Graduation Speech

A couple of weeks ago Lisa's dad was invited to give the keynote speech at his old high school's 2009 graduation. Over the years I've heard a number of speeches at graduation ceremonies, and this one is a good one. You can watch it below.

Heat

I have spent quite a bit of time in the last week painting the wrought iron railings on the front porch of our house. And I'm glad that I'm finished...at least with that part of the job. First of all, for something as insignificant as a railing, it's taken a lot of time to finish this job. The problem is there are all of these little grapes and leaves and designs on the rails, and it's a real pain trying to get good coverage on all of those nooks and crannies.

Another reason I'm glad I'm finished with that, though, is that I did most of that work in the 90 degree heat, and it was darned uncomfortable. After an hour or so standing outside painting I would come in absolutely drenched with sweat. I looked like someone had poured a bucket over me.

I wrote about this a few months ago, but I'll go ahead and say it again: I don't really like the summer. I feel bad saying that because I know most people LOVE the summer and all it has to offer (vacations, pools, barbeques, sun bathing, etc.), but I really have a problem with the heat and humidity. I am so glad to see that the weather for the next few weeks is in the seventies rather than the eighties.

I have more painting to do, and some of it is outside, but at least it won't be extreme heat like it has been.

Looking for a Recruit

I REALLY need someone to sign up for this and try it so I can see what they get. I am WAY too cheap to do it myself.


Click here to see what I'm talking about.

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Update: Rather than one of YOU signing up for this, I went ahead and convinced Choco to sign up for it! I figured if the guy wants to start spamming Choco that he won't mind.

Here's what Choco and I found: The first lesson is free and you can download it off the Internet. The remainder of the course costs $129 if you buy it BEFORE listening to the the first lesson and is $258 if you buy it AFTER listening to the first lesson.

The first lesson is an MP3 of a 20 minute interview that describes how the guru once jumped into another universe in order to become a skilled photographer. Of course, if YOU want to learn how to do this, you have to buy the rest of the course.

Reading between the lines, though, it basically sounds like this guy is using focused daydreaming, which psychologists say can be helpful, in order to improve himself. The fact that he stumbled upon an innovative photographic method doesn't really prove that he ever left out universe. It's all silly malarkey. But as I said above, if anyone else is interested in paying $129 to try it, let me know how it goes.

My Broken Appetite

When it comes to controlling one's weight, one of the most important things is knowing when one is full and when to push away from the table. And I have to say that, for the most part, I'm at least okay at this. Just because a restaurant gives me a 3,000 calorie meal I don't feel obligated to eat everything. I don't have any shame about asking for a "To Go" box.

But there is one food in which, apparently, my ability to tell when I'm full absolutely fails me, and that is with milkshakes. I don't know if it is some neonatal reflex to suck or what, but once I wrap my lips around the straw of a milkshake I just go to town and don't stop until I hear that sad, sad slurping sound at the bottom of the shake.

And that's why--when I order a milkshake at a restaurant--I always order the smallest size. Because I know I'm not going to stop until it's gone. And it doesn't matter how much is in the shake--I'm going to be unhappy when it's gone. I honestly think you could give me a milkshake in a container the size of a kitchen garbage can I'd just keep sucking until the whole thing was gone.

Milkshakes are sort of my diet kryptonite.

They Come in Threes

What's the difference between Michael Jackson and a grocery bag?
One is white, plastic, and dangerous to children, and the other you carry groceries in.
__________________________________

Deaths, so they say, come in three's (though I'm not sure who "they" is in this case). And this week we've had three deaths of famous people who were prominent in the late 1970's: Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Michael Jackson. Fawcett and Jackson even died on the same day, yesterday.

I honestly was never all that attached to Fawcett and McMahon. I didn't have a Farrah poster as a kid, I didn't watch Charlie's Angels and never saw The Burning Bed, and honestly has Fawcett done anything else of note? And though I do remember McMahon from four shows (1. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 2. TV's Funniest Bloopers and Practical Jokes with Dick Clark, 3. Star Search, and 4. The Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes commercials), I never really gave him much thought. He was just a pleasant enough sounding announcer and the guy you could hear laughing off camera at Johnny Carson's bad jokes.

Michael Jackson, though, is another matter. I was genuinely sad when Lisa called me on the phone last night to tell me that Jackson had died. I don't guess anyone should be too awfully surprised by his death--one could tell by looking at the guy that he hadn't been taking care of himself for decades. But I still was caught a little off guard by his death. And like I said, I was sad.

Maybe the sadness stems from the fact that he died, at least as far as we as outsiders can tell, unredeemed. He went from being this super cute little kid in the early '70's who could sing and dance like nothing we'd ever seen to an absolute pop icon in the early 1980's to a plastic surgery joke in the late '80's to a pariah in the last few years. And no, I wouldn't have allowed him to spend ANY time with my kids, but still, I can't help feeling sorry for the man. Here was a guy that you didn't need a degree in psychology to tell had been damaged by his upbringing, someone we got to watch rise to astronomical heights and then fall hard right in front of our eyes, and we couldn't do anything to stop it. It's classic Greek tragedy, the only difference being Greek tragedy is a fiction, and this was a real person's real life we watched fall apart. And that's what made the difference.

