As to be expected, it looked like the Victoria public schools that did the best in 2010, and consistently over the last 5 years are in the “best” neighborhoods.

I’m encouraged that it looked to be fairly equal English and French immersion schools, as we don’t intend to go French immersion. We have heard that if enrolling English consider a full English school.

It’s kind of sad, but expected that our severely underfunded education system would be most successful were supplemented by parents, and where parents put more value on school excellence, and have the energy to be more active in their children’s educations.

I was disappointed, but not surprised that the closest school to our house, Cloverdale Traditional School did not do well. Although, surrounded by some nice neighborhoods, there are also commercial areas close by and (relatively) less expensive homes. I was hopefully that the focus on tradition of the school would give it a significant boost. The reported 49.4% ESL surprised me.

I’m looking forward to reviewing the 2011 reports for elementary and secondary that will come out next month. Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) will be doing a report for the Western Provinces for the first time this year, but only for secondary schools.

Some educators have rejected [Turnitin] and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.

Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”

Trip Gabriel, “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery, July 5, 2010″

The Apple press release from last June includes:

… Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. …

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

Although QA people love this attention to what we are passionate about, conventional wisdom in the software world is that a major release with few new features is suicide, but there are factors working in Apple’s favor.

I don’t find the current version (no snow) Leopard v10.5 to be unstable or buggy, but I know other people have problems with it. There are a lot of user interface (UI) inconsistencies in Leopard among the various Apple applications. I’m interested to see if Snow Leopard sports a more consistent and usable experience.

Apple is selling this upgrade for only $29 US, when their major releases normally sell for $129 US. At $29 Apple customers won’t be looking for much to think they have got a good deal.

Apple’s main competitor Microsoft has created this opportunity. Microsoft Windows costs close to $300. And although Mac OS X only runs on Apple hardware, people’s frustration with Vista’s bugginess and instability has led people to specifically look for a computing experience that address this.

People are hopeful for Windows 7, but it won’t be available until at least a month after Snow Leopard ships. We can expect Windows 7 to have a lot of customer untested technology compared to Mac OS X which looks to be is a very incremental release.

Performance (and polish) is a feature. “Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this.”, my boss Matt Mullenweg, Velocity 09 Conference Presentation.

Because Apple builds both the software and the hardware, they can release their next generation of computers to immediately take advantage of the upgraded 64-bit stack, OpenCL for graphic card processing, and GCD multi-core processing throughout Mac OS X.

If Snow Leopard is well executed and well received, it will help people be more confident on computers and expect more from their software. It will be a good day for QA geeks.

Far from taking the path of least resistance, I’m an ultra tech geek running each of Ubuntu Linux, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X every day, but still I’ve been feeling like I’ve been having my own Maximum Overdrive on a number of fronts, and I’m very happy that another week is over.

Sure, my tank is regularly at half empty because we have the little guy (I’m working on better fuel), and that is part of it, but it has felt like the machine has been winning.

Well, this is my declaration to you, the machine, that starting now, I’m back on top. You aren’t getting the better of me!

Photo from bricolage.108.

Julia and I haven’t attended her yogo classes for the last many months. I had forgotten how much I get out of her philosophy.

During the course she mentioned Mark Gungor’s Men’s Brain Women’s Brain:

I hadn’t heard of this video. It’s hilarious! It’s clear Mark has some insights into having a better marriage, “laugh your way to a better marriage” his site says.

The box theory of men’s brains resonated with me, and I have a particularly bad case of it. It relates to my expertise and career in software problem identification, analysis, and resolution. And a clear symptom is my repulsion when an email or forum discussion has multiple topics in it, or when the discussion travels onto a different issue.

Of course, I grin and bear it, because most of life doesn’t suit the clean, discrete presentation as a bug report. Life is dynamic and messy, but still my boxes definitely don’t touch. Julia you’re so generous in your love for me!

How many times has someone said to you, “I’ve never seen that before?”

It happens to me quite a bit.

Case in point: I tried to have a wire sent to my TD Canada Trust line of credit account and it literally was lost in their system for a week. Every phone call with them ended with, “The problem is on the senders end, not ours.” Finally, I walked into a branch and wouldn’t leave until they found my money and got it into my account.

I bend the rules a little bit by basically using this account as a no fees chequing account with a healthy overdraft projection limit

Wire transfers is the only part of my account that was broken.

Anyway, regardless of how I use the account, more recently I wanted to have another wire sent to that account and didn’t want to encounter the same problem. An hour in a branch later and they figure out somehow my line of credit, set up in the year 2000, had been created using an internal branch number that is actually a call center. So there is no one there to process wire transfers.

The only option in the end was to close the account and open a new one. Another day, another hour spent with Julia at the branch and we have a new account number, our automatic transactions are set back up and new cheques are ordered. I imagine the very helpful Financial Services Representative spent many more hours getting a new line of credit approved with the same interest rate modifier.

This is an example of how I have a knack of testing the edges of a system. I previously wrote about my experience with TurboTax. I have many examples like this.