If you don't play Risk, you might not see that I'm a jerk, but if you do play Risk, it should be very clear. And yes, I try to do this every time I play.


And here's the movie of the game (still in progress as of this writing).

Posted in the section Personal | # |

Just came across this gem from Sam Rowlands on the REALbasic mailing list: 90% of people think software should be free; the other 10% write the software.

So true. So true.

Posted in the section Technology | # |

I heart The Onion:

CEDAR RAPIDS, IA—Kevin Higgins always hated gym class. Like many of his classmates, he questioned the relevance of things like "exercise" and "physical fitness," and wondered if these skills would ever have any real-world applications. Though he endured more than 720 hours of gym over 12 years, the 38-year-old accounting clerk said Monday that he has still never used physical education once in his life.

Read on for a great article. Brilliant. Classic Onion.

Posted in the section Stupid Stuff | # |

From Stuff Christians Like:

1. If your candidate lost, you have to write:
God is sovereign and will provide. He is still in control. Everything is going to be alright.

2. If your candidate won, you have to write:
God is good and has provided. He is still in control. Everything is going to be alright.

Since both those things are true about God and Wednesday is going to be a pretty busy day, I thought I would get my mandatory Christian blogger post election entry out of the way.

God is sovereign. God is good. He will provide and He has provided. Everything is going to be alright.

So true.

Posted in the section Faith | # |

After months of grandstanding, pontificating, debating, and blustering, our two major party presidential candidates are entering the home stretch. We have only a few weeks to go until the general election, which will slightly influence the electoral college, which will decide the future of our great nation, at least for the next four to eight years.

This has been a difficult campaign for a lot of people. The issues are important and varied. We have the economy and the war. And for some reason, we're still bickering about abortion. Not to mention gay marriage, health care, and taxes. It seems like everybody has something at stake in this election.

I've never endorsed a candidate in this blog before, but tonight I take the step of doing so.

It wasn't an easy decision. Both Senator Obama and Senator McCain have served our country with honor, so choosing a single candidate was no simple task.

But in the end, the choice was clear. I decided to endorse a candidate with a long and storied history of getting the tough jobs done. Someone who hasn't made many friends along the way, but who has a proven track record of getting results. Someone who even has a family history in the business.

Click here to see the man who is receiving my endorsement.

Posted in the section Personal | # |

To the citizens of the United States of America from Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. (You should look up ‘revocation’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy).

Your new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections.

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded.

A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

1. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

2. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘colour’, ‘favour’ and ‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ with out skipping half the letters, and the suffix ‘-ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘-ise’. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (Look up ‘vocabulary’)

3. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as ‘like’ and ‘you know’ is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter ‘u’ and the elimination of -ize.

4. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

5. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you’re not quite ready to be independent. Guns should only be used for shooting grouse. If you can’t sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you’re not ready to shoot grouse.

6. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

7. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables.
Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

8. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline)-roughly $10/US gallon. Get used to it.

9. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.

10. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. South African beer is also acceptable as they are pound for pound the greatest sporting Nation on earth and it can only be due to the beer. They are also part of British Commonwealth - see what it did for them. American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat’s Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.

11. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie Macdowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one’s ears removed with a cheese grater.

12. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body Armour like a bunch of nancies). Don’t try Rugby - the South Africans and Kiwis will thrash you, like they regularly thrash us.

13. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first to take the sting out of their deliveries.

14. You must tell us who killed JFK. It’s been driving us mad.

15. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty’s Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776).

16. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper cups, with saucers, and never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; plus strawberries (with cream) when in season.

God Save the Queen

Original source unknown, but this was sent to my department by our secretary, who, as you may assume, is English, and quite a hoot about it.

Posted in the section Stupid Stuff | # |

One of the great frustrations of working in educational technology is the vendor. The vendor is an insidious creature who worms his way into the confidence of your administration, convincing them that he and only he has the solution they need, that nothing the local staff can come up with could match his offering by any measure, and that he and his staff are the ultimate authorities on the subject, whatever the subject may be.

