If You Don't Have Time to Do It Right...

Sometimes I'm amazed at my own stupidity..

I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail here, but yesterday at work I needed to take data that was in one database in our school district and import it into another database. How exactly you do this differs from program to program, but the basic idea is pretty much the same as what you did in elementary school when your teacher gave you a list of definitions on one side of the page and a list of terms on the other and you drew lines from the correct word to the correct term. On the computer, though, there's no margin for error. The computer's going to do what you tell it to do, and so you need to make sure that you have the correct word matched up with the correct definition.

I didn't. And I didn't bother to check, either.

Well, and to be fair to myself, I didn't exactly miss matching the two items--I just matched them incorrectly. The terms I was matching were student birthdates, and I correctly matched the "Date of Birth" field in the first database with the "Birthdate" field in the second database. The problem was that I also had to select the FORMAT of the date. The date was in MM/DD/YYYY format (Today would be 09/30/2011), but in a rush to get this job done, I selected DD/MM/YYYY. I then hit the "Import" button and a message popped up something like this:

"You are about to make permanent changes to the database. Once these changes are applied they cannot be undone. ARE YOU SURE YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?"

What I SHOULD have done at that point was stop, leave the live database system, and go into our identical "sandbox" site and run the test there. Had I done that, I would have seen the error. But I didn't have time for that, so I just hit the "Yes" button and let the program go.

Once the import had finished, I hit the "Report" button and saw that--of the 2,300 or so records I was trying to import--about 1,200 of them failed. I knew something was wrong, and I very quickly figured out what it was. With the days and months reversed, many of the records errored out. A birth date of 07/24/2001, for example, SHOULD have been read by the computer as July 24th, 2001, but the program was doing what I told it to do (day first and then month) and was trying to make it the 7th day of the 24th month of 2001. There obviously is no such month, so nothing was written to that record. That happened to about 1,200 student records.

Worse than that, though, was that the program SUCCEEDED in importing the other 1,100 records. This was worse because the information that was now in the system was wrong! A student who should have had a birth date of February 9th, 1999 instead had a birthday of September 2, 1999. I poked around in the system, and there was no way for me to erase the birthdates on my own. I tried reimporting the information a second time with the information reversed, and this worked, but now those students had TWO birthdates. I called the vendor responsible for the second program and asked if they could fix the issue for me, and they said yes, but since the issue was my fault and I'd admitted it was my fault, it would cost $600 for them to fix it. Screw that, I thought to myself, so I started doing what I had to do: I spent five hours clicking on 1,100 student accounts and deleting the incorrect birthdates. Five hours of work that I could have avoided if I'd taken 20 minutes and tested the import first.

I remember when I got my first power tool. It was hardly even a power tool, to be frank: it was an inexpensive cordless drill. This was years ago, not too long after Lisa and I had married. I'd been hanging blinds in every window of our new house, and I'd been doing it manually with a handheld Phillips screwdriver. After nearly wearing a blister on my thumb I went out to Lowe's and bought the cordless drill, and after letting it charge for a while I eagerly got it out and took it to the window over our kitchen sink. I stood on a step ladder and put a screw against the drywall above the window, lined the bit of the cordless drill up with the screw, and hit the button on the cordless drill. Immediately the screw spun wildly out of position, I lost my balance and fell, dragging the spinning drill in a line across the drywall above the window, creating a scar all the way across, and my knee came up and hit the window, cracking the glass. I fell onto the kitchen counter, bending the sink faucet, which started leaking water.

I walked into the family room on the lower level and told my wife, "Power tools are great. They help you make bigger mistakes faster!"

I think that's what happened to me yesterday, too...

Maybe a Little TOO Frequently Asked?

A couple of years ago I made a post about a cool website called Wordle. Two years and three months later, I think 94% of all people in the world have used the site. So I'm not going to write about the site itself today.

Instead, I want to write about the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page that appears on the site. I was reading it yesterday (Sometimes I just read these things. I can't explain it, either.), and I was amused by one of the replies to a question.

Most of the replies were pretty standard fare. For instance, the question of "I entered a word many times. Why does it only show up once?" is answered with the following: "Wordle uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size. See the next question for details." Similarly, the question of "Why aren't numbers showing up?" gets a response of "By default, Wordle strips numbers from the text before drawing. See the 'Language' menu to change that setting." I'd describe the tone of all of the responses as "Professional-technical."

Except for one. The tone of the response to this question is so different from the others, in fact, that I'm assuming that it wasn't written at the same time. Instead, I think it was probably written in a fit of anger after getting the same question one time too many. The question is "Could you remove or change the name of the 'Sexsmith' font? I don't want my students to see it."

Here's the response:

Yes, with pleasure. First, please write to the musician Ron Sexsmith, after whom the font is named, and get him to change his name. You may also want to write to Sexsmith, Alberta, Canada, and see if you can get them to change their name before any of your students inadvertently consult a map. Christian rocker Paula Sexsmith ought to be in your sights as well; don't let her feel left out. Take a slapshot at goalie Tyson Sexsmith, while you're at it.

"Sexsmith" is a common surname and placename, especially in Canada. It's analogous to “Shoemaker”, “Fletcher”, or just plain “Smith”; it's a profession. A “seax smith” was someone who made seaxes.

