Don't Back Down

Another batch of statistics is out - this one showing the percentage of our income that goes to different expenses. What I don't get is why the government can leave out the largest expenditure that any of us are likely to have - taxes.

In the last year, approximately 10% of our spending went to the home. This includes the mortgage as well as home improvements, maintenance and the like. This is well below the average in the chart you'll see above, and that's okay - but it is easily our largest single category of spending. Except taxes. They rang up a whopping 26% of our spending last year.

Please note that this is slightly different from the chart that I linked above. That chart considers expenditures as a part of income. I didn't do that. I just used the amount that we spent, as that seems to me to be a more appropriate measure. But I find it terribly convenient that the government study leaves out taxes entirely, even though that expense accounts for a quarter of what we spend in a year.

Update: True, we don't generally spend much for taxes. That's not possible because we never actually receive most of the money that we pay in taxes. Instead, the government introduced withholding - by which they get the money withheld from your paycheck so you never even notice that it's gone.

Watching the Panthers game last night, we saw some of the new Miller commercials. The commercials appear to specialize in honesty. The problem is, the honesty is so hard to find that you might miss it.

First, the commercial talks about taste preferences, and then moves to taste tests and finally explains how more people find that Miller beers have more flavor than Budweiser beers. All completely true (presumably) - but make sure you pay attention to the details. Never does the commercial mention that people actually like Miller better than Bud. All it says is that people find that Miller has more flavor than Bud.

Even the "taste test" commercials, that have a single person doing the deed, have the person saying an unlikely "This one has more flavor". If I like something, I'll say "Damn, that's good". Or even "Wow. Great stuff". Not "This one has more flavor".

Still not with me? Check the fine print on the "summary" commercial (not the one with the individual taste test). It says something to the effect of "Results reflect those noticing more flavor, not preference". The taste could be that of a landfill, and people might not care for it. But hey - at least they're being honest. You just have to look for it.

Some of the text on the site is acting a little odd, and I've got no idea why that might be happening. Sorry for any ugliness. I'll see what I can do to get it cleaned up.

After some more use of it, I've decided that I don't like the Wal-Mart wish list as much as the Amazon one. On an ongoing basis it might be okay, but trying to stock it with the contents of the Amazon list is becoming a bit of a pain. I really shouldn't blame that on Wal-Mart, so here are some other reasons.

I have found that prices seem better at Wal-Mart in almost every instance. However, Amazon in most cases will give you free shipping (if you send more than $25 worth), so that might equalize the prices a bit. For usability, I've got to give it to Amazon. Wal-Mart's registries look like someone trying to replicate a real-world list online, while the ones at Amazon are great for shopping the web site.

I also like the priority feature of Amazon's list. I don't use it much, but I do like to have the option. The sort options are better, and Amazon's presentation and selection features are nicer. I do like that Wal-Mart offers the option to create multiple different lists, and I like that they keep track of which items have been purchased. It appears that you still have to remove them manually, but at least you know what's been ordered. Amazon doesn't seem to care, potentially creating duplicate orders (as if I receive that much off my lists).

Wal-Mart's customer service is bleak. I asked a question about the date of the registry - specifically, I wanted to know if I could create a list without a date, as I wanted a general wish list and not a date-specific event registry. They sent me a rather lengthy reply about how to create a registry. I'm sure that's because some automaton is reading the request, sees the word "registry" and fires off the standard reply. It may not even be a person. Still, it didn't help, and I'm not likely to ask again.

The registries at Wal-Mart are printable and scannable at the store, which means you could print them and send them to people who don't have an Internet connection - or that don't care to order online - and they could go to the store themselves. Nice feature, but for my use I don't think it's terribly important.

As far as items, I have found that for books, Wal-Mart does reasonably well. There are a few exceptions for newer and out-of-stock items (see DVD info). For DVDs, I'm finding lots of things that they don't have. Many are older videos. Many are newer, not-yet-released videos. Lots of the videos they do have are full frame only (no widescreen). It also seems that out-of-stock items often can't be added either. Still, I'll likely keep both for the time being - but the Amazon list is likely the most complete (if you're concerned).

I've added a button to the header for my Wal-Mart wish list. The buttons look pretty good in Firefox. They look pretty bad in Internet Explorer. Sorry. I'm still not interested in catering to IE. I also changed the email address presentation. Now it just tells you the address to use. Send it to the domain you're viewing. This is also reflected in a tool tip when you hover over that text. I'm beginning to suspect that the scrapers are looking for "written out" email addresses such as the one I was using, so I am trying a new way of presenting it. Humans should be able to find their way to it, robots may take a while to figure it out. Those reading via RSS shouldn't care about any of these changes, as none of this matters.

I noticed earlier today that Wal-Mart has implemented online gift registries. This could be something they've had for a while, but I've never noticed it. The cool thing about Wal-Mart's registries is that you seem to be able to create more than one - so you can create a birthday registry, a wedding registry, whatever you like, then add items to different lists. It's pretty cool. They don't seem to have a general wish list registry, even though they have one of that name. All of them still seem to require a date, and I'm not sure what will happen once the date is past - it would stink if you lost your entries.

