the gookins dot net

I can’t let the entire month go by without posting something. Sadly, facebook has taken over as my online outlet. Mainly because I can just post stupid shit there without having to actually think about anything. So, in case I’m not on your friend list yet, here’s my message to you:

Friend me! I’m at: http://www.facebook.com/don.gookin

That is all.

Heather makes some interesting points regarding how we, as homeschooling parents, respond to the “What about socialization?” question that seems to revisit us all too often.

Never once do you hear a homeschooler say, “Socialization with other kids? What makes you think they need it?”
There are problems with defending your homeschooled kids’ social development with a list of their social activities. Not only does it reinforce the idea that children somehow NEED other children around them to be mentally healthy, it makes attaining that goal seem like an exhausting task.

Go read the whole thing, before I end up block-quoting the entire thing, cuz it’s all good.

…and testing a post.

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 using the Automatic Upgrade Plugin which seemed to be more of a pain in the butt than anything since it didn’t actually backup my files or database. I’m not sure if it actually put any new files on the server either, but the dashboard says I have 2.5.1 now so I guess I do.

So the big test is to see if the image uploading works correctly…

Nope. Still does the same thing. I’m sick of Wordpress. Time to start testing out some other blogging platforms.

My little sister has a blog now. She only has one post up, so we need to encourage her to keep writing. She’s a photographer too and has a nice gallery of her work, so head over and check it out:

Denise’s blog.

I installed Wordpress 2.5 last night. So far, I’m not real impressed.

I’ll say right up front that I know I’m the biggest jerk in the world for complaining about something I get completely free. But here’s what I think anyway.

There was all this hype about the redesign of the admin pages. So the layout has changed a little and the menus are a little different, but what’s the BFD about that? It’s like re-arranging your living room furniture and telling everyone you built an addition.

And supposedly the dashboard is now controlled by widgets so you can customize it. But where do you do that? The widgets menu only seems to have widgets for the actual blog pages. So I googled to find out how you do it. You either have to manually edit the dashboard file, or install a dashboard manager plugin. But the thing is, there was already a dashboard editor plugin for the old Wordpress, so what’s the difference? You’d think that if they were going through the trouble of widgetizing the dashboard, they’d build the manager in too. That’s like installing a CD player in your car, but leaving the speakers out.

The thing that’s really irritating me though, is that I can’t seem to get the image uploader to work. When you click the little “add image” icon, it opens the uploader, let’s you browse to select a file, acts like its uploading, and then even increments the number on the gallery tab. But click on the gallery tab or go to the media library, and nothing’s there. I’ve tried everything I can think of to get it to work. I re-uploaded the “async-upload” file, I CHMOD’d the uploads folder and all it’s subfolders for write access, and I even made sure the right path was in the settings page. Nothing seems to work. Supposedly there are fixes for some similar problems using an .htaccess file, but apparently my webhosting is set up not to allow .htaccess files below the root level or something because when I tried that it gave me an internal server error. RRRRRGGGHHH! To get the pictures in the post below, I had to upload them via FTP and then insert the image URL into the post. That would be a real pain in the ass to do on an ongoing basis. If anyone has other suggestions I’d love to hear them.

Update: I tried updating Flash as COD suggested and still no luck with uploading pics. I can insert images that are already on the server, I just can’t get any new images to upload.

If you missed John Scalzi’s homeschooling post last week, in which people made all the typical arguments for and against homeschooling in the comments section, he has another post up today that outshines it in terms of pure, internet bickering goodness. The topic? The existence of God. OK, that’s not the real topic, but it does come up in the discussion. The post is actually about Vox Day’s book “The Irrational Atheist” in which Mr. Day (not his real name by the way) attempts to refute the arguments put forth by some of the so-called “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.

I haven’t read the book, but then again I haven’t read any of the atheist books either (except about half of The God Delusion), so I really have no opinion on that. But I do love me a good, rousing, comments-section argument complete with quote-mining, people going off on tangents, misrepresenting what others have said, and trying to change topics in mid-stream. It’s almost like watching a political campaign except nobody there is as eloquent as Barack Obama. At last check, there were 435 comments and counting. Go check it out if you dare.

