Chrisus zlog

Our school got two new LEGO RCX "mindstorm" robo-bricks. I have one at home to test it for use in school. The Robo-brick cannot only be used as robot, that acts in a scenery interactive, it can also be used for taking data and working with them. In my case I attached a temperature sensor and logged the temperature. For this I programmed it so, that it logges the data while it drives a distance. As using the rotation sensor I am able to (later) calculate the temperature with the distance. But that will be another story. The mindstorm project is able to display the data and to generate a website. Have a look at it at this site. And here you can see the robot:

Finished the "Akademielehrgang Elektrotechnik" with a test during a course in St. Kathrein am Offenegg in Styria successfully. The first step to the lectureship for the PTS is done.

It is strange for me and has a "deja vu" experience for me: writing articles for special themes with 20 to 30 pages amount. That means reading, reading, reading and reading other articles, and generate my own thoughts. But two of them came back with: "Well, thats fine and ok". I wrote one more wright this week, so there are only 4 left...

Had a nice advanced education yesterday. 3d pictures in many ways. Stereographs and anaglyphs, autostereographs and optical irritations. We built a stereograph-watcher, took a lot of pictures and produced stereo-pictures, autostereoraphs and anaglyphs. For my anaglyph you need color glasses, left is red, right is blue. Have a look at it:

Today I had my second schoolday and my first lesson. Mathematics. My decision was making a test about 4 years Mathematics in secondary school. Frightened views of the pupils but 50 minutes full concentration. We have 5 classes with 26 - 29 pupils. And on it goes.

At least they started: Summerholidays. Only 65 days remaining until school starts again.

On monday we had a nice trip to Bozen and the Montiggl-lakes. Take the chance and have a look at it: Montiggl.

Today was the last thursday with my pupils from the electro-group. As special event I invited Martin Hotze to tell about internet, networking, security and things like this. Tired kids looking forward the end of the school followed him, some of them used their brain and so they got a glimps of what he does. It was quite interesting, for me too, but after two hours my kids were filled up with info and shut down to silent mode. So this nice afternoon ended, and I hope, Martin will come again next year.
Now have a look at my kids:

Martin telling stories about tracert:

After 6 and a half year of teaching, this year I have the first pupil that uncovered my homepage that I never made public in school: Dominik Lang. His hobby is to offer sound and light equipment for partys. You can have a look at him at dmd-showtechnik.

It took me some days, but now I have finished the grades. Tomorrow I have 2 hours to write them into the catalogues. Then we have a teachers meeting about the grades.

Today I had a fine school-ski-day at Kaltenbach / Zillertal. I had the worst ski-driver. But I had no scruples to show them the black ski-runs. They managed it. The style from 3 of the 8 is called racing-plough. But we had great fun and enjoyed the day together. No bone-brake or other accident occured.

First schoolday after christmas-holidays. Done. So today there are 100 schooldays left until summer-holidays.

Driving down to Mötz at 6.10 a.m. with 30 km/h behind a slipping lorry in heavy snowfall. Dangerous. Got the train, but in Telfs was train-end. Between Innsbruck and Völs the contact wire of the train was fallen down. So no train could pass. After 3 hours of waiting in Telfs I had a train back to Mötz, because school has ended in the meantime. Driving up the hill to Fronhausen 2 lorrys slipped over the street and stopped all the traffic. I moved along their side and had luck and passed them! This was the beginnig of the xmas-holidays. Curious: in the afternoon it started raining, and now we have mush of snow.

Today me and my pupils finished installing ubuntu and kubuntu in one computerroom. We decided not to change the default boot to windows. So everybody who takes no look at the boot-prompt will end up in Linux.

On thursday afternoon I tried something new with my pupils. We tried to install different linuxes on our school-pc's. The first try was damnSmallLinux (DSL)where we had no success, because the installer couldn't find the free partition and I hadn't read exactly the instructions.
The next try was Knoppix, but we read the howto and the first sentence was: "In any cases DO NOT install Knoppix to a HDD". So we stopped this.
Try number three was Kanotix but there was no success either. The howto told us: "Simply start the installation by clicking on the item in the menu". But in all cases we startet Kanotix _this_ item was missing.
Number four was kubuntu but alas, I had the dvd with me, and in school we have only CD-drives.
The last try was ubuntu. And this one worked. Only very few inputs had been requested: Language, country, is the hardware clock GMT and the username and password oft the "Quasi"-administrator. After 45 minutes all and everything worked fine. Grub detects W2k, we have net-access, and ubuntu comes in german, which makes it more easy for my pupils. We added a normal user to work and tested it. And I must say, the optical outfit looks cool.