Step out of line and you wear this!
Category: Daily Life
Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.
Work at home job opportunity!
Now you too can be part of the US border patrol without ever leaving the comfort of your easy chair. Why yes! This excellent opportunity allows you to keep our country safe by using your home computer to spy on our borders and report when an illegal is crossing.
The Texas governor announced his plans for streaming the border surveillance camera footage over the internet at a meeting of police officials on Thursday.
…
Web users who spot an apparently illegal crossing will be able to alert the authorities by telephoning a number free of charge. [Source]
I see a completely new market for a previously distasteful Internet technology!
LIVE-SHOT is a revolutionary concept. You can challenge yourself and compare your skills to other members with our on-line target shooting. We have developed a system where you can control a pan/tilt/zoom camera and a firearm to shoot at real targets in real time. [Source]
What could go wrong?
Who needs Prozac! Tag! You’re it.
I’ve been feeling increasingly depressed. Work stress and my general situation have just beaten me down. I have managed to keep the dizzy spells back but often it is just by luck that I’m not swirling away.
Yesterday I got off my bum and ran. It wasn’t a terribly lengthy run but it was on hills and made me wheeze like the air had suddenly shut off. Then last night I took a break and had Sarah join me for The Knoxville Juggler’s Club meeting. We had a blast and I exercised hard.
Today I feel great! The work is still there. Today’s schedule is nuts 
(that link won’t show it because we use 9 calendars to coordinate our family). I may have a career altering decision to make at lunch. And the wolves are still at door. But I truly feel less down!
Schools have blunted our creative education with the elimination of arts and language skills.
“We can no longer afford the arts,†yet recent studies have confirmed that public schools cannot afford to eliminate arts education because of the important contributions it makes in the cognitive development of the whole child. [Source]
Were it not for the exceptional PTA at Rocky Hill, our elementary school would not be teaching foreign language at all. Now schools are looking ot reduce physical activity, like banning tag, on the premise that these activities are not safe. They are making a huge mistake.
The principal said children playing tag suffered both physical and emotional injuries.
Exercise works to prevent depression! (without side affects)
…another treatment for depression – exercise therapy – that can be as effective as antidepressants and counselling. Several scientific studies have shown that a regular programme of exercise can help people recover from depression – lifting their mood, reducing anxiety and improving self-esteem and concentration. They have also found that taking regular exercise can help protect people against becoming depressed in the first place. [Source]
A study of male graduates at Harvard found that the relative risk of depression over a 25-year period was 27 per cent lower for men who played three hours or more of sport a week. [Source]
I think Franklin Elementary School Principal Pat Samarge has it wrong. Tag, even with its "abuses" develops our children physically and mentally. Without exercise, Samarge is contributing directly to physical problems and, as the studies have shown, Samarge is also contributing directly to the emotional abuse of depression! Of course, not playing tag doesn’t mean these children will become depressed nor does it imply that these children are being denied opportunities to exercise. It simply means that Samarge has taken away an opportunity, opened a door to potential lethargy, and eliminated a possible depression preventative.
Yummy! I had pondered creating a site to review teachers from the parent and student point of view. I am happy that it has already been done!
Side note, In case you missed "Schools Abolish Recess in favor of Sensitivity Training", click this to see the picture! "I’m OK! You’re OK! a horrible bigot."
Coding hurts
This is the stuff that makes my eyes bleed:
<FORM action="{$register_script_name}?{$smarty.server.QUERY_STRING}" method="POST" name="registerform"{if $js_enabled} onsubmit="javascript: if (check_zip_code(){if $default_fields.email.required eq 'Y'} && checkEmailAddress(document.registerform.email){/if}) return true; else return false;"{/if}>
Podcasting $ounds fun!
Remember how I used to talk up Rocketboom? Since discovering it on September 27, 2005 I didn’t miss a show until… I have yet to be able to watch Rocketboom again. I now suspect my Linksys router is the problem.
Sarah wants to get into podcasting so I’ve made some efforts at understanding podcasting. In my research I discovered that Rocketboom has grown!
Yesterday I was talking with Amanda Congdon, one of the co-founders of Rocketboom. Her videoblog is now seeing about 300,000 viewers a day. That’s, what, a year or so old? Did you know that advertisers are now paying her $85,000 per week? That’s almost as much money as I made in an entire year of working at Microsoft. [Source]
This is not to imply that a 3 minute video blog is 3 minutes of work. "…Amanda tells me she and her team are working nearly around the clock right now to put together their three-minute videoblog…" Great success comes from great efforts! Money aside, video podcasting sound fun and is definitely a medium worth learning more about!
