Category Archives: reviews

10 Reasons Why We Home School

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Upon revealing that my wife and I home school our children, we find ourselves in heavy crossfire with an emphasis on us doing wrong by our kids. It’s interesting that the harshest attacks come from (1) single people, (2) childless people, (3) old people who grew up during an age where schools were still good, or (4) people who sent their kids to private school (be it Christian or a Yeshiva). I’ve also entertained some minor attacks from public school teachers, mostly in regard to my pride: how dare I think I can do their professionally trained job (that’s another topic though).

So I decided to do a list of ten reasons why we home school. You’ll notice certain things about this list compared to my other two lists. The five stupid reasons to opt out of home schooling dealt with the storm of stupid attacks I’ve had to weather; the five wrongheaded reasons to home school dealt with what I’ve heard some people say to justify their homeschooling: but these ten reasons are totally personal. They’re Our reasons for home schooling Our children in light of Our situation. Here’s the list:

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Apple WWDC 2009

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No, I’m not there but I’m following the live feed on The Apple Blog and Gizmodo:

  • 15″ Macbook Pro, 7 hour battery life with an SD card slot ($1699).
  • 13″ MacBook now MacBookPro, with unibody, SD Card, 8GB of memory, up to 500GB or 256GB SSD drive with backlet keyboard and FW800. $1199
  • Uber model 17″ with 500GB HD, at $2499. Yup, still can’t buy a Macbook Pro.
  • New Safari does purdee things that are meh. Plugin crash that stops the plugin, not the browser.
  • Quicktime X rebuilt from the ground up. Big woop.
  • Snow Leopard (Leopard users: $29 single/$49 Family) running all major OSX apps in 64 bit coming out December (Windows 7 should be out October, in case you’re wondering).
  • Ms Exchange Support built into Mail, iCal and Address book. This was a Duh, no brainer. Should’ve had that long ago.
  • iPhone OS 3.0: 100 new features. cut/copy/paste across aps. Shake phone for undo. Landscape keyboard. MMS available but AT&T MMS later this summer (HA!) HTTP Streaming AV. Javascript performance boost. HTML 5. Form auto-fill.
  • iTunes rentals available for iPhone.
  • iPhone Tethering now available over USB or Bluetooth. AT&T doesn’t support it at launch (HA!)
  • Find My iPhone (new feature): your iPhone floats from the ether, or at least tells MobileMe ($99 per year) where it is. Your family and friends can also track you down with it. (SkyNet coming soon)
  • A bunch of boring iPhone Ap stuff. Some random announcment of 16gb 3GS iPhone ($199) and 32GB iphone 3GS  ($299) and the base 3G model remaining at $99.
  • No Camera on the front of the iPhone. bah.

All in all, no big woop. Maybe some ups for OS3.0 but, with a jailbroken iTouch I’m not overly hyped.

Keepin’ It Real

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Reality Filming has a long, sordid history and in recent years it has both blessed and threatened the television and movie industry. Reality TV, for example—and with no judgment on my part—has given us American Idol, Survivor, Jerry Springer, Cops and PBS’s Manor House. Some of these shows have managed to dethrone traditional television dramas like Firefly (and possibly even the recent Dollhouse, or so the Rumors whisper). Film wise, reality has given us quite a number of stories but in recent years they have started following the fame of Reality Television with the likes of Borat which might be funny in the short term but there’s no real substance to them; they’re really just a recording of how people react in certain situations.

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Sail On, Battlestar

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Society has a different inner voice; one that sounds more like Nickelodean or Michael Bay and less like Heroditus or Adam Smith. That, in the end, is likely why Battlestar Galactica was canceled and aired its final episode this past Friday with such an ending that it would ensure—amidst the regret of seeing such a show go by those who got it—no DVD’s, no movies and no sequels. (Any subsequent stories should rightly occur before the events that transpired in this episode and not after.)

The reason is not that complex but it will take Battlestar Galactica spoilers which will occur after the jump.

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