News of the proposed agreement between Microsoft and Apple,
allowing schools to purchase items other than those that cost
Microsoft virtually nothing to supply, has been greeted with an
excited buzz in classrooms around the country. I confess I don't sit
in the teacher's workroom (term du jour for "lounge") very often,
probably because everyone has an assigned seat,* but just for once I
sat around eating tuna fish and compiled a list of things teachers
planned to buy with the Windows Windfall.
Now you can get ideas of how to spend the windfall, since you're
reading the Lite Side's
How I Plan to Spend My Microsoft Windows
Windfall
10. Paper. Our school supplies about 40 sheets of paper per
kid. Per year. Let's see, do we have enough magnifying glasses to
read the test questions? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU MO-RONS
TO BRING YOUR MAGNIFYING GLASSES! Sorry, end of year stress there. If
I bust this magnifying glass with a hammer, you can each have a
piece.
9. Plenty of computers. Good number of networked printers.
No toner. One toner cartridge wipes out my supply budget for an
entire year. I swear I am not making this up.
8. Dry Erase marker caps. More advanced than chalk,
Dry-Erase markers get about 2 yards to the ounce of ink - and they
don't hold much ink. This is a feature, not a bug, because it makes
them light enough to hold in your hand. They will dry out in about
five minutes, usually because you can't find the cap you lost.
Therefore I shall purchase a supply of spare caps. In a variety of
vibrant colors.
7. A filing cabinet. If someone could put a CPU and monitor
in a filing cabinet, we could buy them with our technology budget.
Otherwise, it's milk crates stolen from behind SafeWay.
6. Floppy drives for our iMacs because our students bring
floppies to school like zombies looking for some good foot meat.
Aaaaaaugh . . . (they say) . . . I have a
PowerPoint due in English . . . make disk work
. . . maaaaake diiiisssk woooorrrrrk. Aurrrrrgh. And the
only disks they have are old worn-out DSDD disks from AOL version
1.98. And they don't know how to make files save on the A: drive
anyway, so even these are Blanco.
5. A screen large enough to display the image from my
overhead projector. Without making the top twice as wide as the
bottom.
4. Shelves. With doors. And locks. Many locks. We loves our
locks. Locks . . . yessssssss.
3. A USB key-drive. They are all the rage right now.
Cross-platform, network-independent (THANK you JESUS, he said in his
best Southern Baptist dialect), and cheap. These things are so cheap
that next year they'll be in Happy Meals. And while we're at it, an
order of the wisdom to know not to yank it out without unmounting it
first. Supersize that to go.
2. A hub you're not supposed to plug into the network so
you have enough active ports. My record is five-deep. If you know
what I mean, I pity you. I hope no one from the district is reading
this.
And the number-one plan for teachers to spend Microsoft's
ill-gotten gains . . .
1. A copy of Virtual PC because the latest upgrade of SASI
is no longer OS 9 compatible! (Darn, that one's about to become
a Microsoft product...)
There you have it. Oh yeah, I might get a grant or something to
buy some software. Maybe. If I have time after writing bathroom
passes and answering the stupid phone they put in my room.
* By the way, we're an overcrowded school, so some
teachers actually do work in the workroom. In little cubicles. The
cubicles were my idea. No one really remembers that, which is just as
well when you think about it. I try not to.
iPods that never passed beta or focus groups, 09.13.
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Group of the Day: Tiger List is for anyone using Mac OS X 10.4.
July 5 in LEM history: 98: iMac: First of a family? - iMac perfect for schools - 00: Apple is not your friend - 01: 75 Mac Advantages - Exploring the fractal universe - Do you trust me? - 02: The joy of X with Classic - 05: No Quartz Extreme for Pismo - Brief history of NeXT - 06: Education iMac - TopXNotes - Battery reset utility for WallStreet and Clamshell iBooks
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Amazon.com is standing up to states that are trying to have it collect sales tax on interstate commerce, which most see as a violation of federal law.
Introduction to Autofs in Mac OS X, Keith Winston, Linux to Mac, 07.01.
"Autofs is often used in enterprise environments to set up network-based home directories and other network mounts for users at login."
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Safari 4 is the fastest it's ever been, but it's not without some frustrating drawbacks.
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Used beige 300 MHz, $25; G4/366, $39; blue & white 350, $80; 400, $90; 450, $105; PCI video cards from $15; shipping additional.
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