The place-names Middlesex, Essex, Sussex, etc., all derive their names from the seax.

If the children of Boston and its suburbs can grow up in Middlesex county, perhaps giggling occasionally at the mention of the sheriff or courthouse thereof in local news broadcasts or 5th-grade geography lessons, then I believe that the children of the world can weather the mere sight of those letters, in that context. Good luck!



Click here to read the complete FAQ.




P.S. And by the way, just an aside, I made the Wordle above by copying and pasting all of my blog posts for August and September into Wordle. I learned that apparently I use the word "just" WAAAY too much!

Getting Used to Less Privacy

A lot of people are complaining about the new Facebook design. Let's be more frank: A lot of people are WHINING about the new Facebook design. But I'm much less worried about the latest Facebook version than I am worried about what's coming.

And no, this blog post isn't a chain letter about the fact that Facebook is going to start charging for membership...

...This is a REAL change coming to Facebook, and it's going to be called the Timeline. I've included a link to it at the bottom. The video is kind of intriguing, the idea that interested profile viewers can scan back through your online life to see what you've done in the past. It's almost like a virtual autobiography of you that is automatically put together by Facebook. Sounds kind of neat.

But as I glanced down the page, I saw the sample Profile page that Facebook is envisioning, and what scares me is that they're not just planning on pulling data from your Facebook activity, but from what Netflix movies you watch, the Places you've visited that you've shared with the world, the music you've listened to on Spotify, and the places you've been running from Nike, as well (no doubt) as from dozens of other "partners."

As I've read in several places, this compilation of data will be easing very close to the "creepy" edge. How much of our lives do we want visible on Facebook for so called "friends" to see?

But here's something even creepier: Even if you don't enable this Timeline feature of Facebook (my scant research suggests it will at least initially be voluntary), keep in mind that data is being mined about you that COULD allow a company like Facebook to create this data. Even if you don't have a Timeline page, and even if your "friends" (who may not really be your friends) can't see all of this information, there are plenty of corporations (who most definitely are NOT your friends) who'll have access to this wealth of information about you.

It's enough to make me consider deactivating my account.

Learn more about Facebook Timeline here.

P.S. Also, the Timeline page looks very similar to me to what MySapce looks like. This makes me wonder if Facebook has forgotten that it overtook MySpace--at least in part--because of the simplicity of its user interface. By making the user profile page more complex, it's taking a chance that it might make it too hard for grandma and grandpa to figure out, and if that's the case, Mom and Dad might move to a different site so that they can show the kids' photos to grandma and grandpa on a site they can understand.

IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE I EVER POST HERE...

...YOU NEED TO READ THIS!

I'm not kidding. You won't regret it.

A friend of mine forwarded this link to me yesterday. It's to a sample game inside an honest to God piece of educational software. The software is focused on...sexually transmitted diseases! That's right. Everyone's favorite topic.

I'm actually so...I don't know. Shocked? Flabbergasted? Blown away? I don't even know the word to describe how I feel about this. And keep in mind this is not a joke! This is REAL software that--I'm assuming--REAL educators are buying and using with REAL students.

I can barely imagine. Below is a link to the sample game, and here's more information about this software if you don't believe that it's real. But don't click that link until after you've played the game below.

Play the game.

I have nothing to say today

But that won't stop me from writing a blog post anyway. And I'm only going to give myself exactly 7 minutes (Why 7 minutes? I don't know) to write it, so here goes some random thoughts:

• Like everyone else, I hate the new Facebook layout. Like everyone else, I'll probably get used to it and learn to live with it, like I have every other change to Facebook. I actually don't care about Facebook's endless need to move things around for no real purpose, but two things about the new layout really bug me: 1) Why can't I see ALL of the latest posts? That's why I get on Facebook, to see what's happening with the people I care about. I've already hidden myself the people I DON'T care about (Uh, sorry any of you reading this). I don't need a computer algorithm determining what I do and don't want to see. 2) What's with the thing in the upper right. It's like a Facebook summary feed, which would make sense except that I'M ALREADY ON FACEBOOK!
• I didn't watch the TWO AND A HALF MEN opening episode this season. I take that back. I DID watch about the first ten minutes of it because Lisa wanted to, but that's about five times more of the TV show than I'd ever seen before, so I didn't see why I would want to watch this new version when I hadn't seen the old version. The ten minutes I did watch didn't look bad, though. I got the feeling that there were plenty of inside jokes and cameos in the opening funeral scene, but I didn't know what was going on and during all of the canned laughter felt sort of like a college student who walks into a class where he/she didn't do the prerequisites.
• I've never liked salt water taffy, anyway, and--while I can understand why you might buy salt water taffy at a beach location--I've never understood why places like Gatlinburg or Cumberland Falls or other inland locations sell salt water taffy--do they think we think that they pulled that salt water out of the nearby ocean?
• I'm in sort of a bad mood at work because several people here are making some important decisions without prior planning that I know are going to come back to bite them in the butt, and I'll be one of the people who has to come in and clean up. I hate when people ask for my advice, I give it, and then they ignore it, especially when I tell them that I'm 100% certain that my advice is right. I'm not taking guesses here--I'm CERTAIN your planned course of action is the wrong course of action.
• Speaking of being in a bad mood, my cell phone just rang and I could tell by the area code that it was someone I didn't know, probably a sales call. I COULD have just not answered it, but I was hoping--Oh, I was hoping!--that it was a live person calling so that I could light into them about calling me even though my number was on the national Do Not Call list. But alas, it was a recording (about lowering my credit card bills), and I was left unsatisfied.

