Christmas Presents

Erin and I picked out one of Steve Richardsons pictures for my mom for Christmas. We hid it behind on of the pictures hanging on the wall at our house in Valdez. So a couple nights ago since I was getting ready to head down to MN, I figured it was time it surprise her with it. So I went and pulled the picture out from behind the picture and brought it over to her at the dinner table. She immediately grabbed it all excited and held it directly over one of the candles that were on the table. I kind of foresaw that happening, and was quick to move it out of the flame before it was burned. Here is a picture of mom with the picture after the close encounter with the flame.
So we are now in Anchorage and about to head out for a little shopping and maybe catch a movie. I’ll probably end up going to the Harry Crapper movie since the rest of the family loves that little magic guy. Well looks like we are taking off. Catch ya later.

Driving to Anchorage

We have about 100 miles left on our drive to Anchorage. Katie is getting her smart teeth taken out, and she has to also do all of her Christmas shopping. It is a really nice day out. Not a cloud in the sky. I’ll post some pictures on the gallery if you want to take a look at them.
We are listening to the audio book “Deception Point” by Dan Brown. It says there is only about 12 minutes left, but we still have a lot of the story left to tell. I hope it doesn’t stop on us part way through.
My toes have been cold for the last 150 miles, but I don’t want to have the heat turned up because I don’t like riding in a really warm car. It can kind of get me carsick. So I try to wiggle them and get the blood flowing to warm them up.
We saw a few moose on the drive, but that was a long way back. It was still pretty dark out, and closer to Valdez. We just saw a fox a little bit ago, so it has been a pretty interesting drive.
We are going by rabbit valley right now. It’s a place alongside the rode that is a little valley going up into the mountains. The valley has really steep sides, and very little room along the base. I hear they call it rabbit valley is because people used to hunt rabbits there. They would walk up the valley, and the rabbits would try to run away, with the sides so steep, they rabbits had a hard time climbing them quickly, and with very little cover it was easy to shoot them. It made for a pretty sure way to get some dinner.
Well it is official the audio book ran out in the middle of the story. How lame is that? I’ll have to check to see if I did something wrong when I was joining the tracks together.
I have been stumbling a lot lately on the Internet. There is a plug-in for Firefox called “Stumble”. It puts a button on your browser window that when you click it, it takes you to a random website. So its pretty interesting what you find. One I found last night that I thought was pretty interesting was a flash animation of someone drawing. Here is the link if you are interested. Its pretty amazing to see how artistic some people are.

A beautiful day

I am sitting in the chair in the living room that my dad made. It’s pretty comfortable. I took a look out the window a minute ago, and saw an abundance of blue sky. One of those days where you see how beautiful Valdez can be. Katie and I might go take a few pictures while we have the chance.
We take off for Anchorage tomorrow morning. Katie is getting her wisdom teeth out tomorrow afternoon. Poor girl, she won’t even be able to go out for dinner while we are in town. I think we might hit a movie and do a little shopping. Hopefully Katie won’t be in too much pain.
Haven’t done a whole lot since I’ve been home. I’m still really tired and have been trying to catch up on sleep.
Katie and I went out and took pictures today. The mountains look pretty cool on a sunny day. We are now going to watch the third episode of Lost. So I had better get going.

The Last Night

Well I just got back from Randy and Lynn’s place. They had me over for dinner. We had salmon, which is always nice, then sat around talking and listening to music. It was a lot of fun. I need to get some of the music they have.

Okay I need to pause here for a sec and talk about something that just came to my attention. I just received an email from our superintendent wishing the entire BSSD staff a happy Christmas. He and his wife wrote up a little Christmas parody that I would like to share with all of you….

‘Twas the day before vacation, when all through the schools

Not a principal was focused; no teacher using those nifty new tools.

The books were all veiled; the party food greatly evident.

With great hopes that Jim Hickerson would not call or be present.

The children were filled with sugar treats all adults dread,

While visions of more goodies raced through their heads.

When out on the ice there arose such a clatter,

All sprang from their seats to see what was the matter.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow

Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below.

When, what to their wondering eyes should appear,

Oh no, it can’t be, the Superintendent is here!

With Doug at the yoke, so lively and quick,

All knew in a moment it must be a very sad trick.

