2008

This semester has been very hectic. Teaching is going well enough. For the most part, I have really good students, which is nice. It’s our Program Assessment year, which is a big part of our school’s accreditation, so that’s made things a little more hectic than I’d like, but that will be over in less than two weeks. The most challenging part of the semester has been my college classes. Global Information Systems has kept me and my group very, very busy. I’m still here, though. It’ll all be over on December 6, at which point I’ll let loose a huge sigh of relief.

A colleague of mine has just opened a new trading post site at EastKYPost.com. It allows you show the world items that you currently have for sale as well as request items that you are interested in buying. The best thing about it is that the postings are targeted for the people of Eastern Kentucky.

If you check out the homepage of Jerrytravis.com, you’ll notice that there is now a nifty new calendar on the right-hand side of the page that shows the posts from the last active month of the site. I wrote the entire thing myself, which is something I’ve been wanting to write from scratch for a very long time. The calendar itself is very modular and allows the same calendar engine to be used for a myriad of purposes. I’m going to clean up code and document it, then I’ll probably post the code on the site for all to see and use!

I normally don’t take these sorts of quizzes and surely don’t post about them, but I had to put this one up.

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

Today, Mike and I reminisced about our early experiences with computers. (Keep in mind his experiences predate mine by a decade: Before I even had a computer, he was already writing code professionally!) Doing anything and everything on a computer in those days, we decided, was harder, slower, and usually resulted in a relatively poor result. Somehow, however, those hard, slow, poor results were just so much fun! In one of my stories, a Cyrix 686 overheated so badly that it smoked up the paint on the outside of the case. What did Therm and I do? We took a $5 Dollar Store fan, cranked it up on high, pointed it directly at the smoldering silicon, and kept going! As I recall, the machine didn’t lock up anymore that night. What were we doing that required us to keep plugging in the face of fire and destroyed equipment? I don’t remember exactly, but I think it involved drawing some pitiful web graphics in Paint Shop Pro 6. Nowadays, I have access to equipment that is infintismally better and I have the knowledge to push that equipment, but none of it can rival the sheer exhiliration I used to get when I learned how to do something totally new on a computer. I’m not a computer God or total guru, but I’ve done a little bit of everything on a computer to the point where nothing new I do is truly new anymore.

Sometimes, when I’m writing code, I wonder what really got me into coding in the first place. Then, a wonderous memory hits me, and I settle in and code away without reservation. Sometime around October 1996, I got my hands on the Internet for the first time. It was as if the stars were in alignment when I actually sat in front of that honking CRT to see what the World Wide Web thing was all about. I didn’t have a computer of my own, but I was taking Keyboarding/Word Processing at the Leslie County Area Technology Center. In addition to getting some hands on time with Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22, my teacher had given me about 35 old copies of PC Magazine. (Included in this collection was the cover story that compared 486 processors to their Pentium bretheren!) I poured over them with every spare moment for about a month! You must understand that long before this exposure, I had always wanted to be a computer guy. There was one small problem, though: My dad thought personal computers were like an Atari, used for nothing more than playing games.

Anyway, given my fruitless obsession and this new found exposure, I was foaming at the mouth for anything computer related. My teacher, for whatever reason, thought it would be a good idea to show me what the Internet was. The classrooms were not wired with Ethernet, and come to find out, neither was anywhere else in the building. The only connection was in the Principal’s office via a 14.4 dial-up connection to the only ISP available, Leslie County Internet, otherwise known as LCI.* Having never heard a computer dial, I was shocked at how it sounded like a fax machine, except that it seemed to take longer before it got quiet. (Yeah, I know: That part is basically a fax machine, but I didn’t know that!)

After we dialed up, my teaching instructed me to click on this Netscape thinga-ma-bob.  Now, I don’t know for sure, but I’m quite certain it was Netscape 2 or Netscape 3. (I know it wasn’t the Gold version of either, because the colors were a monochrome set of greens and blues.) The teacher then asked me if I knew any web addresses, because the browser didn’t just take you to a Homepage. The only one that came to mind, for some reason, was www.discovery.com: I guess I had seen it on a Discovery Channel commercial or in an AOL commercial. Using my recently learned touch-typing skills, I typed it in the Address Bar and hit Enter. What followed next was life changing…

