Anti-gulllibility training

I've always felt that one of the most important tasks for a parent is to teach their kids to not be gullible. I routinely work on such training with my kids. In fact the other day, I was way into the story about how Los Angeles schools, while not getting many snow days, do get closed for bad hair days. Unfortunately, while my daughter was well into the "realy?" stage, my wife piped up with "They do not!" cutting me off at the knees.

Nothing is a better example of the importance of such training than the comment in response to Paul's revealing post about Microsoft's Identity Assistants.

So parents, take this as a warning. Train your kids in anti-gullibility before they make a fool of themselves publicly.

Tags : identity / Microsoft / Microsoft

The Combo

Paul must be getting a little hard up for cash nowadays as he seems to be out moonlighting.

Planet Earth

The Discovery Channel has started running an 11 part miniseries titled "Planet Earth", narrated by Sigourney Weaver.

We enjoyed watching the first 3 episodes (thanks to Tivo!!!!) which aired on March 25th. The show will continue to air on Sundays through April 22nd.

It's a great show and I recommend it as breathtakingly entertaining (and even educational) for the entire family.

Tags : Planet Earth / Discovery Channel

The Drought is over...

After a loooooonnnnnnggggg dry spell, my little Bro has finally gotten back in the saddle and wrote his first blog post in more than a month.

He has clearly not lost any of his whit.

Glad to have you back bro!

Tags : family

Odd Goods

My son attends Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology here in northern Virginia. It's a magnet school attracting talented math and science students from around the northern Virginia area and frequently wins and/or places in many regional and national academic and science competitions.

Last year, during the freshmen orientation, one of the upper class girls was talking to the incoming freshmen girls, telling them that the odds were very good (being that the girl to boy ratio is rather low). She continued with "BUT..... the goods are very, very odd."

My wife and I like to tell and re-tell this story often, especially when my son is around (definitely an odd good). I'm sure he's cringing now that I've blogged it.

Tags : tjhsst

A Pickup

My wife and I were talking with one of our friends about our CJ's right of passage. He also has a son (one of CJ's friends) that is also going through the same rite. We both spoke about being extra careful on the road nowadays given both of our son's being out there :-).

He also mentioned a solution to the proverbial "how many kids can you get into a single car?" problem for teenagers (yeah, there's laws against a teenage driver carrying more than one other passenger in Virginia and many other states, but kids don't always listen to laws) -- a mutual friend had the policy of providing their kids with pickup trucks only.

Pickup trucks with no extended or crew cab. The kind that only fit at most 3 people. Much stronger restriction than any law.

Seems like a good idea to me although I don't know what's up with this idea about providing a car for your kids... I had to earn my own money to pay for my own car.

Tags : teenage / driving

A Rite of Passage

Today my son started the traditional teenage "rite of passage" of learning to drive.

He's had his driving permit for almost 6 months and finally did some driving today (under my expert tutelage, of course :-)).

We went to a fairly quiet residential area and he did a bunch of driving around the neighborhood (we found many streets that we had never been down before). After about an hour he was getting bored. I told him that's good. Uneventful driving is supposed to be boring -- when it gets exciting, bad things start to happen.

After a while, we headed out of the neighborhood and drove into town and stopped by the nearby supermarket. He seemed to handle this pretty well (I'm still alive, aren't I?).

All without me yelling or having a heart attack... That clearly qualifies as a success in my book!

Tags : teenage / driving

Mindstorms

After helping Paul get around discriminatory pricing against Canadians and find a US-priced Lego Mindstorms NXT at a local Target store in Portland (while we were at the Liberty Alliance TEG F2F meeting nearby -- that good enough Russ?), my interest in the product for one of my kids grew.

We had bought a prior version of Lego Mindstorms for our son years ago and he played with it a little bit, but never really got into it (he's much more interested in video games and now especially DDR). So it pretty much sat there and gathered dust, even as all 3 of our kids can still sit around for hours playing with Legos.

So, last week, I had our daughters out for an xmass shopping trip and as we walked around the toys aisle, I asked Jessica if she thought she might like the Mindstorms set. She looked at me aghast and said "no way". We had already fulfilled CJs gifts, so that was that. No Mindstorms for us this year.

Alas, we're still short on a nice present for Jessica, so I broached the subject with her again, asking her if she even knew what it was. When I explained that it was a robotic system where she could program it to do things, react to things, move about, etc. she still just said "huh" (like: boring!).

Shortly thereafter, as I was searching for something else to buy for her, she runs into my office and shouts (yeah, really shouts):

"Hey Dad, you can get me that mindstorms stuff... because if I learn how to control it the possibilities are endless."

Guess we're going shopping again. Of course I had to ask her if there were other things she might want (can't let her or you know if she's really getting that until after xmass, but it was still a good story -- even my wife said that I needed to blog her comment).

Tags : christmas / lego / mindstorms / mindstorms nxt / target / ddr / liberty alliance

Is it the Cahill Blood?

My wife is sure it is. I'm not sure I can argue with her and I'm pretty sure most of the people that know us would agree -- especially if they've met my father as well.

This morning my wife, who teaches 7th grade math, was talking about a particularly hard test that she had given in her class and my daughter, Jessica, who is taking Algebra this year, perked up and said, "hey, do you have a copy of the test that I can take?".

Yes, my 7th grade daughter was asking to take a math test for a class that she wasn't in on a Saturday morning. I'm thinking that she wanted to show that the test wasn't all that hard :-).

Of course, my wife obliges her and prints out the test and Jessica digs in.

Later, Jessica's twin sister Lauren comes down and, after starting some cinnamon buns in the oven, had to jump in and get her own copy (I'm sure that she too wanted to prove how smart she was as she's taking algebra as well :-)).

And even later, after I went up and drug him out of bed so that he could take care of the dog, their older brother, CJ, comes down. CJ's a bit of a math whiz, taking multi-variable calculus in his sophomore year of high school, and seeing that his sisters weren't zooming through the test had to get a copy for himself.

Of course, after looking at it for a few minutes he had to ask my wife "Hey, what's this dot thing doing here", to which she replies "it's the multiplication symbol" and his response was "no it isn't, that's the dot product" (a concept that isn't introduced till much later in math).

I just find it quite interesting that all 3 of them found it interesting enough to take a math test for a class that they weren't in on a Saturday morning. Definately an interesting household!

Tags : math / test / cahill / algebra / calculus