wildernesscat and his wife have been married 10 years today. Awesome!

I wish you two many, many more happy years together with your children, and someday their children, too make your lives even brighter!

To happy birthdays

The first, today, is yuki_onna and who has the best "this is my birthday" post evar today: My Age Ends In Zero!

Happy Birthday, yuki_onna!!!

The second is for tomorrow. vrax is, like, one of the coolest people I don't really know. No, seriously, I have this huge, massive admiration for this guy, and I love reading his journal and watching his life. Anyway, his birthday doesn't end in zero, but 31 is a pretty decent birthday, too.

Actually, all of them are pretty decent, cuz, you know, birthdays suggest that you've managed to survive another year, and that's always a good thing, I think :)

Happy Birthday, vrax!

Because if he did, he'd totally love this:

http://www.meatcards.com/

Yes, ladies and gentleman, business cards made out of meat. Two ingredients, the website says, "Meat and lasers". Business cards that will help you survive the econoclypse indeed. Yummy, yummy business cards.

(edit: Oops... I said "business cards made out of meet" tee hee. fixed. Maybe I shoulda just left it that way.)

Just now, as I was washing dishes, I had this thought about how kabbalistic the ending of BSG turned out to be. Beware, utter geekiness ensues in which sci-fi fandom meets a love of religious philosophy for its own sake.
( Spoilers about the series finale follow )

OK, yes, I realize that this is way too much heavy philosophical thinking about a fictional world, but its interesting to contemplate.

 

Welcome to the the "why I love homeschooling" issue of "An Open Source". Part 2 of my Homeschooling Thoughts is open to the public because this is the stuff that is less about just my family and more about what I think about Homeschooling in general.

I don't have an ax to grind against the concept of school in general. There are good ones and there are bad ones. There are good teachers and there are bad teachers. There are also schools and teachers that are good for some kids and not good for other kids. Education is not a one size fits all sort of thing. The thing that I do have an ax to grind against is the idea that all children need to be educated in one specific way. That idea is patently ludicrous and isn't even borne out in the world of public education within one given system, much less across the many different systems that exist on our planet today.

Some people think that you can't give your child as many opportunities to learn at home as you can in a school environment, and for some schools that may, in fact, be true. The vast majority of schools, however, suffer from the opposite problem. Each class has to teach to a specific level, not getting ahead of itself for the quick nor slowing down for the laggers. Most schools suffer from a lack of funds and resources, and so they have to do with whatever they have. In general, schools also suffer from time constraints that require subjects to be carved into specific time slots and attention blocks.

At home you are not constrained by the four walls of an institution nor by the scheduling issues of a corporate body. If you would like to study French by visiting a French speaking place on the off season, you can go right ahead and do that. If you would like to keep reading your book about Greek history past 10 o'clock at night, that's fine, too, as long as your own priorities for the next morning allow for a late wake up.

As a homeschooler, for each topic you study you can be an autodidact or you can seek out tutors from a wide variety of sources. Sometimes you will choose to take an organized class on a specific subject. Sometimes you will find an inspiring mentor to help guide you in a particular learning endeavor. Many times you will learn a single subject from a number of different people that you communicate with in different places and different contexts -- the librarian, a professional in the field, hobbyists on the 'Net, friends you meet at a supply store or event. Some of your teachers will be peers of your own age. Some of your peers in a topic you explore will be much older than you are, and will be learning as much from you as you do from them.

As a homeschooling parent I don't have to know everything that my children want to or need to learn. I never even took calculus, so how could I ever teach it? I can't. Instead, my kids can teach me, or we can learn together. I take immense pride in the fact that my eldest son taught me almost everything I know about marine biology and absolutely everything I know about cephalopods in particular.

Homeschooling builds a sort of tightly bonded family that is extremely rare today in the Western world. People notice the relationship that I have with my kids, and fellow homeschooling families say that they experience the same thing. One of the reasons that we are so close is that we talk to each other. A lot. About lots of different subjects. That builds familiarity, sure, but it also builds trust. How many teenage kids actually enjoy sitting and talking with their parents? For me, the teen years have proven to be the best so far precisely because of the great conversations, movies, books, and activities that we've been able to share.

