Justus’s Faculty Blog

Reprinted here for your amusement is the spammy email I just sent out reminding people of a looming deadline:

Hello, friends of Building 45!

For the spring issue of Building 45 (Chemeketa’s online literary/arts publication), we’re soliciting submissions for what we like to call a “contest.” Don’t worry: you’re not in danger of winning anything.

Anyone* can enter, and the rules are simple.

In 100 words or fewer, simply respond to the following question:

“Who cares?”

That’s it. To submit your entry, visit our Who Cares Submission web page.

The deadline for submissions is May 3, 2009.

Also, for those who are interested in passing the information along to students, the deadline for regular submissions to the spring issue of Building 45 is May 3, 2009. You can find our regular submission guidelines here.

As always, we’re looking for poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, video, music, art, photography, and anything else that can be digitally reproduced and accessed via the magic of the InterWebs.

And, as always again, you can view our winter issue here.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Justus Ballard
Managing Editor, Building 45

*By “anyone,” we mean students, faculty, staff, other unnamed employee categories, and any living person who may or may not be affiliated with Chemeketa Community College.

Just a reminder, folks:

The deadline for submitting to Issue 2 of Building 45 is Monday, January 26.

This has been a pretty good summer for submissions to Building 45. Which, I have to admit, is surprising. I didn’t think the submissions would be coming in until at least second week of fall term, but we’ve already got 26 of them (!).

On the one hand, I’m absolutely thrilled that you writers out there got your acts together and submitted early and often.

On the other hand, it means my extended vacation from managing editor duties is now officially over.

However! Since at this point in the summer I’m about five times as dedicated to procrastination as any student I’ve ever met, I decided to ease into things by upgrading the various WordPress installations we use behind the scenes at Building 45.

You whippersnappers out there may not realize this, but in the olden days of yore, upgrading a single WordPress installation could take upwards of an hour… and upgrading four installations, well, that was a solid day’s “work.” (And by “work,” I obviously mean “checking MySpace and eBay for four hours while occasionally clicking the “Next” button on the installer and waiting for files to download and upload. And yes, those were all billable hours.)

These days, WordPress has a fancy “Automatic Upgrade” plug-in, which means I just spent 15 whole minutes doing everything that needed to be done.

I just wasted ten more minutes blogging about the process… and now I’ve got nothing. I could check my FaceBook profile and pretend that my computer is doing something productive in the background, but I’m kind of out of practice at that sort of self-deception. So I guess it’s time to get to work.

Stupid efficiency-boosting technological advances…

For those of you who missed the Books section in the Sunday, June 22 edition of the Statesman Journal (or for those of you who didn’t miss it but want to relive the magic of the experience), the Building 45 write-up featuring an interview with me, the World’s Most Famous Managing Editor of an Online Community College Literary Journal, is available online at the NW BiblioBlog.

And yes, I meant to post about this way back in June, but… I didn’t.