Quote of the Week

And though we love to numb the pain
We come to learn that it's in vain.
Pain is our mother--
She makes us recognize each other.
--Over the Rhine
"Nobody Number One"



(I can't see the video.)

Big Things Come...

Yesterday my smart phone locked up, and the old reliable method of removing and replacing the battery didn't solve the problem. I did some research and found that the way to fix my issue was to take out the Micro SD card, reboot, and then replace the card. I did so, and it fixed the problem.

But that's now what I want to write about today...

...As I held the card in my hand (see photo above), I couldn't help but be amazed by it. The card is smaller than my thumbnail, but it holds 8,000 megabytes of information. That's a lot of "1's" and "0's." In fact, it's the equivalent of roughly 5,555 floppy discs!

My first Windows computer, purchased in the mid to late1990's, wowed everyone I knew because it had TWO 1,000 megabyte hard drives. Two! I could store all kinds of things on there!

Going even further back, the first server we ever had when I was a teacher at Lloyd High School, purchased in about 1994,  had a total memory of just over 1,000 megabytes (or a gigabyte, for the less technology savvy). I remember our network technician saying, "With a gigabyte of  storage space, you'll NEVER need to replace that server. Every document or file that every student in this school ever created could fit on that thing!"

Ignoring the erroneous prediction, it's amazing that the card I hold in the photo above is able itself to hold eight times as much information as that 90 pound server from 1994. So this teeny, tiny micro-card intrigues me. How much smaller will our storage devices get, and how much more will they hold?

Box

I was off work last week on vacation. Whenever I'm off for that amount of time I worry that something is going to go wrong at work in my absence. I wrote a post not too long ago about the nightmares that I have during those times of useless fear and worry. I had one of those last week, and when I returned to work Monday, I couldn't shake the feeling that SOMETHING was going to have been forgotten last week.

But that wasn't the case...at least not until Tuesday. I was working Tuesday morning when I got a phone call from an employee of one of the vendors that the Kentucky Department of Education uses for technology services (KDE has a rack of servers in our basement that are used to connect our district to the state network and to the Internet). Let's call the guy Andrew. After a moment of chit chatting with the guy (whose voice inflections were eerily like Napoleon Dynamite's, by the way), I asked him why he was calling.

"Uh," he said with a pause afterward that made it sound like the word was a complete sentence. "I'm calling to schedule a date and time to install your UPS."

"What UPS?" I asked him.

"Uh. The UPS that was delivered to you some time last week and that's for the [latest KDE] initiative."

I looked quickly around my office. Several boxes HAD been delivered to my office (all pieces of technology I'd ordered before going on vacation), but I'd accounted for all of them. There weren't any errant boxes. "Andrew, I don't know of any boxes delivered last week. I was on vacation, though, and maybe they're out in the outer office somewhere, or maybe my system admin picked them up and stored them for me somewhere. Let me find them and get back with you." He agreed, so we hung up. But after checking with everyone in the office that day, NO ONE remembered any piece of electronics being delivered that hadn't already been accounted for. There were plenty of other packages delivered (we typically get three to four deliveries a day to the Board of Education building), but nothing with my name on it. I sent Andrew an email letting him know that we hadn't found the box, that we didn't think it'd been delivered. And I thought that was that.

Until yesterday.

I got an almost simultaneous email and phone call from Andrew. I read the email as I was talking to him. "Uh. Hey, Bryan. Did you find that UPS? I checked the tracking number, and it WAS delivered to the board office on June 21st. It was signed for by a P. Daugherty. The tracking number is in the email that I sent."

"I'm looking at the email right now," I told him. "It sure sounds like it WAS delivered here to this address. Peggy Daugherty is our receptionist. I guess it must be here somewhere."

"Uh," he said. "Okay. Uh. Can we come install it tomorrow?"

"I don't know," I told him (His "uh"s were starting to get on my nerves.). "I have to find it first. I've already looked once and couldn't find it, and I've had my eye out for it ever since, so I don't know if I'll even be able to do that. Can you tell me what it looks like?"

