Lloyd: “Come read my new rubric for web design class.” (That’s right, we use words like ‘rubric’ around here. We’re Smarty-Smartersons.)

Me: “Mm-hmmm. Yes… looks good….” (Counting in my head to seventy-five while staring at the screen and pretending to know what it means. What the heck is a rubric, anyway?)

Lloyd: “You’re not really reading, are you?”

Me: “Ummmmm…..”

Luckily, at this point his giant monitor starts to flicker in a mad, seizure-inducing way.

Lloyd gets very, very quiet.

I start laughing.

Lloyd glares.

I stop laughing.

I take pictures.

Lloyd messes with the controls and continues to be very, very quiet.

I go to my trusty, non-broken computer, look up “Gateway monitor flicker” and find many, many angry people in the world who hate Gateway with a fiery passion because their monitors have also betrayed them.

Lloyd is also doing research, watching (through the flicker) a video of someone who is speaking in a calm, comforting voice – like a person highly trained in comforting the bereaved.

I get bored and start watching YouTube videos.

Lloyd quietly hisses, “Stop watching videos. You’re using all my bandwidths.”

I go to bed and leave him alone in his sorrow.

End scene

Please leave your condolences below.

Oh, and just so you know, though in this story I seem like a really awful, heartless person – I know what a rubric is.

The NE Technology Coordinator’s Fall meeting (or as I like to call it,
“The day all the computers in Nebraska schools stop working.”) Is
happening in Grand Island today. If you need me, that’s where I’ll
be.
–Lloyd

About an hour later I received a flurry of text messages, phone calls and e-mails, including this one:

So – as long as it doesn’t end up being a super headache for you, I am amused that the server crashed the day you were at a tech conference. I think the server read your email.
–Jared

Well, it turned out to be a very good conference. Really, “conference” is probably too strong a word for it. It was a bunch of technology coordinators from across Nebraska getting together. Some were from schools smaller than Lincoln Lutheran and some were from districts with 48,000 students. Someone would complain about something and a dozen other people would commiserate that the same thing happened to them and then 3 or 4 people would offer some really good ways to deal with that problem. (lather, rinse, repeat)

It was free, and I even bummed a ride with a group of people coming from Omaha. But I’m not really looking forward to going back to school tomorrow. To keep my mind off of it, I bought this game:

It’s called World of Goo, and it’s a sort of puzzle/physics simulation type game. It’s the 1st anniversary of the game, and they are currently selling it for “Whatever you want to pay for it.” If you decide to buy it (and at that price, why wouldn’t you?) I would be interested in knowing what you paid for it. There are versions for Windows, Macs, Linux and Wii. The music is cool, and I played about 5 levels tonight before watching the movie Rounders.

We spent a little while in the morning talking about how to pick parts for a computer and where to buy them. Then we looked at a couple of computers that some of us had recently put together. Then we had pizza. I view the pizza as the most vital part of any successful geekfest.

After Pizza was accomplished we broke into teams of two and I walked them through how to put all of the pieces together. Once we had build one in a step-by-step fashion they went to town on the others. Our very talented alumni put the assembled computers through their paces and set some settings in the BIOS.

I think I have been away from our students for too long. I couldn’t believe how helpful and intelligent they were. When we were finished and were just cleaning up several of them came up to me and said, “What else can I do to help?” And after one of the students asked me what to do with the completed computers and I said, “I guess take them back to the Mac lab.”, he replied, “Why don’t I take them to the PC lab. That way you don’t have to move them later?” The PC lab was about 3 times further away.

I actually just changed the resolution on the monitor to something a mere mortal might use, and the movie was fine, but she did say I could get a new computer.

The next day I spent about, no kidding, six hours figuring out what parts to buy. I’m pretty computer geeky, so you might think that I would be up on all that stuff, but the tightwad in me knows that if I start looking at new computer things, I’ll realize how slow mine is and want to buy something new. So I don’t ever look at computer parts unless I’m ready to buy something.

Here’s what I came up with:

• Motherboard: ASUS M4A78T-E $114 (nice enough)
• Processor: AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz $104 (overclocked to 3.4GHz)
• Video Card: HIS Radeon HD 4850 1GB $114 (4 times faster than my old one)
• Case: Antec Three Hundred $28 ($54 discount on this & power supply)
• hec Raptor500 $17 (cables are almost too short)
• Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 250GB $53 (I don’t need this much space)
• Memory: Crucial 4GB $58 (about what I was using before)
• DVD Writer: SAMSUNG SH-S223L $28 (I needed a black one)

Total cost was $517 after shipping (which was only $10) and rebates. If you’re interested in this sort of thing you can read all of the details on the various parts. Most of the parts arrived in a few days, but I had to wait on the stupid DVD burner. I didn’t wait, I started putting it together right away.

The old computer would get incredibly dirty inside (this happens with all computers that sit on the floor unless your house looks like Annette’s house). We decided to raise it up a few inches to keep that from happening so quickly. Lauren thought a basket would look good. I was really pulling for turtles to support it. Since it was about 4 inches higher, the cooling system had to be re-engineered as well.

