Monthly Archives: September 2015

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Is college worth the cost?

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Is college worth the cost? Many recent graduates don’t think so.

I certainly don’t think so. I regret my decision to attend University of Baltimore. I’ve saddled my family with a huge debt that will take years to pay off, and I’ve seen exactly zero return on investment.

I will say that I don’t feel the sane about community college. I got a lot out of my time there for a reasonable price and it kick started me on my career path. I feel it was a good value and time well spent.

YMMV, but in my case the things that have benefitted me the most in my career are things that I took the initiative to learn myself.

via WaPo

Skateboarding

Thanks, Ed!

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You didn’t quit skateboarding because you got old. You got old because you quit skateboarding.


– Jay Adams

I don’t know if he coined this himself or not, but here’s some inspiring words from my friend Ed Fickert, on his 45th birthday.

I haven’t been on my boards for a while and I’ve definitely seen a difference. That’s going to change this weekend.

Thanks, Ed. 🙂

— updated with correct quote attribution. Thanks! 

Image – Ed 50 50 @ Laurel, image by Jimmy Smutek

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3am is when the liver rejuvenates?

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It’s 3am and I’m lying in bed, wide awake. This happens to me often, I go to bed relatively early – 9:30/10:00 – and wake up in the middle of the night. I’m having trouble falling back asleep so I Googled (Duck Duck Go‘d, actually) “wide awake at 3am”.

Apparently, according to the first result I read, I wake up at 3 am because of stress and because “3 am is when the liver rejuvenates”. 

The suggested rememdy is drinking some sort of elixr that consists of orange juice, an obscure herb, and Baltic Sea salt. I don’t recall the exact ingredients but I do know that I could conveniently order the concoction, premixed, directly from the website.

The idea that the liver rejuvenates at 3 am really made me laugh. I mean, I guess there’s some truth to it, but why 3am exactly? 

Is it like a cron task or something? What if my body time is set to the wrong local time? Do I just open a terminal window, SSH into my liver and set the proper  defaults?

I would do more research about 3am liver rejuvenation but I think I’d rather try to go back to sleep. Wish me luck!

Unrelated featured image is completely unrelated

Links

Inequality in gifted education.

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These kids were geniuses — they were just too poor for anyone to discover them.

Card and Giuliano’s research found that those disparities could be blamed in large part on the county’s gifted nomination process, which relied on teachers and parents to recommend kids for IQ testing by a psychologist. Many promising students, particularly those attending poorer schools, just weren’t getting referred.

That all changed after the county began universally screening its second-graders. The screening test flagged thousands of children as potentially gifted, and school psychologists started working overtime to evaluate all of them. Out of that process, Broward identified an additional 300 gifted children between 2005 and 2006, according to Card and Giuliano’s research. The impact on racial equity was huge: 80 percent more black students and 130 percent more Hispanic students were now entering gifted programs in third grade.

via WaPo

Technology

My iPad 2 is not digging iOS9

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I upgraded my iPad 2 from ios7 to ios9 this morning and I’m really wishing I hadn’t. I did some reading & expected a bit of a performance hit, but wow – it’s borderline unusable.

I know it’s way outdated tech but the only thing I really use it for is web browsing, reading news feeds, and watching tutorial videos. The only game I play is Cargo-Bot (which, by the way, is excellent).

I’m talking 3 to 4 second lags between almost any action, and everything is super sluggish to the point that I just want to throw it out the window.

For me, the icing on the cake is that the handful of videos that I kept on the iPad are now, apparently, no longer compatible. They worked last night, tonight they “cannot be played on this iPad”.

Thanks, Obama.

Update – I just finished doing a factory restore and the old iPad seems to be running much better than it was. It’s still not a speed demon, but much more in line with what my expectations were going into this.