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My good friend TJIC has recently started a business in mail-order technical video rentals.

From his page:

Technical Video Rental is a service that rents video tapes – just like your corner video store…but we rent the kind of tapes that you can’t find on every street corner. Videos on running lathes, casting aluminum, and bending sheet metal… cool videos!

TVR carries titles like “Basic Milling Machine Operation” and “Greensand Casting Techniques (Volume II)”. I think this is an excellent idea. You can watch the video, learn how to use your shop tools more effectively and safely without busting your bank on expensive videos that you probably don’t really need to keep in your library.

I don’t have a shop but, heck I might rent a few videos just because the titles sound so cool. What red-blooded American tool fanatic doesn’t want to get the guys together to watch “Advanced Aspects of Milling Machine Operation”?! It’s the epitome of guy-ness.

TVR has just started out, go easy if the interface is still a little rough around the edges.

I went to Kenvil Hobbies the other day. I ended up hanging out there for an hour or so, talking about electric planes to the proprietor and a couple customers. It was nice. I ended up buying an 1100 mah Ni-MH 9.6v battery. I initially thought that I had bought it out of a need to buy “something, anything” from the nice guy at the shop (we spoke for a good long while about the potential badness of not having a local hobby dealer), but after I flew with it once, I was very pleasantly surprised at the zippy, light-on-it’s wings performance I got when I flew with this very light battery. I know that I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise… I probably would have bought another (heavy) Zagi 1700mah battery.

I found a great new flying field, the front yard of my community college, WCCC. So now I can fly before and after class. :-)

In that photo to the right, the school is in the lower right portion and the field is centered. It’s like 220 yards by 100 yards, plenty big enough for my “fast park flyer”. Just across the way in the lower left corner of the map is the Warren County Technical school. They’ve got a couple signs that say, “No ball playing, no running,… blah blah, no R/C vehicles…” And just to the south of the map is the Warren County Communications center, complete with big multi-frequency radio antenna. I hope none of these folks get mad at me for flying… But then I don’t dare ask, because they’ll of course say, “No, and we’re going to keep an eye on you now, you suspicious terrorist-type.”

My favorite is that with the 1100 mah battery, I can fly along, pull back on the stick and the plane lifts it’s nose like it’s been startled awake from a daze. And up she goes!

Skywalker: “What a piece of junk!”
Solo: “She’ll make point five past lightspeed. She may not look like much but she’s got it where it counts, kid. I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself.”

I’ve discovered the joys of Cascading Style Sheets.

I’ve been looking into snazzing up my journal and letting it graduate into a full fledged blog but I can’t find a solution I like! I might just stick with my home-grown FrontPage-flatfile-FTP system for a while. MovableType looks real nice but stupid Earthlink won’t let me run MySQL in my account! Just as well. I’m a tiny little skiddish about putting my journal in a database just yet. Flat files work darn good at keeping things simple.

This search was predicated by my cousin John, who asked me how he could make a journal like mine. His primary wish is to have a journal that his kids can view in years to come. So my wishlist started with:

• Easy to maintain – Flatfiles are good for this. Nobody wants to spend hours converting their old diaries to the latest and greatest format.
• Easy to backup – many online providers don’t do this well…. So if some dopey dot-com goes belly-up, my diary gets burned in the process?!
• Easy photo storing – Photos are an essential part of a journal! Most blog providers don’t do photo hosting.. they just leave that “as an exercise for the reader”. But keeping the right photos with the right journal entries is a chore that the computer should just take care of!
• Easy updates, including links and revising previous entries – A couple blog providers have blog clients that make editing go smoothly. They’re nice.

Someone HELP ME! I’ve found lots of resources but none that work for me. Grrr, I think I’m going to have to put on my DIY hard-hat, switch ISPs so I can run MySQL, install MoveableType, configure it, and then scream (because I will have then put in some 20 hours of work into essentially doing nothing).

I am now officially tired of winter.

Due to the bad weather, I was late to my job application test. MAYBE I’ll be able to get another retest date. Then again, maybe not. I gave myself 1 1/2 hours to get to my destination, even though it’s only a 45 minute trip. But of course, it took me 2 hours to get there.

I get home at 11:30… more than 4 hours after I left in the morning, with nothing to show except a nervous stomach from being late and 4 hours of dangerous driving. Actually, before I got home, I almost got in an accident. I had stopped at a gas station near my home and filled up. Then I pulled up this 200 yard uphill road to get back on the main road. My car (for the first time in my experience) couldn’t make it up the hill! I slipped and slid. I tried going at 5 MPH and that worked for about 100 feet. But then there I sat, another 100 feet to the main road. Rather than try to make 1 MPH on this slushpile, I decided to back down the hill with my blinkers on. Everything was going fine. A Fedex van passed by me going down the hill. Then some cars came up behind me trying to make it up the hill. First in line was a big SUV. He slowed down and then stopped for me, seeing that I was pointing the tail of my car toward the gas station’s entrance. Another car pulled around the SUV into the oncoming lane. Upon seeing me, he stopped as well. “Thanks!”, I thought. Now that both lanes were safely blocked, I I started making my cut toward the gas station in earnest. Just then, a tiny sedan zipped past both the SUV and the other car in the oncoming lane’s shoulder! He was doing about 35, apparently intent on using his momentum to go through me and up the hill. He very nearly rammed my backside! As he sped by me, I noticed a flash of red, white and blue on his license plate; I’m pretty sure it was a Washington DC plate. This being further evidence that people from non-snowy places have no concept as how to drive safely in snowy conditions.