When I’d check in on him every fifteen minutes to make sure he was breathing, he’s say, “Look at these. Which one looks better to you?”

Me: “That one. It’s red.”

Lloyd: “No. The picture on the screen.”

Me: “The pictures look identical. Get the red one.”

Lloyd: “What do you think about the dot pitch resolution?”

Me: “Ooo! Is that a toaster?”

We took a lunch break at the Burger King inside NFM, and I just have to say that it is genius for large furniture stores to take care of all your physical needs so you never have to leave. We could eat, pee and shower there. Genius.

Anyway, after lunch Lloyd asked, “Is there a clearance section here?” By that time I had already visited it three times, so I took him back there where we found a GIANT monitor that Lloyd had never added to his Original Six lineup because of it’s prohibitive price. It was marked down 65%, so he chose that one. Good thing he stared at those others for so long, right?

Y’know, looking back on the day, I don’t think that I was supposed to shower there.

We have a laptop!  It was supposed to be for school, but I’ve already named it, so now it’s mine.  It’s SOOOOOOOOO cute!  Teeny-tiny, and cute as a button.  It arrived last week (9 3/4 by 7 1/2 inches , 2 lbs 11 oz, brown eyes, brown hair), and it’s delightful!  It came with a weeny little sleeve, though, and since I’ll be toting it to and from school, I sewed a new sleeve out of the remains of the Slanket and a windbreaker.  Good enough for who it’s for.

So, how tiny is it?  Tiny.

One of the things I am most thankful for is this ol’ iMac. It makes me look like a GREAT teacher! This was the first year I got my act together and sorted out (by child) the digital pictures we take at school so every child can have their own DVD of the year. This machine makes the process go lickety-split! So that’s what I’ll be doing the next couple of evenings. Yee-haw.

(*That doesn’t really mean much. Summer is almost the same as the rest of the year – I still have to plan the day’s work, but I can wear shorts if I want! (I don’t. ) For those of you who care about the details, the three-year-olds join us (the four-and-five-and-thirty-eight-year-olds) for the whole day. We still have stories, centers and Jesus Time, but there are a LOT more bathroom visits.)

BTW:  Happy Birthday, Deborah!

I think I did a nice job if I do say so myself. I don’t know how much schools are normally charged for a new website, but I got a flyer in the mail at the start of the school year that had a coupon for $5,000.00 off. The best part of the website is that it takes information in a central location (news and calendar items) and automatically distributes them to very specific subpages. For example, if you put a choir concert on the main calendar or post an announcement about it, that information automatically appears on the choir page (and on the music department page). Basically, I am very, very lazy. For instance:

I didn’t want to answer a lot of questions about the new website, so there’s a tour you can take. I was tired of trying to figure out when people had the computer lab reserved, so there’s a reservation system. I didn’t want to have to do so much work for our Middle School Fun Nights, now there’s an online handbook.

I don’t mind doing work, as long as the net result is that I can sleep more.

I got home and installed the memory in the computer (3 Gig, can you believe it?) and tried to install the game. Not only did it not work, it completely shut down the computer. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m not like normal men. Computers bow to my every whim. But my computer was having no part of it. Nothing I did made the slightest difference. Here are the steps if you want to try trouble shooting: (1) put the Bioshock disc in the computer (2) the computer shuts down.

Well, I was having trouble with my video card anyway, and I thought that it just wasn’t cutting it even for the autorun program for the game. For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to decide what kind of video card to get. I’ve even called cousin Sam twice, but I couldn’t catch him at home, and it seems like he’s too good to return my calls now.

Eventually I decided to buy a really shiny video card. It’s one that would normally be out of my price range, but it was an open box special. It’s at least 4 times as shiny as my last video card, and it came in the mail today. I got home at 5:10 and was disappointed that it wasn’t here, but it pulled in about 5:30. Thanks UPS.

I put in the new video card and everything seemed good. I (1) put the Bioshock disc in the computer (2) the computer shut down. Once again, let me state for the record that this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen to me. So… hmmm… what happens if I put another game in the computer? Nope, everything is fine. So… hmmm… what happens if I (1) put another DVD in the computer (2) the computer shuts down. Okay, that seems like the problem. It doesn’t seem to matter what the DVD is. Bioshock or Searching for Bobby Fischer – either way.

Well, now I need a new DVD player and I’ve wasted (game cost x 5) on the new video card. But I’m not really sad about that, because I’ve got a shiny new video card. I think I’ve got a DVD drive sitting around at school that I can use until I get around to buying a new one. So I’m looking up what a new drive will cost when blammo, the shiny new video card wigs out. Fluke? Restart and 30 minutes later, blammo. So now I have to return the shiny new video card (15% restocking fee).

It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Busy Saturday ahead – I have the plans and possible gumption to take in the recycling and perhaps do something about that dang leaky sink in the bathroom. Ahoy, Saturday!

That’s all.   Safe travels to Amsterdam, Brad.  Don’t die, and don’t have any fun, either.

 

And now, to sleep. I’ve been making breakfasts at school this week, and it makes me tired. God bless Annette, too – she’s been doing it for two months while we’ve been trying to find a cook.

God bless everyone. Good night.