That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
- Aldous Huxley

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
- HG Wells

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
- Pablo Picasso

(...and for some reason this makes me want to read Plato)

Things are so busy as my wife and I both have our final Master's work due in the next few weeks! I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel as I'm halfway done with the editing process. Writing is such a difficult thing, and I find myself with such inequality between my reading level in my writing level that I am constantly frustrated by my own inability to write well. Today's Google quote of the day reminded me of just that:

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
- Walter Bagehot

Nothing like celebrating the inevitable aging process! A few highlights of my year:

• Finishing Masters Degree from Toronto. I drove to Toronto once a week for a class in the Fall Semester, and was just told by my adviser on Thursday that she will be signing my completion paperwork (although we're going to go through a revision process with the research paper I wrote).
• My wife is finishing her online Masters degree.
• We both managed to balance family life with full-time teaching jobs and the graduate school work (go us!)
• In addition, I did independent IT consulting work, taught private lessons, and read a good number of books.
• I worked to get the Service Web Networks a new server, and new co-location. We are getting our feet on the ground financially, so hopefully the hosting co-op becomes self-sustaining. Of course, there is a ton of work to be done in terms of refining our billing/accounting practices and hopefully a web site re-design.
• We celebrated our third wedding anniversary, and our son turned three.
• We learned that we will have an addition to our family in August.
• We pad off most of our high interest credit card debt, and opened a college savings account for our son.
• We traveled to Montreal for the Jazz Fest, Lake George, and visited for a weekend with joffridus and his wife. We traveled to California after Christmas to visit with my wife's father and his new family. We traveled to Mt. Tremblant for a four-day ski weekend.
  

And what's a birthday without a birthday meme?
go to wikipedia and look up your birth day (sans year). list 3 neat facts, 2 births and 1 death in your journal, including the year:

April 8 is the 98th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (99th in leap years). There are 267 days remaining.

• 1820 - The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Melos.
• 1994 - The body of Kurt Cobain is discovered in his Washington home after having died three days earlier.
• 2005 - Funeral of Pope John Paul II.
  

Births:

• 1859 - Edmund Husserl, Austrian philosopher (d. 1938)
• 1947 - Tom DeLay, American politician
  

Death:

• 1973 - Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist (b. 1881)

Well I suppose I now belong in the category of bad bloggers. It has been a very busy few months. In the past two weeks we had out elementary band concert, and my sixth-grade concert band performed both a joint concert with the band at Franklin Magnet School for the Arts in the Syracuse City School District, as well as a performance at the primary building in our district. As if that is not enough, we had our annual band trip this past weekend. Fifty four parents and students traveled to NYC - we toured Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center, Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Ground Zero, South Street Seaport, and China Town. We attended the show "Stomp." It is a great experience as an educator to bring children out of their surroundings and expose them to 'other-ness'. I truly think there are connections to be made between otherness, imagination, and ethics. I'll have to save that for a future paper topic.

Speaking of papers, my MRP (Major Research Paper) is done. Well, I have sent it to my adviser for revision. I can only hope that my break next week is not consumed by revisions (and hope that my adviser gets back to me - I'm on pins and needles). Overall, I think it is a good paper. There were parts that were actually enjoyable to write. I normally detest writing (good thing I picked Philosophy for a discipline, eh?). I am looking forward to this week being much more relaxed than the past few, and can not wait for next week off!

It seems that maybe that Stephen Harper idea wasn't the best. The new Canadian Prime Minister appointed a parlimentary secretary to the Francophonie who can't speak French!