Asymptomatic

I saw this posted in a couple of places, and thought it would be fun to give my own responses.

How old were you when you first started programming?

I was 8 in 4th grade....

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. ...

Every so often I get this urge to have things, things that I really shouldn't buy. I usually end up making a list of these things and throwing them away. This is probably a good thing. But occasionally, I list them here so you can all see how materialistic I am.

I've been pricing out new desktop PCs lately. I've been trying to stay minimal but get the most for the money, knowing very little about individual components. My interest in knowing the minutia of component performance has waned over the years. What I've been pricing is a Core 2 Duo 2.67mhz (it seems that when you go Core 2, you might as well get the fastest one you can find), 4GB of RAM (I have 3 now, so I can't do with less), a super-fast system drive and a giant secondary drive, the fastest pair of DL-DVD writers I can get, and a motherboard that supports dual 16x PCI Express slots to hold matching dual-head video cards. What are my needs here?

Well, the main problem with the current machine sounds kind of silly, but it's the sound. It wasn't really a problem when I was using the PC at home for a few hours a night. But now that I work on it for 10+ hours a day in a small room, I'm beginning to notice a bit of hearing loss. Seriously. That just can't be allowed to continue. So I get to the point where I don't know what parts I need to replace to make the current PC quieter without crippling it (do I need a new power supply? different case fans?), and then I look at the server PC I bought a couple of months ago and don't hear at all and think that maybe it's time to step up....

My subscription period for my Verizon phone has come to an end. I've had my Treo for 2 years and it has served me well, but I'm wondering what I'm going to do next.

I've been paying Verizon the extra money for unlimited broadband access. The sad part is that my Treo is only a 650, and can't take advantage of the high speed access that I'm paying way too much for. It's gotten me thinking about what I'm really getting out of my cell phone and phone service.

What do I really use my phone for besides making calls? Well, I do use it as a contact database. I have all of my phone numbers and addresses in the Palm's address book. (Actually, I use Agendus, but same difference.) I use it as a calculator. I play games on it when I've got time to kill and nothing else to do. I watch movies on it using TCPMP, since Treos can't do VCast or any of that fancy network-provided stuff. I use the phone to get movie times via the built-in web browser, and send SMS to Google to get local addresses....

Every year, Abby's school does a basket raffle to raise money for the school association every year. They mention that it's a popular event at the orientation meeting, but you don't really get a sense of why until you actually see the basket contents.

They sent home a green packet and an envelope with Abby one day. In the envelope were ten raffle tickets, which we had the option to buy at $1 per ticket. The greet packet of paper described the contents of the baskets. There are 21 baskets in all, and a ticket must be purchased for a specific basket (you write the number on the ticket when you return it with payment).

To give you a general idea of what's so amazing about this thing, I'll reproduce the list of contents for basket #21, "Ocean Getaway":...