bavaweekly: 12-21-2021

Christmas in Trento

At this point, three weeks in, I’m finding these weekly reflection posts essential. It’s literally 30 minutes of reflecting and capturing the weeks work, another 30 uploading and organizing images, and then writing the post, which has been sketched out beforehand with pen and pad.  It’s awesome, I highly recommend it, thanks again for the inspiration D’Arcy!

Happy Duke!

Reclaim Hosting

  • This week we had an All Hands Meeting adroitly led by Lauren Hanks, and it was really cool to see everyone together and how much Reclaim has grown. We are focusing on community outreach and professional development for Reclaim Cloud in 2022, amongst other things, and having everyone together already spawned new ideas like inter-division working groups as a way at professional development with very focused projects.

Reclaim Hosting All Hands Meeting December 2021

  • As evidenced from the slide above the 2022 Reclaim Round-Up (our name, thanks to Pilot, for the monthly newsletter) is a topic of conversation. We are thinking it might be fun to use the open source blogging-cum-newsletter app Ghost for this as yet another way to highlight open source apps in Reclaim Cloud. Absolutely thrilled Pilot has been running with this project out of the gate, and we just spun up a fresh version of Ghost on Reclaim Cloud that has all their recent features, so we are thrilled.

  • Taylor has got his first community chat schedule for January 12th, 2022, Reclaim’s first official event in the New Year. He’ll be focusing on building a showcase site for Domain of One’s Own schools to highlight work from their community, you can read more about it  here, and/or sign-up using this link: https://forms.gle/dkHo8ZzwvQJNHXnC6. In fact, Taylor, Pilot, and I just got off a call with UT Austin that highlighted that our emerging instructional technology group has an almost instant niche for our newest partners when it comes to highlighting possibilities and digger deeper on framing their work for their specific context. I am fired up!
  • Much of the previous week has been closing out Reclaim’s books, which means talking to the accountant and wrapping my head around numbers and projecting for the year to come. I have mentioned it before, but I do enjoy this stuff in part for its complexity, which was compounded this year with additional moving parts from Reclaim Arcade which has been fully operational since January 2021, but more on that next week.

bavacade

Stargate Exploding with Colors

  • I held off on installing the multi-game Gyruss mod until next Sunday given I want to avoid suffering disappointment in the days leading up to Christmas. I feel projects gone wrong deep in my stomach, it is literally painful.
  • Still need to get in touch with local tech to figure out the Asterock issue and Astro Invader power issue on marquee, so still a work in progress

Streaming

  • The ALT Winter Conference KaraOERoke session was a blast. I wrote about it on the bava already, and was inspired by the session to get a third monitor for our next event, which I believe will be January 21, 2022. You better book Chahira and I fast given we are in hot demand 🙂

  • Thinking of Karaoke, I’m still planning to do something more regular in the New Year for anyone interested, and one idea I had was ALT Karaoke, meaning singing songs no one really know, like Unwound’s “Dragnalus” or Ty Segall’s “My Lady’s on Fire” —just a thought…

Reading/Watching/Listening

  • Saw Don’t Look Up! in the theaters, we are too close to everything happening in it to laugh just yet.
  • My oldest was reading Kafka’s The Trial in Italian for school, so I returned to it as well given his enthusiasm reminded my how much I loved Kafka in my 20s. Returning was bitter sweet given he is still so awesome, but the soul crushing sense of the world hits even harder as you age. Like a dog….
  • Into season 5 of Better Call Saul, ready for it to end, but I have to see it through.
  • Watched both Four Christmases and Die Hard with the family, candy never tasted so good!
  • Listened to a lot of ds106radio while blogging this week thanks to Nigel broadcasting from the South Pacific. His sets were personal and on point as always, he is a perennial DJ for sure.
  • Missed the Sunday Special given I was out for dinner with family, but will need to hit the archives and listen to both that show and the aftermath with Jon Fulton and Brian Lamb. ds106radio is the gift that keeps on giving.
  • Read an interesting article in the New York Times about the anti-vaccination mentality in Alto Adige, that is the German-speaking Italian region just north of Trentino, and their proximity to Austria and general distrust of Italy’s government offers and interesting scenario. The article mentions an earlier historical anti-inoculation protest in the 19th century with concerns amongst Catholics that the shots were injecting Protestantism in their veins:

In the beginning of the 19th century, after conquering the area [Alto Adige], Napoleon annexed it and attached it to Bavaria, which in 1807 mandated smallpox vaccinations for its subjects. In 1809, the people of the region rose up in armed revolt in part against vaccination, which they thought injected Protestantism into their Catholic veins. To spread the alarm, they lit bonfires throughout the area.

  • I bought the French noir novel Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos thanks to Paul Bond’s recommendation from last week’s reflection, so thanks Paul! Will be arriving tomorrow, and will be reading that and the Ray Harryhausen book over break.
  • It was Tommy’s birthday last week, and it was fun to celebrate that champion!

Personal

    • It was Tommy’s birthday last week, and it was fun to celebrate that champion!

Tommaso Birthday Boy!

  • This past week flew by. pretty much heads down work alternating with Christmas shopping and dealing with a leaky pipe in the wall—which was not fun.

  • Wasn’t able to hike/walk as much but did have fun with family during a Sunday night dinner at a favorite Pizzeria, Salesá.
  • Going to try and see the new Spider-man in English tonight, that said there has been a noticeable uptick of COVID-19 cases here in Trento and yesterday introduced a new series of restrictions and we are now “Giallo” on the color scale of COVID concern. Looks like we are on the verge of locking-down again soon, not a fan.
  • On the bright side there is the possibility we’ll have a white Christmas in Trento (or at least the surrounding mountains will have a fresh coat).
  • At this point it’s Christmas or bust, and I’m loving that! One more of these weekly updates before 2022, and the last one this year will be mostly reflective and speculative given I hope to accomplish very little between now and next week. Happy holidays!
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2 Responses to bavaweekly: 12-21-2021

  1. Lauren Hanks says:

    Loving this series, Jim! Perhaps I’m becoming inspired to follow suit. Happy holidays!

    • Reverend says:

      Thanks Lauren, and I am definitely finding these useful, and I am already hooked. I keep notes in a notebook throughout the week, and then spend an hour or so organizing them and uploading images, after that the writing is easy. I think the best part of this is the annual archive of where I am at any given week with work, thinking through ideas, etc. I know my posts go down rabbit holes very few folks other than me enjoy, so this is a way to keep things moving and work on keeping my writing succinct and highlight -driven. I kinda like the challenge this kind of writing represents for me cause I am often writing without any sense of a clear beginning or end, but these posts are so neatly defined from the outset it makes it that much easier.

      And happy holidays to you too!

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