Today is the first day of the second semester, so back to work for me. The web design business is doing pretty well, since I’ve got about 3 clients backed up.

Today will be a quick meet the students and a 4 minute level test to see how many students I can kick out of my class and move them to the advanced class. Real lessons will start from day 2 this week. In other news, my university finally got around to giving us a raise after three years, so morale is much improved.

Finally, I’ve decided to take the 100 pushup challenge. I took the strength test on Friday and I’m in column three (the most difficult). I did my pushups for day one this morning and will work on day 2, come Wednesday.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Sep 1, 2008 at 08:00 AM
Random_Ramblings | Teaching | (0) | |

English 360 has the answer.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Aug 16, 2008 at 07:31 AM
Random_Ramblings | (0) | |

I recently had a need to add a couple of powerpoint presentations to another web site I’m working on. I wanted to be able to embed the powerpoint and retain transistions and animations as well as embedded audio or video. A quick search didn’t reveal any definitive answers so I’m going to compare the options I did find. One of the keys with using powerpoint online is to remember that not everyone has powerpoint (but the viewer is free 2003 version & 2007 version and openoffice will also open powerpoint files with some loss in functionality)

I’m going to to look at a number of features across all options including: compatibility with pptx files, ease of use, privacy controls, embed, email, social network links, commenting, registration, downloading of original file, and licensing. To make the comparison equal across all options I’m using the same powerpoint file for all services and embedding it here. This is a powerpoint that I used in spring 2008 and it has several animations, transitions, video, and audio embedded. You can see the original by downloading it - I’ve included the ppt and pptx in the zip file (27.5mb). The options I’m looking at are:

• slideshare | jump link
• authorstream | jump link
• zoho show | jump link
• google docs | jump link
• 280 slides | jump link
• scribd | jump link
• Slideboom | jump link
• iSpring | jump link (free) | jump link (pro)
• slideboom & ispring integrated
• conclusion

Not all slideshow players are showing up in bloglines (and possibly other RSS readers) - visit my site to see everything.

Learn about each of these options in the extended entry.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Aug 10, 2008 at 12:22 PM
Random_Ramblings | useful_web_sites | (5) | |

Infrequent blogger Fencerider is moving out of Korea after 12 years. It seems like he has recieved an excellent opportunity in the UAE, something I’ve considered doing, but haven’t. Good luck and I hope you continue your blog from there.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Aug 1, 2008 at 02:24 PM
Random_Ramblings | (1) | |

Mr. D points to a list of 11 Reason not to Stumble upon TEFL at Notes from the TEFL Graveyard, a blog I hadn’t seen before.

I’d like to add a couple more.

• Locals think you are here, because you are a loser and couldn’t make it back home
• There is absolutely no job security - you can easily be replaced by another native speaker who is younger and better looking than you. Even if they are completely incompetent cheaper is better.

Got some more? Add them in the comments.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Jul 26, 2008 at 04:12 PM
Random_Ramblings | Teaching | (3) | |

If you are a white man and tired of teaching ESL in Asia, but don’t want to go home you could always head to Japan. Looks like there’s a market for the White Man Cafe.
Hat tip to the English Blog. Original video on CNN, but I found it on YouTube and embedded it here for your viewing convenience.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Jul 23, 2008 at 09:40 PM
Random_Ramblings | Video | (0) | |

Charles is conducting research on Korean oral literature and culture as seen by foreigners. If you live or have lived in Korea then go fill out this survey and help him out.

I’m filling it out now and have also added the link to my facebook profile.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Jul 12, 2008 at 07:59 AM
Public_Service_Announcement | Random_Ramblings | (0) | |

this video is great.

original video here, but it broke the page layout so I’m using YouTube.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Jul 11, 2008 at 10:03 PM
Random_Ramblings | Video | (0) | |

I’ve completed the web site for my new web design business. Currently my portfolio is rather sparse (just my teaching blog), but I’m working on a client site right now and have a second client lined up for later in the summer.

Create Sean Web Design now open for business.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Jul 9, 2008 at 10:44 AM
Random_Ramblings | |

Wow! if she were my french or Japanese teacher in high school, I probably would’ve paid a lot more attention in class. Watch this video - (near nudity)

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jun 26, 2008 at 10:48 AM
Random_Ramblings | Video | |

I’ve set up a new blog where I’ll be writing all of my entries related to web design, free lancing, and setting up a small business. The point here is that I won’t be cluttering up this space with unrelated material. For the record I have a paying client and am just waiting for the deposit before starting work - I’ll post a link to the finished product once I finish it.

