2nd T-Day Gathering & I’m on the Couch

My brother’s couch, Mission Viejo, CA. It’s almost midnight, my brother’s family have all gone off to sleep and I’m watching the end of “Titanic” on TBS. I don’t even remember the last time I spent the night here. This year has been a blur. Today was my family’s second Thanksgiving gathering. Besides the “normal” T-Day fare, we had a little beer-fest with a pretty good collection of brews my brother purchased from the local BevMo store (Beverages & More). Good times.

Well, given that I’m doing the solo-guy thing sleeping on the couch tonight, maybe things weren’t all that I was hoping for…

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Happy T-Day

“If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?”
John Cleese

Technorati Tags: family

DL.TV Answers My Video Encoding Question… NOT!

“Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy” Jimmy Swaggart

So admittedly my use of my NAS (Network Access Storage) has been more of a solution looking for a problem than anything else. My first thought was to store my MP3 collection on it so that I could run iTunes from any of my computers without having to have multiple copies of the same songs. I really wanted to have my macbookpro be the main iTunes server with the MP3 stored on the NAS, but the laptop’s wireless connection to the network slowed iTunes down to a ridiculous crawl (it took over 15 minutes for iTunes to sync with my iPod in this configuration). Then after watching GeekBrief.TV’s Cali Lewis talk about storing her DVD collection to their massive NAS I thought that that would be a great idea.

I’d already ripped a bunch of my DVDs so that I could put them on my 5th Gen iPod video. Why not move my whole collection. I mean, the damn thing is 400GBs. I moved a bunch of anime movies, started ripping the first seasons of the three StarTrek series, added the matrix series (including the Animatrix) and started ripping the Lord of the Rings movies… and then I ran out of space! Huh? Damn. Looking for a solution I wrote the following question to my buds at DL.TV:

I started ripping my DVD collection to my 400GB SimpleShare NAS and soon discovered that 400GB doesn’t go very far when the media is left in it’s original MPEG2 format. What do you suggest encoding these video at? Obviously making things iPod compatible would be cool, but I want them to not look bad on a standard TV and later when I upgrade to something approaching HD…. any suggestions? JBB

Imagine my surprise when, the next time I viewed their video podcast, Pat & Robert answered my question… OMG!

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The Importance of Background Knowledge… You think?

Staff meetings are such great fodder for journal rants. So today’s “why are our students are not scoring high on standard tests” talk was about the relationship between background knowledge and achieve. Today’s gem was that background knowledge (life experiences and opportunities) trumps innate intelligence. Ya think? The point, of course, was that teachers can turn around low achieving students by adding to or assisting in the background knowledge area. We’re not stuck if we have a student who is not as bright as another.

One thing I learned my first years as a classroom teacher was that, especially with ethnic students, that students are surprised when the teacher validates or taps into students’ background experience. Alas, it would seem that part of the educational process involves trivializing or discounting students’ lives By the time I interacted with my 6th grade students, they were shocked that I knew something about South Park and that allowed me access to their lives. Too bad many teachers teach as if there is no universe beyond their classroom doors.

One good thing that’s being discussed is the importance of subjects being covered in greater depth and with an emphasis on starting or connecting with students’ prior knowledge. Depth, what a concept… Experiences? No way. JBB

Being Single: Don’t Date a Writer if You Want to Stay off the Radar

“Our lives improve only when we take chances — and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.” Walter Anderson (thanks Jen & George)

So I got a major smack-down for my last few relationship-moaning entries. Admittedly there’s nothing attractive about whining, all the more unattractive would be whining online. My bad… Word to the wise, those hoping to stay off the radar post-divorce, it’s probably not wise to date a writer with an online blog. No one likes seeing their shit “in print.” Apparently I haven’t learned my lesson that even though I’m mostly trying to work through my own feelings, etc., the other person in the scenario is going to read it as chicken-shit whiny or worse as a passive-aggressive character attack. Shit. Undoubtedly it’s not enough to “explain” that the blog is neither history nor meant to send a passive-agressive character-attack message. I’m just a writer trying to figure things out. Of course, the joke was that no one reads the damn blog anyway. So much ado about nothing? Not to the person whom I write about…. Fuck. What’s a writer to do? I guess I need more of a life. Or maybe I need to get all mental about world issues or get all geeky about some technology toy? Wait a minute, I do that already. Screw it, I’m a writer, this is what I do. Besides I’ve already confessed that when I’m happy or content that I’m less likely to write about my personal life (which isn’t so great in that this tendency distorts a reader into thinking that my personal life is all about being unhappy or lonely… ack).