And that's my seven minutes people (actually 8 after spell check).

Netflix screwed up

Yesterday I didn't have time to make a blog post, and now I find that, as a result, I'm probably too late with this post, and literally tens of thousands of people have already said what I'm getting ready to write. But that's never stopped me before, so I'll write about this anyway.

Late Sunday Netflix's CEO posted a blog post and sent an email to all current Netflix subscribers (yours truly included) apologizing for the lack of prior information regarding the recent price hikes (the price hikes themselves he did NOT apologize for, saying they were necessary), and basically saying "My fault." What's truly enraged Netflix subscribers, though, was that--in the middle of this supposed apology--he announced that he was splitting the DVD by mail feature off from the on-demand streaming feature. The streaming feature will continue to be called Netflix, while the DVD by mail feature will soon no longer be known as Netflix and will be Qwikster.com. Users who decide to keep both services will have two separate charges on their credit card and will have two different websites and--to the horror of thousands--two different queues to manage.

Before I go on, let me say that--as a long time streaming only subscriber--this whole mess doesn't impact me one way or the other really. MY service isn't changing at all. Having said that, though, I can understand why people are upset. As I mentioned at the beginning, it's all been said before by other bloggers, so there's really no reason for me to rehash all of it, but here are the main points people are complaining about:

• Having two queues to manage will stink.
• No one's going to remember how to spell Qwikster. I actually had to look it up to write this blog entry.
• Having two charges on a credit card is inconvenient. If you change credit cards, you'll have to change it at both sites.
• You don't announce plans to make your users' lives LESS convenient in the middle of an apology.

More than all that, this goes against every branding practice I've ever seen. Why take a service that has a solid brand name and spin it off into a dumb sounding brand? Why can't both the DVD service AND the streaming service have the same name? They've had them for years, and there hasn't been a problem. And every other company I've seen actually goes out of their ways to ride the coattails of past successes. If General Mills is planning to release a lemon flavored cereal, and there's a way to make that cereal into a round, "o" shape. You'd better believe that they're going to market it as "Lemon Cheerios!" Do the soda companies release new sodas with snazzy new names? Not anymore. They used to release products with names like Mountain Dew and Fresca, but today those would be Pepsi Green and Grapefruit Coke. They USE the brand loyalty.

But not Netflix. They're going to change a product everyone loves to Qwikster. Really? I just had to look up how to spell it AGAIN!

For most of the last 24 hours, in fact, I was certain that everyone at Netflix had gone insane. Was there not one person there who could see how absolutely stupid this idea was?

Then I read something on my lunch break today that actually made sense. A commenter on a news story said there was only one explanation: Netflix was planning to sell the DVD delivery business within the next few months, and what they didn't want was to create a threat to their business. By handicapping the buyer with a dumb name like Qwikster, they ensured that whoever was dumb enough to buy their dying DVD delivery business would struggle to jump to streaming.

It's the only thing that makes sense to me.

It's hard to believe that six months ago everyone thought that Netflix was going to replace traditional cable companies, and now experts are saying that Netflix could be on the way out and are already prepping us for life beyond Netflix. Six months ago I would have thought that crazy, but I honestly don't think so anymore. Amazon.com has a competing streaming service (though it only has about 1/6th of the titles of the already paltry Netflix streaming), and when the Amazon tablet is released in the next few weeks, it's rumored to come with a free year of the Amazon streaming service (normally $79 a year). That makes the Amazon tablet even MORE appealing. At $250 for the tablet, if I cancel Netflix and consider $79 of that price the price I'm paying for Amazon Prime, then I'm really paying only $171 for the tablet.

I think I'm going to sign up for the free month of Amazon Prime to see if the streaming videos that are currently there are enough to pull me away from Netflix.

Netflix, you may have just lost a loyal subscriber...

More on the Bengals

I made a post about a month ago which was a letter to Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown in which I said I'd quit the team, and that I might just be quitting football all together. After two weeks of the season, I thought I'd give you an update:

• I haven't completely quit the Bengals, apparently. I HAVE watched parts of the first two games, maybe about 1/3 of each game. But I haven't scheduled my Sundays around the game.
• And to be fair, I have to say this about the Bengals: they're not NEARLY as bad as I thought they'd be. In Cincinnati Bengal terms, that's huge praise!
• I think, more than the Bengals, though, I really have quit football in general. I watched about 5 minutes of preseason football, and no regular season except for the Bengals games. And I haven't watched 5 seconds of college football and don't plan to do so. And I don't feel any worse off physically, mentally, or emotionally as a result.

I guess maybe I'm just outgrowing sports. As I watched a small part of the Bengals game Sunday, I heard the announcer say, "This next play coming up right here...this play is huge!...This play is VERY important!"  And I thought to myself, No, it's not. It's just a play. It's bunch of men in protective gear hurtling their bodies at one another in an effort to move a worthless piece of leather a few yards in one direction or another using stupid, arbitrary rules for a game that has no real meaning. And it's not worth my time to watch.

