Stream o’ Consciousness (such as it is)

Hey, I’d like to thank everyone for the offers to help with my PHP problems! It makes me feel WAY cool to have such good friends! Dad Andersen (with some help from the esteemed Poobomber) have hammered out some code that works for me. I really appreciate it!

Kinda torqued my toes, though — not ten minutes after I uploaded a working file from Dad Andersen the server tech support people answered my e-mail from a week ago. “We just checked your site and we see you have the problem fixed. If you ever need assistance, feel free to contact us…” It upsets me because I’ve been asking tech support to help out with this for several weeks now. Not that I expect them to do my job, mind you, but all my code worked before they changed their procedures at the server level — all I needed to know was how to alter my existing code to get it to work. They MUST have dealt with this before…

Ah well, the new code works better than the old; now I just gotta go through all my other sites and make the change. I imagine it shouldn’t take more than a day or two.

Last Thursday I moderated a Leadership Siouxland class on “Arts in Siouxland.” I’ve never done anything like that before… It’s a bit nerve-wracking, at least the first time through.

We’d arranged for the class to go on a tour of a local landmark theater (it’s positively stunning) for an hour, then move to the Chesterfield (a local club that has TONS of artwork on the walls, a good-sized stage, and plenty of room for this sort of thing) for dinner, a “mini art show,” a live musician, a panel discussion, and a chance to meet one-on-one with local artists and musicians, and a live band afterwards. I was rather dismayed at the number of details and time it took for us to get everything to come together — thankfully the other two people on the planning committee were top-notch organizers.

Things that I learned moderating the panel discussion:

1. It’s always good to hold these types of things in establishments that sell booze.

2. Always include a professional comedian on the panel.

3. Oddly enough, the ONLY panelist (we had an artist, a musician, a comedian, a club owner/art buyer, critic, and Executive Director of the local Symphony) who made a full time living off art was the critic — the one who didn’t actually produce anything. Everyone else had day jobs. That surprised me.

Dagmar and I took the pup to a park yesterday. It was fun. The dog only ran away twice… But she came back twice, so it all worked out in the end.