It Has Begun

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My daughter is playing on a Twin City Youth Soccer Association challenge level team this year after playing on a couple of Optimist rec league teams since our move to NC.  The big difference is that there are two practices a week plus at least one game and we will be traveling to play some games.  Rec league was one practice a week plus one game a week and all the games were played at the same field.

The other big difference for us this year is that I’ve volunteered to be an assistant coach on her team so we’ll be living and breathing soccer from now until next May with a brief respite during the winter.  So there won’t be any bumming rides for her to practice while we’re off doing other things.

The season started this past weekend with the TCYSA Classic Tournament which was held at the Sara Lee complex off of Shattalon Drive and the new BB&T complex in Davie County.  Something like 2,300 kids from all over NC (and a few from VA and WV) sweating their rear ends off on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  Our girls played twice on Saturday, losing 2-1 in the morning and 5-4 in the afternoon, and then once on Sunday, tying our Twin City counterparts 1-1.  This followed two weeks of three practices each (M,T,TR) and a month of informal scrimmaging with the other Twin City girl teams in our age group.

Sounds like a lot, but it’s worth the price.  I figure this is my last chance to spend significant time with Erin before she goes from boy crazy to boy obsessed and then forgets who I am.  The way I look at it there aren’t many better ways to spend an evening or a weekend.

Oh, and as for the tournament the good news is that all of the parents and coaches at our three games behaved very well.  None of the nightmare little league parent behavior that’s becoming more and more common these days.  Hopefully that’s a good omen for the rest of the year.  The bad news is that our goalie dislocated her knee in the second half of our first game.  She seemed a lot better on Sunday (she watched the game from the bench) and we all hope she’ll be back on her feet in a week or two.

Want to Make a Fortune on Your Shipping & Handling Charges? Work With Uncle Sam

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A couple of days ago I wrote about the increasingly popular online practice of selling things dirt cheap and then making money on the shipping and handling charges.  Well the online folks are a bunch of pikers compared to the small defense contractor based in South Carolina that, among other things, charged almost a $1 million to ship two $.19 washers to Texas.  The sister team running this company manages to make Cheney’s boys at Halliburton look like Boy Scouts.

Oh, and because these jokers got away with several of these S&H scams for years thanks to the Pentagon’s expedited payment system for items that were shipped under "priority" status, the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service "have made major changes, including thorough evaluations of the highest shipping charges."  Good to know, huh?

links for 2007-08-16

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Son, You’re 15 and It’s Time You Figured Out What You’re Doing for the Rest of Your Life

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Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author, blogger and general king-geek, posts about the troubling development of US high schools asking freshmen to declare a "major".


Some US high-schools are forcing students to choose "majors" in the
ninth grade. This sounds similar to the UK system, where teens take O-
and A-levels and seal their post-secondary education choices at the age
of 15 or 16. Maybe this works for some kids, but it would have been a
disaster for me.

I have to agree with Cory on this one.  In eighth grade I took one of those aptitude tests that were so popular at the time and I was told that the best career choice for me was becoming a park ranger.  Anyone that knows me knows I’m not the "one-with-nature" type so that career path was a non-starter. 

To be honest I’m 40 years old and I still don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up, so I can’t imagine asking my teenagers to figure out what they want to do their first year of high school.  What I do want them to do is learn, explore and try new things and not kill or seriously maim themselves in the process.  I figure we’ll have been successful if we look back 15 years from now and see that our kids found something in life that they’re passionate about, do it to the best of their ability and make a positive contribution to society in the process.

What I want my kids to see is that the learning process is what’s important, not the test grade.  Memorizing a math formula is worthless without learning how to apply it; memorizing historic dates is irrelevant without understanding the context of each historical event; learning to diagram a sentence is a waste of time if you don’t learn to communicate your thoughts and feelings with your writing.  I’m not saying that my kids shouldn’t learn the importance of working hard even when the subject is "boring", that’s as important to learn as the Pythagorean Theorem, but I am saying that they need to see that  learning in and of itself is a vital component of realizing their dreams, whatever they may be.  If their school asks them to decide in 9th grade whether they’re going to be an artist or a scientist then the school is doing them a supreme disservice.

