A Student Of Mine Made A Phone Call Today

No give me the phone. Hello. You mean this really is ______'s father. Yes this really is _____'s teacher. No she's feeling sick. You think it's strep throat. Well usually students ask for a pass to see the nurse and I give them one. Then they don't disrupt my class with a cellphone. Well no she certainly doesn't sound like she normally does. I'll send her down, the number of the main office is ########. They'll dismiss her from there.

Well that was awkward.

Etiquette

The rules are that the phone is to be kept off and in the students locker. Otherwise the phone is a constant distraction to the learning process. Either to the student using the phone or the other kid being texted in another class. Every time I take a phone off a kid it's always "a call from my mother." Sorry kid, Mommy needs to learn to call the main office and ask to have you dismissed. It's a system that worked for the 90 years prior to 9/11 and there's no reason it can't work for parents and their kids today.

That being said, if this kid had come to me before class and said he was expecting a possible call from his deployed father. I would let him answer and then take the call quietly out into the hallway.

The story is lacking in details but I'm going to give the school the benefit of the doubt here. The kid probably didn't discuss the possible call before class. The teacher would have no idea why the kid is answering the phone in class and past experience would be that the call is another in a long series of cell phone related disruptions. The teacher, needing to maintain classroom control probably ordered the student to cease their disruptive behavior and relinquish the offending device. The student being a child probably did not reason with the teacher effectively and mearly informed the teacher that they were talking to a parent. The teacher hearing that every time they talk to a child about illegal phone use probably did not assume that the parent was a serviceman and this may have been the last time the (from his own admission) troubled boy may ever hear from his father. Emotions most definitely got out of control. Probably by both the student and teacher. They're probably even more out of control as the kid doesn't sound like an honors student and the teacher probably has had disruptions from the boy before.

You and I know nothing of the past history of discipline issues the school faces with this student and classes in general. You and I don't know anything about the level of student commitment this class has. Today it's the cellphone from this kid. Tomorrow it will be the cellphone from another kid. Next week it will be an iPod.

That this made national news is an indication of how fucked up our priorities as a nation are. Snowflake there isn't going to learn that had he merely cleared the call with the adult in charge of the classroom prior to taking the call that things would have worked out. Instead the lesson is that kids can do whatever they want in the classroom so long as mommy goes to the newspapers to complain. What should have been a lesson in civility is now a public embarrassment for the school. Now every phone call is going to be from someones father in a war zone. Every disruption during instruction time is going to affect every student. The outrage here shouldn't from this one jackass kid and his parents. It should be from the parents of every other kid in the class over the loss of instruction time when these snowflakes lose control.

If the student had answered the call and said to me "This is my dad in Iraq. It's the only time he can call. Can I take this into the hall?" I would say yes even if he hadn't asked for permission before class. I doubt very much that is how the event played out.


(A side note here... If you are accused of disrupting classroom time and go on national TV to defend yourself, clean up. Every judge knows that criminals can borrow a suit but showing up to court in a dirty t-shirt shows either contempt for the seriousness of the charges or a lack of understanding about your end of the social contract. In either case, it's an indication to the judge that you may not belong in polite society. The same case is true here. I'm going to assume trailer trash dumbass and say the kid knows nothing about good manners.)

Hey, How Was Your Weekend Dean?

Hey, Thanks for asking.

Pretty good. Thanks to the news media in the United States prattling on about about a game that's rife with more homo eroticism than I'm comfortable with. (What the fuck was up with the racist panda bear?) I'm living my life blissfully unaware of the fact that muther fucking lies are being told about why much of the middle east was knocked off the internet.

A ship dragged anchor and broke the internet in 3 seperate places. Well I just might as well grow a gaping wet pussy. There's no Captain Muhommed Hazelwood that inept as to drag anchor through two cables or three.

Sure there's the obvious Iranian Oil Bourse that the Bush Crime Family is war on terrified of. That's motive enough for me to believe the conspiracy theories.

