Dallas ISD Trustees Closed 11 Schools Last Night

Greg Howard (no relation):

The vote to close schools felt predetermined. Once the human element was removed, it was the most rational thing to do. Of the eight voting trustees, the first five voted to pass the proposal. Upon hearing the fifth, there was an audible groan in the main chamber. Fighting back tears, parents began to pick up their weeping children and exit the room ... parents, teachers and children left 3700 Ross either in silence, deflated or in the same tears they've been shedding for months.

One “L” or or Two?

The question just came up at work, do you use one “l” or two when you spell the past tense of cancel (canceled or cancelled)? It turns out both are valid, but which one is preferred?

Maeve Maddox at DailyWritingTips says:

The double l in cancelled is British usage; the single l is American usage... In American usage, the final l is doubled only when the stress falls on a syllable other than the first.

Where British usage calls for levelled, libelled, quarrelled, and travelled, American usage has leveled, libeled, quarreled, and traveled.

American usage agrees with British on annulled, controlled, patrolled, and extolled because the stress falls on the second syllable of these words.

Confused yet?

J.C. Penney to Reinvent Itself

Maria Halkias:

Gone are the dollar and percent-off coupons, morning only sales, additional markdowns at the register and all the "gimmicks," Johnson said. It will get rid of signs with promotional prices above the racks telling shoppers how much of the artificially inflated "full" prices they're getting. To make things even more simple, prices will no longer end in 99 cents.

Now that sounds refreshing.

The Story of Henry Texas Howard

Megan Howard:

Henry has adjusted quite well to life on this earth -- it's his parents who are having difficulty adjusting to life with him. We love this little guy to bits, but we're not always sure what to do with him. Henry is healthy, eating well, pooping up a storm, and only cries when he needs a diaper change or something to munch on.

I didn’t believe at love at first sight until January 10 at 2:25am when I first set eyes on my son.

-><-

Is SOPA Perfect for OWS?

Dave Winer:

It was all about corporations. On the one side is Hollywood and on the other side is Silicon Valley. That's how news people think. They look for big rich entities that are facing off and make it an epic battle.

Spot on analysis. News has become entertainment. It’s almost like writing historical fiction where you take some facts and build a story around them. In order to sell the ads, you need to attract the people, so you create something that will get the people to watch. Find the facts and build a story around them.

The fact is that new legislation will give the federal government the power to take over your website at the first complaint of a copyright holder. No investigation, no due process, no proof. Just a compliant.

This isn’t tech startups vs movie studios, it’s the federal government vs our right to free speech. But that’s not the story news people want to tell.

Cloves, Hookahs, and Other Non-Cigarettes

Joe Bunting:

Through my college and post-college years, I experimented with cigars, pipes, and menthol cigarettes. (They're not real cigarettes, right? They smell like mint.) But whenever someone offers me a real cigarette?

“Ewwwwww. Gross, no. I don’t smoke those things. Are you even a Christian?”

Background

There’s been a lot of talk recently about [SOPA][1] and what it will do to the internet. The general consensus is that it will [destroy the internet][2]. The basic premise is this: if someone complains that your site is hosting copyrighted material, the federal government will have the authority to seize your domain name.

What does that mean? Every computer connected to the internet has a number called an IP address. It’s kind of like how every telephone connected to the phone network has a phone number. If you want to call your friend, you have to type their phone number into your phone. Over the years, we have built several systems to manage phone numbers from the phone book published by the phone company to the built in address book in most modern cell phones. Today, there are very few phone numbers that I have memorized.

The internet essentially has a worldwide address book that knows each computer’s unique number. I don’t know Google Search’s number, but when I type google.com into my web browser, it looks up google’s number in the global address book (called the domain name system). This system makes the internet usable. (Imagine having to look up IP addresses in a giant phone book every time).

How To Route Around

If this law passes, we can no longer trust that when we type in google.com our browser will take us to Google Search. Here’s what we can do about it.

Step 1: Know the IP Addresses of Your Favorite Sites

Loving the Bible for what it is, not what I want it to be

Rachel Held Evans:

Over the past few years, however, I've worked up the courage to re-approach the Bible, this time with a different set of expectations, and I get the feeling that I'm in the early stages of learning how to relate to it the way that an adult child relates to her parents, a way that honors and respects the Bible for what it is, not what I want it to be.

Your Dallas Cowboys Commemorative Poster

Robert Wilonsky:

We all knew it when we saw it, with 24 seconds to go in the first half and the Dallas Cowboys down 21-0 to the New York Giants: That Sunday Night Football shot of owner and general manager Jerry Jones, his head buried in his hands, would become the defining shot of an 8-8 season that felt much, much worse from the very first game.

