Archive for March, 2005

Mar200518

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Travel Problems due to “Bad Weather”

After a fast week in Cook Minnesota spring break is coming to an end. I had better back track a bit and tell you how this whole thing got started….. Erin was scheduled to leave for home on Wednesday of last week. The day started out really nice. The sun was out, and the wind was, well normal for Brevig. At noon, it was still beautiful out. As the afternoon progressed, the clouds started to move in, and it was starting to spit some snow at us. Erin had a ticket with Bering Air. Unfortunately they didn’t have a full flight, which for Bering Air means that the weather might just be too bad to fly. The weather wasn’t bad at all, and if Bering had decided to show up things would have been great. They however canceled their flight “due to weather”. So we frantically called up Cape Smythe Air, they have an evening flight that comes into Brevig. They said they would come out to get her. Unfortunately they weren’t scheduled to be into Brevig until around 6:30 in the evening. By then the weather was questionable. The plane was on a rout from Nome to Shish, Shish to Wales, Wales to Brevig, Brevig to Teller, and Teller back to Nome. Well, they landed in Shish, decided the weather in Wales was too bad to fly in (they have some pretty crazy wind over there). So they were coming directly to Brevig. We went out to the airport, and watched the plane fly over, and leave. They decided Brevig was too bad too, and just went to Teller where they did land. The snow was blowing pretty good in Brevig, but I think the pilot could have gotten in just fine. We raced home and tried to get the pilot to wait in Teller for us, but did not succeed. So we then called up Alaska Airlines to change her ticket to the next day, and they said she could get out on either of the morning flights to Anchorage but it would cost us 50 dollars to change her ticket (they don’t honor the weather delays of the little airlines that fly in our area). So we called up Northwest, and they moved her ticket to the following day as well. They however looked along her flight plan and said the weather was questionable in Minneapolis, and changed her ticket at no charge. We then got on the phone with Cape Smyth, and booked a flight for the morning from Brevig to Nome. The next morning, the weather was much better, and she got out without any troubles. And after a couple long layovers she made it to Northern Minnesota. I was scheduled to fly out on Friday, and after seeing the troubles Erin encountered, I changed my 4:00 flight to a noon flight. I didn’t want to chance the weather turning sour on me in the afternoon. So I flew into Nome at noon, without any troubles. I then had the 10 hour layover in Nome. I tried to hop on Bering Air’s WIFI network, but they had locked it down in some fashion in the past two weeks, and I couldn’t get on. So I took a cab to the Aurora Inn. I didn’t have a room there, I just wanted to sit in their lounge area, and pick up the WIFI network from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Nome branch). So I checked my email, and surfed the web a little bit, basically killing time. I then went to the Twin Dragon for a little Chinese food. From there I headed over to the bar. I knew Jim would probably be heading their after he finished up school business in Nome. I went in, sat down and ordered a beer. Jim came by about 20 minutes later, and we visited and had another beer, and then went to Fat Freddies for a piece of pie. By then it was about 6:30 P.M. We decided to head out to the airport to wait out the rest of the time. While out there Craig showed up (the principal from Wales) and we chatted for a little while.I have to get on a plane. I’ll post more later…

