10.21.06
New Era
Woke up around five this morning. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Everything in my life is changing right now; my mind is racing and I’m full of nervous energy. But it’s good.
Thursday was my first day at Apple as an IS&T Helpline Analyst. Mostly I just shadowed a couple other techs all day, listening in on their calls and taking notes on the resources they used to solve problems. The calls were generally pretty simple: VPN issues, expired or forgotten passwords, slow network connections, requests for equipment and services, etc. There were a couple of Excel problems and a few oddities here and there (like a MacBook that for some reason always boots in verbose mode), but nothing too scary. Overall, I feel very much in my element.
On Friday I was given the entire morning to set up my workspace. I have two computers, an eMac and a PowerMac, which I was allowed to format and reinstall as I saw fit. I control both systems from a single keyboard and mouse using Teleport, and I also installed Quicksilver and Typeit4me to help me out. It’s all pretty darn slick. Friday afternoon was more shadow time. This Monday I’ll learn how to create accounts and change information in one of the employee databases, which is pretty much all I’ll do until Wednesday, when another temp starts and the two of us enter training on Espresso, the trouble ticket software we’ll use every day at Apple.
Another thing happened last Thursday: I got my acceptance letter from the University of London External Programme. I’m heading out to the Post Office in a few minutes to mail in my registration fee.
Everything just fell into place all at once, and it feels kind of eerie. Not that I can relax just yet; my job at Apple isn’t guaranteed past the end of the year, so I have to work hard to impress my supervisors in the hope of landing one of the limited positions they’ll have available, and I’m starting at UoL later than I’d intended, so I have to study pretty hard for the next few months to prepare for the four exams I plan to sit in May. If you don’t hear much from me in the near future, or if it takes longer than usual to get a response from me by phone or email, that’ll be why. But it feels like October 19, 2006 was the first day of the rest of my life, and I’m pretty happy about the way things look from here.
08.31.05
Summer’s Growing Old
Just one week until the beginning of the school year. It’s been a good, productive summer—I went to Charleston to learn how to teach Latin to children, learned more about the school’s recordkeeping sytem than I ever wanted to know, set up a new Gentoo box to use as the school’s web server, wrote an improved web design unit for the seventh and eighth graders, and bought a car.
Stephanie got a job teaching third grade—unfortunately, it’s in Antioch. But it’s a job doing what she wants to do, and after she builds up some experience she can move back to Sacramento if she wants to. Her school year starts the day before mine does. And no, she’s not commuting there and back every day—until she finds an apartment in that area, she’s staying with the principal of her school.
I started attending the Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup last June, and have been enjoying that immensely. The predominant style of games at these meetups is variously known as “German games,” “Eurogames,” “family strategy games,” and probably a few other terms I haven’t heard yet. They tend to be a lot more strategic than what Americans think of as boardgames (Monopoly, Sorry, Life, etc.) but lighter and more social than traditional strategy games like Chess and Go. My favorite so far has been Settlers of Catan—influenced not at all, I swear, by the fact that I won my first game of it. I also enjoyed Euphrat & Tigris despite coming in dead last and basically stinking up the board with my utter lack of strategic insight. Jim and I, among others, are working on a site to coordinate several Sacramento-based gaming groups with a central news and links page—I’ll link to that as soon as it’s done.
I also did some hiking up in the foothills. Nearly died. That’s a story for another time.
And that’s been my summer, pretty much. Now it’s over, and I feel like I accomplished a pathetically small fraction of what I’d intended to do. But it’s not such a bad list, looking over it now. Could be worse … right?
07.21.05
Charleston in a Nutshell
The conference is going well—I really like the Charleston Latin curriculum, and am going to recommend that my school adopt it for grades five and six. It involves teaching Latin by immersion, believe it or not, and then stepping back periodically to connect the Latin lesson to English and Spanish vocabulary and Roman history. It’s very structured, but can be adapted to fourth through eighth grades.
It surprised me to learn that Latin is much more commonly taught in the South than it is in the North. In the Sacramento area, for example, St. Michael’s is the only elementary or middle school I know of that still teaches Latin, and Jesuit is the only high school that carries it. In the South, however, it’s apparently not at all unusual to take Latin in public school starting in fourth grade. I’m the only participant in the conference who teaches in a Northern state. (One teacher is originally from Long Island, but now teaches in Louisiana.)
