Month: March 2009

Digging in the Dirt

For the 2009 Newton Local School Groundbreaking Ceremony (held yesterday, March 27), I was chosen as one of the staff representatives to turn over some dirt. I was pleased to be chosen and I asked dad to come along to the ceremony. (Well, I’d’ve asked him anyhoo, but since I was gonna be in it, he agreed to come along.) And thankfully he brought his camera and took some photos. Yay! So now I subject you folks to photos. (I’ve chopped everyone else out of the shots since most of ’em are school age kids and thankfully in the first photo, all the kids’ backs were to the camera.)

Waiting for my 15 minutes of Fame (or something)
Waiting for my 15 minutes of Fame (or something)

I wait in line (well, a line of sorts) for my opportunity to turn some dirt.
Posing for photos
Posing for photos

I’m posing with several junior high and high school students for the ceremony. We were the third official dig group. (After board members and administrators.)
Digging in the Dirt
Digging in the Dirt

I dig my ceremonial shovel of dirt for the ceremony.


Electronica

Of late, I’ve been having a love/hate relationship with my electronics.

First, my DVD player, which wasn’t even a month old, had its HDMI port go kablooey. Bummer. I knew when I bought the Philips DVP5990 that some people were having issues with the HDMI port, but I really liked the idea of a USB port in my DVD player and some upconversion of my DVDs. And I usually have good luck with electronics. Still, this one decided to be a butthead and its HDMI port decided it liked the color pink more than any other color. I went to Philips unhelp site and did everything it suggested for the known issue (if it’s a known issue, Philips, why don’t you FIX IT?!?). It stayed pink. I e-mailed their tech support and they said I should phone ’em. Hell, I didn’t want to waste an evening talking to tech support. So I decided instead to switch to component cables and see how long that lasts. It’s not been a month yet, but so far, so good. Considering my TV maxes at 1080i anyhoo, and these are just upconverted DVDs not Blue Ray, the quality is good enough for me.

My second betrayer actually lasted more than a year – but not much more. The SmartParts digital frame which my folks gave me for Christmas in 2007 died. I did whatever I could think of to snap it out of it, but no go. But I’ve gotten used to having a digital frame in my library. So I decided to research digital frames to see what I needed. 7″ was sufficient and if it did 400×234 images, that was fine cuz I already had a set of images from the SmartParts frame. Although a remote would have been nice, it wasn’t a necessity. After seeing one in person at Staples, I decided that the Kodak EasyShare 720 was the frame for me. And best of all, I found it on eBay for $49.95 incl shipping. What I love best about it is that you can set the length of time between photos in the slideshow mode. I have it set for 30s now – I might go longer in future.

Although I’d had my eye set on an Acer Aspire One netbook, I kept getting disappointed when I couldn’t find the combo I wanted: 6-cell battery, SSD, Linux, a color other than black. So I kept my eye on other netbooks. I’d tried HP’s mini and liked the keyboard, but the battery size was only 3-cell and they were pricier than other brands. Dell had a linux version on SSD with a 4-cell battery, but it was initially way too expensive. And the only free color was black. But then Dell started to lower its price (as only Dell can). Eventually the 8GB SSD with 512MB RAM linux netbook was $249. It was tempting. But as I intended to get a red one and get at least 1GB of RAM, the price kept going over $300. And then came Tuesday… $50 off the linux netbook just for that day. I couldn’t wait to get home to buy it. (Hey, I was pricing them at work cuz I figure netbooks will be my future computer lab there!)

So when I got home, I called dad (cuz I’d called him earlier to let him know about the sale and caught him as he was ordering one – heh). While talking to him about his purchase (he went for the barebones one in white which, with tax and shipping, was around $220), I was busy on Dell’s site customizing mine. Although white was now a free upgrade, I decided I didn’t want black or white. Indeed, since I’d been to the site at lunch, there was now BLUE. It was tempting, but I went with red. I also upgraded to 1GB of RAM. Even with those two upgrades, the final price incl shipping & taxes was under $300 (around $280). Yay! Our netbooks won’t arrive until the middle of April or so.

In non-tech news, tomorrow is the groundbreaking for our new school building. At 1:30pm, the entire study body and community members will congregate near where the new building will be built. And lucky me gets to be one of the high school staff representatives to turn over some dirt – woot! I’ll see if dad can get a photo of me turning dirt so I can post it to my blog. 🙂 Keep an eye on the Newton New Building Updates page – there will eventually be a link to a video camera pointing to the job site.

Happy Spring!

It’s the first day of spring – yay! We had a chilly but sunny day to celebrate it.

