High cholesterol and middle age…
As I write this, I have been told by my doctor that I have high cholesterol and am borderline diabetic. This comes after many tests done on me after complaining of a pain in my left side. That pain turns out to be nothing more than a pulled muscle, but the blood tests that accompanied my doctor visits showed this potential problem.
My cholesterol is not exceptionally high, but coupling that with my being about 40 pounds overweight, has caused concern with my doctor, as well as some life changes for me. I have to change my diet and start some exercising in order to try to help my situation. My diet is the toughest for me, since I do love to eat. That will not change, but what I eat will.
I have already cut out all sugars. I have increased my intake of fruits and vegetables. I am working hard on eliminating all processed food. I have scoured the web for heart healthy recipes. I am now knowledgeable about what I can and cannot eat.
I am committed to using diet and exercise to lower my cholesterol. Why? I do not want to start on prescription drugs to control this. Once you start a medication like this, then you are on it for the rest of your life. Also, there are many unpleasant side effects to these drugs, and I do not want to deal with those.
I firmly believe that I can control my cholesterol levels simply by eating right and exercising daily. I know that this is going to take time and discipline on my part. It took me 40 plus years to mess up my body, so it will take me a while to get it back in order.
If you have not had a blood test for your cholestrol, I highly recommend you get one, and have one done every 6 months or so. I am lucky that my high cholesterol was discovered early, and I have the chance to correct it. I am planning on keeping you up to date on my progress.
Thanks for reading.
Black Friday Makes Me See Red
I do not know how you feel about this, but I am sick and tired of all this Black Friday sales nonsense. Every store tries to outdo the other by offering a bigger deal or by opening an hour earlier or by boasting a bigger claim. Some stores do not even close on Thanksgiving day. What these stores do is to publish maps showing the locations of the Black Friday deals, and then allow their customers to line up at those spots in the hopes of getting in on these “deals.”
But what exactly are these deals, and why are they forcing people to get out of a warm bed in the middle of the night and brave sub freezing temperatures in order to purchase these trinkets? Most of the time, no one knows. I browsed through all the post Thanksgiving day fliers looking at the these great buys. Most are incredible. Laptops for under $200. Big screen TVs under $500. Free video games with a purchase of $20. All seem like pretty good deals, until you read the fine print. With all these great bargains come this one warning-”Quantities in Limited Supply,” which boils down to mean “Attention you thousands of people who want this $100 laptop…we only have 1 to sell. Good luck getting it.“ You have a better chance of winning the Lottery!
My family and I took a trip over this Thanksgiving holiday, just to get away from everything for a while. We ended up in a larger city that has many of these stores who were offering these deals. As we were driving around on Thanksgiving evening, we drove past a Best Buy. I am not sure what they were offering for sale the next morning, but there were about 20 people already camped out in front of the store. It was 12 hours before the store opened, and the temperature was about 25 degrees, but there they were in their tents, sleeping bags, and blankets. At first, my family and I thought that this was funny and interesting, but then I realized that it was just ridiculous. There is nothing that a store is offering that is worth putting my health at risk to purchase.
My wife is not immune to this mania. Old Navy was offering a free Lego Rock Band video game and all you had to do was to purchase $20 of merchandise to get it. The store opened at 3:00 AM, so my wife decided to get up at 2:00 AM and go get in line to get a game. The deal was that the store employees would go through the line and hand out wristbands for the game. If you got a wrist band, then you could get a game. My wife told me that the store employee did not start through the line until just before 3:00 AM, and then only handed out 4 wristbands! This means that the store only had 4 games to “give away.” Are you kidding me? My wife told me that as soon as the writst bands were handed out, that most of the people in line left. How much business did Old Navy get by doing this promotion? Not near as much as they lost from those people who left mad.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do like to get a good bargain. I enjoy ploughing through ads and online stores looking for just the right price on the right product. But once I find that price and product, I fully expect to be able to purchase it whenever I want to.
In my opinion, this is just a legal form of the old bait and switch tactic. The store lures you in with the promise of a great deal, only to tell you that they are sold out, but they would love to sell you a similar product for only a few hundred dollars more. It is perfectly legal, since the store did have the advertised product, it is just that they only had a few of them. How much longer will we put up with this sleazy salesmanship? When will the American consumer step up and tell big business, enough is enough?
