Apparently there is porn on the internet

Well another day of excitement. I had a staff meeting this morning. It went pretty well. It looks like I’m going to be the acting principal again next month. I don’t mind it so much during the day. But I really get sick of being in charge of making sure the gym is opened up for gym night, and the closed back up again. I have to go over to the school around 11 on the weekdays, and midnight on the weekends. On top of that the entire village is calling asking if their is going to be gym. It gets kind of old. Not to mention the occasional disciplinary incident I get to deal with during the day. Something to look forward to right??? 🙂 I went and had a chat with one of the classes that was in question for the porn incident. I will do another in about an hour. We are putting in place a more stringent check out system. The new system will allow us to know who was on a certain computer at a certain time. Hopefully it will get their attention and we won’t have an encounter like this again. SFA is going pretty well. It’s kind of tough when a couple of your students miss the first half hour of class. When they do show up, they are rude and loud. Disrupting the entire class every chance they get. That’s what I’m dealing with at the moment. I hope everyone else is having a better morning than me. It’s not that terrible, just disheartening knowing that its the norm. 🙂

I know my recent post have been crazy long.  I’m sure they will slowly start to shrink as the excitement of having a blog wears off.  Anyway…  As promised I went out and took a picture of the sunset today.  It is currently 14 below zero outside.  Definitely colder if you account for the wind chill into account.

So after school I went and finished tracking down the computers that were up to no good.  Having located them I will be talking to a couple of classes tomorrow about appropriate computer use. After I finished that task I remembered I needed to run to the store.  I had thrown together some stuff for stew at lunch, but didn’t have any vegetables to throw in.  The store has been a little bare lately after the poor weather we had a week ago, and they haven’t had a chance to stock back up yet.  So for now we don’t have any eggs, potatoes, or carrots.  🙁  Not so good for stew.  So on my run over to the store I snapped a picture of the sun set.  I about froze by but off.  I ran down to the beach to take a picture without the houses in view, and I was out longer than expected.  I foolishly run round without a coat, and with sandals regardless of the weather.  So by the time I made it to the store I was a little chilled.  Unfortunately they haven’t received replacement supplies yet.  So I found a bag of frozen stew vegetables, which I have had before, and the potatoes aren’t the best.  Anyway.  I picked up some of those and some bugles and Twinkies (One of the things I have grown a taste for since living up here). When I got home I found a box of food waiting for me.  When I was in Anchorage, Katie and I did a little shopping for the second half of the year.  The boxes are starting to trickle in.  The custodians from the school are nice enough to pick up our mail from the post office.  They deliver the boxes to the house and the paper mail to our school mailboxes.  It’s really nice.  The only things we have to go to the post for are things we have to sign for.

I am chatting with Katie right now (via. iChat) who is typing in her blog as well.  I think it is time for some dinner and a little Alias.

Finding a Culprit

Well… The kids are off to P.E. right now.  It’s nice to be sitting in a quite classroom.  After school on Saturday one of our teachers brought me some stuff she found on one of the school’s printers that wasn’t exactly school appropriate.  So to find out whom the culprits was I first had to find out which site it came from.  Luckily on one of the inappropriate pictures there was a water mark (text over the graphic showing ownership) that gave some sort of a web address, and there was a banner at the top of the page.  So I tried the site that was watermarked on the picture and it turned out to be a website for video games.  No porn there, or links to porn.  So I thought I was at a dead end until I started to examine the top of the page.  There was a site index, no links that gave the www. —–.com, but names.  So I goggled one of the names of the links and what do you know, I found the site in question.  So now I had the site, but how do you find out who has visited it you ask?  Well this morning I called up GCI School Access (our ISP).  They run our Internet filtering via a proxy.  So I told them my problem and they asked for the site in question, and he gave me an IP address.  Problem being it was MY ADDRESS.  Mine was the only one there, which was really confusing.  He did a little more looking and that I was the only one who typed in the entire address with the “www” at the beginning of the address.  The other users had just typed in the part of the address that followed the “www”.  So I now have a list of like 5 IP addresses to find.  To locate those I find an IP that is in use that is on the list.  Using my computer I ping that address (send out packets of info and bounce like radar).  While the packets are being sent our I go to the switch and unplug one connection at a time until the packets don’t go through.  That tells me what port the computer is getting its internet connection from.  Then I locate that switch and it is either connected to a computer directly or to a airport base station that is giving the connection wirelessly to a computer.  Once I find if I can have a talk with the class about appropriate computer use.  That’s my exciting news for now.  Looks like the kids are back from P.E.  Gotta go  🙂