So, Today I:

  • Got caught up on my grading (except for the physics test which they took today – it’s multiple guess so I should be able to get that done this weekend).

  • Talked with Covington Savings & Loan (my bank) about refinancing my mortgage (I gave my current mortgage company first dibs, but I haven’t received word back from them in a week – guess they don’t want me to stay with them). 4.5% should be do-able and he suggested I check back each week while things in Washington are brewing – it might go down even more.

  • Went to Applebee’s with a few coworkers and had a nice hour & a half chatting with them.

  • Looked at netbooks at Staples – I still might get myself an Aspire One if I could just find a 6-cell Linux model, pref w/ SSD.

  • Picked up some stuff at Walmart – including the inexpensive silica cat litter I was beginning to suspect I’d dreamed rather than purchased before. (Under $5 for 4lb – only thing cheaper I’ve seen is sold by Trader Joe’s – and they’re MILES away.)

  • Had an ice cream cone from Cold Stone Creamery. Yum!

The new season is looking to be a good ‘un!

Fun with Dry Ice

A delivery is made to school which required dry ice during transport, so I had to claim it for myself. I performed several demonstrations for my chemistry and physics students, and then decided to film them with my phone. Despite the glitches (old PC doing its best with Pinnacle Studio), I’m pretty pleased with how the video came out.

Books beget nostalgia

In many ways, books for me are as much about the places I was when I read them as they are about the stories within them. My old green chair from my bedroom (which rocked & squeaked – it was terrific) was home to a crucial reread of The Chronicles of Narnia. (It was the first time I read my own hardback copy of the series versus paperbacks or library hardbacks, and it was a time when I was a late teen instead of just “a kid.”) Doctor Who’s Missing Adventure Dancing the Code will always remind me of B-WISER camp. And The White Mountains trilogy (or Tripods trilogy to the rest of the universe) was an “under the covers after lights out” series where I read the entire book in one night. (I don’t remember if I did that for all three books, but I’m pretty sure I did it for The White Mountains. It was a reread, IIRC.)

I just recently (as in finished Saturday night) revisited the world of the White Mountains and the Tripods. This came about because of another trilogy. I was at the local bookstore a couple weekends ago looking at young adult and children’s books. I already had Kate DiCamillo’s Tales of Despereaux and Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane in my pile. The bookstore owner approved of my selection (admitting she loved Tulane even more than Despereaux) and suggested several other YA and children’s authors. The one she had the most praise for and that intrigued me the most was Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy.

At first I thought “Oh! Logan’s Run for today’s teens!” when I read the blurb. But then I got to thinking, what with it being a trilogy, it was more akin to The White Mountains for today’s youngin’s. And as I read through the first book, I thought, “Hmmm, I should reread The White Mountains trilogy when I get done.” So when I finished Uglies, I did that. Besides, I wouldn’t get to a bookstore until the weekend to buy Pretties and Specials to finish Westerfeld’s trilogy.

I had several realizations while rereading John Christopher’s trilogy. First, it sure is a “boys’ own” novel. I had never noticed that when I read them originally. But the number of memorable females in the series are, um, two. And one of them catches like a girl. Heh. The other thing, which surprised me completely, was that I remembered many set pieces and plot details from The White Mountains and The City of Gold and Lead. But when I was reading the third book, The Pool of Fire, I remembered NOTHING. I know I’ve read it numerous times, but whereas I could think “Oh, this is the scene when…” in the first two books, I’d only ever remember stuff after it occurred in book 3. I even have trouble remembering the title of book 3. Go figure.

I enjoyed rereading the books, but they often had very abrupt transitions – especially when going from one book to the other. I know there have been attempts at making the books into movies and TV (I’ve not seen the UK series that covered books 1 & 2, but I understand Disney keeps promising to make it – they’ve had the rights since ’97), but I wonder how such a boy’s own book would work with today’s audiences. When reading up on the series on Wikipedia (link above) I found out that the author (who’s real name was Samuel Youd) replied regarding the lack of female characters “at the time of writing the series, it was generally accepted that girls would read books with boy main characters, but not vice versa” (the quote is from Wikipedia not necessarily word-for-word from Youd/Christopher). I wonder if that was true then and/or if it’s true now.

Still, one thing that the Uglies trilogy has is female characters. The lead is female, but it’s not a girly book (like, say, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants – good book too, BTW). I’m about 1/4 into the second book, Pretties, and I’m finding it as captivating as The White Mountains was when I was a kid. But I’m a bit more sensible (and I have a job) so I’m not staying up all night reading it. Indeed, I should probably get to bed so I can read some before I conk out. The kitties are already asleep on my lap. They hate having to get up so that I can go to bed.