Another game, another come from behind victory for my beloved Bruins of U.C.L.A.
We're going to Stateline in December to see the SC/UCLA game. We're all prepared for a letdown, but on the bright side, we'll be drinking and gambling.
Yipee!
Going to bed.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Friday, October 28, 2005
Well, I said I'd say something about music this time, so here goes:
I subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited. It has a million songs to choose from, many I'd rather not hear, and you can download them to your computer and portable music device (aka, Mp3 player).
So, I ponied up the 60 bucks, much to my wife's chagrin, and started loading up the hard drive. I also purchased a Creative Zen Touch 20 gig player, again the wife was chagrined, to store all the "subscribed music" I've downloaded. Great idea, right? Well, in theory anyway.
(seeing yesterday's rant/whine, you're probably wondering why it's free of cussing thus far. So am I)
The Creative Zen Touch (hereinafter referred to as the "Touch" I'm a lawyer as well, you know) was advertised as being compatable with MTP (media transfer protocol) files and would play subscription based music. Yahoo is a subscription service. In other words, I pay my 60 bucks (the price goes up to a whopping $120 a year November 1. Ain't I fucking lucky! ah, cussing) and I get the songs to use as I please for a year. I just can't burn them to a CD. That costs $.79 each or about $8 per CD. No matter, I'd planned to treat the songs as my personal whore and bend them over the nearest armchair and fuck them silly. Weird metaphor, or simile aside, I was subscribing only; not burning. Back to the Touch. It was supposed to be compatable with my hopes, dreams, plans. Ooops! It wasn't. I paid almost $200 for a player that would not do what I had hoped, and been told, it could do. I was pissed. Maybe just worried.
Everything changed this morning as I went to the Creative web site (Creative announced their quarterly profits were down 86% over last year; this added to my anxiety) and there it was: the firmware download I had waited for. The firmware that would allow me to listen to all my downloaded music for the next year. The MTP/Plays for Sure upgrade!!! Yipee. I downloaded. I updated. I synched my player to YMU. My battery ran out.
Bugger! (That was for you Karl, as my second official reader. Steve Stackpole was first. He's stronger, but you're British and that counts for something these days. I think Dan has read this as he told me to listen to a comedy CD called, "Quit your Crying, You Fucking Baby" by David Cross)
Being at work right now (I'm at lunch, so I'm not ignoring the brats I'm educating) without the charger, I'll have to wait until I get home so I can load up the subscribed music. Then it's non-stop with the Damned, the Modern Lovers, Buzzcocks, Devo, The Futureheads, Franz Fucking Ferdinand, The Kaiser Chiefs, and anything Dan suggests that I can download. Dan posts interesting choices on his website. Read them. www.theartofdansilver.com You won't regret it.
Problem is, Yahoo is lame when it comes to getting the licenses for some of these bands. I want to listen to Dillinger Escape Plan, but they don't got it. Shit. Being a cheap bastard, I'll wait. Anyway, I have 10 gigs of music ready to go and now power to use it. I'll get over it.
What I should have been writing about is the fact that most of my listening is stuck somewhere around 1987. Not much new out there I want to hear. I sure as hell am not listening to hip hop or rap (I understand they're two different genres, who knew?). My daughter, in her quest to become African-American (we're pretty damn pale around my house) listens to that crap, er music non-stop. Maybe I'm old, but the shit is horrible. I mean in indiscernable. Each song sounds like the other, except worse. No one is playing instruments because Pro Tools rules the studio. The singers are all over produced and synthesized to the point of sounding inhuman. Listen to Beyonce, if you can, and you'll hear it. Layer upon layer of crappy sound. Put it together and you get a hit single that makes your brain bleed.
My solution: Henry Rollins in the studio with one of these genius producers, say Pharrell Williams. Henry sits behind him and every time he tells a young singer, "That was great, I think we have a hit!" ol' Hank grabs the nearest heavy object and opens Pharrell's head; revealing as everyone expected, nothing. It's a fantasy, but it's all mine.
