Month: June 2008

Summer Festivals are Go!

Well, B-WISER is done and I think everyone had a great time. I know that I did. I love B-WISER week because at the end of it my jaws are sore from all of the laughing. We teachers know how to have a great time.

Saturday, I headed off to Mom & Dad’s place at the Lake to give dad the rest of his birthday present (he received the main part – an 8″ Calphalon chef’s knife the Saturday before his birthday). At the Toyrifix toy store near Wooster, I got us both metal spud guns. (I’d seen the plastic ones before, but this is the first time they’d had the olde fashioned metal ones.) He was pleased. 🙂

It was threatening rain that day, but we decided to go to the Country Festival in Maria Stein for lunch. It worked out quite nicely for us at first. It started raining a little as we made our way from the car to the first tent, but once we got into the dry, the rain ceased. It actually was nice festival weather – only little rain spurts and pleasant temperatures.

I started off with a caramel apple. Mom let me have a bite of her corn dog, too. I opted for a brat with kraut (and mustard and onion) and a few sips of dad’s cola. Then I got us some fries from another booth and managed to dump half a bottle of vinegar on it – whoops! Once I poured the extra vinegar off, the fries were pretty tasty. We decided to check out the craft booths before deciding on dessert.

I was dismayed to see the number of charlatans hocking magnets, hematite, and aromatherapy shit. But the magnet and hematite people gave me information fliers which I intend to debunk in my new science course this year. Yay! There were neat things to look at (and some dips and sauces to taste), but we all refrained from buying anything.

For dessert we went to a trailer selling funnel cakes, elephant ears, sugar waffles, and deep fried Oreos. Dad bought us a funnel cake and an order of deep fried Oreos (our first time for them). It was then that things got interesting weather-wise. From our side of the trailer we saw the rain come closer. The lady on the other side of the trailer zipped over to our side – she was wet before the rain got to our side. We managed to stay in the lee of the overhang from the trailer and didn’t get wet. One of the ladies working in the booth had to zip out to get the bubble gum dispenser and remove the hanging signs. She was nearly soaked when she got back in.

When we got our fried stuff, it was still raining hard, so we munched a bit while standing at the trailer (still nearly all dry) and chatted with the ladies working the booth. The funnel cake was the best we’d ever had (I suspect it’s because she got distracted by the oncoming storm and it fried longer than it should – heh). It was very crunchy and still chewy inside. The fried Oreos were not what I was expecting. They were soft, for one thing. And they were VERY tasty. Guess I’ll have to tried a fried Mars bar someday. 😉

The rain slowed enough to let us race to the car. We were quite surprised by how little rain had gotten on us. That trailer was just in the right place to shade us from the storm. We returned to the Lake where the rain eventually stopped and the sun came out to give us a very beautiful day at the Lake.

Supper was steak for me & mom, and sausage for dad. Plus green beans and potatoes. It was quite yummy. I took my requisite nap on the sofa as well. Then it was time to head home. After all, I had a date to watch episode 12 of Doctor Who with the girls. 🙂

Tomorrow I fly off to Chicago to stay at judiang‘s place. elsaf is also coming, so I know the three of us will have a blast.

B-WISER 2008

Yay! I can has Internets! 🙂

Wooster has changed their IT policy and you can’t simply connect to a cat-5 jack in a dorm room and then access the Internet. You now need an account to do so. So our contact at the college has gotten dorm accounts (for this week) for me and two other teachers who have bought our laptops to the camp. This is good cuz I need to upload photos to the B-WISER images site for the girls to access tomorrow.

The camp has been going very well so far. We have 52 girls, which is up from last year’s all-time low. That’s excellent. The goal (with our current schedule of morning classes different from afternoon and teachers double-teaming) is 60 girls a camp, so we’re not far off the mark.

Sunday, I arrived right before noon. And I wasn’t the last teacher to show. Five of us then went to Applebees for lunch. I returned to the dorm to meet the camp coordinator who had 5 laptops for me to help pad out the 12 in the room I was assigned. I got the room set up as well as I could and returned to the dorms right before one of the really big rains hit. (Big ol’ hail fell – just a little smaller than moth-ball-size.)

We introduced ourselves to the girls, watched them perform their “getting to know each other skits” and then went to supper. After supper was the evening activity – originally planned to be the hot air balloon, but due to weather, being an engineering activity. The girls got an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper and a foot of cellophane tape (gah, Metric system anyone) and they had to build the tallest free-standing structure. They got a practice sheet & tape, then they created their final one. The tallest one was 1.13m tall. Wow!

Monday was sunny to start out. While Dee was working with the girls in physics, I met a couple of the tech department to get a hub for the room. When I met ’em, they asked why I didn’t use room 205 instead of 210. 205 apparently has 16 PCs (it’s a Mac campus, so Winders boxes are rare) and with the two laptops with decent wireless, I’d get 18 (the max number of girls at any point in time). All we needed in 205 was a projector and screen. Apparently that wasn’t difficult to requisition. So I put a sign on 210 saying we were in 205 and tested things in there. It all worked. Yay!

