June 2004 - Posts
Peter's post, I still like the tablet. But I am all out of love. , got me to thinking: Why do I use a Tablet PC? I've posted before about how Peter got me interested in them way back when, last Spring, when he got his first tablet, the first generation of the HP, the one that I currently have. It took me a while to really "get" or understand why Tablets had such a following. Now I know that many people will debate how many people actually have a tablet. And they'll debate whether or not the adoption rate can be considered "promising" or "successful". Numbers and money aside, I feel that those who have their Tablet, are for the most part, happy with their purchase.
In the spring, I used my Tablet primarily for two purposes, work and personal. For work, I used it in the daily business of teaching. I wrote my lesson plans in OneNote, took attendance through the schools in-house system...which I'll admit was a pain because it was definitely not set up for inking, and kept track of my students' grades using Grade Machine, another app that has no inking interface. I also used it to download articles that I wanted to read from various news sites, or read blogs that I subscribed to with News Gator during my lunch breaks. Oh, and using Art Rage, I colored during faculty meetings, while still managing to maintain the "I'm truely busy and taking notes" persona.
There were a lot of other things I wanted to do at work with my tablet. However, I was limited mainly by my lack of initiative. I wanted to set up a wireless network in my classroom, which was a lab of 25 Dell computers, and using a software called Altiris Vision, control the screens of all the computers from my Tablet as I walked around the room. There would have been a lot of obvious benefits to this idea. The Vision software allows the master user to transmit his or her screen image to all of the other computers, i.e. a teacher could take notes, and zap them to all the other computers. I already did this with a main computer in the lab. However, I thought with a tablet, I could also use my inking capabilities, which before, of course, I didn't have access too. It's much easier to draw a T-Account model with my tablet pen, instead of going into Microsoft Word and using the Drawing tool bar, and mouse clicking one. Also, by using a tablet on a wireless network, I could do all of this, and check to see if the little buggers were in fact taking notes, or sleeping, or painting their nails, or doing any of thousands of things high school students do when they don't want to do what you want them to do.
So I said that I was limited by my lack of initiative. That's true. Peter offered to give me a access point, so I could set up a wireless network. I'm not sure why I didn't do that, to be honest, I think it was because of the hassle. It really wouldn't been that big of deal to set-up, but, like my Poppop used to say "If it ain't broke, why fix it?". I could effectively teach just fine, without using my tablet in the way I mentioned above. I only had 3 months left in the school year, so I didn't. All of my students passed for the year, and I'd say about 90% of them truely had a handle on most of the material...Then why do I feel so guilty? Hmm.. That's for another post.
For personal use, I use my tablet at home mainly to surf the net...I also occasionally do homework, or make up groccery lists in OneNote. That's when I use my tablet at home. Lately, I've been using my Powerbook instead. I know, the horrors! Here's why: my Powerbook is a nice, all-contained little machine. It has a CDR/DVDR drive, lots and lots of ports, a decent sized screen at 12 inches, and although it gets hot as anything on the bottom when it is charging, it is still my easier to balance on my lap on the couch versus my HP.
I also have a lot of things set up for ease of use on my Powerbook. For example, I use my iPod pretty much daiily, with my trips to the gym being 6 days a week or so as of late. I hook it up to my Powerbook and sync/charge it, while I download iTunes songs...ok, while I download the one free song Apple has been providing per week..heehee. I also use my dot Mac account. I upload pictures from iPhoto and put together photo albums for our friends and family to see. So I haven't been very loyal to my tablet at home lately...although I am composing this on it. There are a lot of things I still have to learn about my Tablet and I am going to make myself use it more...maybe I will even put iTunes on it and sent my iPod to sync with it...Oh no! Peter would have a heart attack if I did that, I always swore I never would...I said "maybe" after all.
As I write this, Peter and I are holed up, once again, in Mendy's Deli in New York City. The rain is coming down pretty heavily, so even though we finished with our meals a little while ago, we intend on staying until they throw us out. We enjoyed the food and atmosphere so much at last night's Geek Dinner, we thought we would come back for dinner tonight. Oh, and I must add, the Matzoh Ball soup is to die for, I absolutely love it!
At the dinner last night, I was fortunate to meet many interesting people. The first was Buzz Bruggeman, of Active Words. We had spoken via messenger and phone before about various techie things, from Vonage, to Audible, to Active Words. It was great to finally meet him in person. I also met DonXML. I'll be honest, I really didn't understand a lot of what he and Chris Hollander were talking about. However, I have to give them credit, they were incredibly nice to a mini-geek like myself.
Oh, and of course there's Robert Scoble. I had heard all sorts of things about him. I expected there to be some type of shrine set up at the dinner, hee hee just kidding. Robert was really cool though and spoke about all sorts of things techie in ways that I understood about 47% of the time. Hey, I'm learning! Scoble's blog is really interesting, I plan on adding his Rss feed to my NewsGator, which should bring me to 11 subscriptions (see I WILL catch up to your 1400 at some point, Robert!).
