This link has nothing to do with the post!

I was going to say something about how the small computer is going in two seperate and not right directions and then be hypercritical of both the Libretto U100 and the Linux-driven N770 Tablet but I'm getting ready to go on vacation, so enough IT shop talk.

Another year...

...older? wiser? closer to retirement? Not sure yet. It is probably not surprising that each time a school year ends, I begin to look back and think about what the year meant, where I have been, where I am now, and where I want to go. (yes, two years counts as every year, dammit!)

I think I actually had a good year this year. My portfolio evaluation went well (art teachers are audited in my district, to see if we are teaching what we are supposed to be, and how well our students are performing), and I may get to spearhead a new project in our district, if I can write up a stellar proposal soon! More on that later, if it goes through.

I still have one more day of work for the school year, sans students, but I am actually already looking forward to next school year. And not just because my salary will be back to normal (12 weeks of leave, you do the math), but because I have lots of good ideas of how I can do things better. I already applied for one grant (which I recieved the result of on Wednesday "no money for you!") and plan to keep applying for them, until I actually recieve one. I want to document better what my students have done in each grade through the year. And I want to strive to give the students their work back in a more timely manner. My pile of unreturnable work was much smaller this year than last (no names, moved away, etc). And I am also going to try to keep my room more organized, and my lesson plans more decipherable by non arty types - because now that I have 2 kids, I feel that I will most likley have to use all of my sick days next year for "family illness" as opossed to personal. Oh well.

***
NYC, here we come! Late night giggle-fests of 3 & 4 year olds are in the cards, and hopefully a cookout of some sort, even if it is a take-out cook-out.

Obligatory Revenge of the Sith Post

Its a movie about how the sadness and anger of one person can fuel dark and violent social change. I've given this some thought and decided that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is a far better movie in the same ilk.

That said it was great to see Paul Hogan turn his character James "Crocodile" Hacker into the such a complex portrait of evil.

The Bowling Clones

You'd think that I'd have something to say about the UK's first cloned human embryo given the amount of attention my undergraduate professors gave to it.

So to satisfy this very silly expectation of yours I'll say something. Ready?


"The Bowling Clones is what I'd name my All-Cockney Rolling Stones cover band"

"William, the Rolling Stones weren't from the East End and neither are you."

See? I told you it was a very silly expectation.

Louren made me a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast

Yummy yummy. I'm shaving and Louren asks me how would I like my peanut butter and jelly sandwich to be cut.

I think about triangles and it makes me think of sailboats and the mountains and pirate hats.

Then I consider rectangles. They remind me of the struggle for equality. the wasteful design of booster rockers on our space shuttles (no link), and the twin towers.

"I'd like triangles, please!"

I'm Captain of the DESTINY and I'm hiding in the volcanic fjords of INSANITY ISLAND from the the Queen's vessels. They want to take me alive so that they can give me a show trial. But the only show they'll get is the brilliants flashes from my Cannons!

"SHIVER ME TIMBERS!"

"Dad! Hurry up, I'm going to school."

Avast.

My children are so smart

Jason can not only calm himself down by sucking his thumb, if the light is too bright, he swings his other arm over his head, to cover his eyes.

Dakota can work the TiVo. Ok, she can pause, back 8 seconds, end of program, begining of program, and rewind the TiVo. She can't program it herself yet, but considering she can't read, that isn't such a big deal.

***
I read at 3. I think the story involves me sounding out words scribbled on the walls of a bathroom stall. This was before I started preschool. That is actually why I started preschool - my mom was a little scared. Dakota, at 4, can read a few words, but I am not worried at all. She is just begining to show interest in reading, and I for one am not going to push her. She can read some things, though.

"mom, that says 'stop sign'."

"Actually Dakota, it is a stop sign, but it only says 'stop'."

"no mom, it says stop sign"

***

I am, however, amazed at the discrepency of parental perceptions of Kindergarten homework loads.

The moms at the Missouri City Chik-fil-a seem to think that their children were not getting enough, so they must not be learning anything, so they pulled their kids out to homeschool them.

The moms in my Sunday School class seem to think that their children recieve too much homework in Kindergarten.

And a parent at my school insisted that his son recieve nightly homework. In Kindergarten.

All I know is that when I was in Kindergarten, we still had nap time, we turned a giant refrigerator box into a puppet theater, a Doctor's Office, a phonebooth for turning into Superman, and a cave. Oh, and my mom, when it was her turn to make snack one day, actually fried doughnuts for everyone, because we were studying the letter D. It kinda ticked the other moms off a bit, but I bet that is how the other moms felt about Martha Stewart when she made snack for her daughter's Kindergarten Class.

***
Oh, and Dakota is smart for talking me into buy ice cream. First she picked out cones, and said they were Birthday cones. If we had these at our house, it would be like everyday was somebody's birthday. When I relented, she of course reminded me that now we needed to buy ice cream.

She's beyond crazy smart. She's sneaky smart.

Can't Uninstall Windows Media Player 10

Microsoft Windows Media - Media Advice: Windows Media Player 10

Dances around the fact that you can't uninstall it. You can only make it less annoying. In fact, Windows Media Player is the best application for viewing Windows Media.

Nevertheless, there is a principal about which I am very annoyed. I spent the better part of six hours tonight uninstalling all of the annoying "fake-free" (in reality a trap to send information to advertisers or induce you to buy or waste your time or make your computer slow or otherwise just be bad and annoying) applications that invariably come with computers marketed to the home market. At work, we have imaging a computer down to about fifteen minutes, and nothing goes out on those machines which is nonsense.

"But you leave Win Media Player on the machines at work"

Shove it. I can't tweak my personal machine just the way I like it.

"You could always go linux"

Double shove it. I like Windows XP, I just don't want it bundled with Windows Media Player or with Microsoft Ham Sandwich. This is not to say that I
m taking the legal position that Microsoft doesn't have the right to bundle Microsoft Ham Sandwich. I will wait until I take Intellectual Property survey to give an opinion on the right but I can tell you right now that my opinion about just about any legal matter after taking a course on that matter usually becomes "It depends" or "It could go either way" but I'm not talking about the power or right. I'm just talking about bad marketing. Take a product that I like (Windows) add something I don't like (Media Player) make it mandatory that I have it and suddenly, I like your product and your brand less than I did before.

Red Clumps (Time out from my contracts outline)

Once I was in a casino in London. I was planning to start betting on black as soon as there had been no run of red for more than two spins of roullette wheel. There was another bettor there, a high-roller who was already making lots of crazy bets on clumps of black numbers.

The wheel came up red fourty times in a row.

As the high-roller got more and more upset, I just kept eating cheese and pickel sandwiches "Aren't you going to bet" "as soon as we get out of the odd little area of statistical improbability" "Are you some sort of mathemetician" "Are you asking that solely because I haven't tipped you for the sandwhiches?"

I had a point here. It had something to do with that Dilbert where the guy keeps saying "3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3" and the UCC.

Maybe I didn't have a point

More upsetting associations

Pink Floyd's "Pigs on the wing" (part 1) often gets mixed up (inside my head) with the Opening Theme to WKRP in Cincinnati such that I have a basically seemless hybrid of the songs. It goes like this:

Baby, if you didn't wonder,
Wondered what happened to me,
I'm living on the air in Cincinnati,
Cincinnati, WKRP.
Got kind of tired packing and unpacking,
We would zig zag our way up and down the dial
Maybe you and me were never meant to be,
But baby think of me once in awhile.
I'm watching for pigs on the wing.

Upsetting Realizations

I'm well beyond the realization that many of the cartoons that I so loved when I was a kid are, in actuality, of extremely low quality. Similarly comes the realization that the more-recently produced low quality cartoons that Dakota watches are no worse.

Some realizations still manage to be as surprising as they are upsetting. For example, I'm watching Magilla Gorilla on Boomerang when I notice how much the kindly Mr. Peebles looks like the evil leader of the Axis during the 2nd World War (Are you crazy? You think I'm going to let either of that name or that word be a search-engine match to my blog? Get the net.) What gives with that? Surely it was not intentional, so does this evidence some sort of repressed fears by the artist? Maybe Peeples looks nothing like that and I'm projecting my own fears or aggression on to characters on the TV. If its the later, then why Magilla Gorilla?

In fact, I am deeply skeptical of either psychoanalytic theory. Rather, I think that, at a certain point, the recycled detritus of culture (that passes for new cultural production) eventually associates mosts things to some icon that it vaguely resembles. This sounds like a greatly simplifying process in our collective unconsciousness but it can lead to very disturbing associations between similar looking artifacts of good and evil.

I was getting some food somewhere(how's that for vague?) when I overheard someone relating a similar experience. He noticed that H.R. Pufinstuf look like (wait for it...) the Uruk Hai