Parental Pride

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I’ve always been proud of my kids, but this past week or two I’ve had several reasons to be particularly proud:

  • Last week my wife and I went to have lunch with Justin, our youngest, at his school.  Justin is in fourth grade and is an avid reader.  His teacher took the time to sit with us and tell us that Justin has more ‘Accelerated Reader’ points than any other kid in his grade and is reading at a 7th-8th grade level. 

    What made me particularly proud, though, was what she told us next.  There’s a girl in Justin’s class who struggles with reading and Justin’s teacher has teamed him with this girl to read along with her (out loud) to help her with her comprehension.  Apparently it is working well, but Justin’s teacher is worried that Justin may be missing out on his own reading so she asked him if he’d be willing to read into a tape recorder at night and then the girl can listen to the tape while she’s reading during class.  The fact that he agreed to this extra work makes me more proud than I can possibly describe.

  • My oldest son, Michael, is in the seventh grade.  He has been selected by his teachers to be an ambassador for the school.  In the near future fifth graders who will begin attending his school next year will be taking tours of the school and Michael’s job will be to escort them, and their parents around the campus.  Anyone who knows Michael knows that he’s an extremely articulate and personable young man and I think he’ll make a wonderful ambassador for the school.  Again I can’t adequately describe how proud this makes me feel.
  • Last but certainly not least my daughter Erin, a sixth grader, came home with her second consecutive straight-A report card.  She’s a wonderful student, works diligently at every aspect of being a student and is more "together" than I’ve ever been.  On top of that she’s a beautiful young lady, both in body and spirit and I’m now officially freaked out about boys.  Let this be a warning to all boys out there: I’m watching and I’m loaded for bear.

I’ve now gone on record with my parental pride and this post can also double as a place I can go to remind myself of how great my kids are the next time they really screw up.

Playing with Wisdom of Crowds

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There’s a website that is trying to take off on the "Wisdom of Crowds" idea.  It’s called TwoCrowds and the basic idea is that you register (it’s free) and then start making predictions.  You can make your own predictions and you can look at others’ predictions and indicate whether or not you agree.

It’s very new (when I registered no predictions had more than seven peoples’ opinion) but it looks like it could be a lot of fun.

My first prediction was that Hillary Clinton will not run for Prez in 2008, and then I agreed with someone else’s prediction that there will be commercial flights to space by 2015.  Go to www.twocrowds.com and have a little fun prognosticating.

Find Any ATM by Zip Code

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Here’s a cool little Google Maps mashup: simply visit www.locateatms.com, type in a zip code and then click "Search ATMs".  It will bring up a Google Map with all the ATMs in that zip code indicated, then if you want to find a specific bank’s ATM you can select that bank from a drop-down window.

One problem I had is that the bank selector field shows up on the home page even though it doesn’t function until you search by zip code which can be confusing.  Still, pretty cool little application.

I’ve Been Lapped by an Eight Year Old

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A venture capitalist tells his eight year old son what he does for a living.  The precocious kid then dreams up his own company and when daddy tells him he’s busy reading to his sister the kid does what any budding entrepreneur would do: he runs screaming to his mother, the VC’s wife.

Appropriate pressure applied the VC helps his kid get a URL for his company and then points it to his son’s blog.  He checks in a while later to find his son designing t-shirts and hats on Cafepress and then linking the store to his blog.  The dad then blogs about it, it gets picked up by at the Business 2.0 blog and now there’s an eight-year-old who has done more business online than I have.

Sigh.  Time for a Scotch.  I bet the little rug rat can’t do THAT.

Just Curious

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We’ve all had a lot of fun with VP Cheney shooting one of his buddies in the head while hunting (check out the Daily Show’s riff if you haven’t already).  It got a little less funny when the news came out that his buddy had a heart attack as a direct result of being shot.  My question is this: could the VP be charged with manslaughter if his buddy died?  I’m assuming yes, but I really don’t know.

