Southland–TV Show Review

January 1st, 2011

Southland is a cop show on TNT. Somehow even though we are big fans of cop shows and watch a lot of TNT I’d never seen it before this weekend. Then I got a Tweet from Klout (the Twitter grading site) letting me know I had a “Klout Perk.” In short I was given a free online preview to the new season opener and some goodies of some sort to follow. Hey, sure I’ll watch. There is no obligation but honestly if you give me stuff I’m going to watch the show and probably comment on it. I don’t promise a positive review and the last time they did this for me I panned the show. (Lone Star TV Show Review – show closed after one or two episodes so I was not alone in not liking it.)

So I watched it. It’s hard to jump in on a series like this at the start of a fourth season. The characters now have full backstories and histories and a new viewer doesn’t know them. I found the start of this episode a little slow but perhaps that was because they were trying to (re) introduce the characters. And there are a bunch of characters. Some of the characters I liked – some not as much. I find people who are dealing with so much pain that they are trying to get black-market drugs rather than seeing a doctor too stupid to be sympathetic for example.

Like a lot of these shows there were multiple crimes to investigate. I don’t mind the switching from case to case, group of characters to group of characters too much. At the same time I find that it makes story development light and details are not so important as when one case is the heart of the whole episode. Not that the plots were poorly done – they were done well. I think this show is more about the characters than the crimes. While a show (think CSI, NCIS, The Closer to name a few I love) can do both the crime and the characters Southland is clearly just about the characters with the crimes a story to hang the character interaction around.

Would I watch Southland again? Yes, I probably would.  It’s worth a second watching. Maybe a third. I can see how one could get invested in some of the characters. There are enough of them and they are enough different types that is is not so hard to find one or more to really like. It would just take a little time. On the other hand, I’m not programming it into my DVR just yet though.

Disclosure: I was given a free product or sample because I’m a Klout influencer. I was under no obligation to receive the sample or talk about this company. I get no additional benefits for talking about the product or company.

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Postpone is not the same as Cancel

December 27th, 2010

I am so tired of reporters saying that a football game has been cancelled and will now be played on Tuesday. The game was not cancelled. If it had been cancelled it would never be played. It has been postponed which means it will still be played. It will just be played at a different time than originally scheduled.

It’s not just reporters of course. I hear this mistake on a regular basis but news people should understand words. Words matter. Using the right word enhances communication and that is what reporters should largely be about.

Arrg, there – I just screamed on the Internet. Smile

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Bill Gates–The Great Satan of Education Reform

November 22nd, 2010

Business and education are different. And that is putting it mildly. One of the big disconnects is how salaries are calculated and raises are assigned. In education people basically get raises based on two things: longevity and education. In industry experience counts for setting salaries and raises are determined based on some sorts of measurable metrics of accomplishment. In education just getting a degree is grounds for a raise. In business/Industry a new degree doesn’t count for any automatic increase. The assumption is that the education you have acquired will improve your ability and performance and so will be rewarded based on improved performance.

Bill Gates is suggesting (see Gates Urges School Budget Overhauls) that the education model be more like the industry model. He is calling for an end to automatic step increases and separate higher pay levels for advanced degrees. Rather he is pushing for pay for performance. Needless to say teacher unions are not happy about this.

The issue is more complicated than Bill Gates seems to think it is. It’s also more important to deal with than I think the teacher unions think it is. First off pay for performance is not as easy or working out as well at Gates thinks it is. W Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality control in much of the world, was a serious critic of the practice. His view was that there was too much subjectivity and actually much less variance between most employees to justify the differences in raises. While he believed in exceptional performers who were worthy of higher raises he was basically more of a supported of education style raises. Experience and training generally did result in better performance and Deming believed in training as a key to better productivity and performance. In education the evaluation of performance is also a lot harder than in a lot of jobs. The base it all on test scored ideal is seriously flawed for starters. People who don’t understand education really don’t seem to get that. They are looking for easy to gather metrics and have grabbed on to some that are a lot less reliable than they think they are.

On the teacher side I think many ignore the truth that there is a difference, as one superintendent of schools put it to me, between 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 times. Years if experience is the same sort of simple solution that pay for test results is. That is it seems logical and objective but it ignores basic realities of how people operate. Some people get into a rut and never improve – or worse degrade over time. Many people do get better over time but even so not all at the same rate. And then there is the issue of training. There are teachers who actively look for and take training as a way to improve their practice. There are also teachers who attend training so that they can retain certification/licensure but have no intentions of letting that training change the way they do things. And yet the second group is rewarded in the same way the first group is. That seems somehow wrong to many people.

