Saturday, September 8, 2007

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

I generally try to keep any advertising out of the top section of Educators' News, other than a banner ad at the bottom and a possible text link here and there. But with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard due out late this fall, I thought I'd pop a couple of ads up for folks who wish to get in an early order.

While I usually order from the education store, it appears that the family pack is going to be the way to go for me. I currently run four Macs under the latest version of OS X, so four times the expected ed price of $69 still comes out more than the $199 family pack offer. (There doesn't appear to be an education discount for the family pack. :-(

Hummingbirds

I've been on a quest for some time to get a decent picture of a hummingbird. We have them around the feeder all the time, but getting the focus, lighting, and composition right has escaped me until today. Currently, we have two or three hummingbirds visiting our feeder. As usual, one is dominant, trying to chase the others off. That often complicates getting a good shot with my Nikon Coolpix 4300. It's one of the older digitals with a noticeable delay from the time you click the shutter button until the picture is taken. I think I've been ready for a digital SLR for some time. It's just that my pocketbook hasn't caught up with that need as yet. I'll probably add the shot to my Desktop Photos page soon.

Good Show

I recently stumbled across a 2004 TV show on our local PBS affiliate, WTIU, The College Track: America's Sorting Machine, that made me proud to still be in education. The first episode, Who's In, Who's Out, presents several inspiring case studies of students in smaller schools that are making a difference. One of the things that really was special about the program was an interview with an administrator who spoke about smaller schools and smaller classes. He said that if you cut class size from 30 or so to 23 or 14 or 10 but don't change your pedagogy, you're still going to get less than wonderful results.

Dells

I was talking to one of our students at Rose-Hulman who comes from Sullivan, IN (my hometown) about his laptop. Rose-Hulman requires all freshman to buy a laptop and switched from HP to Dell for just one year. I wondered about the "orphaned" group of computers, but the student seemed to really like his Dell laptop. I think I asked more than for any other reason because my wife's employer switched to Dell a couple of years ago from HP, and it's been a rocky road for them ever since.

And what got me going on Dell? Like Apple, they jumped from Linkshare to Commission Junction for their affiliate advertising. I just got my links on this page updated!

Note: Dell dumped us from their advertising program shortly after this posting appeared!

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