Mitraillette des retrouvailles, aka most rambly post ever in which I dare you to keep track of the thought processes - I sure couldn't, obviously

I'm back... basically. For now. Hopefully for good but no promises yet.

"Retrouvailles" is one of my favorite French words (= reunion after a [long, generally] separation) and it's a good title for this mitraillette post which really should be called a "mitrailleuse" (= machine gun) post but I take liberties b/c I think "mitraillette" sounds better. I could call it a gauntlet post, after the idea of running the gauntlet, and/or after one of the blocking drills we used to do in karate at BG.

Again, "mitrailleuse" is much more perty.

• Firstly I must say I Truly Detest this new New Post interface on Blogger. I started to write details but my head is in that Rabbit Hole mode where it would take a 9 or 10-step outline or, better, a balloon graph to keep track of the digressions. Just trust me there are various reasons and, most important: I'm right, Blogger is wrong. :) Still, until I have time to figure out whether HOV and I are headed to another blog host, I can deal. But thanks to my own adaptability, not to Blogger.
• In general the technology gods are having a lot of fun with me lately (immediately in my head I hear the wondrous voice of Farah/Malick Bowens in Out of Africa after the lions attack the convoy, "God is happy, msabu! He plays with us.") And in general I've been dealing.
• Sometimes sanity, such as it is, is preserved because I usually refrain from panicking, like when I set up one of the tools on the New And Improved!!! Blackboard courseware and changing its default hotlinked label "Journals" to the French "Journaux" caused it to go, not to my students' Journaux assignments but, to someone else's 60 or so ASTRONOMY PowerPoints. I figured out a workaround even tho it's not as fun as the imagined version would have been. IT is still scratching their collective head on the problem (and yet, when I asked them if I would get a prize for most weird BB issue ever, they ignored me!) The MOST scary part of this issue is of course the fact that Blackboard, always deemed to be completely secure with whatever class- or student-specific details one wanted to post there, is apparently taking on a life of its own à la Dave from 2001 and soon will be growing lots and lots of new little viral links to everyone's shit from everyone else's BB courses. Fun!
• In the category of "It's not super urgent and I can just fend for myself in the meantime because I'm too fucking busy to walk to IT much less figure out what work to take for which I don't need the laptop so that they can investigate the problem and/or reload my operating system while I wait" we have the fact that the day after school started my emails to IT stopped being delivered. Honestly I don't write IT overmuch b/c well, I'M INCREDIBLY IMPATIENT, and I really can generally figure out whatever the problem is myself, 'cause I'm super smart and (OK fine) had lots of helpful workshops at Aub*rn which helped me learn to brainstorm mostly thanks to my tremendous training and the tremendous CLA IT team at Aub*rn. So the various fun things that have come up in the intervening weeks I've worked out or, on one occasion, broke down and called IT for voice to voice help. It was during that phone call that I mentioned my noticing that I hadn't gotten the auto reply IT normally sends out every time you write them. The guy on the phone suggested I send a test email and then confirmed that it indeed had not reached the IT email acct. They would need to see my computer to fix it; it was probably an OS issue and it would need to be reloaded probably. Joy.
• Other times I'm able to figure out fixes in certain cases (sometimes to my detriment and often much too complicated), my adaptability. Again good thing (in some cases) for my perhaps not Expert but certainly Knowledgeable and Innovative head where pedago-tech and/or Web2.0 stuff is concerned, my adaptability (in some other cases), my hard-won wisdom about not freaking out with GIGANTIC courseware site or webpage problems (in still other cases), and/or (in only a very few cases I swear) my ability to enter Total Denial Land and just ignore the issue until it's so urgent I have no choice but to either jump in and work it out, dammit, or (if it's really necessary) go to IT.
• Completely non-tech related - a student last week in the composition which was supposed to be a dialogue of two friends planning to go to the movies together, made the two people in her dialogue Me and George Clooney. Very fun.