This year I have tried to make a better effort of going to the children’s school book’s publisher’s websites and make use of the online tools. They have quizes and tests and aides to enhance the learning. Homeschooler’s have absolutely embraced the web. I often find great sites like Presidents Secret History that make education fun for the children. Don’t forget, you can also rate your children’s teachers.
Category: Of Interest
Those miscellaneous things that just must be published.
LOST – the unanswered questions
Here is a list of unsolved mysteries and unanswered questions. I expect some will never get answered.
LOST Cometh!
So, how far will the producers go to promote LOST?
MAKASSAR, Indonesia (AP) — An Indonesian jetliner that vanished with 102 people onboard did not issue distress signals or report any mechanical problems, a top aviation official said Thursday, adding to the mystery surrounding its disappearance. [Source]
Blogger – the gateway to WordPress
Blogger with its minimal barrier to entering the world of self-publishing helps people understand the pleasures of blogging. Then it frustrates us with service outages, bad customer service, and the inability to backup data and years of work. Then we discover there is a world of highly configurable, open source content management systems freely available. We learn about a wiki and that they too abound in open source but wikis serve a different a purpose than CMS.
A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiË]
or [ˈwiË.kiË] [1]) is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. … WikiWikiWeb was the first such software to be called a wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called “Wiki Wiki” Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport’s terminals. According to Cunningham, “I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for ‘quick’ and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.” “Wiki Wiki” is a reduplication of “wiki”, a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for “what I know is”, which describes the knowledge contribution, storage, and the exchange function.
[Source]
A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to websites.
[Source]
I am a WordPress fan. WordPress has a shared solution similar to Blogger at WordPress.com and provides an open source solution at WordPress.org. The open source solution will give you more control but you will need to have a place to put your website which means paying for some hosting (which is cheap these days!).
On January 2nd I mentioned that Latte Man moved to WordPress. I should have also mentioned that Newscoma has moved to WordPress! Update your marks. Find Newscoma at http://newscoma.com/. Jon is still trying to get Katie to make the move away from Blogger.
There are other solutions. For great examples of Drupal installations, look at any of Tim’s sites. Anghus suggests that we take a look at Joomla.
Btw, if you are a programmer writing CMS systems, like I do, then this link to compare wysiwyg editors will be invaluable to you. I personally almost always end up with Xinha.
Update your marks!
Incase you missed it, Latte Man has come over from the dark side and converted to WordPress! Visit him at http://tripleventi.com/, and add his rss feed and his comment feed to your readers. Talk to Jon about feed readers.
Person struck by car at Bearden Middle School
News status: Unconfirmed. Ambiguous. Second-hand.
I just received a phone call saying someone (non-specific…may or may not be a student) was struck by a car at Bearden Middle School.
What happened to The Blue Sloth?
Reading in an RSS Reader is wonderful. You can absorb so much more content than through regular browsing. Browsers still have their place and I use browsers probably as much as I use my news reader. One of the things I like to do is use a browser to periodically check in on a site that I normally read in feed because you miss out on the design elements in a page using only RSS.
So today, I check in on Philip and is design is radically changed that I had to question if I was on the right site. His history seems gone (only one post on the site). Links to other sites and interests vanished. Anyone have the story? Is Philip ok?
We ain’t completely cityfied yet
On the drive home from getting Tommy from his visit with the grandparents, I spied 3 American Black Vultures feasting on a road kill (see last paragraph). I tried to photograph them with my cellphone but fumbled when the car behind me got irritated and started tooting its horn. I do love seeing interesting wildlife.
These are very large birds of prey at 65cm length and with a 1.5m wingspan. Their plumage is mainly glossy black; they have broad wings with white tips, a short tail and a featherless greyish head. In comparison with the Turkey Vulture, the Black Vulture flaps its wings more frequently during flight. … Though not having any natural predators, they have become scarce in some areas due to lack of suitable nesting habitat. [Source]
Fenced-in Irony
A Southern California fence building company hired to build some of the fence (stupid! Waste o’ money!) between the US and Mexico has been caught employing…wait for it…illegal aliens!
Some videos must be seen – Jerome Murat
This excellent entertainer is worth the 8:19 of viewing time. So well presented! I can’t describe it without ruining the magic of the video.
Scrubs++
So last night on Scrubs, Zach Braff as Dr. John ‘J.D.’ Dorian is watching television and identifies The Janitor (Neil Flynn) as the transit cop in The Fugitive going on to analysis him as bitter over having to do janitorial work since acting hasn’t worked out. So, not being one to take things at face value, I look up Neil Flynn in the IMBD and sure enough, he was the transit cop that gets shot in The Fugitive! His credits are fairly lengthy including voiceovers in two Ratchet & Clanks (meaning we hear him everday and never knew it), the voice of XR in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, and most amusing to me, the janitor in It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie.
Kudos to Scrubs and Neil Flynn!
And he’s back
Serious bloggersweb publishers that quit are like Knoxville natives that move to another city…they always come back.
Women Need to Understand Internet Porn
The Bathroom Door Rule explains that men look at porn. "If a man has an internet connection, he looks at internet porn. " In their article, "What every woman should know about internet porn," they explain why you might find certain references to bizarre websites on his computer.
This is a simple factof life but if you see something unsettling maybe you should talk to him about it before you make wild assumptions or accusations. Don’t just assume your loved one is a chubby chasing pedophile with an Asian fetish, talk to him. If you see something uncharacteristic of him, confront him on it… [Source]
An online friend of mine commented last night, "my wife was asking me why my porn was 8 months or more old. I told her it had just lost the thrill." He said she replied, "You’re just geting old." So, for my friend, I present a new thrill! The Horny Manatee and its story.
In a line Mr. O’Brien insists was ad-libbed, he mentioned that the voyeur … was watching www.hornymanatee.com. There was only one problem: as of the taping of that show, which concluded at 6:30 p.m., no such site existed. Which presented an immediate quandary for NBC: If a viewer were somehow to acquire the license to use that Internet domain name, then put something inappropriate on the site, the network could potentially be held liable for appearing to promote it.
In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy, NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159, after the taping of the Dec. 4 show but before it was broadcast.
[Source]
PC Purge – PC World writer goes 20 days no computers
I often threaten to turn off the cable, all the computers, and lock away the video games for a week or a month. David J. Lake of PC World went 20 days without a computer at his editor’s request. 20 days was not long enough to draw any strong conclusions but the experience was pleasant enough that he may do it again. I like that by day 5 his child is outside playing instead inside on video games.
Instead of playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and cruising skateboarding-magazine sites for video clips, he actually skateboards and reads. [Source]
Homeschooling seems like a better idea
For reasons like suspending a 4 year old for sexual harassment, er, hugging (btw, that story pushed our little E TN news webpage onto Reddit.com). The child’s hugging is appropriate for continued emotional development.
Emotional Development
Most children aged four to five will:
- Still rely on caregivers, while no longer needing or wanting as much physical contact with caregivers as they received in infancy and as toddlers
- Continue to express emotions physically and to seek hugs and kisses
- Socialize with peers, begin to develop relationships, and learn to recognize some peers as friends and others as people they don’t like
- Have more opportunities to interact with peers, either through school or recreational activities, and will play with other children
[Source]
Today I get the pleasure of having a meeting at Noah’s school. I requested a meeting with one teacher and I ended up with a meeting with all his teacher’s and the vice-principal. This kind of ridiculousness makes me regret not homeschooling Noah this year.
Update: The meeting ended up being 5 women and me. The teacher and vice-principal were only interested in rhetoric and bureaucracy taking exactly the defensive posture I tried to get everyone to put aside. Btw, the meeting was called because at the beginning of the year my son lost a $9 book that my wife offered to replace and it was never replaced so while the rest of the class had books they could write in, my son had to do all his work on a loose leaf paper using a borrowed workbook. I found out about this last week. Absurd statements rolled from the primary teacher’s mouth such as "from the meeting with your wife I gathered the only reason your son is in school is to be a safety." She is a hateful person and I have less respect for her after my meeting than I did before.
This meeting also reinforced my belief that we made a mistake not homeschooling Noah for the fifth grade. One approach some friends used with their children was to home school only in the fifth grade. This gave the child some one-on-one time with the parent at a non-critical year. For instance, to do the one year in the sixth grade would potentially harm the child’s social opportunities through middle school. I think Noah would have learned more this year and had a better time at home. A home schooled child can have plenty of time for social interaction through community activities/sports, home school social networks, and home schooled group classes (that’s right, homeschooling does not imply a child locked away in a closet).