Sometimes It Just Takes 20 Years

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A while ago I wrote about an experience I had with some of the guys from my fraternity (Sigma Chi) when we helped Steve Carlson, one of our brothers who has been dealing with a worsening condition of multiple sclerosis (MS).  That event and the subsequent communication with all those guys I haven’t seen in years reminded me of what a remarkable time my college years were, and gives me even more reason to be proud to be associated with my guys from Sigma Chi-Iota Xi Chapter.

Well our school’s (George Mason University) alumni magazine picked up the story (read it here) and it so happens that on the same day this article appeared I received word that GMU’s basketball team is ranked 30th in the country in the AP poll.  For GMU that’s a big deal, especially since the school (still) doesn’t have a football team, not even Division 1-AA.  Okay, there’s a club team but for a school with 20,000+ students that’s just silly.

Back when I was there we had a top-10 soccer team, and our track team was top-notch. Still, those aren’t exactly glamour sports so it’s nice to see the school doing well in a top-tier sport.

I’ve always been a proud alumnus of GMU, but whenever I tell people where I went to school I get the question, "Who’s that" when I tell them.  (By the way this is who George Mason was). Now maybe if we make a run in March people will know that GMU is a fine Virginia state university that has had Nobel Laureates on its faculty and has one of the better economics and computer science departments in the country.  Oh, and if you’re a conservative you’d love our Law School.  Sad to say, but it usually takes a nationally prominent sports team to make a school recognizable so that’s what I’m hoping for. 

So it may have taken 20 years but now I’m going to be a proud AND vocal alumnus of GMU.  Go Patriots!

My Political Compass

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I took a little test at www.politicalcompass.org and it scored me this way:

Economic Left/Right: -1.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.67 

They also provide a sample chart showing where some notable people would fall.  Here it is:
Famouspoliticalcompass_1 

To give you an idea, the axis is 0,0 so if you’re a negative/negative you fall in the lower left hand quadrant with Gandhi (that’s me).  If you’re a negative/positive then you’re up there with Stalin, if you’re a positive/positive you’re in with Thatcher and positive/negative puts you in the company of Friedman. Personally I don’t think that examples like Hitler and Stalin because quite simply I think they were sub-human and they don’t belong on any chart that tracks normal human behavior/beliefs.  I also think it unnecessarily offends people who might legitimately fall into those sectors but don’t believe in wholesale killing.

If you go to the site you’ll see an overview of what this
means.

Thanks to David Boyd for pointing to this.

Update: Potato Stew put together a plot that shows all the scores for local bloggers that took the test. I’m thinking that it would be interesting to do one for my family.

The CIA Wants Your Kids. No, Really

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Cia_gingerSee that bear on the left?  That’s "Ginger" short for "Virginia" and she provides an online tour of the CIA for kids. 

This has me wondering, does the White House have its own ‘Ginger’?  Searching…

 

Barney3
Oh, right they have Barney, seen here doing a passable imitation of Scott-y McLellan the President’s mouth piece, er, press secretary. 

Here are some suggested mascots for other prominent government folks:

Cheney4

 

Office of the Vice President, Richard Cheney

Gonzalez

 

USDOJ, Attorney General Gonzales

Chernoff

 

Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Chertoff

Job Security?

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Surveillance company CityWatcher.com is requiring that employees that access it’s data center do so with RFID security chips that are implanted in their biceps.  Having the implants is not a condition of employment but is required for access to the data center. 

Ironically a security expert recently discovered that the chips, provided by the company VeriChip can be skimmed and cloned, duplicating an implant’s aunthentification.  According to this article the folks at CityWatcher.com weren’t aware of the security flaw.

All I can say is that you’d have to pay me a bunch of money to implant anything in my already-decrepit body and it darn well better be upgradeable without taking it out and putting it back in.  It also better be a lot more reliable than my PC or my cell phone because if it behaved like those sorry devices it would probably start repeatedly ordering my implanted arm to pick my nose or something slightly worse.