iPad

I’ve been lucky enough to play with an iPad over the last few days. It was one of 6 purchased by the school. I think it could really be an amazing tool in an educational setting. I’m actually posting from one right now. I am using Apple’s keyboard dock to type this and really prefer using the keyboard dock compared to typing with the virtual keyboard provided within the os. One interesting note using wordpress as a blogging platform is that the iPad wouldn’t type into the post area. I could type in the title of the post, but not the body. I found a work around to this problem by just typing into the html mode instead of the visual mode.

I’ve really enjoyed using the iPad finding it great for consuming information. I didn’t have it long enough to truly enjoy books on the device, but I can imagine it’d be great on trips.

Up in the air

Well…  I spent the morning up a ladder.  Kerry Bidle is our schools athletic director and really is working hard to increase student involvement in extra curricular activities.  One of the ways he’s working at this is by keeping all students, staff, and visitors informed of whats going on in our school.  To do this he’s worked with local businesses to fund an electronic information system.  We’ve installed three tv’s as of last year, and have been working on adding a couple more that will allow us to push content into the Roosevelt school as well.  The system pushes powerpoint slides and video over ethernet to the tv’s.  So Kerry spent about 7 hours yesterday getting all the wires pulled through the ceiling.   Today I helped him finish up putting the ends on and getting everything hooked up correctly.  Unfortunatly it didn’t work right off the bat.  I’ve got to do some more testing tomorrow to see what the issue is.  I really hope I can figure this out.  Its pretty frustrating to work on something for so long and to spend most of the time up a ladder to have it not work out.

Well I’ve got to get on the treadmill.  Its already almost a quarter to 8.

Working out….

I have begun the tedious, laborious, painful task of working out.  Granted I’ve only gone twice so far, but its sure not easy.  I get up around 5:00 am and head to the school.  I am able to use the schools equipment when its not in use by the sports teams.  The morning is the best time to achieve this.  So it makes for a wicked early morning, but I get it out of the way for the day which is nice.  I’m just starting out with trying to get my cardio back up to par.  So I’ve been running on the treadmill for about 20 min with a 5 min warm up and a 5 min cool down.  Yesterday I lifted some weights after running and I end each day with sit-ups regardless what I do.  So I’m hoping I’ll be getting in some better shape here over the next few months.  Its sure not fun being out of shape.

Rain

Its been a while since my last post.  The days of snow covered ground have dicipated into the soggy soil below.  As the ice melts away from the shore we’ve scurted along the the mirror smooth water in our aluminum canoe.  The ice moves around in the wind and can cut you off if you are out for too long.  The aluminum canoe allows us to be mini ice breaking boats if we do get a little trapped.

With all this rain coming down and some milder temperatures I am getting more and more anxious to be finished with school.  I have 24 more days with kids and 25 more days of work.  Not like I’m counting.  I really can’t wait for our trip to Austrailia.  It will be nice for Erin and I to get out and about again.  We had a balst over in Ireland, and I think three weeks in a little camper will be a perfect way to start our summer break.  We will be in Southern Australia, so it won’t be a tropical vacation being their winter and all, but watching the penguins run up on shore and checking out the occasional winery will be very relaxing.

We went down to Baxter yesterday for Axton’s second birthday party.  He sure is getting big.  It was nice to catch up with the Svirs.  They have another little one on the way, so they will be busy for sure when the new one comes along.  Wonder what Axton will think of having a younger sibling.

On a sad note, my little dell mini bit the dust today.  I had it set up taking a time lapse for the last 5 days.  It was taking a picture every 5 minutes and when it did it would make a little beeping noise.  I woke up this morning and didn’t notice the beep at all through out the day, so I went over to check on it.  The screen was black and usually it would have the screen saver going, so I tried to move the mouse and no go.  I did some further checking and after a little chat with Dell support Im sending it back in sometime this week.  So for my first Dell purchase this doesn’t boad so well.  Im thinking its just the power board in the laptop that went bad preventing it from powering up the battery or running the computer.  So it shouldn’t be too difficult to fix.  It’ll be interesting to see if the time lapse was saved at all.  We’ll see I guess.  The support guy said that the turnaround time would be about 7 – 10 days, so we should have it back in time for our trip to Australia.  I’ll update you when I find out more.

