LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

ipad

iTrouble

by 5 Comments

Something is wrong with my iPad. It’s not fatal, but it certainly is annoying. The magnetic case doesn’t put it to sleep anymore. I took it along when I went to Lincoln Sunday afternoon and by the time I got back it had used up all the battery and was HOT.

Lloyd brought home some old cases to see if that would solve the problem but it hasn’t. Booooo…. Time to start traveling with a charger.

In other news, I have a crazy cookie idea that is not turning out as planned. I made the dough and had hoped to bake the cookies and have something to show for my efforts, but the dough is chilling in the freezer and I’m going to bake them Wednesday night. (My kids are having a mini concert on Thursday.) What kind of crazy cookie do you think I’m making? (I really just want you to say something wonderfully original so I can make that cookie, stealing your idea and taking all the credit.)

Some adorable mistakes

by 1 Comment

Not many children came to the CDC today, which was good. I’m glad most families decided to stay home. Most of our staff stayed home, too, and I stayed with my children until the end of the day. Around 5, I caved and turned on the tv, firing up an episode of Blue’s Clues and letting the little girls ‘paint’ my hair with dry paintbrushes. (Purple with pink stripes, if you must know.)

One of the girls looked at the letter Steve had received and said, “Dat’s him’s iPad.” She then returned her attention to my hair striping and inquired, “Did you get your ears pinched?” I said I did, but that I don’t wear earrings anymore.

Back to the hair striping, child.

Sundown Disco

by 5 Comments

I already told you that my class is studying space, and this is just such a fine time to be alive, because there is so much technology out there to help us learn.

Today I fired up my ‘Look at the Sky and Identify Stuff’ app – I forget what it’s called – so I can have it ready to use tomorrow. As I was pointing it toward the sun at the end of the day, this was the photo.

image

What?? Usually it identifies objects, but in this case I was sure it was a gag someone slipped in. “Hey, everybody – the sun’s going down. Let’s party!!”

image

But no, it is not a disco ball. It’s the AJISAI (EGS) – an ‘experimental geodesic satelite‘

Who are we kidding? It’s a party in the sky.

My iPad is iDying.

by 3 Comments

Lloyd took my iPad cable to his school and the ‘replacement’ he gave me is sucking power from the iPad instead of charging it. (Don’t bother fact-checking that. I’m sure it’s a thing.)

Therefore, I give myself permission to sit on the sofa all night and watch episodes of Britain’s Great Bake-Off or whatever on PBS instead of typing a post on an actual computer.

Happy Saturday. Lauren out.

Tadaa

by 6 Comments

I’ve got an app that tells me when there are cool free apps. I showed this one to Lauren today, but she’s still making me write the post about it.

The app is called Tadaa SLR. It lets you take a picture that you already have and pretend like you’re a good photographer with a good camera. Let me show you an example…

Say that you have a picture like this just laying around:

Original Noah

In a few seconds you can do this to it:

Blurring your friends

Or, if you misunderstand the directions, you can do this to it:

Self blurring

Lauren wants you to know that it also works on cats:

Dem Cats

All wired up

by 6 Comments

As part of our iPad project at Lincoln Lutheran, we’re redoing our wireless network. What you might not expect is that in order to redo our wireless network we ran over a mile of new wires on Saturday. If you are thinking that it is strange to run that much wire and still call it a wireless project, you are not alone.

I'm thinking about moving my office up there.

We wouldn’t have had to run quite that much wire, but wire is relatively cheap, and you really never want to have to run wire to the same location twice. So since we were running wire for a wireless access point for each classroom, we decided it would be just as easy to run two wires and have a wired connection to the AppleTV (not a real TV, just what they call the little device that lets you display stuff from your iPad on a projector without actually having a wire run from the iPad to the projector*). That wire would make the display less choppy. And, since wire is cheap, you might as well run two. But since we were already running two anyway, why not run a third for the projectors? The projectors all have some management functions that you can do remotely if they have a network connection. You can turn them off remotely, check bulb life and such.

So we ended up running three wires to every classroom.

Lunch Break

Matthew Schranz, one of Concordia’s computing services people, provided the mad skillz to do things right, and some teacher, students, alumni and Lauren provided the labor. There was some doubt as to whether we could get all 26 rooms (78 wires) done in a day, but things went better than I had any right to expect and we did. Well, we almost did. We sort of forgot the library, but the library was one that we didn’t actually have to do at this time, so we’re still good.

Last time I did this I lost my wallet!

Lauren and I worked out in the portable classrooms, and that involved going up into the attic. This wasn’t so bad in the first one, because it was raining, and I had a student do it. But I did the others and the day just got hotter and hotter. Lauren suggested, and I completely agree, that if we ever have to go out in the attics again it will have to be at night –or maybe in winter.

*I’m pretty sure I didn’t explain that well. It actually works like this the iPad talks to the Access Point and the Access Point talks to the AppleTV. If you do both of those wirelessly, it can be slower than if the iPad talks to the Access Point wirelessly and then the Access Point sends the information over the wired network to the AppleTV. The teacher can still move around the room without any wires, but things work faster. There, clear as mud.