robglazebrook.com

I managed to survive my first week of teaching! In fact, I happen to believe I more than survived it — I kicked its ass. Or maybe that’s a hyperbole in the other direction. At the very least, we’ve come to some sort of a ceasefire: all of the students that showed up for the first class also showed up for the second, suggesting they’re willing to weather me for three weeks at least. And when I left class on the second day, I came to the surprising realization that I had honestly and actually enjoyed myself during class. Revelation of revelations, no?

But I’m considering that a good sign: By the second day of class, my jitters were gone and I was enjoying myself. Now I have just four more class periods before Amanda and I head to Europe!

Which… well, we’re thinking we should spend a little more time thinking about this week. We still don’t have bus tickets between the cities, so we should probably get on that. And I sorta intended to re-learn a touch of French before we left (not sure if that’ll really happen, though).

In other happy news, my mom celebrated the 19th edition of her 27th birthday last Thursday. She has officially had as many 27th birthdays as she had regular-type birthdays before I was born. This August, I’ll finally catch up to her, and I fully intend to pass her by in early August 2009. Pamela Glazebrook remains the oldest surviving member of the Forever 27 Club. She resides in Johnston.

Since everyone is so curious, I’ve uploaded a few photos of Amanda’s engagement ring. :) You can find them here. I’ve made a photo set on Flickr that I’ll hopefully keep updated with various engagement-related photos as they come about. Of course, since we currently have absolutely no idea when we’ll actually be getting married (think: more than one year from today), it might take a while for that set to get updated. I’m just saying, don’t go holding your breath or anything.

But yeah! Have some ring pictures. I fell in love with this ring because of its really unique side profile, so be sure to check that out. But despite all of the interesting, modern lines, it manages to look like a very traditional, respectable solitaire from the top. Way to go, ring makers. Oh, and I got it from Anglo, in case anyone is curious.

So, for the half-dozen or so readers who haven’t heard yet, I got engaged over the weekend! :) I asked Amanda on Easter morning, and after a fair bit of prodding and prompting, I managed to get a “yes” out of her.

Since I’ve had a couple of people request it, here’s the abbreviated version of how I proposed:

Since it was Easter, I put together a little basket of goodies for her. There were two large eggs filled with Cadbury goodness, and one small gold egg in the center. The gold egg contained (you guessed it!) a piece of paper. On the paper was a note… something along the lines of “There’s one more gift.” I don’t quite remember the details, because I wrote it in quite a hurry. Once she’d read the note, I pulled the ring box out of my pocket, got down on one knee, and asked. Poke, poke, prod, prod, plead… affirmative.

This was a modified version of the original plan. The ring+box was supposed to be inside a large Easter egg, flanked by candy goodness. Unfortunately, none of the oversized eggs I bought were big enough for the box the ring came in, and I didn’t think the presentation was good enough without the box. Luckily, I’d bought the little gold eggs for just such an emergency, so they got used instead. Only now I have something like $10 worth of useless, opened and discarded Easter eggs in the trunk of my car. It looks like I robbed the Bunny or something.

I’d like to say a big “thanks” to Megan, for going ring shopping with me for many hours and trying on a good hundred or so rings so that I might judge them (and for being pretty good at keeping a big secret). And thanks to my boss, Brian, for letting my leave the ring locked up in his office for a couple of weeks while I figured out the best timeline for propos-ed-ness. Also, I should thank my parents, for giving me permission to marry Amanda (even though I didn’t exactly ask them for permission)… and thanks to Amanda’s parents for giving me permission when I did ask (even though they insisted that asking wasn’t necessary).

And because I know there are a few lady-readers, I’ll do my best to update within the next couple of days with some photos of the ring. :)

Whew! My life continues to move forward at a breakneck speed, whether I’m ready for it or not.

I start teaching my first web design class in five days. I have my course packet written and sent off to the coordinator, who will make me copies and make sure they’re in my classroom on the first day. Last time I checked, I have 14 people signed up, and since the class is currently capped at 15 students maximum, that’s a pretty awesome number to have.

