Back at it…

Well, I will officially start blogging again.

The HughesNet installer was here this morning setting up our “high” speed interent dish today.  Don’t get me wrong its better than dial up when it comes to progressive downloads and overall page loads, but the 900 ms ping times is killing me when I try to FTP files and do web work.  It is nice to be able to surf the web somewhat normally again.

For those of you who hadn’t heard, I accepted a job with the Virginia Minnesota Public Schools for this next year.  They already have me working this summer on revamping their district, high school, upper elementary, and lower elementary websites.  It is quite an undertaking and the beginning of the year is quickly approaching.  I would like to have all 4 sites done by the end of next week.

Along with being in charge of the websites for the district I will also be teaching two hours a day.  One class is a web design class, and the other is an advanced video editing / student broadcasting class.  I should be pretty fun.  The rest of the day I’ll be helping teachers integrate technology into their classes and the rest of the jobs that a tech person runs into.

The shcool uses only Apple computers, however they have the administrators running windows on their macs using bootcamp.  So I do have to deal with the dark side from time to time.

Erin and I have had a busy summer.  She has graciously accompanied me on the BWCACAST camping trips this summer.  We have our last scheduled camping trip this coming Monday.  I don’t know how long we’ll be able to go in for with work hanging over my head.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve been getting up around 6:00 AM to get to work when everyone else does in Virginia.  I have about a 40 mile drive each way, so I have to get up a little earlier than I’d like to, or have had to in the past.  Here is what it looked like the other moring as I drug myself out of bed.

We needed another car since Erin got a job in Net Lake which is 40 miles the opposite direction I’ll be driving.  So we looked around on craig’s list and found a 02 Kia Spectra in Superior.  So last weekend we drove over there and bought it.  Its a nice car and gets about 32 mpg.  So that will be nice with the driving.

Thats all for now.  I’ve found that getting up at 6 AM causes you to go to bed earlier in the evening.

I should be posting more often now that we have upgraded from dail up out here at the lake.

I look forward to reading all of your blogs as well.  I havn’t been able to do much of that either, so it’ll be nice to see what everyone else is up to as well.

BWCACAST Anouncement!!

For those of you who haven’t heard…

I will be starting an IPTV show (Internet Television show) or if your more familiar with the term VideoPodcast.

The show will be a weekly trip into the Boundary Water Canoe Area (BWCA). Most trips will be just day trips in and out the same day, but once a month the show will be a multi-day camping trip. I entered the permit lottery back in January and was able to get all three permits that I wanted. One in May, June, and August.

I will be shooting the show in High Definition and viewers will be able to subscribe to a HD feed, a SD feed, a video ipod feed, or watch each episode embedded in the website. I will be looking for sponsors for the show to help pay for equipment, travel costs, and editing time. So if any of you are connected to any companies that are looking for a new way to advertise have them take a looks at the site in a couple months, I should have some content up by then.

I have built a website for this whole new endeavor. You can find it at www.bwcacast.com.

Here is a preview….

Tied in with the website I have created a forum (Discussion Board) for viewers to chat about the show or anything BWCA related.

There is a link off the main site to the “Discussions”, or you can go directly to it by using this link. www.bwcacast.com/forums/

Here is a preview of the discussions site…

Feel free to sign up for an account. It has many features. I’ve set it up so when you log into the forum your also logged into the blog so your able to comment on both. In the forum you are able to upload a personal avatar that will be associated with all of your posts. I hope that people enjoy the show. Feel free to send me feed back on the site. I’ll need help looking for bugs and typos.