Well on Friday afternoon I got the call to teach a class at one of the local middle schools. I’ll be teaching 8th grade Math. This is a great opportunity. The students need a quality Math teachers and I can give them that. I have some great ideas planned for my students over the course of the year. This is going to be awesome and best of all, I have the feeling in my heart that this is the best thing possible.

I am going to be having a lot of fun and you’ll read about it for sure. Don’t worry, I will still be posting here about business, technology and opinion.

Looking for a free hotel stay? Hampton Hotel is having a contest where you can win a free night stay at any Hampton Hotel. How is that for a great contest?

It’s been while since I did a lot of traveling in across the US, but I remember whenever I stayed at a Hampton, the beds were comfortable, the rooms were clean, the staff was friendly, and amenities were great. In fact, I used to frequent the Hampton in El Paso whenever I would head their for business.

If I won the contest, I’d probably use the free night to make a trip back to El Paso. I had a lot of fun in El Paso and the Hampton there would feel like home once again. This time though I’d go with friends. Solo trips are just not my thing anymore and there is nothing like a nice weekend trip to really recharge the batteries and reinvigorate the creativity.

If you want to try your hand at the sweepstakes, then just go ahead and visit the Hampton Chain of Friends Sweepstakes site and enter the contest. Remember to read all of the details about the contest there as well. It’s a pretty cool contest and a free vacation is the right thing we need in this current economy, right?

And guess what? If you win, try to take me along for your free night stay. Let’s have some fun!

The safety razor cost me $10 off of EBay. It’s a Concord brand one made in China. The blades are Dorco brand made in Korea and cost $1.50 for 10 of them. If you are counting the costs, I usually get 2 or 3 nice close shaves from each blade.

I also went with some shaving soap that I bought off the internet as well. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of it before I started.

I had to learn a new style of shaving when I went with this safety razor. I do a first pass lightly just to get most of the stubble off and then do a second pass that gets just about all of it. The shave ends up being a lot closer than it was with disposable blades.

Cost wise? It’s a lot cheaper. Green wise? It’s a lot better for the environment. Instead of buying heavily packaged cartridges with lots of plastic and steel parts, I simply buy a steel blade that comes in a biodegradable package.

If you haven’t given much thought to moving over to a more traditional shave then you really need to think about it.

I’ve mentioned before that I love taking internet with me when I go. I use my Blackberry all the time when I am out and I’ve got a USB modem that I use with my laptop when I am out and there is no hotspot available. I like being able to catch up on Facebook, Twitter and even the real news when I am out.

I just found a cheaper way to keep connected out and about and that is with Boost Mobile. They’ve got great phones to go along with great services to keep you connected to all of your favorite social media when you are out and about, or even on your couch at home.

As I said, they’ve got some great phones available. One is the Motorola i1. If you follow me very much you know that I got a penchant for Motorola phones and the i1 is high on my list. It’s Android, WiFi, all web, and it’s even got the Boost Walkie Talkie feature. With just $50 a month for unlimited web, email, IM, text and even nationwide calling you know it’s a great deal.

They’ve also got a Blackberry 8330 available. I love my Blackberry, it’s easy to keep in contact and the features you get with a Blackberry are worth it. If you go with Boost, that’s $60 a month for their unlimited Blackberry Plan. Just check out their Blackberry to see for yourself. Let me tell you, the $60 they charge is a lot less than what I am paying right now.

How about paying your bill with them? They call their payment info Re-Boost, as in refill. They’ve got several ways to load up your phone with more boost including online, over the phone and even in person. In other words, it’s as easy as can be. I like how you can set it up with your debit card and automatically replenish your account. That’s so simple.

Face it, you need a mobile phone and if you haven’t used the mobile web then you’re really missing out. Whether you get a Blackberry plan or the i1 unlimited plan, it’s less than a couple of bucks a day to have all of your calling, texts and mobile checkins taken care. It’s indispensable.

Reading about the i1 makes me want to get it right now. I just have to convince my wife…that shouldn’t be hard.

I really think that many people check their Facebook more often than they check their regular email. This means that a Facebook message will get to them quicker. I also can see if they had a chance to read it or not based on their Facebook activity.

I just wish Facebook messages had more features. A better list of features would sure make it more usable for sending messages.

What kind of changes would you make to the Facebook Messaging System in order to make it work better?

I also had security issues with using apartment complex internet. Sometimes when the bandwidth got very congested it would do some rather weird things. I realized that I didn’t feel very comfortable checking my bank account balance and Paypal balance on it.

I am pretty happy with having the EVDO modem. The speeds are not too shabby and I can actually watch Youtube videos streaming rather than choppy. I really like the convenience of having an internet connection that goes with me.

I like writing about ways to give back to the community and also ways to help schools. Today I get to talk about both of them. Charter is currently running a contest that will give 50 laptops away to two nominated schools. You can get involved to help and get a chance to win a laptop for yourself.

