Well this week was filled with excitement. The best thing that happened was that I was finally able to fix my new computer. However, it took restoring it to the factory defaults to get the darn thing to work. I guess sometimes computers can just be a headache. I got everything running the right way again on Wednesday. I was very pleased and I am happy to be clicking along as should have been the case before. I have now disabled my automatic Windows Updates and I will leave them off until Microsoft decides to provide updates that don't screw up services I need to run my modem. I guess that means I won't be updating until I get back!

So that was my big personal accomplishment. There were plenty of work accomplishments as well. The most notable of these accomplishments is that we finally came up with a training plan for the 9 provinces. We are going to do workshops of about 40 people 3 times a week starting next week until the 20th of November. Our audience will be 20/20 from 2 different provinces for each session. I am very happy with this schedule because it does not conflict with my personal agenda whatsoever. What I mean is that we will train on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday of each week. The Friday trainings don't cramp my style at all. Now all I have to do is reconfigure the current content to suit the new audience. This should not be too monumental of a task since we are going to make things more simple and activity oriented. I just have to get down to it.

I have been busy working on reports for our previous workshops and creating job aids for Moodle. The other pressing matter is to create a schedule for Moodle admin workshops. I will do this at the start of this week since I have made some good headway with the job aids. So work is good.

Incidentally, I spent part of today organizing candy for the future workshops so I will be sure to have enough to go around. Hershey's is a hit here and I am going to give some candy out as prizes. The 12 piece sampler prize is going to be given out this week when I award the best group at the NIE for their online work. 3 groups have to complete a report for the Ministry of Education and I am going to give the top group their just rewards. The groups have performed well but I have a feeling the decision will be an easy one to award the top prize.

So what about the Bling Bling you must be saying by now. Well I named this entry as such after my adventure at a gem show this week. We had a day off on Friday for a poya day. This was pretty cool since at home it is Labor Day weekend. So it turned out that I still got my 3 day weekend! Anyway, the show was from Thursday-Sunday. I went on Friday and man am I glad I did. The show was at a huge convention center. There were 2 sides to the display with something like 150 vendors. One side had almost exclusively Sri Lankan gem vendors and the other had mostly Asian dealers from places like China and Myanmar. It turns out that I bought all my stuff from Sri Lankan dealers. I will post pictures of my new acquisitions to Flickr but I have to tell you all the story. First of all I got in for free. There was an enterance fee but I didn't pay. I think it was due to an administrative mistake on their end but I am definately not complaining. I preregistered online but when I went to the desk they didn't have my info. So the guy got my card and prepared a special guest badge with a lanyard and everything. I think this is why I was able to get in without paying and also why so many people were asking me if I was in the gem business. I think I was getting special "exporter" prices.

My biggest purchase was a citrine and a blue topaz. Each of them weighs in at a massive 120+ carats. I had never bought loose gems before so it was kinda hard to get a baseline. Thankfully Beth gave me some insights before I went to the show and I got a heck of a deal. I can hardly wait to get back home and have them appraised. I am also going to get them set by the guy who sold them to me. I am very excited to be in such an amazing place with such great acess to my greatest guilty pleasure. I am going to him and another guy I bought from for the lower end gems and I will depend on my co-consultant's hook for the very pricey sapphires. I had a great time at the show. I was there from 10:30 until 4. It was awesome.

Well that's all folks. I hope you all enjoy Labor Day for me. I know I enjoyed poya day for you!