Of all my varied forays in web design and hosting, the one I am happiest with is A Really Different Place.  This is a student blogging site I set up for the Enhanced Learning program in our school district.  The class is run by Nancy Bosch who does a great job with the kids and who gets on my good side by seeing the Internet as something the kids need to learn about.

She has encouraged the students to blog about whatever they find interesting and along the way instilled some lessons about etiquette and good online manners.  If its true that Content is King then the kids at A Really Different Place have made it the most successful site I’ve been involved with.  Over the last few years the site has gotten more than 30,000 hits.  A small number in the grand scheme but enough to make me smile.

Linus didn’t know what he was unleashing with “an OS you can try to modify to your needs” — yet. But what started as a fun vetting of one *nix became the largest barn-raising in the history of computing.

Linux turns 17 | Linux Journal.

Linux users come in all flavors.  Just as there are Mac fanboys and faithful followers of Microsoft there are folks who will try another OS when you pry their Linux from cold, dead fingers.

I am not such a person.  I don’t like Microsofts business practice and some of their products make me sick to my stomach.  But I can admit that Excel is a hell of a tool in the right hands and that SQL Server is an easy to use, easy to administer (for what I do) tool.

On the other hand, I will not be spending my own money on anything from Redmond.  A few years ago I loaded Ubuntu on a machine and that was that.  Not going back.

Linux is a philosophy for me as much as it is any particular product.  I have a dozen different distributions at home and have used each of them for at least one task top which it was ideally suited.  Rescue disks, reviving old hardware to useful condition, running a half dozen different servers off my modest desktop box.

So today I will pause for a moment and pay homage to Tux and his amazing legacy.

I consider myself very lucky to have an inspirational resource in my life.  Reverend Thom Belote is educated, smart and willing to share his own thoughts in public forum not to necessarily persuade others that his is the correct opinion, but to foster an attitude of open discussion on many topics we tend to ignore in our daily lives.  I don’t go to his sermons often enough but I read them without fail and they almost always make me stop and think about the topic.

This week’s is typically excellent.

So, what is the future of the American dream? The meaning of the term, “American Dream,” is a loaded term. We have so often used it to describe a certain style of living, a certain amount of wealth, owning certain possessions, and taking vacations to certain places. And yet, I think of other dreams:

When John Lennon sang, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” he was not dreaming of taking a cruise.

When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream… It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he was not speaking of a three car garage.

When the Hebrew prophet Joel announced, “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions,” the visions and dreams were not about whose flock of sheep would be larger.

The time might come… the time might come to gather in the streets and roast marshmallows on spits hewn from un-neighborly fences. More likely, we will find smaller ways to cooperate, share, assist, and build community. But amidst these smaller ways we should not forget our bigger dreams or our larger visions.

RevThom: Sermon: “The Future of the American Dream” (Delivered 9-28-08).

Sarah Palin’s Amazon.com: Wish List

I’m assuming its a gag.  But it is a well done gag.  My favorite item?  Juno

Does this make me a bad person?

The fitness craze enters its second month with mixed news.  My policy of not worrying about diet on the weekends has caused some backsliding on the scale.  So I decided that what I needed (along with better self control on the weekends) was some new goals.

So yesterday I woke up determined to act out my own, admittedly odd, version of 300.  I would do 300 pushups before I went to bed.  That’s 10 sets of 30 over the course of the day.  Since doing pushups at work outside of law enforcement or the military will get you some funny looks I had to squeeze them all in at home. And so I began.

One set before my shower, one set after and one set just before leaving the house.  90 down, quite a few to go.

Another set as soon as I got home.  One right before dinner and another after brought it to 180.  My arms were pretty unhappy at this point but life is hard when you have a goal I suppose.

Sparing the gory details, I squeezed out the last four sets before bed and I gota say that the last 20 or so pushups were not of the highest caliber, but they were completed.

The really odd thing is that I’m not sore today at all.  Its been so long since I’ve been in any kind of physically fit condition that I forgot such things could happen.

I’ve read stories before about Herschel Walker’s workout schedule and been envious.  But now that I’m trying stuff like this, it seems a bit more realistic.

From the linked article:

Walker’s work out is a staggering 2,500 sit ups and 1,500 push ups a day.  Those numbers are right.  2,500 sit ups & 1,500 push ups every 24 hours.  That definitely proves that Walker’s body isn’t just for show: those muscles know how to work.  Walker’s philosophy on working out is simple: start every day very early in the morning before the distractions of the day come around, and do that work out without quitting every single day, 365 days a year, 366 on leap years, no matter what.