This blog will continue to recieve my attention and regular posts as my full-time job is still teaching and I will continue to write articles for the Korea Herald. I have two scheduled articles for July. Though like every other vacation period, posting will be light.

Just a reminder that guest authoring is still available to anyone and I am actively looking for semi-regular contributors though one off posts are also very welcome. If you have any questions please send me an email or leave a comment.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Jun 24, 2008 at 04:08 PM
Random_Ramblings | Web Design | Guest Author | web_site | |

Summer Vacation officially began about three minutes ago when I submitted my grades and emailed off the last of the reports that I had to write. I am now free until September 1. This however does not mean I will be sitting around drinking margaritas all day - no, I’m going to be smoking busy as I launch my new career in web design and take on a bunch of extra work on the side - here’s the to do list as it stands:

• private kids class twice a week 1 hour each time. This is actually more stress than you think as I don’t really enjoy teaching kids, but the money is good.
• private company class twice a week 7:30-9:00 am. This is easy, but involves getting up early some travel and prep - but the money is good and I enjoy it.
• In august I’ll be picking up 3 extra private classes for a woman going on vacation - this will be a lot of work, but it’ll also be a huge chunk of cash that will help us pay off the house loan faster
• This semester I’ve been doing classroom research and it is now time to compile the data and write an article for publication. My co-researcher has also submitted an application to present at TESOL 2009. If we get accepted I’ll be going to Denver at the end of March.
• I’ve recently launched a new web design venture. This is essentially my career transition plan for when I move back to Canada. This involves a lot of work and learning on my part:
  
  • Just finished redesigning this site, but it still needs a little work
  • received my first confirmed client, but this client is using a software that I am unfamiliar with (wordpress). I was planning on learning it later, but I guess it’s time to dive in.
  • I need to figure out how much to charge, how to receive payments, and a billing cycle
  • I still need to get my portfolio site (web business) off the ground. Was going to do that next, but paying clients get priority.
  • I want to redo this site, my Korean learning blog, and set up a teaching portfolio site for myself.
  • design and print business cards
  • Learn JavaScript (which is giving me headaches already) and Jquery.
  • I have another client setting up a business site for the first time - but for this I get to use Expression Engine so will be more fun.
• Yesterday I restarted my exercise routine - 5km on the running machine, chin-ups and push-ups daily.
• I also need to upgrade my student site and the department moodle
• modify my class materials for next semester.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Jun 20, 2008 at 08:26 PM
Random_Ramblings | Teaching | |

My editor was stabbed with a broken bottle in what appears to be a completely random without reason assault.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Jun 16, 2008 at 02:03 PM
Random_Ramblings | |

Yesterday morning I was talking with one of my colleagues and I mentioned I had posted something on my blog. In a loud and surprised voice “You’re the Geek!”.

This has happened a couple of times. It’s even more fun when it’s a colleague as I’m not hiding my blog and have mentioned it several times.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Jun 14, 2008 at 08:08 AM
Random_Ramblings | |

Completely unrelated to language, but I must say that I have really been enjoying the latest R.E.M Cd since it got released. Here is one of my favorite songs via YouTube.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Jun 9, 2008 at 07:00 AM
Random_Ramblings | Video | |

I’ve completed the redesign of this web site and it is now live. It’s been three years since I had a new look and the last one was a template available that I just modified. This new look I created from the ground up. I hand coded everything, XHTML, CSS and Expression Engine dynamic tags. It’s really been a great learning experience for me and I’ve definitely improved my understanding of CSS.

EFLGeek 3.0 - skipping 2.0 cause geeks do that!EFLGeek 3.0 - skipping 2.0 cause geeks do that! yeah! Personally I’ve gotten a little tired of all the hype surrounding 2.0 web sites and software upgrades to 2.0.51.3.6 so I decided to have a little fun with my blog name.

Before I get into anymore details I’m going to post up a screen shot of the blog as it’s looked for the past three years so I don’t forget. The image is quite long because my monitor is 22” in vertical profile - almost no vertical scrolling for me.

And a screen shot of the current version as i’m sure it will change in the future as well. One thing I’ve done is remove the forums and wiki since no one was using them. If enough interest were expressed, I would bring them back.

I’ve added a few little effects to the site - one that I particularly like is that now any link to a file (.pdf .pub .xls .pdf .zip) will now automatically have an icon appended to the link making it clearer what is a download and what is a web page. You can see it in action on my entry about powerpoint jeopardy.

I’ve also set up comments to use avatars. If you are a member of this site, then you can upload an avatar (100x100) or you can use a gravatar (80x80 - maximum size allowed by gravatar plugin). If you don’t do either than your comment will end up with a generic silhouette avatar. I like avatars because it can really help regular readers to identify each other visually and adds a little style and class to the comment page.