Homeschooling also builds a kind of independence that is uncommon amongst regular-schooled kids. The homeschooled youth knows that he or she has power over their day, their life, and the things that they learn and do. They may be guided by adults, but they have a much stronger sense than most about the fact that they are ultimately in control. Whereas school children who study topics outside of the school curriculum or skip ahead in their textbooks are considered nerds and geeks, homschooled children who do the same are the norm. Whereas school children who decide to start their own business, write a novel, arrange an apprenticeship for themselves or volunteer independently at an organization they care about are considered remarkable, amongst homeschoolers any of those endeavors are just part of the package.

I love homeschooling because it is limitless, borderless, boundaryless, and immensely fulfilling.

When I was very young and impressionable, somewhere around the age of 6 or 7, my dad told me that school wasn't there to teach me all the subjects that I was supposedly learning. What it was really doing was teaching me how to learn. Learning, he said, is one of the most important things in life. You will need to do it all the time if you want to be able to compete in the job market, if you want to be able to keep up with changes in technology and science, and if you just want to be a better person. Reading and math are tools for learning. The scientific method is a tool for learning. The things you learn about social studies and literature are building blocks on which to build more learning.

The thing is, if that's true, then school may be the wrong tool for teaching what we most need. What percentage of 5 and 6 year olds start their school careers as curious and inquisitive little beings excited about the prospects of learning more, more, more? What percentage of people come out of school full of wonder and a desire to keep learning? I don't have exact numbers, but I'm sure that you know as well as I do that the majority of people finish up school feeling burnt out and not wanting to go back to that experience ever again. For many people, the idea of learning a brand new skill 5 or 10 years after they have gotten out of school is terrifying. This does not bode well.

There are a few things that I think that my parents did extremely well in my early life. One of them is that they helped me to separate between the concept of "school" and the concept of "education". When I was a kid the first was presented to me as a legal requirement, the second as a thing of great joy which, when you are lucky, you can glean from the first. Why hope for luck when you can squeeze education out of every moment in your day without school?

OK, I have a weird question for all of you.

Let's say you are working on a computer, and there is a window on the screen that somehow locks your pointer inside it. When you move your mouse, the pointer hits the edge of the window and doesn't move on beyond that window, as if it's hit a wall. You with me so far? OK, so here's the question:

When you see the pointer hit the window's "wall" do you feel it, too? Do you sense a subtle, imaginary feedback when you see that? Or is it purely visual and nothing else?

It wasn't though. I didn't have any strong feelings. There was nothing I really wanted. In fact, I had to be prodded into doing it at all.

Local elections here remind me of high school class president elections. Basically, it's like a big popularity contest, as if nothing really important is riding on this. Sure, we all want a nice prom and good cafeteria food, but we don't actually know anything about the people who stand there and say that they want us to vote for them, except for their faces and their tag lines.

The most obnoxious tag line I saw this election season was something like "vote gimmel and get". Get what, you ask. Well, the poster had all these hands in the air reaching for something. Handouts? Whatever. It was tasteless.

( More about my first time )

Anyway, I don't really care how it turns out. It's mildly interesting, but I don't feel like I have much stake in it. I don't have any sense that anything will actually be any different due to my vote.

Petach Tikvah is a nice city, actually, despite the bad rap it gets. We have nice parks. Some nice little museums and galleries that almost no one knows about. We have some rather decent schools. In fact, I'm rather fond of D's school. We have nice community centers. We have lots of public art -- and yes, a lot of that has gone up during the campaign period, but they'd been putting new things in place for at least the last year and a half. They are building a light rail system that looks nice in the posters by the construction zones. We have excellent medical facilities, cute main street shopping areas, a large mall and some big box type shopping in another area. People who make fun of Petach Tikvah clearly haven't actually been here any time recently, or else they are too stupid to realize that Tel Aviv might be a nice place to hang out on Thursday night, but it's not as great a place to raise a family.

