Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Falling into the marketing trap, I’m entering a contest for a digital camera (since I think I could use a newer one), and posting a picture taken from my living room window in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

I took it because the sky was unlike any I’d seen before. It was hailing only minutes earlier.

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You may have noticed the Fuel My Blog button on the side of my blog recently. It’s just a vote button for a blog popularity contest site. So far I have had about 40 votes, and just a handful of visitors from Fuel My Blog.

CNN writes:
“• Kids in child care longer had more behavior problems in sixth grade
• Kids who’d been in child care also had better vocabulary scores in fifth grade”

So did the kids lose their ability to use their better vocabulary when they pass grade five? Or maybe they start using their improved vocabulary to tell their teacher that she’s a “simpering pawn of the bourgeoisie,” which incites the teacher to complain about the child’s behaviour?

The more time that children spent in child care, the more likely their sixth-grade teachers were to report problem behavior.

Also, children who got good quality child care before entering kindergarten had better vocabulary scores in the fifth grade than did youngsters who received lower quality care.

The findings come from the largest study of child care and development conducted in the United States. The 1,364 children in the analysis had been tracked since birth as part of a study by the National Institutes of Health.

In the study’s latest installment, released Monday, researchers evaluated whether characteristics observed between kindergarten and third grade were still present in fifth grade or sixth grade. The researchers found that the vocabulary and behavior patterns did continue, though many other characteristics did dissipate.

The researchers said that the increase in vocabulary and problem behaviors was small, and that parenting quality was a much more important predictor of child development.

I’d like to know their definition of “lower quality”.

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Happy Ashley Day, too, by the way!

Saskboy has 70 faces, and counting!

I was inspired to create my own stop-motion face animation after seeing Noah’s excellent work on YouTube last year. I didn’t remember to take a photo every day, so I ended up with about 70 since September 30, 2006, through March 26, 2007. I’m still taking pictures when I remember, so I may have a really super duper animation in a year or two if I stick with it. I like Noah’s background music a bit better because it’s original and in time with his frame changes. I did a version where I hum the Jeopardy theme, but my humming voice cracked, and Ashley didn’t even crack a smile upon hearing it, so I’m keeping that version to myself.

For a really funny version, you have to watch Olde English, which I’ve linked to before.

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While talking about faces, I may as well mention Facebook, which is like MySpace-lite. One can only join so many social networking sites…

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Tea Makers Ouimet points out that the CBC is gutting their design studio. Sounds like a big mistake to me, but then again - I’m a packrat at heart.

“What sort of views have the rest of you inherited from your area that are unproductive?” writes Tim.

It’s a really excellent question, which you can read the background to here. You should also try answering them, as this question makes a great meme since everyones answers are going to be different. We’ll learn lots of interesting things if we pass the question on.

Here’s an something both me and my home province are guilty of in our daily actions:

-One view in Saskatchewan is that plastics can’t be recycled unless they are from pop bottles, even though the plastic recycle numbers might match, it’s not like SARCAN will take anything plastic if it didn’t once hold a drink. There are oodles of plastic containers and packaging that we should be recycling, but there’s just no place in the province collecting it (other than our landfills and incinerators).

Also:

-I see farmers everywhere (who don’t grow flax), burning their stubble and losing valuable organic material for their future crops that way.

-Very few people my age take the provincial bus system when getting from city to city, most drive their own cars (A habit I’ve grown into, the last year or so.). Part of this is due to a lack of municipal bus services at the traveler’s destinations, or origin, but mostly it’s laziness.

-Voting Liberal, NDP, or Conservative (Har har har, this partisan joke brought to you by the Green Party).

-Cheering for the Riders (Har har har, please don’t kill me Rider fans, I bleed Green too).

I tag Rosie, Scott, Miss Cellania, Candace, IP, and BBS (to name an eclectic bunch to carry the torch of self inquiry).

