Stretch Your Imagination

A natural part of growing up for most of us is the loss of imagination. It doesn't totally disappear, we just stop using it as much or start using it in different ways. Instead of imagining being an astronaut and flying to the moon we imagine that two-story house with the white picket fence. Our dreams are more down to earth. I think that's why books that have magical qualities, books that stretch the imagination and push it to its limits are rare in books written for adults. There are obvious exceptions. For example, ...

1

May 28, 2008

The End is Near

I saw that the school posted an opening for my job. Good luck to whoever takes it. They are going to need it. It's hard to do this job and stay sane. No breaks at all. I even eat lunch with the kids. 7 hours non-stop of being with the kids. That's a long time to be with the same kids without so much as a bathroom break or 5 minutes of time to take to yourself to preserve sanity. Oh well, in 5 more days it'll all be over. I'm ...

1

May 27, 2008

A Book a Day

I've been in a reading mood lately. I don't know what it is but I can't get enough of it. Friday night I bought two books, A Good and Happy Child and The Husband. A Good and Happy Child was a pretty good book by first time novelist Justin Evans. It's a book that explores demons, both literal and figurative. The book seemed pretty good at the store and the reviews made it sound excellent. I have to admit, it was a pretty decent book. I enjoyed the way it was told, in ...

1

May 21, 2008

Dropbox

I was given an invite to Dropbox. In a nutshell, it's an online storage service that allows you to sync files across multiple computers. I'm syncing files via my PC running Vista and my MacBook running Leopard. The service is very easy to use. You download the application and install it. In Windows it creates a folder in My Documents called My Dropbox. You drop any files in there you want to put on the server and it automatically uploads them. Once you have files uploaded to Dropbox you can log into the Dropbox website ...

11

May 17, 2008

My Resignation

Today I turned in my letter of resignation. I will not be working for this school district next year. In fact, I won't be working for any school district next year. I am leaving the education field to work for a website design company. I think it's a great opportunity for me and I'm looking forward to hopping on board. As I look back, I realize this school year passed relatively quickly. Yeah, during most of the year it seemed like the days crept by, after all, I do deal with the troublemakers. ...

5

May 14, 2008

Boom Blox

I purchased Boom Blox last night because it looked like a simple fun game. I've been watching videos of gameplay for months and with Steven Spielberg creating it, I thought it must be fun. I'll tell you this, it is. The story line for Adventure mode is very simple and something kids will enjoy a lot more than me. The true fun lies in the levels and not the in-between story line. The control with the Wii remote is very simple and easy and I've enjoyed the different types of play, whether it be strategically ...

0

May 10, 2008

My Life has Disappeared

I use a service called Lifestream.fm to aggregate my online life. It gathers my tweets from twitter, pictures from Flickr, my Diggs, recently played songs, my Del.icio.us feed, and blog posts from this blog. It's a great service. It's very easy to use, includes more social services than Socialthing, and looks great. There's just one problem. The site has disappeared. When you go to Lifestream.fm, there's just a GoDaddy parked page. Very odd. Anyone know what's happened to it? EDIT: It seems to be back up now. Weird.

0

May 9, 2008

Scrobbling on the Mac

I love letting other people see what tracks I listen to and I love being able to find artists similar to what's on my playlist, that is why I love last.fm. Even though I don't use my MacBook for listening to music much, when I do I still like to scrobble, or submit, the tracks. My problem has always been finding a good Mac client to do this. I used to use Menuet, but every time I right click the icon in the menu bar it crashes. So, I'm saying goodbye to that. I downloaded ...

3

May 8, 2008