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{ Monthly Archives } August 2007

The Culture of fear comes to Fredericksburg

Why yes, we did have our own suspicious package episode this morning. And like 99.99999% of the other suspicious packages that are found by people, it was neither suspicious nor dangerous. But hey, the police got to play with the bomb detecting robot, so they go that going for them. [where: 22407]

What they really teach in public school

If you are smarter and more clever than the rest of us, people will not be amused. Exhibit A: The kids that pulled this off were suspended for 3 days.

IS HSLDA just insecure?

Why else would they be so excited about a government proclamation in CO making 4/13/2007 as Colorado Homeschooling Day? HSLDA acts more and more like the insecure pimple faced school kids they claim to decry every day. I thought the whole idea of this was that we didn’t need government approval? And now the self [...]

I ain’t whistling Dixie

As Breck and I walked to the car after his fencing practice tonight, I inexplicably found myself whistling this tune. I have no idea why.

Clothes Shopping for the ‘tween set

We just did this yesterday. Although I guess my son, being 13, is no longer a ‘tween. Luckily neither of my kids have any desire to dress like a skanky ho’. Breck’s goal with clothes shopping is to get the hell out of the mall as soon as possible. He would be quite happy buying [...]

We’re #1, we’re #1

Breck on the strip Originally uploaded by ChrisOD Breck and I scored 13,653 in Countdown trivia at Buffalo Wild Wings this evening. That was good for 56th (out of over 10,000) in the country, and high score for the month to date in the restaurant. And on another TV the Red Sox were spanking the [...]

Never trust a man

That seems to be the general sentiment of child welfare advocates and the police. Lost children are advised to find a safe adult – and all the example safe adults are women. Airlines only seat unaccompanied minors next to women. Even John Walsh, host of America’s Most Wanted, advises against ever hiring a male babysitter. [...]

Who knew vacuum cleaners were so interesting?

I read James Dyson’s biography in 3 days. It is that good. Of particular interest to my readers will be chapter 2, where he just skewers the public education system in England. It was interesting that he successfully designed several products prior to his vacuum, but poor legal and ownership decisions led to him not [...]

Pimp my dorm room video challenge

Best Buy is giving away a $15K dorm room makeover in a video contest. The finalists are here, and the creativity on some of these is damn good.

Do Animals Have Rights?

The whole Michael Vick thing has led to some interesting discussions on the web about animal rights. Of particular interest to me is the whether or not you can construct a theory of animal rights under libertarianism. I’m having a hard time buying that libertarianism would provide for animal rights. In libertarianism, property rights rule, [...]

Data protection – advantage Linux

So I just moved my home directory to a separate partition. What this means is that I could totally bork my Ubuntu install and all I’d have to do is reinstall Linux in the boot partition. All my data, browser history, email, etc would be totally unharmed because it is on a separate logical disk [...]

Texas 30 – Baltimore 3

That would be a bad enough football beat down, but as a baseball score? Yeesh.

1 in 4 Americans did not read a book last year

This might actually explain quite a bit about the state of our country today.

PZ Meyers being sued over book review

Occasional homeschool detractor and rabid atheist PZ Meyers is being sued over his review of the book Lifecode. I’m no PZ Meyers fan, as I find rabid atheists only marginally less irritating than rabid fundies, but I’ll have to support Meyers in this case. If you can’t take the heat of a bad review you [...]

Homeless are key to bridge safety

1. Bridges never collapse on homeless people sleeping under them. 2. Therefore homeless people must have laser beam vision that detects bridge defects. 3. So obviously we should enlist the homeless in our bridge safety programs. I’m kidding. Daryl’s neighbor isn’t.