My daughter Caitlin starts 10th grade next month (OMG!).  She’s Drill Instructor as well as Flute/Piccolo Extraodinaire in the Vandegrift High School Band.  I’ve written about her Band accomplishments in the past, and you just can’t get much prouder than I am of her and what she does with her spare time.

Why am I telling you all this?  To get money for her band, of course!

You see, Caitlin and her fellow band members are doing a March-a-thon, a 4-hour long marching concert throughout one of the neighborhoods. 

The March-a-thon is the band’s biggest and primary fundraiser for the year.  Anyone who donates to this will get something special from me.  I’m going to be completely subjective and possibly weird when I select something for each of you, so don’t miss out!  You might get an impromptu song, you might get a guest post, you might get a CD in the mail, a book, a thank you note… who knows? 

So if you can, click the donate button above and donate something.  (note: if you go to the March-a-thon website and donate from there, be sure to mention “Caitlin H” in the “special instructions” so she gets credit.)

This is Vandegrift High School’s first year of existence – it’s brand-spanking new and will only house 9th and 10th graders for this coming year.  A number of the freshmen that went to Cedar Park High School were re-zoned for the new Vandegrift school.  Because it’s only 9th and 10th graders, it’s a significantly smaller band.

The school board chose to name the school after Lt. Matthew Ryan Vandegrift,
a Leander High School honors graduate (Class of 1999) and athlete – who was killed in Iraq in April 2008.  They also chose a mascot of “Vipers” which was put up to vote to the students, faculty and school board. 

Isn’t that cool?  It’s got a snake head to make the “V”.  I guess “vipers” is better than “Vandegrifters.”   Or Vandal Grifters. Or Van Wilder Grifters.

What I find most interesting about the new school is that as a 10th grader, Caitlin will be a “senior” three years in a row.  She and a few of her fellow sophomores hold leadership positions in the band, and they essentially run the band.  I can’t believe how much they have the students be responsible for.  It’s so cool that they’ll be able to hone their leadership skills for three years, instead of what usually happens, which is having Juniors and Seniors fill the leadership roles.

A few of the leaders were up at the school at 5:15 this morning painting the parking lot with dots and lines.  They knew it was going to be a looooong assignment, and with the heat the way it is, they wanted to get an early start.  Talk about dedication.  The teamwork and friendships they’re forming is to be heralded, and I feel so glad she’s able to be a part of it.

What are you waiting for?!?!?!  Go get in line to get something totally whallsome, and donate. 

UPDATE: There’s no time limit for the donation, but by August 15th would be preferable, since that’s when the Marchathon is. However, students can collect pledges towards the Marchathon throughout the school year.

Hey hey!  How ya doin?  REALLY?!??!  ME TOO!

Proud Papa

Once again, I get to brag about my amazing daughter.

This past weekend she participated in a Texas State thing called UIL Solo & Ensemble.  We’re in Region 26.

This is where a bunch of band students in a specific area (called a region) go and play for judges individually and/or with fellow band geeks.  They can choose to play Class 3 (easiest), Class 2 (harder) or Class 1 (hardest) piece for their grade level (High School).

Last I checked, High School is comprised of four grades, 9th through 12th.  Caitlin is in 9th grade.  Yeah, this little fact plays a role in the bragging.

So she chooses a Class 1 piece.  Did I mention that was the hardest level for High School?

Then, she plays it… get this…  memorized.  TWO PAGES of blank ink splattered all across the page like it was taped on the wall during the shooting of Dune, when Baron Vladimir Harkonnen gets his face treatments.

Eww.

The judge then assigns a rating of 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 (Superior).  The highest rating is a first division or superior performance.  This represents an elite performance given by a student.

If you’re still wondering by now what she earned, you don’t know my writing very well. 

She achieved a Superior Performance! And that also means she’s eligible to compete at the Texas State Solo & Ensemble Contest later in the school year!

She worked very hard on this and we’re so glad all that practice and effort paid off.

Wii Fit Blog Badges

Speaking of bragging…. I wonder why there aren’t Wii Fit Blog Badges yet.  When I lose a ton of weight in the near future, I want to brag about it.  But since I’m lazy, I want my blog to brag about it for me.

I uttered about this recently, but I also wanted to put something up on the blog about it.

If you notice over on the right, my sidebar shows off my Guitar Hero stats.  I have badges that show off how many Expert songs I’ve completed, my ranking, etc.

I wish Nintendo / Wii Fit folks had a similar system.  I envision online profiles, so that your progress (however you measure that) could be uploaded and turned into badges that could proudly show off one’s achievements.  Some might want to show off their Fit Credits, their scores on the balance games,  yoga games, and others might even want to display their weight and BMI.

I, for example, would dare to show off weight and BMI because as vain as I am, I know I’d work out harder to lower it.  I need humiliation to help motivate me.

Everyone, please join together and laugh at my obesity so that I may improve.

Tales of Venus Retrograde

Nick Dagan Best’s traveling multi-media presentation has received rave reviews at astrology conferences across the continent. If you’re in Austin tonight, you can check out this presentation for free!

Tales of Venus Retrograde
by Nick Dagan Best

Venus goes retrograde in Aries on March 6 this year, revisiting an eight-year cycle that is parallel to a pattern found in human history. With this special edition of “Tales of Venus Retrograde,” Nick Dagan Best discusses the background behind this particular section of the Venus retrograde cycle relative to U.S. political history and many notable biographies.

Nick Dagan Best is an exoteric astrologer who uses storytelling and a visual presentation to illustrate how astrology reflects life unfolding in time. A student of astrology since 1995, Nick is known as “the human ephemeris” for his uncanny knowledge of dates in history and their corresponding astrological features. He lives in Montreal, Canada.  This website is http://exotericastrology.com/

Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Time: 7:30-9 pm
Location: Plum Blossom Wellness Center, 1700 S. Lamar, Suite 230
Cost: Free

Best of LOLcats

Note: This blog post is also available via audio.  It is read by the author on Utterli.

My 14yr-old daughter is a little spoiled.  She got an iPhone for Christmas.

Let me explain.  The iPhone was not given to her, as you might justifiably think after that first paragraph, and that’s not why she’s spoiled.

In order to get most of her gadgets or relatively expensive things, she saves up and buys them herself.   And she doesn’t get an allowance.  So how does she get these things?

Well, she babysits, for one.  She also does pet sitting.   But that’s not why she’s spoiled.

She also earns money for grades.  You might think she “gets money for grades” but it’s more complicated than that. 

I probably should explain that one also – it’s a “grade earning agreement” we have.  She earns a set dollar amount for A’s and has to pay a set dollar amount (1/2 of the amt for A’s) for B’s and below.  She gets a bonus (50%) for 100’s.  Now that’s incentive, right?  And she always makes money every report card.  She has 6 grades per grading period, so that means she has to make 2 A’s and 4 B’s and below just to break even.

We as parents provide necessary clothing, household items and things a kid “need” to be a kid.  However, anything extra she wants beyond that, like designer clothing/shoes, going to the movies with her friends, going to the mall and buying stuff from top*kopi or whatever it is, comes out of her money.  I got this idea from my parents (kudos to them).

The iPhone definately falls into the “extra” category.  This 16GB iPhone 3G was $299.  She was able to contribute $212 towards the purchase, but she really really really really really wanted it.  She already agreed to sell us her 8GB video iPod nano for $60 (part of the $212) because I wanted a good MP3 for my wife, and she was already familiar enough with the iPod.   That still left $70+ to pay.   I offered to pay for the difference if she gave me her existing phone, the Palm Centro, and then I’d take the risk of selling it on eBay but I get whatever money I make from it.   (btw, she also paid for the Centro herself when she got it earlier in the year)

She agreed, and she got the phone.

She loves that phone.

We all love that phone.

We have a win-win situation here.  Mom gets a like-new ipod nano for way under market value, daughter gets her new iPhone, and dad makes some money selling off a Centro.  There’s still 4hrs left in the auction and it’s already selling for $40 more than I “paid” for it.

And that’s why she’s spoiled. 

Wait, maybe *I’m* the one who’s spoiled.