Today in Charleston there was an extreme heat warning and a severe thunderstorm warning at the same time. Also, I am sorry I missed this exhibit:
07.17.05
Charleston Trip
From Wednesday through Friday of this coming week I’ll be in Charleston, South Carolina for a conference on teaching Latin to elementary and middle school children. I can’t easily afford a rental car right now and my employer is only willing to pay cab fare to and from the airport, but I’ll be staying in Charleston’s historical district, so I’m hoping there will be things in the area to keep me entertained in the off hours. If you know of anything around there to do, or have a favorite restaurant nearby, please leave advice in the comments.
I’ll have internet access while I’m there, and I hope to get a few pictures to share.
06.22.05
Those Lazy Summer Days
There are advantages to working at a school. Although my position as Assistant to the Director of Technology does not allow for three months of summer vacation, my work schedule opens up nicely from June through August—I work four days a week, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. There are no kids around, and few other staff members, so I have plenty of time and space in which to get things done. And there’s no one around to complain about my music, so I’m finally catching up on all those albums I’d been meaning to listen to. Between the iTunes Music Store, eMusic, and AllofMP3, I’d managed to accumulate literally hundreds of unheard tracks in my iTunes library—a Smart Playlist revealed that the total length of these tracks was well over two days of continuous music. In the past week I’ve winnowed that down considerably; the unheard tracks now total around one day and twenty-one hours … not including a little over a day’s worth of podcasts … or nearly ten solid days of unheard This American Life MP3s.
I found out earlier this month that next year, in addition to being the middle school computer teacher, I’ll be taking over sixth through eighth grade Latin. I have three months to brush up. Wish me luck.
Also, I bought a car.
02.08.05
Vandalism!
Today I was browsing Wikipedia, as I am wont to do, and was informed that someone had written me a private message. It read:
Please stop adding nonsense to Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism. If you want to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. andy 22:49, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Now, there are three interesting things about this message. First, I have never added anything to Wikipedia that could reasonably be described as nonsense. I’m a huge admirer of the project, and have nothing but the utmost respect for its content and its maintainers. Second, I haven’t added anything to Wikipedia in at least a year. What I did submit, way back when, amounted to nothing more than a few minor grammatical corrections, if memory serves. And third, I was not logged in when I received this message.
As it turns out, I received this message because someone from my IP had submitted something of dubious value to the site sometime last week. If I had received the message while browsing at home, that would be the end of it; I have a dynamic IP at home, so the submission in question could have come from any Comcast customer in my neighborhood. At work, however, we have a static IP. That means someone where I work vandalized Wikipedia … and that, I’m almost positive, means one of my students is responsible.
I teach computers to fifth through eighth graders—about a hundred of them. Some of them are remarkably technologically adept, but most of those, I think, aren’t the ones I need to worry about. (Besides, it doesn’t take much computer knowledge to figure out how to use a Wiki—that’s kind of the point.) I can imagine what happened: a kid does a Google search for a class research project, finds Wikipedia in the results, and eventually notices those “Edit” links in the text. The temptation and curiosity is understandable at that age. But it brings up an interesting point: during our internet research unit, I avoided mentioning Wikipedia to the kids, partly out of laziness. Telling them about it would have meant telling them why it’s a good thing, but also why it might not be so good for general research purposes. It would have meant explaining the concept of community-edited content and describing some of the experiments that have been done to test Wikipedia’s accuracy. Inevitably, it would have meant answering questions about how they themselves could edit Wikipedia’s content … and why they probably shouldn’t. I only had a few weeks to cover that unit, and quite frankly Google gave me enough headaches. But did I do them a disservice by ignoring it altogether? Wikipedia articles (and mirrors thereof) pop up frequently in searches; I knew that at some point they’d run across it. (I also knew that chances were good they’d get valid information, and that their teachers wouldn’t know anything about Wikipedia and wouldn’t dock them for using it as a primary source.) Would any mention at all have been better than none, or would it have created more problems than it solved?
I don’t know. But I do know that if I find out who vandalized Wikipedia, someone’s getting extra homework real soon.
