Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Hamlet Paper Preparation

Due Thursday, February 26th

Draft of Hamlet paper due – 3 copies: Due Monday, March 3

For your Hamlet paper, I encourage you to think small. The examination of a single speech may provide enough material for your 5-6 page paper. What does the speech reveal about the characters? The situation? The themes of the play? How do the poetic devices used in the speech enhance the meaning? You’ll probably want to steer away from the speeches we’ve covered intensively in class, unless you’re confident you can add something new to what we’ve already discovered. Alternatively, you may develop your own question about the play. For Thursday, bring some evidence that you’ve done some thinking about what your paper will be about and that you’ve reread some of the relevant sections.

In a short paragraph, identify the topic/question/idea you hope to pursue, and then do two of the three items below. (You may substitute an activity of your own design of equal effort for one of the items below:


  1. List and briefly annotate the scenes (including Act/Scene/Line numbers) that you think are most relevant to your idea or question.
  2. Write a careful analysis of a passage (15-30 lines): Download the lines, translate them into clear, modern English, and write your analysis. In your analysis, you will explain the context of the lines within the play (when and where they occur), the significance of the context (who is listening, who might be listening, the speakers’ goals, etc.), the significance of the lines to your topic, the significance of particular words, and the like.
  3. A substantial log entry in which you discuss your topic and how you might develop it. You can type this up and print it out rather than writing it in your log.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Link Aggregation/iSCSI on OpenSolaris

Setting up iSCSI on a 2008.11 OpenSolaris box. Link aggregation doesn’t play well with NWAM, so NWAM has to be disabled (svcadm disable nwam). Make sure to `svcadm enable network:physical`after NWAM is disabled, so you still have networking!

Helpful Links:


Helpful Commands

  • tail –f /var/adm/messages (for debugging)
  • devfsadm –Cv – clean up the /dev/[r]dsk directory to correctly reflect all connected disks

Monday, February 16, 2009

AP Literature (Green): Third Quarter Calendar

Important dates coming up soon:

19 February – Hamlet, Act III due
23 February – copy-ready poems for Poetry Seminar due, poetry timed writing
24 February – Hamlet, Act IV due

Edit, 5 April 2012 - I've taken down the link for the calendar since that doesn't exist here anymore.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Taylor Swift Contest

A few days ago, a contest to get a Taylor Swift concert at your high school was announced, and the contest is already quite skewed. The rules of the contest allow for web voting and for texting from Verizon phones (Verizon is the sponsor of the contest, so obviously they’re not going to allow texting from phones other than theirs).  Shortly after the contest started, the web voting crashed and even legitimate votes haven’t been counted. A student I know emailed one of the administrators of the contest, who said that the web voting would probably be back up sometime tomorrow or Tuesday. This is unfair to the public schools, as the students attending them are probably in a lower financial bracket than those going to private schools (of which the top three schools in this contest are), and thus are less likely to have unlimited texting to win the contest.

Texting prices are a whole different story. There are plenty of complaints elsewhere on the Internet, so I will not touch on them today.

Windows Live Writer for Drupal Blogs

So I guess I decided to post again. I got Windows Live Writer set up for Drupal, and it was a fairly (very) simple process. Directions on how to set it up are available here: Windows Live Writer and Drupal 6: Client Configuration. Windows Live Writer seems to be a fairly extensible program, with plenty of options for inserting media, saving, adding in tables (oh yes, I always want to add in tables), and so forth. I figure I’ll try this out for a bit (and who knows, it might cause me to start blogging) and report how it works out a month or two down the road.

I originally discovered this software a few months back when I poked around home.live.com for the things they had around there. For Microsoft in the online world, it’s a start, but they have a while to go to get people to switch to it. One neat feature is the SkyDrive, though it lacks a “drive” feature in Windows which would make it actually useable. There’s no way I’m going to upload individual files or folders to the web interface to back them up…just no…