I don’t make much of a secret of the fact that I think our schools are worse than worthless.  I don’t go around telling people what they should do with their kids, but if someone asks me what I think about education, I’ll give them an honest answer.  I think kids would be better educated and we’d be better off as a society if we burned down all the schools and started over.  I’ll go into all the reasons for that sometime when I have all day to type, but I’m always on the lookout for examples that back me up. Read more »

Here’s a heartwarming story about a pastor in Texas who donated a kidney to one of his parishioners.  That’d be tough.  I could see giving one to a close family member like a parent or child, but beyond that, it’d be a hard decision to make.  After all, you can only do it once.

(HT: And Sometimes Tea.)

One of the interesting things about owning a blog or other web site is seeing how people find your site.  Most sites get at least a third of their traffic from search engines, and tools like Google Analytics let you see what keywords people used to find your site.  So now and then I go through that keywords list to see if there are particular topics that get a lot of searches, that I should write more about—or just for curiosity’s sake.  Sometimes I find funny stuff, and sometimes I’m just puzzled. Read more »

This week I tried something new that I’ve been meaning to for a while: online affiliate marketing.  The idea is that you find a product that’s being sold online that offers an affiliate fee, and market it yourself, taking a cut from each sale that comes through you. Read more »

Something that bums me out about blogging (and makes it easy to blow off) is the lack of real conversations.  On Usenet, you can pick a group like rec.games.bridge and find a bunch of conversations (threads) going on.  Any decent newsreader will show each thread in a tree form, so you can see who’s responding to whom, and follow the conversation logically.  You can jump in and respond at any point, and when you come back later, your own posts and any responses to them will be threaded right along with the rest.  If you’re using a good newsreader, you can even have it display direct responses to you at the top, and then other responses in threads you’ve posted in below that, and so on, so you can see the stuff you’re interested in first.  Web forums have some of these features, though I haven’t seen one yet that has all of them. Read more »