Fucking Off Forever*
*Or at least until I can regain a reasonable editorial perspective of current happenings.
As I touched on in my 2021 overview of The Psalms, this blog has undergone some very significant – and mostly involuntary – changes of late. This summer has abruptly brought some life happens which will inevitably contribute further changes to a degree that warrants a very bloggy sort of Update Post.
Most importantly, perhaps, is that I've found myself with a real, tangible, full-time Big Boy job as a nighttime custodian of my actual elementary school. Though I suppose it's never been revealed before, here, I actually love cleaning and love this school, particularly, so I'm more excited than I've ever been for any sort of documentable employment, but this means I will imminently be transitioning from a lifestyle with virtually zero time-bound obligations to working 3-11:15PM, Monday through Friday. Undoubtedly, this will have a profound effect on my recently-announced consultancy business, but I'll be making an effort to formally update the adjacent Fantastical Openings links with revised availability.
Adjacent to this news are the experiences I've had in the past few weeks helping a friend ready her third-grade, public school classroom, which have been particularly enlightening with regard to the extent that iPads have been integrated into the education of young children in this country. Some highlights from this discovery (in this particular, Title I Midwestern elementary school):
- Every child will receive a 5th-generation, WiFi-only iPad (iPad6,11) which they will be able to take home over the course of the school year.
- The district paid $299 per unit for said iPads, a mere $30 off their full retail price for the rest of us, $329.
- The random device I picked up from the pile shown in the images embedded above had not been updated beyond iPadOS 15 (since March of this year.)
- Responsibility for the maintenance, setup, and deployment of said iPads rests entirely on a single individual, who is also responsible for the “media center” (what many of us know as the Library.)
- Responsibility for ongoing hardware considerations (charging and storage) is left entirely to individual teachers.
- Net contributions from Apple, Inc. to this new aspect of childhood education reside some six or seven figures in the negative.
In the two weeks preceding our district's start date, I had the painful opportunity to tour some of my friend's colleagues' storage solutions for their student iPads. The image below is the one I chose to append to my appeal to the MacStories Discord, attempting to leverage workspace-obsessed yuppies' knowledge for the benefit of public education.
There were a few helpful replies, which made it clear that organizations with actual budgets for device storage have gravitated toward rolling carts.
I've been made intimately aware just how integral YouTube has become in public education, these past few weeks. believe it or not, there is not a program – to the educators I've spoken to's knowledge, anyway – that removes advertising from YouTube playback in this case.
— ⓓⓐⓥⓘⓓ ⓑⓛⓤⓔ (@NeoYokel) September 1, 2022
Going Forward
The time I haven't spent in this medium has been redirected toward a few key sources. My Raindrop collections have continued to grow, including a particular one I'd like to highlight here, called Blessed Web Utilities.
With its new ownership, I've continued to pour more and more energy into Siri Shortcuts published on RoutineHub. I'm proud to have been asked to participate directly in the platform's upcoming aggregatory efforts. I've also established a reliable habit of sharing Shortcuts documentation/source files on the extratone Telegram channel, among many other aspects of my ongoing Online Life.
I've also restarted an Extratone-era habit of using redirects to simultaneously simplify and index topical URLs to both my own projects and external resources. My new, NeoCities-bound Redirection Index should be a robust way to keep up with David Blue, Online, therefore.
As always, I hope you'll freely contact me with comments/suggestions/feedback/rants/etc. As for this particular feed, I doubt there will be much noticeable change from its status quo in the past ~two years.