I guess as long as we continue to demand the best price on the best products, then stores will continue to ply their Black Friday sales pitch. Personally, I am done with the chase. I would much rather leisurely shop at my own pace and buy what I want, when I want it.
Now, if you will excuse me, I must get ready for the “After Christmas Sales.” I hear there are going to be some fantastic deals!
Thanks for reading.
Thanksgiving 2009
Well, here we are preparing to celebrate another Thanksgiving in the US. The past couple of years have been tough for lots of people, with the economy not doing well, and folks worried about the security of their jobs. Being in eductation has not sheltered me from these worries. Over the last two years I have been faced with shrinking budgets and dwindling grant monies. It is getting harder and harder to maintain current hardware, not to mention replacing outdated or failing hardware. I know that I am not alone, as I have heard from other school tech leaders who echo these sentiments.
However, at this time of year when we get ready to sit down with family and friends over a wonderful meal, and then push through the Christmas season with its ever eternal sense of joy and hope, I feel that it is time to sit back and be truly thankful for what we do have. I know that I am blessed with a wonderful family that supports what I do. I also am fairly secure in my job. I would like to earn more money, but I am very comfortable with where I am and what I do. I get total satisfaction with my job, both from teaching and maintaining. My health is pretty good for my age. Overall, life seems to be going along at a good pace. I know that it could be taken from me at an instant, but as long as I have it, I will enjoy it.
To all of you, I wish you nothing but happiness during this Thankgiving holiday, and I sincerely hope you have a wonderful Christmas season.
Thanks for reading.
The Current Buzzword-Netbooks, part 2
A few months ago I wrote a post about netbooks (“THE CURRENT BUZZWORD-NETBOOKS “). At that time, my district was considering purchasing these miniscule notebook computers for our Elementary students. The reasoning behind this was that the small design fits with their small hands, that are purchasing power is increased, and that this would increase the computer usage of our younger grades. Well, we bought the machines-64 of them to be exact. And I must say, they do look nice. But, the problem from a tech standpoint, is getting these machines ready to roll out to the Elementary.
Unlike a home machine, when I get a new computer system in my district, I sit down and start removing the junk that OEM’s put on the computer. I then go about installing programs that the user will need, as well as installing our anti-virus and other security features. Once this is done, I then pull an image of this machine so that if anything happens to it, or if I need to configure more than one computer, I can do it relatively easy. This is exactly what I needed to do with our netbooks…all 64!
I began this process by wiping the first netbook’s hard drive, and installing a new OS (basically, I went from WinXP Home to WinXP Pro) and then reinstalling the drivers for all of this machines hardware. Once I had that done, I went to use a system called FOG, however it would not work. Even after emailing back and forth with the systems developer, we could not get this to image. It appears that it is something to do with the hardware and drivers on the netbook. I then wanted to use Ghost (which we own). I attempted to use a Network Boot Disk I had, but the driver for the network card was not on there. I then had to scour the web looking for a driver. Fortunately, a member of an email list I belong to had a copy of the dos drivers, and gave them to me. I slipped them into the NetBootDisk files, and created a new network boot disk, and have successfully Ghosted an image of the netbook, and am now trying to copy that image to another netbook.
What this all boils down to is that I have had 64 netbooks for about 3 weeks now, and no one has been able to use them simply because they could not be quickly and easily be configured for use in my network. I am hopefull that now that I have a workable image, I can now move through the remaining netbooks quickly and get them into the hands of our Elementary staff and students. Once I have this project completed, I will have to write a simply step by step so that anyone else who is thinking of buying some netbooks for their school can read my experience and plan accordingy.
Thanks for reading.
Holiday Time
We are fast approaching the 2009 Holiday season. You know this is true just by walking through any department store or watching television. Tis the season to be a buyer. We are once again being bombarded with images and sounds that let us know that if we do not purchase our friends and families everything that they want, then we are going to be less than patriotic this December 25th. I get sicker of the commercialization of the Christmas season each and every year.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this time of year, and living in Illinois, I am almost certain of some snow on the ground, or at the very least, some cooler temperatures to get me in the spirit. And I do purchase gifts for those folks around me. But I also take time to enjoy the season. The time of peace and goodwill toward others. The time of relaxing and enjoying my friends and family. The time of reflection on the past year and planning for the next. The time to just take time for ourselves. This should be a season of taking stock of ones life and making sure that we are always in the right frame of mind, not if we found the right gifts.
