Ebates

Guess what everyone!!!!  I finally got Erin to see that there is a reason to have a blog.  You may notice the new addition to the shopping column on the right hand side.  That’s right…. ebates.  Erin stumbled onto this site while shopping on the internet (which we do A LOT of up here).  Basically how it works is you go to the site, sign up, and search for a product or store.  If it is one of the 700 stores that work with ebates.com they will track your order via a pop up window.  When you make your purchase, ebates gives you some sort of rebate.  Some are percentages others are like coupons giving you a discount.  Four times a year ebates mails you a check of your cumulative rebates.  Erin has received one check already, so it really does work.  It doesn’t cost a thing and I think Erin believes it gets you into heaven earlier.  🙂  You know how I talk about computers all the time.  Well with her is all about the savings she’s made with ebates, or the deals she has found on drugstore.com. What else happened today…..  Schools was a little crazy.  The kids were a little worse than usual.  Which is a bit frustrating.  After working with the same kids for over a year and half it gets old seeing them pull the same crap you dealt with last year.  We have kids that should be in Jr. High that are acting like they are in 2nd grade.  It’s tough when they don’t have any idea how students act in school.  So they get stuck in their little petty games. Enough negativity for the day I think.  We had an amazing sunrise this morning.  I unfortunately don’t have a digital camera, so I had to enlist Paul to go out and take a picture for me.  He did one better and used the built in pano stitcher on his canon powershot s500 (a sweet camera).

After school, I sat down with one of the Jr. High students (Sharosha) and he built the boys basketball page on the Brevig website.  He resized pictures, compressed videos, and typed up the little review.  I am hoping I can get a few kids excited about the webpage, and hopefully can get them to take over the project.  I have started to scale down the difficulty of the site.  Removing a lot of the layers I have used in the past. Wales (one of the schools in our district) just came out with a new website.  It is really nice.  Very professional looking.  They used PHP, which is way above my head.  I am intrigued by it and downloaded part of a book on how to create your own site with PHP and MYSQL.  The cool thing about sites designed using these techniques is they are database driven.  When a page loads it goes back to the server for info in each part of the page.  Giving you the opportunity to have up to the minute data on your site.  I also want to figure out how to incorporate a way for people to post feedback on topics on a site.  Stuff I need to read up on and learn how to do.  The problem is PHP and MYSQL is all done in code.  So it takes the visual part out of it.  The end result it fun, but he building process is pretty boring unless you like to look at code.

Kids don’t like HTML

Well it’s going to be interesting to see how the broadcast ends up this week.  We are getting some clips in, but we don’t have our anchors picked out yet.  So they haven’t practiced a script resulting in poor fluency when they are live.  I stayed after school yesterday pretty late getting some video editing done.  I finished up a clip about the basketball games last weekend and imported the clip our class is doing on the Tsunami in Asia.  I need to find some pictures to add into the clip.  I’m running into some difficulties with that.  I need ones that are pretty high resolution, so they don’t look pixilated on the TV. Class is going pretty well this morning.  I have 6 that showed up for SFA.  They are tired, but seem to be working pretty well.  Only mild prodding to get them going. I am trying to make the website a little easier to edit.  In all of the new pages I create, I’m going to get rid of the layers, and hopefully train in some kids to take it over.  I am having trouble getting kids interested in web design.  I’ll see if I can get someone to make the basketball page.  They should be interested in the topic.  We’ll see how it goes.