March 2005

Pomp and Circumstance and New Toys

As of this week I have finished all the course work I need to graduate ... again.

That's right, I'm going to have another degree under my belt, making a grand total of ... two. This time, it'll be a Masters of Education in Curriculum & Technology.

Me like playing with shiny things.

Of course this means that my student loans will be coming due. We already dumped our federal tax refund (That's right, we filed early and got it back already. BOOYA!) into them before interest could accrue. The refund isn't much compared to the total amount owed, but every little bit put towards principal means less interest for me to worry about later.

To celebrate, Kelli and I are spending money. Yeah, dumb idea, but we can't help ourselves. Kelli's getting a 256 meg MP3 player while I'm springing for the drool-worthy 1 gig model (We got a discount for buying both at the same time). They're not iPods, but if you compare them to the shuffle (The only way to compare apples to apples here) they have a lot more features (built in FM tuner and microphone for voice recording) for the money spent. They can't play stuff from the iTunes store, but most of my music is ripped from CDs or uploaded by indie bands anyway.

You can be sure I'll be talking about them again when we've had some time to play with our shiny new toys. I myself am personally looking forward to playing around with the recording features. If the microphone's halfway decent I might even start doing podcasts. Maybe.

Boring? Natch.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

A.O.T.M. 25 - Lullaby

Name: Lullaby.mp3
Length: 3:04
Size: 3.5 MB
When: 2004
CD Available?: No

This is my second A.O.T.M. offering created with Apple's GarageBand software. The first one (Ominous) I posted because my sister Gretchen liked it. This one is here because my wife said she likes it.

And that's only fitting, since I made it for her.

As some of you reading this may know, Kelli was very sick for most of last year. Among other things, her blood pressure would go through the roof and she would have massive anxiety attacks. To help her relax I brought in a CD player and a bunch of CDs with calm, relaxing music on them.

At the same time I was just starting to mess around with GarageBand. I made some garbage, but I also made several songs (including this one) that I didn't think were too shabby. This one's primary influence was my overwhelming desire for Kelli to just stay calm and have a normal blood pressure.

Now Kelli's home safe and sound, and we both enjoy listening to this and several other songs when we're about to fall asleep. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Interview with a Kindergartener

Here's a little discussion I had with a Kindergarten class today while trying to have them draw farms:

Me: And what could farmers plant in their fields? Kindergarten Kid #1: Corn! Me: That's right! What else? Kindergarten Kid #2: Chicken! Me: ... Um, not really, the chickens wouldn't like that. You have to plant plants, not animals. Anything else? Kindergarten Kid #3: Cows! Me: No, they wouldn't like that either. What PLANTS would a farmer plant? Kindergarten Kid #4: Chicken! Me: ....

Ah, the innocense of youth! :)

The cartoonist got it right.

Ian and Matt from Mac Hall recently produced a wonderful commentary on college education from the student's / alumni's perspective. I'm not sure how many of you read webcomics, but this particular comic I'm sure has takem place time and time again.

Back in the day it was enough to just provide knowledge and skills in school. Now, however, a school must switch gears and start teaching students how to learn. Give a man a fish, and all that.

It's only common sense, after all. Look at all the cool commonplace technology we have now that people never even thought about 10 years ago. Do you think that schools back then could have possibly trained people to write RSS code for podcasts today? No, those skills were learned much later and were in most cases self taught.