• English I: Literature & Composition
• Physical Education I
• Latin I
• Geometry
• Biology
• Digital Video Editing & Production
• Skills for Health II

Outside of school we are also exploring a few other topics history, philosophy, and astronomy are all areas where Kenzie has shown an interest.

Currently we are exploring a few philosophy books, the philosophy of the Matrix and the philosophy of Star Wars. We recently watched a documentary on the dark ages as well as a documentary about evolution. Astronomy will be covered by having Kenzie keep an astrological journal. Each night he’ll be going outside and keeping track of how many stars he can see (not the number but a general idea either a lot, a little or medium) as well as what phase the moon is in and which constellations he can see. We are also going to explore planetary sciences.

I’m very much looking forward to this year.

Just yesterday it seems since I held your hands, but life doesn’t always follow the plans. Your happiness is all I wish to see and in the end when all is said and done I hope you know I did what sometimes painfully must be done……

The hard part of this transition is the fact that my nose is running, and I’m coughing a lot but that’s normal, as my body is getting rid of all the extra crap in my lungs.  I’m pretty proud of myself as I had sort of resigned myself to fact that I was just never going to be able to quit, but now I know I can! The folks over at the Electronic cigarette forums have been very helpful and support I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to quit smoking, they have tons of information and can answer any questions you might have. If you do check it out make sure to check out their efc library the info is great.

There is a real difference in the feel between dragging on a cigarette and an e-cig but it has already helped me cut way down on smoking just this first day. Hopefully my experience will get even better with different flavors. I’ll update more later on the subject.

My Methods will require you to either have a copy of windows running in virtualbox or a dualboot with a working LOTRO install.
First I downloaded pylotro Though the program is called pylotro it is a launcher for both LOTRO & DDO. I also download and installed wine. My current working version is 1.2-rc1

1. I used the regular download manager from turbine in Virtualbox and downloaded both LOTRO & DDO . You should make sure to do full download of all game files, be forewarned it could take a while.
2. I created a folder called Turbine in
   

   /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/

3. Using grsync I copied everything from
   

   C:\Program Files\Turbine

   to

   /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine

4. Using winetricks I installed
   • win2k
   • gecko
   • vcrun2005
   • vcrun2005sp1
5. I then installed pylotro in wine
6. Once I ran pylotro I had to go into the settings and point it to my LOTRO and DDO installs. While I wasn’t able to patch DDO I can play it just fine. With LOTRO I was able to patch and everything runs just fine.
7. Note You’ll have 2 folders(1 if you only play LOTRO or only play DDO) in your /home directory called
   

   Dungeons and Dragons Online

   and

   The Lord of the Rings Online

   These would generally be the folders that would appear in your Documents
   folder in windows.This folder will normally hold your
   UserPreferences.ini file along with your lotro.keymap file. For reference HERE is a copy my UserPreferences.ini file

I haven’t had any sound issues and my game seems to run fine. Of course I
don’t use pulseaudio being on kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. One thing I
did notice is that settings aren’t saved to the ini file so if you say
adjust your sound one session then log and come back later your need to
readjust them. I worked around this but just editing the volume settings
in the actual UserPreferences.ini file instead of using the in game
options.

Granted everyone should have an education, but I really don’t think that regular school is the way to go for everyone, and as long as the system continues to go downhill, and be at war with our kids less of them are going to be happy and/or succeed at school. As a parent I never really liked the idea of sending my kids off to complete strangers for 8 hours a day, having them become lost in the in crowd of the ever increasing size of classrooms. How can one teacher manage to help each student on any kind of personal level with they have a new set of 30-40 kids every hour to deal with? How is it that some kids excel at school while others stumble the whole time and it’s always just a bit late whenever somebody takes notice and tries to do anything, at that point the child is already lost.

Having no other option for the longest time, my son did attend public school. Always it seemed like the same cycle every year; he would start the year great, then half way through his grades would collapse. My son is now a student at an online public high school. He takes his classes on the internet, a few times a week he has “Live Sessions” where the students and teachers interact through whiteboard. The rest of the time he takes his classes through the schools website. Working on assignments/projects at his own pace. If he’s really into science, he doesn’t have to just stop working because the bell rang, so he can move on the next class. He just keeps on working on it, until he’s done. He’s teachers call him (yes on the phone) and discuss his grades or a current assignment, or even just to see how he’s doing. His counselor calls on a regular basis to give encouragement and to make sure he’s happy in his classes. He can still play sports through his local school, and this school regularly organizes pizza parties, outings and school events. He will have a prom, as well as a regular graduation just like all the other students in public school.

