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Jumping into the pool in 2013 – the teaching pool…
For the last four years, colleagues of mine at Cuesta College have been after me to begin teaching part-time as part of their “pool” of instructors. This “pool” is used to fill teaching vacancies for classes that the college either doesn’t have faculty for, or to help when faculty leave, that sort of thing; basically a temporary pool of teachers available to teach a class or two each semester.
I’ve been fighting the urge to take them up on it because I already have so much going on, with a full time job that I enjoy, an energetic and busy family, and, ironically enough, my own pursuit of my Bachelors Degree at Western Governors University…the pursuit of the same degree that I am now going to be teaching parts of to other students looking to achieve the same goal. The irony is not lost on me, but with my industry experience, and my current college credits giving me an “equivalency” to an Associates degree, I actually qualify to teach classes at Cuesta. Seems like my industry experience is finally earning me some value other than my continued employment!
So with that, since I enjoy teaching and mentoring and have always wanted to someday get into it, I’ve been approved as a CIS Pool Instructor. I won’t be teaching my first class until January at the earliest, and it may be the fall in 2013, but it’s definitely something that feels like it will be interesting career wise and a way to see if teaching is something I might actually like. Code Camps and the .NET User Group were always entertaining, and this seems like a logical extension of both of those endeavors, in addition to a logical career extension somewhere way down the line.
Just don’t call me “Professor Hope”!
iMemories Gets The Thumbs Up
Recently I fleshed out my YouTube channel with three very old videos of rock bands that I played bass for, one from 2003, one from 1993, and one from nearly 25 years ago, in 1988. One day I went to watch the 2003 video of Ironhorse Exchange and to my horror my VHS player jammed on me, and I thought my only video remnants of that stage in my musical career were gone forever.
Thankfully that is not the case! iMemories came to the rescue. Their premise is simple: send them your old videos, slides, photos, etc. etc, and they’ll convert them to a digital format for you. Once they do that, the digital output is available for download, but if you would like, they will also print DVDs of your digital treasures as well.
There are definitely some cost points: the prepaid box they send you to ship your videos to them costs about $25, and the conversion of each of the 4 DVDs cost about $10 each and took about a week. But once done, I was able to download the digital output to my PC at no additional charge, since I am capable of printing DVDs myself. For the uninitiated DVDs can be designed and printed for a nominal fee per DVD.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that after two weeks I had full digital copies of my videos. The only thing I’m waiting on now is for them to return the originals to me, which they do…free of charge.
My poetry book now a published eBook
So I’ve gone ahead and published my book as an eBook via Smashwords and Amazon Kindle for the low low price of $1.99. Hopefully that means all of you who couldn’t afford or didn’t want to wait on the print version can now find it via your eReaders. I also took a stab at designing the cover for it and I think that came out pretty good too, encompassing all of the main themes of the book. If you do get a chance to read it please let me know what you think!
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 