Friday, September 4 - Sunday, September 6

HAPPY WEEKEND! You have reached the end of Week 2. The Week 2 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and the remaining Week 2 assignments are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon. If you do not finish them on Friday, you will need to make sure you finish them over the weekend.

Blog Read and Respond. As you saw last week, the blog "read and respond" assignment has a random element to it. That means some weeks you may get lots of comments, and other weeks you may just have one or two comments. You'll also see that I sometimes leave comments on the blog posts - but my participation is also very random. So, if you feel like you did not get a lot of comments in one particular week, don't worry: the power of random will work its magic, and over the course of the semester you should end up receiving just about the same number of comments that you are leaving at other people's blogs.

Labor Day: Monday, September 7, is the Labor Day holiday. Since you do not have any assignments that are due on Monday, there is no adjustment to the assignment schedule for the holiday. (There is a grace period on Monday morning for the final assignments of Week 2 - but that is a grace period, not a due date, so it is not affected by the holiday.)

Week 2 Internet assignment: Publishing webpages. I'm available via email Friday to help you with any problems you run into as you publish your first webpages. 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, in time for you to finish up the assignment over the weekend. If you put the assignment off until Sunday and run into problems, you might want to give the GoogleSites alternative a try - you might find it easier than using Composer to get your website up and running.

Storybook assignments over the weekend. If you want to receive comments from me about a Storybook assignment before the weekend, please turn it in by noon on Friday. I always do my best to read and reply on Friday afternoon to all the assignments turned in before noon. If you turn in an assignment on Friday afternoon or over the weekend, I'll be updating the list again on TUESDAY (Monday will be a holiday for me). So, on Tuesday morning, you can check the list of assignments in the Stack and you'll be able to make sure I received your assignment; I'll then start reading through the assignments in the order received to send you back comments. Please do NOT go on to the next Storybook assignment until you get comments back from me about the assignment you have turned in.

EXTRA CREDIT. I would like to encourage everybody to be doing some kind of extra credit to build up some extra points. That way if you miss some assignments in the weeks to come, you won't even have to worry about it. There are three kinds of extra credit: you can get Early Bird Extra Credit for working a week ahead (no extra work involved - just work ahead!), there is some extra credit available each week which you will see listed on the weekly assignments page (Technology Tip, Famous Last Words)... plus there are some Grammar quizzes which are available for extra credit, too. If you want to pile up a lot of extra credit at the beginning of the semester, before you get busy in your other classes, that is a great idea! The Technology Tips, in particular, are good to do at the beginning of the semester - and you will find Technology Tip extra credit every week that you can declare. So, if you do multiple technology tips, just declare them like any other work in the class - Week 2, then Week 3 and Week 4 and so on; there is a Technology Tip extra credit Declaration for every week up to Week 15.

September 6: Birthday of Robert Pirsig. Sunday, 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: