Category Archives: uncategorized

Physical Education

I heart The Onion:

CEDAR RAPIDS, there 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.

The Obligatory Post-Election Blog Post For Christians

From Stuff Christians Like:

1. If your candidate lost, viagra sale 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, clinic 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.

Endorsement

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.

Vendors

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.

An Open Letter To The Tractor I Got Behind On My Way To Work Today

Dear Tractor I Got Behind On My Way To Work Today,

Was there really no other time you could have done that? Did you really and truly have to drive that tractor, at fifteen miles per hour, on Prospect Road, between Route 462 and Route 283, at 7:30 AM? You couldn’t have done it, say, last evening, or later this morning?

Either way, thanks for making me late for work.

Brad