Ultimately we do need to reform schools I believe. But it is not going to happen unless educators are an active part of the discussion rather than the targets of reformers. Both sides need to understand the other, listen to the other, and be willing to explain why an idea is good or not good rather than just saying “no.” Bill Gates is not against good education. Teachers are not against improving the way education is delivered. But you’d never know that from the rhetoric. Dialogue is what we need but I don’t see anyone really working at making that happen. Rather we see each side (or multiple sides in some cases) just trying to marshal the public, who are generally way in over their heads in education discussions, against the other. This seems to be to be doomed to failure with our students and ultimately the country as the loser.

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Being a Grown Up

November 15th, 2010

When one is a kid one sort of wants things they shouldn’t have. Like a lot of ice cream. Since you can’t drive and don’t have control of money you can’t get them unless your parent(s) get them. for you. Your parents are adults and have/take responsibility so you get ice cream sometimes but seldom as much as you want.

Eventually you become an adult and have money and can drive. You can make your own decisions. But somehow you don’t have ice cream (for example) every day and twice on Sunday. Why? When and why do you somehow become the responsible “good” decision maker? One of life’s mysteries.

Note that as I write this I am eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup and Maraschino cherries. I don’t do this often but in a way its nice to know I have the option. That’s part of being an adult to. Right?

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Education Professionals and Non Professionals Running Schools

November 2nd, 2010

So my thing to wonder about today is the various attitudes about non-education professionals in education. Specifically it seems that a lot of education professionals attack people like Bill Gates and other would be school reformers from industry and politics for their efforts. They say these are not professional educators and so should stay out of things. OK I can see that line of argument but here is the rub. Most of those same people are strong supporters of local school boards whose memberships are totally made up of, wait for it, non education professionals.

And in fact my experience is that most school board members do less homework and study about education that the big name non-education professional “reformers.” Anyone else see the contradiction here?

Now I have spent time on a school board, six years on the board of a private Catholic K-8 school, time on a public school budget committee (an elected position BTW), and 9 years as a classroom teacher. I’m not sure that makes me an education professional but I do think it makes me more aware of the issues than the average person. And based on those experiences I have concerns about the way we fill school boards for public schools. Some concern about private school boards as well but actually less because the process of selecting board members is very different. But that is a topic for another post.

What I want in someone who makes policy suggestions/decisions for schools is someone who knows what they are talking about. Ideally they read a lot, talk to a lot of people who are education professionals, and have some experience in the classroom – not as a student. This does not fit most school board members but except for the classroom experience does fit a lot of the business and political people who are interested in the issues. So why do people who oppose them support local non-professional school boards? I have a theory.

School boards get almost all of their information from the professional running the school/district. The control of information is the control of the agenda and for the most part of the decisions. The result is that the professionals largely control the board’s decisions. You can see why the critics of school reforms would like this. Educated free-thinkers are generally not welcome on school boards. By controlling information to other interested groups (the PTA can be a very powerful force especially in small town elections) superintendents can often help make sure that board members who disagree with them have a short tenure in office.

Am I being cynical? I don’t think so. I think that many educators who oppose outside reformers and yet support non-professionals on school boards do so only because they know that opposing any sort of outside control is doomed to failure. having ignorant school boards is the next best thing, in their eyes, than no school board at all.

Am I wrong? I’d love to hear (read) a better explanation.

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Questions? Do I get questions?

October 24th, 2010

In short yes I do. I have gotten used to being asked all sorts of questions. Apparently people expect me to know about everything even remotely related to Microsoft.

  • “My printer doesn’t talk to my new computer?”
  • “When is such and such a product coming out?”
  • “What can you say about this court case Microsoft is in?”
  • “Such and such product doesn’t want to install, can you tell me why?”

Answers? Yeah, sometimes I have answers. People don’t like all of them though. For example, the printer not talking to your computer is probably because you don’t have an updated driver and that is the printer companies responsibility not Microsoft’s. It’s amazing how often I get asked about hardware BTW. Not the rare piece of hardware that Microsoft actually sells under their own name but some object that is advertised as working with Windows.

And the occasional Apple question. Why? No idea. I guess because it is a computer.

For products, Microsoft comes out with all sorts of products all the time. I don’t work with all of them. I’m not a gamer and I don’t work in the game group so I have no idea (or much interest most of the time) when new editions of games are coming out. And if I knew but it hasn’t been announced publically I can’t (will not) tell you any way. Chances are that if the product/game/what ever is important to you than you already know as much about the release date as I do. And if I know more?  Sorry, but I really like my job and announcing product release dates is way above my pay grade.

