Life on Mars?

My birthday is coming up, which gives me a good excuse to do things with my friends!

But I don’t know what to do with this excuse. Maybe a dinner sort of thing, watch a movie? Go to Kimo’s? Applebees might be fun. Hmmm… A combination perhaps!

Help me think of something Pat.

The most depressing story I’ve read in a while.

I played with legos a lot as a kid. Me and my friends would construct entire worlds with cities, barren wastelands, fortresses, allies and enemies. It was fun. It was a world we could live the adventures of our imaginations in, a place that we felt we had a hand in creating. We could write the stories there. Makeshift lego wargames even served as my first introduction to tabletop roleplaying.

These kids are having their imaginations neutered. You can tell straight off from their idea to create ‘Lego Town’. I have never met a kid who wanted to build a city with communally owned property when given a crate full of legos. They do look for the ‘cool pieces’, but those pieces weren’t doors or windows. They were plasma guns, swords, castle walls, ion shields, drawbridges. It’s unsaid, but the ‘teachers’ here obviously didn’t allow any pieces like that. How are children going to grow up to be model World Citizens if they play with guns and swords? Legos are about building, and how can you build a society on tools of death? The teachers are terrified of kids, they’re terrified of play.

My nephews, Hans and Jaeger learned very early how to turn their hands into guns and sticks into swords.  That’s just what boys do! But Matt and Mystie took a different approach than taking a hard look at the assumptions and associations of power that the use of force implies and its application in a corrupt, oppressive capitalistic meritocracy (I think I just got sick saying that). They’re teaching their sons about the just use of force, defense and protection. They’re teaching Hans and Jaeger how to recognize and protect the good guys, to not attack the unarmed and defenseless. Hans watches out for bad guys and slays dragons with his sword. That’s education!

Still, thats the implied, unsaid of the article. Any article about kids building things with legos that doesn’t have ANY reference to swords, guns, castles, pirates, police, kings, or ninja means something weird is going on. ; ) The point of the article is essentially about how once a small group of kids started playing with the legos, they didn’t want to share with anyone else who wanted to join in.

Instead of teaching the kids about how they bought the legos for everyone, and why sharing is important, the teachers believed something far more sinister was going on. No, the children were showing their “assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

Children don’t want to share! Such greed could only be from over exposure to capitalism!

To summarize the rest of that imagination-neutering, navel gazing, rubbish: The teachers ban the legos and hold meetings with the children about the nature of ownership, rights, and power. They bring the legos back after groundwork is layed about how all buildings in the new lego town will be equal, none will be “Over-Average” (What kind of kid uses the word over-average? That HAS to be made up.), all buildings will be public, and lego people can only be saved by groups, not individuals.

The kids never learned about how to share. They got a lesson about how everything, if not equal will be made equal.

Why isn’t there a rapper named M.C. Escher?

Today is Kirsten’s 10th birthday. She was so so so excited this morning, especially since mom will let her get pierced ears now.

Seeing excited little kids is one of the best things in life.

I finally got my blog working again. : ) Not out of any cleverness at all, I just installed Wordpress in another directory, linked it to the same database, and then renamed the directory. I’m a code slob. ;_;

When I woke up this morning the internet wasn’t working. It was really weird too, because we could resolve all the IP and DNS info we needed from our ISP (Charter). Well, since our ISP at work is Pocket iNet so I thought I wouldn’t have any problems. Turns out I was wrong :P.

The fine people who host my work’s web service (Thankfully not the application itself), use Charter for their DNS resolver/whatever. Anyone trying to access our web page would not be able to resolve our IP from our domain name. Lovely! We have lots of files hosted there that we link from our app, the density calculator, most our reports and file processes depend on our web hosting as well. So the gears of our glorious machine didn’t grind to a halt, but they sure got gummed up.

Twenty-one and strong as I can be,
I know what freedom means to me.
And I can’t give the reason why,
I should ever want to die.

-The Eagles

A good white russian tastes just like chocolate milk. :]

So I watch my weight.

A LOT of people are surprised when they discover that. They think I shouldn’t because I’m really skinny. Super skinny. But that’s not going to last forever unless I keep it that way. :\

I don’t eat the healthiest food by any means, but I can pay attention to what I do eat, and what my weight is, and play it by ear. I stopped eating at places like Wendy’s because when I was eating regularly there my weight quickly ballooned past 160 for the first time ever. Likewise, if I play a lot of DDR over the course of a few weeks, my weight plummets.

I’m back at 150 on the dot, so I’m happy. : )

If theres one thing that irks me at my job, it’s when the carriers change their pricing with little to no notice. We try to be prepared well in advace for carrier pricing changes. It’s nice to be able to let our customer’s know about upcoming changes, schedule the work load, etc… But in the past two weeks, two pricing changes have been dropped in our lap. One of them had been in effect since 1/1/2007, they changed their pricing and didn’t tell anyone. You can imagine how popular a carrier they must be if it took over a month for people to notice that they increased their rates. The other one was agreed upon in advance, but no one told us about it, and we were unable to get an extension on it. So we had to shove two system wide rating changes into our schedules, and we needed to get those changes pushed out practically simeltaniously. Well, we got it done at least. : )

If this website is true, I am in serious trouble. ;(

Let’s see what bands are there that I listen to..

Wilco, Interpol, Erasure, The Doors, Queen, The Strokes, Morrissey, David Bowie, Man or Astroman, Depeche Mode, Kansas, Velvet Underground, the Killers, Lisa Loeb… looks like I score a 14.

then again, this site HAS to be fake. Like Landover Baptist. Cyndi Lauper is a ’safe’ artist? Quotes from Oscar Wilde? What? I’m so confused ;_;