Month: March 2006

Kingdom Hearts Two is on its way in a sweet and wonderful Amazon shipped package to me as I write this.

Just caught the first trailer today. It’s got Captain Jack Sparrow in it! And possibly more Sephiroth! And Mickey kicking ass with a ninja sword.

Ah… the best things in life are 49.95…

Just got this in my inbox…

Host: QOHS Reunion Committee Location: Holiday Inn 2 Montgomery Village Avenue, Gaithersburg, MD View Map When: Saturday, July 8, 7:30pm to 11:30pm Phone: 301-948-8900 Ticket prices are as follows: $65/person or $120/couple if paid by June 30, 2006 $75/person or $140/couple if paid after June 30, 2006 and at the door

Payment Options: Checks and Money Orders should be made payable to Daniella Hoffman – Quince Orchard Reunion, (Address removed).

UNTIL JUNE 30TH, For a fee of $3.75, Credit or Debit Cards are accepted through Paypal at www.paypal.com. Please send your payment to (email removed).

THE FIRST 50 PAYMENTS RECEIVED WILL BE ENTERED FOR A FREE HOTEL ROOM FOR THE NIGHT OF THE REUNION AND A COMPLIMENTARY BRUNCH THE NEXT MORNING!!!

If you have any questions, please email Daniella at (email removed)

For overnight guests the Holiday Inn is offering rooms at a discounted rate, please contact the hotel for reservations and/or details.

I think I’m going to go, once they get the right email address… I consider my gmail account a “throw-away”, but somehow people keep thinking that’s my address rather than honoring the reply-to address (my barnson.org email).

I think, if we do come, we’ll take up Justin & Kelly on their offer of a place to stay. That really close proximity to the festivities is just too much to pass up. Justin, are you guys going to be in town that weekend? If so, that means all we have to worry about are plane tickets and finding a babysitter for a few days.

Now that I think about it, only Bryan, Daniel, Sam, and I were in the grade together at Q.O., right? No excuse not to get together with whoever’s in town and have a few drinks. For me, the drink of choice is a tall double breve with sugar-free vanilla and hazelnut 🙂

So let’s call it dinner on Friday night, July 7, 2006. Are there any good, cheap restaurants in or around Monkey Village where we can maybe book a room and have a dinner together? We were tallying, and realized that if everyone came that I’d want to see, we’d be looking at like twenty+ people!

Christy and I are working out what we’d want to do for travel plans. I’m thinking we’d fly in Thursday afternoon/evening, plan on spending a day driving around and being tourists on Friday day, have a dinner with friends Friday night, and then spend Saturday just doing whatever and then hitting the reunion Saturday night. Sunday’s another free day, and we’d fly home Monday-ish.

Every so often, an essay comes along that changes your whole point of view on something. This one, by Paul Graham, is long but worth it: Why Nerds Are Unpopular.

I’d usually summarize the points someone’s trying to make, but it would be a disservice to this essay to let it be picked apart based only on my summary of the author’s primary points. All I have to say is my immediate reaction upon reading it was “Wow,” followed by “He’s so right”.

I was terribly unpopular — bottom-of-the-heap unpopular — until 10th grade, when I made a conscious decision to play the popularity game. I managed to bump myself up a few ranks on the popularity scale, until by 11th grade I realized it was stupid and time-consuming. That was about the time I also got less angsty about the whole thing.

I think every thirteen-year-old should read and understand this essay. Unfortunately, I think they’d fall prey to the same problem described in it: it’s an assignment given as part of the zero-sum, worthless game played in the prison of high school.

The trouble with profound things is that they’re too irrelevant, most times, for me to have been interested in “getting” them in junior high and high school when I needed them most. I remember being assigned Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in 7th grade, and pretty much missed the whole thing. My freshman year of college, that piece caused another “Holy Crap!” moment for me.

We’ve built this thing that we were trapped in through junior high and high school. It wasn’t intentional… high school is like the garbage-dump of our industrialized, specialized society. A by-product, something we had to do to build a more productive adult society. What do we do now to fix it? Or does it need fixing?

Today, I heard an NPR report on a company that wants to help the environment by having you pay them for a convenient way to dispose of all your old or outdated electronic devices, including cell phones, computers, TVs, printers and cartridges. I figured that by getting air time on Future Tense, that GreenDisk must have a solid offering. After checking out their site, I thought their offering was not enough.

I would like to provide my fellow bloggers with an option for ridding of old tech gear.

When it comes time to buy something new, such as a 21″ flat-screen monitor, donate the existing item(s) you are replacing to the local school system. By doing this, you are essentially buying new tech gear at a discounted price while helping children, courtesy of the IRS. Most school systems have IT departments that are set up to accept contributions. When you stop off to donate items, the school system hands you a blank donation form. You get to determine the worth of the old items getting donated.

In practice, you might go out and buy that new dual-output video card for $100. Swap out that old video card and donate it to the local school system. When they give you a donation form, you would assess the value of that old video card. It might be worth $50. It might be worth $125. One can never tell these days, since there isn’t a computer electronics parts pricing guide that rules the after-market.

Each calendar year, households are allowed up to $5K in charitable contributions before an audit on the individual contributions is required by the IRS. We keep impeccable records at our house.

Is the Amount spent on cubicles per year, the largest share of office furniture sales.

Cubicle Article

Insane…

4:00 AM. I used to have a joke about this time of morning. “You know why there are so many babies in Tooele lately?” I asked a neighbor once. “The water?” they responded. “No. It’s the 4 AM train,” I replied. “How so?” said they. “Well, you know, the train going by wakes you up. It’s too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep… what’re you gonna’ do?”

