Let me start by saying...I love my wife.

We have decided that we're not having children for at least a year (closer to two). That's good.

Here's the problem: Here in Georgia, BY LAW, a child cannot start Kindergarten before the age of 5, and cannot start First Grade before the age of 6.

Before she actually did the research we jokingly (but really seriously) discussed moving to Japan in a couple of years and educating our children there. After she got home and found that some sort of move was actually in order, she obsessed a little bit.

She has declared that we have to move to Massachusetts. Maybe Idaho. (If not Japan.) Perhaps we'll end up homeschooling, like Marce and Drew.

See y'all later.

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Morning, folkz.

The (very) observant of you have noticed that I've made a few small but personally-pleasing changes to Chopage over the last month or two. Mainly I removed a lot of the extra icons and graphics and stuff from the template. I think the result is cleaner. Later I may play with the colors a bit.

Well, I recently made a few more changes. At the bottom of the right-hand side of the side of Chopage, you'll see a "Get Connected" section. Now you can get my random musings directly to your Inbox, rather than using RSS, or even having to actually navigate to the page. If you choose to continue using RSS, then I've made a few changes to that, too. First, I've piped everything through Feedburner. This allows me to track how many people are actually reading this stuff. Don't worry. No personal information is being collected, or anything. Feedburner also provides me with buttons that you can use to add me directly to your My Yahoo! page or to your Google homepage. Pretty sweet huh? If you choose to use another tool, then just click on the icon, and do go to "Copy Link Location" if you're using Firefox or "Copy Shortcut" if for some reason you're still using Explorer. Then tell your feed reader you want to add a new feed and that you have the URL, and copy the clipboard contents into the URL field.

If this is your first RSS feed, then I'm sure this sounds a bit complicated, but welcome to RSS! If you're seasoned, then this is old hat, and totally unnecessary. Coincidentally, the little example RSS icon isn't just for show. It works too. If you happen to just click on the icon, then Feedburner will also help you do all this.

Lastly, I've added a button that you can use to e-mail me directly. This should be handy in case you don't want to necessarily want to comment on a post and leave your rantings alongside mine. You can just e-mail me and tell me personally how wrong (or hopefully how right) I am.

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Apparently not.

Another blog that I've found recently is Idea Festival. Idea Festival is also an event. I probably won't make it this year, but perhaps 2007. It's a pretty humbling site - a pretty constant stream of really smart people's reflections and thoughts on different subjects combined with current intelligent events. I honestly feel smarter and more knowledgeable from reading it.

What caught my eye enough to share with you today is Citizendium. It seems one of the co-founders of Wikipedia has come to the conclusion that Wikipedia, while a noble and valuable resource in its own right, is good, but could be better. He is building a better Wikipedia. The main differences are quality and qualifications.

The goal is to create a "citizen's compendium of expertise" that tempers the vast resources of and contributions to Wikipedia with expert guidance. The result should be a more concise and accurate resource. The anonymity of Wikipedia will be abandoned, and instead the actual names of contributors will be revealed, for all to see. If all goes according to plan, there will be more fact, and less opinion. More objectivity, and less subjectivity. Citizendium will use as it's foundation the "current" content of Wikipedia, and evolve from there. It should be an interesting trip, to be sure.

So, if you think you're "kind of a big deal" in, well, just about anything, keep your eyes on Citizendium. Better yet, sign up to be a Constable or a Subject Editor. This has the POTENTIAL to pretty ground-breaking, but right now, it's just that - potential.


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I've got a few blog spots that I check out on a regular basis. This comes to me via design sponge.

mi-workshop is a graphics and furniture design house owned and operated by Miki Iwasaki. Miki earned his Bachelor of Architecture Degree from California Polytechnic University, and then went on to earn his Master of Architecture Degree from Harvard. The scholar in me is supremely impressed by that. He also spent a year studying at the Kyushu Institute of Design in Japan.

Miki's furniture work shows that he shares my appreciation for wood furniture. Not that veneered stuff that is a dime-a-dozen, but real wood.

Check out the Ray Shelf. There's a high probability that you'll see this hanging just inside my front door one day:


Hotness. Know What I'm Sayin'??

Blogger just released a bunch of upgrades, but in order to get access to them, you have to take your whole account through a metamorphosis. Seems like there are a lot of changes to your account going on when you make the switch to the Beta version.

There are a few changes I've been looking to make to my template, so I took the plunge.

One of the biggest changes is that it merges your Blogger account with your GMail account. Nothing wrong with that. The changes made to your template - acceptable, but not earth-shattering.

The negative thing: I can't leave comments on non-updated Blogs! My account is no longer compatible with the the previous Blogger version.

That means that I can't leave Marcy a message about how cool it is that she won a contest, and got something for free. (Even if it is just some yarn. I just don't have the yarn fetish that the knitters have. Her commenters are excited about this yarn, people.)

This also means that I can't leave Russatta a message about how her mom hasn't changed a bit, even though I haven't seen her in like 15-ish years.

I can't even ask Irene why she hasn't written anything all week.

Not cool.

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Y'all know who Steve Irwin is, right? The Crocodile Hunter? (Or rather, who he was)

He passed away early this morning, a handful of timezones away, when he was shooting a segment for a series called Ocean's Deadliest. Apparently, he swam a bit too close to a stingray, and the ray stung him. Normally, stingray injuries are not fatal at all. Somehow, because of his proximity, and the angle of entry, the stingray's tail managed to puncture Irwin under his ribcage, and penetrate all the way to his heart.

Not that you should have any trouble finding the article, but here is a link to the Atlanta Journal Constitution article.

Imagine the ratings that episode of Ocean's Deadliest will get!
Was that in bad taste?

To tell you the truth, I doubt he'd have wanted to go out any other way.

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...strictly speaking, voice-wise, Dennis Haysbert is the next James Earl Jones. I'm not talking about the next few years, either. I mean NOW.

Just wanted to put it out there. You heard it here first, peeps.

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...at the top of many Blogger blogs is a pretty interesting thing. It just sends you to a random blog. *POOF* Some you can't read, because they're clearly in an another language. Some are madness. Sometimes you find one that actually catches your interest for some odd reason, like Irene's Space.

Irene is a 7-year-old girl from India, who is now living in Japan with her parents, and her younger brother, Ian. Her writing is typical 7-year-old fare: young and simple, but fresh. Her thinking reflects something that I think most children here in the States don't have. Take today's post, for instance. Here it is, in it's entirety:

These are the names I like. Flora, Bachu , Angelina , Angela , Isabella , Anica , Anushka , Annika , Irene , Lila , Julia , Nithya.Names are all around the world , in every country , every state.

What is your name ? Do you like your name ? Why ? Why not ? Which names do you like ? Which names are the names you do not like ? Think about your names in different ways . Remmember always some start with A , B , C , D , E and lots of letters.Thats what I"m talking about , names.

I suppose because at such a young age, she's already probably visited several countries other than Japan and India, but she's not just thinking about Japan and India. She also has latched on to the fact that just about anyone could be reading her words. She's inquisitive. She takes one subject, and looks at it from different perspectives, which is a skill that, in my opinion, many people many times her age still have not mastered. Not to mention that she's writing in at least her second, but perhaps even her THIRD language. I don't know what it is about her writing that I like, but I think I'll keep up with her.

Keep writing, Irene.

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