The Rogue Cartel

One of the books that, when it first came out, was revelatory was Nurtureshock by Po Bronson.

The premise was tht many of the ideas we have about what makes for healthy chidlren and successful parenting are actually different. This is in keeping with the regular theme that the things we think we know because we have just accepted them as common knowledge often don’t reflect reality.

I’ve read the book once, and listened through to the CD’s during long drives 1.5 times (I only got half-way through the second time).

I am still digesting some of the ideas and thinking of ways to implement them.

One of the clearest examples was the role of praise for a child. The book makes a very strong case that praising children for innate traits (such as intelligence) can make them more risk-adverse from trying new things (for fear of proving that they aren’t so ‘smart’ after all). Praising innate intelligence also de-links the more relevant association of effort with mastery.

When a child (I know from observation when growing up and, in part, my own experience), is told they are “smart” – they tend to see the need for effort as proof of stupidity (or lower intelligence). But effort (the right kind of effort, particularly, intentional practice) is the only real “hack” that leads to mastery in any arena.

One of the other hacks they talked about was lying. Lying is laready known to be bad by children. In fact, they see anything that isn’t a representation of the truth to be a lie, even if unwitting.

They also begin to learn how to lie by watching parents. This can include white lies, as well as a failure to live up to commitments.

I will have to revisit again to come up with other key and applicable hacks from the book.

My take-away:

• Praise for effort or specific behavior
• Encourage and reward truth-telling

I have been trying to build in some basic essential for the baby’s nutrition. Today I drove out to Rockridge to visit with Marin Sun Farms. Normally I pick up my order of pastured eggs and grass-fed liver from the San Francisco Ferry Building, but with all the stuff we had to do yesterday (including going down to the very cool Coyote Point Zoo), I missed it.

But here are some things I’ve been feeding baby this week, and I think it’s been so far a good regular addition:

• grass-fed butter
• extra virgin coconut oil
• grass-fed, hydrolyzed collagen
• sweet potato

The grass-fed butter and coconut oil are to ensure that she’s getting healthy fats. Particularly for building myelin sheaths and producing usable, non-crazy-making energy, healthy fats are important to put in. Now that the baby is no longer drinking mother’s milk, which has a good amount of fats, I want to make sure that she gets what she needs.

She must really like the coconut oil. She takes the baby spoon and, if I put the jar in front of her, she finds a way to stick it in the jar to get out some coconut oil and feed herself. The concern I have had is that coconut oil, in too high amounts, can cause diarrhea.

In fact, when I first started, that happened to me. But now I have nearly doubled, maybe tripled, to about 3 tablespoons, of coconut oil for breakfast and I’ve been fine.

The collagen I have been mixing with almond milk. The almond milk is sweetened with sugar cane, an unfortunate necessity, but she seems to take well to it. The problem is that it’s quite a mess. Even with the collagen, I am basically trying to use a spoon to feed her pure liquid.

And the last thing was we did a pressured-cooked sweet potato nd she ate it all up. I definitely prefer that to many of the other starches or sweets.

I will start documenting my success with liver, and make sure that I include that in her routine (hopefully I can just export from WP into Jekyll that post rather than retyping it).

I bought 5lbs of beef tendon. I’m still not sure I actually got tendon because it hasn’t been behaving or tasting the way I expect. But I have gone to the farmer twice and I keep getting what looks kind of like the same thing.

I’m goig to give it another go, and maybe try a version of this:

http://www.iskandals.com/eats/?p=8296

I have already put in the sous vide the cut and salted tendon, and it still comes out really chewey. Then I took it and blasted it in the pressure cooker for 2 hours. Still chewey. So I’m going to set it on “simmer” and see how that turns out.

This has been kind of frustrating since the pieces that I have don’t seem to match the photographs on the blogs which write about it.

With a now 15-month old daughter, schooling in San Francisco has begun to be a topic of conversation for nearly everone I meet who also has kids in a similar age-range.

The default conventional wisdom is that now I need to start thinking about moving out to the suburbs where the schools are better.

The only alternative, apparently, to a decent education from youngster till they are off to college, is private school. But I’ve heard that the costs of private school are astronomical. This editorial from the SF Chronicle, for example, sites a range of $12-$20k per year, as of 2009:

At random I selected (from a Google search) a school that appears to have pre-school through middle-school:

According to them, the range is $22-24k per year.

I am all for making an investment in my children’s education. This is looking like it’s going to be at minimum a $50k per year investment for two children…for a pretty long time.

The question I have is whether this approach will give me the return that I want for the money, and that is where I want to seriously begin to explore options.

In this case, I am looking at home-schooling.

My sense (but subject to more research), is that home-schooling is no longer only the educational pathway for the strange and extreme. Instead, if the right community and content could be developed, this may be a new, viable option in areas with a meaningful concentration of well-educated professionals.

What are some of the driving trends that I believe will make this happen?

MOOC’s becoming more wide-spread with better content beyond college:

When Coursera announced that they were making courses available designed to education K-12 teachers, I thought that this content could potentially be useful for those wanting to develop home-schooling curriculum:

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/coursera-brings-online-instruction-to-teachers-taking-its-first-steps-into-the-k-12-market/]

The challenge isn’t completely solved: part of the reason I (and I am guessing, others), are exploring homeschooling is not just because their options are bad or pricey, but because they fundamentally question the current means of education.

Those sames methods and curricula are probably in these same MOOC courses.

That being said, I think the availability of high-quality content that can be propagated and used digitally and virtually as a component of the home-schooling experience certainly is more possible because of this particular trend.

People are increasingly challenging conventional education

Whether the attack is on the college bubble (ala Peter Thiel’s Fellowship), the call for disruption of education as we know it by Clayton Christiansen, or even people who have found alternative forms of freedom away from the traditional 9-5 job and, as a result, want to bring that to their kids, I believe the momentum will start to grow.

Rising costs

I am particularly a fan of Christiansen’s writing, and so believe there should be a disruption. Extending his model, he sees decentralization and network effects as ways to disrupt traditionally centralized models. And it is this aspect that I think we’ll be able to address the rising costs element.

So those are the three major forces I think are driving this. I will lay it further my thoughts on what this new form of education that is both more affordable and also more practical for children’s success will be later.

Now that I finally made the change over to *Octopress for my blog, I wanted to use VIM more regularly as my editor. I may go back to an editor like Mou, later, but right now, I want to figure out how to use it.

Looks like my change of the .vimrc failed. I had typed in the following to get some better word-processor like functionality, but it isn’t working:

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autocmd BufRead *\.txt setlocal formatoptions=l
 autocmd BufRead *\.txt setlocal lbr
 autocmd BufRead *\.txt map  j gj
 autocmd BufRead *\.txt  map  k gk
 autocmd BufRead *\.txt setlocal smartindent
 autocmd BufRead *\.txt setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

What the appeal of VIM is, I’m not exactly sure. I only know a handful of commands to move around and such, but when I was doing much more coding with Ruby on Rails, I loved using VIM, especially with the plugin that was Rails specific.

Well, back to the regular post and over time come back to edit this.

That was surprisingly fast! For a while I have been thinking about making some kind of a switch from Wordpress hosted on this shared server on Bluehost, particularly since I have been getting nearly a non-stop number of warnings, at least one a day, that the host is down.

Granted, I have like no traffic, but still: it makes me wonder.

The other reason I’ve been thinking about making the switch has been more nuanced. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t like writing blog posts, but I don’t really mind writing text files.

For a while, I would write the drafts in a text editor and then find some kind of a way to then cut-and-paste it into the best possible blogging client (which turns out to be Windows LiveWriter)…which sits on a VMWare Fusion instance on my Mac….

We’ll see if this helps, but for someone reason, being able to type using markdown and then let it just get pushed up to S3 feels cleaner.

Granted, right now, it’s a bit of a pain to push it up there (even though it is far easier than I had originally thought) because I am using ponyhost to push it, but it would be so much better (so so much better) if I could set a configuration in Octopress itself as part of the deployment option to just push it to S3 everytime I ‘rake generate.’

So, that’s my next step. I am pretty sure I have seen some blog posts out there talk about it…such as:

• http://blog.netdna.com/developer/supercharge-your-site-with-jekyll-s3-and-maxcdn/
• http://blog.jacobelder.com/2012/03/deploying-octopress-to-amazon-s3/
• http://damvin.com/index.php/2013/01/05/octopress-s3-sync/#comment-21

So I used the last blog’s suggestion of changing the Rakefile so that if I used a ‘rake deploy’ it would then push it out to S3…and it appears to work, so – yeah – looks like I won’t need to rely on the ponyhost approach (although that is a cool gem).

There is still quite a bit of getting used to in making this switch, and some information that I had typed in the old version that I now need to retrieve. But it also provides some piece of mind. My source files – the entire Octopress directory – is stored locally on my Mac in a Dropbox folder, so that will always be backed up. And the public files are deployed on S3 where the overhead of managing the blog is so much easier and more secure.

I will probably install Disqus for the comments. Yes, that goes out to a third part who can do who knows what with it…but, who knows, maybe someone will offer a good alternative to that.

Meanwhile, I am now trying to make sure I know all I need to know about Octopress, and hope that now I can start writing more regularly.

EDIT 5/3/13

I came across this link https://github.com/imathis/octopress/wiki/3rd-Party-Octopress-Themes which has a list of different theme that exist. This will give me some additional options to explore.

I was originally using the following:

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ponyhost push www.yoursite.com

But with the new code I added to my Rakefile, I just do this:

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rake generate
rake deploy

I have been thinking a little bit about possibly installing a local AMP environment on the mac on which to run Wordpress, and if there’s a good static site generator plugin that can work locally, then use ponyhost to push it up to S3. There are some things which are nice about Wordpress, particularly the host of themes. There are far more professional themes for Wordpress than there ever will be for Octopress/Jekyll.