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…that I haven’t taken yet, but patience! (I do have well over two thousand images on my flickr account. Check it out by just clicking on any of my photos.) India is three weeks away and the destination is just as thrilling and revealing as the voyage. I’ll be in Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Pushkar on a friggin’ camel! In the meantime, let me catch you up.
In the news:
I don’t know if to hang my head down in shame as one of the most advanced nations only graduates 70.5% of its students. Although Houston has done great job in increasing its numbers above the national average, as a whole, Texas is having serious issues with this.

On the professional horizon: Can your boss ever get dooced? (Dooced meaning fired for blogging.) Well, not if they never keep one. Considering just about every teacher is being forced to head that direction, already there with a personal blog, built one for their class’ e-portfolios district mandate…well shouldn’t the boss blog too? My take is that being an administrator is not easy and dealing with a small school of 500 students really means that the administrator affects the lives of 2,000 people or more. A blog can only increase sensitivity and liability for that person. However, as a teacher, I really have no respect for a someone who has no idea the amount of work a blog requires and will therefor not compensate accordingly or have realistic expectations. Via Education & Tech

FREE: You gotta love it, and not just for educators only! Ever wanted to go to college for free, yes I said FREE, well check this out Universities with the Best Free On-line Courses. While it wont give you your degree or prepare you for the massive amounts of writing you’ll happily do, it will remove much of the anticipation, give you a good heads up on the class and make learning a reward onto itself.

FOR EDUCATORS: Giga pixels is here, hurray! Remember those really cool pictures from Mars? Well the people who made the camera at Carnegie Mellon University are hoping to preserve the images of the world’s heritage sites by partnering with schools to take pictures of them. They hope the technology will be available for the public on a later date and at a far less cost than your mega pixel camera. Check out the giga sexy visuals from learning.com. Can you imagine movies with this technology? While you’re there peek in on the Grock It debate of the overhaul of the educational system. I both like and dislike the idea of peer learning because it changes class sizes but even now as a graduate student, I feel like the instructor is copping out when I get this kind of work. The educational experience then depends on the students if they are able to contribute to the class and make it worth while…so why am I paying the university to teach? It has worked for the people at Carnegie Mellon’s IT and education department but that’s a very extraordinary example. The jury is still out on this one.

Spiritually:
Has your mind on your money got nothing but money on your mind? Then you’re missing out on 6 important things in your life, according to Dumb Little Man, like self-esteem, self awareness, and happiness. Talk about a heated debate on this one! Although I’m leaning toward the “money is great start to happiness” camp, a lower paycheck may not mean less when additional fees for things like a good health care package go away. Health care….that’s another post.

Well folks, love to hear your input! Remember, you’re never lost, you just don’t know where you’re going yet.

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But really, with two pink eyes, bird flu, bronchitis, two busted ankles and endless visits to the doc, thank God April is gone! So how can you celebrate poetry?

1. Poets.org has 30 ways to celebrate the month by: adding a verse to your signature line, hosting a reading, taking your favorite poet out to lunch or giving out a pocket size poems to your friends like this one or this one. My personal favorite is the mp3 ring tones and the phone friendly poetry web page. Think how cool a phone ringing with “Do not go gentle into that good night, Fight!..” would be!

2. Gas is expensive so check out your favorite poet on the net with University of Cali’s TV. I love the way the camera allows you to see the relationship of the author to the audience. The second option: Download a chapter a day from the best books in history or checkout a podcast. A little difficult with the monotone reading and there’s no time to look for really cool words.

3. Find other poetry blogs with blogged poetry. Because I believe poetry is personal, technical and artistic, I surf through many web pages before something hits me. I recommend Ms. Hamm’s beautiful poetry blog and my next interview. Though modern poetry breaks with the author’s natural breath, I still have to wonder where is the line between poetry and prose? Mr. Rappleye, for introducing me to the words of Rothke, “I used to think of poets as helping one another; as advancing consciousness together.” It’s difficult to find a community of poets.

4. Go Shexy! After I’m done with this semester (Research Analysis: 100!), I plan to celebrate poetry month by dressing in my hottest black number and passing out my poetry to Asians on the street. In this harebrained idea is the newest member on my blogroll: Epik Justino, teacher, camera dude and human rights activist.

I was fortunate to see Madam Butterfly as a teenager at the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. I will be visiting the inspiration for this play, the second city to get hit with an atomic bomb: Nagasaki, Japan. I am looking forward to seeing the poetry the place inspires within me and taking lots of great pics from the 9-13th.

Stay tuned for these images and as always, write and send me poetry. Orale! Bali, Bali! The sun sets slower on your side of the world.

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LOL! I fought the urge the make it into a poem but this came directly from Dr. Universe, Herself, via Milton Ramirez.com. Ask Dr. Universe is an on-line website for children all over the world to submit their scientific inquiries sponsored by Washington State University. For example, did you know our cells can only divide 50 factorial and that a human embryo looks like a chicken embryo? (No wonder we can’t do without fried chicken.) Thank you for answering a question that’s been on my mind ever since I became a Mark Leyner fan, whom by the way would answer as a membership card!

A huge red carpet blogroll-out welcome to Devari from Bali! If you have never been to Bali, it is a beautiful place to visit. Devari answers all the question you’ve ever wanted to ask but wasn’t sure how to, like, just how many Gods do you have and what’s the right way to bargain. Welcome the Great Kotsengkuba, a wonderful photographer, Pinoy blogger and writer. Not sure where my summer will take me, but a please pray for the safety and success of friend, blogger and missionary J. Landrum who will be in Chiang Rai, Thailand…a beautiful place to visit. I have just released the pictures of Chiang Mai on flikr, so have fun!

