Stephen Yeargin

August arrived with little fanfare, although I was surprised that I missed Al Gore launching a television network in the headlines. My take on Current TV is that it looks like VH1 or MTV before they became hyper-obsessed with reality television. I don’t see it being added to the UT Martin lineup anytime soon, however.

There’s talk this morning of how the CAFTA vote “outed Bush Democrats,” and even talk of punishing the 15 Democrats who ’sold out’ to ensure its passage. Somebody explain to me how ending tarrifs and running local manufacturing jobs dry is related to national security? In fourth grade, I gave a speech in support of NAFTA for a 4-H competition. It was convincing enough for a topic that a fourth grade shoudln’t know anything about to allow me to compete with other fourth graders in the county. No wonder there wasn’t much surprise when I went into journalism.

Sometime today, the Tennessee Kappa chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon gets a new Web site. I decided against editing the httpd.conf file and allowing our resident hosting guru do the honors. It is now the fourth public site I’ve ported over to WordPress, simply because the platform is a perfect fit for multi-contributor environments. A few of the new features include:

• Logins to the brother portal have enhanced security via SSL.
• The loading speed for the scrapbook should be infinitely faster and more reliable.
• Public guestbook supports Gravatar user icons.
• Meets all current Web standards (valid XHTML, CSS, RSS and Atom)
• A more personal, narrative dedication page to Brother Ralston is forthcoming.
• You can subscribe to chapter news via RSS or Atom feeds.
• Revamped visitors’ center (a lot of the content needed updating)
• The public guestbook should stay spam-free, thanks to stronger filters.
• Every public page can be edited without considerable design knowledge.

In other updates, I’ve posted three new albums into my photo gallery, including the 2001 trip to Beersheba Springs, Ecology Field Trip and the Young Life party. None of the captions have been written, because I can’t bring myself to admit that I have forgotten the names of so many people. The photo quality sucks just about as much as the photographer did at the time, but I blame the camera. It was a first-run line of Kodak consumer digital, long before the 5 megapixel digital SLR’s of today. I want to get some of my other design work uploaded, mostly in case this computer ever decides to die on me again.

Which reminds me, didn’t this thing have massive harddrive failure six months ago? Why is it still running?

Today’s going to be rough, but not because anything is going on. I’m going to try to correct my sleep schedule before I go home this weekend for Conclave. Settling into a pattern of going to bed at 6 a.m., waking back up at 5 p.m. isn’t going to fly for much longer. I have been unable to get over to the house in Greenfield because of a lack of gas money, and money in general. Hopefully that can be arranged later this week.

Staff training week starts in 21 days, so the time between my return to Martin after Conclave and August 22 will be spent trying to craft marching orders for the rest of the year. I still want to focus in very heavily on revamping how we gather the news. I haven’t found a lot of resources (unless you consider tired old textbooks resources for a dynamic and changing profession) on how to drive home the importance of chasing down leads, and developing sources. Both of these areas are starting to look a bit shaky with the changes in the administration and with the student body as a whole. I’m sure that would require more than a simple blog entry to fix.

Nashville drafted an 18-year old defensemen. The kid looks like he barely fills the jersey he’s wearing. This is going to be a very, very interesting season. As I was telling a friend of mine, I honestly would not be surprised if we see more 10 goal games with all the rule changes that take effect this year. Then again… rules?

The title comes from a song that brings a tear to my eye.