More rapid than soaring eagles down came his plane,

And he whistled, and shouted, calling all principals by name:

“Now, Andy and Jeannie, Rick, Robin and Dan!

Now Terry, Now Vern! You know I’m the man!

On Margaret, Elise, Edna, Craig and Steves (2);

On Joe and on Dave!” Oh my gosh, what a crew!

There are children to be taught and teachers to be frightened;

There are masses to be fed and test scores to be heightened.

So up to the school the Superintendent he strode,

With a gleam in his eye and a look that was quite bold.

And then in a twinkling, students and staff heard on the step

The most feared sound of all, the sound of Dr. D’s footstep.

As new staff drew quiet, and tried to hide the evidence of no work,

He came through the door with that famous and very stern look.

He was dressed in his snow pants; and his hair was quite messed,

His clothes were tarnished and torn from years of being poorly dressed.

A bundle of questions, his backpack in tow,

He looked like the last person they wanted to see or know.

His eyes how they twinkled! They all became wary.

His cheeks weren’t like roses, his nose nothing like a cherry!

His droll little mouth was drawn up ready for the first question,

The staff did not dare laugh, no request did they mention.

It was that wink of his eye and twist of his head,

Soon gave them all to know they had something to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,

He began walking around, visiting the kitchen first.

Then went “strait” to the high school, and next the middle school near,

Finally, to the kindergarten room, the teacher in great fear.

And laying his finger aside of his nose,

Giving a nod, he finally arose.

He declared this place the best with the grandest treats and also so neat.

And there he stayed the rest of the day while teachers toggled complete,

While moodling so skillfully with their two feet.

As he left, they all heard him exclaim, as he quietly slipped out of sight,

“Merry Christmas to all and a most Happy New Year’s Eve night.”

Post some comments and let me know what you think about their creative writing. I am not that creative when it comes to writing. I am more of a video guy.

Speaking of video, I just finished up a pretty cool DVD of the Student News Broadcasts. It was the first dual layer DVD I have ever created. All of the videos together were way too big for a single layer DVD, actually almost double what one would hold. I set up a couple tracks that play before you get to the main menu. The main menu has a drop zone in it showing the SBT intro, with a link under it to a second menu with the episode selection. Once in menu two you have the choice of the first six broadcasts, or to go on to the next menu, or back to the main menu. The third and “final” menu has three more broadcasts, the interview that Tori did with Albert (the student in Savoonga that killed the whale a couple weeks ago), a slideshow of pictures of the kids working, and the interview Mia did with the two scientists studying the bird flu that flew up to Brevig Mission. Its a pretty cool interview. The first scientist is currently studying the bird flu, and is very knowledgeable in the subject and linked the 1918 flu pandemic to the current bird flu. The second scientist is the one that obtained the tissue sample from the lung of a Brevig Mission lady who died from the 1918 flu. He was the one who supplied the first scientist with the biomaterial he needed to make the connection with today’s bird flu. There is also another portion of the DVD that is held in a close circle and I won’t get into it here, but I can tell you the DVD ended up being 8 GB.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I am TIRED. I have been staying up till 2:00AM the last few nights, and getting up early. I am crashing early tonight. My plan is to be asleep by 10:00 PM. We have our last broadcast of the semester in the morning. The kids have done pretty well this week. A few of them really worked hard on their stories. There was a lot of video editing invovled in this one. I think the kids are getting the hang of Final Cut Pro which is really cool. That’s what the pro’s use. If they keep up on the tech they could easily hit college with some pretty powerful skills they could use towards a digital video career.
John and I are haeading to MacWorld in January. We just bought the plane tickets, hotel, and confernce admissions today. Should be a great expierence. As Erin says its where the biggest mac nerds go for the week. I will be taking a two day session on video compression. I know its going to be way over my head, but I’m hoping to glean something from the wealth of knowledge around me.

Well its time for some sleep….

