Back to the Grind

Well, a lot has happend since my last post.  I went and had a wonderful time in Talkeetna helping Rick and Tiff build their yurt.  We got a lot accomplished in the few days I was there.  I am looking forward to seeing how it all turns out when they are finished.  I posted some pictures of the process.

I am now back in Unalakleet working in the district office.  We are training the new teachers and working with the principals to get everyone ready for the year.  Next week every teacher in the district will be here for beginning of the year training.  I will be teaching a few classes.  So hopefully they will go well.

Erin flew in yesterday which is nice.  It took me a few days, but I got the house put together before she came home.  Jim (Erin’s dad)  came in today.  So we are planning on some salmon fishing and berry picking while he is here.  It should be a lot of fun.

I am hoping to put up a web cam this year out our window.  I don’t know if it’ll be doable because I need to find another computer that can stay at home to push out the images.  I was thinking about getting a mac mini to use as a media center, which would also work out well for pushing out a web cam image.  I don’t know….  It’s a lot of money to spend on something I don’t really need.

We got up river fishing a couple days ago which was fun.  There are some pictures of that on the gallery of those as well if your interested.

Back in UNK

Well we are back in Unalakleet after a quick weekend.  It was nice to hang out with the family.  It would have been nice to have Katie up, but she was busy playing frisbee.  We left Valdez this morning around 9:00 this morning.  By the time we got out of the Anchorage airport with our rental car it was about 10:00 AM.  We headed right over to Costco to do a little shopping for next year.  We had to be back to the airport by 2:00 P.M.  to check the tubs of food we were buying at Costco.  We shopped pretty quickly, but assembling the boxes, and packing everything up to mail took quite a bit of time.  We mailed our 7 boxes out to ourselves, and made it over to check in about ten to 2:00 P.M.  We got our two tubs checked in, and headed to the board room for a quick snack before our flight.  We made it back up here to a sunny day, and a relaxing evening.

I was stumbling this evening, and found some interesting sites….

The first one here has some really nice pictures of Alaska.  It is a flash based website, but it is put together really nicely.

http://www.noriomatsumoto.com/

I came across this interesting article about a college student who spent part of his spring break in a Walmart.  He wanted to see if it was possible to live in a Walmart.  If you have a minute check out the article.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060327/OPINION01/603270342

This last website is a site that uses the same wiki that wikipedia uses.  They are showing you how things are made.  I thought it was pretty cool.  Take a look around.

http://howstuffismade.org/menupage.html 

Hope you enjoy the sites.

Six AM Shmix AM

Well, when the alarm went off at six this morning, my legs, back, calves, and shoulders said “ehh 7:30 sounds like a better time to get up”.  So off with the alarm and back into slumber-land. So needless to say running didn’t happen for me today, but Im fine with that.

Work went well today.  We are getting things ready for the job fair in Anchorage which I will be leaving or tomorrow.  We have been printing off posters to put up promoting BSSD.  I got the big poster printer to work on OS X machines today.  That was something we have been fighting with for a few years now.  So that was nice.  I had to do a firmware update on the printer which worried me a little.  I didn’t want to turn the big poster printer into a paper weight.  It all worked out though.

Aside from that I destroyed Stebbins website.  I was working with Damon one of the teachers from Stebbins.  He has a wordpress install which is the same thing I use for this blog.  He was using it as the schools main site linking over to a blog where students post to regularly.  Well, we have this problem with someone clicks on a link in the blog it tries to send them to www.stebbins.bssd.org.  which would normally be fine, but our addresses don’t have the www in it.  So it turns up with a page now found error.  So we were working on getting that to work, and I accidently in the wordpress admin area changed the address wordpress looks for to find itself.  So when I updated the site with the new address, it couldn’t find itself.  Which in turn made it impossible to put back.  Whenever I tried to make the change it would to make the change in the wrong spot, and the file it was trying t change was in a totally different area on the server.

So as you can imagine Damon wasn’t too happy.  He had to start over by removing the install, and reinstalling.  Luckily he hadn’t really added anything to the install yet, so he should be able to have it back up in an hour or so.  I offered to do it for him, but he wanted to work on it himself.

So after that catastrophe I worked on some orders for the district for next year.  The Ed Support office is buying some iPods so their trainers can use them to show off podcasts on how to tech different activities.  The idea is… They are creating video podcasts of SFA lessons, and QSM concepts.  These will be a digital resource for the teachers in the district.  The iPods come into play by allowing the support staff to have those video podcsasts right in their pocket.  When out at site they will be able to connect the unit to a TV, in any teachers classroom, and show them examples on how things can be taught.  I hope it all works out, and that they don’t turn into just a music box for the temporary owners.

