Kauscience.org is live!
My latest project has been putting the site that was formally kauscience.hawaii.k12.hu.us back online.
The site belonged to my late friend Ted Brattstrom who passed away on October 2, 2021. He went downhill very quickly after finding out that he had cancer. Just before the end, he and his wife Lisa King called me. He was in the hospital and barely had the energy to speak. He wanted to give me the password to his website and ask that I take it over for him.
His wife just gave me a password, no username or anything. I wasn’t sure what this password was for exactly. I assumed that the site would have domain registration passwords, host passwords, in addition to some sort of administrative panel password. Concerned, I asked Lisa to ask him for more details, but he simply said that was all I should need…
On a whim, I decided to simply ssh to the domain name. To my surprise I got a response! I tried the password that he gave me on the root login and to my shock, I was in! I immediately started a backup of the whole site to my local machine.
The machine was running fedora. As I waited for the scp transfer to complete, I remembered him showing me the server one day when I visited his classroom. It was an old desktop tower behind his desk with a sticky note saying “server, do not turn off!”
The site is an absolute treasure trove and journal of his passions as a science teacher. He was a lover of travel, penguins, amateur radio, astronomy, aviation just to name a few. Ted was a remarkable man.
I remember meeting him for the first time at a Hawai’i DOE PD for Kea’au Ka’u Pahoa complex area science teachers. I was a brand new Teach for America teacher and hadn’t even had my first day of class in Hawaii. Ted was reading a newsletter for the BIARC. I immediately new that I had a new friend. I followed him around the rest of the day asking him questions and listening to stories.
He passed on to me his hovercraft project almost as soon as I met him. My physics students built one in my second year of teaching. The hovercraft has become an annual tradition. It really deserves a blog post in itself.
Ted was one of the most passionate science teachers I have ever had the pleasure to meet. He was a huge inspiration to me in my first years of teaching. I owe him so much and he is so dearly missed. Seeing him was the only reason I would look forward to the otherwise uninspiring annual KKP ‘institute’ day. Whenever there was a science related professional development, I could be sure that I would run into Ted there. Our conversations at lunch would almost always be more fruitful than the whole presentation.
I still use many of the cool science toys that he passed on to me and think of him. Some of them will hopefully get blog posts in the future.
I hope to keep his site preserved for years to come. Hopefully google will index the new domain soon and people will be able to find it easy enough.
Filed under: Uncategorized - @ March 19, 2023 12:53 am