By Juan C. Ayllon 'I am tense but trying not to be. Seated in a hospital room in a light ochre modern rocker, with its tan walls, beige Stryker hospital bed, wires, charts, serene lake metal-framed print, the light green privacy curtain pulled back with a lustrous, faux oak flooring below, I am overcome with the large institutional vibe, the low drone of whooshing forced air, muted chatter from a nurse's station, electronic beeps, the closing of heavy, metal doors and passersby clad in blue scrubs, some pushing heavy equipment, marking the time. I am waiting for my mother, Bess Ayllon, to be wheeled in following a successful trans-catheter mitral valve replacement.
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By Juan C. Ayllon Summer is great for enjoying the outdoors, gardening, exercising and open air dining, and when it rains or gets too hot, binge-watching shows like Netflix's Queen of the South, spinning and streaming tunes in the comfort of air conditioning. With a caveat, that is!
Whether it's that endless, slow rotating circle on our screen, the upload indicator stuck at 20 percent or a message that reads, "Unable to start streaming", we've experienced it. With the legions of students and others now home gobbling up bandwidth, internet providers are stretched and service is more sluggish than usual. Whether they're throttling internet speeds or simply maxed-out, the end result is the same--slower upload times and streaming service timeouts. It's maddening. 'Satisficing' -- What is Better? 'Good Enough' for Now, or Buying with a Longer Term Perspective?6/16/2020 Juan C. Ayllon Back when I was tan and fit, working on my Bachelors degree in Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona in the 80s, I encountered the concept of "Satisficing." It was a hybrid term espoused by a textbook guru that combined the words, "sufficing" and "satisfying." The overarching idea was that in business, often decisions with big ramifications must be made against hard and fast deadlines, and often the best outcome was not ideal, but one that sufficed and was generally satisfying. Through subsequent years in industry and, later, education, I have seen companies and school districts execute this concept countless times.
Sitting through district inservice meetings, fellow educators and I were inculcated in the merits of some new approach that was going to revolutionize student buy-in and achievement -- only to be replaced by something else a few years later. With the plethora of new, bigger (or smaller, more compact) and better products and services being pumped out daily, the tendency for many of us is to either run out and buy what we can, scrimp, save and purchase, then a few years later, sell and repeat the process. By Juan C. Ayllon Now, you may ask what a photo of Michelangelo's David statue is doing here. To find out why, you'll have to go to my review of the Gold Note PA-10 amplifier review at Positive Feedback HERE. For several months, I had a pair of them plugged into my system serving as monoblocks. Generating up to 600 Watts, they definitely added a little extra headroom and oomph to music and HD movies. I was a little sad to see them go, but that's the nature of reviewing!
So, what's next? That's a good question. Yesterday was the last official day of my 2019-2020 school year, and this last quarter was a real doozie! Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my students got their first taste of remote learning I taught my art classes over the internet. Though very different from the traditional classroom, all in all, it was a very positive experience for all.
To celebrate the occasion, I created a short iMovie (my first) of some of my students' works with an upbeat, royalty-free electronic music track as the audio backdrop. Their featured work was largely comprised of found art, creative food concoctions, Q-Tip paintings and photography composition projects. And, coincidentally, our Goldendoodle, Liam, makes a cameo appearance at the beginning of the video! |
Juan C. AyllonA writer, artist, educator and owner of Prairie Audio Man Cave, he lives with his wife, Isabel (AKA Belle), and their Goldendoodle, Liam, enjoys listening to high fidelity music and all things hi-fi at their home in the greater Chicagoland area.. Archives
March 2024
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