What In Tarnation?!?!?

I have been using some of my time to make sure that my classroom is ready to go for the next school year because I will not have time to work in my room in the weeks before school starts. Basically it is a now or never type of deal. Which has been fine. This June has been pretty slow with activities and trips so it has been productive time. The new computer/student tables came in at the end of the year and our custodian put them together for me. After they waxed my floors and cleaned my room they put the tables in according to my directions. I was concered that everything wasn’t going to fit. Really concerned but after all the old and new furniture was in the room it actually looked bigger! I was pleased as punch with the results. You can see two pictures of the room below taken on June 2.

(Click for larger view.)

Handsome isn’t it? I thought so. I even changed the two small bulliten boards to match next year’s movie theme. Now the only thing that the room was lacking were the computers.

Last week I got a call that the computers were in and this past Monday, I helped the high school computer summer school class install the computers and make sure that everything was working properly. I have gone through all the computers and updated Windows and Office, installed Flash Player, Shockwave Player, Palm Desktop, the SMARTBoard Notebook, and the LinQ software that should allow me to show any student computer on the SMARTBoard. I used my phone to snap one picture of the room with the computers:

(Click to enlarge.)

Looks even better. I have a few things that I still want to the room before I leave for youth mission trip to Mobile, AL. Those of you following the development of my classroom website (I change a few things in the header graphic including spelling third correctly, changing the font on “A Tidal Wave of Learning” and sticking with T.E.C. instead of T.E.K.) know that this year’s theme is movies and I was wanting to get some movie posters to hang around the room. I e-mailed my favorite movie production company, Walden Media, and asked if they could send any movie posters to put up in my room. I figure that would be a win-win situation, I get class decorations cheap and they get to advertise their movies in my room to a bunch of impressionable third graders. I got an e-mail back say that had sent the materials that I requested. Sweet. Then while I was waiting around for Michael and Pressed to see Superman Returns, I caught the manager of the movie theater and asked if she had any old movie posters that I could have and would be appropriate for third grade. She took me up into the projection room and into the storage room where they had a ton of old movie posters. I snagged one from Shaggy Dog, Nannie McPhee, Hoodwinked, Over the Hedge, Cheaper by the Dozen II, Star Wars III, and Akeelah and the Bee. Score! I think I might purchase a few vintage posters to hang up as well.

Now if I could just get a class list so I can start getting beginning of the year paperwork done…

Later taters!

I was excited about Superman Returns. I have such fond memories of the Christopher Reeve movies. I even liked number three, but Superman II was probably my favorite. I was probably most interested in the fact that director Bryan Singer, director of two other superhero movies that I liked X-Men and X-Men II, was going to be using archived audio and video of Marlon Brando as Superdaddy Jor-El and using the original theme by John Williams. Just the thought of getting to hear the Superman Theme in a movie theater was worth the $4.00 matinee admission price. So it is with some pain that I report that my moving going experience at Superman Returns was… well… a little disappointing. I did get to hear the Superman theme in the movie theater though.

Superman Returns picks up after the events of Superman I and II (as if the lackluster outings of III and IV never existed). Superman had left earth to go see the debris of Krypton, searching the universe to see if he was really the last Kryptonian. Five years later, he returns to earth to find it just as messed up as when he left it, Lois Lane is practically married to Cyclops Richard White and has a son. I never would have thought I would see Superman play the part of creepy stalker but he does in this movie. Worse than that though Superman Returns is more like a remake of Superman I rather than the third sequel to it. Let us compare the two movies in this handy dandy chart:

Plot point	Superman I	Superman Returns
End game to Lex’s evil plan	To get valuable real estate	To get valuable real estate
Superman saves Lois Lana from…	A falling helicopter	A falling airplane
Lex’s plan involves a…	kryptonite necklace	kryptonite island
Lex’s lady	Eve Teschmacher	Kitty Kowalski
To save lives, at one point Superman…	drills into the earth	drills into the earth
As a result of Lex’s plan…	the earth splits open	the earth splits open
Superman’s humor…	He is charming	He cracks the same jokes from Superman I. Exactly the same.

That isn’t the movie’s biggest problem however. The pacing of the movie is all whacked. The first hour is blah, the middle is okay and the end dragged out beyond what was needed. I think Superman Returns could have done better with some editing. This story didn’t need two and a half hours to tell its story.The acting was fine. I liked Kevin Spacey as Lex Luther but I tend to like villians who wear fancy suits and listen to opera. Brandon Routh is okay. He envokes Christopher Reeve but just isn’t quite as good. The best performances belong to James Marsden, Parker Posey, and Frank Langella.Oh and don’t think about the plot too hard. The inconsistencies are pretty obvious and the continuity with the two previous films is surprising flimsy.

I wish that the film makers would have gone back to the comic books and found a compelling story there and relauched the Superman movie franchise rather than continuing it. Maybe next time. I’m sure this is not the last we have heard of Superman.

For other interesting Superman reading, may I suggest Tim Challies well written article Claiming Superman.

Later taters!

Superman Returns comes out this week. I am looking forward to it. EW didn’t think it was different enough from Donner’s Superman. Is it too early to start thinking about Spiderman 3? Nah, I didn’t think so.

See the whole Quicktime trailer here.

A few things that I found interesting in the trailer:

It looks like Venom to me.

Is Topher Grace playing Eddie Brock? (see previous Venom link)

It must be The Sandman and…

…his alter ego William Baker as portrayed by Thomas Haden Church.

But possibly more interesting to me, what do I spy with my little eye? Is it Green Goblin 2?