5 more days…

With only one week left before Christmas break I find my self sitting here wondering what happened to the last few months. I can’t believe how fast this fall has gone. I have spent my weekend relaxing. I really haven’t done a whole lot. I slept in both days, which was really needed. I can’t remember that last time I was able to sleep in. The last two weekends I have been busy.
We didn’t have a broadcast last week. The kids didn’t get their work done while I was gone, so we had to cancel. I was pretty bummed out about that. The kids had a lot longer than usual, and they still didn’t get it done. I know they need a lot of support and guidance, but I kind of thought after doing eight broadcasts they would be able to pull it off. So that gears us up for this last broadcast of 2005. We have a couple stories that could be great depending on how the kids end up editing them up. One is an interview with a couple scientists, one that exhumed the bodies in Brevig Mission years ago to study the 1918 flu pandemic, an the other is the scientist that took what he recovered and grew it in a lab, and linked it to the modern day bird flu. The other interview is with a 17-year-old student from Savoonga who was the striker on a whaling boat that got a whale last week. They are both pretty long interviews, so I think they are going to edit them down to a couple minute pieces, for the news show, but then work hard on doing a longer one for a more documentary type production. We’ll have them posted as separate vodcasts. I don’t know when the documentary type vodcasts will be finished, but the news broadcast will be live Wednesday morning at 8:30.

Bose

The one thing I have done this weekend more than anything else is use my new Bose Quite Comfort 2 headphones. I am very happy Erin talked me into buying these. With all the noise that is involved in a tournament like this from the loud music that must be played to hype up the players to the cheering and yelling by not only the fans but the players as well, it is imparative to have a way to escape the chaos. When things hit the fan it helps not to be distracted while trying to resolve the issue. There were a couple of times when our conferences completly tanked on us requiring some quick work to minimize the downtime for our audience.
The tournament is going quite well. We are in the last match of the weekend. We just finished the championships with Unalakleet taking the victory. With Golovin losing to them set us up with a manditory “true second place” match where the second and thrid place teams play eachother to decide who should be the other team to travel to the state tournament in Anchorage. Right now Golovin is down 1 games to 0 with the score in teh second game at Galena 10 Golovin 6. Doesn’t look good for Golovin.
After this match I am hoping to get our gear packed up for the evening, and nessle into my sleeping back with either book or some surfing of the world wide web. 🙂

BSSDPN (BSSD Sports Programing Network)

This week’s sports coverage is brought to you from Stebbins and Unalakleet. We have some great high school sports for you this weekend. Unalakleet is hosting the regional Wrestling tournament available to you via video conference and windows media player web cast. You will find the links to each wrestling session web cast at the BSSD website. If anyone is able to watch the live coverage we would love to hear your feedback. Our students work extremely hard and really appreciate any comments they get. You can email them at feedback(at)bssd.org. The other exciting live broadcast is a mixed six-volleyball tournament being held in Stebbins. There are teams from all over the Bering Strait School District, as well as Galena who is from another district. These matches will be viewable only by VTC (video teleconference). Once again students will be doing all of the work that is involved in these broadcasts, and if you are able to watch this coverage the same email address will work for sending them a note.

Today I got up and got over to work around 7:45 A.M. As soon as a I walked in the door the scrambling began. I needed to get John and Randy’s equipment together that they would need for the wrestling broadcast. Gave them a quick run through on how to run the equipment. They knew what they were doing. I just wanted to go over it with them, so they could have a refresher before they started on their own. We took off from Unalakleet around 10:00 A.M. It was only a 20-minute flight over the frozen ocean to Stebbins. The Stebbins staff greeted us warmly. We got our stuff up to the balcony over the gym, and then grabbed some lunch. After we had some food in our stomach’s Hunter, and Austen (the two students that came with to run the broadcast), and I pulled out the equipment and started setting up. We brought with us two GL2 mini dv cameras, and a couple 20-meter firewire cables. We put one camera on each end of the gym up on the balcony, and the cords met up in the middle at the computer running the show. We ended up having John send over a special firewire cord from Unalakleet on the last plane flying this evening to set up a third camera. So I think we are going to be able to put on a pretty good show for everyone this weekend.
Austen and Hunter are really good guys. They work hard, and both have great scenes of humor. They are fun to work with. There will be some students from Stebbins that will be helping out with the broadcast as well. We are hoping that they will get excited about doing this and become more involved in the BSSD news broadcasts. Our goal is to get every site going with a news crew.
I just heard that Savoonga, which is one of our two schools on St. Lawrence Island just, got three whales a couple days ago. I was trying to convince one of their teachers into getting some students out there with a video camera and shooting interviews and getting some footage of the experience. That is something that not many other people in the world will ever get the chance to see. It would be a great addition to the student news broadcasts.
It is now 12:30 A.M. and I need to get my sleep for tomorrow. It is going to be a long day. I’ll see if I can get some blog time in during the busy day, and hopefully get some pictures up as well.