Of course, I still have some details to work out for the class. For example, I’m going to be teaching my students how to upload their files via FTP to a server, so they can see their pages live on the web. But I have no idea where that space is going to exist. And I’ll need to have code examples for most of my classes that don’t yet exist (although Justin pointed out that the code is simple enough, I could probably write it on the fly without much of a problem).

And then there’s the class that starts in April. I’ve barely even started planning it. I have a general outline as to what I want to teach each day, but I don’t have specifics laid out yet, and I haven’t written a single word of the course packet yet. And if the last course packet is any indication, this one will probably be around 30 pages long. So I should really get writing, is what I’m saying. Especially considering we leave for Europe three weeks from tomorrow, and I have to have the whole class planned before then. Yeesh.

CSSnewbie is still taking up a lot of my time, as well, but at least that is fairly rewarding work. Not monetarily rewarding yet, by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s personally rewarding. And I guess that’s something. Happily, I’ve found a couple of people willing to write me a couple of guest articles for the site while I’m on vacation, so I won’t need to worry about generating a boatload of additional content in advance.

ICanHasHope has sadly fallen by the wayside. I haven’t updated that site in like a week. It doesn’t take up all that much time, but I don’t have a lot of free time regardless, and I just can’t justify spending that time for the amount of traffic (or lack of traffic) that it’s pulling in. Sadly, it’s actually gained more steady traffic since I’ve started ignoring it. Although, I’d still encourage anyone and everyone to submit images, and I’ll post them. :)

Non-web-related life has also been busy. I spent a good portion of last week (and a bit of this week) sick with the flu, or at least flu-like symptoms. My grandfather has also taken a (momentary) turn for the worse, health-wise, so I’ve spent a bit of time over the last couple of evenings visiting him in the hospital. You can read more about that on my mom’s site.

And there’s been other stuff taking up a bit of my free time that I’ll probably talk about real soon. But you know what? I think I’ve already spent enough words and minutes talking about working. :)

El sigh. I’ve now had Qwest’s DSL internet service for more than a year. And we all know what that means, right? The internet just got horrendously expensive.

I started out with Qwest’s introductory rate, which wasn’t half bad. I paid around $30/month (or a dollar a day, if you want to look at it that way) for 1.5Mb/second access – it wasn’t the fastest connection in the world, or probably even on the block, but it was okay. And $30/month isn’t great, but it isn’t terrible, either.

Except now that I’m no longer in their introductory “honeymoon” window, I’m suddenly paying $50/month ($1.67 per day) for the exact same access as I had before. And I’m not using any of their equipment or anything – I’ve owned my own DSL router for years now. And while $30/month for medium-to-slow access was okay, $50 for the same access seems pretty outrageous.

And sure, I could try going for one of their so-called Price for Life offers (which are really just two year contracts with $200 penalties for leaving early), which gets me back down to $37/month for what I had previously. I could get it for lower, but I’m penalized for being what you might call “modern” and not having a land line. I’m not exactly sure I want to pay $37/month for LIFE. I plan to live an awful long time, Qwest. And even if I only lived another decade, that’d be nearly $4,500 for a decade of crappy internet speeds.

If I’m looking for a lifetime of internet access, I really don’t have to deal with Qwest. Instead, I could turn to Charter’s new High-Speed Internet for Life auction-style format of ISP shopping. The site is a little entertaining – in both appearance and concept, it mimics what would happen if Qwest were bought out by eBay. You bid whatever you’d be willing to pay in one lump sum for a lifetime of internet access, and wait to see if you’re the winner. And they’re even giving away a Nintendo Wii at the same time, which is pretty awesome, because you still can’t buy them around here. So Click Here for a Chance to Win a Nintendo® Wii™! and get internet for life.* The auction starts up tomorrow (March 12), so you’d best hurry.

*Note: Internet for Life cannot be bequeathed to relatives after the end of the winner’s life, even if their life is tragically short. So no scheming, evildoers. Undead zombies need not apply.