Tuesday, February 27, 2007

California Driver Education

Certainly things have changed since I was there: driver education in California now requires that you take a state approved test before you can get your learner's permit. I am glad that wasn't in place when I took my California driver's test: I would never have managed to do what I did, arrive in the country and rent a condo, buy a car, get a licence, get the house furnished and everything insured in just 8 days.

However, don't despair, there are simple ways to deal with the problem. One option is to get this program dealing with driver education in California. It's a state approved course, so it meets the rules, but the difference is that you can do most of the work at home. Once you've studied this, you can get your learner's permit. Now what is the value of being able to do this at home? Well, you can do it in your own time, at your own speed. There's no need for parents to ferry you off to classes at a particular time and that all just makes life so much easier.

The second option for California driver education is to look at that program, the virtual one. This is computer based and allows you to learn safe and effective driving techniques from your own room! You can simply log on when you want to and take parts of the course. Again, the value is that you can do this when you have time to, not working to the rigid timetable of organised classes. It's also true that we all learn more when we are the only student, not being distracted by those around us.

Either or both programs will teach you in the way the law insists you must be, so that you can complete your California driver education and get your learner's permit.

After that, it's driving on the real roads to gain experience, and no one has quite worked out yet a simpler way to do that.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Blog Reactions to Anna Nicole Smith's Death

There's some sick puppies out there you know, as shown by hte reactions to Anna Nicole Smith's death:

Minutes after word of the death of stripper-turned-celebrity Anna Nicole Smith, the blogosphere began the autopsy of a life lived in the headlines, and the verdict wasn't at all pretty.

From different corners of the Internet, commentators who once considered Smith worthy only of off-color jokes purported to seek out the deeper cultural meanings of her death. Most came up brutally short.

Instead many observers reveled in jokes about the size of the former Playboy model's breasts or the extent of her drug problems -- topics thought to be fair game in the world of celebrity gossip.

Blog search site Technorati.com showed mentions of Anna Nicole Smith spiked fivefold on Thursday. Still, at little over 44,000 mentions, Smith measures only one-tenth the blog star power of pop music sensation Britney Spears.

The occasion gave free rein to the pseudonymous savagery which passes for informed commentary on the Web.

Such cruelty contrasted with the tone of respectful shock used in blanket coverage of her death on cable television.

"Anna Nicole Smith's condition downgraded to dead," one writer on news commentary site Fark.com coldly noted. Thousands of visitors had posted remarks within hours of her death. http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2596842 Fark commentator "LikelyCulprit" posted a photo of a beached whale entitled "preliminary autopsy photo."

That's not even all that funny despite being in truly bad taste.

 

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Friday, February 02, 2007

Harry Potter Book

To absolutely no one at all's surprise, the final Harry Potter book is getting record orders at Amazon:

Amazon.com Inc. said on Friday first-day advance orders for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and last installment of J.K. Rowling's successful book series, were 547 percent higher than for its predecessor.

Thursday's pre-orders for "Deathly Hallows" exceeded the first two weeks of pre-orders for its predecessor, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," Seattle-based Amazon said. "Half-Blood Prince," released in July 2005, generated more than 1.5 million pre-orders on Amazon, the online retailer said.

It really is not wonder that JK Rowling is well on the way to become the first person to make a $ billion from writing. Thank the Lord that it all ends this summer, eh?

 

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