CodeVerity

Want a Table Computer

timweaver — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:37:37 GMT

Everyone wants one right? After all the iPad is going to change everything. The thing is, there are estimates of over 50 tablets launching this year. My hype-o-meter says that number will fall to around 10, but even so. That’s a lot of tablet computing to choose from.

I bet a lot of them will play flash right out of the box, unlike some.

Education is About Knowing How to Teach

timweaver — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:58:44 GMT

What a novel thought. Let’s focus our education efforts on making a better teacher rather than testing a better student.

The New York Times has a lengthy article on Building a Better Teacher that talks about doing just that. As the spouse of a gifted teacher, who is able to make her students perform no matter what their learning ability is, I’m astonished at how bad some teachers are. The art of teaching has been boiled down to the process of generating acceptable test results on standardized tests.

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients [ that makes up a great teacher ], he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise.

Carol talks about this type of thing quiet frequently. It’s her “teacher voice” and “teacher mode”. Both are very different from her normal personality and they produce.

The other big issue I see, which this article covers, is teacher pay. Teachers get an essentially fixed pay based upon number of years of experience. It has nothing to do with the teachers performance or that of his or her students. What other professional organization pays its members a flat rate?

The Love of a Father

timweaver — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:03:41 GMT

We arrived in Montreal around midnight on Sunday. I was due to be downstairs for a long day of meetings at 8am. After check-in and getting settled we finally got everyone in bed by 12:30am. I lay there a while, fighting the dull fatigue of the long drive. It was much later that I finally fell asleep.

At 3:27am Jade coughed. As a parent you learn to react when your child does something unusual. I was instantly awake. I looked over, she was barely three feet from me. She coughed again; wet, gagging as vomit spewed across the bed, her stuffed animals and down onto the floor.

I leapt out of bed and snatched Jade up. The first one is just a precursor to what is coming; another thing parents quickly learn. I ran to the bathroom, Jade gagging in my arms. Most of the second wave made it into the toilet, not all, but most. As she emptied her stomach I held her close, waiting. Finally, nothing left, the growling of her stomach clearly audible. I grabbed a towel and cleaned her face and arms off.

Leaving Jade, I went back out into the room. The smell was overpowering. I kicked Devan out of the bed, he was sitting half up, not sure what had happened. Thankfully Jade had vomited away from him. I stripped the bed, Carol called room service for new sheets and I spent a minute wiping down the floor. The sound of Jade gagging again sent me back to the bathroom to help her.

The new sheets showed up and we got the bed made and Devan back into it. I managed to get Jade into new pj’s ( we only brought 2 pair because they “never” get dirty ) between episodes. I then cleaned the bathroom floor and toilet.

Finally, all signs of vomit erased, aside from the smell ( for the next three days our room stank ) I tossed a couple of towels down on the cold tile bathroom floor for Jade to lay on and just hugged Jade. Her stomach was still gurgling loudly. Every five to ten minutes she would throw up again.

I leaned back against the edge of the tub, the lip digging into the muscles along my back just below my shoulder blades, and locked my legs extended, the flat of my feet against the far wall. Jade lay down onto my chest. She curled up there and, stomach still protesting, fell asleep.

As I sat there, back on fire, legs aching, tailbone being driven into the hard tile and the 62 degree room temperature chilling me to the bone I smiled. My daughter, sick, miserable, lay curled up against my chest sleeping those moments when she could, comforted because I was there to hold her when she needed it.

A tear ran down my cheek as I realized, though I was in serious physical discomfort, I wouldn’t have changed that moment for anything. To be there, even just to hold her, when she needed me was amazing. The peaceful look upon her face, even as the gurgling continued, told me all I needed to know. At 5:45am Jade had slipped down to the floor. She hadn’t been sick in over a half hour, so I figured it was safe. I slowly got to my feet and went back to bed. I was there less than 4 minutes before I heard her gagging again.

I finally slept from around 6am – 7am. It was a long day. Jade woke up feeling fine. She evidently got food poisoning from the restaurant ( The Three Tomatoes ) that we stopped at on the way in. Is there anything a parent won’t do for their children?

Montreal

timweaver — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:39:52 GMT

I’m wrapping up ten days in Old Montreal, hence the complete and utter dearth of anything. The old city is an amazing place to walk around. Much like Boston, you can be walking by a post-modern building only to stumble across an old stone church crouched in the shadows of the steel behemoths towering over it.

One thing that quickly becomes apparent when you come here is that an understanding of French is almost necessary. A great many things are translated, usually in smaller text, but some things aren’t. While most of the main tourist areas have bilingual people don’t expect it everywhere.

We went down to a food court in a mall below the hotel and there was no English to be found at a number of the “restaurants”. Of course if you turn that around, you will notice that in America we provide one language: English and increasingly in the south Spanish, but the expectation is English. We don’t even try.

We’ve become very accustomed to paying for everything with debit cards. Well, not here. You need a real Visa or Mastercard. A bank issued debit card will not work at the majority of places. You can get cash from an ATM and pay that way. In fact, I would recommend you carry enough cash to purchase any meals you might eat on any given day as many of the restaurants that aren’t catering to tourists will only accept cash.

The festival of lights was going on this weekend. Loreal put up an inflatable dome with a very cool 15 minute movie of time from future to past and of course a light show right below our hotel. That made for a very noise Saturday night as bands were playing until early in the morning.

