Still Messing Around

I'm still playing with the blog template. I made some tweaks over the last few days. I hope I haven't broken anything.

Blogger has some new layout tools that eliminate the need to hand-code XML. If you have a blog, it's worth the five minutes to upgrade your template to the new style. It really does make things easier.

Tax Dollars at Work

I love seeing my tax dollars going to such worthy causes. No wonder the Chinese are eating our lunch.

Sad

I'm not quite sure what Bible is being used in some churches, but it definitely isn't the one I grew up with. It also gives me warm fuzzies that cops had to handcuff a 71-year-old woman. Welcome to our "brave" new world. I feel so safe knowing that dangerous old women are being handcuffed by our boys in blue.

And a little note to Pastor Burrick; nice job proving Mrs. Caskey correct.

Primaries

The more presidential election cycles I live through, the more I miss the old smoke-filled back rooms that gave us presidents like Kennedy and Eisenhower. The only good thing about this mess is that Obama is doing well enough to force Hillary to reveal her inner bitch.

I stick by my prediction; a year from today, the Clintons will be back in the White House.

Let the Spoofs Begin

Apple announced the MacAir a couple weeks ago, so of course, the parodies are rolling in.

First Official Day Retrospective

I questioned why I went in on a Saturday night to train at my new job. As I recall, that was the busiest night of the week. Sure enough, not only was it the busiest night of the week, but the busiest night ever since the restaurant opened about 4 months ago. I mostly stayed out of the way or helped various people not go into the weeds. There wasn't room for me to shadow the guy that was supposed to be training me, so I didn't get much out of it. Of course, it's not like any of it is rocket science.

I won't be working a regular schedule this week, just on-call in case someone doesn't show up or calls out sick. I'm supposed to go in on Saturday again, but I don't know what time or what I will be doing there. Fun stuff.

Creating a Hit Song

A while back, Scott Adams asked his blog readers to submit couplets that were more or less random words. He then strung them together into verses and chorus form. The German band RIVO DREI put the lyrics to music, then some random geek created a music video. Now you know how a no-talent like Britney Spears can become a star.

Useless but Fun

It's called vozMe. I doesn't do anything all that useful, but then how useful is most of what we do with our computers? Enjoy!

Making Vacation Plans?

Go to Germany and fly nude.

Money Quote:

The 55 passengers will have to remain clothed until they board, and dress before disembarking, said Hess. The crew will remain clothed throughout the flight for safety reasons.

I'd pay money for the memo on those "safety reasons."

ELIZA

Just stumbled across the web version of an oldie-but-goodie that has been around since the late sixties. I love it.

The Job

Today will be my first official day at work, although I've already been called in twice since going in Thursday to fill out all the paperwork. Both times I was filling in for the dish washer who had an emergency root canal Thursday morning. Today I get to actually start training to do the job I was hired for. When I had time, I've jumped in a couple times over the last two days, but today I start learning how to do all the prep work and back up the two chefs. And yes, this is one of those places that have chefs, not cooks. And don't you ever forget it!

Now I have to run to a drug store and try to get the rest of my insulin pen injector. The Walgreen's morons just gave me the refill cartridges. I didn't catch the problem until last night when I got them out of the box. I'd been using up a couple sample pens prior to then which come as a complete unit, so I didn't realize I had a problem until around midnight last night. So off to spend more money I don't have.

Friend of a Friend

Since when can I be held personally liable, possibly subject to criminal prosecution (persecution?) for a link to a link? And we seem destined to elect the same sort of whiny female as our president. Fun.

Uncharted Waters

Anyone want to take a stab at what this means? It can't be anything good.

Ummmm, Yea

(I've never said it, but just click the image to get a big enough version to actually read the text.)

Some Things Never Change

Massive corruption in the Detroit mayor's office. There's a shock. Next you will be telling me that Flint is bankrupt.

But that's OK; Mitt Romney and his magic underwear will save the day!

A Little Good News

Oil seems to have eased off a bit in recent days, and maybe stocks have bottomed out for now. Of course, the structural problems remain, but it seems we live to die another day.