I looked at my Facebook page last night and found post after post after post of people lamenting Jackson's death. And get it straight: most of these people TWO days ago would have as soon made a joke about Jackson as praise him, but his death means that there will be no redemption, and the jokes aren't funny anymore, if they ever really were.

A Little Too Late

I went to the grocery store Sunday, and as I finished checking out the cashier handed me my receipt and said, "You need to read the notice that's at the bottom of the receipt. Looks like you bought some recalled products."

I read the bottom of the receipt (part of which you can see in the blurry photo to the right), and this is what it said: "IMPORTANT RECALL NOTICE--Valued customer: You may have purchased the product listed below which has now been recalled. You may return the product for a full refund at any of our stores or you may contact the company at" and it listed a phone number. It then listed a number of products that had been recalled, included some Nestle break and bake cookie dough, which we had recently gone on a kick over and as a family had eaten maybe four packages of the stuff.

The bottom of the receipt went on to say "The product may be contaminated with E.COLI 0157:H7 and, if eaten, could result in severe illness to those individuals who may consume this product."

On one hand, I'm grateful that Kroger took the time to warn us. And now I don't feel so bad about using my Shopper's Card. Of course, this confirms what everyone has always suspected: Thanks to the shopper's card, Kroger has a detailed history of everything we buy going back almost a decade. Still, if they're going to have a shopper's card, here's a good use for it.

On the other hand, though, I've already eaten all of the cookie dough, so I've apparently gotten about as sick as I'm going to get.

My Defiant Streak

Sunday I was driving up the road just up the street from my house when I noticed that house after house had put plain little white signs in their yards. These signs had all been spray painted over stencils and they all simply said, "25 mph."

The city where I live had already placed an official road sign that said "SPEED LIMIT 25" on both sides of the street, but apparently that wasn't enough for these people. Drivers DO tend to go about 40 or so through that section of this road, and they wanted to remind everyone of the speed limit.

I was going to snap a photo of these signs and put a picture of them on this blog with this article, but by Monday afternoon the city police had come and taken them all down.

Which is good, I think, because if most people are like me, they were ticked off by the signs. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a speeder. I don't think I drive much above 25 in that section of the road anyway. And I don't mind that the city has its speed limit signs up. Heck, I don't even mind when the city puts up those machines that post the speed limit and then radars you and tells you how fast you're actually driving. I consider that a public service, and I consider it the job of the city to monitor my driving.

What bothers me is that these individual home owners felt like it was THEIR responsibility to tell ME how fast to drive. It really brought out my stubborn, defiant streak. Instead of making me want to slow down, the signs made me want to race my engine as I drove by, get my car up to about 50 or so as I went by. I didn't do it because going that fast through that area would definitely be dangerous. But still, I WANTED to do it.

As I said above, I don't mind being told what to do by people who have the authority to do it. It's when people who don't have the authority try to tell me what to do that I get defiant. Probably the jerkiest thing I've ever done in my life was a result of this. Years ago Lisa and I were at the Cincinnati Zoo and we went to the orangutan exhibit. A woman was photographing the animals with this HUGE camera, and she had a sign hung on her back that read, "Photo Study in Progress. Do NOT Talk to me!" If she'd said "Please do not talk to me" I might have been in a better mood, but the giant "NOT" and the exclamation point sort of set me off. I tried to figure out what would be the most irritating thing I could do to her, and after a moment I went over, tapped her on the shoulder, and asked, "Hey! How come I'm not supposed to talk to you?" She glared at me and then turned away without responding. I didn't feel clever for making her angry. I felt like a heel. And maybe that's another reason why I didn't speed by the houses Sunday or Monday. I knew I wouldn't be happy with myself 30 seconds after doing so.

In any event, the signs are gone now, we've all been reminded of the speed limit, but I doubt that anything much will change as a result of this little mini-protest.

Slot Machines in Kentucky

The issue is dead for now anyway, so I guess I'm a day late and a dollar short, but I want to go ahead and say it:

I am glad that the Kentucky Senate killed the slot machines at race tracks bill.

When I was 18 years old my very first vote EVER was a ballot initiative to allow the lottery in Kentucky. I punched the "Yes" button with absolute glee. Why? Because I understood at the time what I guess most people still don't, that the lottery is really a kind of tax, a tax that allows educated people to avoid it while allowing the less educated to participate in it. As Garrison Keillor once described it, the lottery is "a kind of tax for people who don't do well in math." And at the time I thought, Okay, let the idiots play the lottery and keep my taxes low!

I don't feel that way anymore. It is immoral for the government to make money by tricking the very people who can least afford it to play a game that they have statistically zero chance of winning, all in an effort to keep taxes low. And as an educator, I'm very irritated that the state legislature wants to tie the new slot machines bill to education, promising hundreds of millions of dollars for building new schools if the bill passes.

