10 Weeks Left

Logging in at school, was scared that they’d blocked twitbin… how would i survive? oh yeah, via iPhone… 10 weeks left in CA. tick-tock #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Music/Podcast: Daily Giz Wiz 536: Spoon Sisters Battery Eater from the album “Daily GizWiz” by Dick DeBartolo with Leo Laporte

Technorati Tags: california, florida, iPhone, travel, twitter, work

Read more

Share this Post[?]

Temple on the Waters – A Writing Exercise

I went to work during my break to begin going through my stuff, tossing some of it and putting some of it in boxes, in preparation for my move to Florida. As is pretty normal for this process I had to keep myself from spending too much time reading through everything. As i was tossing papers left and right I found a folder with a couple writing exercises that I used to use with my 6th graders meant to help them with their writing. This one was called a Quick Draw Visualization Exercise and based on my notes it looks like I must have given this to a substitute to do with my students. The instructions and following story was written by moi over 12-years-ago, on March 5th, 1996:

INSTRUCTIONS: Please do not show the photograph or the title of this piece to the students until the end of the exercise. Read the following story with as much dramatic license as you are comfortable with (the idea is to put an image with emotional impact in their minds). After the reading they need to spend 15 minutes (max.) producing their picture of what they thought they’d heard. Emphasis that this is not about their artistic expertise but to help them develop their ability to get the ideas in the their heads on paper (visualization)—an important step to good writing!

I had no idea how long we’d been drifting down this river. I had dropped my compass and map into the water days ago. It was hard for me to trust the river guide, but I didn’t have any choice. I was tired and the days of endless rain made me want to curl up under one of the smelly canvas tarps to sleep the rest of this trip away. I was on the edge of getting mad because I hated hiding from the rain under this stupid tarp. I had gone into areas of this Asian country that I had been told to stay away from and now I was hiding from the rain and some very mean looking soldiers with big guns who were not particularly fond of nosy Americans with cameras. My mom told me that coming here was a bad idea. Thanks mom.

The river guide started chattering about something and he was very insistent about it. Part of me kept saying, “Just keep your head down and it’ll all go away.” But the guy wouldn’t shut up. If his blabbing didn’t attract attention then me sticking my head out to see what was happening wouldn’t mess things up either. I took a deep breath, anticipating the worst. Then I hesitated. I got my cameras ready. I figured if I was going to get my head shot off I’d at least try to get a good picture out of it. I took another deep breath and then threw back the tarp.

For a moment I was blinded by the sun. When I’d crawled into my hiding place the world outside had been filled with grays, and rain drenched drab greens. But now the sky was a bright shimmering blue with one or two pure white clouds scooting away from the sun’s brilliance. And on the water, the thing that the guide had been yammering about… rising out of the water on a beautiful white wooden platform stood a proud colorful Asian temple with a tall tower pointing up to the sky like a long thin finger. I just stood there for a moment with my mouth open, forgetting about the cameras hanging around my neck and whether there might be any solders hiding in the bush. It was all so different from what I had expected. And then without thinking I brought the camera lens to my face and started shooting.

The white platform had a railing all around it that looked finely carved and freshly painted. There were also stairs that led to the waters edge. The temple itself didn’t have any walls but just finely carved wooden beams holding up the red and orange and green roofs. It wasn’t just one roof like an American home and but in all four directions of the building there were three little roofs one above and scooted back from the other until they all met at the tower or spire that stuck out of the center of the temple. There were little pointy carved objects that stuck out of the crest or peak of all of the roofs. From this distance they looked like little carved unicorns. I could count ten of them on the edges of the roofs. The tower on the top of the center roof was as tall as the roof was above the platform. When I looked really closely I could see someone or someone’s statue standing in the center of the temple. I couldn’t see clearly who it was. Just then I heard the grunts of soldiers on the shore and dove back under my tarp. Then I spent the next endless hours crouched in the darkness praying that I’d get home to develop these pictures. jbb

(Click the link to see the original photograph that inspired the story)

Technorati Tags: kids, teaching, work, writing

Read more

Share this Post[?]

Sunday Morning Walk

0330 Sunday Morning Walk
Originally uploaded by boringcom

During my morning walk I saw this big guy in a motorized wheel chair walking down the street with a tiny little 3-year-old girl skipping along side and a tiny black dog straining at its leash like he was going to be able to pull the guy along. Very cute. jbb

Technorati Tags: iPhone, longbeach, travel

Share this Post[?]

OLPC Goes to Taco Beach

Taco Beach. I’m beginning to think that it might be easier to write on my iPhone than on the. OLPC. One problem is where to wriite my notes. It’d be good if I could find a simple place where I could copy my work in progress and then copy to whatever app I’m using on my Macbook Pro. Right now I’m writing this in Google Notebook but it’s a bit weird and there’s some latency . And if I pause too long between thoughts G-notebook thinks I’m writing a whole new note. More research is needed. Oh yeah, in this dark venue I was having a hard tme seeing the non-backlit keyboard keys (damn mbp spoiled me) and this damn keyboard is just too small for touch typing. Solution: I leaned the screen so that the light from screen can light up the little green keys (I also have a little goose-neck USB light that I’m going to experiment with later… as if I’m not already attracting enough attention).

