Archive for 'Old Blog'

Jul200512

0

It’s been a while….

I have been waiting to update my blog because so much time has gone by and I wanted to get it all documented. Erin has persuaded me to just post it and get on with what’s happening now so I will continue it. She is right, I don’t know when I would have found time to sit down and write up the last two months. So before I begin I want to say that the wedding was a lot of fun. It was nice having all of our friends and family together to celebrate the day. Our trip to Hawaii was really nice and relaxing. I’ll get some pictures add to my flickr account.
I am sitting in the Duluth airport right now waiting to fly to Minneapolis on my way to Valdez. I went to sleep around 1:00 A.M. this morning, and was up at 3:10 A.M. for the drive to the airport. Laura was kind enough to give me a ride, especially at such an early hour. We left the house around 3:30 A.M. and got to the Duluth airport around 5:20 A.M. I get to spend about four hours in Minneapolis, and about 2 hours in Anchorage. It’s going to be a long day. The last few days have been really really hot in Northern Minnesota. The temperatures were in the 90’s with the humidity trying to keep up. We spent a lot of time swimming in the lake. In the water its really refreshing, but as soon as you get out you feel like you have to jump right back in it so warm. An Alaska climate will be a nice change of pace.
Erin is out in Baltimore for two weeks right now training for SFA. She wasn’t too excited to leave the lake, but seems to doing well out there. As well as you can be while working in the summer. She will be flying back into Duluth about 10 hours after me on the 22nd. Then I’ll have about a week down here before I head back up to Alaska for work. I’ll be able to make it to Mike Svir’s wedding. I’m looking forward to that. I miss hanging out with him. Well, it looks like we are about to start boarding. I’ll be sure to upload this in Minneapolis.

Jun200516

0

Flying to Maui

Sorry it’s been so long since my last posting. The end of the school year was pretty busy with getting moved out of our apartment and tieing up loose ends at school. All of our stuff was sent over to Unalakleet on the district plane. Hopefully it will be waiting for us in our new apartment in the fall. Its nice to have the year behind us. Erin and I are currently flying from Maui to Seattle. We have been in the air about a half an hour now, so we have another 5 hours till we hit the main land. After the school year finished up we left Brevig Mission, and when I say we left when things finished thats no exageration. We were moved out and flew out after school on the last day. We spent the evening in Anchorage and flew to Minneapolis the next morning. We flew with Sun Country which I would highly rcomend. We upgraded our tickets to first class when we checked in. It made the 5 hour flight seem very fast and relaxing. It is amazing how a little room makes such a difference in your travel expierence. When we got into Minneapolis, Erins dad Jim was there to pick us up. We hopped in the car and drove up to Cook that night. I can’t remember what time we finally go into Cook, but it was night time. We spent the next 10 or so days tieing up loose ends for the wedding. Everything came together nicely. The wedding was a lot of fun. I lucked out and Erin didn’t change her mind before the ceremony so now I am a married man. Jeremy, Josh, and Paul came over to be groomsmen in the wedding. We were very fortune and the Congers let us use their cabin wich is on the same lake as Erins home. It’s actually right around the corner from here house. So the guys were able to stay there prior to the wedding. It was pretty fun. Jim just came into part ownership of a stellar pontoon boat. So we went out for a ride on the lake. It was nice to just hang out and relax. Nice to not have to think about work for a while.

Apr200527

0

MOS Certification for BSSD Students…. Bad idea…

I am once again sitting in the Hageland “terminal” in Nome. This time, I am on my way to Unalakleet. I have been asked to assist with writing some technology curriculum. The district wants to get our students IC3 and MOS certified. I am not sure what IC3 certification is I guess it has something to do with basic computer skills. MOS certification is knowing all about the Microsoft Office Suite (word, excel, and PowerPoint). I guess the plan is to come up with a class that is aligned with our district standards, which will also meet the needs of these two certifications. The students would do a bulk of the learning in their own schools from their own teachers. When they feel they are ready to be certified, they will go into Nome to NACTEC, which is our districts regional technical school, and do a quick refresher of all the skills and take the appropriate tests.

Apr200524

0

BSSD NYO

I am sitting in the Hageland terminal in Nome. I am on my way home from the Bering Strait School District Native Youth Olympics Championships, which was held in Shaktoolik this year. PK and I were sent there to help facilitate a few local students in broadcasting the events. We just got some new video mixing equipment for the district that we used for the event. It was really nice. We were able to have up to 4 video inputs. Each input has its own tiny TV monitor, so you can see which camera you want to have being broadcasted out. You can then transition between them, have picture in picture, and even do live chroma keying (delete the background like with a green screen). We also had four 20 meter firewire cables and special repeaters that allowed us to hook them end to end. We hooked one into a GL2 and mounted it on the wall of the gym, for a high angle view. We used two others, one into a GL2, and the other into a smaller canon dv camera like a zr85 that were mobile and could be moved around the gym to get the desired camera angle. The person running the switcher was able to switch between any of the feeds at any time to show the audience the different events. We did a few live interviews of the athletes and a coach. If we would have had some more equipment we could have been set up a little better and done more of them. It was a lot of fun though.

Apr200506

0

New Position with BSSD

Has it been a long time or what? I am back in Alaska after a quick spring break down in Minnesota. It was a lot of fun, nice to get out to some restaurants and not think about school for a while. Since my last post, I have accepted another job with BSSD. Next year I will be the Distance Learning Facilitator for the District. It sounds like I will be in charge of over 900 videoconferences, as well as helping students broadcast events like the district wrestling tournament, the Native Youth Olympics, and the Iditarod. I’m pretty excited. I’ll be working with John, Randy, and Leona, which will be a blast. Two days before Katie was supposed to leave, we went out for a snowmachine ride with C.O. and AnnMaire. We hadn’t gone very far when we came across a Fox. We wanted a closer look, so we started chasing it up the side of a hill. About half way up, the engine made a clunking sound, and then died. We were hoping that it was possibly the key that held the timing in place had sheared off. We weren’t so lucky. We drug the machine into C.O.’s shop, and tore it apart. After further inspection we found that the skirt on the piston was broken off and the cylinder had a crack in it. We looked around town and found out that Walter Seetot had a similar engine in a “shed”. I bought it from him for 150 dollars. We pulled the pistons off of there and picked the best of the two. He only had one of the cylinders ready for me the other was frozen in a cooler of snow and ice. So we were getting ready to put it all back together and found out that we needed the other cylinder. Apparently on a Ski-doo the cylinders are not interchangeable from left to right, I hear they are on Polaris machines. So I had to go back over to Walters house and chop at the one in the ice for about an hour. It finally came loose after Walter knocked off a few off the aluminum fins. Let me take you back to yesterday… We are doing standardized testing right now in our school. The 3-9 “grade” kids are taking the SBA, and the 10-12 “grade” kids are taking the HSGQE (High School Graduation and Qualifying Exam). I am proctoring the HSGQE. Well, we started around 10:30 A.M. yesterday, and that last student finally finished at 5:45 P.M. We did take a 20 minute lunch break, and a break every hour. So when I finally got out of there last night, I had to run over to Walters house and get the cylinder free, then over to C.O.’s shop. We got it all cleaned up and fought with little things along the way, but eventually got it back together. The motor started up just fine. The only problem now is the throttle is sticking. So I have to get a new one sent in from Nome.Today now, is the second day for the HSGQE. The students will be tested on their writing skills. We are scheduled to begin at 10:30 A.M. Well, we had a few students who didn’t show up on time. By 11:00 we had all but two. One said he was too tired, and couldn’t get out of bed, the other was “sick” and wouldn’t be making it in. So we wait, and wait, and wait. The federal government requires that 95% of the students need to take the HSGQE for the school to make AYP (adequate yearly progress). Since we only have 7 students testing for the writing portion of the exam, that means we need to have all 7 here. If one doesn’t show up, then that automatically drops us down below the required 95%. Well we waited until 1:00 and started the test. We were able to get the one student out of bed. The “sick” one still hasn’t come in. So our school will be dropping down to level 4 for next year. Its pretty frustrating that our school gets punished for lazy apathetic students, who could care less if they don’t get an education. So who knows how long I’ll be here this evening. We were testing for 7 hours yesterday. My birthday is coming up this month, and Erin was nice enough to get me a digital camera for the occasion. I’m pretty excited. Its a 5 mega pixel, which will be nice. If you get a picture you like with that, you can get 20″ X 30″ prints made. Its the same camera my mom has the Canon Powershot S500. I was trying to decide between that and getting a web page (buy a domain name, and pay for hosting service), but I still haven’t made that plunge yet. It costs about 15-20 dollars a year for the domain name, and then about 8 dollars a month for the hosting service. I would like to buy the domain name for 10 years, that’s the longest your can purchase it for, and then the hosting would be all I would have to worry about paying for after that. Well, that’s all for now. I’ll try to post more frequently again.

Mar200518

0

Travel Problems due to “Bad Weather”

After a fast week in Cook Minnesota spring break is coming to an end. I had better back track a bit and tell you how this whole thing got started….. Erin was scheduled to leave for home on Wednesday of last week. The day started out really nice. The sun was out, and the wind was, well normal for Brevig. At noon, it was still beautiful out. As the afternoon progressed, the clouds started to move in, and it was starting to spit some snow at us. Erin had a ticket with Bering Air. Unfortunately they didn’t have a full flight, which for Bering Air means that the weather might just be too bad to fly. The weather wasn’t bad at all, and if Bering had decided to show up things would have been great. They however canceled their flight “due to weather”. So we frantically called up Cape Smythe Air, they have an evening flight that comes into Brevig. They said they would come out to get her. Unfortunately they weren’t scheduled to be into Brevig until around 6:30 in the evening. By then the weather was questionable. The plane was on a rout from Nome to Shish, Shish to Wales, Wales to Brevig, Brevig to Teller, and Teller back to Nome. Well, they landed in Shish, decided the weather in Wales was too bad to fly in (they have some pretty crazy wind over there). So they were coming directly to Brevig. We went out to the airport, and watched the plane fly over, and leave. They decided Brevig was too bad too, and just went to Teller where they did land. The snow was blowing pretty good in Brevig, but I think the pilot could have gotten in just fine. We raced home and tried to get the pilot to wait in Teller for us, but did not succeed. So we then called up Alaska Airlines to change her ticket to the next day, and they said she could get out on either of the morning flights to Anchorage but it would cost us 50 dollars to change her ticket (they don’t honor the weather delays of the little airlines that fly in our area). So we called up Northwest, and they moved her ticket to the following day as well. They however looked along her flight plan and said the weather was questionable in Minneapolis, and changed her ticket at no charge. We then got on the phone with Cape Smyth, and booked a flight for the morning from Brevig to Nome. The next morning, the weather was much better, and she got out without any troubles. And after a couple long layovers she made it to Northern Minnesota. I was scheduled to fly out on Friday, and after seeing the troubles Erin encountered, I changed my 4:00 flight to a noon flight. I didn’t want to chance the weather turning sour on me in the afternoon. So I flew into Nome at noon, without any troubles. I then had the 10 hour layover in Nome. I tried to hop on Bering Air’s WIFI network, but they had locked it down in some fashion in the past two weeks, and I couldn’t get on. So I took a cab to the Aurora Inn. I didn’t have a room there, I just wanted to sit in their lounge area, and pick up the WIFI network from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Nome branch). So I checked my email, and surfed the web a little bit, basically killing time. I then went to the Twin Dragon for a little Chinese food. From there I headed over to the bar. I knew Jim would probably be heading their after he finished up school business in Nome. I went in, sat down and ordered a beer. Jim came by about 20 minutes later, and we visited and had another beer, and then went to Fat Freddies for a piece of pie. By then it was about 6:30 P.M. We decided to head out to the airport to wait out the rest of the time. While out there Craig showed up (the principal from Wales) and we chatted for a little while.I have to get on a plane. I’ll post more later…

