Sunday, December 4th, 2011

Time Flies When Your Having Fun?

For some reason, I have not posted to this blog in a long time. No excuses, just haven’t. Maybe it was the fact that I typed in blakej in the URL window of my Safari browser and the URL to this blog was suggested that brought me back. Maybe it was the Tech Gods telling me to get back to basics. For some unknown reason, something lead me here.

I have never considered myself a writer. Putting words on a page is hard work for me. My thinking bounces from one idea to another and then wonders. I have never mastered the skills of writing blasted in my brain by countless and nameless teachers of yesterday. I write, just like I talk and that almost never produces marketable results. More often than not, my writing ends up closer to rants than raves. Is this not a reason to write? Blogs are not necessarily masterpieces.

Time does fly, when your having fun. Yesterday evening, my wife and I attended a wedding of the daughter of fellow educators. I taught in the same science department as the mother of the bride, and father of the bride taught in the health and physical education department. They seemed to have been handling the stress of the joyous event. I have seen both of them stressed to the maximum dealing with reluctant and defiant students, jubilant sports events, and shared coffee and donuts at a many a faculty meeting. I know when they are putting on a face and when they are really letting it all out. I knew the mother of the bride was comfortable when I looked at her feet and she had on her Rainbow sandals at the wedding reception. The father of the bride never broke out his coaches shoes or hunting boots, so he was stressing. I know what they are going through because as a father, I have been in his shoes and still the words fail me.

While attending the wedding, I was able to chat with a few friends that my busy life keeps getting in the way of seeing. We discussed our battle with our weight, and how things are changing in the world. No politics, just general stuff. It was a time to smile and dance and celebrate. I we did just that and like good school teachers, arrived home in time to watch the news.

I know no one but spambots will read this post, and I don’t blame them. It’s not much to read. It’s December, and I have a slight cold and I am too fat and old to worry about much.

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

What is a solstice?

Sunrise: 5:59, sunset 8:26 – 14 hours and 27 minutes of daylight

The earliest humans knew that the sun’s path across the sky, the length of daylight, and the location of the sunrise and sunset all shifted in a regular way throughout the year.

They built monuments, such as Stonehenge, to follow the sun’s yearly progress.

Today, we know that the solstice is an astronomical event, caused by Earth’s tilt on its axis, and its motion in orbit around the sun.

Because Earth doesn’t orbit upright, but is instead tilted on its axis by 23-and-a-half degrees, Earth’s northern and southern hemispheres trade places in receiving the sun’s light and warmth most directly.

At the June solstice, Earth is positioned in its orbit so that the North Pole is leaning 23-and-a-half degrees toward the sun. As seen from Earth, the sun is directly overhead at noon 23-and-a-half degrees north of the equator, at an imaginary line encircling the globe known as the Tropic of Cancer. This is as far north as the sun ever gets.

All locations north of the equator have day lengths greater than 12 hours at the June solstice. Meanwhile, all locations south of the equator have day lengths less than 12 hours

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Summer Begins June 21

Yesterday’s severe weather here in Columbus and Bladen County almost created a tornado. Almost all the needed conditions lined up to scare the tar out of most of us. Damage to some homes, vehicles, out building, trees, and power lines was not as bad as it could have been. No injuries is a good sign.

I spent several hours shooting and editing video and have come to the conclusion that I need to delete some stuff of this hard drive. Also, I discovered that the using the Flip camcorder, model F260, is not exactly what is needed for shooting good video. I am not using the Flip for my next video. It is time to pull out the Panasonic mini DV camcorder and tripod. It takes less time for me to pull video off the DV camcorder into iMovie than downloading clips from the Flip’s flash memory. The next video project will be Father’s Day at the lake

I am experimenting with including movies from Google Earth Pro into my video projects. So far, it is very impressive and easy to use. When this current video project is ready, I will post it online and discuss the procedure.

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Laptops in my Sleep

Well, tomorrow is the last day of spring break. I am looking forward to Monday. Not sure what the day will bring, but I have a long list of tasks already.

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

Saturday before my 54th Birthday

Here I sit- with a mug of hot coffee, a bowl of instant oatmeal, and a MacBook I affectionately call my “plastic pig”. I want one of those new aluminum MacBooks. I have not taken time to post a blog post in so long, that I am considering deleting this blog. I keep looking for a way to integrate my BlackBerry with my blogging, but I have not gotten my head around it. Since buying my BlackBerry, my blogging has basically stopped. I confess- Hello, my name is John and I am a CrackBerry. I am addicted.

Well, it is time to head out to the gym for my “old man” walk on the treadmill and some weight lifting.

