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Texas Board of Education – Rewriting History in favor of Political Ideology

The folks over at the Texas freedom Network decided to attend the Texas Board of Education as it debated revisions to the school curriculum regarding political history. What they saw was a board dominated by extreme right wing politics. TFN comments:
> These board members clearly haven’t got a clue how to craft a curriculum document that’s streamlined, coherent and focused. They are far more interested in seeding the standards with whatever ideological pet causes they have. Pity the students and teachers of Texas for the foolishness they must endure.
Some choice bits noted from the meeting:
> The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.
During a debate regarding capitalism and free enterprise, several of the board members object to the term ‘Capitalism’ because it is considered a negative term. One member states, regarding using the word, “I do think words mean things. . . . I see no reason, frankly, to compromise with liberal professors from academia.” When it is pointed out that the person who recommended the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘free enterprise’ be used is actually a republican professor at Texas A&M, the information is ignored, and the board passes the measure:
> The Texas State Board of Education has stricken from the standards references to “capitalism” and “free market” because the board’s right-wingers think “capitalism” is a negative term. The only permitted term for such an economic system will be “free enterprise.” We wouldn’t believe this if we hadn’t just watched it happen. This is so stupid it makes our head hurt.
It’s this sort of subtle manipulation of curriculum, particularly in public schools, that has the greatest effect on the political positions of children and young adults. If ideology is allowed to triumph over fact (and in many points in this discussion, fact is trumped in favor of personal stance), how can people trust their public schools, and by inference their local governments? I ask that folks pay close attention to their local school boards, and when they see absurdity like this, raise the roof and call it out – that is the only way this sort of ideological undermining of education can be stopped.

Snake Oil? Visualization of Science vs Health Supplements

Once again InformationIsBeautiful hits one out of the park.
Today’s fun is an interactive page ranking the scientific evidence proving a certain health supplement is effective vs it’s popularity.
Some surprises: Fish oil, folic acid, St Johns Wort, and green tea are well established with proveable scientific evidence to their benefits.
At the other end of the spectrum, Green tea, anti-oxidants, vitamin A and vitamin E have very little evidence as to their effectiveness.

Windows7 – So close!

I’ve been using Windows 7 on my laptop at work for a few months now, and I have to admit, grudgingly, that Microsoft has removed 95% of the irritating problems that make WIndows nigh on impossible to use. The new GUI is smooth, clean, has some very smart behaviours (things that the Linux desktops have been doing for years), and for the most part, it just works.
But.
There’s tidbits that drive me absolutely up a tree, and I’m flat out boggled that Microsoft could make mistakes that I’d expect from a junior hacker whipping up their first app.
Here’s a few highlights.
* One of the BEST enhancements is the ability to grab and drag a window that is maximized. In WinXP, you would have to un-zoom it, move it, then re-zoom it to move it to another monitor. In Win7, a zoomed window can be grabbed and moved. When a window is pushed to the top of the screen, it automatically maximizes. Fantastic. BUT. This behaviour… wait for it… does not work in Office 2007 applications. That’s right, kids, Microsoft’s flagship office suite takes so many shortcuts in their innovative (COUGH HACK) menu and window designs, that it breaks Windows7 default behavior. Stellar work there, guys.
* It’s a universal pattern. A scrollwheel on a mouse will scroll the window or component you’re hovering over. Browser, document, or spreadsheet, move the mouse to a pane, scroll the wheel, and the view scrolls. Except in the Windows 7 explorer (or whatever they call the filesystem browser). Open up the explorer, and resize the window so you have scrollbars on both the left and the right pane. Now scrollwheel on the right – it scrolls. Move the mouse to the left pane, and scrollwheel again. The right pane continues to take the scroll actions. This wouldn’t be a major problem if it weren’t for the next oddity…
* This one isn’t a Windows7 issue in particular, but something that irritates me about Windows in general. Having been using my Macbook Pro for the last 6 months or so, oddities in UIs jump out at me. On a mac, if you click on a non-focused window, the window becomes focused, but the mouse event does not get transferred to the new window. All the click does is make the window active. On windows, the click event does get applied to the window. This is particularly problematic when trying to raise a browse window back to focus, since so many websites have that irritating “click anywhere and I’ll pop up an ad!” – or other javascript idiocy in place.
For the most part, I have to agree with the Penny Arcade folks. “Windows 7. It’s less bad than you expected.”

