I'm Popular!

A couple of months ago I wrote about how I had recently started using my Facebook account, and had in the process found that most of my old classmates and I had lived fairly parallel lives. Today I want to talk about something else...

I looked at my Facebook page today and was startled when it said I had 111 friends. Really? 111? Am I THAT popular?

I guess it all depends on what you consider a "friend." After all, I have 300 co-workers, and I know probably 250 of them by name, and I'm friendLY with all of them, but I wouldn't say that I'm friends with most of them. Not real friends. Not people that I would talk to about personal problems or that I feel particularly close to. There are probably 8 or 10 people at my workplace that I'd consider a real friend.

So I started doing some digging, and what I found was that you could pretty much separate those 111 people into four distinct groups: 1) Old students from my teaching days, 2) old classmates from my learning days, 3) family, and 4) people that I would consider CURRENT friends. And when I crunched the numbers, what I found was that about 50% of my "friends" are former students, about 33% are old classmates, and about 12% are family. Only about 5% of my "friends" on Facebook are what I'd call current real friends.

That's not to say that I wish anything ill towards the other 95%, nor that I'm unhappy they're on my friends list. And truth be known, I'd like to be better friends with a whole bunch of those 95%. But I just found it interesting that my real friends by far make up the smallest population. And even more interesting, several of my closest friends aren't even on the list at all. And that includes my wife, who IS on Facebook but refuses to accept my friend request! (But that's a different story, I guess. She's smart not to accept my request because I promised if she did to flood her with comments and requests to all sorts of applications and all sorts of suggestions for friends. )

I don't know what all of that says about me, but I think it says something.

Probiotics Changed The Way I Feel

Here's a video that Lisa's dad sent us a couple of days ago that was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Joe Cocker's a pretty funny guy even without the subtitles, but when you add them he gets even funnier. If the "You Tube" sign gets in your way (and it will) you can click in the screen and go straight to the page on You Tube.

Ink

As a linguist, I find myself irritated by the phrase "getting inked" to describe getting a tatoo. I guess people say it because it sounds hip. Or maybe people say it because the idea of ink sounds more temporary than a permanent tatoo. Which might explain why no one says, "I'm thinking about getting permanently scarred!"

But "getting inked" just sounds dumb to me. We don't create a new phrase by turning a noun that is part of the activity into a verb. If we did,

• Going to a hair stylist would be "getting scissored."
• Going to a restaurant would be "getting linguined."
• Having my tires changed would be "getting rubbered."

It's just a silly phrase. Especially if anyone over the age of--oh, say 25--says it.

My Day Off

I was just telling Meredith that I didn't have anything written yet for tomorrow. She told me I should take a day off. So that's what I'm going to do. Just like a teacher, I'm calling in a substitute for the day. And her name is Meredith. So here's Meredith's guest blog:

Hey, readers of the infamous Sweasy.net. Anyway, I also don't really have anything to write. The main thing that is on my mind is how freakin' HOT it is out here! It's 90 degrees, or something like that! Also, do you watch American Idol? We've got Alison, Matt, Danny, Adam, and Kris left right? Well, I'm campaining: VOTE FOR ADAM LAMBERT!!!!! I luv the dude! But it wouldn't be to bad if Kris I-totallly-forget-his-last-name won either. I can't wait for American Idol on Tuesday. Plus, I love pie. And cake. And pudding. And CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!! I have this massivly special weakness for the food, and I really wish I had some right now. We all have foods we'd die for, right? Nick Hyde's is pudding, my friend Mel's is Dorritos, Logan H.'s is Oreos, and mine is Chocolate, the amazing, delious Chocolate! Speaking of Chocolate, Choco want to say "'Ello! Dis da CHOCO," I bet. It has been a really long time since he blogged, and I reallly miss him. I also am writing a novel right now, and I don't know what made me write that comment, I just am running out of things to write. 

G2G, Merri C. Sweasy. (lol, that's a dumb joke) 

Something that Irritates Me

Here's something about the Internet that I absolutely hate: At many business websites, when it comes time to check out, you have to type in a pass code of some kind to prove that you're a human and not some robot program that's prowling the Internet and screwing up the business. Having to type this pass code isn't what bothers me per se. What bothers me is that--to keep the robot programs from reading the pass code on the website and entering it themselves, these websites resort to posting those pass codes as images that are distorted. And sometimes they are VERY distorted. Maybe it's just me, because I'm the only person I've ever known to complain about this, but I have a hard time reading something like:




Now, in this particular example (which I pulled off of Ticketmaster's website) I can't tell for sure if that second letter is an "r" or an "n." Both "irked" and "inked" are words. And imagine--as is the case on many web sites--how hard this can be when the sequences of distorted letters and numerals don't spell out ANYTHING. Then you're really in trouble.

