Texting on Takeoff

On our Northwest Flight 594 this morning from Portland to Minneapolis Erin and I were sitting in the exit row by the first bulkhead.  The flight attendants went through the normal procedure of getting everyone in their seats and closing the boarding door.  Like any other flight they then came on the intercom and instructed us to turn off all electronic devices including cell phones and ipods.  I made sure that my cell was off and that my iPod touch was stowed for takeoff.  Kay the flight attendant who was seated across the isle from me dissapeared into the restroom while the plane was taxing to the run way.  She re-emerged a couple minutes later with cell phone in hand.  I only noticed because the lights were off in the cabin, and her cell phone was glowing like a flashlight in the dark.  I thought to myself “This is odd.  They told us to turn those off five minutes ago”  I was kinda of annoyed by this knowing that if I had my cell out and running I would be reprimanded for doing so.  As we pulled into position on the runway for takeoff Kay then sat down in her seat across from me and tried to hide her cell under her coat on her lap while she continued to text away.  As a school teacher this is a tactic often observed in the classroom by high school students.  As the plane was just lifting off the ground she continued to text away and check the glowing screen under her coat.  I felt very cheated knowing that I could be using my ever so dangerous iPod touch to listen to music during our takeoff if it weren’t for the airlines rules.  Now I know that having a cell phone up and running during a flight will not cause the plane to fall from the sky, however as a flight attendant who is supposed to be enforcing these rules, I felt that this was a very unprofessional action to take in front of an entire plane full of passengers.

Just my two cents, but if they can do it, why can’t I?

First Skate

This weekend was the first where we woke up to a nice “solid” layer of ice on the bay in front of our house.  We had a few chilly days ending the week so Jim and I decided to lace up our skates and just find out how thick it actually was.

After a couple of holes poked through the icy layer with an ice chisel we assessed the average ice thickness at roughly 2 inches.  There was also very little snow if any at all, and with a relativly quick freeze we were able to see right through the ice.  This was a little un-nerving, but very cool at the same time.  It also allowed us to see the cracks in the ice which did a great job of showing the ice thickness as well.

We skated for maybe an hour.  It was about 27 degrees out and no real wind to speak of, making pretty much the prefect skating conditions.

[QUICKTIME http://www.bbryson.com/bill/files/2008/11/skating.m4v 320 260]

My first post from my iPod Touch

I was searching the web and came across this fancy free app made by automatic ( the people that make wordpreas). It allows you to post to your wordpress blog directly from your touch or iPhone.

If you have one of these devices and a wordpress blog you should really stop by the app store and download it.

Managing work and play…

I’m about three weeks in to my offical work year now.  Its a bit of a rude awaking from what I have been doing for the last year.  I got pretty used to having days around the house when I was in Minnesota, and crazy jam packed working for three week stints in Alaska.  Now I am back to the old Monday through Friday work week.  I usually leave the house at 6:30 AM to make the 40 mile drive to work.  If I’m lucky I’ll get home around 5, but there are plenty of days that I don’t seem to make it home until 6:30 or 7:00 PM.  That doesn’t leave much time to hang out with Erin before I need to get the sack and catch some z’s to do it all again the next day.

Friday night Erin, April, Jesse, Jim, and myself went to the Cook vs. Tower high school football game to watch their cousin Jordan play.  There were some fancy storm clouds overhead.  I really like the big billowing clouds that build up over the midwest.  Tower ended up beating Cook pretty easily, and it was a fun evening under the lights.

This weekend a couple of friends from work Tony (Art teacher) and Kate (English teacher) joined me on a BWCACAST trip.  I got up at 6:00 AM and met them at the Y-Store at 7:15.  We headed to the end of the Fernburg Trail (by car) and paddled through Lakes 1, 2, 3, and went to the edge of Lake 4.  It was a gorgeous day, and I of course didn’t bring sun screen and burnt my face.  I was hoping to get some video of the leaves changing, but it appears I went a week or two early.  I’ll have to think about going in again in the near future to get the fall colors caught on tape.

My grandparents drove up from Alden to Duluth to attend a hawk sighting deal in Duluth.  They called us up and let us know they were in the area.  We were lucky enough to have them stop by today.  We went out for a pontoon ride, and had them over for some venison pot roast for dinner.  It was nice to catch up with them.

Labor Day Weekend

This was our last real weekend of freedom before heading back to school with kids.  I have been working for the last three weeks trying to rebuild all of the district websites… Its quite a task.   The list runs something like this…

• District Website
• High School
• Roosevelt Elementary
• Parkview Elementary
• Nurses Website
• Each staff member has a site. (roughly 250)
• All the sports (basketball, track, football, tennis, etc.)
• All the student activites (chior, band, orchestra, etc.)
• Community Ed

Im sure there are more that I am either not thinking about, or haven’t even been made aware of.  So that has kept me pretty busy.