I decided that rather than taking the bus to practice, I should just start running the 5km to prepare for my black belt test. Here’s a couple of very painful hard learned lessons and a cool strip of my trip to a traditional oriental clinic in the orient.
1. Use the first 2 weeks to keep a regimen. Walk, run or crawl, just get in the habit. Real Women Running is a great web site.
2. Drink 2 liters of water daily and sleep well.
3. Stretch before and after a run. I have to stretch the piriformis and achilles, but each person is different.
4. Get an e-coach like Hal Hidgon for marathon goals.
5. Massages are a great way to rest on your off days.
6. Love your feet, use light shoes, cushion your run and change out often. I’m partial to Sof Soles, a great company used by many runners.
7. Twisted ankles=RICE, rest, ice, compress, elevate for two weeks. (The last part killed me, but necessary.) Visit the doc, and treat your body naturally:


Wish me luck on my self defense test this coming Sunday. I’ll let you know how my 5k is coming along!

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Congratulate me on making the dean’s list last semester: 97, 97, 96, and 93! Glad I waited and studied something that really excites me and helps my career.

Flickr/claudiapena: All in a day’s, week’s, month’s work! (*uff!*) So with 1500 edited images, how do I introduce it in a way that inspires and doesn’t overwhelm the viewer? That answers all question of where was this taken, how, andwhat was she thinking? For the next few weeks, I will introduce my 10 collections/36 sets with poetry, maps and titles. Although I am still mourning the loss (STOLEN) of my Canon PS640, I am extremely happy to introduce the stitched panoramic shots of Chiang Mai, my favorite place in Thailand.

Personal: The neat thing about goals, is that if I write them, say them, talk to others about it, and publicly announce it, they’ll have power and weight as I did on my 8-26-2007 post. As a result, I have to refine my lists:

By Summer
1. Black belt in Hapkido, one of Korea’s martial arts - a solid black belt is gotten in front of the national association association in Seoul which is a very difficult challenge
2. 135#s, size 7, and 12″ lost all around (runners legs!)
3. Proposal submitted to 5 grants
4. Scholarships

By the end of the year in correlation to my list:
1. Travel 2 more countries
2. Finish 2 out of 3 semesters with same grades as the 1st
3. Publish a book
4. Visit grandparents
5. Eliminate all credit cards forever (exchanged with sky diving)

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There were a total of 431 hits for the 618 pics I was able to place during the two weeks that flicker was open to the public. Those images found in my website will be left permanently for the public to view at flickr.com/claudiapena and I know there’s a way to embed it in my website but that’s a summer project. Thank you for all your support!

Calendar: Taking a two week break from 2/1-2/14 to gather many more images and poems on my trip to Thailand. (Yes, I’ll place them on public display.) The best way to view them is to navigate through all the sets on the right hand side. Click on a set, I usually place a description on the cover, and the pictures come up.

Unusual things from the blogosphere: Never fear, the Grim Reaper is here and his accountant has a dot com. Via Peter Russell a world death toll clock. Wow, heart break really kills people (900k), most deadly infection is in the lungs so stop smoking, kiddos (210k), most deadly communicable disease is AIDS (170k), worst accidents are in cars (62k) and this was only 1/20! I stared for five minutes trying to find the systematic correlations between sets…wow.

Edusphere: The latest buzz on the virtual edu world is this video on teachertube.com about the 20th century student. I hate to throw a wrench here, but how many public education teachers have time, resources, and the class to do this with? My comment on the board: “I need a better perspective…how many of those 2.7 billion Google searches are made by children and more specifically, how many by my students? How many of those searches are not gaming or pornography related? How many texts use the grammatical rules I teach (remember the whole potential thing, even if you know it’s worthless unless you use it)? how many texts are longer than 3 words? How many students are doing this with their parents permission and how many parents don’t just see the computer as a babysitter?” I’d love to know your take please, specially if you are not a teacher.

Flickerize yourself! Did you know if you like one of the images on flickr.com/claudiapena, you can email me or comment to request it, then place it on a calendar, stamp, phone card, make a print, make a book, stretch into a canvas, key chain book, make a journal, a Lego trail or shirts and bags. Most can be done with the resolutions that I’ve uploaded through the magic of vector graphics. The best ones to place on a five foot canvas in a living room would be the stitched triptychs. If you need a high resolution picture and it’s not site specific (ie. the Cambodia or DMZ sets), please let me know and I can go back and retake it. Love the pic below: spot the English, Japanese, Korean, and Russian on one corner and four what?…Be back on V-day! Muach!

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Now you can! Check out my pics of Asia in October-November on flickr.com/claudiapena, without a membership from January 4th-10th. I uploaded about 500 described in sets, but I will try to upload some more throughout the week so come back often. Since I use them to augment the poetry, the pics will be private after the 10th. Still trying to get used to the Canon A640.

Wipe out hunger, learn vocabulary and nerd out: play at freerice.com. My score is 8 bowls in 12 minutes, challenge!

I’d like to welcome new members on the blogroll: artist Roberto Castillo and Mihael Lica of Online Public Relations. Please go by and check out their websites. Smile as you welcome the 2008 work week and eat ice cream for me…I’m spending some time in the dentist’s chair.

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