Late last summer I started working on my first web design project where someone was actually paying me to build something for them. Working lunch hours and evenings, I built a website for a local company which was actually more like a custom content management system. That is to say, all the content of the site can be controlled by them through custom admin pages. (Kind of like a blog, but without the RSS feed). I would give you a link to the site by they haven’t added any content yet, so they still have the “coming soon” page up. Anyway, early on I had designed a cool looking homepage for the site and it looked great in Firefox. It also worked in IE 7.0, but not in earlier versions of Internet Explorer. I discovered that the problem was with Microsoft’s seeming lack of ability to make a standards-compliant browser. It’s very frustrating as a web designer/developer to write good code only to have it break when viewed in a certain browser. I realized that I could have hacked my code to detect different browser versions and served up a different stylesheet/homepage combination for each one, but that seemed like a royal pain in the butt. Not to mention that it would need to be updated whenever new browser versions were released. So instead, I changed the design to something that I liked less, but nonetheless worked in older versions of IE as well as Firefox. Which kind of sucks, but the reality is that many users of the site will be using a browser where the page would appear broken, and you can’t just ignore them.

Anyway I bring all this up because Joel Spolsky has a good article up on the whole issue of standards compliance for web browsers. If you are interested in web design and development, you’ve probably read his blog thingy, Joel on Software. If not, you should.

My ol’ buddy Meister, (hippie leftover, peace activist and frequent commenter here) now has a blog of his own. Stranger in an Even Stranger Land. Although it looks like he’s already slacking off on the posting a bit, you might want to check it out.

The 90 Day Jane blog is back up (with a slightly modified URL), but she’s skipped ahead to day 0. No, she didn’t kill herself. It wasn’t real. Day 0 is the explanation. She says it was a “personal art project” and she expected it to go largely unnoticed. I’m not sure if I believe that either, but the main sentiment of the post seems genuine:

It is my feeling that the internet is the best and worst example of human interaction. This was painfully proven to me by reading every comment and every email. I believe I owed that to everyone. I know we all saw the dark side of the reactions in the blog comments. There was so much hate, immaturity and apathy. But, I truly wish everyone could see the beauty and honesty in the emails; many people feel like Jane (me). People have been more real and heartfelt than I thought was possible. I owe them a debt of gratitude for showing me the difference between people’s reactions and their true feelings. I understand.

Have you heard the buzz about 90 Day Jane? It’s all over the internet. “Jane” is going to kill herself in 90 days, and is documenting her last days in a blog.

I don’t believe it. As soon as I read this in her profile, something didn’t seem right:

I’m not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to? I mean, as an atheist I feel life has no greater purpose. My generation has had no great depression, no great war and our biggest obstacle is beating Halo 3. So, if I feel like saying “game over”, why can’t I?

First of all, nobody just commits suicide for no reason. When someone is suicidal, it is because they are distraught, depressed, or sometimes psychotic.
Second, the bit about feeling that life has no greater purpose because she’s an atheist seems bogus. It’s true that atheists don’t believe in a “greater purpose” (Heaven, eternal life, etc.) but for every atheist that I know of, this just highlights the importance of living, and our own control over the course that our lives take. Asking “if there’s no God, what’s the point of life?” is a typical evangelical Christian line of questioning for atheists, which makes me suspect that the author of this blog has an ulterior motive. Others think so as well.

Aside from all that, it all just seems kind of pathetic. Whether real or not makes no difference. If it is real, then she seems pathetic for taking such a casual view of suicide and of the importance of her own life. If it’s fake, she seems pathetic for resorting to something like this for attention, or whatever her goal is. And it seems sort of pathetic that there are scads of people all over the internet drawn to watch it unfold, and some even encouraging her to go ahead and do it now.

OK, so apparently Heather was trying to start an argument by tagging both Christine and I to do this 6 random things meme, but the twist is we’re supposed to do each others’ list. Since Christine already did mine, I won’t repeat the rules again, you can just get them from her post. So here we go:

1. Once or twice a week, Christine puts puppies in a blender to make herself a delicious, nutritious puppy shake.
2. She once dated Bob Denver of Gilligan’s Island fame.
3. On her back, she has a tattoo of a monkey riding on a bald eagle.
4. She’s part bug.
5. She saves her belly-button lint in a jar.
6. She knows the all words to every Barry Manilow song ever recorded.

OK, I actually made all of those up. Here’s the real list:

1. Christine cannot whistle.
2. She is an organization freak. She will reorganize closets, bookshelves, or entire rooms at the drop of a hat. She starts by removing everything from the target area into an enormous pile that looks like it will never get sorted out, but then she goes through it all and it comes out OK.
3. She doesn’t like to cook. She can do it, but she just doesn’t like to.
4. She’s addicted to Burt’s Bees lip balm.
5. She once owned an AMC Gremlin.
6. She cuts the tags out of all of her shirts because they annoy her.