Whew!  It is a lot of work to host a contest on an external polling site, then have issues with the external polling site, then give people three ways to guess (predictify, comments on two different blog posts and direct email), and then come up with a decent way to display the guesses that make you go “hmm, that’s kind of sexy and interesting… that whall – he’s such a great blogger.”  This is almost as difficult as, oh, let me think, hmmm, maybe…. casting a horary chart to determine a winner?

This time around, there were 26 guesses ranging from 435 to 14368.  This was after I removed and adjusted the guesses that were over 20,000.

The correct answer was 13,551.  That makes the winner…. BEKAH from Eurekablyth!  She wins a $10 gift certificate to pretty much wherever she wants, or I’ll paypal her the money directly if she accepts that.  

Congrats Bekah!

Here’s how everyone fared:

Yes, that’s right.  My daugher had 13,551 text messages in one month.  That’s an average of about 450 a day, or almost 40 per waking hour.  If you take into account that she’s not supposed to have her phone during school, that equates to more like 75 per hour, or more than one a minute.

Fortunately, not only did we elect to have the unlimited txt messaging plan on our cell account, we also purchased “PDA addiction insurance” so that we could enroll our daughter into a 12-step program to eliminate her dependency on constant communication with her friends.

Some of you may recall the contest I ran last week asking people to guess how many TXT messages my 14yr old daughter had on the previous months’ bill.

Well, the contest ended this past Friday, the 5th.  I was pleased to see 10 predictions were done on the widget, and several were submitted in the post’s comments.  As I went to enter the winning number (aka “outcom”) at Predictify, I was perplexed as to where to update the information.

Surely I’m not blind, and I ain’t that dumb.  So I kept looking.  15 minutes passed me by like a quarter hour.  Still I couldn’t find it.  I clicked Results, tried to enter in text messages, blah blah blah but still nothing.

So I emailed Predictify support:

I’m looking for where I can update a question I posed – it simply says “awaiting outcome” even though the contest has ended. Where do I update that info? I’ve logged in and gone to my question and it just has the main page and a “results” page but I can’t find where I can update it with the right answer.

They responded pretty quickly (within an hour)

Unfortunately your question did not qualify to make it on the site because we do not accept questions of that nature. Also, our users currently are not involved with the scoring process, we do that for them.

Whaaaa?

So I stewed on this a bit, calmed down, and sent my response:

I still don’t understand. I got an email saying it wasn’t going to be featured on the main page or the searches, which is fine, but that the question was up and live. 10 people were able to make predictions. The status page says “awaiting outcome”. But why can’t I update the answer? You’re basically saying the question will never have an outcome since you refuse to update it for some unspecified reason, so that leaves people confused.

I’m unsure also what is meant by “do not accept questions of that nature” – all it is is a prediction of how many txt msgs a cell phone bill had. It’s verifiable by a scan of the cell phone bill, which I plan on providing on my personal blog. I’m wanting to update the question so I can provide a payout.

Should I just update my blog entry and say predictify is a useless tool that employs a bait-and-switch methodology? I suppose I could do that, but it seems to me a better outcome is to resolve the issue to my satisfaction. I brought awareness of Predictify to hundreds of readers, some of whom actually bothered to create an account and predict. Seems you’d want to preserve that enthusiasm

Ha!  that should show them.  I can compose sentences together like a lego set and shape them into a coherent and logical construct!  I even goaded them a little into solving my issue.  This, my friends, is how you talk to tech support and get results.

Or so I thought.

Thanks for the email and sorry we confused you in this process. However, since the question did not make it to the main site, we do not score those questions because not everyone has a chance to predict on them.

We do not accept questions that do not have a factually verifiable source available to the general public. Usually our questions are things that people can research and look up more data on, such as Will the 49ers beat the Cardinals or Will Bloomberg be in Obama’s cabinet, etc.

We appreciate that you sent the site to a lot of people and we really do value you as a user. We hope that you continue to submit new questions and predict on the site. However, as I mentioned earlier, we cannot score the question regarding the text messages because it did not fit the criteria of a deterministic question. I hope you understand and I apologize again if we mislead you in any way.

