Fast Weekend

Well, I made it back safely from Nome.  The week went well.  I think the kids not only had fun, but learnd a lot too.  Erin and I spent the weekend relaxing and watching movies.  Last night we went over to Kim and Greg Johnson’s place for a little socializing.  It was a lot of fun.  John and Rebecca, Terry and Linda, Ted and Tonya, and Peggy were all over as well.  It was nice to visit.  Today We watched Red Eye, which was okay.  Very predictable….

Exciting news…. We were able to get our 4-Wheeler running today.  A couple weeks ago I was able to drag it out of the snow which wasn’t easy, and push it around the edge of the house where it would be in the sun most of the time.  So after pulling on it for a while today it started up.  I then went and asked Jason if I could barrow a hammer and a punch to take care of that pesky front drive shaft that had broken off.  Well, not too long thereafter Erin and I were out on a ride up the road.  We took some nifty pictures.

If you would like to take a look at some more you can find them at the new bbryson gallery.

This should be a pretty fast week.  I can’t belive how fast the year has gone.  Erin and I started reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” tonight.  I don’t know how soon we will be able to finsih it.  I head to Anchorage this weekend for an ASTE meeting, and she is planning on heading home soon.  So we’ll have to get a lot of reading done this week, and pick up the rest when my year finally ends.

There’s No Place Like Nome….

With NYO finishing, my travels brought me to Nome.  I am here for the OS Help Desk Certification that BSSD is jointly putting on in conjunction with Southwest Region School District, and to help with the gifted and talented camp.  The help desk kids are staying at the NACTEC dorm, which I visited for the first time today.  The facility is very nice.  They have bedrooms, common rooms, and a kitchen.  The students are responsible for all of their own cooking and cleaning outside of their classwork. So its a good experience for them. The GT kids are staying at the Aurora Inn.

Tomorrow, the GT kids will be flying in.  I will be working primarily with the OS Help Desk kids for tomorrow, and then floating between the two groups after that.  I would write more, but I am exhausted, and need to hit the sack.  I’ll fill you in on the rest of the details tomorrow.

NYO Day Two….

The tournament has finally come to a finish.  The kids were great.  Everyone was very polite, and their sportsmanship was excelent.  These events are amazing.  The “one foot high kick” reached a max height this evening of 104″.  I’ll post some video later on this.  Its really impressive how high they can kick.

I got all the gear packed up.  4 students and I fly to Nome tomorrow morning aroudn 10:00 AM.  I will be staying at the Aurora (Thank you Rebecca) which will be so nice. Im looking forward to getting some sleep.

Erin is in New York right now.  She is presenting at an SFA conference.  Sounds like she may have the morning to get recooperated after a 4 hour time zone change.  I hope her sessions go smoothly.  There was a lot going on today, but Im too tired to write about it.  🙂

I did help Conrad, a teacher from Stebbins set, set up a blog today.  You should check it out.  He put a lot of work into it today.  You can find it  at http://stebbins.bssd.org/radwood/.

More to come from Nome tomorrow…..

NYO Day One….

The first day of NYO is finally over. I started my day out by hopping Doug Air at 8:00 AM. I was scheduled to fly into Nome then catch a Bering Air flight back to White Mountain. Tim who does all of the maintenance on the BSSD plane, and who also is a pilot does a lot of the scheduling for the BSSD plane. He made a couple changes, and set things up so I would be dropped off at White Mountain right away, which not only saved me a ton of time, but the hassle of dealing with extra luggage on Bering Air.

We took of in cloudy skies from the Unalakleet airport. Moments later we had left the clouds behind to find a bright blue sky over crisp snow covered tundra. The ocean is still frozen in most places. You can see the chunks breaking where the ocean is biting away at the pack ice. It looks like a giant jigsaw puzzle. As I’m flying to the 21st annual district Native Youth Olympic competition and looking at the pack ice. It made me think about how the Inupiat’s used to travel and hunt across that ice. There is one competition called the scissor jump where they jump across the gym crossing their one leg behind the other in the jumping process (kind of like a triple jump) to see how much distance they can cover. The sport originated from jumping from ice burg to ice burg over the near freezing water. It amazes me they were able to survive.