Court case? My understanding with the lawyers is that I don’t comment on legal issues and they don’t write code. We’re all better off that way. Oh you want my personal opinion? Sorry, I don’t know you well enough to share that. And you know, I really do like my job.

Few people ever have enough information for me to diagnose an install problem. I need to know every other piece of software they have installed, every version, every error message they have seen and even then there is a great chance that the product is outside my area of expertise.  Sigh! Though I do try when I can.

I don’t mind the questions BTW.  I get more frustrated with myself when I can’t help. But I really like it when I can help. So as long as people ask I will do my best to answer. But I don’t know everything.

Posted in Microsoft, questions | 1 Comment »

Markup Languages

October 16th, 2010

So there is nothing on TV and I am catching up on my blog reading. Eugene Wallingford had an interesting blog post from a conference (I think) he is attending. One of the things that came up, sort of on the side, was markup languages like runoff and troff. These were markup languages used for creating documents in the days before WYSIWYG word processing software. I used runoff and variations of in for a while at DEC. Later DEC developed a tool called VAX Document which processed a markup language called SDML – standard document markup language. I wrote a lot of documentation back in the day using SDML which was processed through VAX Document.

It was sort of like HTML is some ways but with a whole lot more options. If fact is was really a customized set of markup tags for creating computer documentation. It was particularly good at documenting DCL (Digital Command Line) instructions which is how most command line programs were run on the Digital operating systems.

One had to create their files using a text editor of course and enter tags manually. We were not near as sophisticated then as we are today. And as with any coding effort there was often debugging as nesting was wrong or end tags were forgotten or there were typos in the tags. The end results usually looked very good though. We were still getting used to proportional fonts back then and without WYSIWYG editors it was hard to manually format things. Markup languages and the processors that worked with them were much easier. Relatively speaking of course.

We had a markup language for specifying DCL commands. This language was used to help create code that would be used by programs for parsing command line input. For the life of me I can’t remember what that markup language was called. And I used it a lot. While I was in grad school I actually wrote a sort of compiler to input that markup language and then automatically create SDML for documentation purposes. I had to manually add some detail of course but I was guarantied that all of the commands, options and parameters that would be supported by real code were in the documentation. It was a big win for me.

The next step was to have it create more stub code that I could use in my programs. There were a lot of library calls one had to do and this also saved me a lot of work. Especially since I could create code stubs automatically in VAX BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, COBOL and C++. I was using all of those languages on a regular basis at the time.

Eventually HTML came along and with previous experience with several other, more powerful, markup languages it was pretty easy to pick up. I still retain an appreciation of a good markup language. HTML is getting weird in some ways and going beyond a simple markup language. Simple is a valuable thing in a markup language. Oh well. XML is being used quite a bit these days but I am not sure that people whose whole markup language experience is XML and HTML can really understand the beauty of good markup like we old-timers. But then I may be full of it too.

Posted in Observations | 2 Comments »

The Education Party of No

September 24th, 2010

These days a lot of teacher groups (not just unions though they get the attention) are a lot like the Republican party. What am I seriously comparing the teacher unions to Republicans? Well, yes, in a way. They way they are the same is that they are all about saying “no” without offering real competing solutions to real problems. The Republicans are all over the news for obstructing anything the Democrats  and Obama try to do. There is no offering of alternative solutions just a list of why the solutions being offered are wrong/bad/miss the point or what ever. This is of course not helpful but it is working for them because people are angry that Democratic solutions are not working or at least not fast enough. The situation in education is similar and different.

I think there is pretty universal agreement that we have some problems with education in the US. There are groups (Bill Gates and his foundations, the charter school movement, DC school’s chief Michelle Rhee, and others) who are offering their own ideas about fixing things. On the other side are educators who feel that these groups are picking on them, blaming them, and trying to ruin them. So they say “no” to the suggested “solutions.” And they are right in many ways. Standardized tests are a lousy way to judge learning and teacher performance. There really are other problems outside teacher control like poverty, unsupportive parents, kids who are not motivated and more. These problems do have to be addressed for education to be improved. The problem is that they are not offering much in the way of solutions. Just “don’t do what you are suggesting.”

Part of this may be a feeling of powerlessness in the area of they themselves being able to accomplish these changes outside the school building. But teachers could, and I would argue should, be making suggestions as to how to improve the things they can control such as determining who the good and not so good teachers are. Teachers should be working to improve teacher assessment in real and authentic ways. They should be making positive suggests and not just reject other suggestions from outsiders.