I understand why you're doing it, Internet merchants, but there's got to be a better way than blinding your audience.

The First Lady

Yesterday I read this article in USA Today which stated that U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama has very high approval ratings. And as I read the article and the comments that followed, I was struck by three things:

1) The article says that 79% of the public approves of her and "just" 8% disapprove. It's the "just" that I question. I'm surprised that THAT many people have a problem with her. What has she done that causes anyone to have a problem with her? Are these responders old school British people who are mad she touched the Queen? Or are they technophobes ticked off that she got the Queen an iPod? Or are they Republicans still holding resentment about the "For the first time in my life I'm proud to be an American" thing from back during the election? I think she's done an outstanding job thus far, and there's really nothing to complain about.

2) As I read the comments at the end of the article, over and over again crass people (and that's normally the kind of people who post comments on news web sites) mentioned how their biggest problem with her is that she's, as one put it, "ugly as a mud fence." I take exception with these comments, and not just because no one talks about how attractive or ugly a man is when talking about whether or not that person is approved. I also take exception because I disagree--I think Michelle Obama is a very attractive woman. Maybe it's just because she's so well spoken and smart, though. I dig the smart ladies. At least that's what my wife tells me (Rimshot). Seriously, I get as excited by a well-spoken, intelligent comment from a woman as a I do by a beautiful face or a slender but shapely figure. Okay, maybe I get excited in a DIFFERENT way, but I still get excited!

3) I don't know. I had three distinct points when I started this thing, but I have long since forgotten what the third one was. Before I even started the second point, as I was proofing the first point, it occurred to me that I didn't remember what the third point was. Oh well, I told myself, I'll figure it out while I'm typing #2, but I never did. And now here I am with a promised #3 but nothing to say. Bummer. And I'm sure if I re-read the article I'd remember what my third point was, but hey, I'm not THAT interested in this article.

You may wonder, Why didn't he just go back to that first paragraph and edit it to say that he was struck by TWO things? No one would ever know. Well, that's a lie. I was struck by THREE things. I just don't remember all of them. Maybe someone who reads the article now can tell me what was the third thing I was struck by.

A Belated Happy Anniversary to me!

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of when I started this blog. It was not the one year anniversary of sweasy.net, which has existed since 2001, but sweasy.net was just photos prior to a year ago.

When I created my first post a year ago I had absolutely NO intention of still using the blog a year later, nor did I guess that I would eventually be writing EVERY day (October 9 was the last time I DIDN'T make a post, though I've been late and missed my 4:45 AM deadline a day or two). At first I was only testing out the website jottit.com to see how stable it was and whether or not I could recommend it to teachers. And I also wanted to check out the concept of blogging. I'd heard about it for quite some time, and I'd heard a lot of talk in educational circles about it, but I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to create one.

I'm still not certain why anyone besides family would READ one, and I guess that's good, because based on the traffic my site is getting, no one but family and a few friends are reading anyway. But that's not why I'm writing. Okay, that IS part of why I'm writing, to keep people I care about up to date on what is happening in my life.

But the main reason I'm still writing is...I'm a writer. I'm a creative person. I actually went into education with the idea that I was going to be an author, that education would leave me with my summers free so that I could write novels, and that I'd teach until my first novel was published and I could then quit and support myself on my writing.

It didn't work out that way. I DID write a novel which I began in the summer of 1994 and finished sometime in 1995. It was called SHELTER FROM THE STORM. I sent it off to five different publishers, I think, and got five standard rejection letters back from them. It wasn't very good. It's not that the writing was bad, I don't think. I've re-read parts of it over the years, and the writing's got voice and flows pretty well. It's not bad.

It's the plot that's terrible. There's absolutely no salvaging what reads like an ABC After School Special. So that novel--forget about it.

I have some ideas for other novels in my head, and I would have begun a second novel, but something happened early in 1996 that put all of that on the back burner--Lisa got pregnant. Suddenly, providing for my wife and child became my number one concern, and finding a time for my writing sort of faded into the background. So I never wrote another novel.

There was one time about four years ago, though, that I wrote about a ten page outline for a novel that I thought might be pretty good and might sell. I even completed the first two chapters, but then I just stopped enjoying the writing and quit. I still have that outline, though. When we moved from Vent Haven to where we are now I threw out all kinds of stuff, including 14 years of lesson plans and tests, but when I came to that outline I tossed it in the garbage, and then, after a moment of thought, pulled it back out. I may still write it someday.

Anyway, I'm off track a little. I didn't mean to get lost in a discussion of novel writing. That's only a tiny part of the writing I do. Most of what I've written can either hesitatingly be called poetry or confidently called verse, and I wrote over 3,000 poems from 1980 through 2004. Maybe a dozen and a half of the poems have been published over the years in small publications. The rest are in 58 notebooks in a storage bin at my house. I wrote almost every day for a quarter century and then, one day, I just stopped. In the last five years I think I've written about fifteen or so poems, and most of those in a couple of different two-day spurts.