Suddenly, the page background went from a deep gray to white and some text appeared with some science headlines and a schedule of the show.  So far so good, but when a bunch of little boxes with little bitmap icons in the top left corner, I was enthralled. It looked like there was a logical structure to all this, almost like some kind of vines or tree. Everything existed as a square of some type or other. Slowly, one by one, the little boxes gave way to actual images. Now, as ignorant as I was about all this, I wonder how in the world someone could create such an awesome graphic in Paint! It didn’t occur to me that there were very cool, sophisticated programs that do this. I’m pretty sure my mouth dropped open. After everything had loaded, the teacher told me to click on anything that was underlined and it would take me to a page about that underlined thing. For the next 20 minutes, I surfed around on discovery.com, then I eventually went to WebCrawler, as it was one of the sites I remembered from the AOL commercials I had seen. I didin’t have a clue what HTML was or how to even start creating web graphics, but I knew in my heart that I wanted to know how to create these web pages. Over the next few months, I finally got a computer. About six months after that, I had created my first webpage, affectionately called Gassy’s World and hosted on Tripod. There was plenty of new, awesome stuff to learn on a weekly basis: FTP, CSS, IE 4/5 and all it’s bastardization of standards, Photoshop, ad infinitum. The rest is history…That, my friends, is why I do it to this day.

* Leslie County Interenet was run by a former KY State Police officer named David Tennill. The ISP was one server with about 20 modems and a T1 in his basement. David and his son were horrible night owls, so if the network went down, you could only get ahold of them from about 11PM to 3AM. You could call then and they answered cheerfully as if it were morning. The service went out for about 2 weeks once due to a fried power supply. When I asked if we would get a break on the bill, David laughed and said, "Nah. We need the money to fix the server." Ah, what times we had. I think they were running some sort of UNIX, because eventually, they gave each LCI subscriber 2MB of webspace. I remember fighting with WS_FTP to get my little page up! The service was sold to TDS, the only available local telco, in 1998. God bless the Tennill’s for hooking us up with our first trickle to the web.

Even though my year at the ATC doesn’t end until June 15, I have survived my fourth year as a teacher. This year was a decent year, at least I think it was. Joe and I improved the Office Technology Program in several ways.  For one, we gave out 53.8% more certificates. For another, we  improved our passing rate on  the Skill Standards Test by 18.2%.  And finally, we had  12 practicum students…

Somehow, even with these improved metrics, I have a feeling that the powers-that-be will be less-than-impressed.  Improve this much, and they want you to improve that much. "You can always do better" they say.  Of course I can always do better, but I’d be much happier is someone would accept the stairstep improvements that I have managed since I started. Slow and steady improvement will lead to great things.  I wish someone would recognize this fact and actually make me feel good about what I do everyday.  I don’t require constant validation, as I draw a lot on my inner self, but it would be easier to get out of bed every day if I felt like I was pleasing someone.

It has come to my attention that my website has been infected with script that was supposed to install malware on visitors’ computers.  If you have visited the site recently and your antivirus program has popped up with a warning, I apologize. I do not have a clue how the site became compromised, but rest assured, I have cleaned the site and there should be no more problems. If you have visited the site without virus protection, I suggest you scan your system.  On Windows, I highly recommend AVG Free Antivirus, although Symantec, McAfee, and Esset all do a good job. 

Once again, I apologize to anyone who was affected by this malware attack!

I have a student who can draw really well! Her art is awesome!

I took my FBLA students to a local elementary school for our annual Dr. Seuss Reading Day celebration.  My students are in high school and they read Dr. Seuss books  to preschool and primary grade students. This year I noticed something that hadn’t occured to me before: The primary school teachers have a great deal of physical interaction with their students. And no, I’m not talking about inappropriate touching: I’m talking about a tap on the shoulder, a nudge to remind the child to get back in line, or simply patting the child on the back in praise. I was shocked!

Unless you’re a high school teacher, you may not understand why I was shocked. My astonishment stems from the fact that the number one thing you’re told as a beginning teacher is to never ever touch a student, under any circumstances unless they are life threatening (i.e. break up a fight, administer CPR, etc). I have been teaching for four years and have only touched a student twice. In each case, I got too excited about how well they had done on an assignment and patted the student on the back. My immediate response was to back off with my hands in the air and proclaim that I was incredibly sorry that I had touched the student and it was a complete mistake.

With these primary school teachers, though, the ballgame is entirely different. I asked my principal about why these teachers were touching the kids and she reminded me of something from your basic Human Growth and Development class: Young children need positive touch to help build self-esteem and to learn to function with other people. Therefore, it is acceptable for appropriate touches (like those I mentioned above). If you’re curious as to whether or not touching is important for healthy development, watch a biography of Dudley Moore: His mother nor father ever touched him and he had all sorts of intimacy problems as an adult.

Even though I understand why they are allowed to touch their students, I still can’t imagine actually having that much contact with someone else’s child on a daily basis without being terrified of being blamed for something inappropriate. I suppose much of that fear would vanish once I saw how naturally touching most children are. I remember hugging my primary school teachers, and while I don’t recall a specific instance, I’m pretty sure they probably patted me on the back or physically reassured me in some way.  It’s just amazing to me how different the paradigms are between primary and secondary school rules and functions!