The Epic Journy

We left Unalakleet Wednesday at 5:00. The little metro, which is the smaller of the two types of planes that fly into Unalakleet was completely full. The Unalakleet basketball teams are competing in the state tournament in Anchorage this weekend.

Once we arrived in Anchorage we grabbed a rental car and ran over to Walmart. I ran out of contacts about a month ago, and have been seeing the world through glasses. Having enough of that fun, and wanting to lose the frames while in Mexico, I ordered up some new ones at the Walmart vision center. We also picked up a couple beach towels and some weird headphones for Erin to use while she runs.

After our little shopping spree, 😉 we drove over to Sulivans in hopes of some tasty lobster bisc. Unfortunately they were all out. We should have called ahead to make sure they had it before going over. We stayed anyway, and had dinner.

After dinner we went back out to the Anchorage airport to join the rest of the anxious travelers through one of TSA’s finest security checkpoints. 🙂 We tried taking a little nap before our flight, and were airborne a little after midnight.

We flew all night, and landed here in LA around 6:45 in the morning (Cali time). We grabbed a little snack in the Alaska Airlines Boardroom, and I took a little bit of a nap. I tried to sleep on the plane, but it was very restful. Its nice that we got upgraded to first class for the next leg of our trip into Mazatlan. Hopefully it will make the trip a little more comfortable.

I’ll blog again later tonight with pictures from my first time in Mexico. Erin and I are going to have a blast relaxing on the warm sandy beaches.

Iditarod Hits Unalakleet

John Baker the first musher into Unalakleet for the 2006 Iditarod arrived around noon. He was graciouse enough to take 5 minutes of his time allowing the student news broadcasting team to get an exclusive interview. The Channel 2 news team was actually stuck behind our kids while they were getting the first interview from him in Unalakleet.

We are posting a lot of video, and soon pictures to BSSD’s Iditarod coverage website http://mushing.bssd.org/.

ASTE

Well the week of ASTE has come and gone.  For those of you who don’t know what ASTE is, it stands for Alaska Society for Technolgy in Education.  Saturday and Sunday were the preconference days, with half and full day sessions.  Mia Concilus and I taught a full day session on student broadcasting on saturday, and a half day on sunday about podcasting and video podcasting.

Erin and I met up with my mom on Sunday who was in Anchorage for a library conference.  We went to the Brewhouse for lunch, and then did a little shopping before taking her to the airport to fly back to Valdez.

Erin and I went out to dinner a couple nights which was nice, and were also able to catch a movie.  We went to Firewall with Harrison Ford, which wasn’t as good as I had hoped it to be, but it did give us the excuse for extra buttery popcorn and buckets of coke.

Erin had to leave on tuesday which was a bummer.  I ended up getting stuck in Anchorage because there was a blizzard in Unalakleet.  It would have been nice if we had both been stuck in the big city together.

WILD

I got into Anchorage last night on the Pen Air Flight. I got checked into the hotel, and gave Jon a call. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and figured I see what he was up to. He and his girl friend came over and picked me up. We went out to the Outback for dinner. It was good to see him. Sounds like they are both doing really well.
I got up this morning and headed over to the airport. I was lucky enough to get an exit row to sit in. It turns out I was in the seat right by the door that you walk in at. I got situated and waited for everyone to get in their seat. I ended up sitting next to kind of a weird guy. You run into those types of people in Alaska. He was nice, but had some trouble with finding appropriate topics to talk about. I ended up talking to one of the flight attendants for quite a while. I learned about his experience running the Boston Marathon. He said he read a book call some thing like “the swim to antarctica” that helped him run it.
I got to Minneapolis, and tried to get on an earlier flight up to Hibbing, but there weren’t any. So instead of killing my time sitting in the airport I decided to hop a cab to the Excel Energy center. I got here at 5:30 and was able to find a seat. I am only going to be able to catch about an hour of the game, but It’ll be fun.

pictuures to come soon….

MacWorld – Day One

John, Chick, and I met down stairs this morning at 7:15 to head over to the MacWorld check in area. We were essentially at the beginning of the line. Here is what it looked like as we were leaving the check in area.

The class I was taking today which is continuing on tomorrow is covering all the aspects of video compression. I am learning quite a bit. The person teaching the class says that he is a “compressionist”. All the does for a living is compress video for big companies. He worked for Abercrombie & Fitch for the last 5 years compressing their video for their website, and for the in store TV’s that play the videos while you shop. I’m not sure, but I think he now works for a company that just compresses video for major companies around the country. Pretty crazy that is all he does. He was talking about how much easier compression is when using a High Definition camera. He has basically sold me on needing one of them. 🙂

We learned about all the major compression software’s like Sorenson Squeeze, Cleaner, Compressor 2, and a couple others. I learned that pre-compression work is very important to make your video look a lot better. Adjusting the color, saturation, sharpening, and a few other things can really make your video look much better. I am looking forward to playing around with these new ideas when I get back. I also learned that you could use all the computers on your network as a “cluster” to divide up the compression task and make work go a lot faster. If I can find some computers to get this working on I think it can really save some time.

After the conference we stopped off at a couple stores including the San Francisco Apple Store. Its a pretty cool store full of 30 inch monitors and every Mac software and hardware you can think of.

After that we headed back to the hotel and grabbed some dinner. I had a very tasty steak, after which we went out for a walk around town. It is nice to be in an area where you really don’t need a jacket when you are outside.

That’s all I have for now. I should get some sleep before the day starts tomorrow.

