|
Sam and Ivan talk about:
I wasn’t planning on even considering buying one for awhile. Until they were cheaper. Until there was a bigger selection of books. Maybe until there was a second revision. But Brandy has been kind of laid up lately… so over the weekend I ordered her a Kindle. It arrived yesterday. We’ll see how this goes, it will be an interesting trial. Of course, I also bought Brandy five actual physical books over the weekend, so it may be a few days until she actually tires it in earnest. For me, I think I’ll want one once I can look at the list of the last 10 books I read and have more than 50% of them available on Kindle. That is not quite yet. Right now only three of the last 10 books I’ve read are there. But I’m sure that ratio will improve over time.
Two category changes today. First, Minnesota slips from a “Strong Obama” state to a “Weak Obama” state. Still in Obama’s column, still not a “leaning” swing state, but now with a small enough lead (less than 10%) that McCain might want to consider putting resources there to try to put it into play. Second, and probably more significant at this point, North Carolina moves from “Weak McCain” to “Leaning McCain”… putting the state very much into play as a potential swing state and improving Obama’s best case scenario. Current Summary: McCain Best Case – McCain 313, Obama 225 And if everybody gets their leans (and Obama gets DC) – Obama 272, McCain 266 There were also additional new polls yesterday that got quite a bit of blogger coverage showing positive trends for Obama, most notably in Ohio and Florida. I am not ignoring these. My “last five poll” averages simply did not have either one of these move to a new category based on those new polls. Both states are near the edge of a category boundary though, so if new polls confirm what today’s polls show, they may flip soon. But that will all depend on what the next polls in those states show. The same was true of North Carolina before today. There was blog talk for a couple weeks now about how it might be a swing state now based on one or two polls. I did not shift the category until there were enough polls so that the 5 poll average showed a McCain lead of less than 5%. For a long time Firefox has been my browser on Windows. But on Macs I have stuck with Safari. On my Mac I just liked it better, even though Firefox had some things I missed in Safari. Some of that probably just had to do with the skin and it “looking right”. (And yes, I know I could have skinned it or tried Camino or whatnot.) But in any case, with Firefox 3 being released in final form yesterday, I went ahead and tried it again. Within a few minutes I had decided to change default browsers. It is quite good. If you haven’t yet, head on over to Firefox‘s site to download it. Very worth it. There are still a few things I like better in Safari, like the form button shapes, the find function, and resizable text boxes. Overall though, Firefox just has enough little things to make it worth it. (Better URL autocomplete, selectable search box, extensions, etc.) I’ll give Safari another shot next time they push a major update to it. Snow Leopard maybe? Or maybe something will really frustrate me about Firefox in the next few days and I’ll go back early. But right now I’m doubting that. Found by looking at referrers to my site today: Abulsme Blog
Glad you like it! I’ll try to keep it up through the elections!
Today’s update includes a new poll which moves Nevada from “Leaning Obama” to “Leaning McCain”. The state is of course still in the “Leaning” category which means it is really too close to call. But now McCain has the slight edge. Current Summary: McCain Best Case – McCain 313, Obama 225 And if everybody gets their leans (and Obama gets DC) – Obama 272, McCain 266 Do you see how close that is? Wow. Close. Actually, if everybody got their leans, but DC (where we still have no polls) went for McCain, we’d have a 269-269 electoral college tie. Which would be awesome. Of course, the odds of McCain winning DC are probably about the same as me spontaneously quantum tunneling to the moon. So I don’t think we have to worry about that. :-) Looks like she made her local paper. Pastor taught in Africa
Brandy does not want me to say why, but we had a firetruck at our house a few hours ago. Everything and everybody will be fine though. It may take a little while though. Wow, that one was out of the blue. NBC’s Tim Russert dead at 58
A little over half an hour ago, I dropped Amy off at school for the last day of 7th grade. It is a short day. Brandy will pick her up and she will be home by noon. At will also be the last day at Eastside Prep. This makes me sad, but as I’ve talked about before this year was a rocky year. The school, which had been a wonderful place for us in 6th grade, had just not lived up to expectations in 7th grade. Too much of the time it felt like we (and Amy) were in conflict with the school rather than feeling like the school was really doing their best to act in the best interests of Amy. Conflict over things that should have been no-brainers and obvious or at least easily resolved, which instead became soul-sucking battles. Things got a lot better in the third trimester when we had Amy switched back to the advisor she had in 6th grade who we liked a lot, rather than the advisor Amy had most of the year who Amy just never really got along with. The little things make a huge difference. But it was too late. A lot of the trust and faith we had in the school was already gone. And Amy and Brandy had already fallen in love with a new school. In the fall Amy will be attending Chrysalis. As is probably obvious just from the name, it is a much less traditional program than EPS. Lots of one on one classes. (All math classes for instance, are always one on one.) In general class size is much smaller than the 30 that is typical in a public school, or even the 15 or so that was normal at EPS. Classes tend to be more like 6 students. And they put an emphasis on matching the right students to the right teachers (and classmates) to ensure a good match in personality, learning style, etc. There is also a lot of emphasis on flexibility. In classes where the student is ahead and going quickly (in Amy’s case Math for instance) they enable that. In cases where the student needs some extra pushing (in Amy’s case study skills) they spend extra time on that. Things like that. There are some bits that I’m worried might be a bit wishy washy and allow the students to slack a bit in some cases, but we shall see. In the mean time, we just got a call from Amy, extremely upset, because she hadn’t gotten her yearbook when they were handed out today. They say we never submitted the form and paid and all that. Of course we had in fact done those things. Brandy is now rushing to the school to try to resolve the issue and make sure Amy has a yearbook that her friends can sign and such. As if we needed it, final proof we made the right decision. |
||
