This morning, I got very excited. “Charlottesville schools are setting up a private wiki and training teachers to use them” it said on cvillenews.com. I asked myself questions like, “Why didn’t I know about this?” “Are teachers are CHS involved?” and “How many times are the teachers going to screw it up?”

Though in all honestly, it’s a brilliant idea. Multiple teachers can make changes to one lesson plan with automatic distribution, even if none of them understand the first thing about networking or the internet. Teachers at CHS have slowly been adopting the internet as a new frontier for the classroom in the past years. Several of my teachers have utilized blogs to post homework updates and even allow for students to comment and critique each others’ writing work. Individual teacher websites have been around for even longer. But this - now this is something truly innovational.

“But wait,” I paused while reading the Daily Progress article. It says here that “department heads must approve any edits that are made.”

Well, so much for that idea. I’m sorry, but that’s a terrible idea. Everyone loves wikipedia, and that’s edited by everyone. Can the Charlottesville City School system not trust it’s teachers enough to let them edit their own private wiki? With this system in place, it will take days for updates to appear online, and that’s assuming that the department heads actually have enough free time to approve these changes a few times a week.

This is just another example of the technologically-illiterate adopting an idea before they understand why the idea worked in the first place.

Your thoughts?

Well, not really a break. I’m just spending a lot of time right now creating the new Theatre CHS website - and trust me, it’s worth it. Should only be a day or two more now before I submit it for approval, so stay tuned to take a look!

I’ve been fiddling around with website development for about seven years now, and I’ve picked up a few skills along the way. For instance, in a situation where a sane person would call tech support and try to explain their problem to a condescending man in some HQ, I prefer to stick it out and spend however long it takes to solve a problem myself. Foolish in some cases, but extremely helpful in learning the tricks of the trade.

There are some battles, however, that simply cannot be won.

I spent a good six hours today (my first day back from Governor’s School, at that) designing and implementing a new website for Charlottesville High School’s Theatre Department. I’ve been putting off installing a content management system on that thing for months now, and if I don’t do it, there’s no way the site will get updated once I’ve left for college. You may remember I tried to do this very thing two months ago, but hit a brick wall when I learned that Charlottesville City Schools don’t support MySQL. So this time, I decided to just host the MySQL database on my own server, while keeping the actual pages on the schools’ (CCS has some sort of obsession with keeping all their pages hosted locally…). So there I was, for a good six hours, creating banners and modifying templates, chmod-ing and remapping directories, when I realize that the server simply can’t handle WordPress; it’s useless for me to try.

Thus, in my signature rash act of fingers on the keyboard, I decided to completely ignore the CCS Webmaster’s requirement that all sites be hosted locally. I went out, registered a domain, and realized that I could save myself hours and hours of trouble just by hosting the site myself. WordPress will work, my scripts will work - it’s a winning situation.

The way I see it, kids had to host class webpages themselves in the 90s when their school’s didn’t have websites (a.k.a. didn’t have the resources to handle the website the student has created). I see myself in a similar situation. The Charlottesville City Schools are unable to handle the website I want to give to the CHS Theatre Community, so I’m taking things into my own hands. Forget regulations, forget the Webmaster. This is my website, and I’m going to create it the way I want.

Back in middle school, my best friend’s family was asked to participate in a week-long survey of their television habits by Nielson Media Research (the company that figures out how many people watch TV shows each week). I was very jealous. Ever since, I’ve been interested in the seemingly-random statistics that companies like Nielson put out, and how they collect the data. I mean, why would most of us care that 68 million people watched show XYZ last Friday? Well, I care because I can make fun of those 68 million people, but you get the idea.

NMR released a new set of data on Thursday dealing with Video Game habits in the United States. It may just be a bunch of numbers to most of you, but what I found interesting was how they actually determined what video games were being played, and for how long. Using a library of audio signatures from various game titles, the software installed in survey-participants’ televisions analyzes the audio going through the TV, and matches it to the appropriate game.

I thought that was a nice example of technologies which were once considered CIA-grade being used in more widespread and interesting ways.

Plus, it’s fun to laugh at the fact that the average World of Warcraft player spends 2.48 hours/day with the game…
via IGN

Things are going alright here - not too many days left in the month… I’ve had such a great time, though; if any of you ever get a chance to do something like this, take it immediately!

They played my Avril Lavigne video at the Variety Show last week, and I’ve gotten a fairly good response on it (people keep stopping me to compliment the video, and then get into a long winded discussion about how much we miss Charlottesville and the Downtown Mall where the video was filmed). We had another show this week, with some fairly interesting acts… People need to get better at picking out music for their interpretive dances. For example: no one can dance to Cascada outside of a club atmosphere. It just doesn’t work. Tap dancing to Panic at the Disco normally wouldn’t work, but somehow they managed to pull it off… Maybe I’m just prejudiced, since tap dancing has similar rhythms to Dance Dance Revolution, unlike “interpretive dancing,” but whatever.

As for Harry Potter, every other person here is carrying around a copy. Of course, for every person that’s waiting to read it until they get home, there’s someone else who’s read the summary online and tries to shout out the ending to anyone that walks by. Damn them.

When I get back, I’ll tell you all about the guys in A hallway and their “Noga” (it involves streaking).

P.S. - My roommate (in all his Jewness):