I don't know who's most responsible for all the good stuff here, and certainly no one campaigning made any attempt to inform me (or any other voters as far as I could tell) of the real work they were doing. It was all "blah, blah, blah! I'll make it better!" with no description whatsoever of what "better" meant or how they were going to go about that.

I take that back. There was one bit of campaign material that I saw that seemed comprehensive at all was in Russian. So, maybe I should have voted for "Petach Tikvah Beiteinu" (Petach Tikvah is Our Home) and hoped that what is good for the Russian speaking population of Petach Tikvah is good for me, too. (Eh, no. If they'd had the same pamphlet available in Hebrew, I would have struggled read through and considered it, though.)

So, here's a little message to all you future Israeli candidates for whatever, and political parties of all stripes. Israel is one of the most Internet connected countries on the planet. We have lots of language groups represented amongst our citizenry. Next election, don't just tell us to "vote and get". That's BS. Use Social Media. Use the Net. Use volunteer translators. Reach out and tell us what you are REALLY going to do. And make it a two way conversation. Use that same technology to listen to us.

Cuz you know what? If you don't, you are going to continue to frustrate the best of us, and the brightest and most marketable are going to continue to flee to "more civilized" countries where even if they can't vote they can still talk to actual representatives and have a say in the little things about their real lives. And all the work put into bringing in North American and European born Olim will be for naught, too, because we do have a choice of where to live, and a lot of us really do prefer a real democracy over a place we can call "ancestral home".

And if you want partners to make Israel better and stronger, well you just can't get that by playing the popularity card. You have to do that by engaging the people.

Ganked from @gaal, this video shows what it's like to try to ride on Tel Aviv's new "bike paths". For those of you not from around here, that darker gray lane at the edge of the sidewalk is supposed to be a bike path. Yup. Mmmhmmm...


Bike Road Challenge from Gig op on Vimeo.

Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to You! Happy Biiiiiiirthday to YoooooooouuuuuuuuU!

Love and lots of hugs to my little, bitty boy whose gone off and turned 19 today. OMGs!!!

Happy Birthday, byrophyta!

This morning I woke up at 6 in the morning to go out to the Port of Tel Aviv, have coffee and a croissant with friends and get a quick interview with Jeff Pulver for Crictor.co.il before his Tel Aviv Social Breakfast. I don't do mornings. Even with the coffee and the sugar, I still don't do mornings. Even with the sea right there, which certainly helped make up for it a little, I really, really don't do mornings.

Maybe that's why this interview sucked so badly. It wasn't the language, because this interview was in English. Remarkably, I'd say that nearly all of my interviews in Hebrew have gone better than this one went. Why, oh why?

I went into this interview knowing that we were crunched for time, but wanting to hit three different points. I wanted to get a quick intro to who Jeff Pulver is, since he's not that well known in Israel. A lot of people know his name without actually knowing anything about him. Secondly, I wanted to know what it is that he looks for in investments today. Somewhere in there I'd planned to ask how Israel fits into that, but I didn't have to ask, since he volunteered it just fine. Finally, I wanted to know about what he sees in the future of IP Video, since a) I'm working on a series about that right now and b) I know that he's also interested/invested in that area.

We spent WAY too much time on the VOIP stuff and the past, without really getting a feel for what his influence in that area has been. I managed to get him onto the legal stuff and what his role in defining VOIP for the US congress was, but it wasn't easy to get there.

I know that what he had to say about companies worth investing in will be very encouraging to a lot of techies who want to launch a startup. His focus was on passion and personality. He didn't say anything at all about any specific technology. Quite the opposite actually.

At last, I got us onto the question of IP Video, and this is where I think I really fell down. No, actually, I fell down at the segue into IP Video. I had no idea what to say at the end of his answer to the "What excites you in technology today and what do you choose to invest in?" question, and I completely fell on my face there. My seque was something along the lines of, "Uhhhh... cool. That's really great..."