Now marching band competitions...there's something that's REALLY important.

Huge...

Should you give in and buy an iPad?

iPads are the big thing right now, and I don't have a problem with people buying them. They're great devices, with long battery life, a bunch of apps, and they're lightweight and easy to carry around. There's currently no device on the market that can match them. So if you are (like me) one of the seemingly few Americans out there who doesn't already have one, you may be looking (like me) at the fact that it's three months until Christmas and considering purchasing one of these FAIRLY inexpensive devices as a Christmas present to yourself.

But you might want to hold on for a while. Two things are about to change.

First, Amazon is releasing an Android-based tablet sometime in the next eight weeks. Rumors are that the device is going to be about half the price of an iPad, which is great, but it also is going to be a fairly locked-down device, so that users will not be able to go out to the general Android marketplace to download apps but will instead be forced to use the Amazon marketplace. In addition, the Amazon tablet will be smaller and less powerful than the iPad. Still, it might be worth waiting for the debut of this before grabbing an iPad.

The other development you might want to wait for is the public release of Windows 8. Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall, and the new Windows operating system will be designed for touch/tablet use. The video below is one of several on the Internet that show off the new device. My only concern about the new OS is will hardware manufacturers be able to create a device that is powerful enough to run it but cheap enough to be a competitor to the iPad? Cheap PC-based netbooks and devices like the Dell Inspiron Duo have left much to be desired in the giddyup department. I've spent time with those devices and found myself saying things to people like, "Okay, watch this. This program is really cool...It's awesome...it'll load in just a couple of seconds...you're going to love it...I promise...any second now..." Meanwhile, I watch people with iPads and they hit the power button and they're off to the races.

Based on the video below, though, which isn't a Microsoft created video so it isn't a fairy tale device from Never Neverland, I'm impressed with the possibilities.

That, combined with the upcoming Amazon device, have convinced ME, anyway, to wait a while before jumping on the iPad bandwagon.

(I can't see the video.)

Vanity, Part 2

So I have this HUGE head, I guess. And it's always been this way. And as it turns out, my head isn't so large around the X axis from front to back--where my ball cap would be (though it IS larger than the average here, too)--as it is large along the Y axis from top to bottom. My head is much taller than the average person's, and most of that extra height is, I think, in my forehead.

I've ALWAYS had a large forehead. If you don't believe me, check out the photo to the right, which was from my senior prom (Beth, if you're reading this, I cropped you out because I didn't know how you'd feel about having your picture posted up on the Internet with me. I wouldn't want to be pictured beside me!). Even then I had a large, shiny forehead.

So much so that, when I was in high school, my friends used to tease me about it. "Look at your hairline!" they'd say. "You're going to be bald before you're thirty!"

I heard that over and over from person after person, and I started to believe it. And I didn't want to be bald. This was the 1980's, when black guys could shave their heads and be bald and it was considered bold, a statement. But bald white guys were either old or Nazis, and I didn't want to be either. And I CERTAINLY didn't want to be one of those guys who had a ring of hair around his head, so I made a deal with God right then and there: When I got older, if He'd let me keep my hair, I'd never complain about it getting gray. I would just LOVE the fact that it was still there. Just don't let me go bald.

But here we are on the other side of that promise. I'm 43 years old, and I'm not bald. Sure, my hair has receded a little bit from the photo above, but honestly not that much. And I'm not developing male-pattern baldness or anything like that. I've gotten exactly what I asked for.

Except that now my hair is starting to turn gray, and it really IS starting to bother me. And it's not just vanity, though I know that vanity is a part of it. Just as much it is a fear of dying. I know what that gray hair represents: my body shutting down on me. My body isn't making as much pigment as it used to, and that shows up as gray hair. I'm getting more wrinkles, too, and I'm losing muscle mass every decade. I may have another 40 years to live (or maybe not!), but it's going to be a slow decline as my body, which was never designed by evolution to last this long, starts slowly ticking down like a wind up watch towards death.

That said, vanity is a part of my distaste, too. I first noticed the gray hairs popping up one or two at a time in my beard, and I'd just pluck them out with a pair of tweezers. Then they started popping up five or seven at a time, and then ten or fifteen at a time, and then the battle was over, and I'd lost. Also, my wife often said when she was looking at the hair on top of my head that I was getting more and more gray hairs there, too, but I could never see them.

Until a couple of days ago.

I got ready for work and just as I was about to leave for the office, I put on my gray suit coat and checked myself in the mirror, and that's when I noticed: the light gray of the sports coat really pulled the gray out in my hair. I took the coat off and looked at myself again, and the gray was gone. Put the jacket back on, and it came right back. It was magic! And there was no denying it anymore: My hair is quickly turning gray.

The other day I was in the grocery store with my wife (Yes, despite the stories I write on here, we enjoy each other's company so much that we spend time together whenever we can, including doing mundane things like shopping for groceries). Lisa needed to buy shampoo, and while she was wading through the myriad choices, I found myself looking at the "Just for Men" line of hair coloring. I wasn't REALLY planning to buy it, but I was still absorbed in the boxes, trying to figure out which shade would be right for me, which kind of coloring I would need, and so on.