Here's an idea, though: If the legislature REALLY wants to help schools, don't pass a casino bill and instead raise taxes to equal the hundreds of millions of dollars it wants to give schools. The tax will be distributed among all Kentuckians, not just the ones who would play slot machines, and it will be LESS than the money spent on the slot machines. After all, hundreds of millions of the slot machine dollars would go to education, but hundreds of millions of additional dollars would go to the race track owners and to the administrators of the racing casinos. By NOT having the casinos and instead taxing people, the government would free up those other hundreds of millions of dollars for Kentucky taxpayers to spend on other parts of the economy: new cars, houses, furniture, horse racing gambling.

This whole idea to have casinos was wrong, in my opinion, a permanent bad idea to fix a temporary problem in the economy. And I'm glad the Republican led Senate had the sense to see it for what it was.

Dexter

Two nights ago Lisa and I finished watching Season 3 of the Showtime series Dexter. If you've never seen the show before, I can't recommend it enough. It's very exciting stuff. The show is about a serial killer named Dexter Morgan who only kills OTHER serial killers. Sounds weird, and I guess it is, but it's a really good show, with lots of good character development, and plenty of suspense.

Season 3 started out more slowly than the first two seasons, but by the end was just as tension packed as the other two seasons. And just like the other two seasons, Lisa and I watched all 12 episodes in about 5 sittings.

If you've never seen the show, I HIGHLY recommend Season 1, available now on DVD.

The West Wing is still my favorite TV show of all time, but Dexter is somewhere in my top 10.

You're IT!

I was reading an article Friday evening about the origins of baseball, but that's not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about today is something that the article mentioned just in passing.

The article stated that some claimed that baseball was around at least during the Revolutionary War, as one American soldier named George Ewing described a game called "base" that was played at Valley Forge. The article discounts that, though, going on to say that the game of "base" didn't have a ball or bat, but was much more like the game of tag that we all played as kids where someone would chase you and try to tag you before you got to base, hence the name of the game.

The article then went on to describe where baseball actually came from, but I was left thinking, "Our soldiers were playing TAG during war time?!?" That seems so weird to me to think of a guy in one of those pointy revolutionary hats and with a musket rifle lying over against a log cabin getting involved in a spirited game of tag!

Can you imagine some of our soldiers in Kabul today doing this? The lieutenant comes out of the barracks to find some of the off duty soldiers chasing each other around the compound and shouting "Ollie, Ollie, Oxen free!" He might be tempted to ignore the Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy.

Resting

TAKING THE DAY OFF!

The KySTE Conference is over! We finally left North Bullitt High School about 4 o'clock or so Friday, and I made it home around 6. And then I pretty much collapsed. That's all I have to say.

Tomorrow I'll probably have something more profound, but for today I'm resting.

Lessons Learned from KySTE

1) Since Tuesday I've been in Louisville attending the KySTE conference, and I've learned an important lesson: It's not really possible to help organize and run a large conference AND attend it like a regular attendee. You would think I learned this last year. After all, now that I think back, I had pretty much the same experience last year when I was also helping to run the thing, and I even wrote a post about it. But apparently I thought it would be different this year. I sat down a week or so ago with a list of all of the sessions and their times, and I carefully mapped out what I would attend during each session as a 1st choice and what I would attend as a 2nd choice if the 1st didn't work out or something. And I was very excited about some of the sessions that I was going to attend.


But it's been a day and a half of the conference, and I haven't sat in on a complete session yet! There are just too many other things to do. I DID get to spend some time listening to a couple of sessions presented by Microsoft, but I've missed a bunch of sessions that I wanted and/or needed to go to.


There is ONE session that I'm pretty sure I will attend in its entirety today, and that's the session that I'm presenting about free and legal music that can be obtained on the Internet and used in school projects. I hope at least a few people come to the session. I say that, but honestly, if NO ONE showed up I wouldn't be that upset. It would free me up some time.



2) The second thing I learned this week is that I may need to start separating my social networking sites from one another. Right now I have four social networking sites:

• This blog


• A Facebook account


• A Twitter acount (I actually have two of these, but one is a district account and is for the entire school district)


• A YouTube account.

Right now I have them all linked together. My Twitter account posts to my Facebook page and to this blog. Blog entries from this blog also appear on my Facebook page. And if I load a video to YouTube it automatically appears on my Facebook page, and I usually post it here, too.

All of which is great, but...

...but at KySTE this week a number of people have started following me on Twitter because of my updates on KySTE. Those people don't really need to hear my tweets about my kids or about the fact that I'm hanging out at the pool, and my Facebook friends and family don't need to hear my tweets about some new technology I've found. I'm afraid if I make too many Tweets (which show up as status updates currently) about technology that my Facebook friends may get tired of them and unFriend me on Facebook. I'm going to kind of monitor the situation, but I may find that I need to at least disconnect my Twitter and Facebook, leaving Facebook as a place for "friends" and Twitter as a more professional network.

I'm not going to do anything yet, though.