Army of one
In my race against time, I’m losing.
Keep those posts coming! Some of my blogging tricks.
I enjoy blogging. I enjoy both the writing side of blogging as well as the reading and interacting side of blogging. I personally think it is more pleasureable to read a blog that has a steady stream of information rather than bursts of quantity followed by silence. I believe that is one aspect of Instapundit that makes Glen Reynolds (and his rumored ghost writers) stand out. Like dead air on the radio, several days or weeks of no posts can cost your blog readership.
I collect links and tidbits as I work. When I’m researching and see something interesting I open a tab in Firefox and hold the link. My goal, of course, is to write something substantial and correlate to other sources and similar tidbits but rather than Pulitzer I often end up with a couple of sentences saying, "check this out!" I also have friends that instant message or email interesting links which go into the pool of possible publishings. And my browser homepage for Firefox is the Geek Crack site http://popurls.com/ while Internet Explorer retains the news portal iWon.
My trick to steady posting is to devote a bit of time each Sunday to making non-time sensitive posts into the future. This was a feature that Blogger lacked. On blogger, posting in the future made the information immediately available but with a future date. As you can see in the picture, WordPress handles future posts correctly! The screenshot shows my recent posts today but also reveals seven scheduled posts already written which will appear whether or not I’m frantically working, or even away from my computer. The next one arrives in 16 hours then another in 20 hours, three post in 2 days, and finally two posts 4 days from now. These non-time sensitive posts come from the links I’ve collected over the week. The scheduled posts may only be a couple of sentences but if time permits over the week, I can improve the information before their scheduled time (and being what a blog is, I can update them at any time but my style is typically to leave a post alone once it publishes).
By using scheduling features of your blog publishing software, you can have posts appear while you are at the office of a business that has a policy against blogging at work. You can keep your readers satisfied with a steady stream of good writing. By spreading your material out over time, you avoid turning your readers into skimmers because of information overload. Write steady!
Update: Swap Blog also offers bloggers some good advice.
Ajax Tutorial and Prototype
I’ve had Pete Freitag’s Ajax Tutorial and Prototype open for awhile with intent to share. Since I haven’t looked through it yet, I can’t say anthing beyond that. It is written in conjunction with ColdFusion.
From the mouths of babes
Amy, deep asleep, loud and with enthusiasm: "Thank you elephant!"
Large walls
My dragons are formidable today.
Sleep tight
I think it says a lot when you fall asleep to Joe Walsh singing, "life’s been good to me so far."
Airing it on the web
If you aren’t going to secure your security cameras (why yes! Some of those do say k12 and edu), then perhaps you should not name them "Peniswart" and "greenshit".
For the voyuers out there, someone has put several of the public cams on one page.
Today’s magic numbers
Today was June 22nd of 2006 or in English notation 6/22/6. I realized this while starting a check as the cashier rang up my purchases. The total came to $26.62! I love it when that happens. The other day I tried to get a picture of my odometer at 111122 (having missed the opportunity for 111111) and when I missed that I hoped to get 111123 but traffic didn’t permit.
Dinner was $36.93…all factors of 3 and geometrically elegant with 9 being an upturned 6 bookended by 3s.
For the record…
None of my arsensal of antique pci video cards have available drivers for Windows XP (yes, they are that old!). Despite knowing this, I periodically shut down all my machines and go through the exercise of removing and trading out video cards to try to get a second monitor working on my workstation. Eons ago when I had two functioning monitors my productivity felt so much greater. Usually I do this at the crux of a critical deadline (call it avoidance.. call it procrastination.. whatever label, it is just plain stupid.).
So, I now put this down for the world to see so that 6 months from now, when I am certain that I overlooked a compatible car in the stack of useless hardware or buried in the depths of a dusty case, I can be reminded that I’ve been through this exercise enough!
It’s because our a/c is broken
CNN reports: Study: Earth ‘likely’ hottest in 2,000 years
The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the “recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is heating up and that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.”
This is Bush’s fault!
Other new research Thursday showed that global warming produced about half of the extra hurricane-fueled warmth in the North Atlantic in 2005, and natural cycles were a minor factor
Or maybe Jesus’…Because, it was cool when he was around.
The Bush administration has maintained that the threat is not severe enough to warrant new pollution controls…
Yes! It’s Bush’s fault!
The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization chartered by Congress to advise the government of scientific matters.
Ok then…it’s Jesus’ fault.