All for now…..

Long day….

Crazy crazy day!!! As many of you know today is Wednesday. 🙂 Which means we had a news broadcast today. The students I work with haven’t seemed to have caught on to the fact that if they put off doing their stories, It makes more work for us to do in a short amount of time. This week was especially frustrating for me because the kids didn’t have a broadcast last week, giving them extra time to work on their stories, and they still didn’t get anything done. Well, I take that back, I had about three of them get their stories done on time. So that left Monday for writing stories, and a late night last night for writing the script, getting images for the background of the live show, and doing a practice run.
That brings us to this morning. I had to get up early to go finish getting things ready for the broadcast, but I was really really tired, and had to drag myself out of bed at 7:00. I was hoping to be up earlier than that, but no such luck. I went over and picked up Kevin (one of GCI’s School Access employee’s who is here to help with VTC issues) and Leonard (a PolyCom employee here for the same thing) from Browns lodge where they were staying. Its a bit of a walk down to the district office, and it is a little chilly out, especially for Leonard who is visiting Alaska for the first time from California. I got into the office and made sure the computers were set up the correct way, and all the other little things you need to worry about before a live show. The kids started showing up around ten to eight in the morning all excited for the production. We scrabled with getting computers set up with the correct video clips, and got the script put onto the telprompting computer. By then it was getting close to time, and I got a tape put into the camera, and got the lights set up. Austen was getting the anchors placed in the virtual set, and making sure the chroma keying was working correctly. Hunter was double checking the video coming into the mixer, Cassandra and Nilson were queing up the video clips, Mia, Chara, and Kimberly were rehearsing the script, and Ben was getting ready to produce the show. At 8:30 A.M. Ben told everyone to be quiet, and gave the countdown 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and gave the signal for the show to begin. After a few minor audio issues, the show went off a success.
The rest of the day was crazy. Kevin, Leonard, and I did some VTC testing in the AM. We had some serious issues with Shishmaref, which took until 2:15 to fix. I then taught the Journalism Class to a couple students in Shish and a class full in Elim. That went alright. Its kind of difficult to teach over VTC. I guess its just different. Basically the rest of the day was filled with getting things ready for the broadcasting of wrestling and volleyball this weekend, and had one more meeting with the SBT kids. After everything was said and done, I got home around 7:00. Kind of a long day. Well, I had better get some sleep.

Hit the ground running!!!

So the first day back was as crazy as I thought it would be. I was supposed to have a meeting with the SBT kids, but only 3 the 20 or so showed up. The day went really quickly. I got some things squared away for the video conferences this week. Got a filing cabinet put in the studio (so I can have a little better documentation process of the students ILP’s (individualized learning plan). Lunch came awfully quickly which was nice. I got to come home and spend some time with Erin. After having a week of just hanging out with her, it seemed like I hadn’t seen her forever when I was gone this morning. So after lunch I found out that all the student broadcasts that had been published were not iPod Video compliant. So I re-exported the movies again, this time in the correct format. I really like the iPod videos. I was able to play with one, and think that they are cool enough to own. The video quality is amazing on them. If I had money I was trying to get rid of I think that’s what I would get next. So the afternoon went quick enough with the SBT kids showing up after their classes got out at 3:30. They all filtered in and informed me that they hadn’t done any work over the last two weeks, and that their stories were not finished like I had asked. So we rescheduled a meeting for Tomorrow morning at 8:00 A.M. where they are supposed to show up with their completed stories. We’ll see what we get. There are a lot more kids than before, so management is getting to be a little different. I am still not sure how many of them will be sticking it out for the early mornings, and the outside of school hours that are needed to make the show a success. By 5:00 most of them had filtered out promising to have their story done by the next day. A couple of students were heading over to the police station to get an interview about sobriety tests. They dropped off the camera at my house after the interview at about 7:00. It’s nice having students that are willing to put in the extra effort. So that left the rest of the evening to working on the journalism modules, hanging out with Erin, and getting a little dinner. Erin made Italian chicken, wild rice, and asparagus, with a little wine to wash it down. For all you reading my blog out there…. If you feel like sending me an iPod Video I wouldn’t complain. 🙂