These Pillows ARE Pretty Soft...

A few months ago I wrote a post about a very politely written note on the desk in a hotel room I was staying in. When I checked into my hotel a couple of nights ago I found another very politely written note. The note stated, "Due to the popularity of our guest room amenities, our Housekeeping Department now offers these items for sale." It then lists the prices for a bunch of items like bath towels and pillows, and then ends by saying "Each guest room attendant is responsible for maintaining the guest room items. Should you decide to take these articles from your room instead of obtaining them from the Executive Housekeeper, we will assume you approve a corresponding charge to your account. Thank You."

I find that funny because it is so politely written. What the writer wanted to say was something much harsher. And so, for those of you maybe who couldn't read between the lines, here is what the writer wanted to say: "HEY! People keep taking our crap! If you take any of our crap, we're going to charge you way too high prices for them! So there!"

Driving to Louisville

Yesterday morning I drove down I-71 to the south side of Louisville for the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education conference, which begins this morning. As luck would have it, a couple of hours after arriving at the conference location I had to drive back up to Carrollton (long, irrelevant story), so I got to make the drive into Louisville twice in one day. Maybe it was the fact that I made the trip twice, but two things that have always bothered me a little bit about the drive really stuck with me.

1. The road signs that point out the location of the infamous Carrollton bus crash always freak me out a little. Maybe people who drive by those signs all the time don't even notice them, but they bother me. I'm not sure what it is about them--maybe I feel like the area is haunted or something. But I always slow down and I always feel like I'm about to crash in that area.

2. On a lighter note, I've always been bothered by the fact that the interstate signs in Louisville have both metric and English measurements, and it bothers me that the English measurements are relegated to being inside of parentheses. Why does Louisville think it's not in the U.S.A.? Don't they know that no one in America has any idea what the metric system is? Are they trying to fry our brains as we do the .64 miles = 1 km adjustment? Are they trying to distract us in order to cause accidents so that their emergency vehicles can get some work in?

I think that's probably the case. In fact, whenever I'm in the Louisville metro area and I'm slowed down because of an accident on the interstate, I usually think to myself, "Yup, that guy probably crashed because of those metric signs. And now I'm going to be late because of them."

Facebook.com/sweasy

So in case you haven't heard, Friday/Saturday at midnight Facebook began offering users the ability to register a simple URL for their Facebook page. In 15 minutes 500,000 people did so.

I was awake at midnight working on my presentation for the KySTE conference, but I didn't bother to go register a name. But no harm done. Monday morning I went online and registered the Facebook name "sweasy" and attached it to my account. So now, if you're a Facebook friend, you can access my account at http://facebook.com/sweasy.

So I beat Bill Sweasy from Minnesota on that one! HA!

More Odyssey of the Mind

You probably thought I was finished with talking about Odyssey of the Mind, didn't you? But nope. I promised several people that, after the World Finals competition was over, I'd put up video of Natalie's group's presentation.

Well, I still haven't gotten around to loading that video up to YouTube (because I still haven't gotten around to installing the firewire card on my home computer, but that's a different story), so I thought for now I'd just load up some pictures that one of the team member's father's took.

As I mentioned earlier, the task Natalie's group chose to do was called Earth Trek, and it involved them building a vehicle that would visit four different locations. The vehicle had to look different at each location, and when the vehicle visited one of the locations it would appear to be multiple vehicles. They then had to create a skit and perform it. And they had to do everything, from build the vehicle to decide on the four locations to write the skit to build the sets to act it out, WITHOUT any adult help.

Her group decided to use the game Monopoly as the mode for presenting the four locations. In the skit, kids would play Monopoly (which they renamed Omeropoly due to copyright concerns) and the vehicle would travel to four of the squares: Oriental Avenue, New York Avenue, Kentucky Avenue, and Marvin Gardens. At Kentucky Avenue they would change their car into a horse and put mirrors behind it so that it would look like multiple horses.

The team built a rolling cube out of PVC pipe and used it as their set. They simply rotated the cube to a new side to change sets. Natalie spent most of the performance time working "backstage," but she did come out at New York Avenue to perform as a glitzy Broadway dancer.

Here are some more pictures from the performance.

Me as a Painting

I had a Facebook friend the other day who wanted me to tell him what he was going to look like in 25 years (It's a long story). I went searching around and found the "Face of the Future" website. It's one of those sites that will amuse you in a waste-of-time-kind-of-way for about 15 minutes. You upload a photo of yourself (or someone else) and after a few seconds of manipulation the site will show you what the person will look like as a child, a young adult, an older adult, as a black person, as an Asian, and another half dozen or so options. The photo above is me if I were in a Boticelli painting.

It's a waste of time for sure, but then again, most things are, aren't they?

Cruise Control

One of the things that really bugs me is when drivers on the interstate for an extended period of time don't use cruise control.

On Thursday I went to Frankfort to visit my parents, and on the way home Thursday evening I was driving north on I-71 heading back home. The speed limit was 70 miles per hour, so of course I was doing 75, which any reasonable person would know is the ACTUAL speed limit when the posted limit is 70.

