Hello, my name is Mr. Malley

I found a site that will turn an uploaded portrait into a Simpson’s character.

All you do is upload a picture of yourself, answer a few questions, and it creates the character.

Even though I was wearing glasses in the picture I used, I had to add them manually. And, it turned my soul patch into a massive goatee, so I had to change that back.

I uploaded two different pictures and it gave me the same guy. If you try it out, email me the resulting picture. I’d be curious to know how many different characters they select from for each go.

… perfectly legitimate way to spend your time.

I came across this video this morning (that was supposedly animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone) showcasing the ideas of philosopher, writer, and speaker, Alan Watts, whom I don’t know much about other than what you see here:

For obvious reasons, this hit home with me. I’ve spent a lot of the past three to five years very ambitiously trying to build my career and my business. I’ve spent a great deal of effort working toward something. Now that I have a kid, I’ve had no choice in slowing down … enjoying the ride, I suppose.

I guess you could say I listen to the music now.

Update: I have found a much better format of this video here.

After fifteen minutes of trouble-shooting why IE6 was rendering this blog incorrectly, I did a search on how long IE6 will remain the scourge of my designs. Apparently, I’ll be fixing my sites for IE6 for a long time to come.

Here are some statistics from my business site, which has received 5,502 unique visitors in the past 30 days:

• 47% of them visited using Internet Explorer
• Of that group, 40% were using Internet Explorer 6

So, if my math is correct, 19% of the visitors to my site are still using IE6 - an obsolete web browser that renders web pages unlike any other, without regard to universal standards.

From now on, if you visit this site using IE6, I have added a script that will present a gentle reminder that your browser sucks, along with a link to Save the Developers - a site devoted to ridding the world of IE6 users.

If you see this reminder in your browser (and are using an operating system newer than Windows 2000), please do me the favor of upgrading now!

Each year, my Advanced Placement Psychology students are given the opportunity to take the AP Exam for college credit in Psychology. This year, 57 students took my class. Of them, 54 are taking the exam.

Advanced Placement is a product owned by the College Board - the same organization responsible for the SAT. The test that my students will be taking is a national achievement test established to gauge understanding of Psychology. It costs them $82.00 each, but the benefit is that most colleges and universities offer college credit for decent scores.

Last year, I had a number of students who could have done well enough to receive college credit not take the test due to their own insecurity. I want all students who make it through my class to take the AP Exam. Why do all the work and not get the reward?

This year, I added the incentive of an automatic ‘A’ on the class final exam to all students who take the AP Exam. My logic in doing so is that the AP Exam is our class exam. Since I won’t be able to see their scores on that exam until sometime in July, I have no way of assigning them a grade for their exam before the year ends. Therefore, they get an ‘A’.

And, I’m happy to say that it worked: ninety-five percent of them are taking the exam.

Now, I just need to get them to study!

After 10 years of owning a computer, I’ve started backing up. It’s silly that I’ve waited this long, especially considering the number of hours I’ve spent amassing the large sum of data on my hard drive. The truth is I’ve been pretty lucky and have never had a complete data loss have only had one complete data loss on a computer that held a bunch of games and college papers.

Here’s what I got:

Iomega 33720 UltraMax 1 TB FireWire 800 Desktop Hard Drive

I bought this drive from Amazon for under $300.00. Its 1 TB is divided over two drives, which I have decided to use independently.

On one drive, I’m backing up using Leopard’s Time Machine. This is my “oh crap, I can’t believe I just saved over that file” backup. Time machine is great for going “back in time” to retrieve a previous version of a file. It keeps hourly backups of the past day, daily backups of the past week, and weekly backups until the drive you’re using it on is full. Then, I presume it just starts deleting the oldest week saved.

On the other drive, I’m backing up the same data using “Shirt Pocket’s” SuperDuper software. This is my “oh crap, my hard drive just completely crashed and I need to boot from an external drive to keep working” backup. This is the catastrophic situation backup I’ve needed for a long time.

Overall, the drive works well. It came pre-formatted in HFS, so I was able to just plug it into my iMac and go. It is somewhat noisy, though. The fan on its backside is about 5 times as loud as my iMac, and every read and write is quite audible. It’s loud enough that I’ll probably move it off of my desktop as soon as I buy a longer Firewire 800 cable. But, even so, it’s buzz is not nearly loud enough to distract me from my work.

You wouldn’t think I’d be so excited about a technology purchase that does nothing for me unless something goes terribly wrong! Even so, it does what it does quite well and it’s a relief to know that I’m covered.

Last weekend, I made a trip up to Grand Rapids to buy one of those fancy new iMac’s that were released last month. All summer, I was saving for a Mac Pro because I wasn’t impressed with the performance of the old iMac, and I wanted something that would really cruise.

Even when the iMac was released, I wasn’t all that convinced. I kept telling myself that I wanted something that I could upgrade in a few years if I needed to, and that the iMac just wasn’t for a “techy” guy like me.

Then, I realized … I have a five year old Dell that I am now using as a print server and jukebox that has never seen an upgrade.

What can I say? I like new stuff. Why spend $3500 on a Mac Pro and Monitor when the iMac does everything I need?

In the end, I bought a 24-inch 2.8 GHz iMac with a full three years of AppleCare. I figure I’ll want a new computer in three years, anyway. And, in truth, this computer is powerful enough that it will still compete in three years anyway. No compromise was necessary.