From me to you, may you have a blessed and fruitful Christmas, and thanks for reading.
Illinois Education and Technology Conference
I just returned from the Friday session of the Illinois Education and Technology Conference. I love this conference. As the tech leader (and teacher) at my school, I try not to be gone from the district too often. I do not attend every “Tech Conference” that comes down the pike. But this is one that I do attend. It is the one time of the year that I get to hear what other educators are doing in their classrooms with technology, and what other tech folks are implementing in their districts. What always impresses me the most is that schools that are successful with technology are using it to enhance their classrooms and districts, instead of adding items just to add them. I always come away from this conference with some great ideas or a justification of something that we are already doing at our school.
I cannot wait until Monday so that I can tell others about these ideas, and see if we can do them.
Thanks for reading.
“Wake me up, when September ends…”
Here we are halfway through September. Every school has started, and most of us have been in school for a month already. I do not know about you, but I am having a hard time getting going this year. I have been in education for almost 10 years, so I know that it takes a little while to get into the groove again, but this year seems to be taking longer than before. I do not know what the cause of it is, but I do know that I am tired of it, so I have resolved that starting tomorrow (Monday) I am going to take this by the horns and turn this around to my advantage.
I am a firm believer in making “to do” lists, but I am not a good follower of those lists. I am going to make it a priority to not only make this list, but to use it as well. Since I am a computer guy, I would love to do this with a program, so that I can make a list today, and what does not get done moves to tomorrow’s list. Anyone got a good program that does this? I have access to PC’s, Mac’s and Linux machines, so whatever you can offer, I will give a try.
Thanks for reading.
Unemployment Rate Rises
Just read news that the unemployment rate rose to 9.7% in August, even though job losses were lower in August. How can the rest of the world be coming out of the recession, while we keep sinking further into the pit?
End of Another School Year
Well, here we are at the end of another school year. Did you get accomplished everything that you wanted to? If you are like most teachers, the answer to that question is a resounding “No.” That is not a reflection on your abilities to teach, but rather a reflection on the demands of your time. You plan well, but outside forces conspire to take away your classroom time, and you inevitably cut out some portion of your class in order to meet those needs.
I, like every other teacher, made grandiose plans at the start of this school year. This would be the year that I fully covered my subjects, as well as integrated new technologies into my classroom. This would be the year that collaboration took over, and the students taught themselves, with my input only coming to clarify a question. I would love to say that I succeeded beyond my wildest imaginations, but my mother always taught me to speak truthfully. I did cover more of my subjects this year than ever before, but not in totality. I did introduce my students to collaborative tools, as well as make Moodle a more intricate part of daily classroom time, but not to the extent that I managed the students while they worked. And here I sit at the end of a school year, thinking of everything that I did not accomplish, when I should be marveling at what I did accomplish.
The truth is, there really is no way to finish everything you plan to do at the beginning of the year. But, you should take pride in knowing that your students are better equipped now than they were in August. Pat yourself on the back for educating, but do not spend a lot of time with that self-praise. Begin now planning for next year, because the first day of school for the 2009-2010 school year is a mere 90 days away.
Thanks for reading!
Spring has Sprung!
April has come, the flowers are pushing up through the ground, the trees are sprouting new growth, and all good teachers thoughts turn to…summer break! I know, this is not what teachers should be thinking of, but when the weather starts to turn warmer after the long winters chill, all most can long for is those lazy summer days, when they still are working, but not having to deal with staff meetings, students, and lesson plans. Being a district tech guy and a teacher means that I do not get to enjoy those three summer months like other teachers, but I do get a month off in the summer, and I look forward to that as the others look forward to Memorial Day.
Well, as the weather gets nicer, and you find yourself looking out the window of your classroom as much as the students do, I hope that you will find time to do a little instructing. If you cannot concentrate in the building, then take the kids and head outside and teach class there. You will be amazed as to how much better you and they will feel, and they will be more inclined to participate in what you are saying.
Anyway, that is all for now. As I sit here and look out my window, I think it is time to go golfing. The students can take care of themselves for an afternoon, can’t they?
Thanks for reading!