Drat those pesky logical tech support techs!  HE made an excellent move here, almost worthy of my composition.  This would be an excellent chess match if I only had the time to engage in this battle.  You see, he cooked up a thank you, an apology, a reason, an example, and a followup thankyou/apology!  That’s classic integrity with a dash of we’re-sticking-to-our-guns resilience.

But wait.  He MISSPELLED “MISLEAD!”  HAHA! I WIN!

However, I doubt that Predictify sees this as a win in my column. So I did the only thing I could do: take the supplicant role and plead for what I want:

Can I at least find out what the predictions were? There were 10 predictions and I can’t find how to see who guessed what. I was giving away a prize for the closest answer, but all I can see are groupings.

The only thing missing from my composition was signing it with Puss-In-Boots eyes:

I sent that email yesterday and have not yet received a response.  The bottom line at this point is – I cannot see the predictions people made using the tool.  Maybe they’ll be nice and email me the guesses but I can be a little impatient, like now.  NOW!

While I was waiting, I composed up a little bit of a “ok everyone who used Predictify, re-submit your guess”… in fact, here it is for your reading pleasure:

So I have no choice but to ASK YOU FOLKS WHO TRUSTED ME AND USED PREDICTIFY TO MAKE A PREDICTION – to either enter your prediction on the original post or this one, or if you don’t want to make it public, you can email me at whall@whall.org with your guess.

If you already made a prediction in the comments, that still stands.  You guys have until this Thursday the 11th to make your predictions.  Remember, there’s still $10 up for grabs.  I’ll also throw in a code for an AT&T Ringtone if you want it.

NEW FACTOR:  Now that I don’t need to use Predictify, I’m going to make the contest a little easier and instead of accepting guesses between 1 and 100,000, I’ll allow everyone to modify their original guess (once) and put the range to be between 1 and 20,000.  This may or may not cause people to re-guess.

and I’m all ready to click Publish and then what comes into my inbox?!!?!?!?  ANOTHER FRIENDLY RESPONSE FROM PREDICTIFY! DO THEY EVER LET UP!?!?!??!

Hi Wayne,

Sure, let me run a query and get you all the predictions and usernames who predicted on your question. I should have some results in the next couple hours.

ARGH! I can’t win!  And sure enough, the guy sent me the original 10 predictions already! HE’S TOO GOOD…..

SO – NEW “NEW” RULES

• If you had a previous guess, either in the blog comments or on predictify and want to let it stand,  you may do so.  No action required.  If you don’t remember your prediction, I can email it to you.
• The new range for guesses is 1 and 20,000.  I recommend the 3 folks who guessed > 20K change their guess.  Think of it as a second chance at life, but instead of “life” it’s “$10″.
• If you’d like to change your prediction, you can do so either on a comment here, on the original blog post, or via email.  I will take the latest timestamped guess before midnight central time Thursday morning, period.
• I *WILL* accept new predictions as well.
• In the event that the person who would have won before I changed the rules doesn’t still win, I’ll give them a prize as well.
• That one person who knows who they are is ineligible to guess since they’ve been told the answer.  I won’t disclose who that is other than to say he’s, well, ineligible.

Have fun!

Today on Twitter I posed a question asking

How many text messages did my 14yr old daughter have on last month’s cell phone bill?

Well, that’s approximately what I asked.  Let’s go back and look:

After two replies, I decided that I wanted to make a Predictify question and give away a prize!  I opened up the contest to everyone, but only readers/commenters of my blog can actually win.

So what you need to do is predict an answer – I’ll keep the contest open until Friday the 5th.  The closest answerer who’s commented at any time on any post on my blog before the 5th will be declared the winner.  

Yes I think it’s stupid that it allows decimal answers, and NO, I don’t know what half a txt message is. The answer is a whole number.

Now I just gotta figure out what the prize will be.  I haven’t been the best person at keeping up on the prizes people win around here, so I’ll make this one easy.  The winner gets a $10 gift card for whatever they want that I can purchase online with paypal.

No politics today.  Rather, today is a day for REAL CELEBRATION.

Those of you who follow me on twitter (thank you to @marilynzelha, @Ctug, @iounjeyn, @martymankins, @sybillaw, @Blogography, @mr_shiny, and @renmaddox for the warm wishes last night) already know the news, but for the rest of the world to know…

CPHS BAND TAKES 4TH PLACE AT STATE UIL COMPETITION.