"We're not saying anything new here. We're just saying the same things over and over again, that need to be said until things get done."
-Astronaut Wally Shirra in The Right Stuff
I'm tired.
I subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited. It has a million songs to choose from, many I'd rather not hear, and you can download them to your computer and portable music device (aka, Mp3 player).
So, I ponied up the 60 bucks, much to my wife's chagrin, and started loading up the hard drive. I also purchased a Creative Zen Touch 20 gig player, again the wife was chagrined, to store all the "subscribed music" I've downloaded. Great idea, right? Well, in theory anyway.
(seeing yesterday's rant/whine, you're probably wondering why it's free of cussing thus far. So am I)
The Creative Zen Touch (hereinafter referred to as the "Touch" I'm a lawyer as well, you know) was advertised as being compatable with MTP (media transfer protocol) files and would play subscription based music. Yahoo is a subscription service. In other words, I pay my 60 bucks (the price goes up to a whopping $120 a year November 1. Ain't I fucking lucky! ah, cussing) and I get the songs to use as I please for a year. I just can't burn them to a CD. That costs $.79 each or about $8 per CD. No matter, I'd planned to treat the songs as my personal whore and bend them over the nearest armchair and fuck them silly. Weird metaphor, or simile aside, I was subscribing only; not burning. Back to the Touch. It was supposed to be compatable with my hopes, dreams, plans. Ooops! It wasn't. I paid almost $200 for a player that would not do what I had hoped, and been told, it could do. I was pissed. Maybe just worried.
Everything changed this morning as I went to the Creative web site (Creative announced their quarterly profits were down 86% over last year; this added to my anxiety) and there it was: the firmware download I had waited for. The firmware that would allow me to listen to all my downloaded music for the next year. The MTP/Plays for Sure upgrade!!! Yipee. I downloaded. I updated. I synched my player to YMU. My battery ran out.
Bugger! (That was for you Karl, as my second official reader. Steve Stackpole was first. He's stronger, but you're British and that counts for something these days. I think Dan has read this as he told me to listen to a comedy CD called, "Quit your Crying, You Fucking Baby" by David Cross)
Being at work right now (I'm at lunch, so I'm not ignoring the brats I'm educating) without the charger, I'll have to wait until I get home so I can load up the subscribed music. Then it's non-stop with the Damned, the Modern Lovers, Buzzcocks, Devo, The Futureheads, Franz Fucking Ferdinand, The Kaiser Chiefs, and anything Dan suggests that I can download. Dan posts interesting choices on his website. Read them. www.theartofdansilver.com You won't regret it.
Problem is, Yahoo is lame when it comes to getting the licenses for some of these bands. I want to listen to Dillinger Escape Plan, but they don't got it. Shit. Being a cheap bastard, I'll wait. Anyway, I have 10 gigs of music ready to go and now power to use it. I'll get over it.
What I should have been writing about is the fact that most of my listening is stuck somewhere around 1987. Not much new out there I want to hear. I sure as hell am not listening to hip hop or rap (I understand they're two different genres, who knew?). My daughter, in her quest to become African-American (we're pretty damn pale around my house) listens to that crap, er music non-stop. Maybe I'm old, but the shit is horrible. I mean in indiscernable. Each song sounds like the other, except worse. No one is playing instruments because Pro Tools rules the studio. The singers are all over produced and synthesized to the point of sounding inhuman. Listen to Beyonce, if you can, and you'll hear it. Layer upon layer of crappy sound. Put it together and you get a hit single that makes your brain bleed.
My solution: Henry Rollins in the studio with one of these genius producers, say Pharrell Williams. Henry sits behind him and every time he tells a young singer, "That was great, I think we have a hit!" ol' Hank grabs the nearest heavy object and opens Pharrell's head; revealing as everyone expected, nothing. It's a fantasy, but it's all mine.