Mar200507

0

ASTE Part 2

Well the week is over. It has gone by really quickly. Let me recap from when I left you last….I had to shut my computer because we were starting our descent into Anchorage. We picked up our bags and Randy Fleharty met us to get our rental vehicles. I rode with Randy to the hotel. On the way he was telling me that he was running into some troubles imaging some computers that were to be used for a class the next day. I told him that I had an extra firewire cord if he needed. So after we had all checked in Randy gave me a call and asked if I could bring the cord up to his suite. So I went up there, and ended up helping him out till 4:30 A.M. As I was heading back down to my room, I noticed that the complementary news papers were already out in front of everyone’s doors. I fell asleep hoping to wake up for my alarm. At 6:15 A.M. the most obnoxious alarm I have ever heard in my life sounded off. I couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing off, and I don’t know who managed it, but one of us (Nathan my roomy for the week from Little Diomede) finally silenced it. So I got a shower in, and gathered my gear up for the class Ginger and I were about to teach. Back track for a second. When I was in Nome, I spent the majority of Friday afternoon in Bering Airs’ lobby getting things ready for the class. They have wireless internet there unlike the Alaska Airlines “terminal”. I was working on the website, as well as setting up 3 iBooks that our “students” would be using for the class. I was trying to load Live Channel Pro and iStopMotion onto the computers. iStopMotion didn’t cause me any troubles, but for some reason Live Channel Pro would crash every time I tried to launch the program. I tried everything I could think of to fix the problem, but didn’t have any luck. So I did what any other person would do. I emailed the developer of the program, who resides in Israel right now. Unfortunately it was night time there, so I didn’t get an immediate response. Flash back to 6:30 A.M Saturday the 26th. I met Ginger up in the concierge lounge, and checked my email. I had a reply. The developer had sent me a copy of the program that appeared to be the same as the one I was trying, the difference was this one worked. So we were one step closer to having a worry free presentation. Randy took Ginger and I over to Highland Tech High. That’s where all of the pre conference classes were being taught. We got our gear set up, and waited for everyone to show up. Turns out we only had 4 enroll in our class, and the ones that did enroll were tech administrators. Not exactly what Ginger and I had in mind. In hindsight we decided that the title of our class “Video in the Classroom, School, and Beyond” may have freaked out the classroom teachers we were hoping for. The class went well just the same, and I think we were able to get a couple of them thinking about the possibilities of using video conferencing in their school. So that took up most of our day. We taught from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and the time flew by. After we were done, we headed back to the hotel, and dropped off our stuff. I went out to dinner with Nathan, PK (our district computer fixer), and Carrie (a teacher from White Mountain) to the Brewhouse. It was a lot of fun. It was nice to have some restaurant food for a change. It was pretty tasty. When we got back to the hotel, we ran into Randy, John Concilus, Rebecca (Johns wife also the Special Ed director for BSSD), and a few other people. I ended up having a drink with them and talking till a little after 1:00 A.M. I then was ready to crash after having only 2 hours of sleep the night before. Sunday I headed back over to Highland Tech High, this time to take a class. I had signed up to take “The Production Suite” from Vin Capone. Vin works for apple as one of their digital media specialists. Vin had to leave for his wife’s birthday, and to teach a session down in Hawaii. So Kevin Medford another apple employee took his place. I worked with both of those guys last summer at a digital story telling camp in Denali National Park. Very cool guys. Anyway…. The class was really good, and I learned some tricks that will help me in my video editing. Poor Kevin was really sick though, and was having a hard time teaching. The next day the actual conference started. I went to the conference, and ran into Vicky Kelly, the Apple rep for Alaska. I was talking to her and she told me that Kevin was really sick, and wasn’t able to teach his class that day. He was scheduled to teach “The Production Suite” for an hour that day. She then asked if I would teach it for him. I told her that I could probably do that. So two hours later I was teaching about 25 people about Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro. I was supposed to cover Motion, but since I didn’t have it loaded on my machine, and because it doesn’t run so well on G4 machines, I just told them a little about it, and we really didn’t have any time to cover it as it was. So that class went really well. After that class was done, I was tasked with getting all the Ididamovies put onto one disc. I asked the apple people if I could use their dual 2.5 GHz G5 computer to do the editing on since it would save me a lot a of time. They figured it would be a good way to show what the computer could do, so they said that it would be okay. I went and checked out the computer to find that it didn’t have Final Cut pro on it, and no one had the install disc around. Since i had it on my computer, I put my computer in target disk mode, and plugged it into the G5. I then was able to run Final Cut Pro on the G5 off of my HD. I dropped all of the Ididamovies into final cut, and put in some titles. Since they had all been compressed when they were entered into the competition, I had to render them so Final Cut Pro could export them. Once I had everything ready to go I started the rendering process. I had over 3 hours of video to render, and it said it was going to take 16 hours. That’s when I left my computer and went back to the Hotel. Tuesday morning, I got to the conference, and Vicky told me that Kevin was still sick, and was wondering if I could teach two more classes for him. I told her that I would. Turns out that the first class I was to teach was Garage Band 2, an application I have never used before. I have used Garage Band 1 a few times, but I am pretty much musically challenged. On top of that the class was an hour long. That is a long time to talk about this app. So I did a little research, and played around with it for a little bit before the class. I was able to teach for about 47 minutes before I ran out of things to say. It went really well though. The next class was iLife 05. This is the newest version of iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, and Garage Band 2. I once again had never used the newest version. They just came out in the last month, and I hadn’t bought them yet. I had watched Steve Jobs keynote from Macworld, so I knew a lot of the cool futures of the new version. For that class I had close to 50 people. It was a lot of fun, and it sounds like most of the attendees learned some things.We flew back to Nome the next morning, and ended up being weathered out of Brevig for another night. It was nice to have one more day to relax before coming back to school. I spent the weekend sleeping in and working on the Brevig Website.

