Big Honkin' Update
One of my favorite Mitch Hedberg jokes goes something like this:
People who smoke cigarettes, they say, "You don't know how hard it is to quit smoking." Yes I do. It's as hard as it is to start flossing....
Except now substitute 'flossing' for 'blogging' and you'll get a general idea of why this blog has seen less activity than my savings account. Pretty sad on both counts.
Life here at C4K is mostly the same. There's been a few events and changes of note that I'll dive into though. First off, our learning lab director and my officemate just finished his last day last week. Its a real shame since not only was he good at his job, but he was also fun to share a 'cube with. Unfortunately, his father fell ill and he had to relocate to help take care of the family, so its doubly sad loss given the circumstances. His replacement seems equally capable and equally fun to be with though, so I'm sure everything here will be fine.
Our refurb lab is going through some fairly large changes at the moment. For starters, I spent almost a week organizing our junk, culling outdated/malfunctioning equipment, and generally cleaning and sorting the lab. Of course, its starting to lapse into a mess again, but luckily its confined to the workbench so hopefully it won't spread to our inventory shelves. The other notable change is that we're finally moving to Windows 2000 from 98, courtesy of TechSoup's MAR program. Its already throwing us a curve since our old method of blasting a master image to the refurb systems doesn't work for 2000, thanks to differing HALs and SIDs. Blech. We have a volunteer working on a RIS server and also looking into the Enterprise version of Ghost, so hopefully we'll be able to image instead of slogging through the installs manually.
Attendance is still down overall, although our numbers for trainings and recruiting are starting to pick up. Mostly middle school and/or ESL students though, so workshop topics will remain basic (greeting cards, using spreadsheets, etc) for awhile. I'm not entirely thrilled to be doing easy workshops, but its better than trying to steer a room full of novices (who all need individual attention and have never seemed to learn the word 'please') through more advanced stuff. For my own sanity I try and conduct something 'cool' and at least moderately challenging each month though. This month, I'm currently thinking of doing a dubbing workshop where they provide the dialogue for some movie clips and then we have a screening of sorts. Then, when my idealism finally wears off I'll probably switch to conducting a class on making CD labels.
Hopefully I don't sound terribly cynical, as I still enjoy the job very much. Given the absurdity of our kids though, I think a little cynicism is warranted. Anyway, keep up the good work everyone!
