Graduation
Well, things are winding up here at the ol' Education College. The girls and I started our vacation from homeschooling last Monday. Yau Neih gave her final exams this past week. The seniors have graduated, leaving a few weeks before the lower classes. We were invited to two of the graduation banquets. The last English corner was on Saturday and our neighbor Michael headed for the U.K. yesterday. On Friday, we'll head out to the airport for our three day journey back to the States. Depending on what fast food is available at the San Francisco airport, I may be eating a hamburger by Sunday morning.So if I haven't been homeschooling for over a week, why haven't I been posting? What have I been doing with all that free time? Heh. Amazing how easy it is to fill up empty time. The girls have been having moments of boredom already. Me, I can always find plenty to do. The biggest task has been putting together a "slide show" of our year here. People are going to want to see what we've been up to, and I have almost 3000 pictures to sort through and try to illustrate our story. It was nice to dust off the old A/V skills, though it has been a bit like work. My first problem was to try and figure out how to get things to work together. I've got most of my pix catalogued in iPhoto, but with so many pictures it moves like a slug. I could have tried using Quark XPress as a virtual slide tray, but I've got an ancient version of the program. In and of itself it works great, but it doesn't recognize the OS X aliases. (My old version of Photoshop has a similar problem.) In the end, I ended up using iPhoto to grab any shot that might be useful and then exporting a web page and editing the html to create a storyboard. Once I got that set I manually copied all of the photos that made the final cut, processed them in Photoshop and then pasted them into Appleworks' presentation module. (There I showed my age, disdaining the variety of wipes offered and lamenting the fact that I can't control the fade rate like a good ol' multi-projector slide show.) In theory, this should allow us to show all the folks at home our "vacation slides". Of course, that's assuming we can hook up our iBook to a TV or projector. Last night when we had it hooked up to our TV set, the screen cut out. We either lost our video cable or the video out port on our laptop. Looks like priority one after arriving in Tacoma may be to fix the computer. Or maybe I should just buy a new one. Yeah, assuming I run into a leprechaun who gives me a pot of gold.
posted by John @ 8:29 PM
<< Home