As a parent the upsides to his attending this school for me have been, the ability pin point struggling points early on, so that we can face them together. The fact that both myself and my husband can be very involved in his learning experience. If he’s reading about economics, we can have a discussion about it, and know what he’s being taught. If he’s really into art class, we can decided well let’s take the day off today and head to a museum. He can then write up a report on the trip and that counts towards his grade. The biggest concern most people seem to have when they find out about his schooling has been “well what about His social Life” and to be honest he has a great social life. Most of his friends already attended different schools then him anyway, and if I remember correctly school isn’t supposed to be about having a social life. The last time my son attended public school, I clearly remember the handbook stating kids can not hold hands, kiss or even hug for that matter. Kenzie doesn’t have any less of a social life then any of his other friends who do attend regular school. He still goes to the mall, the movies, the skating rink and other places just like other kids. The only difference is that I know he’s actually learning something and getting an education that is sticking with him. His first semester just ended and we asked him if he wanted to stay in this school or return to regular school, without so much as a pause he quickly replied “I want to stay in this school”, and when we asked him why he said “because here it seems like the teachers actually care”.

Protect Yourself

• A website tells you that you have a virus, or spy-ware/malware has been detected.

First don’t panic, second don’t trust the source. Their have been many cases where people have been infected by malware because they clicked on the “FREE VIRUS SCAN NOW” advertisement in their browser from a website claiming that they have malware, It’s a very old trick. I personally was shocked to discover how widespread this practice actually is, but even some very well known sites have been “tricked” into running what they thought were legitimate ads on their websites only to discover they were actively infecting their visitors. Here are a couple of examples of Fake Virus scans:

• Make sure you run updated anti-virus on your windows system – I  recommend Avast it’s free and updated quite regularly.
• Make sure you run updated anti-spyware on your windows system – I highly recommend the free Spybot S&D Make sure run regular scans of your system.
• If your using firefox there are a few more ways to help you avoid those types of fake scans and javascript/flash based attacks. Two extensions I make sure to install on any firefox installation are Ad Block Plus, and WOT(Web of Trust).
• Be Smart, think about what the website in front of you asking you to do. Legitimate Visus & Malware scanning sites, generally wont just pop up in your face, and beg to scan your sytem.
• Stop handing out your email address – You don’t have to give your actual email address to every website that asks, actually there is a free service that helps stop spam in your inbox by giving you a temporary email address that you can use  to register at that one website you just have to check out. Mailinator.com allows you create any email address at random and then check it just by using the email address you created, there is no actual account and no registration required. Be aware though, all email is deleted after a few hours.

Back up and Maintain!

Remember Computers are like car’s you can just Gas & Go, you have to perform regular maintenance.

• Start a back up schedule – Hardware doesn’t last forever, and losing all those precious photo’s or a huge media collection can really make things difficult for you. The best thing you can do is get some external storage, and start a backup schedule. If you don’t have much to back up you can always get a free Dropbox.com account, and have your important files backed up the web. But in case you need more than 2 gig’s of storage space and don’t want to pay for extra an external drive is really the way to go.  DeltaCopy is a great Open Source program for backing up your file. It offers Incremental backup, Task scheduler, Email notification, &  One-click restore features.
• Back up those bookmarks online – Xmarks (formerly foxmarks) works with Internet explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google chrome to keep your bookmarks in sync and backed up across computers and browsers.
• Find our more about System Restore - Answers.com provides great insight about how to use the windows System Restore feature, using it you can create restore points to set your computer back to should something go wrong.
• Clean Your registry – Ccleaner is a great way to make sure your Windows Registry stays clean, as well as helping you clean any temporary files from your system.
• Defragment your files -  Windows XP comes with a nice interface for Defragmenting your hard drive, however  in vista your left with a command line only option of Defragmenting your hard drives. Luckily there are 3rd party  alternatives to windows built in interface, which works with both XP & Vista, I recommend Defraggler.

Are you tired yet?

So once your tired of maintaining your system on a regular basis all the while having paid to have your computer tell you what to do during your free time, Keep your windows for games, and Use Ubuntu/Linux for everything else!

ln -s /storage/Music/* /home/angel/Music
ln -s /storage/Videos/* /home/angel/Videos

the * is a wild card and means that anything in those folders will be linked to. But I knew this and really felt it was a “Duh” moment on my part…..lol