Day 968 of 1000
Lorena was genuinely excited this morning on the way home from dropping the kids off at NCSU. She took this picture close to the intersection of Hwy 401 and Tryon Road. She feels pretty famous now.
Betty Blonde #102 – 12/05/2008
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Day 960 of 1000
Due to Mozilla’s unconscionable and extreme treatment of their former CEO, Brendan Eich, I have decided to kick Firefox to the curb. Daniel Greenfield explains the issue quite well in his blog post at Frontpage Mag. He also makes a great case for why Chrome is a bad choice for a replacement. I thought I would try Opera first because I have heard so many good things about it. I am writing this post from the ScribeFire extension that I used previously in Firefox. I have been able to import all my bookmarks and am blocking ads with AdBlock Plus. The browsers is noticeably faster. I will have to retrain myself to use the Opera layout, but that does not look to be too onerous. So far, admittedly only one day, I am quite happy with the change. I will leave Firefox installed for a few more days to easy the transition, but will put up a post when I am Firefox free.
Betty Blonde #99 – 12/02/2008
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Day 955 of 1000
This is the second time in a row I sat by a semi-almost-famous person on the flight from Charlotte to Phoenix. On the last trip I sat by an old English guy who had a career as a professional ballroom dancer. He spent most of his time traveling around teaching people how to dance and judging dance competitions. I did not know whether to believe him or not, but then he pulled out his iPad and showed me a bunch of pictures of himself with famous people. It turns out he trained some of the Dancing with the Stars dancers–not the celebrities, the dancers that danced with the celebrities. He was a very nice guy and we had a nice chat most of the way to Phoenix.
Yesterday I sat by a guy whose day job is a high school art teacher. He was a very nice guy. When I asked him where he was going, he told me that he was traveling to Reno, Nevada to be some kind of a monitor for the Nevada Gaming Commission of a Mixed Martial Arts fight. It turns out that he does that one or two times per month. He broke out his iPad and showed me some pretty amazing pictures of events he had worked for different gaming commissions monitoring fights for the UFC and other organizations. He sits in the front row about three feet from the cage and monitors whether the fight is being judged fairly.
One of his pictures was of the front row of people watching a fight in St. Petersburg, Florida. It include Vladamir Putin, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and several other famous people. Another was of himself with a guy name Calvin Ayre of Bodog notoriety at the after-party. He was a nice guy and I had a nice chat with him, most of the way to Phoenix, too.
Betty Blonde #97 – 11/28/2008
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Day 954 of 1000
I like to read the Thinking Christian blog. There are some blog posts there about a recent movie that featured a college Philosophy professor who asked all his students to state their unbelief in God. Some contrary commenters to those poses objected to this portrayal as, in a rough paraphrase, an unfair stereotype. The blog author rightly stated that the movie is a work of fiction and so what.
I agree with that assessment, but at the same time, it reminded me of the blog posts I put up here about Kelly’s and Christian’s “commie professor” for Freshman Composition. I think they were the only ones in their class who consistently argued against this professors laughable logic. There were a few who agreed with them but did not say anything. There were others that agreed with the professor most of the time, but with Kelly and Christian on a few things.
This professor was anti-God, anti-gun, pro-abortion, anti-traditional marriage, pro-drug legalization, etc., etc. It does not take much effort on most college campuses to take those positions. All you have to do is go along with the zeitgeist. If you want to be a rebel, you need to stand with the opposite of all those positions. I went to college in the mid-1970’s. Not much has really changed. The people who think they are free-thinking, inclusivist rebels aren’t.
Betty Blonde #96 – 11/27/2008
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Day 906 of 1000
We laughed ourselves sick when we saw this because these people are us. Notice the commentary below the picture. That is us, too.
Betty Blonde #69 – 10/21/2008
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Day 905 of 1000
There is a totally fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal today about how Sweden has legislated themselves into a corner with respect to how they raise their children. It is against the law to spank children in Sweden now and the attitude that goes along with that appears to be bearing fruit against which the adults in the country are starting rebel. Swedish psychiatrist David Eberhard wrote a book about it whose title translates to How Children Took Power. I think this is definitely happening here in the United States, too. Sweden is prospering economicly because they have started to dump some of their liberal economic ideas. Here is hoping they start dumping their liberal social obsessions, too. Maybe there is still hope for Sweden.