Aside from that I’ve been helping Rudy (the network admin for the district) set up polyvision boards, install projectors, set up airports, which doesn’t really fall under my job description, but its a lot of work for one guy.  I have also been helping teachers get their classroom websites up and running, and working with a few of them on how they can start to implement some technology into their classroom.

Needless to say, I’m wicked behind and have decided I’ll work as hard as I can, but at the moment I have more tasks then can be completed before school starts.

So back to school starting tomorrow morning.  Amidts all that I haven’t really had time to plan for the two classes I’ll be teaching.  One being web design and the other broadcasting.  I’ve worked of the last couple of days hammering out a syllabus for each class, and lesson plans for the first week.  Those are finally under my belt, which feels good.  We’ll see how those plans play out in the classroom this week.

So to take a little break from the actual computer we headed out on Donny’s new pontoon boat yesterday with April, Trisha, Tonya, Cindy, Erin, myself, and of course Donny.  It was a great day to be out on the lake.  Very very warm, and just enough of a breeze to keep us somewhat cool, and throw the occasional wave up over the bow splashing everyone from the front of the boat to the stern.

I was reading up on CSS (cascading style sheets) while we were out and about.  I haven’t had time to do any reading lately, so it was a perfect time to relax on the boat and listen to everyone chit chat and catch up on all that fun xhtml/CSS goodness.

Although summer feels like it has come to an end, the days are still warm, and the lake is still swimable.  We went out a couple times today.  Its nolonger like bath water, but it sure helps cool you off from the hot sun.

Pizza

We started the day with sourdough pancakes.  For those of you who don’t know, my parents got this batch of starter going back in the late 70s.  Katie and I grew up with sourdough pancakes on the weekends, and sourdough bread from the leftover batter.

So after breakfast we headed out on the lake for some boating and tubing.  After the tubing we went out and about looking for a place to do some swimming and have a little picknick.  The trouble was all of our favorite places were in use by other people.  So we just dropped the anchor by a reef.  We did some swimming off the boat and had some cheese and crackers.

After some sun we headed back home for dinner.  I had been working on the leftover batter through out the day to use as a pizza dough.  So I streatched it out and thew it in the oven with some cheese and pepperoni and here’s how it came out.

Its been great having Jeremy, Nikiya, Rown, and Scout over for the weekend.

The McDonalds

Erin and I were lucky enough to have Jeremy and his family drive up from Bemidji to stay with us.

Its been fun to spend some time with their little girl Scout who is a little cutie.

They pulled in this afternoon and we hopped in the boat for a little tubing and swimming out at twin islands.  Rowan is pretty much a pro when it comes to the tube.

We did a little swimming out at Twin Islands.. Jeremy had a great jump off the top of the island.  It really is a fun place to go swimming.

We boated around a bit and even went to MooseBirds by boat to get some ice cream after dinner.

Its been a great day.  Its so much fun hanging out with Jeremey again, and getting time to spend with Nikiya, Rowen, and Scout.

Little Breaks

Today I worked from home, which is always nice.  It saves me the drive into the office, and it allows me to get right to work when I get up.  The websites are coming along slowly.  It seems like I run into road blocks every hour or two.  The design of the site is pretty much done, so now I am just porting over all the content from the old sites to the new one.  Its a lot of copy and paste and making sure all the linked files are transfered over to the new server and organized in a manner that makes a little sense.

I take breaks every few hours to either play a little Mario Kart on the Wii, or go swimming in the lake with Erin.  Its nice to give the eyes a little break from staring at code and get the muscles moving around a bit more.

Erin also did some baking today and made home made blueberry muffins as well as some delicous peanut butter twists.  I’ve eaten about 6 of them this evening which isn’t the best for me, but they are pretty tasty.

Laura, Erin, Mike, and I went to “Step Brothers” tonight.  It was a little over the top at times, but Will Farrel is a fun actor.

Jeremy, Nikia, Rowen and Scout will be visiting and staying the night with us tomorrow.  Its always fun hanging out with Jeremy.  It should be a nice evening of boating and grilling.

Im off to work super early in the morning so I’d better get some sleep.

Back at it…

Well, I will officially start blogging again.

The HughesNet installer was here this morning setting up our “high” speed interent dish today.  Don’t get me wrong its better than dial up when it comes to progressive downloads and overall page loads, but the 900 ms ping times is killing me when I try to FTP files and do web work.  It is nice to be able to surf the web somewhat normally again.

For those of you who hadn’t heard, I accepted a job with the Virginia Minnesota Public Schools for this next year.  They already have me working this summer on revamping their district, high school, upper elementary, and lower elementary websites.  It is quite an undertaking and the beginning of the year is quickly approaching.  I would like to have all 4 sites done by the end of next week.

Along with being in charge of the websites for the district I will also be teaching two hours a day.  One class is a web design class, and the other is an advanced video editing / student broadcasting class.  I should be pretty fun.  The rest of the day I’ll be helping teachers integrate technology into their classes and the rest of the jobs that a tech person runs into.