I also figured out that, until I figure out how to upgrade my OLPC to run with WPA wireless I’ll create a WEP connection using my mbp connection. Small victory. One thing I noticed when I was in AZ was that mom’s cable-modem was a hell of a lot faster than my wimpy DSL. ack. Onward and upward.

Just signed up for 37Signals‘ “backpack” web app (I’m now writing this using the Backback app). I wonder if i’ll be able to use it on my iPhone. That’d be cool. But the dealkiller is whether I can use this behind my district’s firewall [fingers crossed]. I used Google’s notebook, but there was something that made me wonder if it would be that useable. I’m just glad to be using something that gives me more screen space than my iPhone.

So far I’ve gotten two commemts about my weird little green OLPC. One dude had no idea what it was and said he was going to go right and get one. Then later beautiful Aimee asked me, “what’s that?” Then we talked about our shared lust for the MacBook Air. [drool]. Life is weird that way.

P.S. When I plugged in upon returning home, my OLPC did an automatic SP1 upgrade and now works with my WPA wireless connection. Yea!

Technorati Tags: Internet, lust, OLPC, tacobeach, techtoys

Read more

Share this Post[?]

4-Days in the Valley

Music: Are You Awake? from the album “Lost In Translation – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Kevin Shields

Music: Alone In Kyoto from the album “Lost In Translation – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” by AIR

Technorati Tags: applehardware, california, family, florida, hardware, travel, twitter, videopodcast

Read more

Share this Post[?]

1TB Time Capsule Unbox

No, this isn’t some about some turn-of-the-century coffee can buried by my grandfather, it’s about Apple’s cool router/network hard disk…. yawn…. actually the router seems to serve up web-pages just a bit more quickly than my former D-Link router. Next project is to upgrade my MacBook Pro to 802.11N with a internal card I bought when I was at MacWorld…. geeky.

Music/Podcast: iLifezone 59 – “Desktop Management” from the album “iLifeZone” by Podango – Scott Bourne

03-27 1TB Time Capsule Unbox
Originally uploaded by boringcom

Technorati Tags: applehardware, harddrives, techtoys

Share this Post[?]

Stack O’ Hard Drives

Stack o’ Drives: top-to-bottom: 400GB Network drive, 300GB Maxtor, 500GB G4 refugee, 2TB Drobo, 1TB Sony MyBook (about 4.2 TB replacing G4 1 TB)… four times the storage in less than the same space…. runs pretty hot though and the Drobo fan runs kind’a loud too…. In the front is my old G4 that ended it’s service as a storage server running 4 internal hard drives (120GB, 200GB, 250BG & 500GB) that was replaced by the smaller stack o’ hard drives. BTW, I’m planning on sending the ol’ G4 to Greg in Madison so that he can begin his glorious Apple experience. JBB

Music/Podcast: dl.tv 225 Mar 27, 2008: Firefox vs IE8 Beta Cage Match from the album “dl.tv iPod video” by DL.TV

03-27 Stack O’ Hard Drives
Originally uploaded by boringcom

Technorati Tags: applehardware, harddrives, hardware, techtoys

Share this Post[?]

Tinkering w/ my OLPC, Part II

I decided to bring along the OLPC on this trip and try to use it again after previous connection failures (I still haven’t gotten the WPA upgrade to work… ack). The keyboard is a tad too small for true touch typing and a bit mushy too. If I had a kid with the slightest interest in tech I’d cut him loose on this thing and no doubt be amazed by the things he/she would do in less than a day.

But I’m a bit stuck in the world of writing, posting to my blog(s) and posting pretty pictures. And I’m just having a damn time keeping this thing on my lap while I type. I saw the ASUS EEE PC just after my first experiments with my OLPC and wondered if I had back invested in the right mini-laptop camp. But that was just a surface observation based on assuming that the EEE PC had a more conventional desktop/User Interface. But tech journalists seem to think that the EEE PC suffers from the same ‘too small” keyboard syndrome. I guess we all wish that we could afford the sexy “normal” keyboard-enabled MacBook Air. Damn. jbb

Music: Re Your Brains from the album “Thing a Week III” by Jonathan Coulton

Share this Post[?]

Second Day of Spring Break

Spring break day 2 itinerary: walk w/ dad, set up family stickam room, dinner w/ fam/friends @ local Mexican restaurant. Out of control SringBreak! # 2008-03-25

Powered by Twitter Tools

Muisc/Podcast: NPR News: 03-25-2008 7AM ET from the album “NPR: 7AM ET News Summary” by NPR

Technorati Tags: comedy, family, travel, twitter

Share this Post[?]

Christian Gene Discovered

Just found this via Twitter. I thought it was funny… so, many of you probably won’t….

And if I haven’t pissed you off with that last one, here’s another one from CNNN about “Holy Homosexuals”:

I love that the reporter asks if Leviticus 18’s condemnation of homosexuality is followed why not Leviticus 35 where it says that those who work on the Sabbath should be put to death and Leviticus 21 where those with defective sight (glasses?) cannot serve in the ministry! And now for a more mainstream media (Fox?) perspective we have Buchanan asking if there is a “God Gene”:

Share this Post[?]

Next Page »