The first part of the recording of last night’s school board meeting is up on the podcast site. Part 2 will be up later this evening, although part 1 contains all the public comments and board discussion of the big issue. If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, just click on the Ypsi government podcasts link at the top of this page and then follow the link to get the podcast.
The big car-makers take a lot of grief from electric vehicle fans over why they seem to be so slow to use new battery technology. I wrote a fairly long article drawing on my two decades in the industry trying to explain why they seem to want to move so slowly, and you can find it over at Autobloggreen.
Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack has the dubious distinction of being the first candidate to drop out of the 2008 Democratic race. What? you didn’t know he was running? That’s all you need to know. Ten and a half months until opening night in Iowa and Hillary and Barack are already sucking all the air out the room. Let’s hope Edwards can hang in there, because the last thing this country needs is another conservative DLC democrat like Clinton.
I’ve heard about the reasons why some Democrats don’t want to pursue impeachment. Bush has less than two years left, they don’t want to pay a political price for showing backbone, etc. That’s not acceptable reasoning for backing down. If Bush and Cheney are allowed to walk away in January 2009 without paying a price, it will send a tragic message to all future potential leaders. It will say that they can essentially do whatever they want and as long as they play the “support your leaders in war-time” strategy and get away with it. It is imperitive more so now than ever in our history, that both Bush and Cheney pay the price for repeatedly lying to the people of the United States, going recklessly into an unnecessary war, handling it with criminal negligence, and now persisting in pushing forward against Iran.
Our legislators must set a high standard for the actions of whoever is in the White House, now and going into the future.  Our constitution must be restored to it’s preeminent place in our nation. They must move forward now and put an end to the madness that is our military misadventure in the middle East and hold those who are responsible accountable.
Listening to the Canadian Podcast Buffet, Bruce Murray finally revealed the truth:
Perfectionism is procrastination disguised as quality control
I’m on the Ypsilanti Public Schools technology committee, and right now we’re trying to figure out what the technology needs of the district are in preparation for the upcoming bond vote. The technology in the schools hasn’t been significantly updated since the last bond 10 years ago. Although much of what was implemented at the time was pretty state of the art, ten years on, the computers are aging and a lot of stuff needs to be updated. The timing of a bond, assuming it passes of course, means that it’s going to be probably another two years before we get any infusion of new hardware. Nonetheless we need to determine a direction and figure out what our needs are going to be now.
Right now we are looking at what the kids need to learn and be able to do and figure out how technology can make that happen. We’re also looking at the district’s tech infrastructure needs to determine what will be needed to support that both to optimize productivity and minimize operating costs going forward. As part of this effort, I set up a special blog at ypsdtech.wordpress.com as a place where anyone who’s interested can participate in the discussion. We’ll be posting questions on there and looking for the community’s input. If you have some ideas about how technology can be useful, please feel free to head over there and participate by commenting in response to the questions. The comments are moderated, and if you have any suggestions about what questions we should be asking, send me an e-mail.
Lately, I haven’t written much about politics at least in part because I have not been paying as close attention to politics as I had previously. The past six years have been particularly painful for me from a political perspective, and I just needed a mental health break from it. After the November elections it became pretty clear, that the democrats were not going to aggressively pursue impeachment, which means that we were looking at two more years of the village idiot in charge.
Fortunately, my other writing tasks have been giving me an increasing amount of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment. That’s something sadly lacking from the day gig as my real income has steadily declined in the past five years while at the same time, the CEO was making more and more. So without really consciosly thinking about it, I have withdrawn somewhat from politics for a while. I’m staying involved in school stuff with the school board podcast, and the tech committee, things that I can actually make a difference with. Bigger stuff is so aggravating that I just need to turn away for awhile to keep from exploding or losing hope. In the same way, I’ve been meeting people who read my ramblings on ABG and feel like I might just be having a little bit of impact in the area of alternative fuels and transportation. So I guess want to focus on the areas where I can have some positive impact.  It’s a lot easier to feel motivated when I can see some results of my efforts.
The recording of the Feb. 12 Board of Education meeting is online now at this page. You can download a copy of the presentation from the reproductive health education advisory committee over here.  If you want to see the presentation and ask questions, it will be presented again on February 27, 2007 in the media center at East Middle School at 6pm.
Jules and I watched the original British version of the office when it was on BBC America, and although it was funny at first, it’s a good thing that it only ran for two six episode seasons. By the second episode I was finding it painful to watch. The majority of the characters, particularly Gervais’ David Brent were fairly one dimensional and didn’t seem to grow, and you can only take so much of the situations he got himself into.
After The Office ended he went on to do his podcast. The first couple of episodes were funny, but the next ten were almost identical. Again, by the end, I’d had enough and when he decided to charge for the second and third seasons, I had no problem at all unsubscribing. Apparently enough other people felt the same way that almost no one else has tried to charge for a podcast since.
Now he has a show called Extras on HBO that is in its second season. The first season was pretty funny, but midway through it was becoming clear that there was no second joke. Now midway through the second season Jules and I have both called enough. The last two episodes were totally unfunny, and without even a single character to like, we’re done. I doubt we will bother with any of his future projects either.
For the past couple of years a Reproductive Health Education Advisory committee has been meeting to research sex-education curriculums for the Ypsilanti Public schools. If you have kids in the schools, you may have noticed that for many years now they have gotten no comprehensive sex-ed. In line with that Ypsi has some of the highest rates of STDs and teen pregnancies in the area. After surveying parents and kids and looking at available materials, the comittee is ready to present their findings to the Board of Education. If you are interested, please come down to the board meeting tonight at 7pm, to hear the presentation, and support the comittee’s recomendations. The board meeting is held in the board room in Ypsilanti High School at 7pm on Feb. 12.