So I landed in White Mountain just 45 minutes after I left Unalakleet. For those of you who haven’t been to White Mountain. It is a small village nestled in the trees on the side of a small mountain. In the summer there is a river that flows right in front of the village. This time of year it is still covered with ice. The school is spread out in a few buildings in an area approximately half the size of a city block. It is a very pretty place.

I got all my gear dropped off in the gym, and then dropped off my bag up in the apartment I am staying in. Andy the principal pointed me in the direction of one of the buildings to steal some kids to help set things up. I was able to get two students who quickly helped me unpack all of my tubs, and get all of the gear set up. After-which time I had about 8 hours to kill before the competition started. So I worked on setting up a gallery for the pictures that would be taken to be uploaded to. If you are interested you can find them at www.bssd.org/gallery/.The events went really well this evening. We started off with the scissor jump, and then ended with the Alaskan one footed high kick. This is where they lean back on one hand, use their other hand to hold one of their feet, then they must jump up with the other foot, kick a ball that is hanging in the air, and then land on the foot they kicked with without falling over. Its amazing how high they can go. The winning boy this evening was able to kick a ball 80 inches off the ground.

Back in UNK

Well we are back in Unalakleet after a quick weekend.  It was nice to hang out with the family.  It would have been nice to have Katie up, but she was busy playing frisbee.  We left Valdez this morning around 9:00 this morning.  By the time we got out of the Anchorage airport with our rental car it was about 10:00 AM.  We headed right over to Costco to do a little shopping for next year.  We had to be back to the airport by 2:00 P.M.  to check the tubs of food we were buying at Costco.  We shopped pretty quickly, but assembling the boxes, and packing everything up to mail took quite a bit of time.  We mailed our 7 boxes out to ourselves, and made it over to check in about ten to 2:00 P.M.  We got our two tubs checked in, and headed to the board room for a quick snack before our flight.  We made it back up here to a sunny day, and a relaxing evening.

I was stumbling this evening, and found some interesting sites….

The first one here has some really nice pictures of Alaska.  It is a flash based website, but it is put together really nicely.

http://www.noriomatsumoto.com/

I came across this interesting article about a college student who spent part of his spring break in a Walmart.  He wanted to see if it was possible to live in a Walmart.  If you have a minute check out the article.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060327/OPINION01/603270342

This last website is a site that uses the same wiki that wikipedia uses.  They are showing you how things are made.  I thought it was pretty cool.  Take a look around.

http://howstuffismade.org/menupage.html 

Hope you enjoy the sites.

Valdez

Well, I am sitting in the chair my dad made listening to music, and talking with the fam.  We just got done looking through pictures from when my parents were in Australia, and when they just moved to Northway.  I had not seen any of those pictures before, so it was pretty interesting.

Today was nice.  I slept till 10:00 A.M. this morning which was a nice change of pace.  After I got up, we had a little breakfast to get the day started.  I made some salsa from scratch, and stuck it into the fridge to get all the tastes to blend together by dinner time.  After that I tried to put in my contacts, and had some difficulties with the jalapeno juice residing on my fingers.  My eyes burned really bad as soon as I touched the contacts to my eyes.  So I gave up on that eventually, and stuck with the glasses.  We decided we should take a ride up to the pass. We heard that there was a snowmachine hill climbing competition going on.  It was a beautiful day out, so we hopped in the car, and headed out of town.  The mountains were all covered in snow, and standing out in the blue sky.  When we got up to the top of the pass, the snowmachines were taking their turns to climb up the huge mountains.  Only one kind of faltered a bit, and took a couple tumbles dropping about 20 feet.  Its kind of fun when they go tumbling all the way down the mountain.  They can really fligh on some of those bounces.

After checking the hill climb out for a while, we headed back into town.  I almost got pulled over by Alpine Woods sub division, there was an unmarked car sitting on the side of the road.  I was doing a little over the speed limit, but the officer was kind enough to let me go on about my way.

