While I was reading this latest Self Pub book, I had a realization: I’ve never read a book set in Canada. I’ve read books in Canada, I’ve read books aboot Canadians, I’ve watched movies based on books that are filmed in Canada but pretend to be somewhere else. Just never any books that actually take place in America’s Northern Neighbor. That changed when I read…
How do you talk about something that has become so painfully political in a non-political fashion? No idea, so I’m just going to rant for a bit. This was the second year in a row where I waited with sickening dread for our new company insurance policies. If they changed our provider–a very definite possibility–I would almost certainly once again be either forced to get a new…
I read. Quite a bit. But after a fairly amusing tiff between Larry Correia (voted most likely to be assassinated by the Hugo Award committee) and one of those random bloggers on Huffington Post, I realized that I’ve seriously overlooked Self Published book. This isn’t due to any intentional shunning on my part, just that few Self Pub books pop up on my Scribd subscription. I’ve…
Last week, my brother-in-law asked on Facebook if it made sense for schools to measure a middle school music teacher’s competence by the students’ ability compared to those in other feeder programs as they moved up to high school. The responses pointed out some valid arguments against this method, such as the myriad of variables that go into how nimbly a child can pull that bow past a…
When we were going through various diagnostic sessions with Finley, one question that came up again and again was if he was “scripting.” This is a term that is thrown around enough that if you search for “scripting autism” you’ll get helpful results on Google (though “scripting” by itself is apparently more associated with programming on the Goog). To sum up the term, scripting is…
Anxiety runs in my family. It’s a trait on the Gordon side, passed down along with above average height (which somehow skipped over me) and sitting on the carpet with only one knee up. For example, Grandpa Doug was probably the best-loved high school biology teacher Redding will ever know, entertaining thousands of students over his long years of teaching. His stories are some of…
We’ve had our share of seizure scares over the past few months. After a particularly frightening incident, we broke down and bought the SAMi-3 Sleep Activity Monitor, which is recommended by the Epilepsy Foundation to help worried parents get a decent night’s sleep. The camera itself is pretty great (except for the dumb limitation of having to be hooked up to a iOS device). The idea…
Every few months, I get super motivated about creating a platform for my writing. Writing’s something I oddly enjoy, a cathartic release from the daily grind of numbers and IRS deadlines, so why not attempt to get people to read it, too? Maybe up that Adsense revenue from $5 a month to $6. Back in high school, finding the audience was easy. The goal was…
My office has a great view of a very frustrating intersection. Accidents are a weekly occurrence, typically caused by some speedy driver thinking he can just make it, only to be proven wrong in the worst possible way. Everyone so far has walked away from the scene, shaken and hopefully a little more sober. Yesterday, though, a triplet of drivers managed to take that impatience…
Several years ago, I remember commenting to a friend that Finley didn’t get into characters the way most kids do. By that age, I had already memorized every Mario character, GI Joe, Thundercat, and Dino Rider created. Yet Finley never really got invested in any of the brightly colored characters parading across the screen. That eventually changed with Phineas and Ferb and, much more annoyingly,…