House panel considers college football playoffs – Yahoo! News.

Always good to see our tax dollars at work…

RCA student radically improves the UK plug | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE.

Having just gotten back from London, I can really appreciate the design of this new plug:

Sure hope the kid who invented it got a patent…

Stafford, Quinn provide shine for tarnished clubs – NFL – Yahoo! Sports.

Give me a break, Stafford v. the Browns and Quinn v. the Lions is hardly a coming out party for two up and coming QBs.  Seriously, so they each picked apart a horrible defense.  Yawn.  So has every other mediocre quaterback in the NFL.  This isn’t news.  So, while the game was actually interesting to watch (we used to call games like this the “Toilet Bowl”), I hardly think it means these two are all of a sudden that good and worth “salivating” over.

Don’t get me wrong, it was good to see each of them have success and Stafford’s grit at the end of the game could well spur some confidence in the Lions which might lead to some more wins, but I think I will wait until they actually do it against a real NFL team before calling it a “coming out party”.

Looks like I finally got my issues worked out with my site and my page rank, etc. has been restored. These Wordpress hackers are getting trickier and tricker. The hack was quite subtle and it wreaked havoc with my rankings, but it appears to be resolved. I’d encourage people to read http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/.

Yesterday, the Raleigh News and Observer ran a pretty extensive piece on why America needs to “save our sons”, based on a new book by William Pollack.  While I can’t dispute the facts about boys and schooling, etc. I find it rings fairly hollow.  Five or ten years ago all the rage was about “Saving our Daughters”. All of a sudden all the girls are saved and the boys are now in desperate need of attention?

I’d argue, both cases are wrong.  The people who really need saving are the parents  You see, I think most parents have lost sight of what it means to be a parent.  I see so many who want to be best friends with their kids or who are so completely afraid to tell their kids no that you wonder who is the actual parent.  It cuts across both moms and dads and it is quite sad.

John Rosemond has been preaching this for a long time to anyone who will listen, but it’s hard to hear him above the din of all the other “experts” and their soothing “feel good” answers.  While I don’t subscribe to all of his tenets (just because my parents did it doesn’t automatically make it right, after all they did raise me to think for myself), I do fundamentally agree that it is more important than ever to make it aware to your child that you are the boss and that the world does not revolve around them.  Your job as a parent is to raise you child to be a conscientious, well behaved citizen, not to make sure they don’t ever have a tantrum because you said no to some silly want they have when they are 3.

At any rate, perhaps I’ll go write a book on it.  I can see the title now:  “Real Parents:  Rescuing Parents from the Myths of Parenting”.

For as much as I like Apple, sometimes they just do really stupid things.  For instance, I installed Snow Leopard the other day and then come to find out it automatically removed Java 1.5 and 1.4 from my machine, never mind the fact that I use them on a regular basis to develop software.  It didn’t even ask.  Oh the arrogance.

At any rate, if you wish to restore them, here are the directions to fix it:

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard – OneSwarm Wiki.