Beacon’s server has been acting, well, quirkly lately.

It’s crashing for no apparent reason. Best guess — hardware.

Worst guess — no idea.

Makes blogging more difficult when the server is down at night.

More to come later.

While I struggle with other issues, here’s a much happier entry.

Jakob turned one yesterday! To say that this year has been a blur is an understatement of near epic proportions. I can’t believe that he is already a year old. He seems to gain skills and understanding every day. (There’s a blog entry to be written about what I’m learning watching my son learn and how that applies to my own teaching, but that’s for another day.)

Being a dad has been — and I am sure will continue to be — the most amazing experience of my life. He’s a rather incredible little boy, and I really do love being his daddy.

(Oh… and be sure to watch the video of
Jakob pushing his cousin around.

I don’t remember where I found this… probably just through the latest Mac OSX product releases, but Comic Life is a wonderful little program. As you can see, the idea is to take photos (or drawings or whatever) and make comic strips / comic books out of them.

The interface is simple. It automatically found my iPhoto Library, so I had immediate access to all of my photos. Dragging in captions couldn’t be easier, and I found that if you know your way around the basic tools of any photo editor, you could quickly figure out most of what you needed to know.

There are several ways to format pages, and you can also design your own and then save that format for future use. Captions, lettering… everything is customizable, and there’s also a well-written straight-forward help center for you to use. Comic Life exports into several different formats, although I didn’t see a PDF format which would be very helpful — and would seem to make sense. Perhaps that’s a licensing issue, I don’t know… but it’s something I would love to see in future releases.

Overall, it’s a great, easy to use program that I could see being incredibly useful in a classroom. I’d love to see how Kate might use it in New Media for storyboarding, or how a student could use it in an English class as a story-telling device, or a science teacher uses to have kids explain an experiment — perhaps as an alternative to a Power Point presentation. I’m going to show it to one of our English teachers, Jon Goldman, who has used comics in the classroom before, because I am sure he could do amazing things with it.

The pricing is pretty good — $25 for a personal use copy (and $20 for edu pricing), and $199 for a 20 seat license — and I would love to find out what the developers have planned for future releases.

And yes, I plan on creating ‘The Life of Jakob: The Comic’ as he goes, but that shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone.