9131 days ago (February 21, 1987) I met the woman that would become my wife. It was not love at first sight. In fact, she was way more interested in one of my frat brothers that evening that she was me. Lucky for her, my good looks and charm won out in the end The [...]
Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive—by which I mean, does homeschooling serve the interests not just of those who are doing it, but of society as a whole? via Homeschooling and unschooling among liberals and progressives. – Slate Magazine. WTF? In what universe are engaged, educated, independent kids not good for society [...]
The technology gremlins are running amok in my house over the last week. My wife’s desktop has some sort of file system error that causes it to take about 15 minutes to boot. Once up, it seems to function normally, although it will lock up if left unattended for a few hours. Not sure what [...]
After numerous attempts to validate my sense of humor in the Free-Lance Star cartoon caption contest, I have finally made the Final 4. Please click through and vote for the one starting with, “Finally, somebody who understands…” http://blogs.fredericksburg.com/toontalk/2012/02/08/caption-contest-156-finalists/ If you don’t think mine is the funniest, vote for it anyway Voting ends at noon on [...]
The latest Hardcore History podcast elegantly covers about 500 years of history in four years; from the Fall of Rome in the 476 CE through the general Christianization of the Germanic tribes shortly before the Crusades. Coincidently, my son and I spent about 4 hours in the car driving back and forth to Richmond this [...]
I had some time to kill in Richmond today, so I took a walk with my camera down Monument Avenue in Richmond VA. Monument Ave is generally considered one of the best streets in any city, due primarily to the 6 large monuments to Southern heroes that dominate the street scape. I’ve driven through the [...]
Fredericksburg Christian Lower (Elementary) caters in fast food every single day. Monday – Pizza of undetermined origin. Tues – KFC Wed – Subway Thur – Salsarita’s Fri – Dairy Queen Really? This is what they are teaching kids about healthy eating? This is a $7000 a year private school, you’d think they could do better [...]
I just watched two hours of the most brilliant film making ever put to “film.” Star Wars uncut takes home made fan recreations of Star Wars from 405 film makers (I counted in the credits) to produce a scene by scene recreation of Star Wars. It goes from fairly serious attempts to recreate the movie [...]
This is a great blog post from Laura Grace Weldon (author of Free Range Learning) about her efforts to get the school system to work with her son, whose learning style was more than one standard deviation from the mean. The school, of course, just wanted to label the kid as ADD and drug him. [...]
Oscar Wilde’s only published novel was a bit of scandal when it came out over 100 years ago. I’m not sure my pedestrian command of the English language is really sufficient to review such a richly written book. An unexplained event sets young, dashingly handsome Dorian Gray up in a situation where a painting of [...]
This is not a cookbook. It’s the print companion to the first 5 seasons of Good Eats. It does include recipes from each episode, which makes it handy for looking up that thing he did with shrimp in season 3. It’s much quicker than trying to navigate the Food Network website. It’s also includes lots [...]
Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out [...]
In 2005 I was interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. I was asked: “If there are 50 beers on tap, what do you order?” I answered, “Something out of a bottle. via Amazon Kindle: Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing FT Press Science. Only January 2 and [...]
Are you familiar with the Kindle Daily Review? It’s a feature of the Kindle that takes your highlighted passages from books that you have read on the Kindle and presents those highlighted passages back to you flashcard style on the Kindle website. I’m finding it a great way to not forgot the key points in [...]
So this is how a blog dies; not with thunderous applause, but with a whimper. (Apologies to Natalie Portman…) This is a graph of O’DonnellWeb traffic, going back to 2005 when I first started using Google Analytics.. The high water mark was March 2006 – with almost 10,000 visitors. It’s been 10-15% of that throughout [...]