floodgate.blog

After a long, eventful, and fun summer, it is now time to go back to work.  My preparation to return to teaching is involving:

1. Sitting on my ass.
2. Watching Superbad (to remember what high school kids are like HAH)
3. Finding as much of my teaching stuff as I can (which isn’t much — I’m hoping I left a lot of it in my room!)
4. Writing blog posts

I’m actually excited to get back.  I never thought I’d say that about a job.  Must be a good thing.

A while back I went searching online for scanner driver software for linux.  I ran across SANE, and it looked promising (with a compatibility list that reminds me of the wonderful NDISWrapper tool).  Since I am now on a mac, I started a similar search for my ancient UMAX 2200 scanner.  Surprise surprise, no OS X support that was worth anything.  I then saw TWAIN-SANE for OS X.

It worked first time.. it’s a little different layout than I am used to, but it is feature complete (maybe more features than I had before, but I haven’t explored yet).  Yet again, props to the linux and OSS communities for quality software

I’m slowly cleaning out the excess “files” on my old dell laptop, and came across something I wrote a while back.. actually was something for school that was so entertaining that I had to scan it in for my own safe keeping.  Teaching as definitely helped “clear up” my handwriting.  Click on the image to see the full page of ugly

Enjoy!

I read an article today on DownloadSquad titled “3 Linux Apps That Make Me Hate Windows” and was rather unimpressed with the examples that drove the author to hate Windows.  I am by no means a Windows-sympathizer, but if you’re going to make a strong statement like that, you should probably come out with more than a package manager, a window manager, and amaroK[1].

Read more…

I’ve been trying to find ways to avoid apps like iMovie and iPhoto (to a lesser extent iCal and Mail) because I justy don’t “think” like an apple person.  While I find iMovie and iPhoto confusing, I find them confusing in the exact same way, which is promising if I ever have a breakthrough and figure it all out.

So, as I write this, I am going along with the hope that I will someday subscribe to the Jobsian way, and am letting iPhoto import my 8,000 pictures.  I just heard both fans kick on… ugh

I guess those closest to me know that I can spend hours (ok, days really) just reading, studying, and thumbing through maps, atlases, etc.  In my universe, it’s completely acceptable that the one book I want to have some day is the National Geographic World Atlas.  Some day I’ll just buy it.  In the mean time, I live out my mapping-ness online.  The University of Texas Map Archive is pretty darn awesome, and today it lead me to the American Memory section of the US Library of Congress.  I am especially into historic maps (pre-1900 is OK, pre-1800 is ideal), and came across this 1600’s map of Europe:

Image from http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g5700.ct001454

Earlier in the day I said “Man, if I could find an old map of Europe, I’d be pretty psyched”..

this is a test — let’s see if this takes. (trying out flock)

So, I guess I won’t be watching any of NBC’s online coverage of the olympics:

I meet almost all requirements: OS 10.5.4, Firefox 3, on a G4… grrrr.  As a former swimmer, I am not THAT upset, as all swimming events are televised, and all medal heats are in prime time.  Who knew that swimming would be a “crowd pleaser” for tv ratings.

My wife just asked me how many ounces were in a gallon.  While I consider myself a man of numbers, I couldn’t remember this one off the top of my head.  Google has this lovely part of their search that will tell you conversions.  So I searched “ounces in a gallon” and it told me 128.  Good thing I checked, becuase I originally thought it was 64 (where is the damn metric system when you need it?!?!).

I then looked up “cups in a gallon”, and noticed something in my little search box.  That’s pretty bad ass that it will give you the conversion as a suggestion.  One more point for Mozilla (and probably google too).  Good work guys!  Now get caught up on Thunderbird and make me a really happy man!

I feel as though this is a never-ending, ever-recurring theme with this blog and my life.  I always have the drive to write.. and yet seldom do I have a topic to write about.  I always find myself writing about the aspects of my life, and I suppose on some level that is a good thing (probably for me only.. unless you’re a nosy/gossip-hound-esque person).  I am always inspired by the writing of others, and admire their positions and views on life.  I tend to gravitate to those who sound like experts on what they write about.  I then will return from blog-reading-dom, and try to figure out answers to questions like

• Am I an expert at anything?
• Can I put my thoughts together on a semi-regular basis, assuming that I have something to say?
• Should I stick to ONE area, or write about ALL aspects that pique my interests?

The answers to these questions always seem to come in as: “NO, NO, ALL”.  I’ve read many posts on how to be a successful blogger, and all of them follow the same mantra:

• Write about what you know.
• Write with some regularity and be consistent.
• Write about one thing, as several topics will distract readers.

So, here’s what I end up thinking every time I read a post like this:

• I know a fair bit about teaching, math, php, linux, and tinkering with electronics.
• I find that my life is governed by.. well.. my life.  I write when I can.  Sometimes this is consistent, others it is not.
• My solution to the “write about one topic” issue is to maintain a blog for each idea I have.  This is a bullshit way to write IMHO, as it would cut in to my already inconsistent style of writing.  If I had to come up with some way of combining everything, it would be my blog about teaching, math, and geekery.

For the most part, this is already what my blog is about.  Unfortunately, it’s less of an article driven blog and more of a personal one.  Maybe this is what I’m meant to write about.

So, hopefully this renewed spirit will carry forward.  I’m not holding my breath, but I can dream, can’t I?  Here’s what I will be (hopefully) writing about in the near future:

Teaching

• Experiences mostly, with one year under my belt it should be much more “entertaining”.
• The politics of teaching, or maybe the politics of high school.

Math

• I don’t really see much happening here.. I teach Algebra II — not really cutting edge!

PHP/Linux/OSS

• I’ve spent the summer (ok, that’s a lie, more like 5 hours this ENTIRE SUMMER) assessing the feasibility of SQLite over MySQL.  I am a ready and willing convert to SQLite, and will write about it I’m sure at some point.  Specifically how I am using it with PHP’s PDO.
• I end up writing about neat OSS packages as they come up.  Wordpress, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, and Vienna at the top of the list right now.
• I’ll write about linux again, once I have a machine with a semi-decent environment working.

Tinkering

• Once I can figure out some of the odd details, expect a running account of my “building the ashtray” project for my car.  It will handle audio switching, powering devices in the car, including USB, and be shiny and blinky too.

Hope you enjoyed my vision.  You can help me stay on track by leaving comments too.  Those always inspire