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.
I no longer get the Ann Arbor News, but I still check the Mlive website from time to time. They recently changed the address for the A2 news section from mlive.com/aanews to mlive.com/annarbornews. That’s fine if they want to do that although changing to a longer url is kind of a dumb idea. However, it should be a no-brainer for whoever did this to at least change the links on the mlive page to go to the right place. Instead clicking the AA News link from the main mlive page takes to an error page, stating that the address has changed. If someone manually enters the old address, they should see this, but an internal link should just go to the right page. Just another example of why they are doomed.
I spent a couple of days in Chicago this week with the Autoblog team covering the Auto Show there, and between this trip and my December trip to Manhattan, I came to the realization that there is at least one thing that Detroit can be proud of, the MacNamara Terminal at Metro Airport. After flying into LaGuardia and O’Hare’s terminal 2, I was reminded in both cases of the nasty old terminal that Northwest flew out of. They are both crowded, narrow and kind of dark. Leaving O’Hare in particular was awful. The entrance to the security screening area was in the middle of the terminal and the lines spread from there in both directions to the entire length of the terminal. Once we got to the security check point, there was a grand total of TWO lanes for the whole terminal. Metro on the other hand, is open and bright and easy to get around. Of course, all is not perfect, all airports need far more electrical outlets for travellers to plug into. With so many people travelling with laptops, dvd players and all manner of other electronics, people need to charge their devices, especially when they are stuck between flights.
Now having said something something positive about Detroit, I must say that Cobo Hall must be demolished immediately if not sooner and replaced with a new convention center.  Cobo as everyone who has ever been in there knows how dark and unpleasant it is, not to mention not that big. McCormick Place by comparison is huge, bright and just generally a much more pleasant place to be. If we had a facility like this in Detroit, we might actually atract a lot of national scale events besides the Auto Show and the SAE World Congress. As it is, the only reason the Detroit Auto Show gets any attention at all is because it’s home to Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Otherwise, the Chicago show would probably get all the big introductions.
I was never a big Peanuts ( the comic strip, not the legume, those I love) fan growing up, but as I perusing Digg this afternoon I spotted the headline Charlie Brown Goes Anime and decided to check it out. There are a bunch illustrations of the various Peanuts characters done in the Anime style. If you are into that go check it out by clicking on the image.
Another peculiar story that popped up on Digg was about yet another politician who is desperately in need of a laryngectomy. State Sen. Phil Berger of North Carolina is proposing that movie scripts should be approved by the government before filming can start on movies in the state. This guy seems to be typical of bible belt Republicans who don’t believe in the Bill of Rights. I think it’s time to start telling these fools “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you move to another country! Like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.”
I finally managed to successfully combine a old Palm III sync cable with a USB cable, which in partnership with some open source software tools allows me to use a CVS camcorder repeatedly. CVS Drugs (and some other drug stores) sell a video camera made by a company called Pure Digital for $29. The camera records to internal memory and has a capacity of 20 minutes. When you buy one, the connector is covered with a sticker and the battery compartment is locked. Normally, after you record to the camera, you take it back to the store, pay them another $13, and they will put the video on a dvd for you. They then keep the camera, put a new sticker over the connector, and sometimes fresh batteries, repack it and sell it to someone else. Once you have a cable made, you just peel off the sticker, plug it in to your computer, and download the videos. The camera uses AA batteries and has pretty decent video quality.
I love the island of Kauai, Jules and I got married there and it’s an amazing place. Going scuba diving or snorkeling and encountering green sea turtles is always a treat. These big lumbering creatures that struggle on land, just glide majestically through the water. I stumbled across a cool little video, of some turtles that someone shot off Kauai.
The White House announced earlier this week that they were going to end the warrantless wire-tapping program that they’ve had going for the last several years. Since the 1970s there has been a special court, that they could go to get warrants in secret to do surveillance. Bush, Cheney and Gonzales decided that they didn’t even need to do this much. So why should we believe that even now that they have said they will stop, that they actually will? Unless congress keeps up the pressure and actually goes after these criminals, I would say it’s a safe bet that they’ll just do whatever they feel like. Bush already said as much with regard to the war, so we can’t let up.
If you’ve been trying to access the site in last day and a half you’ve been out of luck. Shortly after I put the last post and the poll on the Volt, my hosting provider started having DNS issues that made all my sites and mailboxes inaccessible. Hopefully it will stay up now, but I’m going to start looking for a new host. Any recommendations?