February 8, 2006

I had to get up earlier than usual this morning because I had an early conference call. It didn’t go amazingly well but it didn’t really go badly either. Andy and I have to go down to Pittsburgh in early March as a result. That will be the real deciding meeting to see how this phone call actually went.

I did some Amazon shopping today. Dominica and I ordered some new television shows on DVD like Firefly, Gilmore Girls Season Two and Growing Pains Season One. I also ordered some books for the business. I just love getting new books.

CNN cover the news that an Eighth Grader Outspells Spelling Bee Judge and the school is unwilling to reverse the decision. The spokesperson for the school says that they hope that they can work something out with the parents (apparently short of treating the student fairly) because they feel that being defendants in a lawsuit is not a good use of school district funds. Well then, maybe they shouldn’t cheat eighth graders. How defending a lawsuit can be better than admitting that your teachers can’t spell as well as the students and moving on eludes me. Everyone makes mistakes. But in this case they have an opportunity to fix this one but instead of fixing it they are making it far more wrong. To make a mistake on the fly is a true mistake. But to refuse to fix a mistake when they have a chance is ridiculous. In fact, it is what we call cheating. What if someone at that school cheated on a test and a teacher didn’t find out until after the test was all ready graded? Would the school just say “Oh well, it all ready happened. That is just the way it works.” Of course not. They would be furious. But how can they expect any other behaviour from the students. This is the exact behavious that they are teaching them.

Today was a stay at home day. I really didn’t end up leaving the house all day. That is a nice change. Sometimes it is nice to be able to just stay home. Oreo always prefers it when I am home all day. It gives him so much more opportunity to make me take him for walk and to make my throw his binky for him.

I got a bit of work done today. I always feel better when I am productive and this week has been pretty good. Some really important things have been getting taken care of. The biggest thing this week has been making the new Niagara Technology Group web site. We have been running for the past six months by just pointing the domain name at the old Niagara Telecom web site. The old site needs to be revamped but we really need a new site dedicated to what we do as a business. So I took the time to actually work on that this week and am pretty happy with the first stage of development. When I really have a chance to do it right, I really enjoy doing web site design. It is a lot of fun.

I did a little cleaning around the house before Dominica got home. She came home and we watched one episode of The Next Generation and went to bed. We were both pretty tired. I am getting up in the morning and having breakfast with dad. I read for a while in bed. I am almost done reading “The Object Oriented Thought Process, 2nd Ed.” I have been reading more this week that usual. Earlier in the week I read Chris Pine’s “Learning to Program” which teaches the basics of Ruby programming. That was a really good book.

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