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So what can we do, dear daughter? When you get a little older, I will be honest with you and tell you — fuck ’em. You will not change their mind by arguing, by telling them they are wrong. You change their mind by showing them how being a girl is awesome. You show them by not hiding, by not being demure.

You show them by being more than your looks, even if that’s all people comment on. You show them by your independence. You show them by being more than they expect to see. You show them by not taking their shit.

Mur Lafferty

Definitely saving this one to read through every year as my daughter grows up.

Patrick Rhone wrote a great piece about discovering, via his daughter that TV is Broken. I have noticed the same phenomenon with Hazel, she is either confused and annoyed by commercials or she turns into the perfect marketing zombie immediately asking for whatever is being advertised. And that is not even mentioning the annoyance of the auditory volume of commercials, so much so that Congress has taken up legistlation about it.

I have also read Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus in which the entire first chapter discusses our addiction to television:

Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus — comparison of the Gin Craze to contemporary television viewing habits, and speculation on what people would do if not watching television.

Leading up to the Christmas holiday, Esther read Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein, which deals with the “phenomenon of princess culture and in particular how the concept is marketed to young girls” and “young girls’ self-esteem and the sexualization of girlhood”, and I can’t begin to describe how accurate the insights from the book are about how the “princess culture” invades so easily and completely. And that is all without having a cable subscription with the Disney channel on in heavy rotation. Hazel easily becomes a zombie attracted to pink and frilly, highly susceptible to what ever is advertised to her.

I have often read about people who don’t have TV in their life and I find that appealing, but I am hard pressed to actually get rid of all of the televisions in our house. However, last year, we downsized our TV, which is unheard of. We sold our 46 inch monster TV and surround sound and opted to keep the small 24 inch model as our only TV in the house. It has been good, but now that the kids are getting older, I am becoming much more aware of what they consume, advertising and all.

We currently get 65 channels and watch shows on less than a dozen of them, with the actual number shows being between 10 and 15. Of what we watch most of it is not time sensitive, like news or sports. There are a few of these events, namely the Olympics, the World Cup and the Tour de France. Some of these live on niche channels, others do not.

Here is what I am purposing:

We are going to cut the cord. We will get the content for our TV from streaming devices or HD local over-the-air sources, particularly for time sensitive or sporting events.

How:

• We will use the second generation Apple TV and iTunes to get some shows, as well as newly released movies. We will use Netflix on the Apple TV to entertain the kids with the variety of shows they want.
• We will use our upscaling DVD player for movies from the RedBox and public library.
• We have purchased a proper digital over-the-air antenna from Mohu so the few national and international sporting events we want can be watched.
• We will disconnect out TiVO and while not having any issues with the service, it is always a time sink. The fact that it can suggest shows means that there is always more TV to watch (Yes, I know it can be turned off…).

I have been listening to podcasts since about September 2004. It used to be clunky to get content and when Leo Laporte started the TWiT Network, I was excited. I listened to the first episode of TWiT and almost every episode in between.

We are now in a golden age of podcasts. There are multiple independent networks and many main stream providers are furnishing their content via the podcast delivery model. There are great iOS apps, like Instacast, and Apple’s AirPlay makes pushing this content around the house really starts to verge on the Arthur C. Clarke definition of magic.

Unfortunately, it is time to put old horses out to pasture. I want to listen to podcasts that are informational and who have hosts and guests that do not make me want to stab myself in the ears. That is why after Tom Merritt left Buzz Out Loud (now defunct), I stopped listening. The juvenile hosts that tried to fill in turned me off, the deep thought that was put into the show evaporated, so unsubscribing was easy. In growing his podcast network, Leo Laporte had to had more more hosts, which is understandable, but between his belligerent attitude and the grating nature of some of his hosts, I am done with TWiT. The show that started my listening to podcasts is no longer in my subscription list.

What am I listening to instead? I am loving Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network and Mike Hurley’s 70decibels network. They both have niche podcasts that keep me informed enough, but also entertained. I am also a fan of Slate’s podcasts, which in recent months have come on strong with offerings in the non-fiction, but not news category.

Regularly listened to:

5by5

• The B&B Podcast
• Mac Power Users
• Hypercritical
• The Talk Show
• Back to Work

70Decibels

• Mikes on Mics
• 512 Podcast
• The Pen Addict
• Enough — The Podcast

Slate

• Slate’s Manners for the Digital Age
• Slate’s The Afterword
• Slate Presents Lexicon Valley
• Slate’s Culture Gabfest
• Slate’s Political Gabfest

Public Radio

• This American Life
• NPR: Planet Money Podcast
• Freakonomics Radio

Other

• The Moth Podcast

Depending on backlog / topic:

5by5

• Build and Analyze
• The Incomparable

70Decibels

• The Bro Show

Other

• Endurance Planet
• Tech News Today
• David Allen Company Podcast

Our schools are failing. Rarely does real learning happen in modern classrooms, and when it does, it is often merely a byproduct of each student’s pursuit of an independent and potentially conflicting goal: high grades. While I can only speak to grading practices at my school, I suspect that these concerns are endemic throughout high schools nationwide.