What truly bothers me is this:

Why the good muther fucking god damn did our covert attack on the middle east knock out AT&T Edge service in the midwest at the same time?

I just want to scream at the top of my lungs.

FTFA

AT&T and Verizon, the American operators, also said their networks had also been affected by the break, but weren't able to give details.

Why the fuck not? I would think that if my iPhone service depended on routing my data through Iran Cingular/AT&T would have a good reason and know why they're doing it. This can't end well for me. Or probably you.



While I'm at it, what was up with the puking baby? I would much rather see boobies during the Super Bowl than puking baby vulgarity. Next year I expect Two Girls One Cup selling me State Farms Insurance.

Financial Planning

No for those of you who expected a picture of shotguns and canned beans, you'll be surprised to find I'm very upbeat about the prospects of my financial portfolio.

Why you might ask? Because I just blew out of any American Equities we had left. I am going into Canadian Mines and something I like to call a BRIC.

"It's not whether you're right or wrong that's important, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong." - George Soros

This website is not giving unsolicited financial advice. Past performance is no indication of future profits.

Who am I kidding. I'm fucking right all the time. Just ask my cousin Danny how much he wishes he had bought more RNAI when I put him in at a buck. Then ask him if he wishes he didn't start taking profit at $7. I believe Merck bought it at $13.

I like JAN.V MJO.V GXM.V KBGCF.PK and RIO. None of them are dollar backed.

Most of them are sources of indium, selenium and gallium. More importantly. None of them have any worrisome exposure to Central & Western Africa or the risk that such ventures currently enjoy. Demand for In, Se and Ga is about to shoot through every light fixture on Earth as people wake up to the magical wonders of LEDs and Solar Cells. Either one is a hot market place right now and those stocks are all over valued but not the mining stocks. Mines that will supply the raw materials of either one of those technologies will be even more lucrative if both technologies take off. I may actually live to see retirement instead of dropping dead from a Monday morning heart attack.

Part One

I don’t even know where to begin. My weekend has been riding on a high for days now and it’s not even Sunday. I should start from the beginning. Wednesday was parents’ night. I put on a show for 7 minutes and then the bell rings and the parents are ushered into another teacher’s room. I love parents’ night. If I can’t impress the parents in 7 minutes I have no business standing in front of their kids for 90 minutes. At one point during the evening one of the parents said that he really liked my presentation style. I saw a lot of parents nodding their heads at each other. Plus, I was the only teacher who thanked the parents for paying for a new high school.

A little piece of personal trivia that many don’t know is that I teach with Rachel’s mother. I think it’s funny when students find out that Carol and I were friends long before we started teaching together. Many of our colleagues are shocked to learn that I celebrate Christmas Eve with her every year. (My Dads house breaks up around 9pm now that my grandmother isn’t making us wait until midnight to open presents. It leaves me with plenty of time to go over 30 O....)

Wednesday afternoon Carol and Rachel came up to my classroom. I have the last classroom in the building, it really is at the end of the school. When the principal and superintendent come to my floor to spot evaluate us they forget I’m there. I also have the second largest room because I got all the space that was left over. The teacher with the largest room got what he wanted for being the only teacher to actually sit down with the architect. He had to give up his prep room but he got more floor space.

Carol brought Rachel up to see my room before the start of parents’ night. Rachel’s reaction to my classroom is “Oh my god, you really are an adult now.” She’s right to be shocked. How I got to become a pillar of the community is beyond my capacity to understand. I do my teacher on parents night performance for her and she’s impressed.

In all, it was a pretty good night for me.

Thursday night I drove up to the Apple Store in Salem, NH. My 12in PowerBook G4 is dieing. It’s time for a new computer. I was going to get the Black MacBook and upgrade the memory. For about two hundred bucks more I could get the low end MacBook Pro. I really didn’t want to spend the money and I really didn’t want to get something so big. I wish I could get another 12in sub-notebook. I waffled over plain MB or MB Pro for an hour. The store employees thought I was funny going from one computer to the other. In the end I decided that there was enough stress in my life and I didn’t want to learn a new keyboard. I went with the Pro. I saved $600 for being a teacher with iPhone rebates and leaving Taxachusetts.