I’ve no one left to tag, so it’s open for anyone who wants it.

Justyna has a beautifully written post up, go check it out. I couldn’t agree with it more.

I typically sleep only about 5 to 6 hours most nights. I wake up just about every morning and start thinking about all the things I need to do, or should do, or would like to do, but I just don’t have the time or the energy to get done. The last couple weeks I’ve thinking about these things more and more, and thinking about how I really need to stop thinking so much and just get off my ass and get stuff done. I considered making these things into New Years resolutions, but I hate New Years resolutions, so I ignored that. But here we are, ten days into 2008 and I’m just getting more frustrated.

The major problem is that my typical day is 18-19 hours long and I still don’t have enough time to do everything. So I examined the things I spend my time on, and made a list of the things I want to focus on this year (they’re not resolutions though, dammit!) and I’ve decided that I need to spend less time blogging. Not that I write a lot, but I definitely spend an inordinate amount of time reading the blogs I subscribe to, and the blogs that those blogs link to, and the articles that pop up at all of them. So I’m taking some time off from the internet. I’ll still be popping in from time to time to check up on things, but just not so much as now. Don’t mess up the place while I’m gone.

kthxbye.

Well, the great divide between the “secular” homeschoolers and the “Christian” homeschoolers is ever widening. I put quotes around secular and Christian simply because this division is entirely artificial. Many who are lumped into the secular group are actually Christian, but apparently not Christian enough for those who refer to themselves as Christian. And the group that refers to itself as Christian, is really only a subset of Christians, for whom a more accurate title would be evangelical, fundamentalist Christians. Many who fall into the group of evangelical, fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers do not, in my opinion, behave in a very Christ-like fashion.

At first I thought I would summarize all the issues between the two groups, but I think I would have to write a book to do that. Some of it centers around controversies that don’t matter that much when you look at the big picture, such as the Homeschool Blog Awards purposely excluding blogs that didn’t live up to their worldview. Big deal. They can have their flowery little homogeneous contest. Some of it centers around the Christian dominionists at HSLDA, and their attempts to be the voice of homeschoolers, even though there are many of us they do not speak for. That also may not make a huge difference in the long run.

There is another point of contention though, that does matter. About a year and a half ago, many of us (Christian and non-Christian alike) agreed to participate in a boycott of This Old Schoolhouse magazine, and HomeschoolBlogger.com because they accepted advertising from and supported the teachings of Michael and Debi Pearl. The Pearls are the authors of the book “To Train Up a Child”, which is a supposedly biblical-based parenting manual. Except that it advocates harsh corporal punishment, to the extent that it has been described as a child-abuse manual. In February 2006, a 4-year-old child named Sean Paddock was killed by his mother, who had followed the advice in the Pearl’s book. Fast forward to the present, when some of the evangelical, fundamentalist Christian bloggers are complaining that this boycott is an attack on Christians, while other, more moderate bloggers are saying that it is at the very least an overreaction.

But I beg to differ. When it comes to abusing children, complacency is not the answer. And the owners of the Old Schoohouse and HomeschoolBlogger.com are not just complacent. They have actively supported the Pearls by using their products in promotions, and issuing a press statement defending them. I have read To Train Up a Child (you can too; the full text is posted here) and I thought it was repulsive. I described it in a post back then, but I will repeat it now:
The authors of this book advocate hitting infants that try to get up during their nap time: “to get up is to be on the firing line and get switched back down”. They describe hitting a child “with all the force she could possibly muster without standing for a wind-up” and hitting that same child so hard that “I heard a little karate like wheeze come from somewhere deep inside”. They continually talk about “conquering the child’s will” and continuing until the child is “totally broken”. I simply can’t support any business that advocates that kind of behavior. And I don’t limit my opposition to just the above mentioned sites. We have on several occasions declined to purchase books from other (offline) vendors when they were also selling the Pearl’s book.

Bottom line: Yes, there is a division between the so-called Christian and secular homeschoolers. There are reasons for this, some of which are inconsequential, and others of which matter a great deal. No, I don’t care if the two sides are ever unified, and as long as the other side can’t understand our opposition to supporting child abuse, it will never happen.

I can’t help it. I have to do this. Five minutes for mom is giving away a year of free movies and popcorn. Movies courtesy of Netflix, and popcorn courtesy of Orville Redenbacher.