Review: Altec-Lansing Backbeat 903 – Best Bluetooth Headphones Evuh?


Ever since I got my iPhone 3g, and jumped to OS 3.1, I’ve been searching for the best arrangement of comfort, functionality, price, and audio quality in a set of bluetooth headphones. I’ve tried the Apple earbuds, but I find them extremely uncomfortable. Several others have come down the Amazon.com-driven mail pipeline, but until now, I wasn’t completely happy with the results.
The Altec-Lansing Backbeat 903 (also available from Plantronics under the same name is a permanently linked pair of on-the-ear headphones that provide A2DP and HFP profiles to a bluetooth host (such as an iPhone). The tether between the headsets is part antenna part audio wire. It does not hold the headphones in place, it is simply an interconnect. The headphones sit on the back of the earlobe (similar to older Jabra designs), with an audio component placed over the ear canal (slightly inside it, in fact, but not putting any weight on it).
Personally, I find this arrangement excellent, and I’m bothered that it’s not more widely implemented (in fact Jabra appears to no longer make this style, sad).
The Backbeats use a pair of behind-the-ear components. Each side has an adjustable rubber centerpiece that I found quite comfortable and unobtrusive. The left earpiece contains telephone controls that allow a simple pickup / drop of incoming calls. The right earpiece has music and volume controls.
Of all the headphones I’ve played with, the Backbeats have the most intuitive control setup. In general use, just tapping the outside of the right ear piece triggers ‘play/pause’. Tapping the outside of the left ear piece answers / drops phone calls. Volume control is via a sliding control on the bottom of the earpiece. The right-left functionality means you don’t need to remember what little doodad to fiddle when a call comes in. Left side is phone, right side is music. Simple!
What really brought it all home for me was the comfort level of the headphones. I’ve worn them for 6-8 hours a day for the last few days without feeling any discomfort. Even better, when not listening to music, the non-earfilling ear piece means I can leave the headphones on and carry on a normal conversation. One particular enjoyment was spending an entire day skiing and listening to music, where the simple outside button was easily tapped even through a ski hat and while wearing gloves.
The volume level and audio quality is excellent, even with background noise and wind – I had no problems hearing music while zipping down a trail at 25mph.
In summary, I would highly recommend these headphones to anyone who is looking for lightweight, comfortable bluetooth headphones for their iPhone or other A2DP equipped device.

The Loft Project – Building a custom loft bed

Over the winter break I moved into a shared house in Mosaic. My new bedroom had to serve a couple purposes – it needed to, obviously, be my bedroom, but it also had to provide sleeping space for when my son visited, as well as be comfortable and easy to relax in. I needed a space for my bookshelves, my desk, my nice comfy Aeron chair, and naturally my clothing and some other bits. Beds take up a ginormous amount of space and I was working with only about 120 square feet total. A queen sized bed takes up 30 square feet, plus ‘navigation’ around it – I needed to figure out how to use that space the best.

So, a loft.

Loft: space before building
The design for the two bedroom unit master bedroom includes a sort of ‘niche’ area – that space is exactly the size of a queen sized bed (okay, not EXACTLY. It’s 2″ wider and about 15″ short), but after staring at the space, it was pretty easy to picture a loft bed build into the space. The ceiling was high enough, there was an awesome highly-placed window, I was ready to go.