However there is a scene in the trailer that I didn’t capture that has one of the Goblin’s bombs exploding next to Harry Osborn.

Interesting…

Later taters!

While I searched for a Pixar image for the previous entry I came across this neato site. This site takes a web address and creates a graphic representation of a website and the HTML utilized on a website.

In other words it makes pretty pictures.

Here is the masterpiece that my website created:

In case you are curious in what all the pretty colors mean:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

There is also a Flickr tag to see other website glyphs from other sites.

If you got a blog, show off yours!

Later taters!

For the record, my ranking of the Pixar movies from best to worst:

1. Finding Nemo
2. The Incredibles
3. Monsters, Inc.
4. Cars
5. Toy Story 2
6. Toy Story
7. A Bug’s Life

Just try to tell me I am wrong. No really, leave your list in the comments or on your own blog but I’ll just let you know, you are probably wrong. (Though these movies are seperated by small dergrees of wonderfulness. I think I gave them all As.)

Later taters!

PS Pressed tried to trackback.

Small Steps is the newest novel from children’s author Louis Sachar. Sachar is the author of other popular children’s books like Sideways Stories from Wayside School, There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom and more recently, the award winning Holes (a personal favorite of mine). Small Steps is being billed as a follow up to Holes. It is really a shame that Holes has to be associated to this book because if a reader is like me there are certian expectations that I have from Small Steps because of Holes. People expecting a multiplot, multigenre, book with an interesting story structure that Holes had might be a little disappointed. Really the only thing that Small Steps has in common with Holes are the characters Armpit, X-Ray, and the occasional mention of Camp Green Lake and that is about it.

All that, however, is not to say Small Steps is a bad book because nothing could be further from the truth. It is just a very different type of story. In Small Steps, Armpit is living in Austin, Texas and is now 17. He is just trying to take small steps to ensure that he doesn’t get in trouble again. He is holding down a job and saving up money. When he is not working or at school, Armpit can often be found hanging out with Ginny, Armpit’s next door neighbor who is in the fourth grade and has cerebral palsy. Ginny is one of the few people that treat Armpit with any respect and Armpit doesn’t look down on Ginny because of her disability. Soon, Armpit’s buddy from Camp Green Lake, X-Ray shows up with a plot to scalp some tickets to POP singer Kaira DeLeon’s concert. X-Ray would do it himself but he has one problem, he doesn’t have any money but of course Armpit has been saving up. X-Ray’s scheme doesn’t go off exactly as expected it is here that the plot starts to take some unexpected turns.

This story has much more of a straight forward narritive unlike Holes. The story is also geared for an older audience than Holes was. Armpit deals with uncaring parents, drugs and alcohol, some rough language, romance, and unexpectedly harsh violence. Another difference, Holes wraps everything up with a nice bow at the end, Small Steps in keeping with it’s more realistic tone doesn’t so much, a warning to all of those people who feel they have to have everything nice and tidy when they finish a story.

Considered apart from Holes, Small Steps works and kept me reading. There were a few things that I was dissappointed in. Ginny, the little girl with CP was a character that I was especially interested in (of the four kids that have been through my building with CP, I had three of them, two of them last year). I was interested to see what Sachar was going to do with that character and it started out well but about halfway through the novel Ginny disappears when the action moves away from Texas. In my opinion Ginny was just used as a plot decive to a) have Armpit meet Miss DeLeon and b) prove to people around him that Armpit really is a good guy. The action of the story moves to San Fransisco and all the while I kept wondering, “What about Ginny?” My other concern with the story envolves a spoiler so I won’t comment on it however it does mirror some of my concerns with the movie Hoot.

My grade: A-, however, not recomended for younger readers.

And not WIT proudly presents a mish mash of links that I have been saving on my desktop. Some are from some time ago.

The More You Know
I love The Office. It is a funny, funny show. Awkwardly funny. Back around April fools they released bunch of funny parodies of the More You Know public service announcement series. Of course Dwight’s announcements are the funniest. So what did I learn? Don’t trust everything you hear on TV and wolves aren’t that dangerous unless you are naked in the woods. Go and be wiser.

Thematically Speaking
WordPress users might be interested in the WordPress Theme Viewer. Since I just recently added a new theme to my installation I shouldn’t have to use this for awhile.

There’s Time to Sleep When You are Dead
Folgers has a new marketing theme. It is one of the better commercials that I have seen in awhile. Unfortunately I haven’t seen it on TV, only online. If you are not a morning person, you definately need to watch this. Watch the video here or go to the website.

Up, Up and Away - Free iTunes Video
I am looking forward to the new Superman Returns video. I am anticipating it even more after I downloaded and watch the exclusive scene from iTunes. Bonus. It is free! Also available for free from iTunes right now, the pilot episode of Kyle XY from ABC Family. I was slightly interested and since it is free I will give it a try.

Enjoy the linky goodness.

Later taters!

If you have tried to get to WIT and the server could not be found either today or yesterday, here is an explanation from our host:

Today we experienced several MAJOR distributed denial of service attacks against our network. We regret that you experienced some downtime today. We have worked diligently today to further protect our network from these types of attacks. The attack today came from MANY different computers at the same time. This makes it difficult to block and resolve the issue.

Please know that we are working as hard and efficiently as we can to make sure interruptions are brief and rare. The shared hosting environment lends itself to outages and occassional downed servers. We will recommit ourselves to make sure that we not only provide a hosting service with remarkable packages, but also with the service and support that you have come to expect with your Bluehost experience.

Just in way of explanation if you have had trouble reaching this site or other Cranium Leakage site (except asIsaid). Please bear with us.

Later taters!