Wearing the same clothes you wore to church on Sunday to work on Monday

Jon Acuff:

Again, not talking same underwear. I'm talking same jeans, same sweater, same shoes...

As I read this, I chuckled first. Then I realized I’m wearing exactly what I wore yesterday morning at church.

The Original Heresy?

Scot McKnight:

The theme of burial with Christ is that we are raised to be one. The original heresy was to cut up the body of Christ and hack it to pieces.

What if the heretics were not only in the church, but the churches themselves were the ones committing the heresy?

Does your church sign advertise oneness in Christ or difference from other churches? How does it do so? Does your church website market your distinctiveness or your union with all churches in Christ?

The Treason Card

Andrew Sullivan:

It is a sign of a movement that has so lost the narrative it can only smear or ignore those with whom is disagrees -- rather than engage them.

An Advent Thought From Megan

Megan Howard:

Easter is the holiday where we celebrate the fact that Jesus finished the work he came to do, the work that changed the world. But I also think there is good reason for Christmas to be the "bigger" holiday. It is the holiday of mystery and wonder. The holiday where we celebrate not what Jesus has done, but the holiday where we celebrate hope for what he could do. The baby Jesus is not a symbol of accomplishment, but a symbol of potential, and potential holds a great mystery.

The View From Nowhere

Jay Rosen:

If in doing the serious work of journalism--digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat--you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The View from Nowhere doesn't know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you're doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.

I am more and more of the opinion that opinionated reporting is more honest than “impartial” reporting. I don’t believe that one can truly be impartial and that anyone who claims to be is not being honest.

If someone has spent a lifetime covering an industry or topic or company or whatever, that makes them something of an expert on the subject. Someone whose opinion we should value.

He Has a Dream

Dan Bouchelle:

Whether you like it, love it, fear it or loathe it, the dream below is representative of many in a generation raised in our churches who have stuck it out but are struggling to live out their faith in our current setting.

What follows in the post it a list of attributes of the church this young minister wants to lead. Definitely go read the full thing, but I’ll pick out a few:

• There is no building, but the foundation is the love of Christ
• There is no pulpit, but Scripture is opened and taught in living rooms, coffee shops, bars and parks
• Ethnic diversity is the norm
• No topic off the table for discussion--a "safe place" for any issue

The Four Types of Christian Christmas Parents

John Crist:

The "Giving-Gifts-With-Subtle-Hints" Parents: When I was 13 I got deodorant for Christmas. Thanks mom. When did you realize I should start wearing deodorant? April? And you decided to wait nine months because you figured it would be less awkward that just setting it on my sink one morning and saying, "Use this." It was more awkward at Christmas. Trust me.

So, last week Twitter debuted a new interface with the stated intent of simplifying the experience. This new interface has drawn criticism from many bloggers. Most of the discussion centered around Twitter organizing their user interface under two categories: Connect and Discover.

Their PR explains it this way (emphasis mine):

We've simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new.

The problem with Connect and Discover is that they are not words people use to describe routine actions. Instead they are vague words that convey a range of meanings instead of describing specific activities¹.

I actually get where they’re coming from. There is a perceived problem that people don’t really know how to use Twitter. In the old days of boxed software, this would be a documentation issue. In the post-manual world that we live in today, the user interface is to blame.

The answer is to simplify, which means we need less options. Before there were @replies, #hashtags, lists, search, followers and people you follow. I can imagine the meeting where someone asks:

What if we could reduce all those features to two sections. Two is less than six, so that makes it simpler which makes it better. We just need to name the two options in a way that conveys the full power behind them.

That’s how you come up with Connect and Discover. These are abstract concepts, not product features. To someone who already knows what Twitter is capable of, Connect and Discover are great words that succinctly distill the full potential of Twitter. To someone that doesn’t know anything about Twitter, these words mean nothing. They need to be explained in the context of Twitter.

The reason I know this is because Josh Gertzen and I made the same mistake with TileStack.

We needed a name for the button that brought up the stack editor.² We wanted to convey to the user that launching the editor was a safe operation, that any changes they made would not be applied to the stack they were viewing.³ For that reason, we didn’t want to use ‘Edit’, because ‘Edit’ made it sound like you could modify something that someone else had made. We had many long conversations and debates about what to call the button. The thesaurus was consulted. Finally we chose a word⁴: ‘Customize this stack’.

The idea was that ‘Customize’ implied that you were creating a custom version of the stack you were modifying instead of modifying the original. This was the exact behavior we wanted to encourage: see a cool stack, make some changes and save a new copy with your changes. We really wanted to grow a community of re-mixers.

