Spring

As the snow fell outside my classroom window last Friday one of my students said “Isn’t today the first day of spring?”.  I confirmed his statement as we all watched the once clean streets begin to fill with snow.  One of my students has a class at the MIB school before my class, upon her arrival she commented on how slippery the roads were.  We had a little discussion about how the drive home would be joyous.

School has been going pretty well.  The kids are fun to work with.  They always have a great attitudes as we work on our projects.  In my broadcasting class we are about to take a week to work on shooting cooking shows.  Using multiple camera angles and an upbeat host I’m hoping they’ll get to try out a different type of shooting and editing.  Im not sure what we’ll make, but I’m hoping its not too elaborate.  The goal is the tech side of things, not the food side of things.  I’m thinking cookies may be on the docket.

My web design class continues to install php msql systems, and hack the themes to look a certain way.  We are in desperate need of Photoshop, but our lab doesn’t have that, so we skimp by.  I’ll be starting them on a new system tomorrow called glfusion.  I’ve never worked with it, but it seems to have a lot of nice feature sets, so I’m hoping it will be something they may actually use on a real project for a client.

Erin and I have been hanging out.  I picked up a couple of steaks from F&D Meats in Virginia last week.  We had a nice sunny day and fired up the grill after work.  The steaks were the biggest I’d ever seen, and shockingly enough we pretty much finished them off with a little wine.  We hope to be doing more barbecuing in the future once this random spring weather decided to clear itself up.  They are forecasting for freezing rain and snow all week, so that’s nice.  😉

We have officially begun the countdown to Australia 74 days and counting.  We can’t wait to fly half way around the world and begin our lazy 3 week road trip along the great ocean road. More posts on that when we get there and maybe a few more leading up to it.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with believe it or not, the thought of buying a new laptop.  What may surprise you however is that “gasp” its not an apple.  I know, I know…. There really is nothing wrong with me.  Here is my thought process…. I am super happy with the macbook pro I currently use, but I don’t know if I really want to take this with me to Australia.  We are going to try to go as light as possible on that trip, with our full intention being to go carry-on.  So the extra weight and size of my slim macbook pro has me thinking smaller…. Much smaller…..  The computer that has caught my eye is the Dell Mini 9.  Its a tiny 9″ laptop and here is what I like about it.

• Small form factor
• Built in 3G (Can connect to Internet via cell tower)
• SSD (Solid State Hard Drive)
• Built in web cam (for skype video)
• WiFi
• Comes with Ubuntu (Yeah no XP or VISTA)
• CAN BE HACKED TO RUN OS X (Apple’s operating system)

The last one is the biggie for me.  To be able to have such a tiny laptop running my favorite OS with iphoto and everything would be phenomenal.  There are some drawbacks, the biggest being the condensed keyboard and the apostrophe key being moved down by the space bar.  So this can cause some troubles when trying to type out something really quickly.  So how much does this hot little number cost?  It starts out at $250.  After you finish configuring it it comes out to about $555 which if you think about it is not too bad.  So im asking all my readers to donate $30 to “Bill’s little laptop fund”  I figure if I can get 20 people on board then I’ll be good to go.  Something to think about with my B-Day coming up next month wink wink.

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