What’s to Like About Rockford: Free Electronic Recycling

So there I was getting gas one day and I saw this . . .

Live near Rockford? Got electronic junk? Take it here.

Live near Rockford? Got electronic junk? Take it here.

AND THEN, I saw this . . .

Big pile of big TVs

Big pile of big TVs

All you have to do is drive your electronic junk out to Kelley’s Market, on S. Main and Hwy 20 and drop it off in their big blue bin (or off to the side of their big blue bin, like in the photograph above). Old TVs, computers, VHS players, radios, and so on, they take it all.

Kelley Williamson Mobile teamed up with United Recycling Technologies (URT) and the partnership has been going strong since 2013. There’s a second bin at East State Street and Lyford Road. Between the two bins, millions of pounds have been collected. URT handles all kinds of e-waste to make sure it doesn’t wind up in a landfill where the corrosion of electronics can leak lead and hazardous chemicals into the water table.

So go ahead and clear out the basement. You’ve got a place to take that ginormous TV that blew up while you were watching American Ninja Warrior.

Burned Out from Summer Off?

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A normal summer is me recovering from the hectic pace of 60 hour college semester work weeks. The only time when I get to put the word normal back into my life. Like, normally doing laundry once a week. Normally sleeping eight hours a night. Normally seeing my friends and family on a regular basis. Summer = three months of soul rejuvenation before the nine months of crazy takes over.

Only this summer, was not normal. This was the dreaded every third summer. This was the summer the faculty at my employer changed their Learning Management System (LMS). Again.

Yes, I’ve taught online for nine years and this will be the third LMS we’ve used.

Nothing to it. Take everything from the old system: syllabi, course structures, presentations, 100s of files, links, videos, quizzes, assignments, rubrics, announcements, discussions, e-mail history, grade books, blah blah blah, and copy it all into the new system. Voila!

But. No.

In the real world, systems don’t always play nice and there are plenty of surprises along the way. Two hundred hours, seven live classes and two archived for Spring, I hold my breath and hope everything works as planned Monday morning.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m good with change. Often a change leader, sometimes a go with the flow gal, rarely a complainer. But when 2016 rolls around . . . I really don’t want to link back to this post.

Photo by Phil Date

This is a personal weblog. Opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

First Week of School? Blue Screen of Death…

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Every day this week my computer at work greeted me with the ominous message above. The photo doesn’t do it justice, since you might not be able to see such flavorful sentences as “Collecting data for crash dump”, “Initializing disk for crash dump”, and “Beginning dump of physical memory”. Any time you see the word DUMP on your computer screen it’s not a good thing. Seeing the word DUMP half a dozen times, you’ve gone from bad to worse. Lucky for me, rebooting temporarily solves the problem, until this beast of a machine decides to start dumping while I’m working.

Of course this being the first week of a brand new college semester, did not help the situation.

*sigh*

At home, I am blessed to have a Macbook Pro who greets me every day with a heartfelt chime and an eagerness to get the job done. You see even when the PC in my office at school is working, it takes so long to boot up I can go to the copy room and back before I have access to a cursor. Coffee? Sure. Plenty of time.

The Mac? He’s ready, willing and able the moment I pop his lid and press ON . . . and I love him for it.

Now if someone could invent a remote start for the PC (like some folks have for their cars) so it’s all warmed up by the time I climb two flights of stairs… Or maybe the rest of the world, including my college, could just switch over to Apple computers and we could stop this nonsense.

Photo by Karin Blaski 8/20/12