Well time to get to my school work done.  Have a great week.

Spring

As the snow fell outside my classroom window last Friday one of my students said “Isn’t today the first day of spring?”.  I confirmed his statement as we all watched the once clean streets begin to fill with snow.  One of my students has a class at the MIB school before my class, upon her arrival she commented on how slippery the roads were.  We had a little discussion about how the drive home would be joyous.

School has been going pretty well.  The kids are fun to work with.  They always have a great attitudes as we work on our projects.  In my broadcasting class we are about to take a week to work on shooting cooking shows.  Using multiple camera angles and an upbeat host I’m hoping they’ll get to try out a different type of shooting and editing.  Im not sure what we’ll make, but I’m hoping its not too elaborate.  The goal is the tech side of things, not the food side of things.  I’m thinking cookies may be on the docket.

My web design class continues to install php msql systems, and hack the themes to look a certain way.  We are in desperate need of Photoshop, but our lab doesn’t have that, so we skimp by.  I’ll be starting them on a new system tomorrow called glfusion.  I’ve never worked with it, but it seems to have a lot of nice feature sets, so I’m hoping it will be something they may actually use on a real project for a client.

Erin and I have been hanging out.  I picked up a couple of steaks from F&D Meats in Virginia last week.  We had a nice sunny day and fired up the grill after work.  The steaks were the biggest I’d ever seen, and shockingly enough we pretty much finished them off with a little wine.  We hope to be doing more barbecuing in the future once this random spring weather decided to clear itself up.  They are forecasting for freezing rain and snow all week, so that’s nice. 

We have officially begun the countdown to Australia 74 days and counting.  We can’t wait to fly half way around the world and begin our lazy 3 week road trip along the great ocean road. More posts on that when we get there and maybe a few more leading up to it.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with believe it or not, the thought of buying a new laptop.  What may surprise you however is that “gasp” its not an apple.  I know, I know…. There really is nothing wrong with me.  Here is my thought process…. I am super happy with the macbook pro I currently use, but I don’t know if I really want to take this with me to Australia.  We are going to try to go as light as possible on that trip, with our full intention being to go carry-on.  So the extra weight and size of my slim macbook pro has me thinking smaller…. Much smaller…..  The computer that has caught my eye is the Dell Mini 9.  Its a tiny 9″ laptop and here is what I like about it.

• Small form factor
• Built in 3G (Can connect to Internet via cell tower)
• SSD (Solid State Hard Drive)
• Built in web cam (for skype video)
• WiFi
• Comes with Ubuntu (Yeah no XP or VISTA)
• CAN BE HACKED TO RUN OS X (Apple’s operating system)

The last one is the biggie for me.  To be able to have such a tiny laptop running my favorite OS with iphoto and everything would be phenomenal.  There are some drawbacks, the biggest being the condensed keyboard and the apostrophe key being moved down by the space bar.  So this can cause some troubles when trying to type out something really quickly.  So how much does this hot little number cost?  It starts out at $250.  After you finish configuring it it comes out to about $555 which if you think about it is not too bad.  So im asking all my readers to donate $30 to “Bill’s little laptop fund”  I figure if I can get 20 people on board then I’ll be good to go.  Something to think about with my B-Day coming up next month wink wink.

How do you install that?

My web design students are a lot of fun.  We have an ongoing humorous argument about wich operating system is better, Mac or PC.  Well… On Monday one of my students brought me the newest Windows operating system (Windows 7) which was released in beta a couple weeks ago.

So Monday night Jesse and I met up in Hibbing where he helped me pick up some linoleum for our kitchen and we used his truck to bring it back to the house.  Jesse was then kind enough to help me do the install.  Which turned out perfect.

Tuesday back in class, three of my students came up to me asking if I had installed Windows 7 on my Mac the night before.  I told them I hadn’t, because I was too busy installing linoleum.  All three got a very confused look, and then almost at the same time one said “How do you install that?”, while another said “Is that an operating system?”.  I said no, its my new kitchen floor.

