I’m a product of that marching program. Until I joined the band I was a completely undisciplined wallflower incapable of any real interaction with anyone. Now I’m a successful small business owner, father and husband. If it wasn’t for the tutelage and experience I received being a part of something bigger than my young high school mind could perceive I’d likely have not gone on to anything notable in my life. Curtailing a long running program because a. it’s too expensive and b. the new band director doesn’t like marching activites is idiocy. Why apply for the job if you want to eliminate half of it? Moron. Too expensive? Really? Music is time and time again proven to be better for academics as well as improving future prospects for success.

Here’s the note I received about the board’s decision:

In a very sad turn of events the Centennial School district board voted to shutdown the 2009/10 fall/winter marching program. A large contingent of Band Parent Assc members were present when the board was presented with the recommendation to continue the music program but only march for the rose parade. To our amazement the board pres. Shar Giard would not allow comment from any of our group even though it was clear they were acting on mis-information about the number of students currently participating in marching band and colorguard. They did not give any consideration at all to the members of the colorguard as they are not band students. We have had several meetings with the superintendent and members of the board and have had representation at all their meetings and all along they have been telling us that they are very supportive of the marching band program, that they wanted it to continue.
In case you had not heard we were also in a transition of directors this year, spearheaded in part by the band parents assc. because we wanted to see more dicipline and control of the program. Mr. Dave Mann has served as the director since Bret Cappelluti and with great enthusiam and effort. We applaud him for his time and wish him well in the future.
The position of director was posted and a number of very qualified applications were received. In the end the position was given to Mr. Claud Garrett, the current photography teacher at CHS, who had also applied. The administration said their hands were tied because of union rules and the fact that many teachers were being laid off due to the budget crisis. It seems Mr. Garrett had the right to bump anyone the school might have hired from outside. All that said the fact is that while Mr. Garrett has the credentials to teach music he has no interest in marching band, doesn’t even pretend to like drumcorps. He came to a band parent meeting last week and stated that the decision of whether there would be fall marching was out of his control. But it was very clear that given the choice he would not want to run it.

For all of you alumni I am greatly saddened as I was a parent during years when the CHS Marching Band and Colorguard was at the top of its game. I’m sure as you have chosen to be a member of this group that you too have fond memories of your marching days. It is very sad that there could be no future competitive marching band at Centennial.

I would ask that if you feel moved to do so you either write or call the superintendent, Dr. Mckean and all the current district board members and remind them that this is a program that has a rich history and should be preserved. You can find their contact information at this link..

http://www.centennial.k12.or.us/contacts/contacts_board.php

this group will continue and I invite a discussion on this matter

thank you

Mark Huff
CHS Band Parent Assc Communications Director

To the members of the board: You obviously weren’t members of the band so don’t understand the bond we all share regardless of what years we attended. If you want to kill something to save money why not cut out some of the athletic programs? More kids went through the music program then the athletics programs so it’s obviously a better investment. Regardless of anything the liklihood that I’ll ever donate money to the school again is exactly zero. I experienced how it was spent then and it doesn’t surprise me in the least that once again the band gets the sharp pointy end of the stick.

Oh and Claud Garett, obviously you aren’t qualified for this job in the least no matter what degree you’ve got. The Centennial band deserves someone who will appreciate their history. If you apply for a job do the whole job not just the parts that appeal to you.

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In honor of the abject backwards cowardice of the California Supreme Court (and every other court that believes that popular opinion supersedes that pesky constitution (the one that says we’re ALL equal)) I am hereby declaring that I am gay and standing with all of the other oppressed people.

Not opressed you say? Really? So not being able to visit your partner in a hospital without lengthy paperwork ahead of time? Not being able to have all of the same rights as any other couple in love? Seems like oppression to me.

Exactly when did the government have the right to determine who someone loves if they’re both of consenting age? Why is this still an issue in this day an age at all? Doesn’t case law from the 60s establish that discrimination is illegal? Meh it’ll take more than facts, truth and logic to sway the minds of blind stupidity, ignorance and fear.

I strongly endorse the idea of everyone on twitter, facebook, myspace wherever it is that you spend your online social time and be gay for the day, the week, the month. However long it takes for people to wake up and end the all too common standard of discrimination we live in.

Fuck oppression

Fuck discrimination

Fuck religious ideology being forced upon the masses.

The above is how I feel, apparently the courts think otherwise.

I’ll be hashtagging on twitter using #gayfortheday

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It’s interchangeable as a sugarfree recipe too so read it, try it and enjoy the tastiness below.

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3 days later I couldn’t handle the pain anymore (nothing really helped) so I went to a local dentist who could see me plus give me an xray for $35. The appointment took all of 15 minutes and I left with the knowledge that I had a cracked & impacted wisdom tooth:

Incidentally (heh pun intended) I discovered a dark side to dentistry. Apparently the dentist I originally went to is a “meth dentist”. Meth heads pay a pittance to come in and get a quick prescription for painkillers they can then use OHP/Walmart to get cheap meds to sell. Neato eh? “but they’re only trying to help people”. bah.

Anyhow, I notified the Dentist’s office that I was on unemployment, had no money to spare at all until my tax return came and was told “no problem we can work with that”. Went in for an initial appointment and was told that my top wisdom teeth needed to go as well but shouldn’t be an issue even though there was an added cost. Sadly I wouldn’t be able to get nitrous oxide since the dentist charges so much for nitrous, but no problem again right? If only that were the case.

Today arrives with much excitement as I know my horrifying wisdom tooth of agony +2 will be removed once and for all. I hopped a bus and arrived for my appointment only to be told “If you can’t pay $1500 up front then we can’t help you”. uh what? I was told the payments would be small enough to be manageable. If I had a spare $1500 laying around I’d have dealt with this weeks ago when it first became an issue.

Apparently because I didn’t have enough I’m not worthwhile of “emergency treatment” which is what the dentist told me I needed. Last I checked if it’s an emergency they’re not supposed to turn down patients without the revenue. Shows what I know.

What’s hilarious is if I’d been in Canada, the UK or anyplace with socialized medicine I’d likely have gotten in to see a dentist the day the pain started and then once antibiotics kicked in I’d have the teeth removed no harm no foul. Instead under our awesome capitalism based healthcare system I got to wait a week and a half for no treatment. Last time I checked the GOP morons always say that you wait for socialized healthcare and you never wait for medical care here. How delightfully backwards those cute little republican idiots are.

Funny how you’re only a person anymore if you have money. It’s never been a perfect egalitarian system but years ago you could count on the medical community helping people, now it appears in the day of the HMO that if you have no money you are persona non grata. I think they used to call that the fuedal system.

Ironically I’m pretty sure that this is how my family ended up emigrating from Ireland over to the US originally. They were tired of being peasants that continually got the sharp pointy end of the stick. Happily I learned at a young age to not get mad, but to just get even. This is why I’m going to find a new dentist, one with ethics and more concern for patient care instead of being interested only in money like the asshat I went to this morning.Once I find this new dentist I’m going to do everything in my power to bring him more patients.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go take my goddamned tylenol 3 and hope my jaw stops hurting. Also fuck you George Nowland. I just had to call the 5 people I referred to you and tell them to find a dentist that isn’t a soul soliciting pigfucker.

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Anyhow the last bit of 2008 had some very odd ups and downs. Let’s start with the upside though:

• Launched the website for my newest endeavor: Slate Technologies woo. Looks great and was designed by the team over at Duel Designs who do such excellent work that they’re now part of the Slate Technologies team (which is very cool and will help us launch quite a few spectacular projects coming very very soon).
• Started putting more effort into No Filter Fridays, which for those of you who are fans there is now a twitter account called succinctly enough nofilterfriday. Up next on that plate is a weekly podcast with video and some other coolness

On the downside at the end of 2008 was some family drama. Sucks that it had to happen but nice to finally know what type of people some of my relatives are.

Into 2009 we have even more great news!

• I got to have a whole week with my awesome wife Zoe while the boys were off visiting Grandma. It was like a 2nd honeymoon of awesomeness!
• Slate Technologies took just a short 3 months to outgrow Cubespace so we’re moving on down the road to a much bigger place which is good since our team has now grown from 2 of us all the way to 7 of us! Holy crap!?
• We managed to set up a couple of strategic partnerships with a couple of different local startups
• A launch page has been setup for the WordPress Dreamteam site.

Aside from trying to launch multiple products, setup new sites, migrate friend’s websites to better hosting I also found my time even further in demand due to the obligations of being both a “charter member” of the Portland WordPress user group (I’m not entirely sure what a “charter member” does only that it sounds somewhat cool with just a dash of pretentious) as well as being one of the Legion of Tech’s new board members.

In just the last week I’ve managed to juggle a whopping 5 different projects all while attempting to deal with an impacted abcessed wisdom tooth. Finally managed to get into a dentist today and got a prescription for antibiotics & Tylenol 3. Biggest upshot of the dentist appointment was getting to see just how badly impacted my wisdom tooth is. Ow!

I am setting aside some time to post more often (Friday’s between 2 and 3 I will get a post up no matter what) as well as get back to posting less about work and more about the family and I.

Anyhow there’s a nice tasty little update on what the hell I’ve been doing with my time and if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go enjoy some of the painfree time I’m getting to experience after a week of agony :D

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Portal Bar!

Scrollbar hosts the official weekly Fredagbar (Friday Bar) of IT University of Copenhagen. A number of us study games in the “Media, Technology, and Games” Masters program. In November, we made a Final Fantasy Night, so the next step was of course to take the famous video game franchise, which in our opinion is Valve’s Portal game. So this 28th of November we hosted a Portal Bar. We made a lot of companion cubes, took pictures around the bar, went through photoshop and printed out some nice portals to put on the walls around the bar area.

Tags: portal, glados, alcohol, drink recipes

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

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1. If you had one tweet to summarize yourself what would it be?

“Redheaded, polyamorous, badass, tattooed, intellectual freak of nature. Wife, mother, friend, lover, complicated, musical, passionate.”

2. You won a pretty prestigious scholarship recently. What was it and how has it affected you?

I was awarded the Ford Family Foundation ReStart scholarship.  It is an amazing scholarship given to individuals over 25 who have limited college experience and are looking to educate themselves after devoting their adult life to raising a family or serving the community.

Being awarded the ReStart scholarship has been amazing for me.  I have been able to aggressively pursue the education I want at the institution I want without fear of having to pick up a full time job to help my family survive.  The scholarship is significant enough that I will also be able to graduate with less than $20,000 in student loans, which is amazing in this day and age.

3. I see you have a blog, what inspired it?

I began my blog in November of 2004, one month after I started reviewing adult toys for Freddy and Eddy; someone mentioned that a blog would be a reasonable step for me, since I love to write.  I had been a regular contributor on different forum systems and offered advice there, so it made perfect sense to begin a blog and start sharing the twists and turns of my life.  The self discovery and amazing journey has been a side benefit, but a pretty significant one.

4. You seem proud of your celtic heritage, what made you embrace it?

I think, honestly, I’ve been pretty well reminded of my heritage since I was young.  My grandparents brought home kilts for all of us after a trip to Europe when I was around 6 or so; my sister has hers framed in a shadow box and I plan to do the same.  Both of my parents are very interested in genealogy and have helped me study my family’s roots, which in turn got me interested in researching these people that I came from.  Beyond the bloodline, I have always felt a very real connection to Celtic spirituality and think that it is an important part of how I see myself.

5. Do you consider yourself a “sex blogger”

I sure do.  While I blog about things other than sex, my primary focus still tends to revolve around sensuality and eroticism.  I feel more at home in the “sex blogger” community than any other blogging “caste”, so to speak.

6. Since you’ve become a parent, how has that changed your sex life?

Well, that depends.  I think that my sex life has actually been more affected by my being a student than by being a parent, but both of those roles do directly affect my sexuality.  As a parent, I have responsibilities to care for my children and I expend a lot of energy doing so.  As a student, I have responsibilities to focus on my studies and do what it takes to get the most out of my schooling.  There difference between the two is that I can get help with parenting duties (can and, for the most part anymore, do get help) whereas I can’t ask someone else to do my studying for me and expect to learn anything.  Similarly, I don’t think that being a mom has adversely affected my ability to be a kinky, perverted sex goddess long term – in the beginning it took some reconciling my different roles.

7. You posted weeks ago on your blog that you “came out” about being poly to your speech class. Were you nervous?

Are you kidding?  I was pacing and ready to vomit going into that class, but I felt that if I was to be truly honest about who I am and what is important to me I had to find the courage to tell the truth about my family.

8. How did your classmates react?

Honestly, I was a little disappointed in the LACK of reaction.  No one asked any questions about polyamory afterwards, and only two of my classmates have said anything since then.  Both were positive and nonjudgmental about it, so I can’t complain there.

9. What inspires you about each of the following: parenting, education, technology, sexuality

I think, with parenting, what inspires me the most is the community of people I know and love.  My husbands and wife, my friends with children, other bloggers with children, Ian and Alicia Denchasy (of freddyandeddy.com), and realistically the entire support structure of friends and family I have surrounded myself with.  We all have different personalities and I see a great many wonderful things in each person that I can try to instill in my children.

10. What’s the most important object on the planet to you?

Object?  Oooooh, that’s hard.  I would say a computer, but that’s not entirely realistic.  I think the most important OBJECT on the planet to me is my cello.

11. Why is it so important?

All through my life, I have been a very subdued person.  Music is the only thing that brings out the passionate side of me, the personality that is always hidden behind these walls and defenses.  My cello has the strongest effect on me, and without that, without the opportunity to express my true personality, I am nothing.

12. Worst thing you’ve ever done to someone?

Heh… I had to think about this one for a LONG time.  I think the worst thing I’ve done to someone is put a rainbow sticker on a severely homophobic person’s car.

13. Did they deserve it?

Oh, she definitely deserved it.  Trust me.

14. How would you change the world to make it better?

I would magically make people tolerant to alternative lifestyles.

15. Favorite 5 bloggers?

Oh crap… this is a hard one. Besides you? The five that I’ve been following religiously the longest are:

• Twisted Monk
• Shay
• Ell
• Goose and Gander
• Bondage Blog

I have SO many more that I follow now, though, and have made a ridiculous number of blogfriends in the last several months that it’s ridiculously hard to answer that question without feeling like I’m missing a bunch of people.

If you’d like to learn more about Angela you can find her here:

@CelticFrog
SwelteringCelt.com (this is not very work safe so surf with caution)

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In an amazingly awesome post made by Jane Wells (@janeforshort) over on the official WordPress.com blog she announced the release date (and time no less) of the amazingly awesome WordPress 2.7. She’s kind enough to deliver in textual form the great presentation she was uh..presenting at all of the wordcamp she’s been attending (ours was best though).

Anyhow I’m not going to rehash all of the great new features but I will point out my personal reasons for switching to 2.7 way back before beta 1 was even released (yeah I roll that dangerously on my site, but never customers though).

• QuickPress – A new admin dashboard widget that lets you type up and save or even publish a quick blog post. This has helped get me from 2 drafts waiting for finishing up to 31 post ideas that I was able to quickly summarize the idea without leaving my dashboard
• Add New Plugin – No longer do you need to have an ftp app or any other method to adding a new plugin. Simply type in the keywords or name of a plugin you want and it lets you install it right from your dashboard. This one is great since I had a plugin that was breaking my rss feed and was able to delete it and replace it with similar functionality while on Thanksgiving vacation on my iphone. Handy :D
• Quick Edit – Easily add/remove tags without having to open the entire post. This is also quite a timesaver.

Anyhow those are my 3 favorite new functions in WordPress 2.7.

Go get switched over (and if you’re in Portland we’ll be having an Upgrade release party within the next week. Food, drink and all the help you need to upgrade (or even migrate) your site to the goodness that is Wordpress 2.7.

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My current idea list:

1. refresh comments admin dashboard
   A simple idea that adds “refresh me” to the recent comments widget on the dashboard, and uses ajax to only refresh that widget.
2. feedburner widget for dashboard
   Integrated dashboard widget that shows the summary of feed data.
3. plugin compatibility checker
   The idea is when you try and add a new plugin it will check your plugin list against the plugin compatibility checker to see if it will fail. This one is likely to not be done by me lol.
4. mint stats dashboard widget
   I love Mint stats so much. I just don’t love always opening an external page to see it. Giving me my stats via the dashboard in widget form is a no brainer.
5. social media welcome mat with follow me message.
   If people are referred by twitter the header would say “Welcome twitter users, Like what you see? Consider adding <twitter handle> to get updated on new posts” or whatever the user decides to have the message say.
6. Referrer widget for dashboard
   show your readers where the most recent hits came from.
7. WPMU plugin installer permissions
   allow users to only install admin approved plugins from wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives users flexibility but protects your WPMU site (Not even sure if this one is possible or worthwhile)

Obviously this is just a very rough list and I’d love more input and more importantly feedback about what functions you want new plugins to serve. So take a moment and suggest something you’d like me to try and build.

Not my picture (again courtesy of the tagaroo plugin and Flickr).

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Which brings me to a little experiment I’m trying out. Every Friday between 3pm and 5pm I will be engaging in #nofilterfriday. This means I’ll say whatever pops into my head and most importantly will honestly answer any questions that I’m asked. This will be difficult and I will honestly say there are very few subjects that I won’t respond well to (too private of info about my wife and kids for example).

I’ve already had a few questions asked in the original test #nofilterfriday.

sewmyheadon: @chrisorourke #nofilterfriday what pisses you off most about the iPhone?

@chrisorourke: @sewmyheadon The fact that a progressive forward thinking company like Apple did a deal with ATT. Apple could’ve been the first successful..
MVNO. Imagine paying your phone bill with itunes? Simple. Everything apple tied together. Really surprised they didn’t do it.

verso: @chrisorourke #nofilterfriday what is the thing from High School you look back on that still FULLY embarrasses you?

chrisorourke: @verso 1992: huge screwup during the ballad at the U of O marching band show during prelims. I played loud perc notes during flute solo.

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