Anyway, I'm cruising along at 75 MPH and I come upon this old, beat up Corolla that is maybe doing 65. I move over into the left lane to pass it, but when I get up right beside it the driver (who I'm able to see now is an unkempt, overweight woman eating a giant pretzel and talking on a cell phone while simultaneously talking to a woman sitting beside her who could have been her twin) speeds up to about 80 and gets back in front of me. Meanwhile, another driver doing 85 or so is now riding my bumper in the fast lane, so I get back behind the Corolla to let him pass.

About a minute after I get back behind the Corolla, though, she slows down to about 65 again and I'm right up on her bumper. I get in the left lane again and go around her. This time she doesn't speed up when I'm beside her. I get back into the right lane once I've gone around her, and for about three minutes I slowly put distance between the two of us until I'm maybe 100 yards ahead of her. I quit paying attention to her and start looking out of my windshield like a good driver and have actually almost completely forgotten her when she whizzes by me in the fast lane and gets right back in front of me and slows down again.

At that point I had gotten pretty tired of the whole thing, so I took my car off cruise control and slowed WAY down to about 60 and just allowed her to get way ahead of me and finally out of sight.

Her car was old enough that maybe she didn't have cruise control, but I think a likelier story is that she was just too busy with her big soft pretzel and her conversations to pay attention to the road. Oh well. I'm just glad I made it home safely. I hope she did, too.

So Sue Me if I Go Too Fast

I was dreaming when I woke up this morning, which is always a bad time for me. I end up extra jumpy if the alarm goes off during my dream cycle. Add to that the fact that the alarm was up extra loud this morning (I had the volume up almost on maximum last night listening to an old audio tape with garbled sound) and those two things together meant that when the radio blasted on I just about hit the ceiling. In fact, the noise was so loud that--lying on my back--I couldn't quite tell where it was coming from and I reached to my right to slap the alarm off. The problem with that was that the alarm was to my left and so instead of hitting the alarm I ended up smacking Lisa pretty hard. I then quickly rolled over and hit the actual alarm and I listened quietly. I hoped that maybe I hadn't hit Lisa as hard as I thought, maybe she had been in such a deep sleep that the punch and the alarm hadn't even awakened her. I counted in my head to four and then I heard Lisa mumble, "I hate you."

My dream, by the way, was a weird one, but one I think I can easily explain. First, I dreamed that as I was getting ready for work I noticed a big puddle of water in the bathroom at our house. I then realized that the drain pipe from the bathroom sink--which in the dream, by the way, was the size of a sewer pipe--had a huge hole in it and that every time the sink was turned on the water was just running onto the floor. So I had that stressor in the dream.

Then I dreamed that I went to work and I was wearing my gray pin-striped suit, but for whatever reason instead of putting on my black dress shoes I wore my ten year old Jesus sandals instead. When I got to work every one made fun of me (I would have done the same thing if anyone else had worn sandals and a suit to work) and I had to go back home to change. I was heading back home when the alarm went off.

Sounds weird, but I think I know what my brain was thinking of. First of all, yesterday morning when I stepped out of the shower there was a big old puddle of water in the bathroom. At first I assumed that I'd left the shower liner out of the shower, but that wasn't the case. I never did figure out what caused so much water to come out of the shower.

Second, Tuesday night I took my laptop home from work so that I could do some work. Wednesday morning I forgot to take it back to work. I'd been at work maybe ten minutes when I settled in behind my desk. I flipped on my monitor (I have a docking station with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse that I use at work instead of working on the laptop), pulled the keyboard up to me, and nothing happened. And that's when I looked over at where the laptop sat and remembered I'd left it at home. I had to turn right around and go back and get it.

What's the point of this whole post? Nothing really. Just explaining how my morning began. If you see me later today and I don't seem quite myself, this might be why. I had a rough start.

Wordle--Cool Site

Here's a site I discovered that I think is pretty cool: http://www.wordle.net/.

It's a site that anybody--and I emphasize ANYBODY--can use. You just type in some text and hit go and the site creates a picture out of the words. Or if you're lazy, you can actually just enter the address of a web site that already has a bunch of words on it and Wordle will create a text picture from THAT site. The picture above (which you can click on to see larger) describes what--off the top of my head--were the kinds of things you could find on Sweasy.net. The image below takes my extended family and sort of puts us all together.

As I said, the program is super easy. Here are some quick tips, though, so that you don't have to find this stuff out yourself:

1) You can keep words together (like I did above with "Sweasy stuff" and "Me trying to be funny") by putting a ~ in between the words. So I typed "Me~trying~to~be~funny" to get that to work.

2) To make a word larger (as in Sweasy.net above) type it multiple times.

Go play with it. It's fun. Once you've created something you like, it's released to you under a Creative Commons attribution license. That means you're free to do whatever you want with it as long as you give Wordle credit (like I did above). So go be creative!

News Article

Look, Ma! I'm in da newspaper!

