunderbird as my email client.  I’ve slowly been trying to get people to email me at my samharrelson.com address (me at samharrelson.com) rather than my GMail address and all of my feed subscriptions are now on Liferea.

Similarly, I’ve stopped using the chat program Meebo as much as I have in the past in favor of GAIM and the new Pidgin (Gaim2.0).

I wonder how many other techy people plunged into the web only lifestyle and have since pulled back into non-web apps?

Heck, I’m even writing this using Drivel, which is an offline blog composer in Linux.

Just got through watching George Tenet on this week’s Meet the Press.

It’s amazing how everyone is trying to cover their behinds now that we realize what we’ve gotten ourselves into.  And, it’s sad.