Technical Stuff

I learned a lot by reading CSS Mastery which is co-authored by Simon Collision who just happened to have created my previous look. I also ready Principles of Beautiful Web Design and various web sites. The Expression Engine forums has a very helpful community that I could not live without.

Probably my greatest assistance came from Andy Harris, an active member on the Expression Engine forums - he seemed to be paying special attention to my twitters and posts on the forums and even went so far as to offer me extensive advice via email. Through Andy I came to discovered Firebug (firefox extension) and the IE Developer Toolbar which are indispensable for web development. Andy also ensured that I learned how to add a seperate style sheet to deal with the troubles that come from internet explorer.

I’ve always enjoyed playing around with photoshop, but that has mostly been with photo touch up. Making backgrounds for the web was a learning experience. I’m sure I have a lot to learn still - I think my site might be a little slow to load as I didn’t do a particularly great job with optimizing images. The problem I had was that compression resulted in a horrible look. I need to learn how to design so that my images can be compressed without getting destroyed in the process.

There are still a couple of minor changes to be done to the look. I need to add the dynamic comment preview, as well as buttons for HTML code in comments. I haven’t yet decided if I want to go with the show/hide option with extended text that I had in the previous look. For now, I’ll just have a link to the rest of the entry.  I also want to add the ability to edit comments for a limited time after submission.

Please do come and take a look at the site and tell me what you think in the comments as well as vote in the poll.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Jun 4, 2008 at 03:46 PM
Random_Ramblings | Polling_Station | Web Design | web_site | |

Today I had one of those moments, you know the good ones. I was at school in the convenience store picking up a snack when I saw one of my students from three semesters back. I taught this student advanced presentation skills. I remember that she really learned a lot and did quite well in the class.

Today she told me that she is still in school full time and also has a full time Job acting as a liason between Japan and Korea (Her Japanese is apparently better than her excellent English skills). She told me that my presentation skills class helped her to get the job and what she learned gets put to use regularly.

A good day for me.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Jun 2, 2008 at 05:59 PM
Random_Ramblings | Teaching | |

The Marmot has a story on a 14 year old foreigner who died in a sauna - His mother is an English teacher. It definitely sounds like criminal negligence and incompetence all around.

I sent an email to my editor at the Korea Herald to see about this getting into national media and not just on blogs.

Got a really distressing — and infuriating — email this morning from a reader telling me of the tragic death of a 14-year-old son of a foreign English teacher in a sauna in Daegu. Mike McStay in Daejeon has been covering it on his blog, and all I have to say is I’m completely speechless. To give you the summary I got in the email:

There has been no coverage of this story, and it’s heartbreaking.  A 14 year old boy, Mike, died in a sauna this past weekend.  The sauna staff assumed he was dead and waited almost an hour to notify his mother in the women’s area.  Turns out he WASN’T dead, but because they waited so long to try to revive him, he ended up dying.

The Daegu police are not conducting an investigation.  They started one later, but they won’t even give the victim’s mother, Stephannie, a copy of the police report (I suspect that none exists).

From Mike McStay’s blog:

What do you call it when a room full of men/boys doing their family bathing before the Buddha holiday just turn their backs on someone who’s coughing & retching so bad that there’s extensive damage to his throat, lungs & back of the mouth. What do you call it when ’someone” called him in DOA at 11:02, the mother isn’t notified until 11:45 and she arrives in the parking lot to discover that the DOA is actually alive & NOW doesn’t have proper help because the WRONG type of ambulance was sent.

The mother now has a page open on Facebook with information on this tragedy.

My condolences got to Stephannie White at this difficult time.

UPDATE: I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t point out that so far, there have been no reports on the death, so there are many unanswered questions and nothing you read is “official.” I just called the establishment in question (note to fellow bloggers/netizens: I’d remove the name of the place for legal reasons), and they couldn’t even confirm whether an incident took place (BTW, I don’t blame them for that — obviously, this is not something you discuss with every Tom, Dick and Harry that calls), and the person who might be able to wasn’t in (probably not smoke & mirrors, given I called at lunch). There could very well be more sides to this story; we’ll have to wait to learn more.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday May 15, 2008 at 01:25 PM
Random_Ramblings | ESL_in_the_News | |

Recently I was dubbed the Dean of EFL Bloggers, but last night I received a new, higher, and possibly less justified accolade of The King of TEFL Bloggers. You can send your annual tithe and tribute to my paypal account!

Really thanks for the praise guys. 

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday May 7, 2008 at 10:01 AM
Random_Ramblings | web_site | |