The shcool uses only Apple computers, however they have the administrators running windows on their macs using bootcamp.  So I do have to deal with the dark side from time to time.

Erin and I have had a busy summer.  She has graciously accompanied me on the BWCACAST camping trips this summer.  We have our last scheduled camping trip this coming Monday.  I don’t know how long we’ll be able to go in for with work hanging over my head.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve been getting up around 6:00 AM to get to work when everyone else does in Virginia.  I have about a 40 mile drive each way, so I have to get up a little earlier than I’d like to, or have had to in the past.  Here is what it looked like the other moring as I drug myself out of bed.

We needed another car since Erin got a job in Net Lake which is 40 miles the opposite direction I’ll be driving.  So we looked around on craig’s list and found a 02 Kia Spectra in Superior.  So last weekend we drove over there and bought it.  Its a nice car and gets about 32 mpg.  So that will be nice with the driving.

Thats all for now.  I’ve found that getting up at 6 AM causes you to go to bed earlier in the evening.

I should be posting more often now that we have upgraded from dail up out here at the lake.

I look forward to reading all of your blogs as well.  I havn’t been able to do much of that either, so it’ll be nice to see what everyone else is up to as well.

Lots to catch up on…

I know its been a long time since my last post, so I’ll try to give you a quick recap of whats happened since then.

Currently I am waiting for the third overtime in game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals between Detroit and Pittsburgh.  If Detroit scores the next goal they win the cup, if Pittsburgh scores they force a game 6 back in Pittsburgh.  Its been an exciting game.  They are tied at 3 a piece.

A few weeks ago Jesse and I took a weekend motorcycle class in Eveleth.  It started Friday night from 5 PM to 9 PM, and let me tell you, they used every minute of it.  The 4 hours was basically going through a book they had sent in the mail with instructions to read it before the class.  The evening came to an end with a multiple choice test.  Jesse’s quick studying in the parking lot allowed him to pull off a 100%.  My diligent three days of reading through the book and answering the questions through out the book enabled me to only miss one on the test.  So with the first step done we were back bright an early at 8 AM for the first 5 hours of actual riding time.  The class assumes you know nothing about riding a motorcycle, so it was perfect for me.  They walk you through everything from how to use the clutch to shifting, swerving, and turning.  We had great weather for the occasion with cool over cast skies.  I am so glad it wasn’t 90 degrees out.

The next day we were back again for the last day at 8 AM.  We had another 5 hours on the bikes picking up the speed and difficulty a bit working more on quick stops, running over obstacles, swerving, and slow tight turns.  The day ended with the actual driving test.  I made a couple of mistakes, but passed anyway.  The cool thing about the class is the test you take is good enough to get your Minnesota motorcycle license.

A quick break in the story..  Pittsburgh just won in the third overtime.. Game 6 in Pittsburgh on Wednesday…

So when I got back to Baxter I went into the DMV and not only added the motorcycle license, but also got my address changed to Erin’s Grandparents place in cook since we are moving there in a couple days.

Also since my last post I have finished my BSSD contract which feels really good.  Getting all 15 videos done was quite a job.  Its nice to have that all wrapped up before the summer really starts.

Two weekends ago I flew out to Tacoma to attend Katie’s college graduation.  It was fun to hang out with family and spend a quick couple days with her.

When I got back to Baxter I had a couple days off and then drove down to the cities to pick up Rick Holt who was coming over for a couple of days to work with me on finishing up my RISC contract.  Along with the barrage of video editing we found time to play a little Wii golf.  Rick is a feisty competitor.

Friday I drove him back down to the cities to fly out, then back up to Baxter to pick up Erin and we continued on our way up to Cook for the weekend.  We got in super late and worked all day Saturday on her grandparents house.  The new carpet was installed and looked and felt really nice.  We went out to dinner Saturday night with April, Jesse, and Trisha and then worked again all day Sunday on the house before heading back to Baxter.  We pretty much have all the plumbing done, and are getting closer and closer to having the place all fixed up.  Its really starting to look nice.

Erin is finishing up her last bit of work this week.  She worked Monday and still has Tuesday and half of Wednesday.  The nice part for her is there are no kid on any of these days.  She gets to work on packing up her classroom since they are cutting her position.

Tomorrow morning I will be picking up the Uhaul to load up everything in our apartment.  It’ll be a big job, but we should be able to get it everything packed up tomorrow.

Then Wednesday morning I will head off to cook, and Erin will follow when she is done with work.

I hope it all goes well…

Also in the last few weeks Jim and I have been working on getting his Motorcycle up and running.  I’m happy to say after a few parts from DennisKirk and some new gas and oil the bike is running like a charm.  Erin and I have been out for a couple short rides.  Once the house gets all settled I’m sure we’ll be out for some longer excursions.

Well that’s all for now.  Sorry there aren’t any pictures or video, I know they make posts a ton better.  I’ll try to do a better job of that on the next post.