Back to it

Okay, time to ramp it up here, and actually write in my blog. I started a blog with my students, which, so far, has been pretty successful. But it has consumed my time so I haven’t really thought much about my own sites. Enough of that nonsense! I spend enough time online that I should actually make it worthwhile. So here goes…What do I have to write about?  Guess I can start with that which I know best, school…Yes, school started about a month ago, and there was much kicking and screaming and gnashing of teeth…and that was just the teachers! Seriously, it’s always hard to go back after having that glorious time off we call summer vacation. But it has been a good start, for the most part. The kids are nice, the overall atmosphere has been mellow and peaceful, and I’ve survived this first month unscathed…until today, when I woke up feeling all headachy with a scratchy throat and swollen glands. Decided to nip this sucker in the bud, and take the day off to sleep and recuperate. Anyway, when I awoke a bit before noon, I jumped on our district’s webmail to see what I’ve been missing, and damn if I hadn’t missed out on some great emails! We’ve been using a new records management/gradebook system this year, created by and based on our former system, which nobody was really in love with. Well, nobody’s terribly in love with this new one, either, especially since it seems to still be in beta and we’re their free test pilots/lab monkeys. I’m sure there will be more on this to follow, but for now, I’m outta here… 

Geeks rock!

So I was fiddling around with my cell phone and Mac the other day, trying to figure out how to use my cell to get online. Y’know, connecting with bluetooth and capitalizing on the unlimited data plan I have to surf the ‘net. A handy thing to be able to do, when you’re as addicted to geekery as I am, always travel with my computer, can’t always find a coffee house with wifi. Or at least not one with free wifi. Call me spoiled, I just can’t bring myself to pay for it when so many places offer it free. Just in my neighborhood alone, there are at least six free hotspots within walking distance, so when someplace like Starbucks wants me to drop ten bucks for a day’s worth of surfing (I think they still do that – haven’t tried it for awhile), it makes sense to me to find another way. Hence the cell phone-Mac-bluetooth thing.So last night, I got online (using my own Clearwire signal) and began my search for instructions as to how to properly configure my networks settings to accomplish this task. After about an hour or so of searching, reading, setting, testing, tweaking and the like, I hit on the magic combination of numbers, and voila! I got online! I’d read warnings about how painfully slow it could be, surfing the web this way, but to be honest, it wasn’t bad. At times pages loaded slowly, but others were pretty quick to appear. I’m very excited about this, as I have a trip to the coast coming up, and it will be really nice to have access whenever and wherever I want it. I’ll post an update afterward to tell how it went.