"We're not saying anything new here. We're just saying the same things over and over again, that need to be said until things get done."
-Astronaut Wally Shirra in The Right Stuff
I'm tired.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Having never done this, I don't know what to expect. I'm really not expecting anyone to read a blog from a boring old fart of a teacher/attorney/tired father, but what the hell; it's free.
Lately I've been thinking about the state of education in the state of California. Thanks to the worst president ever, we have a system called No Child Left Behind, or NCLB. It mandates all kinds of testing and reporting by schools to make them better imposers of education on our youth. In all, it's a crock of shit.
What NCLB does is pressure schools, and in turn, the teachers, to teach to a test. Yes, I know that all 5 of you home-schooling moms out there who Googled "education" or "NCLB" are reading that line and saying, "Stupid pisant teachers always blame the president for making them teach to the test." Well, yes Mrs. Christian, stay-at-home, my child won't touch those dirty illegal aliens, stick up my ass, mom; it does and here's how. Each year a school is given a report on how its test score have improved over last year's. You see, the feds in NCLB look at test scores and only test scores to measure the progress of a school. So, if a school's scores go down, the idiot teachers are obviously not doing their jobs. If the scores stay the same, no progress, something must be wrong. If they go up, must be the good parenting. All bullshit.
You see, even if a school's scores steadily improve over the years, as they have at my school, then you can still not meet the insane criteria set by President Big-Ears and his dipshit cronies.
They call us an "underachieving school." Nice. Kiss my ass.
The fine state of California goes one better. They say to the offending school, you've got 3 years to get your shit together, or we're coming in; kicking ass; and taking names. Like a state that can't elect a decent governator could come in and run a junior high school. Give me a fucking break. Now. (in case you couldn't tell, I'm not one for exclamation marks) My school is in the third year of being piss poor according to the unrealistic measurments set by the bureaucratic asswipes in Washington and Sacramento. In other words, if our kids don't get their collective asses in gear, I'm going to have some overpaid, long retired, brain dead "consultant" coming in and telling me how to get my kids to do better in school. That will be fun, no doubt. Please, someone, fuck me in the ass. It would hurt less.
The sad part of all of this is we have improved. Hell, we've kicked some serious ass in the past three years where test scores are concerned. You think someone from the Big Sac or D.C. would give us a laurel and hardy handshake? Hell no! (there, an exclamation mark, or is it point. happy?) They would rather tell us we missed our goals by .2% (I'm not making this up, we missed by that much in one of our criteria) of the EL students. Well, we obviously suck ass.
I could go on, but why? No one is reading this, at least not on purpose; and if they are, they don't care. Governator Arnold, kiss my ass. President W, get in line. You're both shams.
Oh, here's a great analogy about using test scores to judge a teacher's effectiveness. Say you're a doctor and you are evaluated by the state every year (they are, I think), but they don't actually evaluate you personally, they look at your patients' test results. So, they may look at patients' EKG's, blood cultures, HDL/LDL levels, chest x-rays, whatever, but you know that they always look at certain tests (in California, the state looks at a student's CST, or standards test, scores). So, as a bright doctor, what do you do? Why the answer is simple; start pushing drugs on the patients that will cause the certain tests to come out favorable. You might even put them on a diet, or suggest an exercise routine. Everything possible to prepare for those state mandated tests. But, what if the patient is a rebellious smoker with a penchant for Krispy Kreme doughnuts (don't get me started on that bunch of crooks. May Scott Livengood burn in Hell, smoking a big dog turd)? That one doofus could ruin your state scores and your license would be in jeopardy. Not fair is it? Welcome to the world of education. The only place where you have exposure to a child for about an hour a day and you're supposed to change all of his or her bad habits over the course of 180 days. Sucks to be us.
I'm tired of writing. I'm going to the gym and taking my kid to soccer practice.
I do CrossFit at the gym. Go to the website: www.crossfit.com. Get your ass handed to you; come back for more. I post there as Ron N. I talk more than anything else, but I keep most of my thoughts in as I have great respect for the Glassmans and the members of the armed forces
who frequent the site. Get some.