I have no idea why I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old, but I have a pretty good idea why I stopped. In 2004 it occurred to me that I hadn't REALLY written any good poetry in years. After 3,000 poems, I'd pretty much run out of things to say. I never assumed that possible. I always figured that life would change me and I'd always have new things to say, but I'm finding that my life is a whole lot like a pendulum swinging on its own. There were large, arcing changes in my life as a young man, but over the years those changes have been less and less pronounced until I'm honestly not a whole lot different now than I was 10 years ago. So I ran out of things to say in poetry. There are only so many poems about nature that you can write, only so many poems about death. Ask Emily Dickinson. She wrote about the same number of poems I did, but students read the same 20 or so of hers every year. The rest are pretty dreadful. Trust me. I've seen 'em.

So I'm through with poetry, and I don't have the time at this point in my life to write novels. So this blog is serving as my written creative outlet for now. I don't know how long it will last. In the same way that I just stopped writing poetry, I may look at this blog one day and think, That's it! I don't really have anything else to say. And there are days like that. Yesterday was a day like that, actually. I had NOTHING to say, so I found a photo of a heavy person, wrote "University of Pink!" on her butt, and then blurred the writing so it looked like it had always been there. And I put that up for a cheap laugh.

That's me, a classy guy!

So there are days like that, but for the most part I have the opposite problem. I have so many blog entries in my head today that I'm jotting them down so that I can remember to write about them when I have time. Soon (maybe tomorrow?) I plan to write about tattooing. I have another one in the back of my head about the perils of spring. I'll keep writing them as long as I'm enjoying it.

I started 366 days ago with a blog that I was just playing with, that I had no intention of using for more than a week or so. Now this is just one of four blogs that I have, and I'm toying with the idea of creating another. There's no end in sight.

But if you're a regular reader, don't be surprised to come on here one day to find a note that says, "Uh, yeah, I'm done with this. --Me"

Just Found This

What's this? Two updates in one day! I know. Weird. But I just found this online and thought I'd share it with you:

http://rodeo.cincinnati.com/getlocal/gpstory.aspx?id=100039&sid=143253

A Picture to Balance the Page

Yesterday I wrote about a harrowing event that occurred to me in Kroger two nights ago, the details of which I won't go into at this time (as that would be a bit redundant), but I will mention that it had something to do with a woman with writing on the hinder side of her sweat pants. At the time I couldn't find a photograph that really captured the essence of the story, so I posted a photo of an attractive model wearing sweats with writing on them. I didn't find that satisfying, though. Also, it sort of bothered me that I'd posted a photo of an attractive blond two days in a row.

So feeling dissatisfied, I went searching today. I STILL couldn't find the exact photo I was searching for, but here is this photo to the right, which is definitely a whole lot closer to my actual experience two days ago than what I posted initially. And I also feel that this sort of balances out the page.

Observation of the Day

Let me preface my observation with the comment that I think sweatpants with writing on the--How shall I say it? The rear end? The tush? The butt? The derriere? You get the picture. Anyway, sweat pants with writing on the backside, in my opinion, are tacky because the only purpose of the writing is to draw attention to the wearer's hiney.

Anyway, that said, here's the observation I made late yesterday:

No one over the age of 30 or so should be wearing sweatpants with writing on the backside...

...because I was in Kroger last night checking out and the woman in front of me was overweight and maybe 55 years old, gray haired, and she had on a pair of hot pink sweat pants with white lettering on the rear that spelled out "Pink Univ." And it just made her look ridiculous. And also, it's going to give me nightmares for weeks.
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On a side note, I'm going to make sure tomorrow not to put an image of an attractive blond woman on my post. Don't want people thinking I'm having a midlife crisis.

Picking on Miss California

Yesterday I read with bemusement the many articles on the Internet that talked about the Miss California's misstep during the Miss U.S.A. pageant Sunday night. During the question and answer session (which in other pageants has led to such gems as a rambling dialogue about why American children can't read maps) Miss California was asked how she felt about gay marriage and whether it should be legal in all 50 states. After a stumbling start that made me wonder if we were going to see a repeat of the parenthetical link I provided above, Carrie Prejean found her stride and stated that she personally believed that marriage should be between a man and a woman. She was booed by several members of the audience, and many said that this cost her the crown (she finished second).

In fact, Perez Hilton, the semi-celebrity who asked her the question during her interview, later stated that, "I applaud her for her honesty. However, she is not a politician, she's a hopeful Miss U.S.A. Miss U.S.A should represent everyone. Her answer alienated millions" of people.