The specs are pretty good on these laptops: Lenovo G555′s with a 15.6″ screen, 160GB drive and 3GB ram . That’s plenty of power for video encoding and just about anything a student or teacher needs to do. These are definitely well worth it for the winning school.

Basically, the contest will run like this. First you go and nominate your school on the laptop-a-day giveaway site. After nominating your local school, you can participate in the open voting to decide which two schools will win 50 laptops. The open voting runs through September 20th.

You can win a laptop for yourself by either signing up for Charter Cable or by going to the laptop-a-day giveaway site and registering to win a laptop. If you do sign up for Charter service then you’ll not only get a chance to win a laptop but also be eligible for up to $300 cash back. That’s how easy it is. Basically, you can help yourself and help your local school.

This is just one of many contests that Charter Cable runs throughout the year, from HDTV giveaways to free XBox 360′s. I like keeping track of these contests and offers by checking out Charter on Facebook. If you click “Like” on the page, you’ll get all the latest offers and news right on your Facebook Wall. That’s how easy it is to keep up to date.

I used MySpace on and off during that time period but haven’t logged in a maybe 2 years. I find that there is no point in it and I don’t even think I can remember my login. I stopped using MySpace primarily because of the fact that people themed out their pages to the point of making them ridiculous but I think I might be the only one who left because of that reason.

This last school year I witnessed my students going from all on MySpace to all one Facebook over the period of about 3 or 4 months. For them it was the Facebook games and then it all snowballed. The kids wanted to be where the other kids where. Pretty much everyone had moved over to Facebook by the end of the year.

I don’t know if MySpace can get that back. Facebook’s now a place where families hang out, where kids meets other kids, where parents meet other parents, where people play games, join in political discussions, and just about anything else you can imagine. It’s the modern day equivalent of a town square. That’s something that MySpace never was. If they change then they need to be a better town square, but even that might make people make the switch.

Why? People don’t like going back to something they abandoned. They made a choice to leave it behind so they need a good reason to head back. I just don’t see that happening.

I like to make video calls with Skype. I like being able to see people and share experiences. In fact, it’s one of the best ways to keep in touch with family is different parts of the world. Video calls on Skype and MSN Messenger have become a part of life for me and my family.

Unfortunately, the video often leaves something to be desired. The little webcam that came with my laptop isn’t that good and it’s hard to find a decent webcam that produces really high quality video. In fact, I was rather surprised to learn that many of the leading webcams out there like the Microsoft Cinema and Logitech Pro 9000 may claim to be HD, but they don’t stream HD over the internet.

This is where the FV touchcam N1 by faceVsion comes in. It’s one of the few webcams out there that offers true HD video streaming over the internet. It does it by having its very own H.264 video encoder built in. In other words, it’s encoding your video in H.264 in real time. This is a big deal because video encoding can be cpu intensive but when it’s done at the hardware level, then it’s seamless to the end user. You can’t have real time streaming of HD unless you have the encoder built into the webcam.

The FV touchcam N1 is actually the first Skype Certified webcam with embedded H.264 encoding, that’s right, the FV touchcam N1 is the first Internet streaming true HD webcam for Skype video calls. It’s sister product is the FV ExpressCombo that provides a great laptop webcam experience through either ExpressCard slot or USB 2.0. For more information check out the faceVision on line store.

When you are ready to buy, the FV touchcam is available through shop.facevsion.com and other value added partners. If you want to save some money, www.shop.facevsion.com is now running a back to school promotion with $10 off any purchase, using the promo code of FVTBTS2 while checkout. That makes it an even better deal.

I just wish I would have had several of these when I was teaching my computer class last semester.

In the second semester of the last school year, I had a chance to teach a computer class to all of the high school students at our small private school. I designed and developed the entire curriculum from the ground up and it was truly an educational experience for both me and my students. I thought going in that the students would be the only ones learning but boy was I wrong when I started realizing how much they already knew and how hungry they were for interesting projects.

I started them out by introducing them to Social Media and making sure they were grounded in at least one social networking site. Next I moved on to Squidoo Lenses. Every student had to make a Squidoo Lens on something that interested them. I wanted to get them writing and sharing about something they were passionate about.

After Squidoo lenses, I introduced them to the world of blogging by sharing some of the more famous blogging sites. I showed them how you could share your views and opinions and also how you could use a blog to make money. John Chow’s blog really struck a cord with some of the boys. For the blogging unit, they had to create a blog, adjust the blog’s theme and then publish several posts on the blog.

Our next project unit was about video. Basically, I divided the class into several groups and they had to produce a 2 minute video of their own creation. I was surprised out how great the quality turned out. I saw a lot of potential in my students from this project.

I added in a unit about Powerpoint just because a couple of the students expressed interest in it, but generally most of the students were a bit bored with it. I allowed them to use to Powerpoint to create a project showing what they had learned over the school year as a final project.

All in all, I’d say it was a great class and while the curriculum wasn’t perfect, it gives a general idea of what to offer in a high school elective computer class.