I’m out of my mind right now with grading. This winter term I had a flexible and effective schedule that balanced research and teaching (with service trailing a distant third). I stayed on top of my teaching and pushed out an article that is not unreadable. It has a few jokes.

And now on this last Friday of final exams I have one lower-division essay, ten upper-division essays, and a stack of lower-division final exams and I plain tired. My noodle is cooked!

As psychic defense, I surfed over to daringfireball and clicked through to an article disparaging Twitter. Daringfireball, a week or so ago, was close to jumping the shark, with Gruber seemingly letting his unconscious sexism rear its head. The form it took (paraphrased) was “women do not present at web conferences because they’re not interested.” This may be true, but what such a outloook ignores is the fact that there is gender imbalance in the world of web developers, an imbalance that is not the effect of biology. If women are not interested in conferences for web developers (which I just don’t think is the case) and there is nothing gender-biased about web development, then there is something deterring those women from participating. Ergo, sexism.

But Gruber decided not to mount the ramp, the fireball boat looping around for another approach. Now Gruber predicts Twitter will have increased its traffic a year from now while Mat Balez predicts Twitter keels over before year’s end.

I used to love daringfireball. Now, it is mostly a distraction. I’ve been using Apple-branded OSes since 1992. Post Intel, Apple is bigger than it’s ever been and for that reason annoying. Parts of the Apple machine are little more than advertising. I’m the kind of guy that would get excited if WordPerfect for Mac came back, but everything else is just sort of on hold and I don’t program for a living. So, a blog for “Mac nerdery” is not the center of my life and I’m glad Gruber is around to alert me to interesting developments. Detente.

Still, the whole Twitter thing seemed stupid to me five months ago and it seems stupid to me now, not that stupid translates into failure since some days stupid seems to be a requirement for Internet-era “success.” What gets my panties wadded is that the people who gush over Twitter also seem to think Merlin Mann is cool. If Merlin Mann is anything, cool is not one of them.

Maybe I could whip up a PERL one-liner to do my grading for me.

I love the pyschosomatic theory of the origin of disease.

I couldn’t figure out whether I had a head cold or was having an attack of hay fever. Tonight I realized that I have both.

I logged between 4 and 5 hours a sleep each a night for four nights. I ate hotel conference food and chain restaurant transfats. Two mornings, I walked a mile each way to get coffee and a pastry. Starbucks has established around the Piccadilly Inn side of CSU Fresno a network of stores, each node spaced one mile apart.

Tom, Lana, Trula, and I made dinner for us, Matt, Ellen, Jason, Monica, and Hadil.

I miss California enough to contemplate living in Fresno. I did not have any authentic Mexican. You aren’t serious about using the word “authentic,” are you?

Kathleen is fun to hang out with. Sunday, she took me to the airport.

To spend time with her, I cut out on Tom, Matt, and Ellen on Saturday night. I was sorry to miss his brother, Michael, but the upshot of that was a much-needed talk with Tom.

I miss him dearly.