Round One of Edits Complete

timweaver — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:19:55 GMT

After a marathon round of about three straight hours of editing I’m finally done with the first edit of The Desert War.

There were a few really rough patches that I’m still not completely happy with, but I needed to go through the complete thing to get all the events and characters straight in my head before embarking on a more detailed edit.

The Desert War will sit idle now for a few weeks while I began writing Oasis: The New Dawn.

The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten

timweaver — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:11:28 GMT

For years now there has been an ongoing [cover-up/convenient set of events] surrounding the drinking water on Camp Lejeune.

A great many Marines, family members, children of family members have lived on the base and been exposed to the toxins that are undeniably in the water. I am no exception. I’ve been on Lejeune briefly, but have certainly drank much of the same water.

I was stationed on Camp Johnson, which is essentially next door to Camp Lejeune. We did exercises on Lejeune, we drank the water, we hung out, etc.

Kind of gives a whole new meaning to those stenciled letters on the “water buffulo’s” that the Corps would haul out to the rifle range. When it says Potable Water, it really meant was: contains trace elements of benzene… have a nice day.

MSNBC has a story highlighting this debacle which you can read here, however if you want less of the varnished truth you should go to the site created specifically for those who are afflicted by the toxins they absorbed at Lejeune. The site: The Few the Proud the Forgotten.

Learning by Failure

timweaver — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:57:49 GMT

Anyone who has written software for more than about 10 minutes quickly realizes that you learn and remember far more when your design fails than when it succeeds. Apparently the US education system hasn’t quite caught up to the notion that getting something wrong is good for you.

Over at Scientific America there is a new article titled The Pluses of getting it wrong. I’m not sure why it took research to figure this one out.

Personally, I find it disturbing that anyone, especially educators would believe this:

For years many educators have championed “errorless learning,” advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors.

But then I remind myself just how technologically illiterate a great many educators are and given the decisions and actions I see going on in our schools the above sounds just about on par.

There are some really great educators out there, if only those running things would take a moment to listen and learn from those actually doing the teaching rather than from those who do the “research”.

Suspense, Surprise and Foreshadowing

timweaver — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:46:28 GMT

Jordan McCollum’s latest post on telegraphing struck a nerve with me, especially this statement:

Make sure your readers have all the pieces your characters do—but beating your readers over the head with the coming surprise is a good way to ruin it

I’ve been reading Brisingr to Devan, after having finished the previous two novels in the series, and one of my major issues with these books, aside from the fact that you can’t pronounce a single name, is the foreshadowing. Now, to be fair, the first book was much worse than Brisignr, but even this one lays on the foreshadowing to the point where predicting what is going to happen next is just annoying.

As I read through my own work I find that I can pick-out instances of foreshadowing that I wasn’t even aware I put into the book. The question then becomes, is it foreshadowing or merely circumstance? So far, I’ve only had to remove/revise one instance that to me was clearly foreshadowing, I’m not sure anyone else would have caught it.

How do you achieve that balance of circumstance, to deliberate to over abundance?

Castle Panic – Loads of Fun

timweaver — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:42:47 GMT

I went looking for a new game to play with the kids this weekend and stumbled across this title by Fireside Games.

This is a cooperative game, which games it great for the younger kids. The game plays fast and takes very little time to setup.

The basic play is as follows

Setup you castle towers and walls. When all your towers have fallen, it’s game over.

Setup the initial attacking monsters.

Let the mayhem begin.

Each turn the monsters advance on your castle and the players take turns playing cards: Archer, Knight, Swordsman and try and kill all the monsters before they get beyond your walls. Watch out for the boulders that crush everything in their path, including your towers.

Players can trade cards, give advice, etc. Everyone wins or looses together. There is an element of scoring, should you survive, so that means there is an additional level of strategy, but if you get greedy everyone might die!

I played a couple of solo games to get the feel (lost). Devan and I played two games (won both) and then Devan and Jade and I played (won). After that Devan and Jade played another couple of games. All told we got a good 5 hours of entertainment out of this one game on the first day we owned it. Not bad.

ERTL Amputation Two Years Later

timweaver — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:38:05 GMT

Carol pointed out to me that I was remise in writing the two year update. You can find the One Year Update here.

The very short update is everything has been going fine. Carol goes to the gym and works out 4-6 days per week. She runs 3 – 5 miles, weights, etc. Aside from the revision for bone spurs and nerve issues she’s had very few problems with the amputation.

She has continued to have fit problems with her prosthetic. These are caused mostly by the fact that she seems to continue to lose volume in her stump. I’ve lost count of the number of actual legs she has had. Fortunately she has a great prosthetist who has really helped.

Lately she’s been in a different type of leg. Rather than the vacuum seal that she had been wearing she’s now in one held on by a full length leg sleeve. For a long time she avoided this type of leg because she didn’t care how it looked. Now that she is in it, though, it’s by far the most comfortable leg she’s ever had.

Recently she did have an incident of skin breakdown that went unnoticed for a few days. It was at the very bottom of her stump and began leaking fluids. She had a scheduled doctor’s appointment the day after we found it and after two nights of tegaderm the wound is completely healed.

She is still experiencing significant nerve issues in the stump and lately we’ve started to strongly suspect that the medication she’s taking for the phantom pain is causing other more serious side effects. Unfortunately the nerve issues, for her, aren’t really related to the amputation, but to an underlying issue at birth.

All things considered, she’s in far less pain, more mobile, and generally happier than she was with the broken ankle.