Suffice it to say, once an administrator falls under the spell of a vendor, it is difficult, if not impossible, to break the curse. No amount of incontrovertible proof on your part that the vendor is an incompetent charlatan will help. Sometimes only another vendor can break the curse.

I've dealt with my share of vendors over the past decade. I've seen all kinds: slick, pretty, slimy, dirtbag. I've cleaned up their messes and I've almost always taken the blame for their failure to meet the expectations of the hapless administrator they've ensnared.

With that in mind, here are some rhetorical questions I'd like to pose to a cross-section of the vendors I've encountered. Answers are not expected, but hopefully the questions will give you an idea of the havoc they've wrought.

1) Why don't you know about line endings? How can you sell yourself as an expert in importing and exporting data when you don't know the difference between a carriage return and a line feed? And why is notepad.exe your only tool for data validation?

2) What on earth made you think you could install the NT Option Pack on Windows95? I mean, come on! And you did it not once, but twice! Two days in a row! I rebuilt that machine twice in two days, miraculously recovering her data, and then I got reamed out by the physical plant manager because your crap didn't work.

3) When I tell you that the leading zeros in my data matter, it's because they really do matter. Why would you think otherwise? Why would you think it's okay to modify the data I give you?

4) Why do you believe that running on VirtualPC (or as you called it in your adorable southern drawl, "the VirtualPC platform") is supporting the Mac? Are you high? That's not supporting the Mac. That's the opposite of supporting the Mac.

5) Why wouldn't you list everything you require in the document you called System Requirements? I know the machine didn't have a parallel port. You know why? Because you never said it needed one!

6) Speaking of which, why in the world are you still using hardware dongles? Don't treat us like thieves. Believe me, no one wants to pirate your school cafeteria point-of-sale system. I promise.

7) Why did your trainer go in and add users to the system without notifying me? And while we're on the subject, why didn't he follow the convention that I had established? And when that caused a bunch of errors when you tried to import my data, why did you lead the administrator to believe that it was my fault?

8) Bonus question for said trainer: where do you get off asking for a job at the district? Seriously uncool, man.

9) Why would you call a meeting with the users of the application, very conspicuously not invite me to the meeting, and then write a nastygram to the administrator saying that I didn't bother to show up? That's just low.

10) Why do I have to explain the difference between strings and doubles? Aren't you supposed to be the expert on data?

11) Why is your "relational database" built out of batch files? How did you even do that? Major props, though. The biggest thing I ever built from batch files was an app launcher for DOS.

Posted in the section Work | # |

Posted in the section Stupid Stuff | # |

Posted in the section Stupid Stuff | # |

I'll probably never get around to writing this book, but I hope I do. I'd like to read it when it's done. Should be interesting. Anyway, here, in no particular order, is a partial list of the chapter titles from the book.

Downtown
In which I discuss the circumstances in which we first found him.

A Tale Of Two Cities
In which I discuss our "courtship": the expanse of time between meeting Jonathan and moving him into our home.

Free At Last, Free At Last
In which I discuss the days leading up to his adoption and the great relief we felt when it was finally done.

The Path Of Most Resistance
In which I discuss his tendency to perform every task in the most difficult, cumbersome, awkward way.

Love Will Tear Us Apart
In which I discuss the initial effects of Jonathan's presence upon my marriage.

And Along Came Emmi
In which I discuss the birth of my first niece and the effect on Jonathan.

Millions Of Peaches
In which I discuss Jonathan's uncanny ability to identify songs after one hearing and the possibility that his knowledge of alternative rock will someday be encyclopedic (assuming I can keep him from listening to too much of his sister's Hannah Montana, which could corrupt him).

Can You Make It Bigger?
In which I discuss some of the peculiarities of Jonathan's language development.

It's My Birthday!
In which I discuss Jonathan's early insistence that every day was birthday (and also the birthday of Joe from Blue's Clues (Joe, by the way, is no Steve, and never will be)).

Pete And Repeat
In which I discuss the reasons why Jonathan's media consumption is now very, very limited.

Angels Watching Over Us
In which I discuss Bethanna, and how very helpful they were to us throughout the process.

Kindred Spirits
In which I discuss the strange, unique, and strong bond between my father and my son.

Posted in the section Personal | # |