Next: Something about music, I think.
Lately I've been thinking about the state of education in the state of California. Thanks to the worst president ever, we have a system called No Child Left Behind, or NCLB. It mandates all kinds of testing and reporting by schools to make them better imposers of education on our youth. In all, it's a crock of shit.
What NCLB does is pressure schools, and in turn, the teachers, to teach to a test. Yes, I know that all 5 of you home-schooling moms out there who Googled "education" or "NCLB" are reading that line and saying, "Stupid pisant teachers always blame the president for making them teach to the test." Well, yes Mrs. Christian, stay-at-home, my child won't touch those dirty illegal aliens, stick up my ass, mom; it does and here's how. Each year a school is given a report on how its test score have improved over last year's. You see, the feds in NCLB look at test scores and only test scores to measure the progress of a school. So, if a school's scores go down, the idiot teachers are obviously not doing their jobs. If the scores stay the same, no progress, something must be wrong. If they go up, must be the good parenting. All bullshit.
You see, even if a school's scores steadily improve over the years, as they have at my school, then you can still not meet the insane criteria set by President Big-Ears and his dipshit cronies.
They call us an "underachieving school." Nice. Kiss my ass.
The fine state of California goes one better. They say to the offending school, you've got 3 years to get your shit together, or we're coming in; kicking ass; and taking names. Like a state that can't elect a decent governator could come in and run a junior high school. Give me a fucking break. Now. (in case you couldn't tell, I'm not one for exclamation marks) My school is in the third year of being piss poor according to the unrealistic measurments set by the bureaucratic asswipes in Washington and Sacramento. In other words, if our kids don't get their collective asses in gear, I'm going to have some overpaid, long retired, brain dead "consultant" coming in and telling me how to get my kids to do better in school. That will be fun, no doubt. Please, someone, fuck me in the ass. It would hurt less.
The sad part of all of this is we have improved. Hell, we've kicked some serious ass in the past three years where test scores are concerned. You think someone from the Big Sac or D.C. would give us a laurel and hardy handshake? Hell no! (there, an exclamation mark, or is it point. happy?) They would rather tell us we missed our goals by .2% (I'm not making this up, we missed by that much in one of our criteria) of the EL students. Well, we obviously suck ass.
I could go on, but why? No one is reading this, at least not on purpose; and if they are, they don't care. Governator Arnold, kiss my ass. President W, get in line. You're both shams.
Oh, here's a great analogy about using test scores to judge a teacher's effectiveness. Say you're a doctor and you are evaluated by the state every year (they are, I think), but they don't actually evaluate you personally, they look at your patients' test results. So, they may look at patients' EKG's, blood cultures, HDL/LDL levels, chest x-rays, whatever, but you know that they always look at certain tests (in California, the state looks at a student's CST, or standards test, scores). So, as a bright doctor, what do you do? Why the answer is simple; start pushing drugs on the patients that will cause the certain tests to come out favorable. You might even put them on a diet, or suggest an exercise routine. Everything possible to prepare for those state mandated tests. But, what if the patient is a rebellious smoker with a penchant for Krispy Kreme doughnuts (don't get me started on that bunch of crooks. May Scott Livengood burn in Hell, smoking a big dog turd)? That one doofus could ruin your state scores and your license would be in jeopardy. Not fair is it? Welcome to the world of education. The only place where you have exposure to a child for about an hour a day and you're supposed to change all of his or her bad habits over the course of 180 days. Sucks to be us.
I'm tired of writing. I'm going to the gym and taking my kid to soccer practice.
I do CrossFit at the gym. Go to the website: www.crossfit.com. Get your ass handed to you; come back for more. I post there as Ron N. I talk more than anything else, but I keep most of my thoughts in as I have great respect for the Glassmans and the members of the armed forces
who frequent the site. Get some.
Next: Something about music, I think.
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