Let me tell you – these outstanding students worked so incredibly hard to get where they are.  My hat’s off to the directors, students, and parents for an emotion-inducing and powerful performance.  

This show…. is simply amazing.  I’m not an overly emotional guy except when it comes to patriotic themes and family, but EVERY TIME I see this show, I’m moved to that lump-in-the-throat tears-start-brimming-at-bottom-of-eyelid place you probably have felt a few times in your life.  Two sections in particular just make your heart swell and you feel your body flush.

You can see their semi-official collection of photos at SmugMug from the various shows and Festivals.  Here’s one sample – I can’t BELIEVE how good the photography is – that shows just how busy and on-the-move sections of the show are:

This wonderful band has won several awards and top-place finishes and for good reason.  The videos we have of the band is currently on a secure server, so I’m not supposed to share it Internet-style but I’m hoping we can release something soon.

Congrats, Caitlin!  YOU MADE US VERY PROUD!

UPDATE 11/6/2008: 

There was another High School from Leander Independent School District that competed at State UIL – Vista Ridge High School Band.  They do a fantastic show.  Bryan Christian, the Director of Bands at Vista Ridge, sent a congratulatory memo to the Timberwolf Band that I wanted to share with everyone.  

Adding to my pride for the band itself is the supportive environment the school system provides to the students, directors, teachers and parents.  If all the public schools ran as well as LISD, there wouldn’t BE an education problem in America!

Here’s a celebratory picture of the Vista Ridge Rangers (red) and the Cedar Park Timberwolves (green) immediately after the Area Finals when they found out they were State-bound.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked you to put your hands in the ay-yer.  I think I only counted 12 people doing so.  Now, I don’t know if it’s that you can’t hear me, or if you’re just “not interested” but a slightly better attitude would be appreciated.  

Sycophants of the world, UNITE!

Why?

Because I TOLD YOU TO!

A very useful engine

Many of you know that Thomas the Tank Engine is a “very useful engine”. Jaden loves Thomas movies, action figures, train sets, computer games, and I blogged last year about the Day Out With Thomas, which he and I both loved immensely.

But this post isn’t about Thomas, as much as it’s about a “very useful computer gadget”

A co-worker of mine picked up a couple of these at Altex and I must say, it’s gotta win some kind of product award. It’s incredible!

For those of you who do computer support, you’ve  probably run into the problem where a hard drive won’t boot. It still spins up, and it still has data, but it just won’t boot for this reason or that reason, usually a problem with Windows.

In the past, we’ve just used some special hardware to try to slave or mount the drive on a desktop machine with ribbon cables and room for extra drives. This was easy with desktop drives, but we had to get a special adapter for the laptop drives. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job.

Then came along SATA, the way-faster and way-simpler connector but made it harder for us to do the drive slaving. We had to use a SATA desktop or one of the cool combo units Dell sold for a while that had both EIDE and SATA. But still, it was a pain, and generally involved “open heart surgery” on the PC we used as the diagnostic system.

This adapter he picked up allows for just a simple USB connection and it supports all desktop/laptop PC drives – desktop IDE, desktop SATA, laptop IDE and laptop SATA.   When connecting IDE, you don’t even need a separate power adapter!  For SATA, there is a separate power cable you have to plug in, but still, all of this beats doing it manually.  Best of all, since it’s USB, you don’t have to open up any PC’s.

Plus, it’s all hot-swappable.  With our old way of doing things, we’d have to shut down and reboot every time we disconnected or connected a drive.

Kudos, VANTEC!

Marching Band is still cool

Caitlin, our eldest, joined “the big time” this year by reaching freshman high school age. Now she’s with the Big Time band, the Cedar Park Timberwolves. This band is something else, lemme tell ya.

Last night was the “LISD Festival of Bands” where all the Leander Independent School District bands (middle school and high school) perform to a very populated football stadium.  I shot some video that I might upload at some point.  Let me know if interested.

Last year, the marching band put on a show called “Pursuit of Happiness” and even ended the show with a winking smiley face:

The official videos of this year’s band are still secure and for staff/band/family, so if you want to see them, get in touch with me directly and I’ll send a link.

