Friday, December 26, 2008

My Christmas Pin-Up Girl

Here's my Christmas pin-up girl, Annie, passing out gifts yesterday afternoon to some of our children and grandchildren. I hope your holiday has been as joyous as ours.

Annie checks this site from time to time, I think, to check on what I'm up to! A few weeks ago, I'd posted a note about some new pocket sized camcorders. Fortunately, Annie didn't pick up on my enthusiasm for the items as I decided to get her the Kodak Zi6 HD Pocket Video Camera. I had her open it up before our Christmas guests arrived. She quickly figured out its set-up and use and took some great film clips with it throughout the day.

Free Stuff

David Pogue notes in Tis the Season for Free Stuff that "the company that makes PC Pandora is giving away 50,000 free copies of its $70 computer-monitoring software." Parents can download the application and use the code "PCPANDORAGIVEAWAY" (no quotes) to activate the software. Note that this one is Windows only.

Pogue also tells of the Garritan Community Christmas Album that can be downloaded free (one mp3 at a time). The music for the album was created by musicians on their computers and submitted to be freely distributed. There are a limited number of free CDs available. You can also download the CD Cover Art and label if you plan to burn the music to disc.

For Mac users, MacHeist is offering a number of free applications for download, including Synergy, Pangea's Enigmo 2, iConquer, 1password, Headline, and Santa Snaps 2.

Saturn's Rings Now Edge-on

Science@NASA as a good article with an excellent illustration that describes how our view of Saturn's rings changes as the planets orbit the sun. Saturn's Crazy Christmas Tilt notes that "All year long, the rings of Saturn have been tilting toward Earth and now they are almost perfectly edge-on."

Recess

Jay Mathews is off on another one of his education rants in the Washington Post in Is Recess Necessary? Mathews makes some good observations in the column about the problems recess can cause. Unfortunately, he's still off on a love-fest with the Knowledge Is Power Program that he's doing a book on. While some of the results from some KIPP schools look really impressive, our two here in Indiana (Search for "kipp") are having trouble making their annual yearly progress or coming up to state averages. I wish Mathews would leave out the KIPP praise and fully explore the issue of how recess should be used (or eliminated).

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