That’s all that’s between Erin and I and our trip to Australia. The weekend seems to just fly by. Its already Sunday evening and it seems work is just around the corner. Students in the Virginia School District will be enjoying a three day weekend. The teachers however have a work day. The high school teachers will be in a four hour differentiated instruction class in the morning. Hopefully the day goes well. I’m already looking forward to next weekend. 🙂
Whats so new you ask? Well, BACON CUPS of course!
I was stumbling last night and came across this. I just had to share it. I guess its something of a BLT minus the bread. Anyway to see how these things are made check it out at http://www.notmartha.org.
I hope you enjoy. 🙂
I was starting to do a long detailed blog post about the new things that Apple came out with, but then got tired going over all the details that no-one that reads my blog really cares about. So here it is in brief…
The movie rentals I feel are a little too expensive. You are given up to a month to watch the movie after renting, and once you start playing you have 24 hours to finish it. You can watch it more than once, but it has to be in that 24 hour time period. You are able to transfer to your ipod, laptop, or Apple TV.
The Macbook Air’s battery is built into the computer like they are in the iPods. So if you are flying you can’t take an extra battery with for additional computing time. It does not have an optical drive built in. You have the option to buy an external super drive for 99 dollars, or they also give you the option to use other machines optical drives on your wireless network both mac and pc. The Macbook Air only has one USB port, no FireWire ports, no line in, and the line out is not optical. So if you are a power user that needs these functionalities then the Air is not for you. If your looking for a super portable laptop then this is the one for you.  They retail at 1799.
For all you lost lovers out there, and I know there are a few of you. Someone has built the very thing that many of us have wondered about while watching NBC’s hit tv show. There is now a timer on this website that needs to be reset every 108 minutes.
I found this in a digg.com article.
Enter the code every 108 minutes (Ajax LOST hatch)
The timer on this addictive little website will reset every 108 minutes aslong as someone, somewhere enters the code ‘4 8 15 16 23 42’ into theprompt. So far the counter has been reset 584 times!
So the million dollar question is…..
willl you punch in the numbers??
I just downloaded this new web browser called Flock. It seems really cool. It has built in blogging support. I am testing it out right now. If this works. I may try switching over from firefox for a while, to see how everything works.
Im sure most of you have heard about this by now, its been in the news, and in the talk shows, but if you haven’t here is your chance.
Apparently kids are using a special ring tone for their cell phones. Its a tone that British police would use to break up student riots. This tone can only be heard by younger people. Scientists say that adults start to lose that range of their hearing around the age of 20. I am youthfull enough I guess since I am able to hear this annoying noise.
Can you???
[QUICKTIME http://www.bbryson.com/movies/ringtone.mov 320 20]
Well the week of ASTE has come and gone. For those of you who don’t know what ASTE is, it stands for Alaska Society for Technolgy in Education. Saturday and Sunday were the preconference days, with half and full day sessions. Mia Concilus and I taught a full day session on student broadcasting on saturday, and a half day on sunday about podcasting and video podcasting.
Erin and I met up with my mom on Sunday who was in Anchorage for a library conference. We went to the Brewhouse for lunch, and then did a little shopping before taking her to the airport to fly back to Valdez.
Erin and I went out to dinner a couple nights which was nice, and were also able to catch a movie. We went to Firewall with Harrison Ford, which wasn’t as good as I had hoped it to be, but it did give us the excuse for extra buttery popcorn and buckets of coke.
Erin had to leave on tuesday which was a bummer. I ended up getting stuck in Anchorage because there was a blizzard in Unalakleet. It would have been nice if we had both been stuck in the big city together.
I got into Anchorage last night on the Pen Air Flight. I got checked into the hotel, and gave Jon a call. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and figured I see what he was up to. He and his girl friend came over and picked me up. We went out to the Outback for dinner. It was good to see him. Sounds like they are both doing really well.
I got up this morning and headed over to the airport. I was lucky enough to get an exit row to sit in. It turns out I was in the seat right by the door that you walk in at. I got situated and waited for everyone to get in their seat. I ended up sitting next to kind of a weird guy. You run into those types of people in Alaska. He was nice, but had some trouble with finding appropriate topics to talk about. I ended up talking to one of the flight attendants for quite a while. I learned about his experience running the Boston Marathon. He said he read a book call some thing like “the swim to antarctica” that helped him run it.
I got to Minneapolis, and tried to get on an earlier flight up to Hibbing, but there weren’t any. So instead of killing my time sitting in the airport I decided to hop a cab to the Excel Energy center. I got here at 5:30 and was able to find a seat. I am only going to be able to catch about an hour of the game, but It’ll be fun.
pictuures to come soon….
John, Chick, and I met down stairs this morning at 7:15 to head over to the MacWorld check in area. We were essentially at the beginning of the line. Here is what it looked like as we were leaving the check in area. 
The class I was taking today which is continuing on tomorrow is covering all the aspects of video compression. I am learning quite a bit. The person teaching the class says that he is a “compressionist”. All the does for a living is compress video for big companies. He worked for Abercrombie & Fitch for the last 5 years compressing their video for their website, and for the in store TV’s that play the videos while you shop. I’m not sure, but I think he now works for a company that just compresses video for major companies around the country. Pretty crazy that is all he does. He was talking about how much easier compression is when using a High Definition camera. He has basically sold me on needing one of them. 🙂
We learned about all the major compression software’s like Sorenson Squeeze, Cleaner, Compressor 2, and a couple others. I learned that pre-compression work is very important to make your video look a lot better. Adjusting the color, saturation, sharpening, and a few other things can really make your video look much better. I am looking forward to playing around with these new ideas when I get back. I also learned that you could use all the computers on your network as a “cluster” to divide up the compression task and make work go a lot faster. If I can find some computers to get this working on I think it can really save some time.
After the conference we stopped off at a couple stores including the San Francisco Apple Store. Its a pretty cool store full of 30 inch monitors and every Mac software and hardware you can think of. 
After that we headed back to the hotel and grabbed some dinner. I had a very tasty steak, after which we went out for a walk around town. It is nice to be in an area where you really don’t need a jacket when you are outside.
That’s all I have for now. I should get some sleep before the day starts tomorrow.
My journey has begun. I am sitting in the Alaska Airlines Board Room right now waiting for my flight to Seattle and then on to San Francisco for the beginning of the adventure. The Concilus’ made it safely back from Bali. They are pretty tired out since it is almost 5:00 AM tomorrow in Bali. I am planning on taking a lot of pictures, and posting them during the week. I will try to get a daily update of what’s going on. More to come later…
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