After lunch we had computer classes and the girls seemed excited about getting 1GB flash drives. One girl said “oooh, I’ve been wanting a flash drive!” Even if they don’t use ’em with the Portable Apps programs on ’em, they’ll have a nice little storage device. I did my internet safety presentation and two of the three classes had enough time to research a female scientist.

The evening activities for Monday were scavenger hunt, bowling, and crafts. I worked at the crafts station and made a little binder clip deer. Kind of cute, but I screwed up the ears. I went to bed exhausted.

Today went a bit smoother with technology – only had to leave physics once to upload some photos and check the weather. And then we were given our usernames & passwords to access the ‘net in the dorms. Yay. In the afternoon we used OpenOffice.org Calc Portable to calculate work and power expended going up stairs. And then when classes were done, it was teacher’s night off.

Six of us headed out to the Toyrifix toy store first. I got a couple of olde fashioned toys (one for me, one for dad) and Looney Labs’ Fluxx card game. Then we saw Get Smart and I really enjoyed it. Then supper was Red Lobster where I had Tuesday’s shrimp special. Mmmmm. We then had a short stop at Walmart so Carolyn and I could pick up The Spiderwick Chronicles. We also got 10,000 BC too (I got the one with the National Geographic extra DVD on saber tooth tigers).

I’m sleepy now – just a few more photos to upload and then I’ll head off to bed.
Now

Going Digital!

As I slowly make myself a digital-only gal, I have several store-bought PAL VHS tapes which I no longer need. Just in case anyone here is still analog and has either a PAL or multi-play VCR, I’ll be happy to send you any of these tapes for free. (If I don’t already have your snail mail addy, you can e-mail it to me.) I’ll be throwing ’em away in a week or so. First come, first served! (Sorry folks with NTSC-only VCRs. I’ll eventually start getting rid of those tapes, but I’ll get to ’em later.)

Titles are as follows:

  • One Foot in the Grave series 1&2, 4

  • One Foot in the Algarve

  • Nearly all of the One Foot in the Grave specials

  • Porridge: A Day Out

  • Porridge: A Night In

  • Porridge: No Way Out

  • Porridge: the movie

  • Murder Most Horrid series 1

  • TISWAS: The Best of the Best Bits

  • TISWAS: More of the Best Bits

  • TISWAS: Comedy Capers

  • Rab C Nesbitt: series 5 part 2

  • A History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (the ABC tapes, not the BBC tapes)

  • Babylon 5: vol 5.01 & 5.05

  • The Prisoner eps 1&2

  • The Wind in the Willows (Terry Jones version)

  • Danny the Champion of the World

  • The Curse of Fatal Death

  • Delta & the Bananamen

  • Ghost Light

  • Castrovalva

  • Mark of the Rani

  • Trial of a Time Lord

So, Trina, how’s summer break treating you?

Nearly done with my first full week of summer break (after a nearly full week off last week). And I will say this – it’s sooooooooooooooo nice not working for a change. 🙂

So, what all have I been doing thus far?

  • Very slowly, I’m getting my closets cleaned out. The bedroom ones are pretty much done, it’s the ones in the library and den that are taking awhile. Mostly because I hate to throw things away. But I will do it, by gum!

  • I was helping my mom’s cousin Lyn (a shut-in) with her electronics. She had several different things hooked to her LCD TV and had so many remotes she didn’t know what to use to do what. So I first got her connections set up properly, then recommended a Harmony remote from Logitech. She liked the idea, so mom & I picked one up for her and then I installed the software on mom’s laptop, but had to take it to Panera Bread in order to finish setting up the remote (requires an Internet connection, which Lyn doesn’t have).

  • I went to the Strawberry Festival on Sunday. I got two dozen strawberry donuts (some for me & dad, some for mom & Lyn), picked up BBQ chicken dinners for all of us, had a strawberry-lemon shake up, and tried a strawberry burrito. I wasn’t at the festival long – I usually just go for the food.

  • When I dropped off lunch from the Festival to mom & Lyn, I finished working on the Harmony remote (which required another visit to Panera – two, actually). I got everything working – the stupid LCD TV takes 7 seconds to warm up and it was affecting how the remote changed inputs.

  • I finished working on the B-WISER photo gallery.

  • I started working on a new Sylvester McCoy Image and Sound Archive using Coppermine as the backbone.

  • FINALLY cleaned my tub and got my kitchen cleaned up after leaving things lie for too long.

  • Decided to give The Biggest Loser/BistroMD service a try for a week. The frozen foodstuff arrived today, so I’ll start tomorrow. (As monocot mentioned in her blog, the food comes packed with dry ice, so I took some ’round to dad and we played with it. Heh.)