There was just one problem: people didn’t click the button. We knew this not by using fancy analytics tools, but by the questions we were asked by email or in our forums. One of the top questions we got was a feature request for a stack editor. We were completely befuddled. The stack editor was the core of what we had built, and most people didn’t even know it existed!

Back to the drawing board. The problem with ‘Customize’ was that it always implied that the intent was to make a new creation. Early on, there was no community. People just wanted to upload their HyperCard stacks and edit them in the browser. We needed something that would convey this ability as well as the fact that it is still a safe operation on someone else’s public stack.

After another long round, we finally settled on ‘Inspect’. The word sounds pretty harmless. You’re just looking around to see how something worked. There’s also the notion of an Inspector Window which was essentially what our editor was.⁵

Do you care to guess what the impact of that change was? How about nothing? We ended up making a series of videos showing how to use the site, which did help a lot, but we still got questions about where to find the stack editor.

To be fair, both Customize and Inspect are actually pretty concrete words, but they were the wrong words. How do I know they were the wrong words? I didn’t use them myself. I would always say Edit. In fact, the tool palette that appeared was called the Editor (not Customizer or Inspector). Those words were forced because the natural word wasn’t deemed to be good enough. This just exposes that we weren’t as smart as we thought we were. Eventually we broke down and just called the button ‘Edit'⁶

So, American detainees are non-citizens?

Dave Jones:

But, remember what we're talking about here. The whole controversy is about detaining Americans, captured on American soil. So, when Scott Brown says that trying these folks in court would "award detainees the same rights as U.S. citizens," he is evidently saying that once you are detained, you are no longer a citizen.

Blessed are the entitled?

Rachel Held Evans:

...we've got to have a "Merry Christmas" banner in front of every parade and an inflatable manger scene outside of every courthouse... or else we'll make a big stink about it in the name of Jesus.

…

This is a very strange way to honor Jesus, “who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped…but made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.” (Philippians 2:8)

…

Jesus wasn’t embraced by the government. He was crucified by it.

On the impracticality of a cheeseburger.

Waldo Jaquith:

Further reflection revealed that it's quite impractical--nearly impossible--to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would be wildly expensive--requiring a trio of cows--and demand many acres of land. There's just no sense in it.

via Daring Fireball

A Christmas Carol As Resistance Literature

Richard Beck:

O Holy Night, it turns out, was a song of political resistance and protest. Imagine Americans singing in the years leading up to the Civil War the lyrics: "Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother; And in His name all oppression shall cease."

O Holy Night is a political protest. A Christmas carol as resistance literature.

This is as it should be. Advent is a call to Christian anarchism…

Awesome! I love learning things like this.

The abusive teachings of Michael and Debi Pearl hurt both women and children

Rachel Held Evans:

Why bring this to your attention? Because the Pearls are inexplicably popular in certain Christian circles, and abuse in the name of God must be spoken against.

If your church is considering using books by the Pearls as part of its curriculum, please say something. If you see friends or family employing their tactics, confront them. This is not simply a matter of different parenting methods or relationship styles—like Sears vs. Ezzo, or cloth diapers vs. disposable diapers, or complementarianism vs. egalitarianism—it’s a matter of abuse.

There can be no more beatings, no more deaths…especially not in the name of Christ.

I’m about to become a parent, so I’ve been reading as much on the subject as I can. Just about all the authors disagree with each other on some points, so I’m reading to backfill my mind so I can come up with my own style. I like parts of almost everything I’ve read, but every once in a while I see something that is just shocking.

What I Learned About Dallas From Watching Top Chef: Texas

Jason Heid collects some choice quotes from various national media outlets discussing last night’s episode of Top Chef: Texas which was filmed in Dallas. It’s a wonderful collection of gems such as

What we learned here is that rich people in Dallas are freaking weird.

Thank you Bravo, for bringing this wonderful attention to my beloved city.

You Are Facebook’s Product: That’s Why You Don’t Pay to Use it

Adrian Hon:

... it's not as if you pay to use Facebook. You're the product, and the advertisers are the buyers!

via Dave Winer

How Does SOPA Threaten Stack Overflow

Joel Spolsky

If we took down everything somebody wanted us to take down, the Internet would be worse. Right now, under the DMCA, we require the person making the complaint to send us a complete DMCA take down notice. ... We respond by notifying the person who posted the material, giving them a chance to make a case for why the material is non-infringing. ... The SOPA dramatically alters the careful balance in favor of "alleged" copyright holders.

In other words, it will make the Internet worse and put good sites like this out of business.