Neither Grading NOR Teaching

Saturday, I didn't feel so hot so I didn't go to Pittsburgh as per usual...and spent a good part of the evening grading papers so I wouldn't have to worry about it Sunday.

Then, seventeen students sent me late stuff that HAD to be done by today. So I spent all of Sunday grading, like, a hundred freakin' papers.

Guess what I get to face today and tomorrow?

....Christ, I hate the last week of class. Anyway, here's a brief breather before I go right back to the grind:

Name 5 of life's simple pleasures that you like most, then pick 5 people to do the same. Try to be original and creative and not to use things that someone else has already used. Tag 5 people on your list.

1. Sleeping with my warm fuzzy cat on a cold night
2. Reading about cool techy/sciencey stuff
3. Chocolate cookies with peanut-butter chips (SO GOOD)
4. Having a good, long scratch (my skin is always dry and itchy, and nothing feels as good as scratching)
5. The feeling of flexible, warm well-being that briefly descends when the Vicodin takes away the eternal soreness and lets me feel young and healthy for a few hours.

A dingo rat ate my baby!

Better watch out for 'em if you're in Belfast, Ireland.

They're big as cats and they FEAR NO MAN!

To all my G's in Ireland...if anyone can catch a few of these beasts and send 'em to me here in the States, I'll be grateful. I plan to let them loose on several of my writing classes.

I must see this movie.

Never Been Thawed.

It's a movie about "frozen-entree enthusiasts" who collection TV dinners, play in a Christian punk-rock band called The Christers (for money, not because they believe in that shit), and just generally do completely retarded things.

It's like Napoleon Dynamite--truly a classic--only dumber!

ProtoPage!

OK, I have to take a break from the fucking grading to write about the coolest goddamned thing I've discovered on the Web in ages. Cooler than that archive of Bea Arthur pr0n, you ask? Yes. Cooler than that bottomless collection of animated flaming skull and dancing hamster GIFs? Yes. Cooler than SomethingAwful.com and Wikipedia combined?! YES!

ProtoPage.

ProtoPage is basically a highly configurable virtual desktop that is completely web-based, accessible from anywhere, and completely fucking awesome. You can begin making a page for yourself without registering an account first, so you can try it out all you like, and then sign up in order to store your configurations and stuff if you dig it. I dug it within ten seconds of playing around with it. It's free as a motherfucker, too.

When you set up a ProtoPage, here's what you'll see: a "desktop" with several varicolored "panels" arranged on it, a config bar in the lower left (along with a registration link if you want to go ahead and create a free account for yourself), a date block in the upper right, and a name block in the upper left so you can name it whatever you like--mine's called The Pegritz Zone, (un)creatively enough. The panels can be collections of links, a collection of quick-search buttons, RSS aggregators, or just sticky notes where you can scribble reminders to yourself and so forth. Within a few seconds of experimenting, you'll be ready to go. And don't worry about filling up one entire page: you can always make more "desktops" to pin notes to, etc., and decide whether they will be public--viewable to all--or private. Right now, the Pegritz Zone is entirely private, but I will, of course, create public pages as guides to all things Pegritzian, teaching aids for my writing courses, and just assorted stuff that I'd like to share conveniently with friends. Dig? So that means get your own.

The Pegritz Zone currently contains a number of simple panels: a collection of quick links to pages I'm always going to, like LJ, Gmail, Hot Naked Ukrainian Grandmothers, and Kitty Time New; the standard Quick Search panel with redundant links to Google, Wikipedia, etc., a few notes to myself to remind me to hand in grades and so forth, and an News aggregator that collects RSS feeds from CNN, Techdirt, and a few others. The RSS aggregator is completely redundant, since I use Bloglines exclusively for that, but it's good to have around anyway just to keep up on major headlines without going to a different Firefox tab. Basically, it lets me clump a bunch of different functions together onto ONE PAGE in ONE TAB that I can always glance back to whenever needed. No more sticky notes and assorted other shit clumping up my regular desktop; here it's all centralized in one browser tab. And best of all: you can access your page from any terminal with a browser on it!

Now, be advised: I wouldn't go around scribbling personal info and whatnot on these pages--you can set privacy options, but considering that the pages are held on a remote server, it only makes sense to be wary of that...at least, if you're security conscious. And always remember to keep local backups of notes in a text file or something. But, hell, as far as organizing basic To Do lists and collecting links and whatnot, it's FUCKING BRILLIANT. Holy CHRIST is this thing handy!

And by the way, Google Calendar will probably be going live tomorrow as well. With ProtoPage and Gtalkr.com, a web-based Google Talk front-end, I'm doing away with a LOT of software installed on my computer and using these free web-based equivalents. It lets me organize everything into my second-most-used window of them all--my browser (which, incidentally, is Firefox 1.5, the Browser of the Gods)--and allows me access from anyplace with a web terminal.

Distributed-intelligence Pegritz is on its way. I believe I may actually see an incremental version number increase coming along. 2006 may be the year Pegritz 1.2 actually comes out of beta, FINALLY.