Do an American’s rights under to U.S. constitution not apply if they are of school age? Or for that matter are our schools not part of the U.S. and governed by some other laws? Of course not, but some shool districts and administrators seem to think that their particular domain is in an alternate reality and not subject to the law of the land. Even more frightening is the apparent spreading of this type of thinking to entire communities.

Now before I get a lot of complaints, let me say that I feel that overall our school systems and staff are doing an admirable job (although I would like to see shop class make a comeback in more schools). There are a few bad apples however, and since the educational community likes to point out that they are shaping the leaders of tomorrow - why isn’t there a better system in place for weeding out such individuals from the educational community? Is the stress of rising to administrative level in school systems causing them to lose all sense of perspective or giving them some reason to believe they have God like power?

I recently watched a show about how a student was suspended from his high school sports team for trash talking an opponents team (nothing profane). Now, I’m not big on sports but trash talking is as much a part of it as hitting a ball and certainly not something that should incite a coach and administrators to such actions.  The real kicker is - he made these comments on the internet while seated at his home computer. Not at a game, not on school property, not even from a school computer.

After having his day in court, the judge agreed that the school violated his right to free speech and ordered that be allowed to return to the team.  But it didn’t end there - after the court ruling - the team’s coaches quit (in protest I assume). What maturity - quitting because a student proved beyond doubt in a court of law they were wrong.

There is more to the story including a second bout in court with the accusation that the school did not try to replace the coaches in order to not comply with the previous ruling. The team was disbanded and neither the student or his team mates got to finish the season. Everyone came out a loser, but the student came out a loser with a 60k award for damages.

Now what if this had been handled from the beginning with a bit of common sense? It may have gone like this:

Principal A - Did you see what (student) wrote on that message board about us?

Principal B - Yes, it is the talk of the town.

Principal A - What can we do about this?

Principal B - About a bit of trash talk between sports rivals? You’re joking right?

Principal A - Hmm, well I guess you are right about that - not like we didn’t do the same back in high school.

And it would have ended there, with everyone a winner and the student 60k poorer.

A new article has been added to the web site showing how to make sugar skulls for November 2 - Dias de Los Muertos. A popular Day Of the Dead tradition, this large heavily illustrated article has step by step instructions for making your own sugar skulls using chocolate molds.

See: How To Make Sugar Skulls

After deleting today’s daily dose of spam regarding stocks which seem immune to most spam filters, I got to wondering about them.

1. What does this spammer get out of it? - there appears to be no sales pitch or any way the spammer stands to gain anything from annoying the world’s population.
2. Do folks really buy stocks recommended anonymously?
3. If so, would it make any sense to take advice from someone you know is a criminal? - At the very least they are willing to violate anti spam laws.
4. Would you take a stock market tip from someone who can’t even spell stock? The following is an actual quote from one of these spams including stock spelled incorrectly four times in three lines, as well as numerous other mispelled words:
• When this sotck moves - watch out! stooocks wwe profilee shhow aa signifficant increease inn stocck prrice sometimes in days, not months or years, remember this is a stronng playy.
  Massive news for AG AO this thursday! A GAO is a big mover in the STCOK MAKRET!!!
5. Why would someone take stock advice seriously from someone who fills the second half of their email with random junk including such gems as:
• Ive assault thought Critical Thinking tool lash ones values
• faltering Air testing waters after moving unique radio show Big Apple wags said brand humor losing steam loss
• recent bipolar meltdown featured geezer wearing neck tie quot collar named Ned
• Planetary examples horseshoe righthand theory slope forms plateau Kinetic Geotail Flux Crabtree

I honestly can’t envision what these spammers hope to achieve with this, although I’m sure a few addlebrained folks may be taken in by it. But meanwhile at least it will provide some comic relief  if you read about Joey Headset’s Portfolio

One German automobile maker has recently decided to break with the tradition of using attractive men and women to promote car sales. This has been a long standing method to sell autos and probably dates back to some of the earliest cars.

Deciding that the tried and true method of attracting customers is not for them,  these folks have unleashed the second most irritating ad campaign in television history and have bombarded our airwaves with it constantly.

This annoying ad features folks sitting in pricey German autos screaming into megaphones -the same message over and over. I can understand that they feel owning one of their vehicles is nothing to get an inflated ego about - as a matter of fact I knew that all my life without it being screamed at me repeatedly every time I turn on a TV. 

What I really don’t understand is why they feel that irritating every person in the US will actually help them sell cars.

I tried allowing open posting for a while, but just don’t have time to keep up with all the automated spam posts. So I’ve been forced to require registration before a comment can be posted, sorry for the inconvenience.

