Technology Reflections

Thanksgiving was nice. It was low-key and relaxed – just the way i like it. we had a small dinner here at my parents with friends of theirs joining us. Dinner was delicious – turkey, homemade cranberry sauce, green beans, caramelized onions, sweet potatoes and homemade apple and pumpkin pie with ice cream for dessert. Then last night we did it all over again. Mom made turkey soup, too! YUM!

Yesterday Mom and I braved the malls – I even went back in the afternoon t try to find a shirt that I bought in another color – but they were sold out

Dad installed wireless a few weeks ago so now getting online here is so easy! I used to have to connect to his modem with a long ethernet cord and then he’d want to go online, so I’d have to log off – it was a never ending battle for the internet. Now we can both be online and I even took my laptop downstairs to show my mother something.

I still have today and tomorrow off – I’ll be leaving my parents house in a couple of hours to head home. I have the never-ending cleaning to attend to at home and maybe I’ll do more shopping this weekend. Lesson plans are written for next week, but the week after that we’re starting another novel (Absolutely Normal Chaos) so I need to start planning that – I hope I have a copy of the book at home. Reading the novel will continue for a week or so after the Winter break, then it will be the big push for state test prep. The tests are given in late February this year.

We’re also starting after-school tutoring for the lowest of our kids to give them more help for the state tests. I will be teaching 8th graders one afternoon a week. Last year we did 3:30 – 5:00pm, but from 4:30 – 5:00 I was fighting for their attention. I told the powers that be that we needed to end at 4:30 and they agreed, but then they forgot that they agreed and sent the letter home with the 3:30 – 5:00 times! ARGH! I’ll teach for an hour then have them use a computer program for the last 30 mins. I’ll take the extra 30 mins pay <G>.

This break was a necessary one – we all needed time to recharge our brains and get ready for the next few weeks until Winter Break……

Today, while driving to my parent’s house for Thanksgiving I hit traffic. It wasn’t holiday traffic, but an accident. I knew it was an accident from one of those electronic traffic signs. This one said something to the effect of

ALL LANES CLOSED AHEAD

Great! NOT! And the next exit came up too fast for me to get over one lane and take it.

So now I’m stuck with whatever is causing all the lanes to be closed somewhere up ahead of me. I decide that I need to know what is going o, so I turn down the GooGooDolls that I’ve been blasting on the ipod and pick up my cellphone and call my father. He hasn’t heard about any accidents but he says he’ll see what he can find out. We hang up. I turn off the ipod and turn on my XMRadio to see if they have anything on the traffic station. They do – but they say one lane is getting through up ahead and it’s the lane I’m in! he cell phone rings and it’s Dad. He’s looked on the Internet and found the problem, but they still say all lanes are blocked. I still don’t know what i’ll find up ahead, but whatever it is, is reported to be just beyond the next exit, so I still have one more chance to get off the road before I’m stuck for good. Now I turn off XM and put on a local radio station to see what they say. They just have music on. Then I try an AM station that my mother yelled in the background while I was on the phone with dad that she says has traffic. They are reporting the accident and I think they say it’s off on the left shoulder. (I heard that on one station) Things are looking better for me – I’m still in the right lane. But now I’m coming up to the exit that is just south of the reported accident. Do I get off, do I stay on? and to complicate things – it’s an exit only lane! As I approach the exit the traffic seems to be moving a bit better, so I decide to stay on the highway and risk it. In the end, staying on the highway was the right decision and I never even saw what the problem was! I lost about 30 mins in travel time, but I wasn’t in a rush. I put the GooGooDolls back on and just rocked out

Last month I bought a new Dell Laptop. I planned to buy a new desktop computer as a Holiday gift to myself, but last week I priced one and I decided to buy it now. It’s in production and hopefully it’s shipping today so that I will get it on Thursday and have a long weekend to play with it.

In preparation for the new computer I rearranged my office area. My old cat (she’ll be 20 soon!) needs to live off the floor because the other cats (2 boys) annoy her. Her bed used to be on my desk, but I moved it over to an old printer stand so that I had more room on the desk for my new 19″ Flat Panel monitor

I also needed to prepare the old laptop, and eventually the old desktop, so that I can sell them. Last year I had a flood in my house from hurricane Wilma and I lost a bunch of stuff. Apparently my old WinXP disks and all the Gateway restore disks were among the casualties because I couldn’t find any of them. I consulted the IT guy at work and he convinced me to reformat the computers using Linux and other Open Source applications. He also turned me on to a program to wipe my disk. So today I wiped the old laptop and installed Linux and the other applications using Fedora Core 5.

The picture above shows what my office looked like this afternoon: (click on the image to see a larger view with notes)