I was holding a box and reading the usage instructions when my wife, who had found her shampoo, walked past me and said, "I wouldn't, if I were you."

"Why not?"

"Because," she said as she put the shampoo into our shopping cart and came back over to where I was standing, "those kits never work right. You'll turn your hair purple."

"Really?"

"Really."

I stared at the box again for a moment before saying, "Purple is worse than gray, right?"

"Yes, it is," she said, as she took my hand and looked earnestly at me. "Besides, you're not that gray anyway. And it makes you look distinguished."

"Hah!" I pulled my hand away and put the box back on the shelf. "'Distinguished!' That's just another word for 'old.' And maybe women our age do find a graying man distinguished, but a 20 year old woman looks at gray hair and just thinks 'ancient.'"

My wife took my hand again and said, half playfully, half seriously, "Hey? Do you WANT some 20 year old woman?"

I smiled, looked her in the eye, and said with all the sincerity I could muster, "No, my dear. I want you. You are my wife, the woman I love. You are my friend, my partner, my life. You're the funniest person I know, and I can't wait to spend time with you. A 20 year old would be immature. She wouldn't get ANY of my cultural references. Ke$ha would be her favorite musical artist. She would never have seen a single episode of SEINFELD, and she'd want to do things I would never want to do, like going clubbing or white water rafting or something like that. She wouldn't be the mother of my children, and she wouldn't have the 20 years of history that you and I have. I want you. I absolutely do NOT want a 20 year old." I let go of her hand and looked away.

"I just want them to want me..."

What is my point in all of this? I guess I'm just saying that the vanity of my 43 year old self is making it difficult to keep the contract with God that my 20 year old self made all those years ago.

And I guess also I'm writing as a warning to you: If you see me in public someday soon, and you find yourself thinking, "Hey, is his hair..is it...PURPLE?" you'll know there's nothing wrong with your eyes, and you'll understand why.

Vanity, part one

NOTE: Before I ever started writing this post, when I was just organizing it in my head, I could tell that it was really too long for a single post. So I'm posting the first half of the story today and will finish it tomorrow. --Bryan
_______________________________

I have a big head.

Really.

I don't mean I'm conceited. I wouldn't presume to make a statement about that as that's for OTHERS to determine. I mean that--physically--my head is larger than the average person's head. Not Charlie Brown larger, but larger. I didn't know that for many years (though I probably SHOULD have known that. When I played high school football, the school had to order a special helmet for me, and I'm not that large a guy!). It wasn't until my younger daughter was about one year old that I found this out.

I was at work, teaching high school English, and a note was handed to me from a student aide. It was a note to call my wife AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Once the bell rang to end the period and all of the students were out of the room, I picked up the phone on my desk and dialed my home number.

"Hello," I heard my wife say on the other end of the line, and I could tell from her tone of voice she was worried.

"Hey," I said. "I have a note to call you. What's up?"

"Good!" she said. "I've been waiting to call you since we got back from the pediatrician. Do you have a tape measure?"

"You need a tape measure?" I asked.

"Do you HAVE a tape measure?" she asked again.

I blinked a couple of times before responding. "You mean a ruler or a yard stick?"

"No!" she said emphatically. "I mean a measuring tape. Like to measure your waist. It has to be flexible. Do you have a measuring tape?"

I blinked a couple more times. "Why WOULD I have a measuring tape?"

"Well, does someone else at the school have a measuring tape?"

"I don't know," I said. "Do you need to measure something?"

"No," my wife said. "YOU need to measure something. Does someone there have a tape measure?"

"Uh, maybe the Home Ec. teacher might?"

"Good!" she said. "Go get a tape measure from her and then measure yourself around your chest, and then measure around your head, first around your forehead like where you'd wear a ball cap, and then around your chin to the top of your head. Write the numbers down and then call me back."

"Lisa," I said. "What's going on?"

"I don't want to tell you anything right now," she said. "Just get the measurements and call me back."

So I did. It was my planning period, so I poked around the school building and found a measuring tape (the Home Ec. teacher DID have one), and I measured myself and wrote down the measurements. For the life of me I don't remember what those measurements were. But I wrote them down and called my wife, and read them off to her.

"Oh, thank God!" she said with a long sigh, as if I'd told her that she didn't have cancer.

"'Thank God' what?" I shouted into the phone. "Would you please tell me what's going on?"

"We went to the pediatrician today, and he was very worried that [my younger daughter]'s head was much larger than it should have been, in the 99th percentile. He thought there might be some underlying medical condition, but he said that if one of us had a significantly larger than normal head then it was most likely a genetic thing and nothing to worry about. He measured my head, and my head was normal, maybe even a little small. So he said we should get your measurements." There was a pause, and then she said, "Dear God!"

"What?" I asked.

"You have a HUGE head!"

But I'm not here to talk about my big head. I'm here to talk about something I've been a little sensitive about since I was a young guy that is a RESULT of my big head. But I'll wait until tomorrow to talk about that.

Is Technology Worth the Expense?

I actually wrote the blog post below for my work blog, but after reading it there I thought it just as appropriate for THIS blog, so I'm including it in its entirety here as well. --bryan
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Here's a link to an article that you perhaps wouldn't expect to see on the front page of a technology department's blog. But please keep in mind that I'm an educator first and a technology-advocate second, and what I will always want is what is best for students, not what is best for technology.