A currently running commercial for a fast food sandwich claims to be made on “Artisan Bread”.

Being an artisan myself, I was initially outraged at the thought of calling a product mass produced to supply thousands of restaurants “artisan bread”. After all the definition of artisan is a skilled craftsman, not skilled machinery.

On doing a bit of research it turns out that it is actually an uncommon name for a very common product - sourdough and other types of breads using a starter in place of yeast. It is probably the most common type of bread available from the invention / discovery of bread up until the commercial availability of yeast in the 1900’s.

So much for rightous indignation, but I still can’t accept calling a mass produced product artisan bread just because it is made with a recipe similar to that used by artisans to make it by hand for thousands of years.

This  occurred to me on a recent trip to a local store to buy cooking pots - I won’t mention any names but they have 3 B’s in their initials. Normally I avoid big chains preferring to buy from smaller businesses, but my wife had $50 in gift cards (from a credit card reward or something)  so we headed there. We are replacing all our non stick pots in light of the possible health threat they pose.

The shopping part went smoothly and after looking at all the cooking pot sets we couldn’t afford, settled on a nice copper bottom 10 piece set for about the price of what a single high end pot would have cost.

As we were leaving we noticed a small sign on the display that the set included a free gift - ask at register or customer service. Well, a free gift always sounds nice but “ask at the register” translates into “you are about to waste a lot of time” in my experience.

Sure enough the cashier knew nothing about this, so someone from that department was paged to the register. He actually showed up after the second page (a small miracle in itself). He of course knew nothing about it either and headed back to his department to investigate. At this point I would have just left the store and bought it online, but my wife is like a hound dog trailing a scent when it comes to a “bargain” so I was forced to wait.

While he was gone we waited on line at the customer service desk only to find that they also knew nothing about it. So we went back to the department in search of the the person who went off to find the answer.

Eventually a manager was located who figured it out. The free gift was quite nice - a cast iron griddle. But time is money and as I figure it, by wasting 30 minutes of two adults time to get it - it would actually have been cheaper to just buy the griddle.

Is this an aberration? No, whenever I buy from a mass marketer I expect things like this. Which is why I prefer to buy from small businesses. When I purchase from a small business, I can expect to deal with knowledgeable people for the most part because good service is what keeps them in business at a time when mass marketers are cutting prices.  This applies to both mortar and brick businesses as well as online businesses.

Had I purchased my cooking pots  online I would have saved a lot:

• Time - the most valuable commodity on Earth. This includes both travel time (about 40 minutes) and the 30 minutes or so wasted while the store got its act together.
• Aggravation - incompetence really annoys me.
• Gas - I don’t know the actual milage but with todays fuel prices, 40 minutes of driving adds up to several dollars.

I know I only mentioned non stick coatings in passing  above.  There is a growing sentiment that under some conditions, non stick pots can release toxins into the air when heated. One of the symptoms said to occur is “flu like headaches” which I have been subjected to far more often than one would expect in recent years (we switched to all non stick cookware several years ago).  I am unsure how much of this is fact and how much is fiction so have decided on a safer approach and stopped using non stick pots and pans as a personal choice.

The quest for chocolate made from scratch started with grining coffee for this blogger - see In The Beginning…

Ever wonder just how that chocolate is made? The Chocolate Alchemy site is devoted to those who wish to make their own chocolate from scratch (or just want to learn about it).

I thought I had a chocolate addiction until I read this. This blog is fun reading.

Our opening line of hard candy making supplies and molds is now available.

I will be working on some candy making projects and illustrated instructions soon.

What is there about complicated or difficult to decipher bounced email messages that are so attractive to email server administrators? Are they all techies that believe only fellow techies should send email?

I know the codes associated with bounced emails are well entrenched and see no reason to change them, but I find it hard to believe that none of this software enables sysadmins to actually configure the wording and layout of the bounce message to actually be meaningful easy to understand to non techies (and software tasked with deleting bounced email addresses as well. To quote an article on handling bounces “In fact, there are over one thousand seven hundred different formats recognized today by those who study email deliverability, and the number is increasing.”

Why can’t some kind of standards be set? And even if none are set, is there really any reason why the first line or 2 of the bounce message can’t say something like:

Error ### - User Mailbox over quota ( or whatever the delivery problem is)

Why do many bounce messages require you to scroll through multiple lines of header code to find out why it bounced? If sysadmins frown so badly on multiple bounced emails to their mail server, why do they make it so difficult to figure out who needs deletion from our mailings?

A pretty good explanation of what goes with bounced email can be found in Bounced Email? Deal With It! by Edward Grossman for those who want a better understanding in terms most of us can understand.