Best of LOLCats

I’ve been selfish recently – pimping myself out for the Hot Blogger Calendar, and then accepting the McCain VP Spot.  I realized after mediation and deep reflection that this world is not. about. me. at. all.  Who am I to keep advertising to the world “LOOK AT ME!  PAY ATTENTION TO ME! DO SOMETHING FOR ME!”

The sickness inside is almost unbearable sometimes.

It’s time I did something for someone else.

so….

VOTE FOR MY DAUGHTER!  PAY ATTENTION TO HER!  DO SOMETHING FOR HER!

Her High School Marching Band is in a local “Marching Band Challenge”. They have a complete online voting system sponsored by our local TV station.  The local Cable TV company is even playing, for free, on-demand high school football games!

Normally, in the spirit of fairness, you should watch all of them to actually determine who is the best.  And I’m fine if you do that. But if it just so happens that you don’t have a lot of time, and you start watching them but get carried away with the rest of your day and you just need to quickly vote for one of them, I’m completely ok if you just go ahead and vote. And when you vote, vote “Cedar Park”!

This voting is about the easiest one out there:

1. Click the voting link
2. Click “Cedar Park”
3. Put in name and email address (what, fairness? who knew?!?!)
4. Click Submit

I’m going to try to embed the video of their Marching Band Drum Line here. It’s only 1.5 minutes long…

If you watch to look at all the bands, click on over and do that. Cedar Park Timberwolves are Team 2 on Week 3.

Last night was so funny.

Before our pool league, we were discussing “rumors” or “facts” about this teacher or that teacher at our daughter’s new high school.  She was saying what she heard about teacher X or teacher Y and we (my wife and I) challenged her on whether or not she should believe other students, or at least not completely believe everything she hears.

My 14yr old daughter cocked her head, put on a faux-insulted smirk and said “Dad, I’m not that gullible…” and our niece Kaili said “What’s ‘gullible’?“  And you KNOW that as soon as someone asks THAT QUESTION, they’re in for a little ride.

I was too slow to respond (yeah, I know! impossible, right?!!?).  Caitlin pointed up at a patch of ceiling right above our niece’s head and said “There’s a gullible right up there.” 

I was barely able to contain my shock that my daughter knew a NEW way of pulling “the gullible trick” on someone.  So we went along with it and looked, pushing Kaili to look as well.  And look she did.

“Wait, where?” Kaili inquired.

“Right up there.  There’s a gullible right above you,” Caitlin responded.  She was reveling in her enjoyment of verbally torturing Kaili with her superior vocabulary.  She glanced over at mom and me, with her all-knowing eyes saying “look at me, I can trick her!”

At this point I needed to chime in.  I told both of them in a severely matter-of-fact manner, “you know, they removed the word ‘gullible’ from the dictionary a couple of months ago…” and Caitlin, who had been the instigator and predator in this particular word battle, opened her eyes wiiiiide and said “they did?!?!  Why did they do that?!!!!”

Oh, we had some fun with that response for the three seconds it took for her to realize she had been had.  Her expression went from the look of sheer elitist contentment to awe and surprise at having a word removed, to indignant mock offense at being taken.  In the same way she was taking someone else just a moment ago.

A quick shout of “DAD!!!!” and a playful slap to the shoulder let me know she knew her place, and was appreciative of the lesson.  Then she looked over to Kaili and said “being gullible means you’ll believe anything” and smiled all the bigger, probably thinking to herself “yeah, even stuff your dad tells you.”

Speaking of gullible, I’m being anxiously impressed by the more recent spam comments.  They’re really starting to look real!  It seems they’re taking information from the blog article and submitting a comment that actually seems related to the content.

Take a look at this one, put on a post of mine about XP

The comment has decent english, is related to the post, has vernacular such as btw and a smiley, and the only thing that makes it suspicious is the name and email.  ARGH!  Why are they improving!

I’m just glad I have my blog set up to approve all new commenters.  You don’t get in unlessI approve, but once I approve you, you’re good to go from then on.  Not only does it help cut down on the annoying comments like the above, but it also lets me welcome new readers.