Mar200507

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ASTE Part 2

Well the week is over. It has gone by really quickly. Let me recap from when I left you last….I had to shut my computer because we were starting our descent into Anchorage. We picked up our bags and Randy Fleharty met us to get our rental vehicles. I rode with Randy to the hotel. On the way he was telling me that he was running into some troubles imaging some computers that were to be used for a class the next day. I told him that I had an extra firewire cord if he needed. So after we had all checked in Randy gave me a call and asked if I could bring the cord up to his suite. So I went up there, and ended up helping him out till 4:30 A.M. As I was heading back down to my room, I noticed that the complementary news papers were already out in front of everyone’s doors. I fell asleep hoping to wake up for my alarm. At 6:15 A.M. the most obnoxious alarm I have ever heard in my life sounded off. I couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing off, and I don’t know who managed it, but one of us (Nathan my roomy for the week from Little Diomede) finally silenced it. So I got a shower in, and gathered my gear up for the class Ginger and I were about to teach. Back track for a second. When I was in Nome, I spent the majority of Friday afternoon in Bering Airs’ lobby getting things ready for the class. They have wireless internet there unlike the Alaska Airlines “terminal”. I was working on the website, as well as setting up 3 iBooks that our “students” would be using for the class. I was trying to load Live Channel Pro and iStopMotion onto the computers. iStopMotion didn’t cause me any troubles, but for some reason Live Channel Pro would crash every time I tried to launch the program. I tried everything I could think of to fix the problem, but didn’t have any luck. So I did what any other person would do. I emailed the developer of the program, who resides in Israel right now. Unfortunately it was night time there, so I didn’t get an immediate response. Flash back to 6:30 A.M Saturday the 26th. I met Ginger up in the concierge lounge, and checked my email. I had a reply. The developer had sent me a copy of the program that appeared to be the same as the one I was trying, the difference was this one worked. So we were one step closer to having a worry free presentation. Randy took Ginger and I over to Highland Tech High. That’s where all of the pre conference classes were being taught. We got our gear set up, and waited for everyone to show up. Turns out we only had 4 enroll in our class, and the ones that did enroll were tech administrators. Not exactly what Ginger and I had in mind. In hindsight we decided that the title of our class “Video in the Classroom, School, and Beyond” may have freaked out the classroom teachers we were hoping for. The class went well just the same, and I think we were able to get a couple of them thinking about the possibilities of using video conferencing in their school. So that took up most of our day. We taught from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and the time flew by. After we were done, we headed back to the hotel, and dropped off our stuff. I went out to dinner with Nathan, PK (our district computer fixer), and Carrie (a teacher from White Mountain) to the Brewhouse. It was a lot of fun. It was nice to have some restaurant food for a change. It was pretty tasty. When we got back to the hotel, we ran into Randy, John Concilus, Rebecca (Johns wife also the Special Ed director for BSSD), and a few other people. I ended up having a drink with them and talking till a little after 1:00 A.M. I then was ready to crash after having only 2 hours of sleep the night before. Sunday I headed back over to Highland Tech High, this time to take a class. I had signed up to take “The Production Suite” from Vin Capone. Vin works for apple as one of their digital media specialists. Vin had to leave for his wife’s birthday, and to teach a session down in Hawaii. So Kevin Medford another apple employee took his place. I worked with both of those guys last summer at a digital story telling camp in Denali National Park. Very cool guys. Anyway…. The class was really good, and I learned some tricks that will help me in my video editing. Poor Kevin was really sick though, and was having a hard time teaching. The next day the actual conference started. I went to the conference, and ran into Vicky Kelly, the Apple rep for Alaska. I was talking to her and she told me that Kevin was really sick, and wasn’t able to teach his class that day. He was scheduled to teach “The Production Suite” for an hour that day. She then asked if I would teach it for him. I told her that I could probably do that. So two hours later I was teaching about 25 people about Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro. I was supposed to cover Motion, but since I didn’t have it loaded on my machine, and because it doesn’t run so well on G4 machines, I just told them a little about it, and we really didn’t have any time to cover it as it was. So that class went really well. After that class was done, I was tasked with getting all the Ididamovies put onto one disc. I asked the apple people if I could use their dual 2.5 GHz G5 computer to do the editing on since it would save me a lot a of time. They figured it would be a good way to show what the computer could do, so they said that it would be okay. I went and checked out the computer to find that it didn’t have Final Cut pro on it, and no one had the install disc around. Since i had it on my computer, I put my computer in target disk mode, and plugged it into the G5. I then was able to run Final Cut Pro on the G5 off of my HD. I dropped all of the Ididamovies into final cut, and put in some titles. Since they had all been compressed when they were entered into the competition, I had to render them so Final Cut Pro could export them. Once I had everything ready to go I started the rendering process. I had over 3 hours of video to render, and it said it was going to take 16 hours. That’s when I left my computer and went back to the Hotel. Tuesday morning, I got to the conference, and Vicky told me that Kevin was still sick, and was wondering if I could teach two more classes for him. I told her that I would. Turns out that the first class I was to teach was Garage Band 2, an application I have never used before. I have used Garage Band 1 a few times, but I am pretty much musically challenged. On top of that the class was an hour long. That is a long time to talk about this app. So I did a little research, and played around with it for a little bit before the class. I was able to teach for about 47 minutes before I ran out of things to say. It went really well though. The next class was iLife 05. This is the newest version of iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, and Garage Band 2. I once again had never used the newest version. They just came out in the last month, and I hadn’t bought them yet. I had watched Steve Jobs keynote from Macworld, so I knew a lot of the cool futures of the new version. For that class I had close to 50 people. It was a lot of fun, and it sounds like most of the attendees learned some things.We flew back to Nome the next morning, and ended up being weathered out of Brevig for another night. It was nice to have one more day to relax before coming back to school. I spent the weekend sleeping in and working on the Brevig Website.