Asymptomatic

Abby has been home with me for the past two days because the teachers a Downingtown Schools can't come to an agreement with their administration over how much money they should be making. We're lucky that Abby is very low-maintenence and that I'm able to be "at work" with her at home so that there's someone to keep an eye on her. Still, this teacher's strike is absolutely absurd, and I'll be happy to wait out the full state-allowed 23 days of strike to see a reasonable agreement reached - one that likely doesn't assent to the teachers' demands.

The teachers are asking for raises over 5 years totalling 23.75%. The board is offering them 18% over 4 years. It seems like a large gap, but think about this: It's an 18% raise in pay. That's higher than the average cost of living raises here. It's more raise than I've seen in 8 years. It's more than generous, but apparently it's not enough. An opinion article in the Daily Local News expresses my sentiments quite well.

The DASD board makes some great points about what is reasonable in terms of what the district can afford. Primarily, the surplus money that the teacher think they should have access to is a capital surplus. It's a fixed amount of money that won't renew after it's all spent, meaning that salaries would have to drop back when it's gone or people will be fired. ...

Berta and I went to IndyHall's movie night on Saturday to hang out in the city and to watch the first of the two films in the double-feature, "Office Space". We got to talk to a few of the folks down there, both some people we knew and some people we met for the first time.

The event was sponsored by Philly Car Share, which is an interesting organization that offers shared vehicles to city-dwellers. You basically make a reservation, and you get a car for a few hours. It's kind of like renting, I suppose, but it's a more comfortable plan. The cars are where you might need them to be, parked in nearby lots, rather than centrally at a rental place. And they have all different kinds of cars, so if you needed a trunk or a van, they've got that, or for a night out on the town, a convertible or BMW is obtainable. Neat idea for folks that live downtown, especially.

We don't have much use for the service, since we'd have to drive our own cars to anywhere where a carshare car would be waiting, and that doesn't make much sense. In talking to people who have more use for these services, I discovered an interesting distinction of what is "city" and "suburb", and it was amusing to me to see how the line moves depending on which side of it you primarily dwell....

Wow. The folks in this presentation are really naive in their perception of paid blogging. A major concern is that bloggers would take money to support a product that they might not otherwise say good things about. Or maybe they'd take money for advertising that would "junk up" their blogs. The weird thing is the double-standard they have about when you can take money.

If you're a small site with no traffic, whether it's because you haven't been discovered or haven't said anything that people want to read, it's apparently ok to advertise on your piece of crap blog. But as soon as you start getting noticed, you are supposed to have "integrity", and therefore you should be taking money for writing, not money for advertising.

Well, where the heck do they think the money comes from for those bigger sites? Sure, you can do sponsorship, but not everybody can, and aren't those bloggers beholden (in at least the same way the complainers would complain about) to their sponsors? Seems a bit hypocritical to me. But there's more to the seminar than this....

In the recent 941/942 double-issue of Entertainment Weekly, they've listed 32 things (page 110) that they hate about Entertainment these days. They've not gone far enough. I've revised their list to make more sense. Observe:

1. EW: "Paris Hilton on CNN"
Me: "Paris Hilton"

You may be able to tell how this is going to go...

2. EW: "The overuse of that damn KT Tunstall song 'Suddenly I see'"
Me: The overuse of any song that might otherwise be a catchy pop tune that one could easily put into their MP3 rotation. Additionally, the changing of words to "good" (read: recognizable) songs to be used as advertising jingles. Also, the word "damn" as an adjective. (Editor dude, it's a verb.)

3. EW: "TV shows that end at 10:02pm. Our DVRs don't know to wait up."
Me: TV networks that haven't figured out how to cater to DVR users. Tivo for patenting the process and TV Networks for scaring other DVR makers into not providing the handy time-shifting features that would record those extra two minutes. (Hey, mine does it. EW, does your equipment suck?)

Oh yes, there are 32 of these... more

We're going on a trip to Disney World this month where we're likely to be standing in a lot of lines waiting to get on rides. Because the kids have such great potential to be annoyed at this, and at the suggestion of a travel book, I have considered what it would take to keep them occupied while waiting. The book specifically suggests notepads and paper for particular kinds of lines, and I got to wondering what kinds of games we could play to stay occupied.

There are a few other games we could play that don't involve paper at all, and those are fine. I worry that Riley will be inconsolable standing in wait for everything, and that we'll constantly need to attend to him to keep him appeased. In that case, having some activities to keep Abby entertained would probably be a good idea. So what pen and paper games can we play? What sort of games can you play with just pen and paper?

The classic that Abby likes is Tic Tac Toe. She hasn't gotten so old that she's figured out how to tie every time, but she's getting pretty good at it. We have a long-running series of tied games. I seem to be the only one that doesn't let her win. But I'm sure that game will run out of steam quickly. So what else is there to do?...