First, high school grades themselves are very poor indicators of a student’s competence. As a graduate of MIT and Georgetown Law, I have experience in earning high grades and gaining admission to competitive universities. My grades were in part due to “grade engineering”: the process of maximizing grades with minimal effort and without regard to learning or understanding material. In other words, I received high grades partially by exploiting the weak correlation between grades and mastery.

Andrew F. Knight, a former high school physics teacher, writing on how high school is broken.

I wonder how this squares with Fairfax County considers creating virtual high school

Fairfax County schools could become the first in the Washington region to create a virtual public high school that would allow students to take all their classes from a computer at home.

No sports teams. No pep rallies. No lockers, no hall passes. Instead, assignments delivered on-screen and after-school clubs that meet online.

I read a long time ago about Cal Newport’s Fixed-Schedule Productivity.

The system work as follows:

1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

This sounds simple. But think about it for a moment. Satisfying rule 2 is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here’s a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

• Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
• Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
• Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
• Stop procrastinating.

I like the idea and am pretty sure that this follows Parkinson’s Law, which states:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

It works that if you have an unlimited amount of time to complete a task, the task will continue to grow to fill the time. This is many of my projects, like “Clean out the Garage”, work as well as many business related projects, “Deploy Document Management System to entire organization.”

One of the computer-related corollaries of Parkinson’s Law is “Storage requirements will increase to meet storage capacity.” It is Spring, so I am in the mood to clean out, and I have to wonder where all of the stuff in our house has come from.

I am here by forwarding another corollary to Parkinson’s Law: “The amount of items owned will grow to fill the space.”

I am probably not the first to posit this concept, but I know that it is true in our house. When we first moved into our house, we had a futon, a bed, a desk and two chairs. Now, we have boxes of bits and bobs that have not been touched in a year, or more, furniture that has been moved from room to room to try and make it to work, we have clothes that are either no longer in style, don’t fit, or we just don’t wear.

I have been reading Discardia and I think that we are now going to start observing the Discardian holidays, until then we will be starting our massive Spring cleaning.

Last night, I ducked out from home after putting John to bed to see Randall Munroe, author of the XKCD webcomic speak at his alma mater, CNU, where I work.

Randall told some great stories, about how the comic started and some pranks he played while on campus. The great thing about these stories is that I remember the events, but on the “administrator” side versus the “student” side. He also explained the XKCD April Fools joke, which was impressive in both planning and technical scope.

If you don’t read XKCD, and you like science and most things nerdy, you should start reading today.

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.

I have been using the native web app for viewing Fever° on the iPhone and waiting for Reeder 3 to ship with Fever° support. In the mean time, I have had to build some odd muscle memory tricks to browse quickly, but also manage to save items that I want to read later. The biggest thing is not using the web app as “Saved to Homescreen” “app”. That is one of the worst options, because when I go back to the Fever° “app”, the whole “app” has to reload and I lose whatever blog post I as reading. So much for saving it for later.

Today I was following a Twitter rabbit trail, catching up with tweets from my favorite developer Shaun Inman, and Shaun retweeted a link announcing Sunstroke: a Fever Reader for iPhone.

This is exactly what I have been looking for. The apps is very clean, although I don’t care for the app icon or the “action” button in the article view. It is much more stable than Ashes, so I am hoping that the developer is planning an iPad version.

This weeks This American Life is a fantastic story about what the question: What kind of country do people want, specifically in regards to the size of government?

All across the country right now, local and state governments are finding they can’t pay their bills. Schools are losing teachers, street lights are going dark, garbage is piling up in public parks, and cops are suddenly an optional expense.

This week we travel to Colorado Springs, to Trenton and to the office of Grover Norquist to ask: Is the kind of country we want? One where government gets smaller? Or should we all pay higher taxes, and keep government bigger?

Take an hour out of your weekend and give it a listen.

I have always had a love hate relationship with shaving. I love how smooth my skins feels after, I love the ritual that goes into shaving, but I hate razors. More specifically, I hate razor blade manufacturers and I even cycle in and out of growing a beard to not have to shave.

The act of shaving isn’t the problem. The blades, that is where the problem lies. I have a inherit aversion to changing blades, which means that I am always scraping my face with a dull blade. That makes it a completely uncomfortable experience.

Why? The blades are expensive. The whole razor and blades business model is frustrating.

My coworkers and I have had conversations about the cost of blades and shared strategies on how we maximize the life of our razor blades. One of them even buys them in bulk on eBay to save as much as he can.

So when my coworker shared a link to DollarShaveClub.com, I was intrigued. First by their video, but then by the actual business proposition. I have signed up for the $6 service. For the $6, I’ll be getting 4 cartridges a month, a handle and the comfort knowing that I can dispose of the blades weekly (!).

I will let you know how the experience is. And if you are intrigued by the proposition, you can sign up using this link: https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/ref/mw2/u25ixe. If you use that link when you sign up, I’ll get a free month of blades.