Click here to read it.

What I Pretend to Be

Today I have spent the last hour of my time running mundane attendance reports which mostly require me to hit a button on the computer screen and then wait 10 minutes until the report is finished, at which point I quickly check it and hit another button. It's a lot of waiting around.

While waiting today I decided to check on our web filtering software. Federal and state laws require my school district to filter dangerous and offensive materials on the Internet to protect the district's children. I have a program that does a pretty darned good job of that, but every now and then I have to go in and tweak it. To tweak it, I have to basically think like a student trying to get around it. I do searches for inappropriate materials and when I find that I CAN access them, I analyze WHY I'm able to access them and try to plug the holes. I actually enjoy the figuring out of where the gaps are.

So what's the problem? About a year ago I wrote a short post about a passage from Kurt Vonnegut's book Mother Night. The post discussed one of my favorite sections of the novel, but it's not that section that I think about when the novel's name gets mentioned. The sentence that sticks out in my mind is one that Vonnegut says is the moral of the story:"Be careful what you pretend to be, because you ARE what you pretend to be." Everything sounds so clinical in my description above, but when I do find those holes in our filter, it means that I've successfully accessed an adult page. And when that happens, I always see things that I DON'T want to see, but sometimes I see things that I REALLY don't want to see. And it begins to sap at my spirit. I almost feel like Harry Potter in The Goblet of Fire when the evil ghost like thingies (Sorry, I'm a Muggle. I don't know those kinds of names) are pulling at him. I imagine that's how people who are addicted to pornography must feel: spiritless. I can only take it for so long.

And that's why I'm writing this instead of looking for more porn. I just have this sinking in my stomach, and I needed a break.

Monday

This is when the summer feels like it's really started for me at work.

In some ways, things haven't changed much at all. I work every day for the next two weeks except this Thursday, when Lisa has jury duty. Every one in my office, in fact, will be working. On a day to day basis I don't see students anyway, and I don't always see any classroom teachers, either. So in many ways, it'll be like any other Monday.

And to top it all off, this is going to be the most frenetic summer of work for me ever. Between now and the first day of school on August 17, I have to complete the following:

1. work with maintenance to install 38 projectors in classrooms
2. install 23 wireless access points and configure
3. replace the switches in one of the district's network closets
4. install a new server in a new rolling rack and configure the server
5. move several other servers into that rack
6. install 5 new administrator workstations
7. consolidate 8 aging network servers down to 2
8. complete the attendance reports for THIS year
9. set up the Student Information System software in preparation for NEXT year
10. set up new account for new employees and delete accounts of old employees
11. help set up and run a statewide technology conference for about 600 attendees.
12. prepare and present one session during that conference.
13. And actually, there are about 15 other things, but I think you get the picture

And I have to do all of that without my technician and School Technology Coordinators, who don't work in the summer. So in some ways I'm as stressed as ever. But there ARE a few things that make this time feel different:

• We start and finish work an hour earlier than during the school year, meaning that I get home in the middle of the afternoon.
• I don't wear a suit and tie on days when students are not in session.
• And most importantly, there are only about 40 people district wide working on any given day rather than 300 people. That means that I am interrupted far less often in the summer than during the regular school year, so I am able to get more done in the same amount of time.

So I'm glad that summer has finally arrived so that I can relax and take it easy.

I just hope I survive it...

Vent Haven Video

Okay. I know. I know. We don't live at Vent Haven anymore, and Lisa isn't the curator anymore. Nonetheless, thanks to Microsoft's new search engine Bing, I found this video online and thought I'd share it. It's from a KET program called Kentucky Life, and it's the best piece I've EVER seen on Vent Haven Museum. The 60 Minutes piece the year before was nice, but it was focused much more on the convention than on the museum. THIS piece is the piece that should be shown to tourists who visit the museum.

Click here to watch it.

My Resolution to the Whole Gay Marriage Crisis Thing

I've mentioned in post after post after post after post that I was torn about the concept of gay marriage. But no longer! I just had an epiphany, one so simple that I'm surprised that no one has pushed for it before...

The main argument that gays have regarding marriage is that denying them the right to marry denies them their civil rights. And there is a case to be made for this. There are certain legal changes that come when two people are legally married. In most states, the married couple now legally share joint ownership of everything. And the example that is always mentioned by gay rights activists: a married person has the right to be in the hospital room with his/her spouse, something that can't be guaranteed if you're just the "partner" of the sick person, even if you've been that person's partner for 50 years!

Some states have tried to resolve this by issuing "Civil Unions" to gay partners. A civil union provides all of the legal rights and responsibilities but is not called "marriage" (Which begs Shakespeare's comment about a rose by any other name). Gays have argued that this does not go far enough--they want to be legally recognized as married.

So the epiphany that hit me today was this: State governments need to get out of the marriage business altogether! Eliminate the entire word "marriage" from state law. Give EVERYONE civil union certificates. Let churches be the entities that gives out marriage certificates. Some already do anyway.