DOH! Someone smack me upside the head, puleez!

So, I did manage to get him to talk about video a bit, and then I closed the interview because I was painfully aware of the fact that there were tons of people milling around, wanting to see Jeff Pulver, and I was hogging him in front of the camera. But, before he got up, the producer, Yael, said from next to the cameraman, "Can I ask you just one more question?" and that one question turned into several questions, but she got WAY more interviewy goodness out of him than I had. Blah! Well, I'm glad she did ask the questions, because his answers were great.

On the plus side, I came away from the interview with a very different view of this guy than I'd had before. I was expecting him to be kind of full of himself, as a lot of people with his kind of "net fame" are. He was quite down to earth, and not in the least bragadocious. He seemed pleased that he'd been able to have influence on VOIP in a positive, disruptive way, but he also felt that his work had been rolled back in the last couple of years and that it needed to be pushed forward again. He also touched on the role of voice and video as a spectrum in the services available through the 'Net and how those should be more disruptive than they are now, but that the incumbent powers (telecoms and tv networks) have a stake in keeping the status quo as much as possible.

I really, really hate watching these videos. It's very uncomfortable to see myself on camera like that, but in this case I think it's especially important that I grit my teeth and watch it so that I can learn from my mistakes. I'm just a baby broadcaster, but I'm only going to get better at these skills if I get over my ego so that I can learn.

There is something very compelling to me about faith-based activism. It is the polar opposite of dead, purposeless religion. It takes philosophy and theology and puts it to work. Faith-based activism, in its best form, says that there is hope for this world when we as individuals and as communities make a commitment to improve things.

The problem with faith-based activism is that there is a very thin line between working to improve the world and imposing your faith and world-view on others. Some would argue that any faith-based activism is, by definition, imposing your world-view on others, but this is not the case. Take for example organizations which feed the poor with no strings attached, like Mazon or like church-based food banks. More controversially, an anti-abortion organization can provide support and options for women with unplanned pregnancies without actually getting in the way of her making the ultimate choice regarding her pregnancy.

The fact that faith-based activists can cross the line into inappropriate behavior, coercion or worse is truly unfortunate because it means that people who do not understand the concept of faith, much less faith-based action, end up painting all such action and even faith itself with the same ugly brush.

There are millions of people in the world -- billions, perhaps -- who don't understand faith because they have never experienced it. They have never had a spiritual epiphany, have never felt that indescribable connection to somethingwhen they pray. The have never glimpsed the Universe while meditating. They have never seen their prayers answered miraculously, or discovered divine love even in the midst of tragedy. These people often imagine that all the noise about religion and faith is nothing more than weakness, psychological games, and population control.

When someone says that nothing good has ever come from religion or God, they are closing their eyes and their mind to the many obvious ways in which religion has played a part in pushing society towards better things. It is often pointed out that the Bible was used to justify slavery, but the fact that the abolitionists were a faith-based movement is nearly always ignored. Talking about how religion is used to keep women marginalized is easy, but it is harder to remember that some of the same religions which, in some streams, marginalize women today were the same religions that created more justice and opportunity for women in times past. The Jewish marriage contract of today is hopelessly outdated, but at one time it was groundbreaking in the fact that it goes so far to make sure that a woman is cared for when things went badly. The fact that some rabbis have twisted even the good parts of that contract to harm women even more today is a shame, but it doesn't mean that religion is bad. It means that those rabbis are wrong. The way to improve this situation isn't to reject religion outright, but rather to push harder for justice both in and outside of religious institutions.

In the end, that's what faith-based activism represents to me. It's action towards justice, as understood based on the framework provided by faith. That faith comes not from some blind leap, but from personal experiential evidence.

I haven't seen anything in the news about the continuing earthquakes in China, but I hear about them through Twitter. A 6.0 is not a huge quake, but neither is it a small tremor. It's big enough that you can feel it, generally, and you'll see lights swaying and maybe a picture frame will fall over. They're still having lots of those. Take a look at this map.