Betty Blonde #68 – 10/20/2008
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Day 903 of 1000
I just finished reading a great article titled The Secular Religion of the Left. It is worth your while to read the whole thing. It articulates some of the things we have seen in the downward spiral of our society. An amazing connection is made between the culture malaise we see in parts of our own family who have immigrated here to the United States from Mexico and the idea that “Organic” food is somehow morally superior. The premise of the article is that the religion of the secular left is materialism. Here is the comment about immigrants that rings so true in light of our own personal experience:
Those most in need of the moral system of materialism are the descendants of the displaced, whether by immigration to the United States or migration within the United States from rural to urban areas, who have become detached from a large extended family structure that once sustained them.
Their grandparents had already loosened their grip on religion and as the family disintegrated, materialism took its place. Their grandparents worked hard to provide for their children, but the children no longer saw maintaining the family as a moral activity. Sometimes they didn’t even bother with a family. They became lonely individuals looking for a collective. A virtual political family.
Liberalism fills the missing space once inhabited by religion and the family. It provides a moral and ethical system as religion did and the accompanying sense of purpose and its state institutions replace and supplant the family. It does both of these things destructively and badly as its institutions forever try to patch social problems created by the disintegration of the family and its ideas provide too few people with a sense of purpose of a meaningful life.
Amazingly, the author, Daniel Greenfield, ties all this to the culture and religion of those who buy their organic food at Whole Foods. And it is a coherent connection. Whole Foods is a pretentious place. Here is a snippet about that connection:
Organic, a category with a debatable meaning, doesn’t really provide that much more value. And environmental labels are worth very little. And yet the average product at Whole Foods is covered in so many “ethical liberal” labels that it’s hard to figure out what it even is.
He finishes the post with this brilliant gem:
The left can’t replace family or religion. Its social solutions are alien and artificial. They fix nothing and damage everything. Their appeal is to those who are arrogant and starved for meaning, who want religion without religion and family without family only to discover that they are not enough.
The quotes above are great, but do not come close to doing justice to the entire piece. Read it. I am adding Greenfield’s blog to my daily reading list.
Betty Blonde #67 – 10/17/2008
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I had occassion to read this article titled “Don’t date a girl who travels.” It talks about the type of woman who is solely devoted to her own pleasure to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. Her life is all about her. She wants this. She wants that. You are boring. The money about always going where she wants, when she wants, doing what she wants, in the end, makes for a wasted life.
Chances are, she can’t hold a steady job. Or she’s probably daydreaming about quitting. She doesn’t want to keep working her ass off for someone else’s dream. She has her own and is working towards it. She is a freelancer. She makes money from designing, writing, photography or something that requires creativity and imagination. Don’t waste her time complaining about your boring job.
Don’t date a girl who travels. She might have wasted her college degree and switched careers entirely. She is now a dive instructor or a yoga teacher. She’s not sure when the next paycheck is coming. But she doesn’t work like a robot all day, she goes out and takes what life has to offer and challenges you to do the same.
In their travels, many of these people do not have a high enough level of education nor literacy to understand what they were seeing because they are too busy thinking about where they want to be or what they want to be doing rather than productively learning something or working in a way that benefits society. Sadly, their curiosity generally extends to what they learn “in the moment” so they know little or nothing about the places they visit.
I have traveled a lot to places like Taiwan, Korean, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, England, Czech Republic, Israel, etc. The reason I have had time and opportunity to travel was not because I spent all my time and resources on myself. Rather it was because I was willing to forgo doing the “fun” stuff like being a dive instructor or yoga teacher (as if yoga were fun or interesting). I got to travel because of hard work at school in a hard degree and a steady job so I could contribute productively to society. My company sent me, sometimes along with friends or family to all these places.
This is one of those things about which we warned our children. Cheap and easy is not even gratifying in the short term. Think of a life lived like that and how it culminates in little worth having. People are more important, interesting, and gratifying than places. Those who are dedicated solely to their own fulfillment and “things” like travel are destined to live boring lives.
I wrote this post on career women a little over a week ago and got some interesting responses. Matt Walsh very thoughtfully responds to a blog post titled I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I’m Not Sorry that characterizes the attitude about which I wrote. Feminism is going to have to confront and defeat that kind of thinking if it is ever wants to be taken seriously, let alone capture the pro-life, high moral ground held by the early suffragists in America.