I have a fondness for heavy lumber and carriage bolts, so naturally that’s what I ended up using. I borrowed the Mosaic pickup truck and headed over to Home Depot. Total materials cost was around $160, which, all things considered, wasn’t too bad. I only had to buy one new tool – a 1/4″ boring drill so I could make holes through the 4×4 support posts – everything else I could do with my existing tool set (a very nice feeling I must admit). The hardest choice was trying to determine what to use for the decking – initially I had thought to use sanded 3/4″ plywood, but holy cats that’s expensive ($40+ for a 4×8 sheet, and I’d need two). I ended up using OSB plywood, which was inexpensive and quite strong (but holy cats is it heavy). Not as elegant, but I also determined I’d paint the entire structure (rather than stain or leave as raw wood), so the material for the decking wouldn’t really matter – it would be painted and covered with the mattress

Loft: framing mostly doneOnce I had all the lumber back home, I started building the framing. 2×6 wood for the sideboards and the head and footboards – 4×4 post wood for the corners. The back posts were made ‘taller’ so that I could build what will amount to a headboard against them, with a built in shelf. I set the height so that the decking would be below the window sill but high enough to make ‘bunk’ space underneath accessible. The other design step was to put the 2×6 lumber ‘outboard’ from the posts – this would mean the corner posts woul dbe ‘away’ from the walls and corners, therefore trimwood around the floor would not push the loft away from the wall.

I used 1/4″ x 6″ carriage bolts to hold all the pieces together, boring pilot holes with my drill. This was quite a challenge in several respects. One was making sure the whole thing aligned properly, another was some of the holes needed to be bored while the structure was standing in the space. Not a lot of room to work with!

The lower supports on three sides are simply standard 2×4 studs, also bolted into place. The decking is held up by 5 2×4 stringers. These stringers are hung from the 2×6 side rails using aluminum joist hangers. I have to say, these hangers are one of the niftiest little accessories I’ve used. They made installing the stringers a walk in the park (once I had the right length screws. Grr. 🙂

Loft: painted in placeOnce the framing was done, it was time to paint. I decided to paint the entire structure flat black, mixed at the local hardware store. I overbought on the paint, thinking I’d use a half gallon or so on the whole project, but after I had painted all the structural members, I had only used about 1/10th of the gallon. Later, when I started painting the decking, I was using MUCH more paint. More surface area? Didn’t seem like it… but I guess it just costs more to paint OSB.

Putting the decking on was a bit of a challenge due to the size and weight of the OSB, and the space I was working in. It’s impossible to carry a 4×8 sheet of plywood upstairs in these houses, so I had to cut the sheets down before carrying them up the stairs. The second challenge was the lack of a table saw, so all cuts needed to be done with my skilsaw. Time consuming and inaccurate. I mis-cut one piece (the OSB is tongue-in-groove, and I mismatched the side :-/), but eventually I had the 2 pieces of decking in place and screwed down. Yay!

By this time I was getting pretty tired, and I ended up painting only about 1/3rd of the top of the decking – enough to cover all the edges and a chunk of the surface – everything that would be visible once things were in place.

Loft: As it stands nowAnother community member offered up a very nice queen sized mattress which we schlepped up and put into place. Perfect fit! The drawback was I had calculated based on what I remember mattresses were like. Unfortunately, I have been sleeping on futons and waterbeds for the last 20 years. Mattresses got thick! Fortunately, not THAT thick – I could still sit up comfortably up in the loft space, but there’s slightly less headroom than I had planned. Oh well!

There’s some steps left to do – I still need to put the backing board and shelf along the posts for the ‘headboard’, and I’d like to mount a reading light or two back there as well (with a remote switch I can turn on when I’m climbing into bed). However, I’m ecstatic with the end result as it stands. The loft is secure and doesn’t wobble – it’s comfortable and very ‘cozy’. I adore having the window right next to me when I wake up in the morning, and the mattress is a delight to sleep on.

Total construction time (sawing, hammering, drilling, painting, etc) – about 12 hours. Incidental work (driving and shopping and the like) another 4 hours. Cost: about $180.

I like it.

Article on the State of Microsoft – “The Lost Decade”

Joe Wilcox of Betanews writes an excellent article on why Microsoft is stumbling, and how they lost their initiative after the major gains in the late 90’s and early aughts…

Microsoft executives and product managers — Chairman Bill Gates, above all of them — showed great technology vision for the new millennium. The company was right about so many trends to come but, sadly, executed poorly in bringing too many of them to market. Microsoft’s stiffness, perhaps a sign of its aging leadership, consistently proved its foible. Then there is arcane organizational structure, which has swelled with needless middle managers, and the system of group competition — and in the new century compensation — that worked well for a growth company but not one trying to manage mature markets.

Read the entire article over at betanews.com…

Health Insurers Caught Paying Facebook Gamers Virtual Currency To Oppose Reform Bill

According to this article on BusinessInsider.com :

Health insurance industry trade groups opposed to President Obama’s health care reform bill are paying Facebook users fake money — called “virtual currency” — to send letters to Congress protesting the bill.

Sort of puts to bed the entire notion that the health care industry has a single care for your personal well-being.

Mail.app vs Thunderbird – Which one?

It’s been about two and a half months since I got my Macbook Pro, and all in all, it’s been a productive, happy relationship. The Mac functions beautifully for all the things I need to get done, and from my side, I haven’t had to spend any time yak shaving. In fact, I can’t think of a time where I really had to dig into the filesystem or look up tech articles to get something configured on the machine. Everything just plain works.
Somewhere along the line I decided to complete the Kool-Aid conversion, and switched from using Thunderbird to using the Mac’s native mail application, collectively known as Mail.app. Why? Well, part of my philosophy on tech platforms is to try to not carry over preconceived notions of “how things should work”, and immediately critiquing a new environment simply because it doesn’t exactly mirror the one I’m used to.
I’ve been using Mail.app for about a month and a half now, and… I’m not impressed. It works, it talks nicely to my personal IMAP server and to Exchange at work, but… sorry Apple, the UI has some pretty painful choices.
In a recent Facebook conversation (based on a tweet I sent out), folks asked what my issues with Mail.app were. So, here they are:
1. The ‘file to folder’ function is irritating to use. Shortcuts change regularly (F3-space-foldername-enter – BLEAH) – it’s better than the default non-existent methods, but still difficult. (Note this is in reference to using Act-On, a plugin for Mail.app that brings some of the functionality of the super-awesome Nostalgy plugin for Thunderbird)
2. Window management is poor. Composition windows are not floating in alt-tab rotation. If I want to flip back to my Inbox to view something, I have to mouse (no KB shortcuts to switch between inbox / composition / whatever)
3. No identity management – I can’t say “Compose this mail, but it’s business mail, so use my Biz address, footer, etc)
4. The thread management is WEIRD. So, If I have a single message, it’s one row in my inbox. If I have 2 in a thread, its’ THREE rows in my inbox. That makes no sense.
5. I can’t find anyway of skipping to the next unread message in the inbox. So I’ll see Inbox(1) and have to scan where in my inbox that one message is.
6. And who the heck determined that control-shift-D means “Send message” ? What, Control-Enter, a keystroke that is nigh on universal, wasn’t appropriate?
I haven’t come up with a good reason to stick with Mail.app yet. One thing I do worry about is contact management. I’m not sure how to manage that path yet, or how Thunderbird contacts will interract (if at all) with the contact manager on the Mac. That being said, I don’t know if I’ve been using the contact manager at all, so it may be a moot point.
The UI issues in Mail.app though are enough to have me close to jumping ship. Any reasons I shouldn’t?

The Abyss awaits

PenkSo, okay, it’s true.
I’m playing World of Warcraft.
I’ve been fighting this ever since the whole platform launched. Hearing stories of folks’ lives getting sucked into the game, coupled with tales of hordes of kiddies hacking and slashing their way across the landscape – not exactly ringing endorsements.
But recently Blizzard had an 11 day trial (not sure how recent this is really), and I decided to take the plunge and give it a try.
I… kinda like it.
I can completely see how it would suck people in and replace their lives. The game is immersive, the landscape interesting and beautifully handled, the levelling and character development are interesting enough to keep the game rolling, but not so hard to elicit complete frustration.
My Macbook is handling the game beautifully – frame rates are through the roof, though it does take a mere 5 minutes of playing before I hear the cooling fan kick on. It does take resources.
WoW is as close as you can get to ‘real D&D online’, particularly if you’re in a good guild (which I am) that has good players as well as a fun environment.
Will I stick with it? I’m not sure. The big draw for me right now is not the 3 hour dragon raids (which I haven’t participated in yet :), but the “I have an hour – think I’ll go run a few quests.) – this is very different (in my opinion) than Eve, where you couldn’t ‘just play casually for an hour, then go back to work’. In Eve, if you started a mission, you had to complete it within a set time period (days or a week or so), or suffer a major penalty. There’s no such issue in WoW. I have a dozen quests going at any given time, so when I log in, I can choose to do deliveries / messaging (mostly involving travelling), or grinds where you have to kill off X critters.
So far, it’s been enjoyable, but has not sucked the life out of me. We’ll see.

Fall in New England

Around the south endIt’s no secret I’m not a summer person. I don’t like heat and sweatiness and all that goes with it. So as fall rolls around, the weather gets cooler and drier, my satisfaction with being out in the woods goes up accordingly.
Sunday we took a nice 3 mile walk around Gates Pond, a good sized pond (really, IMHO, a lake), about a mile from us.
The weather was glorious. Low sixties, breezy and sunny. Perfect for enjoying the colors and sounds of the woods.
It also gave me an opportunity to haul out my camera, dust it off, and spend some time taking pictures again. I’ve really neglected my photography. I had to learn how to work with iPhoto and CF card adapters, but all in all, it went pretty smoothly.
Click through to see the gallery!

Free Introductory Mac Strategy Games?

Ever since my Mom got her new Macbook, she’s been a total flash game addict. Word games, match-the-gem games, silly “get the ball in the bucket” games – the whole gamut.
momsmacShe’s a gamer, but a gamer that’s never been exposed to games beyond these simple mindless toys. Granted, some of them are sort of interesting and fun, but there’s a whole world that she’s never seen.
Now me? I’m into Starcraft, and Civilization, and Eve, and all these epic immersive things. But for someone who has never played the basics, these are completely daunting and will more likely scare her off than intrigue her.
So where do you find the middle ground?
I’m looking for basic, introductory games for the Mac that are free (or really close to free), that should have a basic plot line (even if it’s trivial), and some way of advancing through the game.
We tried FreeCiv, but that’s targeted at people who already grok Civilization, so that’s not going to work. Something simpler than that, along the lines of Master of Orion (the original), Spaceward Ho, etc etc. At some point she tried the original SimCity but that almost ate her brain, and she deleted it. However, this same woman is one of the best players I’ve ever seen at… believe it or not… Crystal Quest. Granted, that’s also a mindless “keep shooting” game, but it takes some serious chops for the upper levels.
So, dear readers, what would you suggest? It can be flash based, or downloadable, needs to run on the Mac, and should have a very basic level of introduction, particularly to turn based gameplay where there’s regular advancement. The first one I’ve come across that comes even remotely close is TradeWinds, a trading game set in Arabia. Very simple gameplay, entertaining, and has a plotline of sorts.
Any others?
(Note – I’ve had reports of people having problems posting comments to the blog. If you have a problem, please send mail to me ( dbs@homeport.org ) and I’ll look into it!)