The article, from the New York Times' September 3 edition, focuses on an Arizona school that has pumped more than 30 million dollars into the technology of the school district, turning the district's classrooms into models of "Next Generation" learning. Every classroom has projectors, interactive whiteboards, document cameras, student input devices, and ample computers for students so that students can learn at their own pace using software not unlike the Compass Odyssey, MAP, and Fast ForWord products used in this school district.

It sounds like a technology director's dream, and it certainly fits the idea of the "Future Classroom" that I've been a proponent of for years.

But here's the problem: This school district is not--as you might expect--leaping past all other schools in Arizona with this innovative approach. In fact, since the program began, the district has actually fallen BEHIND most other schools in the state, with their scores remaining stagnant while other districts are rising. Many proponents of increased technology in the classroom argue that state tests are measuring traditional 20th Century skills and are not able to measure the increased "Next Generation" learning that is taking place in these classrooms. These people may, indeed, have a point, but it is impossible to argue that--"Next Generation" learning or not--these students are not performing as well as their peers in reading and math.

According to the article, one of the reasons for this change may be budget cuts in other areas. In order to afford the gigantic technology bill, the district had to lay off teachers and staff and make other cuts. The increased classroom sizes may contribute to the poor performance of the students.

As I said above, this makes for a strange blog post for a technology website, but I wanted to remind teachers that--no matter what technology is in their classrooms--it's YOU the teacher who is going to really make a difference in whether or not your students learn. The technology is a tool designed to help you help your students. It will never replace good teaching, only supplement it.

Click here to read the article.

Ten Years

I've seen this weekend coming on my calendar for about six weeks now, and I've been trying to figure out what I was going to say about the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I don't want to rehash the events of the day and how they affected me. I already did that in a post on the anniversary two years ago. I've decided, instead, that I'd rather write about how we've changed as a country in the last ten years.

It isn't going to be a pleasant post to write...

Ten years ago, the United States seemingly was on top of the world. Sure, the stock market had been down for a few months, there were even whispers of a possible coming recession and of a "tech bubble" that might have started a year or two before, but overall we were feeling pretty good. The last remaining Superpower, we were told. The world's mightiest military. The policeman of the world. Heck, we were the moral conscience of the world! It didn't feel like we were just boasting when we declared the United States the greatest country in the world.

But September 11 shook us, and I don't think we've recovered yet. And I'm certainly not proud of how this nation has handled itself over the last ten years. We started a war that we had no business starting, a war which needlessly killed thousands of U.S. soldiers and tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, some who were pretty bad guys and probably deserved what they got, but most who were just in the wrong country at the wrong decade. We've become xenophobic, suspicious of anyone who looks like they're from the Middle East (When I first grew my beard, a co-worker warned me that I was just asking to get stopped at airports. "You look like a raghead terrorist!" he told me, with no apparent awareness that he was being insulting), ready to picket and legislate to keep mosques out of our towns. In an effort to keep our economy humming, we loosened regulation and lowered interest rates, in the process encouraging predatory lending and allowing "robber barons" to get rich from the pain of others while almost driving our economy into ruins. And after a few months of solidarity immediately following 9/11, our political atmosphere, which had been a little tense anyway thanks to the close nature of the Bush/Gore election, has become absolutely poisonous, so much so that the two parties couldn't even work together to raise the debt ceiling without negatively impacting our economy.

As the world's only Superpower, we didn't act so super.

No matter, I guess. No one calls us the only Superpower anymore. We've lost our coveted AAA rating. These days people talk about China as a nation that will soon be running the world. And just this past week the World Economic Forum ranked the United States--the supposed greatest country in the world--FIFTH in global competitiveness. If the attacks on September 11 humbled us and made us feel weak, the last ten years have been even worse.

But I don't mean to be so negative.

More than once in my life I've nearly been in catastrophic car accidents. It's not that I'm a bad driver. Yes, some of the near accidents were my fault; most were the fault of the other driver. But regardless of that, after the honking of horns, the wildly spinning vehicle, the screams and shouts of terror, the slamming of brakes, I always ended up in the same place--pulled over on the side of the road, out of breath and wide eyed, adrenaline coursing through my body. And once my heart beat finally slowed and I felt ready to continue, I'd pull back into traffic, but I was always overly cautious and over reactive as a result. For the next few minutes of driving, every driver who switched lanes without signaling freaked me out and caused me to jerk the steering wheel in a panic. I wasn't driving the way I normally drove, and I probably was a WORSE driver for my hyper-reactivity.

I think that's what's been happening for the last ten years. A decade later, we're STILL not acting like ourselves because of September 11. These last ten years, the way we've all acted...that's not us. That's not America. We're better than this.

Eventually, and usually without my awareness, I would stop driving in an overly defensive manner. I guess I just decided that it was time to move on. After ten years, I hope that's what's going to happen to this country. We're going to get back to what made this country great. I hope in another ten years we'll have changed enough that we'll again be able to say we're the greatest country in the world, and it will again not feel like boasting, but a simple statement of fact.

