Our Kids Are Smarter Than Your Kids

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A new set of California Academic Performance Index (API) scores are out . . .

Boy doing math problems

In Irvine, where I live, education is king, and the school district posted a very nice score: 888 out of 1000.

Breaking it down demographically, the Asian kids led the way with a 933. African-American and Hispanic kids were both more than 100 points below the average, but there are so few of them in the district that they don’t affect the overall score very much.

Even the special ed kids scored a respectable 705, higher than the 668 scored by the neighboring Santa Ana district, where education takes a back seat to gang-related slayings.

Irvine: Our special ed kids are smarter than your honor students.

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What is a Trans Fat?

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According to the Krispy Kreme box on the receptionist’s desk this morning, they’re now making their doughnuts with zero trans fats. I read the other day that McDonald’s is serving zero trans fat french fries.

What the heck is a trans fat anyway?

This has got to be the biggest nutritional scam in history. Everyone’s advertising “zero trans fats” and yet I look around and people are fatter than ever, because this trans fat scam lets them convince themselves that eating french fries and doughnuts is actually healthy . . .

No trans fats in the doughnuts?! In that case, I’ll eat six of them!

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It’s Not Easy Being Green

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“If we shortened our showers by one minute, we’d save $100 a year,” my son informs me, pausing for a moment to let the news sink in. “And if we shortened our showers by two minutes, we’d save $200 a year. If we didn’t take showers at all, we could be rich!

Personal fans

“As for the AC, we leave it off and everybody gets one of those personal fans and points it at their face.”

“Why don’t we get the old-fashioned fold-out fans and wave them back and forth?” I ask.

“Now that’s just stupid,” he says.

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Scrum Doesn’t Do Anything

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In the end it doesn’t matter what names you use for your processes, good people will do good work and continuously improve what they do. So much of the discussion around Lean versus Scrum (etc.) is about marketing hype, selling consulting and training services, and cornering the market with new name-brands. . . .

Scrum is not a methodology, it is not a process. It is a simple framework underpinned by some common sense principles. Scrum offers individuals and organizations the opportunity to continuously improve the way they work. It provides a space for people to behave like human beings, with trust, respect and passion. That’s about it. But that is huge.

— Tobias Mayer

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Another Reason I Like to Just Stay Home

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ROME – Italian railway police say an American tourist was hit and killed by a train at a Rome station as he was walking on the tracks in a daze after being drugged and robbed.

Police official Giovanni Piccolantonio said Monday that 74-year-old Frank Phel from California died early Friday at the suburban Tiburtina station.

— Associated Press

Arrivederci Roma!

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More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of

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Serial Entrepreneur — I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who refer to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs.” What the heck is the difference between an entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur? I suppose Bill Gates is an entrepreneur and e.e. cummings’ Uncle Sol was a serial entrepreneur — farmer, chicken farmer, skunk farmer, worm farmer.

 

Length — For some reason, people who talk about basketball now describe players as having “great length.” Nobody says, “He’s very tall.” They say, “He’s got great length.”

News flash: People don’t have length. They have height. They even have width. But they don’t have length — except at birth and shortly thereafter, when we measure them lying down because they can’t stand up yet.

Describing a basketball player as having “great length” is as uninformative as saying, “He’s a tall black guy with long arms.”

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Hockey Practice

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I was watching my son’s roller hockey practice last weekend . . . during a scrimmage, he skated the puck up the rink, faked the goalie to the right, then snapped a shot into the top left corner of the net.

“Oh my gosh!” I yelled to anyone within earshot. “Just like I taught him!”

A few minutes later, he got a pass in front of the net and one-timed it so high and hard that if not for the protective netting around the top of the rink, I don’t know where it would have come down.

“I didn’t teach him that,” I said.

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Go Ask Alice

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One pill makes you larger . . .

A musclehead co-worker is talking to someone on the phone about nutritional supplements:

“It changes the metabolism of the . . . en-DOC-rine? . . . EN-do-CREEN? . . . system, so it releases more testosterone.”

Yeah, you should definitely take some of that. A product that claims to alter the function of bodily organs you can’t even pronounce. What could possibly go wrong?

In fact, you should go to the vitamin store right now and just gobble up everything they’ve got.

Did you ever read Alice in Wonderland? She finds a cake that says EAT ME so she eats it. Next thing you know she’s nine feet tall. Draw your own parallels . . .

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Asian Gang Activities

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A co-worker informs me that a Santa Ana elementary school teacher has been charged with child endangerment for keeping a gun in her classroom.

“Well, that’s Santa Ana,” I say. “What do you expect from people? Not a day goes by that you can’t pick up the Orange County Register and read about a gang-related slaying in Santa Ana. If I were a teacher in Santa Ana, you best believe I’d be packing heat too. Thank god this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Irvine where I live.”

“There are Asian gangs in Irvine.”

“Asian gangs in Irvine?! What a racist you are. I’ve lived in Irvine for seven years and I’ve never seen or heard of any Asian gang activity. Unless studying for AP exams counts as a gang activity. Blowing their brains out with mathematical formulas . . .”

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He Didn’t Go Crazy

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JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Paul Davis, a singer and songwriter whose soft rock hit “I Go Crazy” stayed on the charts for months after its release in 1977, died Tuesday. He was 60.

— CNN.com

That’s disappointing.

Not the fact that he died, because who cares, really, but the fact that he didn’t actually go crazy and kill himself in some bizarre fashion . . .

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Cool Gadgets You Can’t Get

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His mom and I are trying to get the boy to log off the computer and go to bed.

“Hang on,” he says, “I’m looking at a PC World thing.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“’10 Cool Gadgets You Can’t Get in the U.S.'”

“If you can’t get them in the U.S., what do you care?”

“They’re cool. Don’t forget about that part.”

His mom is running out of patience. “Oh, am I steaming,” she says.

The boy’s still looking at the computer.

“Mmmm . . . cool,” he says.

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EppsNet Book Review: The Elegant Solution

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The Elegant Solution

Unreadable . . . unbelievably bad. Ironically, for a book about innovation, the concepts are trite and the prose consists of one lazy cliche after another.

Watch — I’m going to open the book to a random page and list the cliches: “secret sauce,” “blow the doors off,” “boil the ocean,” “where the action is,” “ivory tower,” “marching instructions.”

The book is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who might conceivably want to read it.

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Embedding YouTube Videos in Valid Web Pages

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One thing I learned from this post is that YouTube’s recommended method for embedding videos in web pages will prevent your page from validating:

<object width="425" height="355">
  <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xRCWnfMAmqE"></param>
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
  
</object>

The <embed> element is Netscape’s method of embedding plugins and players in web pages. It’s not part of the XHTML specification.

If you care about this kind of thing, you can use the markup below instead. It’s simpler, it validates, and it works (I tested it) in IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:425px; height:355px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/xRCWnfMAmqE">
  <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xRCWnfMAmqE" />
</object>

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