Board Room

My journey has begun. I am sitting in the Alaska Airlines Board Room right now waiting for my flight to Seattle and then on to San Francisco for the beginning of the adventure. The Concilus’ made it safely back from Bali. They are pretty tired out since it is almost 5:00 AM tomorrow in Bali. I am planning on taking a lot of pictures, and posting them during the week. I will try to get a daily update of what’s going on. More to come later…

Board Room

My journey has begun. I am sitting in the Alaska Airlines Board Room right now waiting for my flight to Seattle and then on to San Francisco for the beginning of the adventure. The Concilus’ made it safely back from Bali. They are pretty tired out since it is almost 5:00 AM tomorrow in Bali. I am planning on taking a lot of pictures, and posting them during the week. I will try to get a daily update of what’s going on. More to come later…

Board Room

My journey has begun. I am sitting in the Alaska Airlines Board Room right now waiting for my flight to Seattle and then on to San Francisco for the beginning of the adventure. The Concilus’ made it safely back from Bali. They are pretty tired out since it is almost 5:00 AM tomorrow in Bali. I am planning on taking a lot of pictures, and posting them during the week. I will try to get a daily update of what’s going on. More to come later…

Christmas Day

Christmas is coming to a close here in a couple hours. It was a pretty packed 24 hours. Last night we went over to Rick and Sue’s place (Erin’s aunt and uncle) for Christmas Eve festivities. The whole Aune clan was there. There was a little food to be eaten, and some presents to exchange. They do boy and girl gifts. All the boys bring one present, and all the girls bring one present. Then every boy draws a number and every girl draws a number, and when your number is called you grab a present from the boy pile if your a boy, and from the girl pile if your a girl. We left there and headed over to an 11:00 PM church service in Cook. That lasted until a little after midnight, which put us back at Erin’s house at 1:00 AM. So it was a late night. This morning we were up around 6:45 AM, and did the present opening thing. I was lucky enough to get a sweatshirt, a knife, a fossil watch, and some candy. We went over to her grandparents place (for those of you that don’t know, that’s a 10 second walk) and watched Erin’s cousins’ kids who are 4 and almost 2 open their presents from Santa. We chatted for a bit, and then it was time to head over to the other end of the lake to Erin’s mom’s house. We had a nice dinner over there, and opened presents. Erin and I got a feather bed, a new phone for our place (ours was on its last legs), I got a sweatshirt, and an iTunes gift card. Erin got a bracelet, some tootsie rolls, cocoa, and some perfume. After that we played the DVD version of “Trivial Pursuit”. Then it was time to head back over here. When we got back we watched a little bit of the Vikings game, I heard they ended up losing, and Erin has been uploading some pictures to the gallery. Hope you all like them. I am now tired out and ready to hit the sack. I hope everyone else’s Christmas was nice an relaxing.

MSP

I’m sitting here in the Minneapolis airport waiting for my flight to Duluth. I found a plug in near my gate to charge my laptop and ipod up with while I wait. There are a lot of people looking for outlets. I have had probably 10 people walk by looking for a plug-in as well. There are two plugs on this outlet; unfortunately the second one is broken somehow. It’s like there is something jammed in one of the connection slots. You can’t get your plug into it. Oh wait, make that 11 people. So my flight went really well. When I checked in I told them that I had a first class ticket for my return flight from MSP to ANC, and that I would really rather fly first class on the way down, so I could sit with my wife on the way back up. I explained that she had a coach ticket and so on. So he did a little looking in the computer, and said he couldn’t switch my ticket coming back up to a coach seat because they were completely booked, but he upgraded me to first class anyway, and told me that I shouldn’t have a problem talking someone into trading seats with me on the way back up. No I am left with the dilemma of still having a first class seat on the way back up, and weather I should give up that comfort to sit with Erin. 🙂 We’ll see if she can convince me to give up living the high life or not. I watched a couple movies on the flight, one on the computer, and one on the ipod. I have decided I really really need to get another battery for my computer. These ones really don’t last very long. It took both my batteries to get through one movie. So that’s a little disheartening. It was nice to have the video ipod to fall back on when the “big screen” went out on me.

Last night we ended up going to the theater to watch Harry Crapper, and got there about 5 minutes after the movie had started. Now mind you not the credits, because we know there is like a half an hour of credits before movies, so we asked about that and the person selling tickets told us that it had actually started. So we ended up buying tickets for the 7:00 PM show, and went out to dinner. We decided to go to the Outback. It’s like two blocks from the theater, so we just left our car at the theater and walked over. (12 people looking for an outlet now) Dinner was tasty, I had prime rib that was really good. Katie nibbled on some fettuccini alfredo, since she is still recovering from losing her smart teeth. So after dinner we walked back over to the theater and got there early enough to get the best seats in the house. The movie was pretty good. Even though I am not a Harry Crapper fan. After that mom was in the mood for another movie, so we ended up going right into “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”. It was also a good movie. We didn’t get back to the hotel till about 1:00 A.M., so it made it a short night for getting up to catch the plane this morning.

I just got a VTC request in from Laura a teacher at NACTEC. Its crazy to think that there are people that don’t get this time off. I feel bad for them. It’s nice to have a break. I got that scheduled and updated on the VTC calendar. That is one thing that is tough to get behind on. I got to a point there where I would schedule them the day they happened, and that ended up causing some problems. I am going to try to not let that happen next semester.

Well for the rest of my time here in the Minneapolis Airport, I think I’ll be surfing the web, maybe watching a movie or something.