But here's the deal: this was a no win situation for her. If she'd said that gay marriage would be allowed she would have alienated religious conservatives. She was going to alienate millions of people no matter which position she'd taken. And if she'd taken a wishy washy moderate stance she probably would have alienated everyone!

As I understand it (I didn't actually watch the show! Ew!) the other contestants weren't asked cupcake questions either, but I can't imagine a more loaded question...Wait! I have one: "Describe how, as Miss U.S.A., you will ensure that all citizens of the world understand that the Muslim faith is evil." That's the only thing I can come up that would be harder to answer without getting yourself in trouble.

More Odyssey of the Mind

At Saturday's state competition, Natalie's Odyssey of the Mind team won first place on the elementary level for their "Earth Trek" problem. The teams that finish first and second in the state are eligible to go on to the World Finals. This year's World Finals will be held at Iowa State University in May, so it looks like the family is going to be spending some time apart at the end of next month: Natalie and Lisa will be off to Iowa, and Meredith--who will still have school--and I will be staying home.

And going to Iowa has always been a dream of mine!

Anyway, everyone was VERY excited yesterday. And it wasn't just Natalie's team that did well. There were FIVE Beechwood teams who qualified for the state meet (2 elementary teams, 1 middle school team, and 2 high school teams) and FOUR of them finished first and will be going to Iowa. The one team that didn't finish first finished third, and they will go to Iowa if either of the two teams that beat them cannot. So it was a pretty happy day for everyone yesterday.

By the way, I don't think I described it well last time, but this is the task that Natalie's team decided to take on all of those many months ago in their initial meeting:

Earth Trek
This problem requires teams to design and build a small vehicle that will visit four locations. The locations will be different places within one or more team-determined environments. Each time the vehicle leaves a location it will look different in appearance, and after leaving one of the locations it will appear to be a group of vehicles that are traveling together. The team's performance will incorporate the visits to the locations, the environments, and the changes in appearance of the vehicle. Cost limit: $145 US

As I mentioned previously, we aren't allowed to post the video of the children's solution to the problem above until after the World Event, but here's video of the Awards Ceremony, which was held at Western Kentucky University's Diddle Arena.

Odyssey of the Mind

This will post Sunday morning, but as I write this it is 1 o'clock Saturday, and I am sitting in an indoor pool in a Courtyard Marriott in Bowling Green watching my children swim. WHY Are we in an indoor swimming pool in a Courtyard Marriott in Bowling Green, Kentucky? Because Natalie and the rest of her team are competing in the state Odyssey of the Mind competion today at Western Kentucky University. Due to the vagaries of the OotM scheduling, Natalie's team finished all elements of their competition before 11 today, and we now have time to kill prior to the Awards ceremony at 5.

And here are some random thoughts I have had over the last 24 hours.

1. WKU has a beautiful campus. It really is one of the nicest public university campuses that I have ever seen. As we walked around the campus looking at all of the buildings I became nostalgic for my college days. I really loved colleget, much more than I did schooling before that, and I kept thinking how nice it would be to go back. On the other hand, we went into the University Center because we were a few minutes early, and it just so happened that the University was having an Open House for potential students and their parents. And I realized that we were just 6 years away from this ourselves with Meredith. Time flies.

2. As we were driving down I-65 headed toward Bowling Green I saw a sign that said "Construction 2 miles ahead" and I thought something that I never would have guessed would have come to me after seeing that sign: "Thank God!" Because the interstate just south of Louisville is in such bad shape, I WELCOMED the orange construction signs because they meant that soon the roads were going to get better.

3. I just realized that my cell phone is not a great place to try to type a long blog entry, so I am going to stop.

Now.

Board Meeting

At the Board Meeting Monday night (Yes, I'm a little late getting this on here) Natalie and the rest of her Governor's Cup Academic Team were recognized for winning the Regional Quick Recall championship. There is no state competition at the elementary level, so their season ends with this victory.

You can read more and see pictures on the Beechwood website.

Quote of the Day

"It's not fair to judge others by their actions and then want others to judge you by your intentions."

--from the film Facing the Giants*

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*which I don't recommend, by the way. And apparently neither does pretty much anyone else. The whole film was predictable and boring, and that one line is the only thing that stood out as thought-provoking in the whole film.

Still, it's a pretty though-provoking statement.

A Fundamental Change

The Internet is great for a lot of different reasons. You can watch movies on demand. You can keep up with friends on Facebook. You can buy stuff and do your banking and your taxes all while in your pajamas. I could go on all day listing reasons it's cool. Heck, I most likely wouldn't have the job I have now without the Internet.

However, today I want to talk about one specific reason why the Internet is cool, and one fundamental change in my life as a result of the Internet. What I'm specifically talking about is how easy the Internet makes it to find answers to those dozens of little questions that come up over the course of the day, questions like "Why does a watery substance sometimes come out of the ketchup bottle BEFORE the ketchup?" or "Where did Toyota come up with the name Yaris?"