Day 886 of 1000
Kelly and Christian made good friends when they went to Wake Technical Community College. Of their three closest friends from that time, two entered five year co-op programs, so will graduate next year with a boat-load of engineering experience. The third is an Iraq war vet name Mike who is nothing short of amazing. We expect to hear very big things about him some day. I hope it is in my lifetime. He will graduate this May the same time as Kelly and Christian with a degree in Computer Science. They have all maintained very high grades since the arrived at NCSU at least partially due the stellar preparation they received at community college. I guess I never expected these kids would stay in touch. Actually, the kids from the community college seem to be significantly more mature both in their studies and in the way they live their lives than the kids that started out at NCSU as freshman. We are glad and thankful the kids started at Wake Tech.
Betty Blonde #52 – 09/26/2008
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Here is a great article in the Wall Street Journal about verbal “tee-ups” as prefixes to statements. They say it is a sign of insecurity.
“To be honest…”
“I want you to know…”
“I’m just saying…”
“I hate to be the one to tell you this…”
“I’m not saying…”
I think they are right on all counts and, furthermore, I confess my guilt.
Day 878 of 1000
Night before last I was had a long discussion with a colleague at work who had just joined the company as a high level executive. After we had talked about business for a good while we started talking about our families. She has very accomplished children, similar in age to Kelly and Christian. I mentioned that Kelly had applied to several universities for a PhD program in Management, but probably wanted to be a stay at home mom after that.
I think the woman was a little bit offended. She admonished me that I should encourage her to do what she loves. I told her Kelly loves the idea of being a stay at home mom, but she would kind of like to finish a graduate degree first (or after she gets married but before she has kids). For awhile my colleague did not get it. She could not believe that someone might place a higher priority on her family than in a career. She told me how she had spent really big money on great nannies to take care of her kids while she was not there. She used the old canard of quality time being more important than the quantity of time one spends with their children.
All this made me thankful for Lorena who has been the gold standard of all role models for how a woman can set her priorities to maximize the impact of her life by caring for her children and her husband in the home. I am beyond grateful for all that she has done in that regard. I hope Kelly is able to acheive that level of contribution to her family and society. Anybody can be a company executive if they work hard and stay focused. It takes a lot more to be a stay at home mom.
Betty Blonde #44 – 09/16/2008
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Day 870 of 1000
Betty Blonde #36 – 09/04/2008
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Kelly put the following comments up on Facebook last night that is similar to this post. So far she has gotten 59 comments. I think most people get it, but was amazed that some of the comments were about how one coast is better than the other rather than the impoliteness of telling people you hate the place where they live.
Day 867 of 1000
Betty Blonde #33 – 09/01/2008
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A funny thing has happened to both Kelly and I over the last several months. The kids have applied for graduate schools in California, Arizona, and Washington. In the meantime, Lorena and I are trying to figure out whether we should move back out west and where we should land if we do so. Several people, almost all of them from the Northeast who go to school and church with us in North Carolina have seen fit to tell us they hate California because it is horrible and, in one case, ugly. Thinking about it, I can remember no one from the South who did this.
We are a bilingual, binational family. We have seen first hand how bad it is to hear bad things about places and cultures we love. Before we were even married, both Lorena’s parents and my parents taught us to find something nice to say about where people are from whether it be their town, their state, or their country. I lived in El Paso, Texas and worked frequently in Juarez, Mexico. I had plenty of wonderful experiences in both places and lots of nice things to say about them. This is behavior I really do not understand. There is no good that comes from talking about bad things that are nothing more than perceptions, fashion, and uninformed opinions. I need to redouble my efforts not to stray into that territory.
Camille Paglia is a Democrat, a lesbian, and a feminist, but she seems to be on the correct side of a lot of stuff. It surprises me that I agree with her so often. Here is her take on the Phil Robertson/Duck Commander affair.
Day 835 of 1000
Betty Blonde #17 – 08/08/2008
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We are big fans of Dave Ramsey. He put a list up on his website that I like very much. Virtually every item on the list is a worthy habit to engender. The only thing I do not like about it is that it is characterized as a list of the differences between rich people and poor people. I am sure the statistics for the calculations were made with some arbitrary definition of rich and poor. That is fine, and I have a good level of confidence that they are true. My problem with it is that the rich-poor distinction makes the list way less interesting.
