truetech

I’ll admit it: I’m a big softie. I have a long and storied history of crying at movies, dating back to my childhood when Snoopy, Come Home always choked me up.

This afternoon, the movie of choice was Because of Winn-Dixie. It was a good movie, very cute and family friendly. And yes, it made me cry.

Now, before you go hurling epithets at me, let me explain. There were several themes at work in this film. First, there was the (very obvious) dog theme. I’m a dog-lover, through and through (note my Snoopy reference above), so dog movies get me every single time. Second, there was the father/daughter theme. Being the father of a young girl myself, I have an automatic affinity for such stories. Then throw in the redemption theme and toss in a world-weary guitarist who just wants to play music for animals, and you’ve got yourself a surefire tearjerker as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t stand a chance.

All kidding aside, I was very interested to see how Dave Matthews did in this film, as I’ve never seen him act before. I thought he did a good job, although it would have been tough for him to mess up the whole freaky musician thing. His guitar playing, which I nearly always enjoy, was a really nice touch in several parts of the film.

Anyway, Grace had invited a friend over to watch the movie, and the two of them were lying on the floor in front of the couch, so I don’t think they saw me wiping my eyes. I’m not sure if Jen did or not, but I was slightly more confident that she wouldn’t tease me as much as the girls would have. In the end, nobody said anything, so either Jen didn’t see, or she was being kind. I could go either way.

Let me conclude by saying that this curse is genetic. My mother cries at coffee commercials, so at least I’m a step up from that. By the way, Mom, feel free to leave a comment some time. I know you read this.

Ah, a good day!

Today concluded my pilot run of online testing at Etown. It went swimmingly. This is a strange feeling for me, becuase everything at Etown is typically two or three steps more difficult than it has to be. But this actually went well.

At Etown, we do a lot of testing. Each student takes a pre-test and a post-test in both reading and math. We look at this data in several ways to track and predict student progress. This is a good thing.

However, since 1998 or so, this has all been done with Scantron stuff. Now, don’t get me wrong: I like Scantron. My new ES2260 scanner rocks. It’s blazing fast. But OMR scanning technology has serious limits. It needs perfect paper. Wrinkle the paper and the test won’t scan right. Staple, fold, or clip the paper, and the test won’t scan right. Dump coffee on the paper (I received a stack of coffee-stained tests just yesterday, thank-you-very-much) and the test won’t scan right.

And when the test won’t scan right, that means we’re not being as accurate as we could be. Not to mention the huge waste of resources in re-printing tests and copying answers from a bad sheet to a good sheet.

In short, these scan forms are the bane of my existence. Well, ones of the banes of my existence.

So what’s the solution? REALbasic and PostgreSQL to the rescue, naturally!

I recently began working on a solution that would allow our students to take their tests on the computer instead of on paper.

As a brief aside here, there was some initial resistance to the idea from some of our elementary folks, who were no doubt well-meaning in their dissent. They were afraid that taking the test on the computer might be too daunting for some of our younger students, who may have trouble reading what’s on the screen. This perplexed me, so I asked how they read what’s on the paper now. “Oh,” someone told me, “they don’t take the tests themselves. An aide writes down their answers on the test sheet!” When I suggested that said aide could simply enter these answers directly into the computer, I was met with wide-eyed stares.

At any rate, after a few false starts and some discouraging delays, yesterday was the big day. One brave Middle School math teacher offered to let me use one of her classes as my guinea pigs. And they loved it. As I circulated during the test, one kid looked up at me and said, “This is awesome.” Wow.

And the teacher loved that she could see the results in real time. That was a huge plus for her.

Today, as the test wrapped up and the next class began to filter into the room, some of them asked what the computers were for. My guinea pigs replied that they were taking their post test online. “No fair!” shouted the newcomers. “How come we don’t get to take our test online?”

I call that a success.

From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can’t stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don’t think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.

McSweeney’s continues to publish some of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Just the thought of Cookie Monster standing in his apartment, filled with self-loathing, is something I find hilarious. I highly recommend checking out some of their lists and Open Letters To People Or Entities Who Are Unlikely To Respond.