Well, I had better hit the sack.  More to come from Anchorage and then Valdez this week.

Run Run Run as Fast as You Can!!

So much for the lazy weekend. Erin and I got up this morning, and laid around for a while which was on track for what I felt a weekend should be. I did a little work on the internet, and we watched a little T.V. Around 4:00 however Erin was wanting to go for a run. She was debating the treadmill vs. outside. We had a pretty nice day, so it was a legitimate bit of decision making. I have been thinking about getting back into shape for a while now. Since I do a lot of sitting on my butt at work. I need to pick up something extracurricular to drop a few pounds and get to where a short jog doesn’t make me wheeze. So I told Erin I would accompany her for her run if she wanted to go outside.

The run went pretty well. I think we went about 3 miles total. The run was from our apartment out across the bridge over the river, along a bit of tundra, up a little incline, and then back again. I am hoping to run every day now, which will be tough for me since I don’t like to work out just for work out sake. I don’t mind getting in shape if I am out hiking, or something like that, but just running to run doesn’t motivate me very much. On the other hand. I don’t have much time for the hiking thing and if I ever want to get back into some reasonable shape, I better just suck it up.

So the next delema is when should our daily run take place? I don’t think I would have the energy after work, since I usually just want to hold the couch down. So that leaves the morning. I am not so much of a morning person, but lately I have been getting up pretty early. So I told Erin we should start going at 6:00 AM. I know thats crazy early, but it would get it out of the way for the day, and jump start our metabolism.

ick ick ick……

Anyway.. I was working on a help desk website for BSSD today. I had to take what was installed by fantastico on to the php msql server and make it look BSSDish. That involves pulling down the files, and finding all the little pictures that make up the website design, and replacing them with things that have the BSSD logo, or our coined phrase keeping the exact same size proportions. If you want to check it out its at..

http://help.bssd.org/hcl/

I was also working on the main page for the help site. It will tell who all works for BSSD Ed-Tech, as well as what they do, their contact info, and a link to the ticketing system/live help. I got a starter page up. If you want to check it out its at…
http://help.bssd.org/

Well, thats about all that got done today. I did do a little stumbling around on the internet, and came across these interesting sites..

Wildlife Photo Contest
Amazing Paper Art

I was pretty impressed. So I figured I’d pass it on. Hope you enjoy them.

That’s all for now. Time to go to bed and read.

Weekend :)

The week went really fast. Hard to believe we were in Mexico just over a week ago. John and I have been getting ready for the Job fair next week. We will be traveling to Anchorage for most of next week hoping to fill the last few spots left in BSSD. I will be responsible for scheduling and maintaining all of the video conferences during the week. BSSD and other school districts will have video conferences set up to bring in administrators and or principals into interviews with prospective hires. BSSD is also providing a large portion of the computers at the job fair which will be used for the attendees to check into the fair, or to sign up with ATP (Alaska Teacher Placement), which is the best way to get a job in the state.

We got an xServe in last week we are hoping to use to set up quicktime streaming of our video conferences for the rest of the year, and for the years to come. Currently we are using GCI’s Starbak system which only streams in Windows Media player. This pretty much doesn’t work for us. It is a really finicky media codec, and doesn’t work reliably on Apple machines. Quicktime on the other hand is truly universal, and when using the new H264 codec has a very small file size, yet still has very good video quality. So I have been working on setting that up this week. we are bringing the server down to Anchorage next week, hoping to install it.

The weekend hopefully will involve a lot of relaxation. Erin and I fly out of here on Tuesday evening. Erin will be heading over to Valdez on Wednesday morning. I will work the rest of the week in Anchorage with John, then fly into Valdez on Friday night. I guess my dad will be in Anchorage Thursday through Saturday, so hopefully we will be able to hang out a bit before Valdez. He is in for a telephone board meeting. He will join us back in Valdez on Saturday evening. I took Monday off, so we won’t have to leave Valdez till that morning, getting back into Unalakleet that night.

Got an email from Mike Svir tonight. Sounds like he and Amanda had a good time down in Florida for their spring break. I am looking forward to seeing them this summer. They are really cool, and I miss hanging out with him. So this summer should be a lot of fun.

I’ve been stumbling around the internet and ran across a couple interesting sites.  The first one has some amazing 3D sidewalk art, and the other one had “The worst analogies ever written in a high school essay”.  I thoght it was funny, so I’ll pass it on.

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/.

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….

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. 🙂