Well, here I am at 4 AM. I hereby nominated 4 AM for the “Armpit of the Day”. The real hard partyers all went to bed two hours ago. The hard workers have at least another half-hour or hour to sleep before they’re up for the day. The hard sleepers have another 3 or 5 hours to go yet before they’re up.

The tattoo-to-customer ratio down at Wal-Mart goes way, way up, as does the “generally scary people” quotient.

The sobering thing is that I am numbered amongst that “scary people” bit. It’s just a smelly time of day. The air lingers, heavy and thick like fumes over a garbage dump, waiting for the morning breeze to blow them away.

On the flip side, I’d call 3 or 4 in the afternoon the “Back” of the day: the traditional time at which you might take a nap, or ease back in your chair to read some email and get ready for the stretch to quitting time. For the night-shifters like me, that’s the time of day when sounds and smells begin permeating your existence, slowly drawing you toward wakefulness and preparation for another hard, long night.

It’s break time at work. That’s about the only redeeming feature of the Armpit of the Day. Maybe I’ll go hit Wal-Mart and act like a scary person.

Okay,

Explain this to me: We have a trade deficit, which means we buy more foreign products than we sell to other countries. We also have a budget deficit, which is where we spend more money via the government than we take in. Are we getting these two numbers confused when we talk about how much in debt we are?

Also, I can see how it’s bad that we send out more money than we take in, trade-wise. But it’s simply bad economics to pay a US worker $6 an hour plus benefits to manufacture something that they can make in China paying $5 a day. We’re a victim of our own standard of living…we need to make too much to live in our country and still compete against manufacturing in other countries. Give China some time, and when their standard of living goes up, they’ll be hard pressed to find $5 a day workers. (Note: numbers are pulled from thin air to make a point).

So what’s the solution for the trade deficit? We can’t compete with the prices. Embargo? That would leave us out of the world trade economy.

Now, with the fiscal deficit, that’s the gov’t spending more than it’s bringing in. That’s bad. But the problem is that to reduce the deficit, the gov’t would have to reduce spending. However, the choices to do that are: reduce spending or bring in more. Obviously, spending less in Iraq is a great choice, but what about the part of the economy that feasts on military spending? Do we spend less by cutting programs? Do we eliminate bloated gov’t jobs? Those things tend to weigh against you in election years. But not nearly as do the opposite approach, which is bringing in more via taxation.

While I don’t advise the US to totally withdraw from global concerns, I think for a period of time it would be wise to pull back. if you overextend yourself financially, you stay home, cook your own food, and save money. I think the US should do that as well. Pull out of Iraq. Concern itself with getting its own house in order before taking care of the neighbors.

But then, if we do withdraw from global affairs, when we look to come back in 5, 10 years after we fix things (oh my hopeless optimism!), do we see our place filled by China?

My $.02 Weed

Latest idiotic news today: Tresa Waggoner was fired from teaching for playing excerpts of “Faust” in class.

The first part of the editorial is something we’ve dealt with before: the suspension of a teacher for presenting an imbalanced political argument in history class. The second part is what I found interesting (excerpts below):

Her supposed sin was introducing her first-, second- and third-grade students to opera by showing them a bit of Faust, a staple from the school library.

She showed a clip of the video last fall to teach the children about bass and tenor voices, the use of props and “trouser roles” in opera ahead of an upcoming Opera Colorado performance in Bennett.

…

Some folks think the real reason Waggoner became a target was more because of the school’s Christmas play than her playing 12 minutes of Faust.

Karen Grossiant, who resigned as Bennett mayor after Tresa Waggoner was placed on leave – saying it was “the last straw” – acknowledged as much.

The true problem: Waggoner did not put Christian songs in the play. This outraged some townsfolk. She had to go.

Faust is a classic opera by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. In a moment of despair, Faust makes a pact with the Devil (Mephistopheles) to have Mephistopheles do his bidding in exchange for Faust’s soul. After a period of festivity, Faust realizes the error of his ways, and that service to mankind is how one gains “immortality”, and is saved by angels as the Devil attempts to claim him.

You probably wouldn’t, at first, draw a correlation between this incident and the firing of Utah teacher Erin Jensen. But the common theme underneath them both, from where I sit, seems to be the practice of firing teachers due to politics and religion, rather than their ability to provide a quality education.

This really concerns me. Teachers should be worried grading papers, keeping kids interested in learning, and ensuring that children have the education they need to thrive in today’s society, not which politician, parent, or pundit they’ll offend.

About a year ago, I was talking with Christy, and suggested that maybe she ought to consider returning to teaching after our smallest children are in school. She told me the ugly truth about teaching. “I love teaching. I loved the kids. But I hated the paperwork, grading papers, and politics, and that’s 80% of the job.” She’s more interested in pursuing her home-decorating business (which turned a modest profit last year! Yay!) than teaching.

It looks like only 20% of the job is actually the enjoyable part most of us associate with teaching: instructing the class. That’s the fun part, I guess. But with today’s political climate seeping into public-school classrooms, that 20% fun seems to be turning into 50% “walking on eggshells”.

I guess that’s just another reason why we’re having so much difficulty finding good teachers for public-school classrooms in the US. The awful pay and bad coffee weren’t enough.

Help!!!

I have a problem with audio CD-Rs not getting played back on certain devices. This is a problem because for the first time I had a customer call and complain that they can’t get my CDs to play.

I’m burning audio CD-Rs from a external Mad Dog 7×1 using Nero Express on XP. Once the customer complaint came in I took a CD and played it back without problems on an office boombox, office computer, car stereo, home computer…and then it wouldn’t read on my home CD player. Yikes!!!

What am I doing wrong? I couldn’t find any configuration settings in Nero that would account for older CD players. Are CD-Rs not the correct media?

Help!!! If the issue is too much for posting, phone calls appreciated.

Just wanted everyone to know I am still among the living, only barely tho. Everyone be good.