I've been reading "Catching Up or Leading the Way," which was loaned to me by a friend. I've been inspired by much of the author's very keen insights. I've long thought that NCLB was a crock. Anytime you have Ted Kennedy with his arm around George W. Bush and they are smiling and agreeing that this is what's best for American education you have to hold your nose.

I just updated my code to Drupal  6.15 and I've updated the Twitter module and switched to CKEditor. This will give me some new learning and capabilities to explore.

It's been a long time since I regularly posted anything here. In the early summer I was busy developing a course which I now teach to 7th and 8th grade students about becoming good digital citizens and then I enrolled in an Educational Leadership Program at St. Bonaventure University. Between the course at Bonaventure and my work iwth the students I became so busy that I didn't have time to write but now that's changing a bit and I hope to begin to write a bit more.

I'm not bowled over by the Macintosh. It's a great OS with some great tools and like Ross Brunson said on Facebook when I first got it, it is Linux with great multi-media.  I love Photo Booth, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD all great software products that work together rather seamlessly. But are they worth double the price of a Dell for the average person. I don't think so. I think Apple's future is with the iPhone and maybe their upcoming tablet. They are really a desktop OS and the future belongs to mobile platforms. I think Microsoft has gotten the bugs out of Vista in Windows 7.

Monday I returned to work at Franklinville Central School and one of the new staff in the high school guidance office showed me the current course selection guide for the high school and explained her vision of having it "on the computer" so that it could easily be published and downloaded by students, parents and others. I told her I'd get back to her soon and today it came to me that this might be yet another great application for Drupal.

James Dean made a name for himself in the 1950's movie, "Rebel Without a Cause." In the past almost four years I've been determined to show that Linux and in particular Ubuntu Linux is a viable desktop operating system. I've proven it to myself time and again but still it remains an outlier in consumer circles. In the last week I've rebuilt three Windows computers that had been virtually destroyed by malware. In two of the three cases the individuals let their virus protection lapse, in the third the lady was using a well known anti-virus and security solution and she still was victimized.