Under this system, any couple--straight or gay--of sound mind and body who want to create a contract to be life partners can go to the county courthouse and get a Civil Union license. And that's the ONLY choice they have. A Civil Union license. The term "marriage" is reserved for use by religious organizations (and that organization MUST be recognized by the IRS as a religious organization). Only churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. can issue Marriage Certificates. If a church wishes to deny a marriage certificate to a couple FOR ANY REASON, then that's the right of that church. The couple is free to try elsewhere.

The government should not be in the business of handing out marriage certificates, only civil union licenses.

Now tell me, where's the flaw in my logic?*
_____________________________________
*And don't tell me that my flaw is that the IRS is part of the government so that in the end the government is still deciding who gets to issue the certificates. That's not the case at all. The IRS is only deciding for tax purposes what is a religion and what is not. And their criteria is fairly clear and can be found right at about the halfway point of this article.

My Fictional Life / Twuffer

A few posts ago I wrote that I was going to create a piece of fiction using my Twitter account and my Facebook page. I mentioned at the time that I knew where the story was going, though I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to get there. The gist of the story was that the main character in the story (that would be "me") was going to be revealed as an overstressed, overworked, middle-aged man who wasn't taking care of himself (as demonstrated by the on and off caffeine usage which was going to escalate into something else--I wasn't sure what) and who was in a "bad" period with his wife and family. Over the course of the story the man was going to beat his dog, cheat on his wife, completely give up his faith in God, but by the end of the story be redeemed/reconciled in all of these areas. Or (and I'm not kidding here) he was going to develop powers and become a superhero. I hadn't really made up my mind, as the beginning of the story was going to be the same either way.

I knew that there was some potential for misunderstanding, since the story was going to use MY Facebook and Twitter pages and I was going to refer to my wife as Lisa and my children by their names and everything else was going to be fairly similar as well, but I didn't really care whether or not anyone got angry or confused by it. In fact, I was pretty much going to do this as long as I got one person's go ahead: my wife's.

And in the end, she wasn't too keen on the idea of me lying to a bunch of people. In fact, I believe the words she said were "If you want to BE a friend, you have to ACT like one, and friends don't lie to their friends." She also said she was (understandably) uncomfortable with me creating a parallel me that did so many bad things. And I can see why she'd feel this way. If I were in her shoes, I wouldn't like it, either. And to be honest, I felt a little sheepish about people taking me seriously, even though I tried to warn everyone who was getting upset.

So I stopped the story. I had actually created all of my 5 a day posts through the middle of June, but I got rid of all of them.

But don't feel that I wasted my time, though, because in the process of creating this story I found a really cool website: Twuffer. Twuffer allows you to make your Twitter posts in advance and schedule them to be posted. That's how I was able to write the story through the middle of June when Facebook and Twitter don't allow you to schedule posts. It's a pretty cool tool for anyone who needs to do this, and for me that includes not just writing a novel. I use Twitter to post "breaking" announcements to my district's web site front page, and now I don't have to remember to make a post on some future date. I can go ahead and schedule the post now and let Twuffer post it for me later. So the whole experience was worth it to me for that alone.

Too Much Service Can Be a Bad Thing

Here's a weird thing that happened to me the other night.

This past Saturday, while Lisa and Natalie were out of town for Odyssey of the Mind, I took Meredith to an Applebees for dinner. I ordered a new menu item, the Cheeseburger Sliders. I was completely unimpressed. I assumed, because they were called sliders, that they would taste something like a White Castle hamburger, but probably better, maybe with a grilled out taste or something like that. Instead, they were basically tasteless, which really bothered me for a beef patty that I assumed was not low fat. The bun was grilled and had a nice crispness but again had little taste to it, and while there were plenty of onions, there wasn't a strong onion taste in the burger. The whole thing was like a study in blandness.

But that's not the weird part. I've had lots of items at restaurants that weren't that good, and despite the blandness I ate these sliders anyway. The weird part was that toward the end of our meal a manager came up to our booth. He'd been going from booth to booth checking to make sure customers were satisfied, and though I couldn't hear the conversations I noticed that he stopped at each table, asked a question, maybe chit chatted about one more thing, and then moved on. Fifteen seconds at each table, tops!

He made his way to our table. He was a handsome enough fellow, I guess, with a big, friendly smile, and he was dressed sort of like an American Eagle mannequin with a name tag.

"Hi!" he said brightly. "How was your meal?"

"Fine," I said.

He pointed at my empty plate. "I see you got the new sliders." I have no idea how he knew I had the sliders since my plate was empty. Maybe they came in a unique serving tray. "How did you like them?"

I hesitated. I didn't think he really wanted my answer. But almost against my better judgment I gave it to him. "Honestly, I didn't like them all that much."

He looked really concerned. "Really?" he said, as if he'd just learned my grandmother had died. "What was the problem?"

"No problem, really," I said lightly. "I just didn't think they were that good."

"What was wrong with them?" he asked. He sounded offended, as if he had created the recipe himself.