"Uh," he said, "It's a box."

"I KNOW it's a box," I told him slowly, "but what does it look like? Is it brown like every other box? Does it have your company's name on it? Is it addressed to me?"

"Uh, I've installed a bunch of these. Let me think what it looks like." Long pause. "It's just a regular box. I don't remember what color it is. I don't know what company's name is listed on it. I know it's not our company's name, but I can't remember whose it is." Another long pause. "I don't know who it's addressed to."

"Okay," I said. "What size is it, then? Am I looking for a bread box? A computer monitor? A case of paper?"

"Uh, it's pretty much just a standard box," he said. "I'm not very good with sizes of stuff. I'd say it's about one to four feet wide, and about one to four feet deep, and about one to three feet tall. Maybe."

I was really frustrated at this point, so I snapped back at him, "So let me get this straight? I'm looking for a box that doesn't have your company's name on it, that's 1-4 feet wide and deep and 1-3 feet tall. It might have been addressed to anyone, and it could be any color. Is that right?"

"Uh, yup. That sounds like the box."

I paused for a moment, drumming my fingers on my desk before saying, "You do realize that you have described 99.9% of all boxes that exist in the world, don't you!"

"I guess I wasn't much help," he said plainly.

The situation was so ridiculous, though, that I couldn't stay angry but for a few seconds. I laughed at his reply. "It's better than nothing," I said. "We've eliminated a tenth of a percent of the boxes here in the district. I'll just have to dig around all of the rest and see what I can find." So I did. I looked at every box at the Board of Education. I went to the maintenance garage behind the board office, where our deliveries are sometimes taken, and I looked through the storage room in the basement. I quizzed a dozen people before finally deciding that I wasn't going to look anymore that day.

I walked back up to the board office and walked in and sighed in exasperation. Linda, our finance officer, was walking by the entrance, saw me and said, "What's going on?"

"I am so FRUSTRATED!" I told her. "I've just spent the last hour doing my best Sherlock Holmes imitation trying to track down a missing box."

"What's in the box?" she asked me.

"It's a UPS, a big battery thing, and it's for the [latest KDE] project."

"Oh, THAT!" she said. "That's in a closet in my office!"

"WHAT?" I asked her. "Why would it be in your closet?"

"You weren't here last week, and I didn't want it to get misplaced, and I knew it was for the [latest KDE] thing, so I stuck it in there."

"How could that be?" I asked her. "I asked everyone Tuesday if they'd seen it, and you said you hadn't!"

"I wasn't HERE Tuesday," she reminded me. "I was on vacation."

Uh.

Guess what? It just occurred to me that I have no point to this story nor do I have an ending. I just wanted to share with you a frustrating event in my life. Oh well. This is just my second post after 2 months away from my blog. I guess I'm still a little rusty. I'll work on having a real ending on my next post.

Back from Hiatus

I'm back!

After taking time off from this blog--exactly 60 days to be exact--I'm refreshed and ready to write again.In my "final" post before taking the break, I mentioned that I wasn't out of ideas for the blog--just out of motivation (In fact, I mentioned three posts I had in my head at the time). In that sense,  the time off was good for me. There were four or five times during the hiatus when I had a story that I REALLY wanted to tell, but I forced myself to not do so. I'm glad that I WANTED to write again and wasn't doing so because I felt obligated.

Before I begin writing new posts, though (including something funny/exasperating that happened to me today at work!), I thought I'd deal with those three items that I mentioned in the final post. As I looked back at what those items were, though, I realized that--in all three cases--I'm a little late in posting this. For one reason or another, the ship has already sailed on these items. But oh well. I don't want to leave anyone hanging. I'll write about them anyway.

