I think that Nintendo’s “Wii” should have a movie making channel in which you are the director of the movie and you may hire other people’s Mii’s from the check Mii out channel and use them as actors. You can choose all sorts of different backgrounds from all sorts of different scenes in different movies and you can write a script and choose vehicles and make robot animals and aliens and things that couldn’t be filled by the parts of the Mii.

You can make animated movies in which the Miis are smaller or funnier, or 2-D or 3-D movies or 4-D plays. You can make movies about anything, as in ANYTHING.

Thank-you, thank you very much!

One of the truly great things about WordPress is the depth and quality of its development community. Even without knowing how to program, a blog author can spend an hour searching for plug-ins and themes and be within an FTP of dramatically changing her web site. I have been amazed every time I conduct one of these scans for existing themes how wonderful the selections are. We arrived at this one—Clean [Bluehaze] (v0.6), designed by Arpit Jacob—as the foundation for our new look.

The visuals and functionality will likely still change over the next few weeks, but we wanted to do something about problems people were having viewing some of our pages through Internet Explorer. Our hope is that those errors have now disappeared, and we can move forward with customization a few edits at a time.

Our previous theme lasted a year longer than desired, as we failed to change in last winter due to a computer crash ("R.I.P. Mac Hard Drive"). There are a few more pieces we will try to salvage from that design.

BlogSchmog, as the site looked for most of 2006 and 2007.

That was a blow, to my ego and pocketbook. It made the decision to attend Indiana’s School of Informatics a much more poignant one. We were no financial wizards with a nice salary, but to attempt a full courseload while caring for two small boys on an assistantship and spare change was a tall order. Loans saved our butt in the winter, and a government tax refund just helped us cut loose the noose this week. Still, it is one more year of the same. Worse, probably, since there is no meager savings to use in this second year.

So what now?

IU has a new PhD program, the first in the country for Informatics. Having loved the extreme mental and philosophical makeover that was Year One, I’d be all too happy to extend the process through the rest of the decade. There’s plenty of academic project work I could explore, beginning with my capstone thesis ideas — empathic political discussion, use of non-human actors in video prototyping, using technology to boost athletic attendance, designing a research wizard for the university, to name a few. It would also entrench me in Bloomington for the next few years, at least, without committing me to a long career in academia. However, the idea of one more year of rubber checks and melted plastic is bad enough, let alone tacking on three more. I hate money.

I’m not thinking too much about the long-term future these days. Happy we can pay our mortgage for a few more months and maybe get the credit cards paid down a bit, I’m looking at what I can do this week. I just finished a 4-class load — WARNING: Do not try this at home! — that finished poorly, gasping at mile 25 and needing an Incomplete to overcome a failed attempt at my first real research paper. I also had to shortchange my RA work, which paid for the bulk of my tuition. So even without piling on personal research goals, parenting and home maintenance, I’m going to spend summer paying for my spring. Note the time, and you’ll see I haven’t been very good at meeting sleep goals, either.

But eventually, those big questions loom. What will my capstone be? Will I pursue a PhD? Who will employ me and make this financial investment pay off? What is it that I want to do with my life, now that it is starting again?

Stay tuned.