2006
03.31
I was just reading this article about a bill before the Alabama senate that would allow home schooled children to play for public school sports teams. This is a growing trend among public schools in the U.S. with athletes like Tim Tebow showing how good an idea it is. Of course it’s being opposed by the usual suspects like Paul Hubbard so it must be a good idea. The whole issue to me is the fact that parents who home school their children pay taxes into the system yet don’t use any of the resources created by those taxes. It’s basically free money to the public school system. And since home school parents still can’t deduct home-school supply related expenses from their taxes it’s even more of a freebie for the state government. Allowing home schooled kids to play sports at the local public school is only fair. You would think that the AEA would want as many homeschoolers as possible since each kid represents a unit of surplus money to the education budget.
2006
03.31
If you are a DSL user but need to get access to your own machine remotely from time to time you might find this program useful. You simply run this little executable and it will e-mail you it’s IP address on a schedule you define. If you are behind a NAT type DSL router and don’t have direct access to your real IP address you can simply look in the e-mail headers and you should see your real address in their in the return path. I haven’t used it in a while since I use DynDNS now but somebody might find it useful. The full masm32 source code is included.
2006
03.31
I have written a program to automatically download the Stand to Reason talkshow whenever their podcast is updated. It sits in your system tray and checks the podcast feed every 6 hours, automatically downloading if a new one gets added. The program consists of one tiny executable file. I write all my windows software in assembly language so it is small and fast. There is no “installer”. To install it just download the program and save it on your desktop. Double-click on it. The first time you run it, it will ask you if you want it to auto-start when you boot up windows. If you say yes it will move itself to your windows directory and place an entry in your registry’s run key so it will start every time you boot windows.
The default directory where it stores downloaded shows is on your desktop. If you want them stored in a different folder just click on the strCast icon on your taskbar and choose “Download directory…” and pick which one you want. You can also force it to manually check for a new show if you think one has been posted already and you can tell it to check for updated versions of strCast from this website. I hope you find this program to be useful and thanks again to STR for such a great ministry and a great podcast.
Screenshot:
2006
03.30
I have been reading the Davinci Code mostly to see what the hype has been all about. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through the book and at this point my thoughts about the book are about 50% amusement and 50% indifference. I find myself laughing out loud everytime Robert Langdon, the main character, opens his mouth. I swear if he uses the term “Sacred Feminine” one more time I am going to vomit. I will reserve final judgement until I finish the book but it’s lookin’ weak so far. Every time I start to get pulled back in to the plot one of the characters will go and say something so stupid and ruin it.
