Teddy Bear Parade

My kindergartener had a Teddy Bear parade recently. Every kindergartener in the school made a "float" for their teddy bear to ride on while they pulled the float around the school. It was done on a Monday to kick-off a week of learning about bears.

We asked my son what he wanted his float to be and without hesitation he says "Jeff Gordon race car." So just in case anybody out there wants to see a cardboard race car, here goes.

And yes to all the Jeff Gordan fans, I know the flames on the door are backwards, that is a slight design flaw on my part.



The car is essentially made up of 4 parts. The front (engine) is a long piece of cardboard bent to form the cone. Then two sides were cut out and fastened to the first piece by brass paper fasteners.

The middle part (doors) is the bottom and two long sides of a computer box. The rear of the car was essentially the opposite of the middle. The rear of the car didn't have a bottom until the very end. That and the hood were the last things that I added. Two things that I wanted to add but ran out of time: 1. a roll cage built from styrofoam. 2. Support for the car "roof." It sags just a bit and I think a center support on each side would have helped that.

All the painting was done with a spray paint white primer and then regular spray paint. The flames, numbers, and letters were all done with stencils.

If anyone wants any more info just let me know and I will try to help.

<the todd />

kindergarten is hard

I am now 2 weeks into Kindergarten and I believe it is much harder on parents than the children. My child loves it and is excited everyday about going to school, so that is a welcomed sight.

But I had no idea how much work the parents do for kids in school. I'm also sure that as the next levels of school hit and tests begin that schooling will become even more difficult. Who knew it was so hard to explain the concept of rhyming???

<the todd />

technorati... woo hoo!

Technorati Profile

This is my technorati ping post. I have hit the mainstream and fully expect people to start flocking to read other peoples wisdom that I link to.

<the todd />

FERPA and electonic ID's

<sarcasm>First off, I would like to apologize to my loyal readers for going so long without a post.</sarcasm>

I wanted to post this here because this recently came up for discussion here. Also I probably never would be able to find it again if I didn't. This article does a good job of explaining what is public, private, directory information, and just when an electronic ID can be released as directory info.

FERPA and Electronic IDs by Steven L. Worona (EDUCAUSE) on December 02, 2004

<the todd />

testing in old browsers

I came upon this post today http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE?page=1 that allows installation of IE browsers back to v3.

In the same spirit I thought I would also put out the URL's for the location of some other stuff.
Mozilla Firefox - http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/ - this used to go back quite a bit further but I don't know where anything older is at this point.

Mozilla - http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/ - same thing as Firefox

More Mozilla products (Camino, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, etc.) - http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/

Netscape < 4.8 - http://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/english/
Netscape 6 - http://ftp.netscape.com/pub/netscape6/english/
Netscape 7 - http://ftp.netscape.com/pub/netscape7/english/
Netscape 8 - http://ftp.netscape.com/pub/netscape8/english/

More Netscape products at http://ftp.netscape.com/pub/

Opera - http://arc.opera.com/pub/opera/

Hope this helps.

<the todd />

exclamation mark (!) showing up in emails from PHP mail() function

I ran into this problem and this is the solution that worked for me. This post helped out http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.mail.php#53231


It references RFC 2822, and look at section 2.1.1. "Line Length Limits" for the explanation of the 998 char limit. Anyway the solution at php.net worked for me minus the rtrim.

The php code for mine is
$message = chunk_split(base64_encode($message));

Then also you must make sure the headers are using base64 for the Content-Transfer-Encoding:
$header .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\r\n\r\n";

<the todd />

TIOBE programming index

Not 100% how useful this information is but it is still interesting. The following is taken straight from http://www.tiobe.com:

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

<the todd />

coolness from microsoft

Photosynth from Microsoft is amazing to me. I can't wait for this to come out to the public and be able to play with the software. I'm sure it will be pricey, but I hope not.

General premise is it takes a ton of photos of a single item, and then puts them all together in a seamless fashion. It allows you to zoom and fly through the pictures. There are a few available at their site now, with more to come.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

<the todd />

what's so cool about this?

I just don't get this...maybe it's b/c I don't have a lot to say. Maybe I will get the hang of posting my thoughts but right now it's just to see how this stuff works in case I have to build one.

<the todd />

Edit: not gonna build one since there are already many that do the trick. Falls under something about not reinventing the wheel concept.