Have a nice day!

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Science Teaching (weekly)

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

Science Teaching (weekly)

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Science Teaching (weekly)

  • tags: PLC, PLN, Professional Learning Community, n2teaching

  • Creating a Personal Learning Communities online.

    tags: n2teaching, ustream.tv

  • What is The Levelator™?

    Do you believe in magic? You will after using The Levelator to enhance your podcast. And you’ll be amazed that it’s free, now even for commercial use.

    So what is The Levelator? It’s software that runs on Windows, OS X (universal binary), or Linux (Ubuntu) that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It’s much more than those tools, and it’s much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler’s application window, and a few moments later you’ll find a new version which just sounds better.

    Have you ever recorded an interview in which you and your guest ended up at different volumes? How about a panel discussion where some people were close to microphones and others were not? These are the problems the post-production engineers of Team ITC here at The Conversations Network solve every day, and it used to take them hours of painstaking work with expensive and complex tools like SoundTrack Pro, Audacity, Sound Forge or Audition to solve them. Now it takes mere seconds. Seriously. The Levelator is unlike any other audio tool you’ve ever seen, heard or used. It’s magic. And it’s free.

    When we developed the IT Conversations component-based show-assembly system, we realized all the components had to be of the same loudness or the results would sound awful. We limped along for many months using the RMS normalization functions in various applications, but the results weren’t satisfactory and it required tools and skillsets that some of our post-production audio engineers didn’t have. One of our best engineers, Bruce Sharpe, offered to write a standalone software RMS normalization utility, which we’ve been using as part of our production system CNUploader since 2005.

    The CNUploader’s normalizer acts similar to an intelligent RMS-based compressor/limiter combination, and it therefore affects primarily the short-term (transient) sounds and the long-term overall loudness of the file. It doesn’t make the kind of adjustments that a skilled audio engineer can perform in software or at a mixing console, riding the levels up and down to compensate for medium-term variations.

    There are some hardware devices such as various AGC (automatic-gain control) components that can do moderate leveling, but since they have to operate in real time (i.e., without look-ahead), they can’t do much. And they aren’t cheap, let alone free. Even a skilled human can only react to changes unless s/he is lucky enough to be present during a recording session and can use visual cues to anticipate coming variations. Software can do better by performing multiple passes over the audio, generating a loudness map of where the volume changes. (It’s not actually that simple, but the metaphor is helpful.)

    Bruce, with help from his son, Malcolm, had proven that he knew how to tackle these problems in ways that no one else anywhere in the audio/software industry has done to date. So we asked him, “Bruce, do you you think you can write a leveler that corrects for medium-term variations in loudness instead of the short-term and long-term variatons processed by compressor/limiters and normalizers, respectively?” Bruce and Malcolm took on the challenge, and eight months later we began testing The Levelator.

    You’ll believe in magic.

    tags: audio, software, podcast, podcasting, tools, freeware, tool, mp3

  • Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

    tags: visualization, web2.0, cloud

  • tags: no_tag

    • And often those users or customers have no desire to be “engaged”. They simply want to buy the product, use it, and move on.
  • I like this page. It shows how the classroom looks, not just words!

    tags: no_tag

  • tags: 1-1, classroom-management, laptop

  • This page provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes:

    tags: emerging learning technologies, 1 to 1 Learning, 1to1, 1:1

  • tags: traits

  • tags: hunt

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Science Teaching (weekly)

  • tags: earth, googleearth, places, sharing

    • Sharing Data Over a Network

      In addition to saving placemarks or folders to your local computer, you can also save place data to a web server or network server. Other Google Earth users who have access to the server can then use the data. As with other documents, you can create links or references to KMZ files for easy access. Storing a placemark file on the network or on a web server offers the following advantages:

      • Accessibility – If your place data is stored on a network or the Web, you can access it from any computer anywhere, provided the location is either publicly available or you have log in access.
      • Ease in Distribution – You can develop an extensive presentation folder for Google Earth software and make that presentation available to everyone who has access to your network storage location or web server. This is more convenient than sending the data via email when you want to make it persistently available to a large number of people.
      • Automatic Updates/Network Link Access – Any new information or changes you make to network-based KMZ information is automatically available to all users who access the KML data via a network link.
      • Backup – If for some reason the data on your local computer is corrupt or lost, you can open any of the KMZ files that you have saved to a network location, and if so desired, save it as a local file again.
      Note: Before you can create a network link to an item in Google Earth, you must first store that place data on a server.

      This section covers the following topics:

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

Science Teaching (weekly)

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