Walking robots

Today was an FCAT day, so the school has begun assigning busy work for seniors who really don't need to show up to school at all until the afternoon. Today's assignment was to make a presentation for incoming freshmen introducing them to good old PBHS. As you may recall, we were given the choice between making a movie file with iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, making a slide show in PowerPoint, or making a "podcast" with a microphone and a computer. I think they grouped everybody by what they chose because maybe somebody wanted to do an iMovie and they would have been put in a class that didn't have Macs. I don't know.

But anyway, the school seems to be serious about this. They gave us a rubric with what they're expecting. It was asking for a lot; in order to score the big points, you had to use lots of stupid flashy stuff (colors, text effects, crazy transitions, flashing lights, etc.) but in a tasteful, reserved way. That's kind of a contradiction in itself. Another part of the rubric would score how well we adhered to "copyright guidelines" in our presentations. In other words, we would have to be good, upstanding young citizens and respect the intellectual property rights of our dear corporate America. I don't think most teenagers would know if they were breaking copyright law in their little presentation. Even if they weren't that ignorant, they wouldn't care anyway. In the whole room, I didn't see a single presentation that didn't have some form of copyright infringement.

Mr. Mumtaz, whose room we were in, told us to do our projects in groups, so I teamed up with Gilbert and a goth girl who wants to kill everyone. Since Flash is Gilbert's area of expertise, we made our presentation as a Flash movie. I had some snarky ideas for deliberately breaking the guidelines set down by the rubric. But the overall message was the same as many of the presentations that I happened to see other people working on. You've got to do well on the FCAT (though they'll give you busy work when you're a senior) in order for the school to continue having Fridays off (which the county doesn't like) and maintain its high rank in the state (if only we could beat the top 12 schools...). After that, there were some videos of the sun rotating and robots moving around. I think we'll have to present these videos on Wednesday, and they're going to be (gulp) graded. I wonder what class they'll count for.

Many people who have used Windows Vista say it's far from perfect. Here are the Five Sins of Vista (according to one reviewer).

Here are the secrets to choosing the right sunglasses for your face. (I assume the rules apply to regular glasses also.) I've been told I have a diamond-shaped face, so I would look best with oval-shaped glasses.