In olden days (i.e. 1992 or so) I would have thought of a question like that and then not been bothered enough by it to actually do any research and would have just forgotten about it. I probably wouldn't have thought of it again until some two-bit comedian actually asked the same question in his or her stand up act I was watching on TV. And then I would think that comedian a comic genius. "Yes!" I would say with force through my laughter. "I was just thinking that the other day!"

But now, when I have a question like those above, I just google them, and I know the answer in 30 seconds. I'm not exaggerating with this blog title: that's a fundamental change in how information is received. I no longer have to be willing to do the research in order to get an answer to a question I have. Well, okay, I have to do SOME research. I have to type "location of actual Brady Bunch house" in Google and hit the "Enter" button with my pinky finger, but that's all it takes to open up the world's vast array of useless (and on a rare occasion, useFUL) knowledge.

In the last week alone, I've used the Internet to find answers to the following questions:
1. How do you pronounce the word "derisory"?
2. Is Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Masacree" based on real events?
3. How do you remove an incorrectly installed toggle bolt from the back of a medicine cabinet?
4. What's the proper way to install a toggle bolt?
5. Did porn star Marilyn Chambers ever do any "real" acting?
6. In what year was the movie Billy Elliot released?
7. How do you get egg off of the glass that is in between the panels of an oven door?

It's easy to find answers to those questions now, and that's just a huge shift for all of us.

And maybe that explains why those late '80's / early '90's "observation" comedians aren't that funny anymore. If Jerry Seinfeld got up onstage and began a routine with, "What IS it about those Somali pirates, anyway?" before he ever got to the punchline I'd think to myself, "Google 'Somali Pirates' and you'll know more about them than you ever wanted to!"

Uh...Stumped...

I heard this article on All Things Considered on public radio last night, and I immediately realized that the story would have fit in as well on the satirical website The Onion as easily as it did on All Things Considered. Because it certainly sounds like a joke. Except they're not kidding!

At least, I don't THINK they are. Maybe the whole thing is some April Fool's gag.

In any event, it made for a weird story.

Click here for the story.

Plagiarized!

I can't decide whether to feel honored or violated here...


A few days ago I wrote a blog post called "What I Do," which talks about my current job as Chief Information Officer. The post included a link to my job description online, which can be found by clicking this link. That job description includes a job goal that is stated as follows: "To propose the information technology that the Erlanger-Elsmere School District will need to achieve its educational goals and then to work within a budget to implement the plan."



Yesterday I needed some information about the role of Chief Information Officer for a presentation I was working on, so I searched the Internet for the phrase "Chief Information Officer." And what I found was that page after page online included a variation of what's written in my online job description. You can see for yourself by clicking this link.

That's not a big deal, you're probably thinking. Whoever created your job description probably borrowed the job goal from one of these definitions. No big deal.

Except here IS the problem: I wrote that job goal myself, four years ago! The goal that was written before was this circuitous, nonsensical description* that said absolutely nothing about what I did in my job, and I was embarrassed that it was on our district website. It was there for a year before it occurred to me, Hey! I'm the district webmaster. I can't officially change the job goal as that's done by the Board of Education. But I can at least change what's online to give a better description of what it is I do. And so I wrote the phrase that's boldfaced above. I wrote it all on my own, with no help from the Internet.

So that means that since then someone somewhere, while doing research on the title of Chief Information Officer, stumbled upon my web page, liked what I'd written, and modified it to get the sentence that appears on all of those other web pages. That person posted it on some web page and others have been copying it ever since. And as I mentioned at the start of this entry, that makes me feel honored and ticked off all at the same time. Because I don't see any credit issued for this lifted sentence!

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*I did some research and found in my files the original job description that I found so poorly written: "To develop and maintain a program of computer education that uses to the best advantage the computer capabilities of the district for the educational excellence of this and other instructional programs."

Easter Weekend

Easter weekend has been a busy weekend for us.

Saturday began with us travelling the hour and a half to Frankfort. We then went to a senior citizen center for the Sweasy Family Reunion. Sadly, we were so busy catching up with people that the photo to the right, which we took on the way into the center, was the ONLY photo that we took. It was good to see everyone, though, and maybe I'll get some photos from someone else in the family that I can share here.

We left Frankfort and went straight to church for Saturday night Easter service and then came home and went to bed.

Sunday was the Blaine Family Easter. After sleeping in a little we got up and boiled 2 dozen eggs because we were bringing the deviled eggs. We then headed to Grandma's house for a big Easter celebration. It was good to actually see Grandma at her house. She looked to be in good spirits. There were a number of members of the family there, as these photos show:





Shelley did the cooking, and her restaurant sponsored all trips to the powder room:



Uncle Alex did his version of Grampa Blaine's famous egg trick, which you can see below in this video:



Finally, there was an Easter egg hunt. My plan was to video a little of the hunt and then take some pictures, but I forgot how quickly these things go, so by the time I turned the video off the whole thing was over and I got no pictures at all. Oh well, here you can watch ten or fifteen kids running and screaming like crazy:



It was a fun weekend.

