Sharing holiday gift ideas

Do you have any favorite children’s gifts your children have received or been given? Any timeless ideas you’d like to share?

If you have come across something really good, please leave it a comment on this page. Please tell us the name, a description, where you found it, and what age child it would be best suited for. And if you need some ideas, I hope there are a few here to inspire you.

Thanks!

paying your way II

well, it didn’t take long to find the information I wanted. How read this chart:

  1. find your state
  2. see if it’s red or blue (you probably know)
  3. check to see if the final column is a positive or negative number.

If it’s a negative number, you lose: you’re giving away more than your get, in California’s case, $58 billion. But if you’re in Alabama, say, you win: you collected $10 billion more than you contributed. And hey, look at Virginia with almost $22 billion in federal funds: you’d think one of the oldest states would have figured out how to generate a surplus by now.

States’ Balance of Payments with Washington, 2001

(dollars in millions)
 
Taxes Paid
Spending Received
Surplus/Deficit
Alabama
22,437
33,205
10,768
Alaska
4,200
6,685
2,485
Arizona
30,057
32,392
2,335
Arkansas
12,476
17,469
4,993
California
264,344
206,245
-58,099
Colorado
33,898
26,618
-7,280
Connecticut
36,416
25,351
-11,065
Delaware
5,750
4,632
-1,118
Florida
110,294
107,395
-2,899
Georgia
52,225
50,822
-1,403
Hawaii
6,903
10,185
3,282
Idaho
6,683
7,977
1,294
Illinois
96,686
71,520
-25,166
Indiana
36,733
34,630
-2,103
Iowa
16,725
18,523
1,798
Kansas
16,503
17,806
1,303
Kentucky
20,509
27,210
6,701
Louisiana
21,371
29,249
7,878
Maine
6,904
8,643
1,739
Maryland
41,779
50,966
9,187
Massachusetts
59,779
48,188
-11,591
Michigan
67,886
56,185
-11,701
Minnesota
36,519
27,384
-9,135
Mississippi
12,094
21,023
8,929
Missouri
33,718
41,452
7,734
Montana
4,359
6,910
2,551
Nebraska
10,415
11,469
1,054
Nevada
15,014
10,631
-4,383
New Hampshire
10,315
7,006
-3,309
New Jersey
75,115
51,657
-23,458
New Mexico
8,487
17,156
8,669
New York
166,554
126,990
-39,564
North Carolina
47,579
47,748
169
North Dakota
3,288
6,169
2,881
Ohio
69,127
66,341
-2,786
Oklahoma
16,667
23,790
7,123
Oregon
21,241
19,826
-1,415
Pennsylvania
83,052
84,880
1,828
Rhode Island
6,990
7,458
468
South Carolina
20,799
26,070
5,271
South Dakota
4,293
6,095
1,802
Tennessee
33,225
38,986
5,761
Texas
134,809
121,571
-13,238
Utah
11,358
12,139
781
Vermont
3,731
3,984
253
Virginia
52,858
74,802
21,944
Washington
49,651
40,233
-9,418
West Virginia
7,793
13,064
5,271
Wisconsin
34,609
28,966
-5,643
Wyoming
3,583
3,824
241

Unfair? Perhaps. The federal system is supposed to benefit everyone without quibbling about who generates a surplus or a deficit. But the divisions aren’t my invention: again, if people can speak for the president and his party and deprecate the ones who generate the tax revenues that subsidize their base without fear of correction, why should we put up with it?

playing the game or locking us out?

OK, I can see why there’s some indignation here . . . .

iPod Download is back!:

Cory Doctorow:
iPod Download is an iTunes plugin for moving music off your iPod onto your Mac that Apple had removed from the Internet by means of a series of lawyer letters. Then Apple shipped a disingenous “update” to iTunes that contained a blacklist of disallowed plugins, including iPod Download, because apparently Apple knows better than you which software you should use with your iPod after you’ve bought it and paid for it.

iPod Download has been updated to version 1.1, and it works with iTunes again. Get it before Apple uses the law to take away your rights again.

1.4MB DMG Link

(via Engadget)

but if you follow the links and see how trivial it was to re-enable the plugin and regain access to the files, I have to wonder if Apple is doing just a little more than playing along. Consider that “breaking” the DRM is as simple as burning a CD from iTunes and ripping it. Does that sound like a draconian regime or is it more like someone playing “wink wink nudge nudge” with clueless RIAA cartel?

I admit the whole idea of copy protection/DRM is nasty and has proven to be technically unworkable: the idea of the RIAA getting into an intellectual arms race with hackers isn’t worth betting on — unless you bet with the RIAA on them winning.

Now playing:The Bottom Line by Big Audio Dynamite from the album “This Is Big Audio Dynamite”

TinyURL.com – where tiny is better!

Any idea why Yahoo!, et al, don’t disintermediate this service?

TinyURL.com – where tiny is better!:

Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you’ve come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.

Who really wants to copy — or worse, type — this mess: http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/freecycleseattle/lst?.dir=/1912+Smith+%26+Barnes+piano&.src=gr&.order=&.view=t&.done=http%3a//briefcase.yahoo.com/ ?

sample of how busy a news site was yesterday

A friend and former colleague at CNN.com writes:

Peak hits/min: 3 million

Peak page views/min: 1 million

4 million hits/min peak (sustained for 15 min, 23:05-23:20)

Max response time for cnn.com: 0.6 second

Dunno yet what total page views for the day wound up at. I picked 275M in the pool but we blew past that shortly after 10pm.

346,416,000 page views

Record a solo album in “NaNoWriMo for musicians”

I should have seen this coming . . .

Record a solo album in “NaNoWriMo for musicians”:

Cory Doctorow:
The fifth NaNoWriMo — the national novel writing month that challenges individuals to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days — has just kicked off, and good luck to the NaNovelists!

But what of the musically creative? They need not suffer in silence any longer: Lacunae has just floated “NaSoAlMo” — the national solo album month, for “brave souls who are up for it will write and record an entire solo album in the course of its 30 days.”

Q. So, for the purposes of NaSoAlMo, what exactly is a solo album?

A. An album of music you have written, played and recorded entirely by yourself*. The shortest inarguably awesome album I can think of offhand that a lot of people have heard is the first Ramones album, which is 29:09 long, so your solo album must be at least that long. Beyond that, its form and content are up to you.

*Since Ramones includes a cover of “Let’s Dance,” your NaSoAlMo album may, if you wish, include one cover of somebody else’s song.

Link

(Thanks, Lalitree!)

Jeez, you’d think they could have picked a different month, though. What if you wanna do both?