Wait, What?

I didn’t notice any spelling errors…

Friday: Home Opening Baseball Game.

-We went without tickets -I took the afternoon off work- and met friends at the stadium.  We did end up buying tickets from a friend of a friend who had two that no one was going to use.  He wanted $40 -face value- and I said, “I’m not going to go in for $40.  I just don’t care that much.”  I proceeded to tell him go try to sell them because I don’t want you feeling obligated to give them to me and I’m not going to pay that much.  He gave them to me for $20.  Back felt bad about this because he had paid so much more than that but then later he was giving out beer to random strangers.  That made us think he didn’t care about money as much as he let on.

Besides when we got to our seats -not with all of our friends as we had thought- we were in the last row of the highest deck.  Someone had thrown up all over the place though so we had to move up two rows to avoid it.  So 18th row.

But it was fun to be in there and the parking lot party was fun so I hope Back had fun in the end.

In the news: Seven Third Graders Suspended for Planning to Kidnap Their Teacher. No I’m not making this up, I’d link it but Firefox and WordPress are being obstinate. I hope my students don’t get any ideas, parent/teacher conferences are coming up.

~Forth

When your school’s technology becomes sentient…

I am a teacher. There I’ve said it. Now everyone who didn’t know how I make my money can sleep easy.

I only bring it up because my class website was recently blocked by the school over spring break. The state of technology integration in the school is not exactly archaic but it is nowhere near cutting edge. My class website was not blocked because of the content on it but because it is on a server that has been deemed dangerous by the school’s Barracuda security system. Here’s the kicker though, the interim technology coordinator neither updated nor changed anything in the system. Sometime over spring break it decided my site was a threat.

You may be thinking well why do I have it hosted on a dangerous server? Why don’t I just host it on the school’s server? Addressing the questions in opposite order: I think the school system is a ferret or possibly gerbil on a spinning wheel. I’m not sure who feeds him but I know he’s here somewhere. I can’t upload anything to it without being on a school computer (school computer’s are notoriously crap and not without good reason) and I have to use Microsoft’s FrontPage. It isn’t a good or recent program nor is it an effecient way of updating my site since I can’t touch it from out of the building.

As for the first question, I have iWeb and my site is hosted by .Mac. Hardly a malicious server. iWeb is super easy to use, much like creating a PowerPoint. Yes, I know it isn’t as great a CMS as WordPress or many of the other tools but this one I have and it is good enough for a school website.

The interim technology director then tells me that he doesn’t have the authority to change what the computer did ON ITS OWN because of company policy that teacher websites aren’t hosted outside of the building… I respect the man for the tough position he’s in but I feel like this is The Terminator or Resident Evil. Barracuda has become sentient and it is updating itself without permission. It is probably altering the company policy .docs archived on its internal servers to prevent the dissemination of information. Much like a rebelling nation in an authoritarian country, our communication is slowly being cut off. Soon the doors won’t open and my students will see Orwellian images on the morning announcements and perhaps even HAL will make a disembodied appearance. I can’t tell anymore.

One thing I do know is that if the school forces me to host my site on the server through the archaic FrontPage program my site will read: “Welcome to Mr. Forth’s Classroom. On the right is a list of interesting links that Barracuda has probably blocked. Look them up at home. On the left is a link to a syllabus I typed up three years ago but will not be updating until the front office notices. I will change the ‘updated on’ date once a year during faculty in-service. Please direct all questions elsewhere.”

~Forth