More about jargon

A few months ago I made a post about how much jargon gets used in my job at work, but I was reminded just now of how much jargon we ALL use in our everyday lives.

While I was working at my desk today my computer--for no obvious reason--just sort of wigged out on me. I decided the best thing to do was to reboot the thing, and while it was rebooting, in my frustration, I got on Facebook on my cell phone and posted this:

60 seconds ago the desktop on my computer seemed to freeze. I could move the mouse but no matter how many times I clicked nothing seemed to happen. 15 seconds ago my screen flashed and then Internet Explorer opened 26 times and Microsoft Word 14 times. Computers are fun!...

I posted that on Facebook where all 430 of my friends could read it. And my guess would be that--if all 430 of them DID read it (Fat chance!), 429 of them would have understood every word of the message.

As I looked at the post again just now, though, it occurred to me that if I'd sent that message to 430 people just 40 years ago, almost none of them would have had any idea what I was talking about. They would have understood pretty much every single word in the paragraph ("Internet" and "Microsoft" being the only exceptions), but they would have had NO idea what the paragraph was actually saying. To the average person in 1971, a "desktop" was part of a piece of furniture, a computer was a giant device with spinning tape decks that occupied whole wings of university buildings, a "mouse" was a rodent, and they'd have been totally stymied by what an "Internet" and a "Microsoft" were (I think, had I been an adult in 1971, I would guessed they had something to do with textiles, maybe an ultra-soft fish net or something!). Put it all together, and the 1971 person would have read the message and wondered why there was a frozen piece of furniture sitting on top of a computer, why I was moving a small rodent around and making a clicking noise, and the third sentence probably would have been utter nonsense.

Today, though, as I said, we all understand the paragraph. We've accepted all of these jargony terms into our lexicon one word at a time.

The Future of Technology

When it comes to future trends in technology, I have more than once been wrong. Very wrong. As a result, I've learned to never trust my own instinct when I hear about how technology is going to be in the future. I apparently can't see that far ahead.

I remember the first time I ever made such a mistake. It was in the fall of 1984, and I was taking a semester long computer programming course at my high school. Even way back then computers were something that interested me very much (Computers and the piano. I think anything that allowed my nervous fingers to move and create things.). During the last three weeks of the course, though, we moved away from computer programming, and I remember my instructor saying to us, "For the rest of the class we're going to work--not on computer programming--but on something called 'computer applications.' You see," he went on, "in the future, most people are NOT going to write their own programs. Other people will write the programs for them, and they'll just USE those programs written by someone else."

I didn't get it. Why would a person let someone else write a program for them? What was the fun in that? I understood it even less when we started working on a word processing program a few moments after that. I HATED the word processing program. I had been trained to type on a typewriter. I couldn't handle the idea that I didn't need to listen for the DING anymore to return the carriage to the left of the paper. I was sure I'd never get used to a word processing program, and even more sure that I wouldn't use a bunch of programs written by other people.

Utter nonsense, of course. I'm writing this blog entry on a word processing program of sorts, and I got used to the idea of not hitting the "Return" key long ago. And I haven't written a computer program since I left that class in 1984. The closest I've ever come to writing in computer code is writing in HTML and javascript on web pages. In 1984, though, I just couldn't see the future.

The same thing happened about 10 years ago when I read in a news magazine that the next big thing in computing was going to be Internet-based programs. "Cloud" programs they were called, because the software wasn't something you could physically touch or hold, wasn't on a CD or a floppy disk. Instead, consumers would pay a monthly or yearly fee to use this Internet-based service.

What a load of baloney, I remember thinking. Why would someone pay an ongoing fee to rent a program that runs over the Internet--which, mind you, was a pretty unreliable beast back in the year 2000--when they could purchase software on a CD and install it on their computers themselves? When you bought software you actually GOT something. When you purchased a cloud license you got...what? Nothing you could hold. It would NEVER catch on.

I know better now. At home, my email is entirely web based (Gmail), and I do my taxes and banking using online tools. At work, nearly every major system is now a cloud-based system, including our district email, student information system, and (coming in the next couple of weeks) our financial management / human resources system.

So don't ever ask me about the future trends of technology. I have no idea. I've learned to just trust the people who seem to know. 1 to 1 student computing using students' own devices that they bring to school? If you say so. Tablet PC's that are powerful and under $200 in price? You must know something I don't!

God of Carnage

Lisa and I saw the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park's God of Carnage yesterday afternoon. I can't recommend it enough. It may be the funniest play I've ever seen. If you're in the Cincinnati area, go see it. I promise you it will be better than waiting to see the pedophile's version in movie theaters at Christmas.

I went into the play knowing absolutely NOTHING about it (other than that it was the first show of the season), and came out in love with it. Don't want to tell you any more about it than that.

If you MUST know more, though, you can watch the trailer below.



(I can't see the video.)

P.S. If you DO decide to go, though, try to get seats either center stage or stage left. Lisa and I have front row seats slightly stage right, and because of the set design we could see almost NOTHING for the first ten minutes or so of the show. Once the actors got out of their chairs and started walking around it wasn't a problem, but still, why start off being forced to listen if you can avoid it.

Update on a VERY Old Post

Here's an update on a post that's almost two years old...