What seems to be a really nice feature is that you can print out a registry - perhaps even particular items from the registry - that include a bar code. Then you can shop at the store, they can update the bar code into their system and the registry will be updated (allegedly - I haven't tried this yet). I've long disliked the feature at Amazon that your wish list doesn't get updated as things are bought, meaning that you could receive more than one of some items. Perhaps that will change in the future if Wal-Mart's works as advertised.

Wal-Mart's recommendations don't seem to be quite as solid as Amazon's, but I suspect you'll see that improve. I'd also like to see some reviews, as I generally enjoy reading those at Amazon. The selection isn't as good, either. But the prices overall do seem to be a bit lower, so that's nice for those items that exist at both places.

They also have introduced a DVD rental service (apparently like Netflix). Prices seem to be good and they offer a free 30-day trial. Might have to try it out.

New research has surfaced that sheds some doubt on particular quotes from the Quran. I don't know enough about any language to offer insight into the interpretation, so I'll leave that to someone else and I'll just look at the conclusions in this particular article. Other information, as always, is welcome.

So apparently the bit where martyrs will end up with 72 virgins in heaven when they die? It might not be correct. They may end up with white grapes (presumably 72 of them) instead. Talk about disappointment.

It's not enough that our government wants to mess with the school system, imposing a complicated set of calculations that don't really seem to help all that much. North Carolina also wants to get into the act, by making sure that school doesn't start prior to a particular date and doesn't run past a particular date. Couple that with the fact that North Carolina schools must apparently operate for a minimum of 180 days, it's going to make for quite a challenge.

Most months seem to have around 22 available days (week days) for education. The new start and end requirements allow for a maximum of 13 days in August and June. Using those numbers, we're talking about 211 days that may be possible over that calendar. Consider that there are 22 holidays on the CMS calendar this year. That's 189 days. There are 10 additional teacher workdays on that calendar. That's 179 days, and makes no consideration for days the school may unexpectedly not operate (ie, snow days). We've had at least a couple of those for the last two years. Also consider that except in very rare occasions, February will never have 22 possible school days, so the starting number is likely to be even lower. Using the actual months for a 2004-2005 school year, you'd start with 208 days. Uh-oh.

In fact, the last two years have seen problems with snow days and the school schedule that require a slight addition of extra days - extra hours through the last couple months, Saturday school, even extending the school year by a day. And that's with a calendar that starts in the middle of August. It continues to amaze me that our government thinks that they can legislate everything and have it magically work itself out. Just because it's on the books doesn't mean that the real calendar has to comply.

During the process of checking things out recently, I noticed that Shockwave Flash movies had stopped displaying in Firefox at some point. I think it was the loading of 0.9.

So I went through the ritual of uninstalling and reinstalling, but it didn't really help. Then I started looking at Flashblock again. Looking through some posts here and there, it seemed that while Flashblock may work with the newer versions, it did seem to have some install problems. So I installed it to see what happened.

Flashblock no longer shows up in the extension list (it hadn't for a while anyway), but it does seem to work as expected. And more importantly, my movies are back. But only when I want them. Sweet.

They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

Nice. Oh, I'm sure he meant to say something about how they are always vigilant in order to make sure they've thought of everything so that they can defend against the same - but I find it refreshing when the government can be so open and forthright. It's downright refreshing that we have a president like Dubya, who doesn't try and hide his true thoughts from us.

I'm not talking about the free, kookily fun software here. I'm talking about the math that is used by the government to measure our schools. Let's start with the basics. The government recently passed the No Child Left Behind Act to try and make sure our schools do a better job of educating our children. Nevermind that the people who are in positions to make such acts went through schools without the benefit of such a thing, and in general they've turned out okay.

Let's assume for a moment that this is a good idea. The results of this year's testing for North Carolina show that just over 70 percent of the schools in the state met the standard. Yet nearly 80 percent of the districts failed. Huh? The difference between the individual schools and the districts that they make up are due to some simply bizarre calculations that could only come from the government.

Let's assume that this is okay and take an even deeper look. Apparently a change in the law allowed those schools who were pretty close to the target to apply a margin of error and pretend that they made it. Why in the world do they even create a benchmark if you let people miss it? Didn't pass, Timmy? You were really close - we'll let you move to the next grade anyway. If this was a percent or two, I'd say it's not a big deal. But if you remove this requirement, the schools that passed drop to just 56 percent, meaning that nearly 15 percent of schools (and just over 21% of those that passed) did so because they came really close to their goals, even though they didn't achieve them.

And this is making things better? What exactly does it teach those children that in order to increase your performance, you need to make up new methods of calculating that performance?

We're trying to get geared up for school, and working on some math around the house, so we needed to find some practice math. I found a couple of sites that are coming in pretty useful.

The first, the Kid's Page, offers a whole bunch of pre-made worksheets. Generally speaking, the level required for some of them are middle elementary and up. Our soon-to-be-first-grader can't handle more than a few of them, while our soon-to-be-fourth-grader can handle most, but a couple are a little out of his reach. There are also a bunch of other worksheets available on other subjects, but I haven't checked those out yet.

The second site comes from the Discovery School, where they offer a handful of worksheet generators. They even include some pre-generated worksheets that are ready-to-go. The addition and subtraction worksheet generators, specifically, have worked out really well for us, as we can do small-number math for our younger son and larger numbers for our older. There also are some additional teaching tools, including a lesson planner, a puzzle maker, and a quiz center. I haven't tried them, but they look pretty impressive.