Grim News for the Music Industry

Things look bad for the big labels. According to the RIAA, that means humanity will cease creating music.

Right.

Death by Media

Scott Adams stirs the pot a little. Interesting conjecture. Death sells. Celebrity death sells a lot. War sells even more. Enlightened self-interest would dictate the obvious.

That Readin' Thing

Anyone who knows me understands that I have zero respect for our current public education system. I am not alone.

Jerry Pournelle responding to the Suprynowicz article:

I am not an enemy of the locally controlled public school, just as I am not an enemy of universal manhood conscription. It is good for a republic to have the social classes mix. Catholic schools do as good a job of that as public schools, or did when I was in First Grade. My family was from the ruined old aristocracy, now solidly middle class, dependent on my father's salary. Next to me was the scion of the noveau riche family that owned the Coca Cola franchise. In the seat ahead of me was a boy perhaps ten years old, still in first grade, an amiable giant who became my best friend. Most of my classmates were middle class suburbanites but there were also Italian truck gardener children. There were two grades in a room.

When we moved to Capleville the consolidated school, also two grades to a room, was the only school available. Once again there were the rich and the poor, farmers and intellectuals, a complete mix of rural Shelby County. Of course I went to high school at Christian Brothers, which was considered the college prep high school; most CBC students went on to college as a matter of course. Catholic High, run by Jesuits, did not sent 20% of its student on to higher education. The city of Memphis had a school system that was similar. Central High was the college prep high school, while the local neighborhood high schools were "terminal", in that most of the graduates got jobs or got married soon after graduation. Memphis had a third alternative: there was Memphis Tech, which taught drafting and wood and metal shop, and was considered a good place to have come from if you wanted any kind of technical job that didn't require calculus.

So long as local schools are locally controlled, and raise their fund locally -- that is, transparency and accountability are preserved, those who spend the money control what is done with the money -- the public schools will not become the enemy of the republic. I am not at all sure that today's centrally controlled schools funded by the states, hell bent to keep up attendance and leave no child behind, are responsibly to anyone at all. They are like the Golem created to defend a community but which terrorizes it, answering to no one. And no child left behind means that no child gets ahead.

Interestingly, I have found few intellectual communities including the national security bureaucracy who dispute that assessment of the school system. In the Homeland Security conference last week, a high ranking California homeland security official said "We are faced with an increasing requirement for technically competent employees while our schools are increasingly unable to produce them." No one in a conference of 1500 government and private industry security experts questioned the assertion. When I called attention to it to everyone I met, I got no quarrel. Everyone agreed: yet it was as if it had not been said.

We have an increasing need for technically competent high school graduates, and a school system decreasingly able to meet that need. And the band plays on. And No Child Is Left Behind.

On a related note, The Onion is sometimes too real to be funny.

Parents; it's really simple. If you want your children to know how to read (and by extension know how to self-educate) then they have to read. Be the adult. Shut off the damn TV and get a library card for your kids. Cheap books are available used from a variety of sources. There is probably a used book store within walking distance of your home where you can not only purchase used books for next to nothing, but will take books you've already read as trade for little or no cash. If not, Amazon can hook you up easily enough. Debbie and I just purchased over a dozen new and used books from there delivered to our door for a little over $100 (the price of dinner and a movie for the family). And don't be too concerned about what they are reading (obvious caveats aside) or if it's "good" literature or pulp fiction or magazines or even comic books. Oh. Sorry. Make that graphic novels. Our Amazon book order had everything from Richard Feynman's lectures on quantum electrodynamics to Patricia Cornwell to Wil Wheaton's latest.

Read. Read. Read. A hundred pages a day as a minimum. And the internet doesn't count.

Clean-up

You may or may not have noticed changes over on the right-hand side of the page. Several of my regular sites have recently retired and others have reduced the frequency of their updates. I also decided to get rid of a lot of links that were simply being stored as it were on the blog page because I grew tired of losing all my bookmarks every time Windows has one of its frequent brain farts. Those are now on my Google bookmarks, where they should be somewhat safe.

I'll also be experimenting with some changes to my page template, so if you hit the site and everything looks incredibly stupid, you'll know why.