I get a helpful newsletter every week or so in my email. Education Tech News is aimed at mostly secondary-level teachers and administrators, but I glean some useful things out of it once in a while. Today’s newsletter featured an article about a teacher who has been suspended, with pay, pending an investigation. He has been accused of political blogging on company time.

There are several areas of concern here. The teacher in question, Jason Levin, created a web page and blog as a way to not only present his political views, but used it as a sort of call to action. The school received hundreds of complaints about his views and call to action, and specifically about his suggestion that anyone following his cause engage in identity theft through the taking of petition signatures and identifying information.

The school district, and the state teacher’s accrediting body, are both investigating, although there is no criminal investigation. At issue is whether Mr. Levin wrote his blogs and maintained his website from his school-owned computer and on the school’s time.

The fact is, many of us do personal things while on work time, whether it is a phone call or two to schedule an appointment, checking personal email, looking up directions to the restaurant we want to go to for dinner, reading the news, checking the scores on a day baseball game, we all do it to some extent. And I think generally a little of that kind of thing is fine. Studies have shown that those things actually increase morale and sharpen productivity for most people. But if you’re running an entire campaign from the comfort of your at-work computer, there is going to be some question of how you spend your time.

I imagine I’ll see an update to this story in my next newsletter, which I’ll be looking forward to.

There is one thing that keeps me from dumping my paid satellite television. Actually, there’s two. First, my family would likely kill me. They live on their loaded DVR’s in the family room and living room. I generally don’t watch television except for the local news, but I am really the reason I won’t get rid of my pay television, and it isn’t about the local news.

It’s about baseball. I’m a huge fan of my St. Louis Team, the Cardinals. Whether it’s a good year or a bad year, I am still a fan, and I hate missing games. I often plan my evenings around whether or not there is a game being televised. I see most of the games on Fox Sports (Midwest for us), and have come to enjoy and appreciate the skill of our local game callers. I could pay for MLB.tv if I wanted, but I would not have my local commentary with the game. And that would be a hard thing for me to give up. On the rare occasions when Cardinals games are broadcast on ESPN, I spend half the game annoyed online announcers, who can’t pronounce things properly, and often are spending commentary time digging up dirt on the winning team so they can talk bad about them. The usual ESPN guy also sounds like he went to the Harry Carey School of Sports Broadcasting, and failed. It makes my baseball-watching much less enjoyable, and I often find myself turning off the volume on the television and turning on the radio where I can hear our regular, local sports announcers broadcast the game through an AM station.

Losing baseball, especially local baseball, would be the hardest thing about giving up pay television. If I could solve this problem easily, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I hate paying that bill every month. Had to pay it this morning and I just bristle every time. I just know I’m not getting $80-worth of enjoyment out of the satellite television every month. Unless it’s baseball. Then, for a couple bucks a day or so, I’m getting something I really enjoy out of it.

How are others feeding their sports addictions yet getting rid of their pay television?

This week, my son, who is 20, broke up with his girlfriend. Or she broke up with him. I’m not sure which it was, I just know she packed her things and moved out within a few hours. I heard about it first on Facebook.

I got to hear what a jerk my son is, what he did to make the girlfriend mad, and how she was right, so right, and no one in this world was every right! I got to hear how awful she was, how he was right, how she was jealous and unreasonable. I got to hear this not only from the two of them, but from their friends who responded to their post with “me toos” and “I always knew he/she was a jerk” and etc. If there’s anyone who doesn’t know about this breakup, I don’t know who it would be.

I know that friends lists will be trimmed soon, and I will be off the girlfriend’s list, and that will be that. But there seems to be such an intermingling of “friends” on these friends lists, that there will still be posts I will see, or at least responses to posts that I will see, and I will still know what is going on and being said.

There’s a song out now with a refrain that goes something like this: “Haven’t you ever heard of closing the door?” Facebook is very much like standing naked in your front yard, or living in a glass house. Everyone can see you, and see around you. No matter how limited your friends’ list, there are invariably people seeing things about you that you never really intended for them to see.

It is so hard to explain to my kids what to post and not post on Facebook, and how they should watch what they say, whether it is in a text, on a social networking site, or face to face. Nothing is really a secret, if you’re talking about it in even a limited public way, and when it’s in writing, it can’t be taken back. And people will find out things about you, true or not, through all of that talking, texting, and posting.

