An eclectic collection of oddities, humorous anecdotes, weird photos, funny headlines, cartoons, puzzles, inspirational items, jokes, and more. . .  gathered here as a reference repository for speakers, lecturers, teachers, students, writers, or Web travellers just looking for diversion and a bit of levity. 

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Diary of a laptop school pupil
BBC News
Sarah Murrin is a student at Empire High School in Arizona that is swapping school books for Apple laptops. Here she describes a typical day in her school life:

• Ring! Ring! It's 6:30am and time to get ready for school.
• Brush my teeth, comb my hair. Hmm, what to wear? Polo, jeans, and flip-flops, perfect! Get dressed and get ready to go. Oh! Don't forget my laptop! Off I go!
• 8:40am at Empire High School. Time to do to my first class of the day.
• Algebra 2 with Mrs Jensen - factoring today. I'm so relieved we still use paper for math.
• An hour of Algebra and on to Second Period, Life Connections with Mrs Medivil. This class is great! It really prepares us for the real world and teaches us who we are.
• Period Three, Honors English with Mrs Flom, what adventures will this class behold today? Movies, vocab, essay, maybe a short story. Time to type our vocab for the week.
• It's really great having laptops not only because of the extra organization but also because students are more interested. It is so much easier because you have access to resources on the wireless internet for your assignments.
• Next, Graphics and Animation with Mrs Ogle. Time to work with Flash and learn how to put sound effects in a movie. I love this class!
• 12:40 pm and it's time for a lunch break! Lunch here is still a little hectic, but our cafeteria is coming along.
• The thrill of only two classes left. Chemistry for Fifth, and teachers aid for Sixth.
• I wonder if we are burning anything in chem? Nope, just taking notes off a PowerPoint presentation.
• I love the sound of the clicking and clacking of the keyboards. Dr Frank sure catches our interest with atomic mass and isotopes.
• Sixth Period, Teachers Aid for Mrs King in freshman English, its not too bad. I pretty much use this class as a study hall.
• 3:20 pm rolls around and its time to go home and do homework. When leaving the school, we get a good-bye from the fabulous office administration and Mrs Lee, one of the best principals that I've ever had.
• Empire High School is great!

The Vail school district is really starting a tradition with Empire. The first school to be laptop based. This school will forever be looked upon and remembered and I am more than happy to be part of it.

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IT support for parents
Dot.life - how technology changes us ~ Really, how wired up are you?
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Computer Tip: Make Type Big Enough to Read - Quickly! 
You can quickly and simply increase and decrease the size of a font on a web page by holding down the CTRL key on the keyboard and scrolling up or down with the wheel on a wheel mouse. Enlarging the font size can even help make difficult-to-read fonts styles and poor contrast between type and background more readable. 

 
Pro guide to Google searches. Part I
Our-Picks

You can search whole phrases by using quotes like “Rose Chappel” instead of plain Rose Chappel. The first query searches for the Rose Chappel and the second searches for the words Rose and Chappel.

When you want to exclude a certain term from your search: PS3 -price. This will exclude all the results that contain the word ‘price’.  Note that there must be no space between ‘-’ and the word to exclude.

Google excludes by default some common terms like I, of, the, etc. If you ever need to make Google include a given term all you need to do is put a ‘+’ in front of it: +the tower. Note that, when words like these are included within a phrase search they are automatically included like: “the tower”.

You can specify that one word OR the other should be searched. To do this insert the capitalized OR in your queries: expensive (red OR green) dress.

You can ask Google to search synonyms of a certain word you search by using the ‘~’ key. For example: ~wood is going to search for both wood, woods, forest, etc.

Another interesting trick that I’m not sure many of you knew about implies ranges of numbers. Say you want to purchase a computer monitor with a diagonal of 17” to 20” and a price ranging from $1000 to $1500, you can use: monitor 17..20 “price 1000..1500?. The ‘..’ operand tells Google that you are referring to a range of numbers, for the same example you can use monitor 17..20 “price ..1500? to say the top price should be $1500.

Google permits you to use wildcards in order to replace a part of word or even a whole word: sea* in order to search for seafood, seaside, seasick, etc. Also you can use ‘*’ to substitute whole words, such as: expensive “* dress” and you will find red, blue, short, ugly,etc dress. Keep in mind you can do this with several words by using more ‘*’ marks: the ** hood, so you can find the red riding hood.

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DNA

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A long time ago our ancestors noticed some things tended to reproduce themselves – that traits were inherited. Today, we have the field of science called genetics. You are made up of billions of cells. Inside the nucleus of each of your cells is your own unique set of 46 chromosomes. These chromosomes hold an incredibly long molecule of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). It stores all the information that determines what you look like and how your body functions. Check out these amazing facts about DNA, the single most important molecule in living cells:

• The chemical compound DNA was first discovered by Friederich Miescher in Germany about 100 years ago. Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the 'Double Helix' structure in 1953.
• DNA can be pictured as an incredibly long ladder that has been twisted into a double helix shape. 
• You have about 9 million kilometers of DNA. That's enough to reach to the moon and back 13 times! 
• Sections of DNA which contain complete messages are known as genes. They can be thought of as 'words' along the DNA 'sentences', with about 100,000 of these 'words' in each sentence.
• A gene is a segment of the DNA molecule that codes for a single protein and most organisms have between 50,000 and 100,000 genes.
• In each of our cells we carry a complete genetic record which requires around 100 million ‘rungs’. 
• Any two unrelated strangers anywhere on the planet share 99.9 percent of the same DNA. A miniscule fraction of the genome—about 3 million of its over 3 billion bases—accounts for the vast differences within the human race.
• Human beings have roughly 99.1 percent of our genes in common with the chimpanzee, our closest relative on earth. 
• The overlap between mice and humans is surprisingly close, too. We have nearly 75 percent of our genes in common.
• Single gene errors account for more than 4,000 known hereditable diseases and the list is growing rapidly. A person’s risk for diseases from cystic fibrosis to Huntington’s now can be determined by looking at the DNA.
• The red blood cells are the only kind of cells in your body that don’t have DNA! That’s because they’re the only cells in your body that don’t have nuclei.

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Bible group spreads word by SMS
ADELAIDE, Australia (AP) -- "In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth," according to a new version of the Bible translated into the text message language of cell phone users. The Bible Society in Australia launched on Thursday its translation of all 31,173 verses of the Bible in the modern, abbreviated language of text messages, or SMS. The verses can be accessed over the Internet for free so that the word of God can be spread by cell phone to family and friends, said society spokesman Michael Chant. 
More . . . 

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The Bible, told in verse 
The Daily Telegraph

Two weeks ago, the Rev. Michael Hinton, launched a condensed version of the Bible called The 100-Minute Bible, intended for those who want to know more about Christianity but don't have time to read. Since its release, British journalists have taken the condensation project further, competing to see who can deliver the shortest abridgment. What follows is an effort by Christopher Howse to summarize the Bible in just 241 (rhyming) words.