It was pretty funny how the terminology was the same, and they were mulling over in their mind how one might install linoleum on their computer.

Break has come to an end.

Let me be the first to tell you that the last week and a half has been very very nice.  I really enjoyed sleeping in every morning and playing outside on the nice and not so nice days.

I feel I accomplished a lot over break with a new bwcacast episode being shot, five episdoes edited up, some snowshowing on the lake with Erin, and some skating at the outdoor hockey rink in cook.

We went to a couple of movies “Yes Man” and “Marley and Me”.  Both were fun movies.  Erin and I unfortunetly got the gigles at the end of Marley and Me when there were people in the theater that were so caught up in the movie that they were actually sobbing.  Let me tell you its not good to get the giggles in a “quiet” theater surrounded by very upset people.  Luckliy we were able to control ourselves enough to not cause a scene.  The movie was a little sad, but man… Its a movie folks, its not your dog. 

I am hoping that the new year of work will go by as quickly as the last few months.  I am ready for another summer of adventures.  If you haven’t heard, we booked tickets for Austraila in June.  I can’t wait for the trip.  Its going to be a ton of fun traveling the Great Ocean Road with Erin for three weeks.

I have also strated planning trips into the BWCAW.  I need to get some dates from people that will be going with to see what will work out best entry permit dates.

For now I have another few months with students and teachers to focus on.

I hope everyone has a nice January.

Finally Friday

The week has finally come to an end.  To cap off the week I successfully broke the school districts website this morning.  It was only visually down for about 5 min.  It wasn’t fully restored for a few more hours.  I won’t go into the nerdy details too much, but it involved a corrupt file being uploaded causing the site to not work.  I have since made a complete backup of the entire system just for such an occasion.

Erin and I decided to go out to a movie and dinner tonight.  So while I was waiting for her to drive over from school Tony and I went out for a tasty beverage.  When Erin got to Virginai we headed out to the mexican resturant for dinner and caught up on the day.  After that we went and did some grocery shopping before heading to see 4 Christmases at the theater.  The movie was pretty funny.  I really do like Vince Vaughn.  After the movie we made the 40 mile drive home in a pretty heavy snow storm.  It was very difficult to see at times, and the road was less than visible.

Its very nice to have the week done and better yet have the opportunity to sleep in tomorrow.  More than likely I’ll be up at 8:30 feeling like I’ve slept forever.  Crazy to think back to the days when I’d sleep till 2:00 in the afternoon.  Man that was nice.

Ehh

So I figured I should keep up the schedule of posting, but I couldn’t really think of a title for this post.  Work has been well… Work…. The 9 – 5 hasn’t been super duper fun lately, but I guess that’s how it goes sometimes.

I got to work with a few of the Parkview teachers this morning.  They were getting trained in on how to use their staff websites.  They were great to work with.  Very upbeat and willing to learn.  I know some of the things asked of teachers (such as a staff website) can really add a lot of work to your already busy day.  These folks sure took it in stride and were brainstorming ways they could utilize this online system not only to connect with parents, but also to provide information for their students.  I hope they are able to log in a couple times in the near future and post a couple more times.  It always helps to practice a few more times right after you learn it to help make it stick in your brain.

My broadcasting class have been given the task of creating a 30 second commercial about the school district to have aired on the local television channels.  Its a tight timeline to have it all done by Christmas break, but they are eager for the challenge.   I’ll keep you posted on our progress and will more than likely post the finished product on here when its completed.

My web design class just took on a big project.  I put them into groups of three and gave them the task of creating a full website including a main site, a forum, and a gallery.  All three installs need to have a very similar design and layout which is very time consuming.  I’ve asked them to make this very professional looking.  Up until now I’ve let them be “creative” with their design, and it has really opened up wide range of design styles.  It will be interesting to see how these come out.  They are a fun bunch of kids to work with.

I was going through my iPhoto library and came across this photo…  I think its kind a cool… A reflection of a tree at the edge of the lake on one of our BWCA trips.

Have a happy Friday.  I’m sure looking forward to the weekend.  Hopefully some fancy posts to follow. 

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.