I thought of the best way to say it, and after a moment said, "They just weren't all that tasteful. I felt like I could easily have made a better burger myself on the grill at home."

"Well," he said after a moment, "fair enough! Would you like me to bring something else out to you instead?"

"No, I'm fine," I said congenially, waving him off.

"There'd be no charge," he swiftly added.

"No," I said, trying to be polite. "It's not like I didn't eat it. Look! My plate's empty!"

He shook his head. "That doesn't matter! It's my job to make sure that you're happy with the food you have."

"Don't worry about it," I said, and I tried to make meaningful eye contact with the guy. "Really." He apparently didn't notice, though.

"Let me get you a menu. You can pick something else!" He started to walk away but I stopped him.

"Really!" I said. "I'm fine."

He looked around our booth. "There must be something I can get you. How about dessert? Are you getting dessert?"

"We're getting dessert," I told him, "but we can order it from our waiter and we DON'T want it for free!"

"Well, I have a dessert menu right here," he said, reaching for his back pocket. "We'll pick something out together and I'll give it to you, my compliments." I threw my hands up in the air like I was signalling for a touchdown, or maybe the way contemporary Christian worshippers do when they're singing songs in church.

"Dude!" I said fairly forcefully. "We're okay! We're fine! We don't want...we don't want anything." I said "anything" very slowly, like I was talking to a six year old.

"Well, okay," he said as he dropped his head in a dejected manner. "Just let me know if you change your mind."

He left. Eventually our waiter came back and brought me a new drink and we ordered dessert. I was a little bothered by the guy's insistence, but overall I was ready to forget the whole thing. But as we were finishing our dessert the guy was back.

"How was the cake?" he asked us.

I looked at him warily. "It was good. We fought over the last bite."

He laughed a big, hearty laugh. "It must have been good for that to happen!" He paused. "Hey, are you sure that I can't--"

I cut him off forcefully. "If you offer to give me something free one more time I'm going to ask you to give me the ENTIRE meal for free!" He froze and then started to say something else and I said, "It's really becoming a problem for me. Can we just get our check?" He apologized and brought us our check.

I just re-read everything I wrote above, and it occurs to me that maybe I sound like the jerk in this story. And maybe I am. After all, the guy was just trying to be helpful. Maybe by denying him of the opportunity to give us something for free we also robbed him of the opportunity to feel good about his job, about serving people. I don't know. I do know that the whole thing sounds like a bad scene from Seinfeld, but I really just needed the guy to leave me alone. And it taught me this: Too much service can be a bad thing.

Holy Cow!

The first time I saw the Nintendo Wii I thought, Holy Cow! This is the coolest thing ever! Video gaming has reached the pinnacle of fun!

But now the Nintendo Wii looks as antiquated as the joystick on the original Atari 2600. The video below introduces us to Microsoft's new Microsoft Natal, which is still a few months away from actual production but has actually been demoed. 

If I didn't know better, I would think this is ridiculous, some April Fool's Joke to see how gullible we all are. But this is REAL!

Watch the video below, and prepare to be wowed!

A Couple of Smart Kids

Last night was 6th grade graduation at Meredith's school, so the whole family walked up to the school for the ceremony. In addition to receiving diplomas, the ceremony also functioned as Honors Night for the 6th graders. And Meredith cleaned up.

A year ago I wrote about attending Honor's Day for Meredith and Natalie last year, and how I worried what would happen if one of them hadn't receive an award. I mentioned in that article a great line I had in the event that one of the girls DIDN'T get an award. Well, bewteen the 2 of them there have been 12 of these things now, and I still haven't gotten  to use that line. 

Last night Meredith received the following awards

• Creative Writing
• The Class Social Studies award
• The Class Science award (The Golden Test Tube)
• The Class Mathematics award
• The All "A" Honor Roll
• The President's Academic Achievement Award

The last award was presented as a certificate signed by Meredith's principal, superintendent, and President Barack Obama. I kind of felt bad for the other kids in her class. She literally was given half of the awards last night for her class. At the end of the ceremony the guy in front of us, a friend, whose daughter was also in Meredith's class, turned and said, "SOME kids hogged all of the awards from every one else."

If it sounds like I'm bragging, I guess I am. I'm VERY proud of her. 

Natalie, I think, was just a tiny bit jealous. I reminded her that a) she had just finished 19th in the world in Iowa, and that b) she had been in Iowa last Thursday when HER class had its Honors Day. On that day Natalie also won several awards:

• Perfect attendance
• Creative Writing
• All "A" Honor Roll

And that's nothing to sneeze at.

I can't begin to tell you how blessed I feel to have children who are so academically strong. I know that, based on how I squandered my academic skills as a child, I don't deserve it. 

Must all be coming from Lisa's side.

Anyway, in addition to the nuclear family being there, Meredith's Grandma Myra and Aunt Judy were there, too. They and Meredith and Lisa and Natalie can be seen in the photo above. 

George Bush and Teletubbies

I just stumbled across this while looking for something else on youtube. Don't take it to mean any kind of comment about anything. I just thought it funny.