Montessori and Open Source Culture

My kids go to a Montessori school. As parents we have been very impressed by the philosophy of learning there, and our kids have thrived.

It should come as no surprise to me then that there is a strong link between the Open Source community and Montessori.

FabFi: wifi build out of trash

This is very cool.

Al Franken and Ari Discuss Fishing

I-94 Corridor and the East Side

I live on the east side of St Paul. These big changes to the I-94 corridor would happen within a mile of where I live.

Mounds Park

From my neighborhood email list:

For all of us interested in what being/been proposed/planned for Indian Mounds Regional Park here is a link to "City of Saint Paul – Indian Mounds Regional Park Master Plan" page. It includes an overview, meeting agenda, notes, presentation along with the Indian Mounds Master Plan Concept.

Link:

http://www.stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=4036

Bug

My laptop started making a Very Bad Noise on Tuesday morning, the kind of whirring creak I usually associate with the death throes of a hard drive. It didn't sound exactly like a hard drive, which often clicks or knocks, and the whir was rather slower paced than the high RPMs of a hard drive. But as I didn't think this Macbook Pro had a fan, since I had never heard one, I just assumed the only moving part was the hard drive and so I ordered a new one online using my wife's computer.

When the drive arrived today, I opened the laptop to swap out the hard drive, and lo! there was a box elder bug caught in one of the two small fans on the logic board. Yes, my computer had a bug in it. I pulled out the lifeless, hard little black and orange-striped carcass, and put the cover back on. Started without problem or Very Bad Noise.

I had thought that the term "bug" used to describe a computer glitch was coined after someone found a moth in an early computer. But according to the all-knowing Wikipedia I was wrong. Nonetheless, I was relieved to discover this bug and to fix the problem so easily.

And now I have a spare drive for that time when my hard drive really does die.

The Apple Store

I was at the Apple Store just now getting a bad RAM chip replaced in my MacBook. All in all it was a very pleasant experience, and aside from the inconvenience of having to drive 40 minutes round-trip for a 20 minute errand, pretty painless.

I took the bad RAM chip, which I had identified and yanked from my machine a couple of weeks ago, in an anti-static bag I had in my desk drawer. My desk is full of them, along with spare parts and adapters and such, many for machines that haven't been manufactered or supported for over a decade. I'm a packrat for old computer junk, though to my credit I have tossed/recycled lots and lots of old "beige" computer parts in the last few years, especially now that the city/county has good recycling for that kind of thing.

Anyway, when I handed the bag with the bad chip in it to the young man at the Apple Store, I didn't think anything of it, but on returning the bag to me he joked that it was a vintage piece. I chuckled and replied, Well, I'm feeling kind of vintage these days.

The bag had the original label attached: 32MB Apple Quadra and Centris Series.

The chip I had replaced was a standard-issue 2GB size, roughly 1000x more memory than the bag had originally held.

You know you're getting old in this business when you can distinctly remember the thrill of a 32MB chip of RAM and how much pure computing power it held.

Netflix prize

I'm always late to the game, but the Netflix prize was awarded back in September. I wrote about it before.

Anyway, an interesting article at wired.com looking at how the winning teams' combined disparate algorithms to help them reach the goal.

Sand Story from Ukraine

Via tinyrevolution.