So, how ’bout some specs:

• 24-inch glossy widescreen LCD (1920×1200px)
• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2×1GB
• 500 GB Hard Drive
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• TI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory
• AirPort Extreme
• Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

And, of course, here it is:

Part 1: My Quiz Policy

Last year, I gave random quizzes in AP Psychology on a “variable ratio schedule of reinforcement.” My logic was that if students never knew when there would be a quiz, then they would always come prepared.

This, I learned, is untrue. What students did instead was search out possible patterns of behavior in my quizzing schedule. They would say things like “I didn’t think there would be a quiz today” or “Why do you always give a quiz on the days I don’t think there will be one.” They would guess whether they would have a quiz or not, and shape their behavior around that guess. If they didn’t think there would be a quiz, they wouldn’t study. If they thought there might be one, they would.

This is not the type of behavior I want to encourage. Based on the recommendation of last year’s AP class, I decided this year to give a daily reading quiz, reinforcing reading on a continuous schedule.

Part 2: My Quiz Make-up Policy

High school juniors and seniors have hundreds of reasons to miss my class. Many of them are unjustifiable. For example, it is reasonable for me to expect that students schedule vacations, senior pictures, extended lunches, routine doctor’s appointments, etc. around my class.

Based on this logic, last year’s AP students could not make up missed quizzes in my class. They went into the book as a zero. However, since I know that we’re all human, and that we occasionally cannot prevent missing class (illness, certain medical appointments, etc.), I dropped the lowest quiz score from calculation. This, in a sense, allowed each student one missed class every marking period (9 weeks), or two per semester.

Part 3: The Problem

I can’t help but wonder whether this is too strict, especially considering that I am now planning to give quizzes every single class period. If my classes meet five times every two weeks, that’s approximately 24 quizzes every marking period.

Perhaps I could offer extra work in the form of research that would make up for their lowest two scores. This would allow them the opportunity to turn their two lowest scores into high scores, offsetting the effect that an absense would have on their grade.

This, of course, would force me to do more work. I would have to not only read, comment on, and assess the papers produced by the make-up research, but I would have to come up with the research topics, something I would have to do in advance to anticipate students wanting to take the opportunity. After all, these are highly motivated students I’m talking about.

And, would these research papers be punitive? If so, then its not worth doing. Why create more work for my students if it does not reinforce learning the content I wanted them to know in the first place.

Part 4: The Solution

One thing that I would definitely like to do is create a menu of research questions/topics from which students must choose to present on at least once/twice per marking period. These presentations could be “multimedia” (podcast, blog, video, oral, paper, etc.). Questions would range from historical to analytical. Quizzes could be made up by completing additional questions from that list.

Now I think I’m on to something!

This year, all students will be required to present on one topic of their choice from a list of topics that I provide. This list will grow throughout the year; as I find new topics I will simply add them to the list. These presentations can use any media and will be graded using a rubric that I will have to make that assesses their understanding of the topic that they are presenting on.

If students miss class, they can make up the quiz by presenting on another topic of their choice.

Note: exceptions will of course be made for long-term extenuating circumstances (i.e. illness or tragedy).

This should a.) make absences undesirable, and b.) encourage in-depth study in psychology, and c.) actually boost the students grade by allowing them the opportunity to turn a zero into full credit.

I always like to see where people work. It puts things into perspective a little bit for me. With that in mind, I took some snapshots of my classroom this morning. Here they are:

A few notes that I suppose might be necessary:

• The trophy is a 1990s third place women’s weight-lifting trophy. It was a gift from a student last year. I collect trophies and give them away to AP Psychology students as prizes for the “highest test score.” It’s my silly way of recognizing hard work (that I learned from Charles Blair-Broeker).
• The sign hanging on the trophy was left in my room by Tuba Steve - another student. I’m not sure of its origin, but I think its purpose is clear.
• I like lamps. There is something soothing about incandescent lightbulbs. In the morning, I will turn the lamps on along with a single row of ceiling lights. I bought them at Good Will. They have a certain “Uncle Malley” feel that my students tend to appreciate.
• The graffiti on the wall was done by a guy named Woody. It stands for Small Town Skate Crew. Last I heard, he was moving somewhere warm to skate under a sponsor - he’s really good. I really need to cover that back bulletin board. I left it uncovered all last year. Hence, Woody’s desire to tag my boring wall.

Ok, so I’m obsessed. So, shoot me. This recent price drop should mean that I can actually afford one now. I would have bought one anyway, just now it feels a little more justifiable (to those of you who do not read to every word spoken by Steve Jobs, the iPhone price was dropped $200 yesterday). This means that the refurbished iPhone price has dropped $250.

Yes friends, in October my Verizon contract runs out and I run to apple.com like a little girl getting her first Barbie. I don’t care if AT&T’s service map says I live in nowhere. I’ll try it anyway!

I don’t know why, but I can never sleep the night before the first day. Last night, I stayed up later than I should have (11:30), I tossed and turned throughout the night, and then awoke at 4:12am unable to go back to sleep. So, I got up. I drank coffee. I downloaded some music. Then, I grabbed the iPod and was out the door by 6am.

I just don’t function well on such little sleep. I’m a real active sort of guy. I teach as if I’m a rugby coach, for crying out loud. My mojo doesn’t work when I don’t get my z’s! Rather, I stutter, stammer, and my mind traverses every corner of my mind. “Am I going too fast? Am I going to slow? Should I be covering all this on the first day? Should I be covering more? Why are they all staring at me? Ahhhh!!!!”

I’m not like that when I’m rested.

Anyway, it is done. The school year has begun, and I have been introduced to all of my classes. Let the fun begin.