We spent the rest of the day pretty much hanging out.  Talked to Katie on the phone this evening.  She is down at an ultimate frisbee competition this weekend.  It is sectionals or something, so it’s kind of a big deal.  I guess they won 3 games and lost one today, so they are on the right track.  She said they have some tough games tomorrow though, and she sprained her anckle, so she was hoping that wouldn’t inhibit her play.

Erin made dinner which was pretty tasty.  We had enchiladas, the salsa and chips, and some wierd salsa stuff that Erin made.  Everyone said it was tasty, but I wasn’t buying it.  I know they were just trying to get me to try it.  That brings us back to the photo albums.  Mom and dad just got a scanner, so I might be able to show you some of those pictures some day.

Job Fair Day Two

Today has gone by really quickly.  Started off the day with getting a VTC set up for Kodiak.  Unfortunately the person in Kodiak who was supposed to join us ended up being on a plane to Anchorage.  So all the work was for nothing, but that why I make the big bucks.  :)  I pulled down the web cam that never worked.  🙁 Then I set up a VTC for Tuluksak which is part of the Yupitt School District.  They were having problems with their camera, so we spent about an hour trying to get that figured out.  After it was resolved, the principal that was being interviewed was scheduled to be on a plane in only a matter of time.  So the interview was cut kind of short.  We planned on connecting to them again an hour later, for another candidate.  That conference unlike the others started up with out a hitch, but the interviewee did not show up.  So that went rather quickly.

Right now John and I are sitting in on the DEED exit interview about the audits they conducted on our districts over the last week.  Its pretty interesting to see what they are having issues with, and how the district is responding to those issues.  Im glad I don’t have my type b.

In about an hour I’ll be heading to the airport to fly to Valdez.  Im looking forward to hanging out at home for the weekend.  Erin has been there since Wednesday, the lucky girl.

Job Fair

Well, I know its been a while since my last post.  It has been pretty hectic over here at the Anchorage Job fair.  We flew into Anchorage Tuesday evening.  Erin, Josh, and my self went out to the brewhouse for dinner after stopping by the mall to get my hair cut.  Erin took off the next morning for Valdez.  She was a little delayed leaving ANC because the weather in Valdez was a little iffy.  She made it in just a little late.

We spent the day getting things ready, and and doing the pre-conference sign in stuff with people that had already arrived.  It was a pretty long day.  After we closed up shop for the day, John, Josh, and myself went out to dinner at club paris.  Its a really nice restaurant here in town.  I got a tasty burger there, it was fun hanging out and talking.

Today the job fair really got underway.  I ran the registering booth for most of the morning with the occasional interruption to get a video conference going so a district could interview a possible hire.  We had a bit of a melt down in VTC land during the day.  The whole system started t crash.  It took a while to get it back up and functioning, but Tom over at GCI does a tremendous job.  He was as usual, able to rectify the situation.  So everything is happy in VTC land again.

We did have one interview when the video conferencing system was in use that I set up using iChat AV.  We were only able to do a one way video chat because the principal we were connecting to didn’t have an iSight camera, and the video camera he was trying to use in its place didn’t have a firewire cable that came with it.  So he was able to see her, but she wasn’t able to see him.  I was using my fancy shmancy MacBook Pro, which all of you know has a built in iSight camera.  So that was cool.

My dad flew into ANC this evening to attend a Telephone board meeting.  So we got to hang out today.  We had some drinks at fletchers, which is a restaurant bar in the captain cook hotel.  After visiting with people that were over for the job fair, we headed out the the brewhouse for dinner.  It was dad, Jim Hickerson, John Concilus, Chick Beckley, and myself.  We had a good dinner, and then headed back to the hotel. Dad and I hung out some more, and now its time to hit the sack.

Six AM Shmix AM

Well, when the alarm went off at six this morning, my legs, back, calves, and shoulders said “ehh 7:30 sounds like a better time to get up”.  So off with the alarm and back into slumber-land. So needless to say running didn’t happen for me today, but Im fine with that.