Remember I told you that I had two -other- tests today? Well school was cancelled as well. GRRRHHEHRFFRIGGINGRIG!

Just for the record, I hate math. I hate psychology and I hate job applications where you’ve got to be tested for 4 hours in math and psychology

All my hates are coming together tomorrow! 3 tests in 1 day. Well, at least there’s this (weirdly synchronistic!) overlap between the job app. and the other two.

Today’s reality check:

(click to enlarge) Yes, these are real resin models for sale at The Catholic Shopper. Thanks to Jay for the reference.

Yes, I’m aware that these are supposed to just be allegorical, and some folks might “get it”, but…. Check please!

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More (completely unrelated!) reality check:

Megan’s Law would not have saved Megan. Megan’s murderer, Jesse Timmandequas’ prior criminal history would not have put him on any public sexual predator lists.

Lee Quote of the Day: “The manner in which something fails is often far more instructive than how it succeeds.”

Jen pointed out a good site to me: BookCrossing.com. It’s a free book reviewing, book exchange environment. Neat. If you read and want to let your books roam free while keeping an eye on them, this is nifty.

[excerpted and edited from a letter from me to TJIC]

Hey Trav, didn’t you say that a friend of yours was a part of a TV show called Myth Busters?

I stuck it into Tivo and the first episodes will be airing this week. 3 episodes of “Myth Busters” on the Discover Channel on 3/7/03 at 8, 9 and 10 pm.

This’ll be one of the last new things going on my Tivo for a while. I recently put my Tivo account on hold.

My folks got me Netflix for Christmas. I’m very happy with it… $20 a month gets me about 12 DVD rentals per month, delivered via US Postal Service to my door. And, I have a suped-up Tivo, it’s got an extra 60 gig drive in it, for a total of 80 Gig or so. That gives me about 85 hours of recording capacity. Actually, it’s between 55 and 200 hours depending on the picture quality you choose to record at … I usually opt for “High Quality” mode, which gets me 85 hrs. The snazziest factory built Tivos get about 35 hrs of record time on High Quality mode. But recently I’ve been selecting the lowest quality mode… I’m hoarding TV programs for that vast upcoming time without a Tivo programming guide. I still don’t understand why Tivo doesn’t have a dual 100 gig drive option for TV nuts… I’m sure that lots of folks would go for it and love it. The hardware isn’t that expensive and it’s completely worth it.

So I’ve got like 100 hours of all my favorite television programs + 3 new DVDs per week + I’m taking 2 classes + I’m teaching 2 days per week. I won’t be reinstating my Tivo service for a while…

That isn’t to say that I’m not a huge fan of Tivo. It’s only because of all the reasons above that I can put the service on hold for a while.

[Begin Tivo gush]

If you watch television and don’t have one, you need one. You don’t even realize it, but you do, really. I’m not just saying that. Your television watching will become smarter and more productive with less effort than your current channel surfing habit affords you. You’ll watch more of the type of programs you want to watch, when you want to watch them. You’ll find lots of great shows that you didn’t know existed, and you won’t ever be tied to network program guides as when to watch them.

If you’re thinking of paying extra to get more cable TV channels, don’t. Get a Tivo instead and the amount of stuff that you want to to watch on your existing channels will instantly quadruple. I can give you a hundred examples but here’s a start: My dad likes programs about WWII. So I put in a Tivo Wishlist item looking for the keyword “WWII”. In 5 minutes, I found many programs that he would NEVER have found on his own. Like “The Veteran’s Project”. It airs bi-weekly, Sunday mornings at 8am on the History Channel. It’s a fantastic program but we would NEVER have come across this without Tivo.

So, a month before his visit, I pack Tivo full of WWII programs for him. Of course he watches TV most nights when he’s in Florida. Nevertheless, fully 3/4 of the programs that I record for him are shows that he hasn’t seen! Quadruple!

[End Tivo gush]

I could gush about Tivo for a long while; it’s pros and even it’s few cons. I’ll leave the rest of my gush for another time.

I subbed my second day on Friday. I helped another teacher in the Alternative Learning group in the Hackettstown middle school. It’s a small class where some kids that do well getting a little more attention are. The class completely rocked. The kids were great… and way smart. The format happily made me think about the Sudbury Valley School, a “Free School” where students are strongly encouraged to do their own thing. Check out their web page to find out more about it.

Our class wasn’t nearly as free as SVS, but the feel was there. 1/2 the class time was reading Willa Cather’s My Antonia out loud. After each paragraph, and sometimes each sentence, we’d pause and ask what a word means, or what is going on with the characters. While staying focused on the subject material, our discussion touched on an extremely wide variety of subjects.

I believe that the idea of a “free school” is wonderful. I’m not convinced that it’s the best way to go about a teaching program, but it’s important to see a free school as one end (though not the extreme end) of a continuum of teaching styles. Actually, I haven’t ever seen a free school environment first-hand so I can’t make a judgment on whether it’s not a good style.

I have had the good fortune to become friends with several graduates of The Sudbury Valley School. They introduced me to these ideas but certainly didn’t push them on me, in the same way that you might relate your own high school experience to another person. I’ve found that these free-schoolers come out of this non-standard environment just fine! The SVSers that I know the best moved seamlessly out of SVS and into college, showing that their academic skill-set was fine. All the SVSers I know are creative, intelligent people. I have many good things to say about “organic learning”, the concept of the free school, and the place of this type of learning in the world.

Hmm…. You know, I’m looking around on the internet now and… I didn’t quite realize this but it seems that SVS isn’t the product of an educational movement… it started the movement. Cool.