Feb200526

0

ASTE

I am on my flight to Anchorage right now. In fact I think we just started our decent. 🙂 I am heading into town to attend the ASTE conference. Ginger and I are teaching the “Video in the Classroom, School, and Beyond” class today in about 9 hours. The We have worked on putting the class together for a little over a week now, and I think we are ready to roll. The website is in its final stages and is now officially posted at the Brevig Website.I really need to work on updating this more often. I know a lot has happened in the last 9 days, but I just can’t remember any of it. Went out and checked the crab pot aging a couple days ago. Once again, just the little ones, and about four of them. We pulled the pot for good in that spot. So we don’t have any down right now. We are hoping to try out some new locations when I return from this trip.That reminds me, last week; Jim and I attempted to go to Teller to pick something up for the school. The weather was pretty bad out, and visibility was extremely poor. I had the GPS with, which without it, we would not have made it home. We took off for Teller, only able to see about 50 feet. Everything was white out. We are driving over the frozen ocean, which is white, and the blowing snow and clouds that surrounded us were also white. I was using the GPS heading for Teller that was built into the GPS. It wasn’t a waypoint that I had marked, so I was a little worried. There is a place by Teller where the ice is really thin. I didn’t want the GPS to take us right through that area. So I wasn’t too confident with the heading the GPS was taking us. After about 45 minutes of driving, in who knows what direction, I told Jim that it would probably be a better idea to head home. So we did just that. On the way home I hit a pressure ridge at about 25 miles an hour. I didn’t even see it coming it blended in so well. I had to have the GPS out the whole time, so I could find my way back to Brevig. I am planning a trip to Teller in the near future to set some reliable waypoints.

Feb200517

0

The joys of being the “Acting Principal”

I can’t believe it’s been over a week since my last posting.  The weather is crazy.  There is bunch of blowing snow outside.  There are times when you can’t even see 10 feet.  Wunderground.com says that we have 40 to 60 mph winds and a winter storm advisory.  So that’s fun.  No mail today. ASTE is only a week away.  Ginger and I are scrambling to get our class put together.  I am making a website with all of the information, so the people taking our class can go to it as a reference when they are back at their own schools.  I am still in the process of putting it together and upload it as  I go.  The final step will to be sure I have correct spelling and punctuation.  If you want to see what I have, and check my slow progress, you can go to this link.  Remember I haven’t even begun to look at my conventions, this is the rough draft.  It isn’t linked up to anything else, so only people with the exact address can go to it.  I am hoping to be done with it in the next week.  Then the real criticisms can be sent my way.The acting principal gig ended up being longer than originally planned.  Erin and Jim (our principal) took off for Unalakleet (our district office) on Thursday of last week.  The basketball games on Friday went pretty well.  The Brevig Jr. High played themselves in a scrimmage.  Then our high school girls team lost to Nome J.V. in over time.  The reffing was questionable.  I ended up having to clean up after dinner for them.  The cook took off.  We luckily in a way had Saturday school.  Having this required our cooking staff to come in and cook breakfast and lunch for the kids, which in turn fed the visiting team.  All was going great until we had some pretty bad weather the rest of that day, and not only could Nome not leave, but Jim and Erin could not get back home.  So my duties continued.  The cook informed me he wasn’t going to cook them dinner Saturday evening, or breakfast Sunday Morning.  So added to my duties of teacher, athletic director, and principal was being the cook too.  So I ended up having to get up at 8:00 A.M. to make breakfast for the Nome team before they left.  Erin and Jim ended up making it back the following Monday. C.O., Jeff, and I went out crabbing on Sunday.  We pulled our two pots, the first had one small crab and a bunch of star fish.  The second had 3 small crabs, and a bunch of sea urchins.  We didn’t have a chainsaw since we broke the one we were using on the previous trip, that made the process a lot more work.  We are hoping to have it fixed for our next trip.

Feb200509

0

Tera Nova and Iditamovie

The last couple mornings have been pretty nice. We have been proctoring the Tera Nova tests. Since the kids here strive on structure, they have been exceptionally well behaved in the morning. In the afternoon on the other hand, they are ready to break out and tired of thinking. So they are a little unruly at times. The deadline for turning in a clip fro the Ididamovie contest is tomorrow. I wasn’t able to get any audio recorded to add as background music. So I wasn’t able to get it the clip finished up and sent in. That kind of bums me out, but what can ya do right? Erin and Jim are taking off to Unalakleet tomorrow. They get to meet with all the other principals, SFA coordinators, and district office people to talk about data. So while Jim is gone I am the acting principal. Lucky me huh? No extra pay for the extra stress, and no sub. So I get to try to handle all the discipline problems that may occur while I am teaching class. We are also blessed with a day of Saturday school. We have to make up the two days we missed after Christmas due to weather. We also have basketball games this weekend that I get to run. So it’s going to be a busy rest of the week. We have another broadcast tomorrow. We are doing a joint broadcast with a school in Montana. They will have their own anchors as well as 4 clips. So that is exciting. It’ll be nice for our students to see some clips from some other schools. We are hoping everything goes as planned.

« Older Entries