One Trick Pony

Alex had his friend Sam over for the day. They’ve known each other since they were a year and a half old and four moms got together to form the Friday group. Once a week the kids played together, with the moms taking turns setting up food, crafts and activities. All four kids went off to different schools but we’ve kept the relationship going on the holidays and other events. All four kids have turned out beautifully.

It was fun listening to Alex and Sam in the next room as they alternated between playing Magic, WarCraft, and a game they made up that takes no hardware, just imagination.

Alex: “OK, you’re a Rigelian spy and you need to get off the planet to report on what you’ve learned.”

Sam: “I go to the spaceport and book a flight.”

Alex: “Not so fast. You’ve got an implant in your brain that they’ll detect if you try to leave.”

Sam: “Wait! You never told me about that before.”

Alex: “So there it is. What are you going to do?”

And so on. Smart, nice kids. And since they both start high school on Tuesday, I was thinking of this as the end of a phase for them. Soon they’ll have less time to dream up Rigelian spy stories because homework will hang over their heads. A bittersweet day.

In spite of budget limitations, the U. S. Department of Education earlier this month awarded a contract for a What Works Clearinghouse. This could be very useful as long as it’s based on research and not overly biased by the present regime’s love of easily-measured factual recall.

A Guardian article War of the Worlds, makes the case that Osama bin Laden was inspired by Asimov’s Foundation series. How? There are lots of parallels, starting with the fact that “al-Qaida” is the word used in the title when Foundation was translated into Arabic. Apparently the Japanese nutgroup Aum Shinrikyo was also influenced by the book. Ironically, Asimov was a pacifist. Talk about unintended consequences. UPDATE: According to this link via GeekPress, this story doesn’t hold up. As Roseanne Rosannadanna would say, “Nevermind”.

How many numbers have to be called out before someone yells “Bingo!”? It depends. Since I’m gearing up to teach the game design course again, this article about Probabilities in Bingo caught my eye. One of the new assignments or exercises I’m thinking about adding to the course involves figuring out what makes things fun. That will take a combination of motivation theory and math to figure out. [from Science News via Geek Press]

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here this long. Today my 22nd summer in San Diego officially came to a close with the Fall College of Education Assembly. Lots of new faces in other departments. Grim news ahead as another budget cut is likely after the elections.

Not to worry. We’ve got enough equipment and faculty to stick it out for a lean year or two. I’m looking forward to getting started again.

Spent my waking hours this weekend playing with PHP and SQL. Not playing, actually. It’s more intense and brow-furrowing than that. Fortunately I’ve got a pile of books to learn from, and today Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL was at the top of the heap. It helped a lot.

I’ve got a long list of projects based on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and it’s been hard figuring out how to get them started. There’s such a huge list of things to learn and I’m too impatient to go through the usual toy exercises to learn each bit. I wanted to learn as I build so I decided to start with user authentication: figuring out how to control access to different pages based on a database of usernames and passwords.

Today I got that part done, and it will be the foundation for June’s Julian Charter School projects, new improvements to the WebQuest page, and new web-based versions of my lesson planning and adventure-game authoring tools. The sky’s the limit and I finally feel as though I’m one rung up the ladder.

Wow. There’s a list of what various entertainers get on the college circuit. Here’s a sampling, sorted from pricy to bargain basement:

Adam Sandler - $100K + !!!!

Sting - $100K +

Jay Leno - $75K

Jon Stewart - $65K

Dennis Miller - $50K

Kids in the Hall - $40K

Wayne Brady - $40K

Weird Al Yankovic - $20K

Ellen Degeneres - $35K

Art Garfunkel - $25K

Joan Rivers - $20K

Rockapella - $10K

Laurie Anderson - $10K

Arlo Guthrie - $7.5K

Rich Hall - $2.5K

I’d enjoy seeing any of these except for Adam Sandler and Joan Rivers. I wish there were a similar list of public speakers on the education circuit. I’m never sure how to price myself. Higher than Rich Hall, anyway. [from Boing Boing]

Thanks to Tivo, we watched Invasion of the Saucer-Men tonight. It’s one of the movies of my yoot, and it had all the standard ingredients of a late 50s teen movie: befuddled adults who refuse to believe the kids; secretive military guys; skeptical cops; and drunken cows. The technology of Tivo is certainly broadening our cultural horizons.

It wasn’t totally wasted time, though. With our laptops before us, we multitasked. June whipped up web pages for Julian Charter School. Alex rewrote his blog software in PHP from scratch. I watched the movie.

The Airborne Express truck just brought me the goofy box with Jaguar spots that I’ve been waiting for. Soon I’ll be able to jump higher, run faster, play concert piano, bowl a perfect 300, catch flies with my bare hands, and solve non-linear equations in my head. Just you wait and see.

Arianna Huffington, who I like more and more as time goes on, got it right in last week’s column: Wacko In Waco: The Brunch Bushians Drink The Kool-Aid

“But while the Burning Bush preached to the choir at Baylor, an ominous rumbling was coming from outside. This time, it was not ATF sharpshooters and tanks, it those ordinary citizens the Brunch Bushians pretended to include in Waco. They keep losing jobs and losing their savings while their president keeps telling them that, despite the increasingly grim realities of their daily lives, they still gotta believe in the Bushians’ Holy Trinity: more tax cuts, less regulation, and more domestic energy exploration.”