I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of other names and faces that I've met, but needless to say, I had a wonderful time at my first Geek dinner. I really thought that it was going to be a slightly uncomfortable social situation, given that a) I'm a baby geek and don't get much, and b) I'm female, and didn't think there would be too many of those there. But everyone was really nice, I learned a lot, and even saw a few women. I look forward to the next dinner...more east coast get togethers please!
Peter and I spent the day in New York City, after attending the Geek Dinner last night. We spent the morning wandering around Times Square and visiting the Sanrio Store and Toys R Us. We then took the train down to Canal street, which in my opinion, we really could have skipped. It smells and has way to many people in the streets looking at knock-off designer bags. Can you say tacky? A Prada look-a-like bag, only problem is, the logo says "Pegasus". Tacky and smelly. We then finally made our way to Soho, where we visited Kid Robot, awesome store and then the Soho Apple store, which is in an old Post Office building. The air condition felt wonderful, given the heat and humidity outside. Peter and I made our way upstairs and found benches. We took advantage of the free wireless to download e-mail, etc... to our tablets, and spent about 30 minutes surfing the net. Every once and a while, someone who stop and stare at my tablet, and I had to go through my spiel about how great the tablet is, and how I was a Mac user too, but "switched" to the PC. Isn't inking awesome? After every person came up and walked away, Peter remarked that we were going to get thrown out. But we weren't. I'm not sure if it was because the sales people didn't know what my tablet was, or if it was that they didn't want to get into a discussion with us as to why we were using our PCs so obviously in their Mac store. Go tablets!
While surfing the internet, I discovered a Czech Restaurant in New York City called
Zlahta Praha, which means Golden Prague in Czech. It looks really yummy. I think we might check it out.
I'm such a geek. But, actually, I'm extremely excited. Tomorrow, there will be a
Geek Dinner in the
Mendy's Deli in New York City, and Peter and I will be attending. And get this, Mendy's actually has free wireless!
We'll be taking Amtrak up tomorrow from Wilmington and staying in the city. As to where in the city, I don't know! Peter is surprising me so I have no idea where we are staying.
I've decided to tote my tablet with me, of course, and my SPOT watch. I've set New York City as a destination on it through the
MSN Direct and I'll have to see how well my watch receives content. I'll be taking my Nokia 3650 (in fuchsia no less!) and will photo blogging as well.
I found out yesterday that I'm officially moving on to a middle school in my area. I am unbelieveably excited about that! You know, I've learned something in my short years of holding jobs and/or job hunting. You can send out a million resumes, really good ones, and maybe hear a few responses, or nothing...But, if you know someone, who knows someone, things tend to roll a lot faster. At 22, I have held about what I would call 3 significant jobs. One for the largest newspaper in Delaware. I was there for almost 2 years...I got that job after I was interviewed by the same paper for graduating high school with a lot of college credits. I called up the editor of the Business desk and basically said that I was looking for a job because I was moving up to the area for college...A few short interviews later, and that worked out. My high school was really kind of a wild card. I read the ad in the paper and sent in my information. But the middle school worked out similarly. I have a lot of respect for the principal of my high school. He's a great person, and I really do admire him (I'm not just saying that because he could possibly google my name). Knowing that I was somewhat up in the air about next year, he mentioned me to his friend, who happened to be the principal of this middle school. A few conversations later, and I have a job for the fall! Amazing how things work out.
Yesterday was my last day teaching at my high school. For the year, and for now. I think I mentioned a little earlier that my employment contract was 1 year only, because of the teacher that was on a sabbatical leave. She is coming back, and I'm moving on.
I didn't think my last day with my students would be so hard. I got myself a yearbook, mainly because there were some pretty good pictures of myself and my juniors, and I've decided that I want to collect a yearbook from everywhere I teach. All of my students wanted to sign my book!
Here are some quotes that made me tear up...The first, from a young man who struggled quite a bit...He is bright, but many people make him feel as if he is not. He struggled all year, and managed to squeek by and pass for the year...”Yo Miss Prouse, Thank you so much for a great. I will really miss you a lot. I know that even though we had a couple ups and downs we still stuck through together and as a person I believe I have matured and learned from my mistakes. I really appreciate that.”
This, from a girl who actually wanted to take a swing at me earlier in the Spring (long, long story there), “Yo Miss Prouse, I know we had our hard times but I decided to stop being so young and grow up and act my age, so it was fun while it lasted. Hope you have a great summer”.
And this finally one really made me turn on the waterworks once they had left...this student is so incredibly bright and creative...due to one part laziness, one part teenagerness, and two parts parents who don't pay attention to her too much, she was absent quite a bit this year.. She still squeeked by as well. “Ms. Prouse, You'll be an awesome teacher in the future and I admire you for that. To be as young as you are, you've done a lot! I hope to tell others that I've done half of the things that you experienced. You're young, smart, and strong.”
Can you tell why yesterday was a day for waterproof mascara?