Fear of Girls

Apple Day

As this class goes along, it will become no great secret that I'm a fan of Apple and Apple products. They're slick, they're easy to use, and they just work.

So today was an exciting day to see that Apple is rolling out a new iTunes (which I've already updated) some new iPods, a few other neat little do-dads. One of the cool by-products of this whole thing is that NBC and Apple have worked out their distribution differences. So what does that mean? It means that once again I can download The Office and Battlestar Galatica from iTunes... what's even color? They now offer all the TV shows in HD... MMMMMmmm HD TV.

All and all I'm pretty stocked.

As a side note, I'm back from Photoshop World in Las Vegas. It was a great conference and I got some good ideas and had a chance to take some great photos in some new places (like the Valley of Fire). I'll most likely share those this week sometime.

Speaking of this week, yep, its that time - time to start on your lesson plans. I'll be cranking out a video here tomorrow and then posting the one for Learning Block Two so you can get started.

Best Wishes,
Bob

Hitting the 'Friendly' Skies

So here I am sitting in the airport (again, it seems like I've been doing that a lot over the past few years). The luggage is checked (thankfully I booked before June 15, so no extra surcharge But here's the coolest thing. I'm not just sitting around waiting, I'm working. More importantly I'm teaching.

Online technology provides an immediate and instant platform for your to reach your students, parents and co-workers. Because this is an online class, I can "teach" from my hotel room in Las Vegas, or from the desert in the Valley of Fire. Online makes it so. Hopefully as we progress through this learning block you will start to find some cool technologies and you'll start to imagine the ways in which you can deploy them in your classroom.

Not every technology is right for each student, and sometimes technology isn't required at all. My hope is that through practice and imagination you'll start to open your eyes to the ways in which you can, can't and should use technology in a teaching setting.

I will be blogging all week from Las Vegas (well unless I win some major cash and then I'll just give you all A's and be about my business) as Amber and I are attending Photoshop World. So lots of pictures, tips and what not. Don't forget to start your reading, it will catch up to you.

Always,
Bob

Snapshots from the Road

I made my way to Madison, WI this week for the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning. Here are a few shots from the trip. I couldn’t make it all the way to Madison on Monday (too much going on), so I stopped in Chicago. So there is a shot or two from there as well.

Enjoy. (Oh, since I haven’t had time to Photoshop these [though I did use Lightroom to process the RAW images], some still need to be color corrected and straightened… so please forgive the mess).

Pwned Verizon FIOS

So for all your no hacker elite speakers, 'pwned' is slang for 'owned' (since people typing online often miss important keys and the like. To 'own' something is to dominate, control and totally master. That is indeed what I did with my Verizon FIOS on Thursday.

All of the folks that I had talked too had complained of a gradual slowing down of their FIOS internet after they installed FIOS tv. I questioned the installer at length and he was... well, as helpful as a person can be who FIOS is their job and not their passion (let me put it this way, I helped him install the router). But all that aside, he had assured me that no, FIOS boots for on demand programing and I wouldn't loose a drop of my 20 down that I abuse on a daily basis.

Last Monday I noticed that my service was getting slower. Well, perhaps it could have been that my Hard Drive on my MacBook Pro was filling up (again - you would think that 4 external portable hard drives would be enough for a guy, but turns out, nope). Yet, after porting some files to another drive, nothing. I mean my browser was starting to time out. Not a happy Bob.

See the first thing I did when FIOS got installed initially was replace their router with an Apple one (the thing is pretty much a tank and its wireless 'n' so my internal network just hauls and I'm able to pull down lots of info from multiple sources on multiple computers (I've mentioned in the past I'm a geek right?). I was sadden when the installer said, sorry, due to the on demand and what not, we have to use the Verizon router, you can't use yours at all. At which point, I said, "oh really? Step back Jr. and watch." So I had to slave my Apple router to the Verizon one and then I just turned off wireless and let Apple do its thing.

Worked great for the first month... then the suckage set in. Then I got mad.

So, I thought what the heck, let's see how this thing really works.

LONG boring tech story later, I set my Apple router up as the main router, installed the Verizon one as a slave (with the wireless still turned off). Everything still works and the internet is FIOS awesome again.