  • Went for a workshop on using FirstClass to build teacher webpages. I was quite pleased with the results. The pages generated are standards compliant! Yay! And it’s easy to use since our staff are already used to FirstClass.

Tomorrow I’m going in to work in order to update a few web pages and work on the student handbook for the HS. It’s the closest I’ll come to working all summer. Heh.

“Why would an Eskimo need an air conditioner?” “SUMMAH!”

For those of you lucky enough to never see a Rex commercial, the title of this post will make no sense. Heh.

Anyhoo, today was my second day of Summer Vacation. Yay! It’s nice not having to work. Of course, today I was at the school, but that was mostly for a Design Team meeting about the new school (and the architects provided lunch for us – woohoo). Yesterday, however, I spent a nice day hanging out with Linus. He basically sat down beside me or on me no matter where I was in the house. I even got my first assignment done for my summer course.

Now that summer is here and I can breath again, I’ve been working on B-WISER preparations. I found 1GB USB drives for $5.99 a piece and bought the store out (45 bought – and I’ll need to get a few more because we’re up to 49 girls now as of my last correspondence with the camp coordinator). The drives arrived today and they’re just what we need for the computer class. And they’re very cute. (Oh, and I’d tell you where I bought the USB drives from, but I’ll wait until I get the others ordered – don’t want you folks buying out my second choice, also $5.99 a piece!)

One thing that I worked on yesterday and today was an image gallery for my website. OK, so it uses up my last database on my webhost, but it’ll be very helpful for getting B-WISER photos out to the girls. (I used to just bung ’em into folders on my website – this way the girls can actually SEE what’s there.) I’m using Coppermine Photo Gallery (one of the photo galleries that Fantastico can automatically install) and I like it. Especially now that I have it working. Heh.

I already had 2005, 2006 and 2007 photos from B-WISER on a folder on my webhost, so I wanted to use the Batch Add Files option that the program provides. Only every time I tried to use it, I’d get a couple of different warnings. One was a permissions warning, the other a warning from either ImageMagick or GD version 2.x (the programs used by Coppermine to make thumbnails etc). I posted a question about stuff to the InMotionHosting support forum, and one of the techs asked me to PM her with more details. However, before she got back to me, I slogged through things today and found out the problem. Coppermine *said* that either permission levels 777 or 755 would suffice (which all of the folders were). But the program worked only when I set all of the folders to the more permissive 777 setting.

So now I’m fixing and tweaking and making the place look more inviting. I don’t, for the moment, want to have user accounts for the site, so I’ve disabled that, I think. I’m playing with the morpheusXgreen theme, though if I later find it’s not standards compliant, I may switch to one of the default themes. (One of my summer goals is to update my website and go to XHTML 1.0 transitional and be as standards compliant as I can.) Check out the B-WISER photo gallery thus far.

School’s Out!

Today was a LONG day. For the kids, it was pretty short – they were dismissed at 11am. Rather than have normal classes today, we had a series of workshops that kids signed up for on cool things they could do in the summer. Neat idea. I signed up to work in the room that Barefoot Canoes was doing their sessions on. I sat for the first two sessions and then the other teacher in the room let me go to the Brukner Nature Center workshop.

I liked the sessions I observed and the Brukner one was doubly cool cuz she had critters. She brought a snake, a salamander, a teeny little screech owl (adult size), and a juvenile possum. These were critters from their wildlife rehabilitation clinic – if the critters get back to 100% health, they’ll be returned to the wild. The snake isn’t an Ohio native (too cold in Ohio for it), the screech owl was blind in one eye, and the possum couldn’t smell, so I doubt if they’ll be returned to the wild. But they’re very well behaved critters, so they are great for the nature center for taking them around to schools.

After the kids were gone, the staff had a carry-in lunch. I brought brownies. Mmmm, brownies. I baked ’em myself! Lunch was tasty and it was nice to chat with co-workers.

I spent most of the rest of the day working on LPDC stuff. I’m the chair of the local professional development committee at work and we were having our last meeting of the year today. So I got all of the paperwork ready for the meeting and chased down a few people who really needed to get paperwork in today. Normally our LPDC meetings are 15 minutes or less. Today’s meeting was 45 minutes and we were all sore in our signing arms when we were done. Towards the end, I was getting my initials confused with dating and my signature. Sheesh.

I made copies of all of the LPDC paperwork of the day, filed stuff in folders, and returned originals to staff members. And then I finally had time to work in my lab. Our superintendent was great – he gave us the option of working til 6pm today and getting tomorrow off, or working a regular day today and working tomorrow. I left shortly after 6pm. Sleeping in tomorrow – woot!

I’ll pop into the school a few times this summer to work on lab stuff, but I don’t actually work this summer. My first summer off in years. Woohoo!