Chris

What you can’t say

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I like Paul Grahams site, he has some really cool essays, books on lisp and a story on how they sold Viaweb to yahoo for $45 million.

He also wrote an essay on what you can’t say that I think most people would enjoy reading.

“Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them.”

He gave an awesome talk about hackers that you can download here

Share your most dangerous idea

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Originally from slashdot but this article is well worth a read.
What is your most dangerous idea.

ROGER C. SCHANK makes some interesting comments about education.

“My dangerous idea is one that most people immediately reject without giving it serious thought: school is bad for kids — it makes them unhappy and as tests show — they don’t learn much.”

Read more on this page, he’s forth from the top.

Superuser User Group

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I’ve setup the Superuser User Group. There’s still quite a lot to do but I’m tired so hopefully I’ll get back into the swing of things soon.

Over the holidays I’ve been having some fun with free and open source online games. I posted a list of 10 online games that we’ve been playing on GNU/Linux and windows in the user group forum.

Quizzes

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I’ve added a quiz feature to my blog, you can see the option on the menu that runs across the top of the page. Its a simple script written in Perl. The format is pretty self explanatory.
Here’s an example of how to write your own:

Q=Free Software is excellent for education?
A=Highly Agree=5
A=Agree=4
A=No Opinion=3
A=Disagree=2
A=Highly Disagree=1

If your answer is either correct or incorrect you would just use 5 for the correct answer and 0 for the incorrect ones.

Wikibooks and Self-defence

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A while back I wrote a guide on How to Escape the Headlock for Wikibooks and managed to get some friends to help with the pics then an anonymous person added some tips on how to avoid the headlock and a wrote a book on folkstyle wrestling.

It was when bullying in schools was receiving attention from the media. Knowledge of self-defence was useful during my time in school and still is as an adult.

First Blog

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I’ve never really been into blogging or keeping a journal but after my research in adult and community education in the real world and reading Lawrence Lessigs book Free Culture, that you can download HERE, I’ve decided to give it a try.