Category: General

Apple and I go way back. Still, I wonder what the plan is for K-12 classrooms and I am concerned. The rumor sites (e.g., Mac Rumors) report that the 17 inch iMac is to be discontinued. The present difference between the 17 and 20 inch iMac price is approx. $900 vs. $1300. While machine vs. machine (once software and capabilities are considered), I think Apple is quite competitive, this argument is not valid if there is no machine at the lower price point. With an increasing focus on Web 2.0 apps for many educational experiences, you don’t need $1300 machines even with iLife.

Perhaps I should ignore the rumors and trust Apple to do the right thing. This vail of secrecy thing Apple seems to enjoy is not good for my high blood pressure.

BTW – the iPhone is also not relevant to me because I can’t purchase one to use in North Dakota. Hence, the total focus of the Apple home page on the iPhone is simply annoying.

Now I feel better.

I leave town for just a few days and another blogger scoops me on a really cool local idea (my excuse – we donate the local paper when we are gone or I would have been all over this).

Doug Johnson (Blue Skunk Blog) evidently was in town for a wedding. He describes this as a destination wedding – maybe it just seems that way if you are from Mankato, MN 😉 . Anyway, he decides to read the “Pulitzer prize” winning GFHerald and discovers a column in the paper attempting to generate a list of the seven wonders of Grand Forks. Doug must have had some down time because he drove around and took pictures of the sites for his blog.

He is right when he proposes this could be a great local project for someone. What are your local wonders?

Actually, I have been collecting images of local “wonders” myself this summer and I have been exploring our neighbors to the east. You may have observed my pictures of the world’s largest prairie chicken and Big “Ole” in my side bar.

Rothsay, MN

Alexandria, MN

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I have to give Doug credit. He posted a response nearly as quickly as I could hit the “Save” button. I do admire those bloggers who put their heart and soul into their sites and really keep on top of things.

He is right about the difficulty in adding “comments” to my blog – it can be done, but it is not easy. I gave up on the easy approach to protect anyone who is willing to read my material from the spammers of the world. Here is the way it works. You have to “register”. The system then sends me a notification and I have to upgrade your status (allow comments, allow posts, etc.). I prefer participants with email addresses or web sites I can track to an educational institution. Else – I will likely send you an email and ask for additional information.

I was back home in rural Iowa on Saturday to attend a reunion for my high school class. It has been 40 years since we graduated from Kingsley-Pierson High School. It would have been a great situation for one of those long term memory tests. You are supposed to be pretty good at remembering imagery (pictures), but not verbal information. I turned out not that good at remembering either – few names and many could have been random individuals plucked from the streets. It don’t think it is that my mind has slipped that much in 40 years, it is that folks look a little different now. More mature I guess. 😉

Thinking back, it was my impression that when we left high school most of us intended to be teachers/coaches or farmers. This would include me I guess. Farming turned out not to be a great choice and only a few of those who tried were able to make a career of it. So much for the family farm. A few more did enter education, but for most of us the future was not exactly what we had imagined.

I was surprised to encounter so many retired classmates. I know that retirement is out there on the horizon, but I have only begun to accept this reality. Most of those who are already retired seemed pleased with their new life and this was reassuring.

So – here is to my classmates (and significant others) and the KP class of 1967.

I do continue to spend time in Iowa, but I drove more back roads on this trip and saw some changes. I have viewed the wind generators in the fields before, but the numbers seem to be increasing. I wonder why this option is not being pursued more aggressively in my new home state.

Blogged with Flock

I have been aware of the Slingbox for some time. It is a small box that converts a television feed and sends it over the Internet. Cindy’s boss purchased one and was able to access local television from his house in Grand Forks will traveling in Norway.

Buy.Com had one on sale for $159 so I made the purchase. It was easy to set up for use within my home. Split the cable leading to a television and run one connection into the device. Connect the device to the home lan. Plug it in. Download the software and run through the setup and it works.

Getting the system to work outside of the home (over the Internet) was a little more of a challenge. I had to figure out to reconfigure my router for port forwarding. I keep telling myself that struggling with issues like this is the way I learn things. I now know a little about port forwarding.

The image below was captured from the laptop operating in wireless mode. Yes, it is CNN and the flying fish video. The quality is much better than I expected.

What is this good for? I know why I wanted this. Strange as it may seem, I want to be able to watch Twins baseball from my home or office office. CNN is also a habit. I can work on certain things (e.g., programming) with this video feed running in my periphery. Come to think of it, this type of multitasking is what is supposed to set we old folks apart from the students who are now in our classes. I am guessing most of my students won’t be running CNN in a window on their laptops while doing their work, but whatever is running in that unused attentional space is really not the issue.