And teachers need to make more suggestions about how to asses students. I hear over and over again that teachers do assess students and that they do a good job. The problem is that the end results of our educational system, in some ways, call into question the accuracy of many assessments. We see “honor students” who reach college and can not handle the work there. We see high school graduates who lack basic skills in things like math and English when  they get their first jobs. While we see many graduates with good education we see far too many who seem to have gotten their diplomas without actually learning much. The reason outsiders press for standardized testing is a lack of trust in the assessment job that too many teachers are doing. Fixing that credibility problem is the key to holding back on standardized testing. It has to come by improving assessment, improving teaching and teachers, and helping to clean house of the worst teachers.

There are many huge problems that good teachers can not completely overcome. No doubt about that. But we have to remember that there are few educational problems that a bad teacher can’t make worse.

[Note that these are my opinions and may not be shared by anyone else I know.]

Posted in Education, Observations, rants | No Comments »

Lone Star TV Show Review

September 20th, 2010

So last week I received an email from Klout offering me a preview package to watch a pilot of the new show Lone Star on the FOX network. In exchange they included this message.

  • If you accept the offer you are not required to do anything. We do not want to "buy" your tweets. You are receiving the product because you are influential and have authority on topics related to the product. This is a more targeted form of receiving a sample while shopping at the grocery store. You are welcome to tell the world you love the product, you hate the product or say nothing at all.

How could I refuse? Well I guess I could and I guess a lot of people might. The truth is that taking some sort of gift often does make people feel like they owe something. In my case I feel like I owe them actually watching the show and giving a review. I don’t feel I owe them a favorable review. Which is good because I didn’t much like the show. I loved the goodie box though. So a review they get.

I don’t like con artists. Oh sure there are lots of con  game shows on TV I do like. I’ll watch Leverage anytime its own and it is largely a con game show. The difference is that the bad guys get conned in the shows I like and the main character is coning good people. Now this is a story of a man, Bob Allen, changing his heart and mind about his line of work. If it focuses on his trying to go straight in future episodes, and it looks like that is the goal, I might get to like the show. The character of his father though is truly hateful to me and that is a drawback. The man is so sold on conning people as being the right way to live that he insists on his son staying on the broad and crooked.

John Vought is down right scary as the oil magnate father of the main character’s first wife. There is some ambiguity about him. Is he evil or just tough? He’s clearly no nonsense and a bit of tension is always going to be there in this show about what would happen if he learns the truth about his son in law. And of course he has a son who is out to get Bob Allen since his father put him in charge of the oil company. And a second son is likely to have torn loyalties because Bob Allen as the new CEO is running with some of the projects the younger son has been suggesting over the years but getting shot down about. Family drama ala Dallas.

Oh and Bob Allen wants to keep things going with his girl friend who lives in a town where he has been coming lots of people out of their money. Yep, a girl friend and a wife. IS this guy totally crazy? He thinks he is in love with both. Possible? I guess we’ll see.

The women in the show, the wife and girl friend, are the two characters I do like. They are both in love and seem to be supportive of their man. They seem honest and good. Seems a shame they got mixed up with this guy.

I may watch another episode to see where it goes. Pilots can be a hard thing to base a show on because there is so much set up going on. So if you like shows about criminals trying to go straight or con artists give Lone Star a try and maybe a second episode. If there is a limit to how much tension you like in a show (and there is for me) you may want to give this one a pass. Either way it starts tonight on FOX.

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Why Space

August 17th, 2010

Outer space is all but unreachable. Even close planets like Mars take months to get to and there isn’t much there. Other solar systems? Forget about it! Unless we discover a way around the whole speed of light thing – highly unlikely – we are never leaving this solar system. And yet we keep trying stuff?

It’s not like there are no challenges closer to home either. We have better maps of Mars than we do of the earth under the oceans. And the oceans have lots of highly valuable things like minerals, and metals and food stuff and what not that we really could use. OF source it is hard to get at which should be a challenge, like space, that we raise up to and try to solve. But for the most part we don’t.

We look to space. What is it about space that makes us want to strive for it? I don’t understand it. Honestly though if given a choice between a trip to the bottom of the ocean and a trip into earth orbit I’d want to go to space. Makes no sense. But there you have it.

Now I love the seas. Even as a young person I was very interested in undersea things. I read about it, I went to conferences, and I thought a lot about it. But my blood still raced more reading science fiction about space exploration. Is it the fantasy or something else? Or are we just foolishly acting against our best interests? What do you think?

Posted in Life Thoughts, Observations, Philospohy | No Comments »

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