John Zagula is Not Lame. I agree wholeheartedly with the lamelist! – John is a great great guy and I am glad every day he is part of Ignition.

College Application Postmortem. C and L and I spent some time talking about the whole college application process now that it is behind us, and I jotted down some notes. Mostly I did this for myself to remind me of things to think about in the future, but maybe someone else will get something out of this. Your mileage may vary – I am generalizing from a sample of 1 with incomplete information!

• Remember above all – the decision about where to go to college really doesn’t matter. Life will be fine no matter where you go. Kids put enough stress on themselves, as parents we tried to relax the situation and not accentuate the stress. And I believe it really doesn’t matter – there are great people and great opportunities everywhere, it is all what you make of it. My alma mater, Ohio State, is not the most prestigious institution on the planet (excepting the football team!), but my life has been fine.
• Remember again – it really doesn’t matter. I transferred, C transferred, my sister transferred, my brother-in-law transferred, … In our family, odds are you will change your mind anyway, and transferring is a very possible thing to do. So don’t kill yourself worrying about where you go as a freshman – if it is not right, you can change.
• The decisions the schools make are semi-random. They are a function of your own application, but also a lot of other factors you can’t control. Each school is looking for a particular demographic mix – gender balance, geography balance, interest balance, etc etc etc. And each school is different and you can’t know everything the school is looking for. And each admissions officer at each school has different goals and targets. So don’t get too keyed up about any individual school and don’t get too whipsawed by any single decision.
• As parents, remember – it is not your decision. You provide support and help, assistance as asked, but you don’t get to decide. You may have opinions, but largely keep them to yourself, and provide only very soft guidance when asked. You don’t have to live with the decision every day, your child does.
• Visit the schools during the week when they are in session. It is easy and tempting to visit during natural vacation times, but all you see are the buildings and you don’t get a real feel for the school. Go during the week (not Fridays, some schools are basically out fridays), go attend classes, talk to everyone you meet.
• Make it hard for the school to say no. Without being annoying, make sure they have a thick file on you. Visit early. Interview at every chance. Ask for intros to people in departments of interest, and talk with them (ccing the admissions department). You can’t do this with every school obviously but you can do it with a couple of schools maybe. or at least one.
• Your child will want to have a couple activities in which they have some real depth and commitment outside of school, but you don’t need to start developing these when they are 4. Late middle school/high school is plenty of time. For liz it was varsity volleyball and outdoors, and these are really things that started in 8th/9th grade for her. You don’t need to worry if your 5th grader doesn’t have a national ranking in paintball yet. Tho obviously if your child has a deep passion early that is ok, but don’t panic if they don’t. It will come.
• SAT Scores. An admissions officer at Harvey Mudd said this best – beyond a certain level of achievement, they don’t care what the scores are. The college wants to know that the student can handle the work and that may mean an sat score of 600 or 650. an 800 is wonderful but it may not have that much incremental advantage. Again encourage your child not to stress if they got a score that is not as high as they would like, it may not matter.
• SAT Math scores. C and I generally are not fans of pushing kids ahead a year in school as it makes it tough for them socially. But pushing ahead a year in math only is easy to do, and it makes your child stand out on SAT and SAT II scores. Algebra and Algebra II are courses that are relatively easy to push a year ahead on – within your school, or outside of the school – Johns Hopkins for instance has a good distance learning program. This may not be for everyone, not every kid is a math wonk, but if your child has some aptitude, I’d consider it.
• Encourage your child to read like a madman. Buy them lots of books, whatever will engage their interest – while our kids have an allowance, I have never made them pay for books or magazines, I buy any and all of those that they want. Don’t worry if it is pulp science fiction, comic books, whatever. Once they develop the habit it will grow and has a huge impact on test scores and other areas.
• Finally, remember again it doesn’t matter that much, everything will be fine no matter the outcome. Despite the stress of the situation and the potential for conflict, we became closer during the search and had a lot of fun, so it was a good good outcome.

C-dilla installed on my machine. Grr, some game I installed whacked this on my machine, as an NT service – Privacy and Spying: C-Dilla Copy Protection or Spyware?. With absolutely no indication to me, no permission.

NewsGator – the Outlook News Aggregator. I have to say again how cool this is – NewsGator - the Outlook News Aggregator. And Greg has been super responsive on bugs, thanks much!

Crossroads blog event. I sadly had to miss this – Weblog Entry - 01/28/2003: “Sam Ruby Weblog Gather Report” – I was up at the school watching a basketball game instead. Looks like a great list of people, wish I could have been there.

Another Spain phone option. Telestia seems to be out of Spain SIMs – here is another option – Prepaid Spain SIM Cards for GSM cellular phones

Kavalier and Clay. Finally reading Kavalier and Clay. About 1/3rd in, enjoying so far. A little reminiscent of Carter Beats the Devil, tho that book is a little simpler at many levels, but still a good read.

Alphacuts. Hey this is way easier to use than the start menu if, like me, you have 4million apps installed – AlphaCuts

Macs and Exchange. Brad and I were talking about getting a Mac for our next computer, Brad pointed me towards this – Mactopia: Macintosh customers working with Exchange servers. What a confusing mess.

Google Word. Have you got your Google Word? – “John Ludwig” is mine. I wish i could get “Halloween Blog” as well. I’m close on “Ohio State blog”. Tong is not doing bad on “Ignition blog”.

Master Key Copying Revealed. Very interesting – Master Key Copying Revealed – and see the technical paper.

Disruptive Technologies. Pointed to by Ross Mayfield’s Weblog, a good read.

MDV closes Seattle office. More signs of stress in VC business – The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Venture firm closing its satellite site in Seattle

The Fall of Berlin: 1945. Just finishing this book about the fall of Berlin in 1945. Great account. What I take away: War is hell; If you fight one, don’t lose; If you lose, surrender to nations with a strong history of civil rights, not to totalitarians; If you lose and you have committed genocide and other war crimes, well it is going to go hard on you.

Server-based RSS aggregators. Evan believes that RSS aggregation should move to the server and we will all want to read our news thru web pages. Dave thinks not, thinks that desktop software will rule. I think the truth may lie in a new middle. I like desktop software – it gives great personal control, I can try it out with disrupting any IT staff, I don’t have to trust my data to any external service. But there are shortcomings – I use 5 different machines, all behind different combinations of firewalls/nats, I can’t always get to the aggregated news on my machine. As I get more and more hooked on my aggregator I want to be able to move it to a more accessible and reliable machine.

This is very like the blackberry adoption cycle in our office. 2-3 of us got blackberries and all started out using the desktop redirector. We didn’t need to make any changes to our servers, we didn’t need permission from anyone, etc. But as we got hooked, and started to struggle with the shortcomings of the desktop redirector, it became obvious that we should buy the blackberry server software and install it. Perhaps this is the evolution path for aggregators (and other types of software that you will want to access from many locations).