Item 1: Anthony Weiner.
This was a pretty topical item, and I knew that if I took any length of time off from this blog that when I came back it would be too late to write about this topic. I was right. So many other topics have come and gone since Weiner was in the headlines that you might need to be reminded of who he is: he's the guy who mistakenly sent via Twitter photos of his crotch. Oh yeah. Remember him now?

What I was going to write in that blog post that never happened was a thank you letter to Representative Weiner. Because he had just made my job easier. Every August I get to spend about 30 minutes with new employees talking about technology in the school district, and one of the things that I talk about is the hyper-awareness that teachers need to have when communicating in ANY forum on the Internet. There's a sense of privacy when emailing/chatting/messaging/poking/whatevering someone on the Internet, but that privacy is ALWAYS an illusion. It takes about four clicks of a computer mouse for the person on the other end to share that entire communication with the rest of the world. In education, this is even more important since email is considered a public record and parents have the right to review email messages concerning their children. I always end my little mini-lecture with this statement: "You need to write EVERY email you send with the idea that your students, your students' parents, your principal, the CINCINNATI ENQUIRER, and I are looking over your shoulder and what you're writing. Because I AM, and the rest of them very well could be!" Thanks to Representative Weiner, I have a really good example that I can use to make my case.

Item 2: A For Sale Sign on Buttermilk Pike
There's a sign visible from Buttermilk Pike--at least, that USED to be visible from Buttermilk Pike--that always makes (made) we laugh when I read it. I went to take a photograph of it today and found that it has been covered up and replaced with another sign. So this issue becomes kind of moot. But again, I'll go ahead and talk about it anyway...

...The sign was a For Sale sign for an old Bob Evans restaurant that sits on a hill above I-75 and ceased to be a Bob Evans about four years ago. It still LOOKED like a Bob Evans, though, and because it sits on a hill it was visible in both directions and had the distinctive red with white trim farmhouse look, so the Bob Evans company came along and painted the restaurant completely powder blue. It was a sushi bar for a while after that, but for more than a year it's sat empty.

And that brings me back to the yellow and black sign that USED TO make me laugh. What it said was this: "For Sale. Sign Included." That's not funny in and of itself. What made the whole thing funny to me was that the words "Sign Included" were twice the size of the words "For Sale." I always wondered what the sign maker was thinking when he made the sign. Did he think someone was going to come along and say, "Well, I WASN'T interested in the old, decaying, powder blue, former Bob Evans restaurant at first...but when I learned that the sign was included I thought, 'Why not?'"

Alas, I can't show you the sign. It's been covered up by the sign to the right that reads, "For Lease--Sign Included." In the new version, the "Sign Included" has been reduced in size so that it's now not quite as large as the "For Lease"  wording. That makes the whole thing unfunny. Plus, and I couldn't begin to tell you why, I just think "For Lease--Sign Included" is less funny than "For Sale--Sign Included."

Item 3: A YouTube Video from my prom from way back in 1986
The high school I graduated from had a reunion this past Friday for the classes of 1981-1989, and I thought it would be great to take an old VHS video I had of my senior prom and load it up to YouTube. The video had been made by a mom and pop video production company, was recorded on a VHS home video camera, and included mostly shots of people in tuxes and fancy dresses either getting their official prom photo taken or else squinting and waving frantically for the camera to be pointed somewhere else (For some reason, the video's directors thought people would LIKE to have bright lights shined in their faces). Also, the video was overdubbed with popular music of the day, which the producers no doubt did not have rights to use, and which YouTube would have no doubt stripped from the videos upon upload. But oh well. My plan was to break the video into five minute segments and load it up every few days.

That was my plan. The problem was that I could never find the video. I tossed out all but a handful of my VHS tapes when we moved from Vent Haven in 2008, and after all but taking my house apart four different times over the last two months, I had to concede that the tape was gone. Oh well. Maybe all for the better. I remember that I was one of those squinting people waving off the camera, and the bright lights from the camera made my large forehead look extra shiny.

So now you're all caught up. Tomorrow I can start writing about something that wasn't irrelevant a long time ago...