Ben McMurry

In case you were unaware, I sold my trike to buy a commuter bike . . . . and so far I love it! Today was the first day of commuting by bike. I have always wanted to be bike commuter, but the trike just wasn't doing it for me. It's so hard to store and hard to take places. Plus, it's an expensive piece of art that I couldn't just leave anywhere. I added 15 minutes to my total commute time, but also added 40 minutes of moderate exercise. Many of you may thing that 20 minutes to go 4 miles is slow. There is a giant hill I have to overcome! Check out the elevation profile. Long story short. I like cycling and I like cycling to work!

I've read all about standing desks. I like them. I'm never going to be a full-time stander though. I like to stand and work on days that I don't stand in front of a classroom all day. But, after 4 hours of teaching, I prefer to sit. I'd seen this great Ikea hack  a while back about a cheap standing desk . We went to ikea this weekend, so I decided to give it a try. I switched out some of the ingredients mentioned in the aforlinked article . I used $3 brackets and a $1.99 shelf. I also went with the black-brown look. Lack side table  - $9.99 Ekby Valter - 2 X $3.00 Ekby Laiva - $1.99 It was still under $20! Hopefully it will continue to work for me.

I've heard great things about using ifttt.com. I finally got around to using it. It's a great way to automate repetitive tasks on the Internet. For example, you can make a recipe that automagically saves pictures from Pinterest to dropbox. I think I may have just made a recipe that will repost this blog on my professional blog to my family blog. If it works as well as it claims to, then I'll love it. Here is a picture. I wanted to see how this works.

This isn't really a post about how to use Siri in the classroom. Well, it could be. This semester I have a deaf student in my class. He's fluent in Russian, Uzbek, American Sign Language, and Russian Sign Language. He's here to learn English. Communication with him involves an interpreter or a series of notes on paper. Enter Siri. After class, his interpreter had to leave but he still needed to talk. Honestly, I got tired of writing/typing everything. It was slow and annoying. I opened up notes on my ipad mini and started using Siri. I could say whatever I wanted and it would be written in real time. He would then type his response. It sped up our communication and was fun for both of us. Siri, thanks for making my job easier and enjoyable!