Blog # 1 - It's All About Me !

My name is Richard C. Kayser. I currently am employed as a teacher of Information technology at the Greene Counter Career Center in Xenia, Ohio. I have re-entered the teaching profession after a 26 year hiatus.

During those 26 years I worked as a Systems Analyst ( fancy title for a computer programmer ) at NCR Corp ( 6 years ) and then at BASS, Inc. (20 years). BASS, Inc. provides complete systems to grocery store and mass merchandiser chains. I have software that I wrote in over 5000 grocery stores and mass merchandise stores around the world. Unfortunately for me, BASS was purchased by a company in Israel named Retalix Ltd. ( http://www.retalix.com/ ) and they decided after 3 years that they no longer needed my services. What a blow to my ego that was.

After a 3 month summer of searching for a new job, I found the position at Greene County Career Center. What better for me than to be able to go back into the teaching profession and to be able to teach about computers. The only bad element was the big cut in salary I had to swallow. I am having a ball teaching A+ PC Repair & Troubleshooting, Network+ networking, Visual basic.NET programming, and Visual C++ programming to Juniors and seniors at the Career Center. Life is good again.

I have served as the Boys Junior Varsity Basketball coach at Dayton Stivers School for the Arts for the past 5 years. I get a great deal of satisfaction working with the young men that play for me. Quite a few of my past players have gone on to have a 1 or 2 year successful career at the Varsity level at Stivers. This is an even bigger thrill for me because I am an Alumni of Stivers (class of '72) as is my mother (class of '35). In fact my mother, who will turn 90 years old in March, still lives in the same house I grew up in just a few blocks away from Stivers in the South park Historical District in Dayton. Check out the picture of my JV team on the right.

I have really begun to delve into the world of Multimedia with my students. I often feel so inadequate because my students 1.) know so much more about this than I do, and 2.) they can do just about anything they want to in the way of editing and "touching-up" digital pictures. I have decided this class may give me the opportunity to catch up with them ( at least I hope so !).

For years I have been taking digital pictures and videos of family, teams, games, you name it. There are so many pictures I have that I would like to "adjust" or add to that I don't know where to begin. Maybe I will finally get around to doing just that.