Brushing Teeth

I am back from my lunch break. The kids are brushing their teeth right now. It is about 17 below zero out right now, 43 below with the windchill. One of my more challenging students has decided to show up after lunch. So we’ll see how the afternoon goes. Its a beautiful day out today minus the cold. I’ll see if I can post a picture of the perpetual sunset later.

Sleepless Night

Didn’t get much sleep last night.  I went to bed and just couldn’t fall asleep.  So I got up and created this blog.  I tried going back to sleep at 2:00 A.M. without much luck.  I don’t know what time I finally fell asleep.  I luckily woke up this morning on time and not very sleepy believe it or not. When I got to school this morning, I was greeted with one of my least favorite chores.  I was tasked with trying to get a “PC” to work on our wireless network.  They are really picky when it comes to wireless encryption passwords.  They have to be a certain number of characters long or they won’t work.  So I had to redo all of the settings on our wireless network.  Which I still haven’t finished.  I have a wireless access point that is unwilling to reset.  Something to play with on my breaks I guess.   I was going to take a picture of my class for you, but don’t have a camera handy right now.  🙁  Sorry.  We are in the middle of SFA (Success for All reading) right now.  It is tough on a Monday morning to get the kids back in the groove.  They are all a little tired from staying up all night, and reading isn’t one of their strong suits.  So it always makes for a challenging morning. I had better get back at it.  Have a good morning.

The Beginnings of a Blog

So there I was…. Checking my sister’s blog on a daily basis.  This is the blog mind you that I helped her create.  The one I showed her how to use.  When I realized.  Hey! I don’t have a blog.  I can’t let my sister out do me in the realm of technology.  So I decided to create my own.  Mine will be much cooler though.  I will try to update mine a little more often than she does hers.  So I know I’ll be hogging all of the traffic on the family site.  Soon I’m sure people from all over will have my blog as their homepage.  Just to see what’s happening in my life.  🙂  Not really.  But I am going to try to post pictures, and a daily note about the crazy things that go on in the far far north.  For instance…  How many of you have your boss and half of your co-workers stop by on a Sunday to visit.  Some stopped by to talk shop and some for a visit.  Maybe some of you, but how many of you live in the same building as half of your staff.  With the other half living no more than 100 ft. away?  I am enjoying my one-day off this week.  That’s right…. One day!!  Flying back up to Brevig after our two week Christmas break didn’t go exactly as planned.  Turns out we were “stuck” in Anchorage for an extra two days.  Now I put extra in quotes because I wouldn’t exactly say I was bummed I didn’t make it back.  The problem was.  Erin and I were not the only ones delayed from our return.  9 out of the 10 staff that run our school were “stuck” in Anchorage, including our principal.  So school was canceled on Monday and Tuesday.  The only problem being BSSD (Bering Strait School District) doesn’t have any school days to spare.  So we have to make up the days we had to cancel.  Hence only one day off.  That’s right folks.  We in Brevig were privileged with a day of Saturday school.  With another one promised in a month or two.  Aren’t we lucky?  These are new additions to the normal Saturday workdays that are in our contract.  See the district realizes that it’s staff isn’t from the arctic and wants to get home as soon as possible.  So the days that normal schools in the lower 48 and those schools that are on the road system in Alaska take as teacher workdays during the week are scheduled on Saturdays for us.  So we can spend as little time as possible away from our families and places that are warm.  Actually the weather isn’t too bad right now.  It’s only 11 below zero (37 below with the wind chill).  So after our one-day off we are back at it again tomorrow trying to encourage learning in the youth of the north.  I hope everyone has a quick and pain free Monday.