Praise the Lord, I have programs! It's taken a month, but I now have Microsoft Office, QBasic, and all the Macromedia programs I could ever hope to want on all the computers in my lab! I'm so happy I could cry. I've been stalling in most of my computer classes, waiting to have software so I could actually teach something and now I can, and I'm so glad! I'm even okay with the fact that I had to work three days of my holiday week just to get it done. It's been good working this week because I'm getting a lot of the computer stuff done that I need to, and it's a lot faster when there aren't other people around. I'm a ready for a day off though, I've worked nine days straight! I think I'm going to head to Hong Kong for the day tomorrow or something. If I'm not here I can't be tempted to go to school. I feel so smart now though. Having virtually no networking background, I have mastered our school network system and successfully installed our marking program for all the teachers. My big project now, is figuring out how the students hack into the computer system at school and install games. They have me baffled on this one. No matter how restricted their user account is, they always manage to find a backdoor into the hard drive to download games and other crap. I just realized I never wrote about the coolest thing at school. At first I was going to compile this list of "You know you teach at a pompus private school when..." but then the list was so short I never bothered, but that means I didn't mention the best part of Clifford school (okay maybe not the best, but it's pretty high up there for me), and that's the bell system. Bells have been a pet-peeve of mine for a long time. At Miles Mac, the bell schedule changed everyday and so you never knew when the bell was going to interupt your lesson. At Maples, they didn't have bells, so students had to guess when you were going to start class. But here I have absolutely no complaints about the bells, because instead of annoying buzzers that sound like obnoxious alarm clocks or fire alarams, they play the opening theme of Spring from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It's so happy, light and airy that you can't possibly be mad at the music even if it does interupt your lesson, but the schedule never changes so that's not usually a problem. And the kids get a little shot of culture from it, which is cool, because you can walk down the halls and hear the kids humming the tune. Anyways, when I heard that, I thought what genius! Who needs bells when you can play a few lines of beautiful music? Anyways, it always makes my day, especially after a difficult class, to hear this bit of sunshine in the midst of the chaos.