Month: February 2013

Carmen Ortiz was a Democrat up-and-comer, a potential candidate for Governor or Senator. That is, until Aaron Swartz committed suicide.

Now she’s in House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s sights, and even some Dems are running for cover, like Rep. Jared Polis, an internet entrepreneur from Colorado.

Ortiz blew it and she’s handled it badly from the get-go, including not muzzling her idiot husband, a 1%-er IBM exec who posted his opinion of the case and Swartz’s family on Twitter.

Disregarding the merits of this case – and I personally think she was way, way, WAY out of line – Ortiz’s big blunder was misjudging the political fallout that she and (worse) her bosses now need to deal with. We have enough amateurs now in government, and we certainly don’t need one more.

We were watching one of Ron’s military shoot-em-ups last night as Fluffles was being his athletic self, jumping on chairs for attention and treats.

This suggested to me that our cat, especially when he’s in claws out/hissing mode, is really a tiny Marine.

Ron topped with, “Not a tiny Marine: a submarine.”

Your statement that “In many cases, charter schools are no friend of municipal public schools” seems an elitist argument at best: only the very wealthy should have the opportunity to insist on high standards for their children’s education.

You complain that where charter schools are available, those students needing “special services and attention” get left behind. You claim that “poverty has more to do with performance than anything else.”

Even if those assertions are true, why should “motivated” kids and their parents be kicked to the curb?

Rather, should we pander to families that can’t be bothered to motivate their kids or help them to improve their circumstances by getting an education – at public expense?

That’s pretty incredible when you stop and think about it: the child of a low-income family that may not even pay taxes can get an education – including language arts, history, math and science – at no cost to the family. And some people are unappreciative enough to not take advantage of that and it’s all the fault of charter schools. Unbelievable.

Mashpee spends over $20 million to educate 1720 students, or over $12,000 per student. The ratio of teachers and professional staff is less than 13:1 (source) If students are dropping out, failing or graduating with poor skills, I certainly don’t think that Sturgis, or for that matter Mashpee taxpayers, bear the responsibility.

We’ve been devouring episodes of Netflix’s first self-produced series “House of Cards”.

It’s a corker!

Oh my gosh, this has been a career. I’ve been working on moving the O-F site since January 8, first psyching myself for days because I knew it was going to be horrible, and it was.

Following some bad online advice, I copied everything off by hand, but that didn’t work. My content directory was fine, but not the WordPress files themselves.

I’m pretty sure that there was problem with versions. I think the old site may have needed to be updated. Whether for that reason or another, the WordPress files themselves were not correct, and there were a slew of missing files.

I tried a plugin to copy the files and generate the script. That worked okay except that I had no idea where the backup files were on the old server, and the plugin didn’t create a compressed archive.

I ended up using the GoDaddy WordPress install. That worked like a champ, so I only had to copy over the content files, which the plugin did copy very well, and run the database script.

I had to revise the script, though, since it was a create database, and the GoDaddy install had already put a WordPress db on the server.

I messed things up by editing the wp_option records incorrectly (I mimicked the actual directory structure, setting two key records to “www.capecoder.com/occupyfalmouth”) and forwarding and aliasing the domain. I fixed the first and GoDaddy Tech Support did the second.

I had to clear not only the browser cache but the cookies cache to get the GoDaddy File Manager to work. I had to reset permissions to FTP over Windows.

I had to create an .htaccess file to enable permalinks.

Unlike the problem I had with this blog, I was able to see images on the posts and pages where they belong.

Emme and I helped Ron sort through his piles of t-shirts yesterday.

We – Ron, Emme, James and I – celebrated the fourth anniversary of Fluffles’ arrival here with a small party last Saturday.

Moved the Occupy Falmouth website today. Haven’t got it entirely configured yet, hope to do that this weekend.

Ron spotted a bluebird in the front yard this morning – first time I’ve seen one here!!

Visited Candy at Spaulding yesterday. She was transferred from the Brigham on Wednesday night. Very upsetting.

Cheered up after watching the insane Onion movie: juvenile, sexist, funny.