I had been trying very hard to avoid having to do a nested query, but in the end, I really couldn't figure out a way around it. This is the query that gets the job done:


mysql> select tnid from fr_strings where sid NOT IN (SELECT sid from fr_tr_by_uid where uid = 1 and language = 'es');


If you have a non-nested solution for this problem, I'd still love to see it!

I'm having a hellish time with a sql statement. I need to get nodes ("tnid" here) where a given user (uid = 1) has not translated a given language (language = "he", or rather, != as you'll see)

fr_strings has sid and tnid (those are the only ones important to us now, anyway)
fr_tr_by_uid has sid, uid and language

When someone translates a string, it pops in their user id, the string id and the language that they translated the string to. So, say, if I am translating into es or he (spanish or hebrew) I should no longer see the string pop up for translation in es if I've already done that translation, but the request for the string translation would still pop up when I'm working on the he translation. Get it? OK.

So, I want to select the tnid's where uid != 1 and language != 'he'. Something like that. Let's look at some queries and responses:


mysql> select distinct * from fr_strings as st natural left join fr_tr_by_uid as ui where sid > 279;
+-----+------+------+----------+
| sid | tnid | uid | language |
+-----+------+------+----------+
| 280 | 870 | 2 | es |
| 280 | 870 | 1 | es |
| 281 | 871 | 1 | es |
| 283 | 873 | NULL | NULL |
+-----+------+------+----------+


What I want out of this bunch here is tnid 283. That's all. That's the ONLY one I want. But if I try this:


mysql> select distinct tnid from fr_strings as st natural left join fr_tr_by_uid as ui where sid > 279 AND uid != 1;
+------+
| tnid |
+------+
| 870 |
+------+

That's clearly not what I wanted.

How about This:

mysql> select distinct tnid from fr_strings as st natural left join fr_tr_by_uid as ui where sid > 279 AND uid != 1 OR uid is null;
+------+
| tnid |
+------+
| 870 |
| 873 |
+------+


Still not there. As you can see, since the tnid shows up once in the table under a different uid, I still get that tnid back, even though one record with that tnid does have the uid=1.

I'm sure that this is something really stupid. (I'm always sure when I can't figure something out that the solution is something really stupid.) But, I can't shake the answer out of my head. Any of you know what I'm doing wrong?

On one of the local bus company websites, there are some kind of funny translations in the English version. (http://dan.co.il/english)

The term "לא משנה" which could be translated "not applicable" in this context was translated as "never mind".

The term "ישוב" which should be translated as "settlement" or "village" in this case was translated as "sitting". (The word "yishuv" comes from the root to sit. You can imagine how they got there, but WOW you'd have to not speak English at all to think that was the correct translation!)

Oh, and for those of you on Firefox, don't bother with that website. This is Israel. Companies don't believe in customer service, and they don't believe that anyone uses anything other than Microsoft Internet Explorer, either.

(ǝsn ɟo ǝsɐǝ ɹoɟ ʇɥƃıɹdn ʇɟǝl s,lɹn)

¡¡ǝʌɐǝʍ ǝʍ qǝʍ pǝlƃuɐʇ ɐ ʇɐɥʍ 'ɥo

http://pne.livejournal.com/398399.html
:ǝɹǝɥ 'ɾl oʇ ʞɔɐq ǝɯ pǝl 'uɹnʇ uı 'ɥɔıɥʍ

http://www.revfad.com/flip.html
:ǝɹǝɥ oʇ noʎ spɐǝl ɥɔıɥʍ


http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/statuses/857929353
ɯoɹɟ sıɥʇ ɟo pǝuɹɐǝl ı

I've heard really great things about the current production of Fiddler on the Roof at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv, and today eumelia posted this YouTube video from the June 8, 2008 performance. I thought that many of you would enjoy this as well.

Guitar Hero pedal controllers

Amen.