To be continued…

And it's a fucking great story!

What The Fuck?

In the last month I've been given over three hundred grand in credit to buy a house and a car. I can't seem to buy either?

What do poor people do?

Car dealers don't seem to be interested in selling me the car I want because they're not going to get to rape me in the F&I.

Houses have yet to come down in price despite overwhelming foreclosure rates.

Maybe Kevin was right.

I should stop acting so uppity.

At least I get $200 from Apple.

Computer is killing me

Here's a little bit of fucked up trivia.

If you have a webpage in Safari open on your iPhone (you do have an iPhone now don't you?) If you open a page on the built in browser that has a phone number on it, clicking on it dials the phone. That's a nice feature.

The bug is that the feature carries over to TCP/IP addresses. So if you have an iPhone (why do I douubt that you do? Doesn't every one?) Click on this:

192.168.0.1

Now click on this:

http://66.30.66.128/

So it dials the bad number and doesn't recognize the good and proper html for a real website.

iCrap

Since getting an iPhone I find my ties.org email has gone straight into the trash. Sorry if I haven't replied. Looks like I've lost about a month worth of communication.

Binary Solo 10001000011100101010001010001

Weekend of computer issues. Largely self inflicted. Been trying to sync a Sony camera to my Macintosh. No firewire, just USB and it's a Sony so no Macintosh support. VirtualPC works and I can drag the mpeg-2 files to my Mac desktop but I want a more elegant solution. I tried installing WinXP on Lisa's Mac but had issues with BootCamp recognizing the windows install disk. No it wasn't an OEM disk. I know better then that. It was an XP disk that I thought was a full install of the home edition but it wasn't having it.

AT&T amuses the shit out of me. Only carrier to work with the iPhone, which as far as i know is an Apple product, will not sell me DSL service because i use a Macintosh. Looks like i'm stuck with Comcast a while longer.

My 12 inch powerbook is fading on me. It makes me sad. The fluorescent tube grows dimmer every day. I'm just hoping that it survives until the start of the next school year (two weeks.) Then I'm elligable for another MacBook on my teachers discount. What I really want is another submicro notebook like my little aluminum PB G4. The 15in is more than I want to carry around.

Although, the good news is that the new MB will come with iLife which rumor has it has a version of iMovie that now supports DVD cameras through USB. According to this cryptic message from the Apple site my camera will work with the software.

It might just be worth the $300 premium over what I would spend trying to fix my screen, install Leopard and get iLife'08 for Lisa's computer because it still won't work on my G4.

By the way Darren, what I meant to say is 3mm jack not 3/4 inch. It's the little 8th inch jack like on a Walkman. The line out on the iPhone dock will work with a standard mini headphone plug and doesn't need to be connected to the power cable to feed music to regular headphones or in my case a Walkman to RCA addapter into my TV. I'd still like to know if you tried docking it in your iPod speakers.

I know, I'm using my TV to listen to music. I don't have a bitchen stereo with tube preamp and powerline smoother. iSuck.

Does anyone remember the phrase "Don't touch my Dads NADs!"

Got to get ready for school!

Things I Love

iSquint for converting avi, mp4 and wmv files to an iPhone viewable format.

HandBrake for converting (format shifting) my DVD collection to QuickTime files so I can watch them on my iPhone.

320x480 or 480x320 depending on how you hold it is the magic setting to optimize your videos for the 3 1/2 inch monitor.

Also in HandBrake, I notice no flicker down converting to 24 frames per second and unless you're watching something with subtitles 300mb file size looks as good as larger files. There's no need to waste valuable real estate on my puny 4 gig which is really 3.64 gigs.