Friends, I stand before you unabashed and in contempt. I refuse to be an enabler for mindless tolerance any more.
You know it in your heart that this is true. If you have any competence at interface design, you cannot deny it. If you’ve used any of the other packages for design out there, you know that Photoshop has nothing essential or unique except a complete lack of intuitiveness.
We got Abby a new computer for her birthday last week, and she’s now starting to use it fairly regularly. She has a current school assignment to do a research project on an endangered species. She had to look up a list of species and choose three interesting ones, from which the teacher would determine on what topic her report would be written. We looked at a few sites and found the island fox, which has since been learning more about online.
Of course, one of the concerns you have when you let kids browse the internet is that they would encounter inappropriate content. I’ve installed Microsoft’s Live Family Safety on her computer, which does a handy job of blocking everything on the web until Beta or I approve it. It also manages her contact list, so I can add approved family members to her instant messenger (Live).
Yesterday, I finished the book Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind. I originally became interested in the book as a result of seeing the TV show Legend of the Seeker, which is loosely based on the book.
In the novel, Richard Cypher is an unassuming woodland guide in a region called Westland. His land is separated from the two other lands of the world, Midland and D’Hara, by the “boundary”, a magical wall where the separation between the living world and the underworld has been removed. The intention of the boundary is to protect Westland’s residents from the effects of magic, which is prevalent in the other regions.
On Tuesday it was pretty nice outside, although I hadn’t realized it until Abby came in my office to ask me to take the training wheels off of her bike.
The question was phrased something like, “We need the things to take the wheels off my bike.” “A wrench?” I asked. We went for the toolbox.
Someone on the PANMA list recently asked about running a web server on his FiOS line. I have some thoughts.
Verizon definitely blocks incoming port 80. The only way around that is to get a business account that allows servers (opens port 80) and provides a dedicated IP address.