We know our young people engage in risky online behaviors. But our only recourse is to continue to watch, and continue to guide, and hope for the best. The horse is out of the barn at this point, there’s no putting it back in. And I like Facebook, I just am not sure most of us are responsible enough to use it properly.

I’ve watched the all of the discussion about how Apple refuses to support, aka, pay for access to, Adobe products for their portable devices. First it was the iTouch, then the iPhone, now the iPad. They’ve either offered their own proprietary solution, or started adding html5 support to accommodate the requirement for a flash alternative. I think most end users really don’t know the difference; they see YouTube videos the same way regardless of what device they are using.

But for those of us working the nuts and bolts of things in the background, this continued standoff could keep many things from moving forward.

I have not been shy about my opinion about Adobe over the years. I often compare them to Microsoft in my own thinking process, and know that I’d rather deal with Microsoft than Adobe when it comes to forced and assumed product upgrades. My college campus has to upgrade to the latest and greatest of Adobe products regularly, and even using it in a metered status so we don’t have to buy more seats than we absolutely need, costs a small fortune every year. And every yearly upgrade to things like CS4 Design Premium can mean you also have to upgrade equipment to go along with the new software. And that, as we all know, is no small matter.

I think many of us have looked for years for alternatives. Alternatives to QuickTime Pro, alternatives to Flash, Alternatives to CS4. There are some good ones out there, granted, but many of them don’t quite have the polish of the Adobe products. But as they are knifing us in the back and turning that knife a little bit more every once in a while, I get a little more resentful.

So when Apple refuses to dance to Adobe’s tune, I can understand it, and even to some degree, agree with it. Adobe has hacked me off more than once over the years with all kinds of issues. But if there’s no decent alternative to what Adobe can provide, we are rather stuck in the situation we are in. And while Apple refuses to dance to the tune and purchase Flash support for their portable devices, I have to wonder if we’re all being ill-served by Apple not taking the next step and making alternatives available for developers outside of Apple. Html5 can’t be all there is, right?

I know, I know…Apple isn’t a “software company.” But they do make an operating system, and they purchase and approve apps that are distributed through their systems, whether portable or desktop. Why aren’t they taking this next step? If they are so hell-bent against using Adobe, then it should logically follow that they have an alternative to offer.

I don’t expect Apple to change. And I don’t expect Adobe to change. But one can hope, right?

I’ve just watched Pixels by Patrick Jean over on YouTube and it’s fabulous.  If you remember the early days of computer games, if you spent all your quarters on Pacman, and it was “just one more game” of Space Invaders, you will love this as the 8-bit monsters take out New York.  And wait for the credits and the closing soundtrack.

Sheer brilliance.

It has been a bit of a rough year emotionally for me, as I’ve lost a few friends and loved ones in the last eight months or so. Last summer I lost a woman who was just a few years older than me, but whom I considered in many ways to be my mother. She went into the hospital for a hernia operation and got a hospital-borne infection and was gone before we knew it. Then in the fall, one of my student employees passed away at the age of 62. She was taking classes to “stay young” and got a lung infection. And already this spring I’ve lost a relative to old age.

These events are a part of life, and as I get older, I expect to experience more of these kinds of things. What I don’t expect from these experiences are getting emails from my friends who have passed away, or to see them “online” through instant messenger or various chats.

But that is exactly what has happened. I saw my friend “online,” in an instant messenger program we both used, for several months after her death. And recently, I’ve started receiving emails from my student worker’s AOL account. She has been gone for almost six months. The emails, unfortunately, are spam, and include a link to a site where you will automatically get a trojan. Of course I delete the emails, never taking the link.

If this person were alive, I would just give them a call and tell them that either their computer is compromised, or their email account has been hacked. Several of my very-much-alive friends have gotten this particular infection lately, and it’s easy enough to correct. But when the person is gone, what do you do? I have, of course, simply marked her emails as spam so my spam filter catches them and I don’t see them anymore, but the bigger question in my mind is how many other long-gone people are sending emails from the grave? And beyond blocking the emails, is there anything one can do to have the account shut down and that email stopped permanently?

As our population ages, and as individuals have more and more email accounts go dormant, how do we stop this?