The Screaming Viking

It’s year end for the school, and with that comes the onslaught of ordering.  I like this time of year because I get a chance to play with a few new things.  It also gives me the opportunity to set things up the way I’d like them setup.  Like I’ve said before, there is nothing wrong with the way the previous guy configured things…I just have a different idea of how I want it to work.  I want to move towards a more “enterprisy” environment.  I want to be able to manage all the machines from one central point, and I want to do it as cheaply as possible.

So far we have received approval to build out 2 business computer labs.  I’m going to use iMacs for these labs running both lion and win7.  They are going to be setup to dual boot.  I think this gives us maximum flexibility.  For one of these labs they are looking at teaching multimedia applications and some web design.  We’re looking at dual monitor setups and all that.  I think it will be pretty decent by the time we are done.  The only real concern I have is getting enough data pipe to these machines.  I don’t think the network drops in that room was ever really designed to push as much traffic as these machines will potentially push/pull.  What I’m going to do is build out the room the way I want, then I’ll look at going back and attacking the networking situation later.  The way the building is segmented there is no real main switch closet.  There are a couple of locations that have auxiliary switches.  In the next few years I would like to run fiber…but I’m not sure how much that is going to cost.

Something else I want to do is replace all the ancient macs we have here.  There are 90 or more emacs, which at this point are long past their usefulness.  I wonder how much we’d save on power alone if these were replaced…  My thoughts are instead of replacing X amount each year, we finance it…replace them all at once and pay it off over a few years.  This is going to be quite a bit of work for me, but I think this would jump start us on to a regular replacement schedule.  Also, in five years maybe we would be looking at some kind of 1 to 1 initiative where we can downsize the desktop machines.  Right now I don’t know how that would work…but we’ll see.

If all this replacement action gets approved, it will keep me fairly busy over the summer.  Physically setting them up and moving things around will take a little bit of time, but the big time sink will be putting images on the machines.  With deep freeze it has to copy the size of the frozen disk with each image…that’s what takes all the time.

We’re also ordering a few iPads.  Not a whole bunch, I will probably have around 20 to mess with and get ready for the school year.  The management of the ipads is something that is a bit tricky.  I’ve decided to quite expecting that people won’t use them for personal stuff.  As long as they are ready for school and they have them for that…I don’t care what they are used for.

Gonna be a busy summer.

For several years there has been a change coming down the road for education.  In the past few years, with the introduction of the smart phones really, that change has been accelerated.  A lot of knowledge that people insisted kids memorize has changed to knowledge that can be found on the internet.  We need to change some of our focus from recalled knowledge to retrieving knowledge.  I don’t think this should be a whole sale shift across the board…there is some knowledge that is important…but that knowledge is changing from “facts” to “concepts”.  Is it important that I know the capital of Mississippi?  What that ever important?  Is it important that I know how to spell?  To some extent yeah, it probably is…but once a kid has passed the 5th grade it’s time to switch that focus from memorizing how to spell words over to knowing where to find the data.  Do we need to extensively teach geography?  or should we focus on the the knowledge to use the tools to find out about the current geography in an area?  Writing and penmanship is getting less and less important, but composition and effectively communicating is becoming more important (IMO).  So many people have a personal blog, lots of people us facebook/twitter/txts to communicate…maybe we should offer some course work involving communicating effectively in 140 characters or less?

We have such a limited school day, limited dollars, limited resources in general, it’s unfortunate that educational institutions are not keeping up with the knowledge and skills that are relevant in society.  I could go on about this, expand on my ideas…but I’ve burnt up way more than 140 characters.