Happy Easter!

I hope everyone has a Happy Easter!

Uh, that's pretty much all I've got today. Yesterday was very busy.

I will add this, though. I am glad that Easter has come, if for no other reason than that I don't have to see graphics like the one above on the local weathermen's 5 day forecasts.

At least not for another year.

The End of Spring Break

This past Monday I wrote about how wonderful it was that Spring Break was beginning, and I made a list of all of the wonderful things I planned to accomplish, and I imagined that at the end of Spring Break I'd bemoan that I didn't get done half of what I imagined.

Well, here it is, the day before the end of my Spring Break, and I can say without a doubt that I got even less done than I imagined I would. I listed eight items:

1. Paint the basement
2. Finish the bathroom project
3. Clean the area in the back of our yard that the former home owner used as a compost pile
4. Go to lunch with a friend I haven't seen in a few months
5. Paint my bedroom
6. Plant grass in the barren areas of our yard
7. Paint the foundation of the house
8. Spend some quality time with my wife

I managed to do items 2, 4, and 8. The problem was that finishing the bathroom project turned out to be a much larger job than I had anitcipated. There were only a couple of little loose ends to tie up, but as it turns out, those little loose ends weren't so little after all.

Let me give you an example. Lisa had purchased a cabinet to go over the toilet. I got up yesterday with the idea that I could put it up in an hour. As it turned out, it took me FIVE HOURS, and Lisa was there helping the whole time, too.

I had planned to write a long, comic blog here about my experience, but doing some research on the Internet Lisa found an article that pretty much summed up our experience, and no doubt does a better job of it than I could do. So read this article and you'll get an idea of how most of my day went yesterday.

What I Do

One of the things that I didn't like about being a teacher was that everybody already knew what a teacher was, and everybody also had pretty clear notions about what it meant to be a teacher, most of which were wrong. Things like

• You get to go home every day at 3:00.
• You don't work in June, July, or August.
• You're incompetent. No really, that's an opinion people have about teachers, as evidenced by the well known quotation, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

So there were bad things about being a teacher, true, but the good thing was that when people asked me what I did for a living, I always gave the same answer: "I'm a teacher." And people immediately understood what I did.

But with my current job, that's not so easy. My official title is Chief Information Officer. But if people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them that, since most people have never heard of that title, I haven't really told them much of anything (though that doesn't stop me from using that title when I'm trying to impress someone, 'cause you gotta admit: it sounds pretty cool). The old title for my job was District Technology Coordinator, which was pretty descriptive, but the state changed that title because in a school typically a "coordinator" is a part-time job, something that a school employee does in addition to his or her regular job, and it also implies that the DTC only deals with keeping the district technology running, and not with any kind of long term planning. So I don't use that title. Sometimes I just tell people I'm an "educator," and occasionally that's enough for people (though I assume those people think I'm a classroom teacher), but often it just leads people to ask more questions: What kind of educator? At what level--elementary, high school, or college? Are you in the classroom or a principal? Huh?

So for everyone who asks, here is what I do for a living.

A Great Song

For the last three days I've been working to finish the rehab of the main floor bathroom in our house (Lisa and I have both been working on it when we could for the last three weeks). Some way to spend Spring Break, huh? Honestly, I don't mind it. I actually enjoy painting very much (though I'd hate to do it as a career) for the same reason that I love to play the piano and the guitar: because I'm not very good at it, and to do it in a passable manner I have to block out everything else and concentrate. And it's the "blocking out everything else" part that makes those activities enjoyable for me. My mind gets emptied of all of my personal and work problems, and there's just me and the piano, or me and the guitar, or me and the paint brush. It's a kind of meditation, I guess.

Anyway, that's not what this post is about. Lisa has been off to work as a substitute teacher for the last couple of days, and so I've been alone in the house while I painted, so I've been blasting Pandora from my computer as I've worked. And there have been a number of songs as I was working that I really liked, and I'd come running into the office and read the name of the song and artist off of the computer and then go back to work.

One song in particular blew me away. It's called "Where I Stood" and it's by Australian singer/songwriter Missy Higgins. I just thought it was a lovely song. And before you listen to it and decide that it's saying something about MY love life, it's not. The song didn't affect me because I heard my life story in it. I just thought it was a moving piece.

I couldn't find a studio version of the single anywhere that I could embed here, but here's a live version from YouTube. This version is nice, but it's not quite as good as the studio version, which swells to a crescendo that isn't captured well here.