Back in November of 2009 I posted about how I was transitioning all of the bulbs in the house from the old, incandescent style of bulb compact fluorescent lights. As I mentioned in another post, I DID replace all of the incandescent lights by the end of that month, and I did see a decrease in my energy bill as a result.

I'm writing today, though, to say that this morning I had to replace my first burned out CFL. Almost two years with no light bulb changing, and a total of about 30 bulbs in the house. Not bad.

Figuring it out

Part of the reality of my job is that almost every day I'm at work--and usually several times a day--I'm asked by someone else to do something that I've never done before. That hasn't always been the case. When I was a classroom teacher I pretty much did the same thing every day. Sure, as an English teacher, some days I was teaching grammar, some days I was teaching writing, and other days some type of literature, but I pretty much came to work each day with a clear idea of what was going to happen that day and how I was going to do it.

Not anymore. In my job as the head of technology for the school district, I usually have a vague idea of what's going to happen at work each day, but as often as not I'm met by a person during the day who is requesting something that I've never done before. In the last week, here are just a few of the questions that I've had to tackle, all things that--while not necessarily new to the world of Information Technology--were new for ME:

• Do you know how to set up the buses in [our student database system] so that users of the system can easily track what bus a student rides?
• Can you make the "http" at the start of our website "https" for part of the site so that we can set it up for secure banking information?
• If I send you some information about a recent fundraiser and maybe 30 photos from the fundraiser, can you create a web page that has the information on it and that randomly shows 4 or 5 of the30 photos each time the page is loaded?
• Is it possible to load some music software onto a server so that everyone in the district can use it at the same time?
• Can you set up a system--without spending any money--where we can dump students into one of three groups: 1) those who have Internet access, 2) those who don't, and 3) those who have access to only certain sites, and can you make the system easy enough to use so that a classroom teacher can move kids in and out of the three groups AND edit the sites that students do and don't have access to?
• Can you create a program that allows me to walk through the buildings and take notes on how teachers are doing, and that will dump all of the data into a database that I can use to crunch numbers, and that will send the data for an individual teacher to that teacher automatically via email, and that will have exactly the fields we want in exactly the spots we want, unlike our current walkthrough software? And can you get that done by the end of next week?

When I'm asked questions like this, I basically give one of three answers: 1) Yes, I can definitely do that, 2) No, I definitely CANNOT do that, and 3) I think I might be able to do that. And for option three, I usually say the same thing: "I don't know how to do that now, but I can probably figure something out."

I say that so often, in fact, that it's apparently become a bad habit, like someone saying "Umm" before speaking. I hadn't noticed until one day a couple of weeks ago my wife asked me if I could do something for her (I honestly don't remember what it was now). Before I could answer she said, "And if you say 'I'll figure it out' I swear I'll scream at you!"

I was a little taken aback. First, because she said it with such vehemence. Second, because "I'll figure it out" WERE the words that I had been just about to say. And third, because I had never noticed that I said that any more often than any other set of words. After she said that to me, though, I've heard myself say it all of the time. And I've become pretty self-conscious about it.The other day I heard myself say to our Foods Director, "Okay, so we'll meet next Tuesday to look at the Foods database and the student information system database to make sure that they match up, and if they don't we'll fig--I mean, if they don't, we'll determine where the breakdown is and try to resolve it."

Which was a stupid thing for me to say. It's stilted and hard to follow. "We'll figure out the problem" would have been more direct. Besides, I don't know that saying "We'll figure it out" over and over is necessarily a bad thing. As I said at the start of this blog entry, it's more a reflection what I do from day to day in my job. I'm constantly "figuring out" things.

Maybe it should be the motto for people in my position: "Chief Information Officers: We figure things out!"

By the way, the answers to the questions above were "Yes," "I'll figure it out," "Yes," "Yes," "I'll figure it out,"  and "No.

Piracy

Today a teacher at work asked me, with a completely straight face, why I wouldn't load a piece of software that she had bought in a store and paid $9.99 for onto EVERY student computer in two elementary schools (about 130 computers). When I explained to her that the license--that big, long agreement that she hit "Agree" to when she first installed the computer--granted her the right to install that piece of software on ONE computer, she made a "Pffff" sound with her mouth and said, "Oh! That company isn't even around anymore! What difference does it make?"

I don't mean to vilify this woman. On the contrary, her opinion isn't uncommon. Most people don't see intellectual theft as theft at all. They'll "rip" a friend's CD to their MP3 player and not think twice about it. They'll install Microsoft Office to their computer from a copy of a copy of a copy and not worry about the effort that went into the development of that program. It's just one copy, people say all of the time. No one cares.

But I care. I have to. It's part of my job at work to make sure that we are legally complying with our software licenses. So I get to be the bad guy and tell people what I said to this woman: "It makes a difference to ME. I want to be able to sleep at night knowing I have stolen anything--because whether you want to believe it or not, that's what intellectual theft is."

Boy, I just reread what I wrote, and all of that sounded grand. On the other hand, I seem to remember a couple of weeks ago renting RANGO from Amazon Instant Video ($3.99 for 24 hours), and when the 24 hours was up and the family hadn't yet finished the movie, trying to defeat the anti-piracy settings on my DVR and Roku player so that I could record the last 20 minutes for later viewing.

So maybe I don't have room to talk.