It has been a busy week, the school year is winding down for the kids and me. Also there have been a lot of birthday parties and festivities to attend. There were three birthday parties this weekend alone. Next week is commencement, and all the pomp and circumstance that goes with it. For me, commencement is just another part of the rhythm of the school year. For my students it is a very big deal, as you can imagine. It seems like just when I really get to know the students, they are seniors and on their way. It always great to here how those that have graduated are doing. Although it seems like my students from W&L are doing things like going to be lawyers or getting degrees not in theatre. My students from Bradley are all in theatre. Although I think that will change with the new crop of W&L kids. They seem more theatre-y, we’ll see how they do.
One reason I started this blog was to explore this new media thing. I was interested in how this worked. I had already made static webpages, but this was something new. I enjoyed slogging thru the process of installing and setting up a fresh Wordpress blog. It caused me to learn how it all fit together.
Another reason was to try and get myself to write more. I have never been comfortable with writing. If you knew me in Highschool you would have said I was not comfortable talking to people. I was always very quiet and it took me a long time to warm up and feel comfortable expressing myself. Which in high school is hard anyway.
But nowadays, I have more confidence in putting words on the page. I just have to figure out a system to make it more efficient. I have lots of typos and then I go and correct them, which messes up my train of thought sometimes. Also I need to work out a regimen so that I actually write more. It seems to slip down the priority list with family, and work taking up time. Plus I need to stop wasting time on other stuff.
But as I find myself doing less designing at school, I need to have a place to put my creative energies. Maybe I can do that here…
The girls were given a craft kit from Ikea as a christmas present. It is made from the PYSSLA beads kit. You set all the beads on a little frame, put some wax paper on top a little pass with a iron, Viola!
Raw material
I immediately saw the ability to make little pictures pixel by pixel.
Laying out the beautiful masterpiece (McKelvey drew a flower on the grid paper for me)
And a flower for Arden & McKelvey
You can get even fancier by using something to help you layout your pixel art, like Photoshop. I used Pixelego.(link using the Archive.org ‘wayback machine’)
So I have spent a good hunk of the last two days trying to fix computers. Namely, our iBook(old Mac laptop) that we’ve have since 2003, and our 2006 MacBook (new mac laptop-thanks Dad). The first sign when something is wrong is when a dark grey screen descends and your computer tells you to restart in 5 different languages.
So I go through the usual restart thing, try to book into safe mode, single user mode, from an emergency startup disk. Always the same evil grey screen. Even booting into target disk mode( basically making the computer into an external hard drive) so I can try to copy the info off, causes the evil grey screen to happen on whatever computer I plug it into.
So this is hosed, must go to backup, (always backup your computer) Oh look, my back up is a month old, guess the lazy person. So off to the MacBook to restore my files onto it. However it seems to have this thing where it decides to shut down randomly, with no warning. One second running a software update to bring things up to speed then click, all off.
Pull up third computer to search Apple.com/support to find the cause, Oh need to upgrade the firmware. Which would happen if I could just run the Software Update, but oh yeah it just keeps crashing and turning off.
Just in case, I pull out the department’s spare laptop(yes 4th computer) and begin to restore backed up files to it, USB hard drive, “estimated time remaining 2 hours and 23 minutes”. Great
look at support pages again find another option for iBook, doesn’t work. Look in apple support again, find solution for MacBook, download firmware restore, burn it onto a CD. However a disk recovery/repair CD is stuck in the drive of the MacBook and can’t get it out since when I try to start up the computer it just keeps shutting down again. Figure that out, put in Firmware Restore CD run that. then Upgrade Firmware( which is what was causing the random shut downs), get that back up to speed. Look at the clock it’s time to go pick up McKelvey from school, I have spent 5 hours on this(plus my 3.5 hours last night)
After picking McKelvey up, I restore the backed up files onto the MacBook and then have to tweak the settings for the Dial-up internet and email to get them working again.
So we have the MacBook up and running, files duplicated on the work laptop(mental note must erase) and the iBook which has only one trick up it’s sleeve, and that is Frustration I mean the grey of complete evil.
Time to sell things on ebay so we can buy a new Hard Drive for the iBook.
I saw this great video of an interactive touchscreen for your computer.
Basically it is just like from Minority Report, where the person is grabbing and moving things around on the screen. It supports multiple touch points on the surface, which gives cool possibilities for manipulating data onscreen.
I’ve started playing around with the Legos that Jon sent for Christmas(yes I make sure the kids get to play with them) I have started a lego version of the Thomas Jefferson Polygraph machine. It is a mechanical device to copy your writing as your are writing. ( think I could have said that better) The original can be viewed here. It is from the Monticello website.
I’ll post a picture when I get it finished. It’s a nice diversion from all the work I bring home.
After looking at another blog I frequent(Boing Boing) I found an neat post on finding confidential info on the internet. It seems that all you have to do is to google “confidential do not distribute”. I got 15,700,000 results.
Obviously, you shouldn’t post things on the web if you don’t want them found. Even if you don’t link them to anything else.
I’m going to go read some confidential material from the FDA now… ;)
@MarqRobinson working on some random stuff, soon will take a week with the family. Then in August I am working on the dept self-assessment. twitter.com/owenscenic2010/07/27