Another Typing Error Microsoft Hides from Me

Quite some time ago I wrote about how Microsoft Office was making me dumber because it was autocorrecting words for me, which was slowly degrading my typing skills as I wasn't seeing any of the mistakes that I was making. I found another example yesterday.

As I was typing a required No Child Left Behind technology plan (and amazingly, doing so is even LESS enjoyable than you're imagining) I noticed that every time I intended to type the word "does" I instead typed the word "dose," which the computer left alone at first, as "dose" is a real word. Once I added a little more to the sentence, though, and the computer was able to put what I was typing into context, it would change "dose" to the correct "does."

And again, this irritated me as I never would have known I was making the mistake if I hadn't been looking at the screen while I was typing, which I rarely ever do and which isn't really the textbook way of typing. On the other hand, I was pretty amazed at Microsoft Office's ability to correct that error, because it meant that it had to analyze more than just a word or two.

Maybe eventually Microsoft Office will just write the darned NCLB report for me, and I wouldn't even have to worry about the whole typing thing.

Then MS Office would be worth its $500 street price!

The Princess Warrior

I thought I would provide a quick update on Xena, the Warrior Princess...

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we were fostering a dog that a friend was trying to get rid of because they were moving. We were fostering her with the idea that we might actually adopt her. Yesterday marks the one month anniversary of the day that Xena came to live with us, and I guess that's long enough to call it official: We're keeping her.

She's a pretty good dog. I am NOT a dog person, and I think she's okay. In a month she hasn't used the bathroom anywhere inside the house, which is pretty much the only real criteria I have for calling a dog "a pretty good dog." And she's plenty affectionate.

She does have a couple of drawbacks, though:

• She's not an aggressive dog, but she is a dominant dog. Without strict training and consistency, she begins to act like SHE'S running the show, not us.


• She has pretty bad separation anxiety. If we leave her alone for anything longer than an hour she's almost hysterical when we come back. She comes running in and she starts yelping and jumping up on us. She's distraught.


• She has pretty much zero desire to obey. It's not that she's a dumb dog. You can whisper "sit" to her when you've got food to give her and she'll sit right down. Say it to her when she's got her mind set on something else, and she reacts like she doesn't hear you at all. You could shout it into her ear and the only reaction you'd get would be her briefly glancing in the other direction before going about whatever she was doing before.


• If she gets loose, she's gone. She's only gotten out once, but it was an absolute pain getting her back. It didn't help that there were half a dozen kids (Natalie and some friends) screaming at her and chasing her AWAY from the house.
  

But none of that matters to me, to be honest. I would much rather have a strong-willed dog than a submissive one that pees every time I walk into a room, which was a problem with the last dog we had. It lasted about two weeks before I told Lisa that I couldn't take it any more.

Spring Break

This is the first day of Spring Break for me, and I couldn't be more excited.

I'm not actually off the entire week. I plan to go in two days later this week as this is a great time to get some work done with no one around to bother me about a computer that isn't working or a software application that won't open. Still, I'm going to get some time away from technology for a week, and I'm looking forward to it.

I plan to

• Paint the basement
• Finish the bathroom project
• Clean the area in the back of our yard that the former home owner used as a compost pile
• Go to lunch with a friend I haven't seen in a few months
• Paint my bedroom
• Plant grass in the barren areas of our yard
• Paint the foundation of the house
• Spend some quality time with my wife

Of course, I probably won't get half of that done. In fact, I'll be lucky to get three of the bullets done, and I'm sure that when the end of the day Friday rolls around I'll be bummed about how little I got done, about all of the time I squandered doing nothing.

But I don't care about that now. I have a week of endless possibility stretching out in front of me right now. I might just do something...something...something AWESOME!

Cincinnati Nature Center

Yesterday was the first Saturday in quite some time that the girls did not have SOMETHING school related going on early Saturday morning, so the family was able to sleep in a little, and we were able to do a family activity that did not have to do with school. So we took off for the Cincinnati Nature Center, as we've done before in the past (see here and here). This time, though, for the first time, Lisa went with us.

And I'm glad she did because we got to see what I filmed on my camera and posted below. The woman in the video went around the Visitor's Center of the CNC asking people if they wanted to see her feed a snake. We didn't know she was going to try to feed the snake her finger!

Google Street View: The Other Side

I've written two blog posts about how nifty I think Google Street View is, including one post just a few days ago. It would appear that some stuffy Brits, though, are a little less in love with the service than I am.

On the other hand, the article confirmed what I wrote in my original post: that the photos had to be taken by multiple cameras mounted on a vehicle.

Click here to read the story.

Fall From Grace

It's a long fall from "Highest Paid Player in the NFL" to "Inmate Hoping to Get a Job in Construction," but that's exactly how far former Atlanta Falcon Michael Vick has fallen.