Work went well today.  We are getting things ready for the job fair in Anchorage which I will be leaving or tomorrow.  We have been printing off posters to put up promoting BSSD.  I got the big poster printer to work on OS X machines today.  That was something we have been fighting with for a few years now.  So that was nice.  I had to do a firmware update on the printer which worried me a little.  I didn’t want to turn the big poster printer into a paper weight.  It all worked out though.

Aside from that I destroyed Stebbins website.  I was working with Damon one of the teachers from Stebbins.  He has a wordpress install which is the same thing I use for this blog.  He was using it as the schools main site linking over to a blog where students post to regularly.  Well, we have this problem with someone clicks on a link in the blog it tries to send them to www.stebbins.bssd.org.  which would normally be fine, but our addresses don’t have the www in it.  So it turns up with a page now found error.  So we were working on getting that to work, and I accidently in the wordpress admin area changed the address wordpress looks for to find itself.  So when I updated the site with the new address, it couldn’t find itself.  Which in turn made it impossible to put back.  Whenever I tried to make the change it would to make the change in the wrong spot, and the file it was trying t change was in a totally different area on the server.

So as you can imagine Damon wasn’t too happy.  He had to start over by removing the install, and reinstalling.  Luckily he hadn’t really added anything to the install yet, so he should be able to have it back up in an hour or so.  I offered to do it for him, but he wanted to work on it himself.

So after that catastrophe I worked on some orders for the district for next year.  The Ed Support office is buying some iPods so their trainers can use them to show off podcasts on how to tech different activities.  The idea is… They are creating video podcasts of SFA lessons, and QSM concepts.  These will be a digital resource for the teachers in the district.  The iPods come into play by allowing the support staff to have those video podcsasts right in their pocket.  When out at site they will be able to connect the unit to a TV, in any teachers classroom, and show them examples on how things can be taught.  I hope it all works out, and that they don’t turn into just a music box for the temporary owners.

Well, I had better hit the sack.  More to come from Anchorage and then Valdez this week.

Run Run Run as Fast as You Can!!

So much for the lazy weekend. Erin and I got up this morning, and laid around for a while which was on track for what I felt a weekend should be. I did a little work on the internet, and we watched a little T.V. Around 4:00 however Erin was wanting to go for a run. She was debating the treadmill vs. outside. We had a pretty nice day, so it was a legitimate bit of decision making. I have been thinking about getting back into shape for a while now. Since I do a lot of sitting on my butt at work. I need to pick up something extracurricular to drop a few pounds and get to where a short jog doesn’t make me wheeze. So I told Erin I would accompany her for her run if she wanted to go outside.

The run went pretty well. I think we went about 3 miles total. The run was from our apartment out across the bridge over the river, along a bit of tundra, up a little incline, and then back again. I am hoping to run every day now, which will be tough for me since I don’t like to work out just for work out sake. I don’t mind getting in shape if I am out hiking, or something like that, but just running to run doesn’t motivate me very much. On the other hand. I don’t have much time for the hiking thing and if I ever want to get back into some reasonable shape, I better just suck it up.

So the next delema is when should our daily run take place? I don’t think I would have the energy after work, since I usually just want to hold the couch down. So that leaves the morning. I am not so much of a morning person, but lately I have been getting up pretty early. So I told Erin we should start going at 6:00 AM. I know thats crazy early, but it would get it out of the way for the day, and jump start our metabolism.

ick ick ick……

Anyway.. I was working on a help desk website for BSSD today. I had to take what was installed by fantastico on to the php msql server and make it look BSSDish. That involves pulling down the files, and finding all the little pictures that make up the website design, and replacing them with things that have the BSSD logo, or our coined phrase keeping the exact same size proportions. If you want to check it out its at..

http://help.bssd.org/hcl/

I was also working on the main page for the help site. It will tell who all works for BSSD Ed-Tech, as well as what they do, their contact info, and a link to the ticketing system/live help. I got a starter page up. If you want to check it out its at…
http://help.bssd.org/

Well, thats about all that got done today. I did do a little stumbling around on the internet, and came across these interesting sites..

Wildlife Photo Contest
Amazing Paper Art

I was pretty impressed. So I figured I’d pass it on. Hope you enjoy them.

That’s all for now. Time to go to bed and read.