I think of poor people who would be characterized as rich if they were measured against the items on the list. Those people are WAY more interesting than the people who are rich that have established those habits. Examples of such people might include Mother Teresa and other Christian ministers who have left everything to help people they had never previously met. It might also include academics, authors, and artists who, for the love of knowledge, literature, and art, have given up more lucrative careers to follow their passions.
There are other examples, but my sense is that engendering such habits for the purpose of getting rich is not so worthy. The nobility of a goal has little or nothing to do with how much money one earns in doing it. I suppose it could be argued that riches will come if one establishes these habits, but it is a secondary artifact, not a noble goal in an of itself. I do not want this to be misconstrued to suggest, one should not pay their own way. People need to be financially responsible for themselves. Nevertheless, riches will get no one into heaven. The habits list stands alone, as a noble goal, whether or not they lead to riches or to something else, a lot more noble.
Day 824 of 1000
Betty Blonde #8 – 07/28/2008
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This is an excerpt from a World Magazine article about how the Common Core government education standards treats math:
Two years ago in September, Heather Crossin’s 8-year-old daughter Lucy came home from her Catholic school in Indianapolis with a math problem that seemed unusual.
“Bridge A is 407 feet long. Bridge B is 448 feet long,” the problem read. “Which bridge is longer? How do you know?”
“Bridge B is longer,” Crossin’s daughter had written. “I found this out by just looking at the number and seeing that 448 is greater than 407.”
The youngster’s answer was mostly wrong: According to her new textbook, enVisionMATH Common Core, she was supposed to compare the hundreds column, the tens column, and the ones column individually. The teacher gave her one point out of three.
Read the whole article here. The sad part is the Common Core is not only bad in its philosophical biases, but in that it will effect even those how do not buy into the governments really bad educational methods and ideas–home and private schools. Here is an excellent analysis of Common Core and its impact from people who have done their homework and have an excellent record of supporting educational methods that actually work.
Day 772 of 1000
I logged for one summer in North Idaho while I was in college. Though I had worked in sawmills a lot, I found the logging culture both different and interesting. There seemed to be a constant flame war going on about which cork boots were best (White is the brand I remember). There were also continuous arguments about chainsaws (Stihl, Husqvarna, etc.), the “right” way to file you saw chain (whether to do it yourself or have someone else do it), and a million other work and tool related subjects. It is really not much different in the world of of programming. There is always a struggle to get everyone on the same page with respect to programming languages, development environments, debuggers, hardware, etc., etc.
I got a kick out of the seventh item on this list in an article at Simply Statistics. It points to an article about using something called Hadoop to deal with “big data” problems. I am just starting to learn more about different statistical tools, so it was great to be able to glean information about tools that are new to me from this article like pandas and scalding. The pop-culture element of the article is the reason I thought to right about it here. The disdain with which the author writes about Hadoop is more than matched in the comments section below the post. I especially like an aside written by one of the commenters in response to a commenter before him who extolled the virtues of language named Erlang while hammering everything else:
[Edit: I have had a poke around, and you appear to have a bit of a history of trolling and flaming-anything-that-isn’t Erlang, so if you don’t mind, I will take your criticism with a grain of salt.]
Christian and I discuss this kind of thing pretty regularly. It is hard not to get caught up in the religious wars. It is something I have to fight on a regular basis. In industry it is critical to do what is best for the company. Sometimes that means reuse of a really, really bad code base to get something to market quickly. Sometimes it means using almost dead cult languages like Delphi and Haskell (see, I still have some religion) that have little penetration in the real world. As I get older I realize there is nothing new under the sun. Before there were chain-saw arguments, I am sure there were axe arguments.
We love Monterrey. Lorena’s brother, Jorge, sent a link to this great video about that beautiful city. It is really even better than this video shows. Except the cheesy Yoga thing.
I have written a good number of posts about the issue of “socialization” in homeschool over the years. Since the subject still comes up regularly, I thought it might be good to make an index of some of the more interesting posts on the subject. I will list the posts in reverse chronological order with a brief description because some of the titles are not very precise with respect to the content of the articles. I would like to state for the record that we know home schools, government schools, children, parents, and teachers vary. These posts are about our experience and observations.
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