And I have to say, in some ways I feel sorry for the guy. He was handed the world on a platter when he was very young, immature, and not ready for it, and he's paying the price now. He needed someone to mentor him along. Maybe the NFL needs an official mentoring program, where the older, better adjusted players could help the younger players along, talk to them about handling the press, handling the fame, saving money because there's only one Jerry Rice and they're most likely NOT going to still be playing in their forties. Talk about how to handle the off season, how to handle the press. For players like Vick, they could talk about how to surround themselves with the right kinds of people, people who aren't going to get them in jail for two years.

Sounds like a great idea, but the problem, of course, is that there's no way there are enough well adjusted players to be mentors. Would Randy Moss make a good mentor? Or Chad Ocho Cinco?

I think that would actually be humorous. I could see Chad's advice now: "The first thing you need to work on," he'd tell the rookie, "is how to do your touchdown dance, what kind of props to use! Later we'll talk about outrageous ways you can get a fine so that you can stay in the media's mind even if your performance is lacking!"

A Good Laugh

Yesterday was April Fools Day, of course. I only had two attempts to fool me yesterday, one which succeeded and one which failed miserably. However, it was the miserable failure that made me laugh out loud.

As I was walking through the hallways at one of the elementary schools a young girl, maybe 3rd grade, pointed at the ground and said, "Watch out for that!" I glanced down and she laughed. "Ha ha! April Fools!"

I laughed, too, and said, "You got me all right!" But my laughter was forced. It's not that I mind getting tricked. It's just that I didn't think that particularly funny.

A few minutes later, though, I was working on a printer that was requiring me to sit and wait and wait and wait (I don't usually get out to do these kind of workorders, but my tech is seriously overworked right now, so I've been helping her out when I can) and I got on my cell phone's web browser and went to Google's mobile web page. And that's when I saw a link for "New! Google Brain Search." I laughed out loud.

Every year Google puts a couple of practical jokes on its site on April Fools Day, and I spotted this one right away. Still, I downloaded the application to my phone, and it's quite funny. Google's Brain Search uses the power of Google to access your brain's memory. Just start the program and hold your cell phone up to your forehead! It will use a special "psycho-neural matrix radiating 3cm beyond your brain" to read your mind and answer all of those questions you were thinking, like "When is my wife's birthday anyway?" and "That guy's cute. Should I walk over and introduce myself?" The answers are always funny.

I may have ruined some of the humor by telling your it's fake, but come on! Who's stupid enough to have believed it anyway? Here's the link if you want to check it out yourself: http://www.google.com/mobile/default/brainsearch.html. It works on iPhones, Blackberries, and Windows Mobile phones.

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UPDATE AT 7:43 AM: Darn it! I just clicked on the link above and found that the website is gone. And when I looked on my mobile phone I see that the application has uninstalled itself! So I guess it really was an April Fool's joke on me, after all! But I swear I didn't make the above up. You can read about it by clicking this link.

Goodbye, Encarta

I learned yesterday that, later this year, Microsoft will cease to produce the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia products. The digital encyclopedia all but killed the print encyclopedia, and now it is being killed itself by the Internet.

The Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia was first produced in 1993, and at the time it was a stand-alone CD product only. But it was cool. I first used it in 1995, and I was blown away by the possibility. Here was an encyclopedia where you could jump from topic to topic in an instant, without having to put one book away and get out another. Moreover, there was video and audio on the Microsoft encyclopedia! Now a young student could do more than just read about Martin Luther King, Jr. He could watch part of the King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech right there on his computer! It was too cool. Unfortunately, I never really got to use it in my classroom. The first computers we had in our district didn't have CD-ROM drives on them. By the time we got around to replacing those computers, in the late 90's, the computers had CD-ROM drives but no speakers. And by the time we got around to replacing THOSE computers at the beginning of this century, Wikipedia and encarta online and other online encyclopedias had replaced the Encarta product as the most efficient ways of getting information. But I still always thought the Encarta CD-ROMs were a neat idea, and a nice bridge from the print encyclopedia to the larger world of the Internet.

All that said, they'll never have as soft a place in my heart as the Merit Students Encyclopedias that I had as a kid. In many ways, those were my version of the Internet when I was young. I used to browse the encyclopedias in pretty much the same way that I browse the Internet sometimes today.

My God! Could I be any more of a geek!

I read them until I wore out the poor things, and I even took them with me when I moved out of the house. I kept them in my classroom for years, and though they eventually became very outdated, I would still read them from time to time, and would allow my students to use them if what they were researching involved something where the scholarship hadn't changed much over the last forty years (something like William Shakespeare).

I don't have them anymore, though I know exactly where they are: They're all in the bottom of the well at Vent Haven Museum. I tossed them in there long, long ago.