It’s been tough finding time to get back to keeping up this journal because every hour of every day seems to be filled with getting things going with my new job at the new lab (and the beginning of my second year at Pepperdine sucks up what little time is left after that). The most interesting thing about this new job is that I’m back to working in a mac lab like the one where I really began my tech teaching career, right down to having to contend with now aging iMacs running OS9. Ack. OS9?

Just before I finished my MA program at Pepperdine three years ago I purchased my own first personal Mac running OSX, having left that first Mac OS9 lab and was at the time teaching in a PC lab. So I’ve been away from using OS9 as a primary OS for four years. Needless to say, as much as I’d like to present cutting-edge opportunities for my students working on a computer platform that I really love, these iMacs are really limiting. Add to that a lot of the fun things on that we might be able to do seems hampered by the old browser currently installed on these computers (something like Netscape 4… ugh!). Several times lessons have failed because Netscape would crash or we’d run headlong into the district’s firewall because we typed in “best video cards for gaming.” That just sucks. Anyway, eventually I’ll have a more current version of Netscape installed and maybe something advanced like …. MS Office. Wow. Onward and upward. Now if I could just replace those horrible hockey-puck mice with modern optical logitech mice. Oh boy, I hope we have enough coupons to buy a couple mice. JBB