I have had one hell of an aggravating time dealing with my website host. Couldn’t find their ass with both hands, a map, and a dumbass-to-English dictionary. That said, I’M BAAAACK! It feels great to be up and running again. I am sorry I haven’t kept up with you all very well in dealing with the mess that has been PlanetHuff.

Basically, my host decided to upgrade servers. The email they sent informing me of this wonderful event went into my junk folder, which I only check every few days. They dumped my old server literally two days after they sent the email. For cripe’s sake, I could have been on vacation! What was I supposed to do? I have been emailing back and forth trying to get them to help me out, but I don’t think they know how.

Here’s a short list of problems I encountered:

• They deleted my site. Or, I should say, they prevented me or anyone else from accessing it, though they had all my files stashed away somewhere, because they uploaded them to the site on the new server (once they set that up, which I had to tell them to do — imbeciles!) in the form of a tar.gz (compression) file.
• I had to unpack the tar.gz file and figure out (again) exactly how you’re supposed to install Movable Type, which isn’t exactly a cakewalk. That took the bulk of the time I’ve been absent.
• I thought my blog was going to have to be completely rebuilt, but it turns out my host actually put my old MySQL database into that tar.gz file, and Steve knew how to get that puppy uploaded.
• I had to do all kinds of wonky things with setting permissions for my site, but most of you probably wouldn’t know what I was talking about, nor would you care.
• My stupid server “isn’t configured to serve CSS files.” Can you believe that? I found a workaround for that issue at Webmaster World forums. It seems to be working. I can now see my CSS in Firefox, and my site looks as I intended. What do you think, Cranky? Back to normal for you, too?
• My comments weren’t working because I was an idiot and forgot to change the post URL for my comments at Junk Eater, which filters all my comments to prevent comment spam.

There were some days when the thought of working on this blog made me want to bang my head in frustration. But I did it.

I have lots to say about school…

I love my new job. The students don’t start until Monday. I was in preplanning this week. My colleagues are wonderful: kind, generous, friendly, intellectually curious and stimulating folks to be around. We have “faculty forums” where we discuss our pedagogical ideas, education, interpretation of texts. I am even beginning to learn a little bit about Judaism. My colleagues are all very open and will answer any questions I have, no matter how silly or obvious it might seem someone raised with a knowledge of Judaism. Everyone introduced themselves to me on their own. They welcomed me to the school. In fact, Lys, who teaches Spanish and coaches, introduced himself and added, “Welcome home.” And that is how it truly feels — like home. Everyone is so extremely nice. It’s hard to really put into words. I have never felt so welcome. I told Sim, the head of the school, how I felt: that I felt like I was already such a part of the family. He said, “Well, you are.” But I had to tell him I hadn’t ever felt like that anywhere else I had worked.

My biography is up at the school’s website, but I’m not sure if it is accessible to nonregistered viewers. And you all will not be able to register, so don’t try. They set it up so that only parents, students, and teachers can do that. I don’t have a picture up yet. My classes haven’t been put in by my IT yet. I plan to just use that space for keeping my students updated, so I’m ditching the blog I got at School Blogs. It was kind of hard to use, anyway.

I’m so incredibly happy to be working there. I have been enjoying this week. The atmosphere at this school is so positive. It reminds me of my college experiences in many ways.

I am going to close by saying that if you look at the links in my sidebar, you will see two new ones: the first is a link under the “Links” section to Learning Movable Type, a blog by Elise Bauer. It has been helpful to me on more than one occasion recently, and she has lots of great ideas and tricks to help make using Movable Type an easier, more rewarding, and better experience. The second filed under “Reads” is a link to Steve’s newest project: Atlanta Metroblog, part of Sean Bonner’s Metroblogging. The concept, as I understand it, is to get a group of writers living in certain cities on the Metroblogging “network” to write about their cities: anything from rants about traffic to local events to sites around town. It’s a pretty nifty idea. Steve is the captain for the Atlanta-area bloggers, which basically means he slaps the other bloggers around, makes them row harder, and denies them their daily grog if they don’t.

I love y’all, and I missed you.