Friday, June 01, 2007

Crispy Fried Computer & Creativity

Say, do you smell something burning? You wonder where that smoke came from? It's the computer in my classroom! Earlier in the week we had a huge storm - buckets of water, rain so heavy that you might have thought a kid was standing outside of the window with the hose pointed to the building - and lightening!!! The storm was so big that my students had me stop so we could look out the window and see how much it was raining. Then there were six (yeah, you read that right, six!) bolts of lightening that hit right outside of the school. One got the flag pole and has left marks on it. The energy from this traveled through some parts of our building. In my classroom, and other, it was so intense that the hair on our arms stood up, the hair on our heads got funky, some kids kind of quivered. And then it blew out several computers, mine among them. The lights and the screen became uncomputer-like shares of coral. Then I got the blue screen of death (computer death, that would be). UUUrrrgggg! the lightening fried some parts of my mother board and transformed my internet server connector into something that looks like it came from the jewelry class. Amazingly, I was able to harvest my internet links and a few files, but nothing else. It was exciting. But now I am stuck having to use other people's computers - a problem since it is finals week. Bummer!

On a lighter note, I have something to share. If you look to the right part of the screen you will see a new widget for slide shows. I have made three in the last two weeks. This one is from our cycling team. I made it was a borrowed copy of "ProShow Gold" and it is WAY COOL! If you made slide shows for anything thing you need to check it out. I listed the company name on the last slide. It is a long slide show with three songs. The photo movement and transitions are a ton of fun! The others are not of interest unless you work with me as they are retirement videos for people here. I transferred it to my blog from mydatabus.com. If you have files (video, jpeg, etc.) this is an excellent and free resource that you should check out!Another fun website that I intend to go and play with soon is flektor.com. It allows you to make slide shows for your website or blog. It was just bought by MySpace.com. While I am no fan of MySpace.com, I know that they have good software. If you are one who cruises the net, check it out, too.

Ethan and I leave for the "HammerIn" a Blacksmithing camp we go to each year. I should have some fun photos from that to share soon.

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