Verizon: Great fiber optics. Crappy routers :)

iPhone Car Show

Well believe it or not, my wife turned 29 again this year. As a way of happenstance, the Fort Wayne Mustang Club was holding their annual show at Ivy Tech this past Saturday (lucky her). So as an easy way to score points with my woman who loves cars, we made our way to share in the goodness. While I am not the car expert that Michelle is, I knew if nothing else, I had a chance to get some fun photos of the cars. I had the super cool camera from work in my possession (as I was working this weekend on learning the ins and outs of f-stops, ISO, and other things that I have no clue about), however, since it was raining, I didn’t think that they would be very keen if I went about getting it wet. Sigh. So all these were taken with my iPhone, which while an AWESOME phone, the camera isn't as robust. Take them for what they're worth (oh, and yes, they have been Photo Shopped).

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Reasons for Hope

Many of you may be wondering about a post I wrote earlier last week. I wrote about a dear friend of mine who was fighting cancer. Doctors reported that she wouldn't make it through the night. Her breathing had dropped down to 2 or 3 breaths per minute, sometimes less; she'll most likely never wake up again.

That's a heavy place to be in; in that moment, waiting. Few, if any, places are darker. And so, what do you do? What do you do when you are powerless, and hopeless, and lost?

And so we prayed. As individuals, we prayed. As a community, we prayed. As fellow believers for a stranger we'd never met we prayed.

And when the praying was done. We waited.

Several of us discussed prayer. Do our words have an effect on the outcome or merely ourselves? Does praying make a difference or is it merely happenstance that the thing we prayed for comes about? That day I prayed for one thing, that my friend would have the opportunity to speak to his wife again (as he had missed the small window where she was awake the day before), that he would get to say the things he needed to say.

I held my breath and waited, but I dared not hope. I was reminded of a quote from the Shawshank Redemption, "Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane."

Miracle is such a funny word. We toss it around at everything and we never really wrestle with what it means. It's kinda like "love". I love's me the pizza. I love you mom. It becomes watered down and powerless.

My friend buzzed through on Skype the following evening and I waited for the bad news that I had been expecting all day. I braced myself. I hardened my emotions.

But the shoe never fell.

Instead I was greeted by, "Well, she's still with us. She woke up today and I got talk with her."

Was that a miracle? I don't know. But what I had asked God for happened and the unexpected took place. Despite all of that, I dared not hope for more. It was enough that my buddy got to talk to his wife one last time and I could tell that he was more at peace than the night before.

So again I waited and I held my breath.

Friday afternoon my phone rang and it was my buddy's number. Once again my heart sank and I prepared myself for what I knew was coming.

But it wasn't him. It was her. There was shock. There was joy. And there was terror.

I fancy myself a bit of a wordsmith. Most of the time I can easily and quickly command language, but I was caught like a cat up to no good. I had asked myself earlier if I wanted this conversation, if I wanted my chance to say good bye. See, I don't believe in 'good bye', not really. I don't believe that this life is all there is to us a people, that there is an existence that happens beyond this world and that even if someone sheds this broken flesh, that shortly I will run into them again in another place and another time.

Yet here I was, on the phone. The first thing I noticed is that my iPhone's battery was at 20% so I quickly plugged it into my MacBook so that we weren't cut off again. And then we began to talk.

We laughed.

We joked.

She told me about her progress. How yesterday she spent more time awake and that she ate a little food. That today she spent more time awake and ate even more food.

We complained about work.

We talked about Batman.

And then we said good bye.

The last thing she said to me was, "I'll talk to you again soon."

I thought a lot about Shawshank Redemption this weekend. I thought about the theme of hope. At the end of the movie, Red is off to Mexico so see Andy, and he closes the film with this quote:

"I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope."

"I'll talk to you again soon."

Do you know what the funny thing is? I believe her. She's stubborn like that.

Don't miss understand. I'm still aware of the reality of things. I am aware that the doctors aren't looking at treatment options, that they are focusing on pain management. But she hasn't given up hope, she and her husband are working at different options. They're fighting and hoping; that's really the key I realized. You can't let that hope go.

There's another quote from Andy in that movie, "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best thing, and no good thing ever dies."

I hope.