In May I discovered Ebay. I had been wanting to purchase at least one old Mac to play around with, but ended up like a kid in a candy shop, or, more like a kid in a toy shop.  I now own 10 legacy Macs and an old ImageWriter II dot matrix printer.  I learned all about bidding and winning on Ebay, while at the same time, I was able to purchase nearly every upgrade available for these machines at a fraction of the original price.  Imagine having a machine that, when it was new, went for more than $6,000, in pieces on your kitchen counter, undergoing major surgery. I became so absorbed in this new found hobby that it occupied most of my time for the months of May and June. All but one have network cards and can call up my new Macs’ folders and files.  All but 2 can go onto the Web (however awkwardly) over my cable modem.  All of my Macs can print to the ImageWriter printer - even my Mac Pro and my Powerbook G4. The Color Classic pictured here has a 10″ Sony Trinitron CRT display, a 256K video RAM upgrade card (for a total of 512k), 12 MB of RAM (but can only read 10), an 80 MB hard drive, and an Asante ethernet card (10Bt). This model has become much sought after and people are bidding on these from all over the world. To be continued…!

At first, I shied away from the idea of naming the new video section of the site, “Talon Tube.” After some deliberating, however, it just seemed like the best choice. Not being a fan of any of the “Tube” sites, I have, however, always hoped to be posting more video and believed this might gain some momentum. I enjoyed very much using some of the techniques learned recently in Flash. Although I am not a programmer, I truly admire anyone who can write original scripts. I enjoy tinkering with the scripts and scripting of others, whether from Flash Help, on the web, or in books, and using my imagination to envision an application’s design. What will happen to your video projects? Will they get lost in the crowd on the other “Tubes,” or will they be viewed by their intended audience? If it’s tasteful and you’d like to share it with us, we will be happy to consider any project submitted to the tech. dept.

Finally found some time to step back and assess the latest events. The whole idea of “upgrading” has been an issue with me lately. Will we ever be there? Will we ever finish upgrading? Or is this the fate of those of us who work with making systems go and continue to operate at optimum speed and efficiency? We were certain the set up of my new lab machines would be a snap. After all, we sent a hard drive for the DakTech people to copy onto all of the boxes. But I still spent hours unpacking boxes, loading software, and making sure the browser settings were all correct. The screens were of a different size and resolution so I had to actually load the monitor software on each machine. Got a new printer–very nice. Had to set it up on each machine. I like the fact that these boxes have a DVD RW drive. Anyone can make a movie now, and they also have headphone and mic jacks in the front. What a concept. I thought they would be much faster with the Intel Pentium Duo Core label on them, but alas, they are only 1.6 Ghz each. I’m not sure if the .4 Ghz will be that much of an improvement over my 2.8 Pentium IVs. My machine was a major undertaking. I had spent years setting up my old box and it took an entire day to transfer all of my old files and re-load all of the software on the new one. And, of course, it still is not the setup I had before. So, why do we do it? Because it’s there, I guess.

As someone who has let music become less important in his life, I really was not drawn to the iPod culture as many of the younger people were.  So, when the school began its venture into the world of podcasting, I found myself in possession of this cool little hard drive with a screen that could hold all kinds of data and media.  Just as I do with any other new tech toy, I threw myself into it full force.  I love to work with video and am a Mac person through and through, and even purchased the iLife suite of software so that I could use Garageband.  I like to think that what keeps me vital is being constantly active both mentally and physically.  Before long I had explored the basics of the xml feed file and had my iTunes podcast up and running.  I must say  that I have not had time to be creative in that area for a while, but some of the episodes are good.  I look forward to making some more converts this year and to helping those technophobes who may be on the verge of venturing forth to get published and maybe get their students published.

Welcome to the Falcon Forum, Mr. Beattie’s first venture into the world of the bloggers. While I enjoy a good discussion, making the time to actually compose is something that many of us find difficult to do these days. I was astounded to discover how many people are involved in hosting blogs, even in just the Word Press environs. I also got lost for hours in the many themes that developers, some good and some bad, have made available to use with your blog. Many are as easy as uploading all of the files into the proper folder and then selecting it in the Word Press themes window. However, clearly, php is an evolving technology and many of the themes simply did not work or had minor problems. If your like me, though, you want your stuff to work. One theme simply made the rich text editor not work when setting italicized text. I like the theme, but probably won’t use it. But, I digress.

I would like to extend an invitation to all staff and faculty members at Bishop Dunne who would like to host a blog based on the Bishop Dunne website to contact me. I can get you set up and answer some basic questions as I have done some playing around in the Word Press forum interface. Another person using Word Press is J. J. in the library. I believe her “books and beyond” site set up in Word Press. I can help you with setting up new themes and test drive them for you on the server to look for errors and give you the thumbs up or thumbs down. If you have any questions or comments you can post them here and/or contact me at webmaster@bdhs.org