Of course, in our politically correct and hyper-sensitive world, Cookie Monster has declared that cookies are a “sometimes food” these days. Sacrilege.

Via The Dilbert Blog:

Savannah: “Scott, pharm did you tell Justin that pedaling backwards makes you weaker?”

It was then that I realized I probably ought to undo some other things I had told them, site before they mention those things in school and get put in some sort of slow learner program.

Read the whole story for a good laugh.

Wow. GData. This is cool stuff.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t read the spec in its entirity yet, but I gotta say, this had the potential to be very, very big. Especially this part: the Calendar Data API. Check this out:

Google Calendar allows client applications to view and update calendar events in the form of Google data API (“GData”) feeds. Your client application can use the Google Calendar data API to create new events, edit or delete existing events, and query for events that match particular criteria.

There are many possible uses for the Calendar data API. For example, you can create a web front end for your group’s calendar that uses Google Calendar as a back end. Or you can generate a public calendar for Google Calendar to display, based on your organization’s event database. Or you can search relevant calendars to display a list of upcoming events on those calendars.

I’m thinking that this could be the elusive shared calendar solution we’ve been searching for at work. If multiple people can edit it remotely, plus people can use iCal to enable synchronizing (at least on the Mac), then this has huge potential. Time to dive into web services again, I suppose.

Via Gadgetopia.

This is one of those things that if you get it, it’s really, really funny. And if you don’t, no amount of explaining will help.

From David Weiss’s blog. Good stuff. And the obligatory joke:

Q: What do rocket scientists say when they want to describe a portion of their work as easy?
A: “This bit isn’t exactly brain surgery.”

Subject: Gouranga
From: Neateye
Call out Gouranga be happy
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga!
That which brings the highest happiness…

Wow! Not just any happiness, but the highest happiness! Rock on!

Initially, I figured Gouranga was a made-up word. I suppose this shows a certain level of cultural ignorance on my part, but I get a lot of weird spam that borders on beatnik poetry written in Esperanto. If you want to know what it means, WikiPedia can hook you up: Gouranga, or Gauranga, is said to originate in the Hare Krishna religious movement, whose founding father, Shri Krishna Caitanya Mahaprabhu, was also called Gaura, or Gauranga. In popular culture it is accepted generally as a word meaning simply ‘be happy’, although the literal Sanskrit translation is ‘light/golden-limbed’. Ummmm… okay.

This was weird enough for me to do a little bit of Googling. Turns out, I’m not that special: other people have gotten this same message. I guess that shouldn’t bother me. I mean, really, once I have the highest happiness, I’m sure I’ll want to share it with everyone possible.

I guess.

Is Dr. Pepper the Lando Calrissian of Sodas?

From Stuffo.com:

It was an ordinary Sunday night. Maybe a little rainy. It had been a long day. On the way home from the charity center I stopped at a gas station convenience store to quench my thirst. My hands were gnarled from long hours with a spoon and toothpicks, and my haggard frame barely held up my suit. I didn’t need much, just a little pick-me-up to take the edge off. I instinctively reached for something from the cold case, but as I grabbed for my usual can of Diet Coke my eyes came to rest on a strange new something. That something had 25 letters and red and yellow stripes. It had three flavors in its name and sported the title of a professional — a physician no less. I’m not one to take chances in life, but something about this stocky, stripy stranger and her erudite airs was giving me the spins. I fell for her, and I fell hard.

So it’s not just me, then. That’s good to know. I am hooked on this stuff. And the new Diet Berries & Cream Dr. Pepper, too. The stuff is like liquid crack.

This is really good Flash simulation of Mac System 7.1 (click the image for the link).

Takes me back to my first Mac, in 1991. Of course, I hadn’t upgraded to System 7 yet; I was still using System 6.0.7, which was lean and fast, even on my 8 MHz Macintosh Classic with 2 MB RAM. And a whopping 40 MB hard drive. Man, I thought that computer rocked. I’d stay up late at night using ResEdit to poke through every file I could get my hands on.

But anyway, the simulation is great. Very realistic. I love the Netscape icon on the desktop. I wonder if the simulated extensions folder has a simulated copy of Netscape Defrost in there?

You’re not going to Adam and believe this…