So, this is a general apology to all those whom I’ve flamed in the past and will probably continue to ponder about in the future. You’re more than welcome to flame me in the comments section of this blog or start your own (though my non-writer friends aren’t too likely to waste their precious time with a stupid blog, blah, blah, blah). Hey, what can I say…

“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” A.J. LIEBLING

JBB

GBTV #0092 | GeekBrief.TV from the album “GeekBrief.TV | Video Podcast (iPod)” by Cali Lewis

“F” is for Fridays

I’m not very fond of Fridays. I know that seems so odd in a world clamoring for “time off” and racing to get away from the work-a-day world. And it’s not that I have something against that day itself or that I don’t like the idea that I could sleep in the next day if I wanted to. It’s just that after doing my best to make it through the week I’m tired of spending my friday nights alone. For all my efforts to fulfill my call as a teacher, for all my long hours looking for ways to make my classroom come alive and it be a place where something more than “computers” happens, for all that I think I deserve more than an In-n-Out burger for one followed by an empty darkened apartment.

So, here I am with a week with a Friday holiday, making this a week with two “Fridays.” Damn. And here I am typing these silly words on my treo/palm PDA, the solo geek-boy eating alone at In-n-Out again. I stayed a little late at work so that I could grade a bunch of papers, thus making it so that I would not have to take said papers home. It would have been nice if I would have been able to connect with someone, but this “someone” was already driving home when I called and she was a little vague about her plans for the evening except that they didn’t include me. She said she’d call back later but I’m not going to hold my breath. I’m really tired of existing on the lower rungs of someone else’s “maybe” list.

There was a time when she would wake up before dawn and drive through morning traffic across the county just to spend less than an hour in my arms before we both had to get to work.

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Watching the Blue “Copy” Meter

I’m sitting here watching files fly between computers, while others disappear off of my server. TRANSLATION: I’m backing up or copying my iTunes library of songs from my G4 to my PC, partly because I need to erase the backed-up collection from my NAS (Network-Access Storage) so that I can continue to rip (copy) my DVD collection to the NAS. The PC has already crashed once because I tried to copy too many files at once (or it was time for the PC’s afternoon break…, you know how unions can be). I don’t know what it is, but there’s something soothing about watching a little blue meter creep across the screen and get bigger and bigger as the computer gets closer to completing its task. The jury duty that I’d been on for the past week concluded this morning, shortly before 11, so I went to the gym, caught up on a bunch of video podcasts while walking my 5K and now I’m doing a little digital housekeeping. Oops, the little blue line is done, so I need to give it some more files to copy. These digital drones can be so handy at times. JBB

A Million Monkeys

“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.” Robert Wilensky (thanks Jen & George)

Next…

With the door to the future now wide open, I thought I’d drop a note to my former worship leader/mentor:

Hey bro,

How goes things? I think the last time we communicated you’d just taken a new job at Orange Coast, or one of the colleges in the West OC area. I hope that that has worked out and that things are going well for you and Michelle. I’m in my second year teaching computers to middle school kids and I have to say that for whatever reason it is 100% better the second year (last year was a real bitch… sorry, no better way to describe the experience). Alas, I’m sorry to say that things at my local Vineyard are not so promising.

We switched pastors last Spring when the former pastor took a teaching job on the East Coast and since then our poor little group has shrunk down to myself, the other worship leader, the pastor, his wife and a rotating group of two to six other souls. On more than one occasion ten O’clock has rolled around and it’s just been the four of us.

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Dark Skies from the Courthouse

It’s been a bitch of a week. Something I ate on Sunday wiped me out from Sunday night all the way ’til Tuesday. It’s amazing how little it seems to take to take the human body out of commission. Thus it only makes sense that instead of having another day to recover from said bug, I then got called up on Wednesday and then selected to sit on a jury for the rest of the week. Shit. All of that would darken anyone’s mood, but it was more some of the things that i heard in the courthouse that gave me greater pause.

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