The Day of Conception or The Day I’d Like to Visit Lenin’s Birthplace

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The Russians have a problem in that they don’t produce enough offspring and they tend to die a lot younger  than they should, hence a declining population.  The folks in Ulyanovsk, Russia think they have the solution.  They’ve declared September 12 the Day of Conception and given couples time off from work to go and be fertile. 

It gets better.

On June 12, Russia’s national day, the proud parents who "give birth to a patriot" on that day win "money, car, refrigerators, and other prizes."  Now that’s what I call a Patriot Act! From the article:

Everyone who has a
baby in an Ulyanovsk hospital on Russia Day gets some kind of prize.
But the grand prize winners are couples judged to be the fittest
parents by a committee that deliberates for two weeks over the
selection.

The 2007
grand prize went to Irina and Andrei Kartuzov, who received a
UAZ-Patriot, an SUV made in Ulyanovsk. They told reporters they were
planning to have another child anyway when they heard about the
contest.

Irina Kartuzova had to have a Caesarian section to deliver the baby and it was scheduled for June 12.

The
selection committee chose the Kartuzovs from among the 78 couples
because of their “respectability” and “commendable parenting” of
their two older children, a spokesman for the governor said.

It’s not just the Ulyanovskovites who think they need to be aggressive in boosting the birthrate. In his state of the nation address last year Russian president Darth Vader Dick Cheney Vladimir Putin declared the declining population the most acute problem facing the country and announced a "broad effort to boost Russia’s birthrate, including cash incentives to families to have more than one child."

Ulyanovsk’s Governor, Sergei Morozov, added the fun twist in his region with the Day of Conception and the Russia Day bonuses, and it seems to be working.  Ulyanovsk’s birthrate is up 4.5% this year over the same time last year.

I’m thinking that we should all show our support for the Ulyanovskovites by participating on September 12.  We should take the day off and, you know, do what any good Ulyanovskovite would do.  Honey? 

links for 2007-08-15

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Cool Way to Manage Information

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Yesterday I wrote on my business blog about searchCrystal
and noted that I liked the graphical display of its search results.
Today I stumbled upon a couple of sites that deal with visual
information management.  First I came across VisualComplexity.com which is best explained by this description from the site’s "About" page:

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource
space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.
The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of
different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as
diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope
this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing
research on this field.

From the VisualComplexity site I found TheBrain.com.
These guys have visual content management products, one for individuals
and the other for enterprises.  They describe their products this way:

 

TheBrain Technologies is the leading provider of visual content
management solutions. The company was founded in 1996 and has been
delivering award-winning information management solutions for over a
decade. By connecting people, processes, and information, TheBrain’s
products provide unparalleled context for smarter information discovery
and more informed decision-making.

      
 

TheBrain technology can be utilized on corporate intranets, desktops, and the Internet. Some
      applications include: customer care, project management, dynamic mind mapping, IT management and helpdesks,
      impact assessment, competitive intelligence, marketing and sales support, and personal information management.

       
 

TheBrain has two primary products: PersonalBrain for
        individual users and BrainEKP, an enterprise knowledge platform for group collaboration.

I’ve always struggled with content management.  In the physical
world I’m a "pile don’t file" kind of guy because when I file it I
forget about it.  (A happy compromise for me is binders; active
projects are organized in binders that I keep on my desk and then I
shelve the binders once the project is complete).  I’m constantly
hunting for files online because my folder systems tend to get too
complex and so I forget if I saved a file under "Taxes" or
"Accounting."  These products offer hope for folks like me.

Future of Newspaper Boxes, er, Racks?

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NewsboxWhat to do with an old newspaper vending machine rack?  This guy added a computer and a flat monitor and turned it into a news display using a slide program that shows pics of newspaper front pages (picture at left).   If I had thought of this I’d have connected the computer to my wireless network, pulled up my browser and kept it on my Google News page.

Update: My brother comments and informs me that this is newspaper rack, not a box.  He knows whereof he speaks so I stand corrected.  He also points the way to a headline that would have obviously been better than the original: Nice Rack!