Working on the weekend. As many of you discovered, it is sometimes hard to squeeze assignments for this course into your busy weekday schedule. So, you might want to consider doing all your work for this course over the weekend. To do that, just finish up the Week 2 assignments this weekend, and do the Week 3 Tuesday-thru-Thursday assignments this weekend also. That way, you can take the week off, and then get back to work the next weekend, finishing up Week 3 and starting on Week 4. If you take this approach, not only will you find the workload easier to manage, you can get Early Bird extra credit for working ahead.
Week 2 Internet assignment: Publishing webpages. As I mentioned in Thursday's announcements, it's a good idea to give yourself plenty of time when publishing your first webpages for this class, especially if you have never published a webpage in your OU webspace before. I'm available via email Friday to help you with any problems you run into. Over the weekend, I am not as quick to answer email - so please make sure you get started on that assignment on Saturday at the latest. That way, if you run into trouble, you can contact me on Saturday and there will be time for me to send you a reply on Sunday. I can't guarantee that I'll answer emails the same day on the weekend, but if you send me a question on Saturday, I'll definitely get back to you early on Sunday, which will still give you plenty of time to finish the assignment.
Refund reminder: Monday is the last day. For those of you who are still deciding whether or not you want to stay in the class, Monday is when you need to make that decision. You can still drop on Monday and get a full refund. After Monday, you can drop the class with a W on your transcript, but the university will be keeping your money.
September 6: Birthday of Robert Pirsig. Saturday, September 6, marks the birthday of Robert Pirsig, who was born in 1928 and who is still with us today: Happy birthday, Robert Pirsig! For those of you who have not already had your lives changed by his amazing book, Pirsig is the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I first read this book when I was 16 years old and I've read it again pretty much every year or every other year since then - let's say twenty times or so. I just finished reading it again two weeks ago, as a matter of fact. You can learn more about Pirsig in this Wikipedia article - and truly, if you are interested in life itself (and who is not interested in life, eh?), then I recommend that you give this book a try. It's the only book I don't think I will ever catch up with - every time I come back to it, it seems a little more far out, in the best sense of that phrase, and I keep running right on after it, learning new things every time. The novel itself is about a motorcycle journey that Pirsig took across the country in 1968 together with his young son, Chris - here's a picture from the trip showing the two of them on the bike:
