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School Lunches Were Never Like This

Fast FoodFredericksburg 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 than pump the kids full of fat and sodium every day at lunch. Are the parents there really ok with this?

Oh, and if your parents forget to add money to your lunch account?

Lower School students who do not have a lunch or a balance in their account, will be given a package of crackers and water and we will send you a note advising you of that action.

Obviously, no kid going to this school is depending on the school lunch as his only decent meal of the day, However, the prison like crackers and water bit is a little over the top. More sodium too! I’d think for $7000 a year the school could toss a hungry kid an apple.

Is this as ridiculous as it looks to me?

2012 01 22 chrisod Education Comments (4) Permalink

Star Wars Uncut

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 to kids doing the scenes in the backyard to Lego stop motion to my personal favorite, beer bottles decorated to kind of sort of maybe resemble the Star Wars characters. I can’t recommend this enough. If you have a Kindle or Xbox Live, pop some corn, grab a brew, and sit back for two hours of pure entertainment.

2012 01 20 chrisod Amusements
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“Normal” for kids is a really, really wide range

Delaney and her saddleThis 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. After failing to get anywhere with the schools, she pulled him out to homeschool. The kid that couldn’t learn is currently a full scholarship grad student at MIT.

I think my kids would have done fine in school. They probably would have been like me, disinterested yet accomplished students going through the motions and maintaining a B average. But I wonder if either would have turned out to be the uniquely cool young adults they are (or are becoming) today. The school might have beat the uniqueness out of them, one worksheet at a time. And I don’t know if either would have developed the deep passions for their particular interests that they did while homeschooling. They might not have had the time.

It makes me wonder how many thousands (millions?) of talented, uniquely focused kids we miss out on developing each year because they are trapped in a school system that simply does not work for them. How many bored business majors at State U this semester would have been passionate “something elses” if they had been given the opportunities my kids had to develop those passions as kids?

2012 01 17 chrisod Education Comments (2) Permalink

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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 him absorbs all the sins of his life. The painting ages as Dorian looks 20 forever, and the stain of Dorian’s immoral and decadent lifestyle stain the painting and stays clear of Dorian’s conscience.

Or does it?

The book is extravagantly written, and at times veered off into deeply detailed descriptions of events that don’t really advance the plot. There isn’t a likable character in the book, in fact, the two stars of the book are miserable human beings. The descriptions and setting in Victorian England are wonderful, and Wilde was clearly playing the book for satire in many places.

In the end though, the book is somewhat disturbing morality tale that borders on horror at times. It’s one of the classics, and I can’t believe I made to 2012 without reading it. I’m glad I finally got to it.

2012 01 08 chrisod Amusements
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Good Eats: The Early Years

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 of cool behind the scenes info about the episodes, shooting locations, etc.

And of course, it’s filled with science!


2012 01 08 chrisod Amusements
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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success

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 social inequality.

via What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success – Anu Partanen – National – The Atlantic.

Contrast that with the US, where student performance and overall school excellence is highly correlated with the income of the families whose children attend that school. If you want to get ahead in American the best thing to do is to be born into a white, upper-middle class family. Homeschoolers are obviously not exempt, as being upper-middle class certainly makes homeschooling easier.

The high achieving kids are not the issue. Even with bad schools, those kids will be ok. Even the worst schools in America produce plenty of kids that go onto college and productive lives after school.

2012 01 02 chrisod Education Comments (0) Permalink

Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing

beer

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 I’ve finished my first book of the year. I did cheat and start this in 2011 though! The author Charles Bamforth is a long time employee / executive at Bass and currently a Professor of Brewing at UC-Davis, in a position endowed by whatever we are calling Anheuser-Bush these days.

I wanted to love this book, but I just couldn’t. First of all, almost half the book is endnotes, which is a very odd was to organize a book. Some of the endnotes are technical details related to a point he was making, and thus are placed appropriately. Other endnotes are almost entire chapters, and should have been incorporated into the text of the book. I’m not sure what his editor was thinking.

Charlie has spent his career in the big brewer side of the beer world, and thus his view of beer is colored appropriately. He adamantly defends macro-lagers on several occasions in the book. I’ll grant the technical achievement in making Budweiser taste the same across the world. It is true that even a minor mistake is magnified and more noticeable in such a thin and flavorless beer. Personally, I think wasting such technical brewing ability on soulless beer is a crime.

However, his explanation of what happened to the British pub culture and brewing industry was fascinating, and I’m much smarter for having read his book; as I knew nothing of Thatcher’s changes to the beer industry in the 80s. Beer enthusiasts on the right-wing side of the US political spectrum may very well have to take her off the pedestal when they understand what she did to beer culture in the UK.

He also takes on MADD and other neo-prohibitionist organizations in the US. This a subject I can agree 100% with him on.

And finally, the quote I started this review with. It sounds heretical on the surface, but he has good reason for it. But you’ll have to read the book to find out why :)

If you are a beer nerd and can get the book cheap, I’d recommend reading it. I got is as free Kindle download. If I had paid $5 for the book, I wouldn’t feel cheated. I think I would be disappointed if I had paid much more than that though.

2012 01 02 chrisod Amusements
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The Kindle Daily Review

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 books that I felt were important enough to mark in the first place. One of the (many) downsides of getting older is that I don’t have the “read it and never forget it memory” that I had 30 years ago. You can enable it from your Kindle account on the website, then anything you highlight is automatically synced to the web. The Review feature only works for books that you have marked as read, and you can also pull in the popular highlights from other Kindle users too. You can make your notes public, or keep them private. It’s up to you.

If you have a Kindle you should check it out. I’m finding it to be one of the real killer features of the Kindle, and I’m trying to build a habit of quickly reviewing my highlights from one book each day.

2012 01 01 chrisod Books Comments (0) Permalink

So this is how a blog dies…

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 2011. I suspect most personal blogs would show something similar. On one hand, it’s kind of depressing. On the other hand, if you had told me in 1995 when I started this that almost 1000 people would ever check in monthly, I’d have danced a jig.

I was averaging 1200 or so a month through May, when it nosedived to about 800 a month. Wasn’t that when Google made the big changes to the algorithm? Interestingly though, incoming search was still my #1 source of traffic, just edging out Facebook referrals.



2011 12 31 chrisod Site & Me News Comments (4) Permalink

Happy 16th Birthday to O’DonnellWeb

O’DonnellWeb will be 16 years old on 12/31/2011. It’s hard to believe I’ve been writing here for 16 years. It’s even harder to believe that anybody reads. The archives only go back to 2001. The earlier stuff is lost. I probably should be thankful for that.

The story of how O’DonnellWeb came to be. (This is an edited repeat post, because I’m lazy that way.)

It was a cold and windy one, that night of Dec 31, 1995. OK, actually I have no idea if it was cold or windy. What I do remember is that my wife was 7+ months pregnant with out daughter, so we were not going anywhere to celebrate the passing of the year. She retired to bed well before midnight, leaving me alone with a computer and a lot of homebrew. That was a recipe for mischief.

Being the geek that I am, building a web page seemed to be a great way to spend New Year’s Eve. In fact, I decided that I wanted a page online that year. Armed with nothing more than Notepad and Netscape 1.0 on a Windows 95 machine, I set off the figure out how to build a web page. It really wasn’t that difficult. The number of HTML tags back then was very limited, and I was able to look at the code on IBM.com and a few other sites to figure out how it all worked. Several hours later it was nearing midnight and I was ready to launch my first site. I read the scarce documentation available and deduced where exactly on the server I needed to FTP my file.

It didn’t work. The file was there, but I got a You are not authorized error when trying to access the page on my 14.4 modem. It was probably about 3 AM when I finally figured out the arcane syntax of the Unix CHMOD command and made the site available to the world. However, technically I was online by midnight. This would not be the last time I spent 3+ hours figuring out a single Linux command.

That original page has been lost to the mists of time, or something. However, it did look a lot like this.

I bought the ODonnellWeb domain in 1998. I’m not a digital pack rat. I don’t have copies of all the old sites. If you are interested, Archive.org seems to have me covered from early 1999.

That first silly web page had a surprising impact on my life. Several months later I parlayed my rudimentary web skills into a job with a tech start up, and 16 years later the Internet is still paying my bills.

2011 12 30 chrisod Geek
Site & Me News Comments (1) Permalink

Disconnected

One of the things that I have noticed on my daily commute is how disconnected we are from our environment. When I get in line to catch a ride some people will already have headphones on. So they are there physically, but you can’t really interact with them. On the ride to the Pentagon, nobody talks, everybody either has headphones on, or has their nose buried in a smartphone, or is sleeping. That is partly by design, as the rules of slugging dictate that slugs (the riders) should be seen and not heard. At 6 AM it is understandable, as I count the ride in as an extension of sleep time. When I drive, especially coming home, I try to open it up to a little conversation. Usually it fails as the riders put on their headphones and retreat from their environment.

Once we get to the Pentagon I join the masses on public transportation. A large percentage of people will have headphones on, often loud enough that the people around them can also enjoy their music. Traveling around DC via subway with your sense of sound essentially shut off seems a little but dangerous, especially if you are young and/or female and thus already a potential target for crime or harassment.

Note: This morning I had my headphones on all the way to my destination Metro stop – so I’m just as guilty as anybody else. Although I just started this in the last couple of weeks. I used to put my MP3 player away when we got to the Pentagon, because traveling through public spaces disconnected from my environment made me nervous. I do keep the volume low enough that I can hear what is going on around me.

It just seems odd to me that we all have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook that we interact with, yet we try to avoid interacting with the people around us in the real world. If you ride in a car with 3 strangers for an hour, and the total extent of your interaction is a thank you to the driver as you exit, did you even really share the experience of the ride? It’s more like we had 4 separate rides, while sharing a physical space.

Walt Whitman once wrote something about a rose being just a rose, not aware of any past or future, or any other roses. It just is, in that moment. We humans are increasingly doing the opposite. We live in every moment except the one we are currently experiencing.

I’m wondering if that is really healthy, both individually, and for society.

2011 12 20 chrisod Random Comments (1) Permalink

Happy Holidays!

2011 12 13 chrisod My Life Comments Off Permalink

I would so fail the SAT today.

A school board member, successful in the real world by any measure, takes his local 10th grade achievement test. He fails.

This does not surprise me at all. Last year when Breck was preparing for the SAT, I was getting the SAT question of the day via email. I did fine on the verbal section, hanging around 85% correct. I struggled to stay at 50% on the math questions, and that was with occasionally cheating by Googling a formula when I needed it. I got through Differential Calculus in college. I’m not math averse. The stuff they are teaching in school is simply not relevant to real life.

The money quote from the article.

If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

2011 12 05 chrisod Education Comments (2) Permalink

Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism

Because that’s the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars.

via Ask Chris #81: Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism – ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews.

2011 11 30 chrisod Amusements Comments Off Permalink

Black Friday on Old Rag

The kids and myself headed to the mountains this AM for a 8 mile circuit hike of Old Rag. I’m not going to lie to you Marge, it wasn’t the easiest hike we’ve done. Steeply up for the first 3 miles, with lots of rock hopping, actual hand over hand rock climbing, and several leaps of faith across chasms between large boulders. We ended up waiting about an hour in all at various choke points on the trail where you need to do something harder than just walk to continue forward. It was kind of like the backups on Everest, only totally different :)

Still a great day to be out with the kids though.

Update: My left quad disputes the enjoyability of today, and it is punishing me right now. Damn anthropomorphic body parts. Ouch.

Pictures

2011 11 25 chrisod Amusements Comments (2) Permalink