I sold my NookColor recently…I came to the conclusion that it’s a pretty cool little device, but I just don’t have a space for it in my gadget drawer.  I bought the nook around the 1st of the year.  I was working at the Nor and my “personal” cell phone was a locked down black berry.  This was adequate for what I wanted to use a phone for at the time…and free makes it even better.  At the time, the NC did quite a bit of my crap surfing for me.  I didn’t have to fire up a laptop to check out facebook, it was light..quick to power on and served it’s purpose.  I also used it as a book reader and enjoyed what it had to offer.  At the time, I did quite a bit of reading in bed and the back lit screen worked out well for me.  The lack of battery life wasn’t a concern because I would plug it in each night.  It served it’s purpose well.

Then things changed a bit…I got my job at the school, which meant I wouldn’t have access to a black berry anymore.  Faced with the prospect of buying my own phone, I looked at what android devices were available and went with the Droid X.  This sucker has a pretty good screen size for a cell phone and is useful for quite a few things.  Also at the school I have access to an iPad for evaluation purposes.  It was with the introduction of these two devices that I now found my nook didn’t really have a niche anymore.  The iPad is bigger than the nook and offers a bit better battery life, but I don’t really care to read on it.  It can play videos a little better than the nook, the touch screen is of a little better quality and it has netflix available.  Being able to use netflix on one of these devices is actually pretty handy.  Sitting in bed and want to watch a quick episode of something…netflix to the rescue…etc.  It’s just a handy feature to have.

The phone has come in really handy for lots of things including alleviating boredom.  Since my house is about a 20 min drive from the school, on the days where I have to stay for a board meeting or when I was doing some coaching it would be handy if I had a device where I could do something to kill some time…these would be good opportunities to read.  How about when I go somewhere for lunch…I could read a bit while I’m eating.  This is where I found the nook a little cumbersome.  It’s rather large to bring with everywhere…and it’s another device to haul around.  I always have my phone on me, I’ll try to read on that.  Again, this showed me another problem…there was no way to sync the pages between the phone and the nook.  I’d have to remember where I was at from one device to the next…major suck.  I decided to try to read exclusively on the phone and see how it pans out.

Reading on the phone has worked out surprisingly well.  I can turn the screen brightness down quite a bit, the app I use is Aldiko.  It is very easy to get this software to pick up books in whatever directory you put them in to.  My screen is 4 inches…which works out well for me.  I’m not turning pages all the time and the touch screen on my phone is a bit better than the touch screen on the nook.  The phone fits a bit better in my hand, is lighter…etc.  I can see the text just as easily…it’s a win win to have less devices.

So…I sold the NC.  The guy I sold it to was eager to have one.  If I didn’t have access to an iPad I probably would have held on to it, as it was though…it became a redundant device.

As I may have mentioned on here before, I now live out in the sticks.  We’re not just talking so remote you don’t get high speed internet…oh no we’re talking no cell service end of the world here.  They have recently offered extended loop DSL service in our area and quite frankly it works well for standard use.  It’s not going to be sufficient for streaming netflix or a lot of downloading, but it’s fine for normal surfing and for the wife to work from home (I’m surprised at how little bandwidth she actually uses up from the home office).  Given that we live in the sticks, having reliable phone service is pretty important.  Also, using the cell phones gets us around long distance charges (yes, land lines still charge long distance).  There are some spots in the house that work…and others that give you no service at all.  The part that is extremly frustrating about the whole deal is there is a full strength “extended network” tower that it hits and works fine from.  The phones will not stay locked on this tower though because they prefer verizon’s network.  I don’t get charged to use this tower but I assume verizon incurs some cost on the backend.  From what I can see there is no way to “force” the phones to use this better signal either…they might lock on to it for a few min, then they sniff a verizon tower and while it’s not a good enough signal to actually do anything it causes the phone to try to lock on to it.  This drains battery as well as resulting in no connection.  Clearly I had to remedy this situation before the wife came out here.  It would be nice to make this transition as smooth as possible for her…

Enter the verizon range extender.  I did some reading about this little device and from what I understand it needs gps signal and high speed internet to work.  I called to make sure I had a “return” window if it didn’t work in my area.  They said I had 14 days, so I ordered it.  It came two days later and the fun began! Read the rest of this entry »