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Here’s some other news I mentioned the other week, when a CNN reporter expressed shock that a boy lost in the woods for days hadn’t eaten tree bark. I since learned that a book I read as a child (and again last year for fun) Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, is in the news because it ties into the survival story of the lost boy rescued from the woods after he wandered away from his Scout camping trip. The Sun incorrectly identifies the wilderness “Brian” was lost in as Alaskan when it was supposed to be the Canadian Sheild. It shows what kind of barren land Americans peg Canada for, when they can’t even imagine people managing to survive in the Canadian wilderness.

Posted originally on TooReal.net:

The Tyee has an excellent article with some of Canada’s top bloggers giving their theories about online life. I agree with all of them. Raymi [NSFW] has a good line about all online hobbies turning into addictions.

Mr. Good got me thinking that an excellent blogging system, that would fit into my ideology surrounding reader comments, would be to have a system where I can easily vote up, or vote down comments. This way I can direct commentary in a post the way I want it to go, without removing the work some [troll] put into adding tripe to my pages. This way they’d be free to be read by those who want to waste time, and I’d not have to be saddled with the regret from deleting what they think is very important. There is something to be said about saving disk space and just deleting them, however… but I’ve not yet reached that point.

I can feel myself slowing down in my blogging, but that’s because I’m at a juncture in real-life. I won’t stop blogging any time soon though, since it’s a personal archive (as one of the top bloggers mentioned in The Tyee article), and it’s how I can look back and find something I want to reminisce about. I also like that I can help others through my photo archive, or personal experience. Today many people found on my site that “Canada RIT” means they got direct deposit from the CRA, probably their due to their GST or Tax return. They know that now, because I took a moment to write it on my blog the other year.

Another benefit to blogging I’ve found is that it’s a way to “tag” your life. If you want to see when you last went to a place, just search that place name on your blog. If you watched a movie before, but don’t remember what you thought about it (because it sucked), check your blog. Of course this only works if you have remembered to write about the details you want to search by later. It doesn’t always work. When asked by a reader just yesterday, I couldn’t find the photos of Saltcoats’ Cemetery I know I had put on my blog years ago, no matter what search I tried. I guess there’s something to be said for putting accurate subtitles under pictures, and banal detailed blogging.

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Hat tip goes to Woman At Mile 0.

I’m watching it now, and it’s pretty interesting.

Putting my partisan twist on it, I wonder if something similar might happen in Canada with the up and coming Green Party. Could we see more Canadians who are fed up with Liberal inaction, and Conservative misdirection deciding on either the NDP or Green Party alternatives? Perhaps someone with a better sense of Quebec politics could tell me just how popular and well known the ADQ was in Quebec the last two years?

Charest is behind in his seat right now.

Interim results for the province:
ADQ 15 32 47 31.59%
LIB 26 18 44 31.72%
PQ 10 24 34 29.49%
QS 0 0 0 3.34%
GRN 0 0 0 3.66%
OTH 0 0 0 .20%

Edenwold, SK a town north east of Regina:

UofR from five floors up in the South Res:

and from the second floor of the Education building’s north west corner:

Theodore, a community thirty minutes north west of Yorkton:

I smelled BBQ from my bedroom window this afternoon, which got me thinking about Summer. July 8 2007 in Regina doesn’t appear to have any events besides the CFL game where the Riders host the Calgary Stamps in the regular season home opener Sunday at 5:00 PM. There are no big events listed in Saskatoon that day, so hopefully people can travel down The Louis Riel Trail Highway #11, and attend the Blogger BBQ in the Queen City. I hope people from all over the province will be looking to meet some bloggers, enjoy a pot luck lunch, and some games. There will be a Saskatoon date too, as soon as someone picks one.

So (very) tentatively, the Regina SaskBloggers BBQ will be somewhere in a Regina park [otherwise indoors if it's heavy rain] at 12:00 PM Noon July 8 2007 Sunday.

Anyone with comments, please chime in. You can email Saskboy at his hotmail.com address, or leave a comment here.

Lance has posted the news of the Blogger BBQ at the Aggregator.

You can also leave a comment, and see last year’s parties at Saskblogs.ca.