george w bush

i am sick and tired of people calling our president names like "lame duck" and such. he has become the butt of every joke and it pisses me off!

has he shown himself to be less than perfectly presidential? yes.
has he made decisions that we do not agree with? yes.
is he still the president of the best country and leader of the free world? yes, yes, yes!!!

last time i checked it took a majority of americans to vote in this president twice. we all voted him in for a reason. do we forget that if our president is truly an idiot then so is over half of the nation? if this is true then we better hang up our hats and join the socialists because we don't think our democracy worked correctly.

i will be the first to say our country is not in a perfect place, but i do believe that a big part of that problem is our fat baby whining and complaining, cnn, and how quickly we forget our own responsibility.

by the way, obama, biden and mccain have a lower approval rating as senators than george w. bush...and sarah palin has a higher rating than all of them put together.

so be done with it. he's gone in just a few short months and we may be wishing he was back before the end.

What is poverty? - Part I

terrible news about the finances of the u.s. has been all over the television today. the safety of the united states economy has become a questionable thing and i wonder what impact it will have on our society.

with all of the turmoil of this, the bombing in pakistan and the presidential election coming soon i had cause to think deeply about poverty in america. people on tv keep saying that we are losing the middle class in america and we keep heading towards a greater gap between the rich and those in poverty. this causes me to wonder. i once told my mom that i thought she grew up in poverty and she was offended. she said that she always had clothes to wear and food to eat. they weren't the richest people in town, but they had what they needed.

my family qualified for food stamps and just about every government assistance you can name. yet, i always had a place to live, clothes to wear and food to eat. i went to the movies, got christmas presents and really was able to do fun things that most kids do. in fact, sometimes i think i was able to do much more because of all the artistic events i was able to attend because my parents were involved with the productions.

so what is poverty? is it living without basic needs? is it a salary below $20.000 a year? in some ways doesn't american poverty look like middle class in other countries?

today i am just posing the questions...maybe i'll find some answers another day.

Fantasy Football

i now have my very first fantasy football team. it is a trivial persuit, but for some reason it makes me smile. i won my first game and can't wait to see what happens this week. i did put a lot of my team on seattle! gotta stay true to the home team! so i picked hasselback as qb and the seattle defense. they didn't do so great last week, but i'm hoping they will step it up this week. fun, fun, fun!

weekends

I should really look forward to weekends, but I am in a funk. During the week I am busy with the school where I work and the girls go to school, college homework and basically trying to keep the house from completely turning into a science experiment and keeping us fed. This is about all I can do during the week and I find it satisfying despite it being tiring.

The weekend is another story. I should be catching up on laundry and cleaning and homework, but my back hurts and all I feel like doing is sitting around and being lazy. It doesn't help that Ari woke up sick last night and that just sucks the life out of me.

Today is filled with finishing up my homework and watching football. I think the biggest frustration is that I missed church because Ari was sick and Jason has a toothache and can't hear in one ear. I think when I miss that time with other Christians that it just sets off the weekend and makes me look forward to going back to work.

i dig her

i am stealing my husband's cool morphed picture because the more i hear about this person, the more i think that john mccain kicked butt on his choice for vp. not because he picked a woman, although it doesn't hurt. mainly because i love the way she is totally against wasting money and seems to be a straight shooter (at least when aiming a caribou). my hopes are high.

Goodbye

A couple of nights ago I heard about a hacking job on the news. The hackers used a broadband connection and a laptop (as well as some pretty good decoding software) to hack into a department stores computer and stole 41,000 credit card numbers. The news report said that a lot of stores have good encryption, but do not have passwords to get into the encrypted data. So the hackers just had to decode the encryption and BAM! they had the info. They also said that there is no legal requirement for businesses to have any kind of particular protection on their computer files, so as a consumer, there is no way to know how protected your credit card information is when you make purchases at the store.

Here we have been spending all of this time studying and learning about what can be done online and here you could have your credit card number hacked without every touching a computer. All you have to do is make a purchase at a store and you could lose your identity to a thief.

Throughout this class I have also been a proponent of the idea that stealing has always been a problem. Yet, I will concede that in the past people were stealing what you had, while today they are stealing what you may not have. They are creating debt for you. I guess people could charge things in your name in the past, but when they did it was face to face instead of anonymously online.

The news report concluded that the best way to protect yourself was to get cash from the bank and make more purchases with cash instead of trusting businesses with your credit card information because banks were more secure with their passwords, firewalls, and encrypted data.

I think the bottom line is that we are always at risk with our finances and we can do some basic things to be careful, teach kids ethics and hope for the best. The other option is crawling under a rock until the computer age goes away (which is not going to happen). Because of this class I will be more careful with passwords and make more of an effort to work with kids on these issues, but I refuse to crawl under a rock.

Goodbye ethics class and classmates that have completed the program. Hope to see you around!

skittles vs. webquest

for my ethics in tech. course (the reason i started this blog) we did a skittles lesson, where we learned a lot about how to create a graph through data used from the colors of skittles. we also did a lesson about webquests, evaluating them and finding good ones. these two assignments were similar in that we were required to learn about an area of technology. they were different in that one pertained more to a specific program, while the other was exploratory in nature. i don't think it is fair to say one is better than the other. i think that they are different lessons with different goals in mind. one would be better for working with graphs and learning about excell, while webquests are better for using the internet to explore content informaiton. i would say that the webquests are more appropriate for my educational setting because i have very limited time with my music students. a webquest gets them using technology in a way that will help them learn about music without taking time away to just learn about technology. in my opinion, it is my job as a music teacher to use technology as a tool to enhance curricular goals. i actually believe that is true for every teacher. a lesson like the skittle lesson, would be more appropriate in a math class or a computer class.