Sunday, March 16, 2008

Off to college - only if your parents are rich and educated

The pie graphs below indicate a harsh reality for students from poor or uneducated families: you are less likely to take the ACT or SAT and therefore not going to MIT.

Here are a few more Anchorage facts from the US Census Bureau:
High school graduates, percent of persons age 25+........... 90.3%
Bachelor's degree or higher, pct of persons age 25+.......... 28.9%

Free, public K-12 education produces graduates. Free, public college education would do the same. It would be a wise investment in our future economy to have an educated workforce.

Someone might ask, "Why should government pay for college? College students are adults, responsible for their own tuition, right? Don't we need money for national defense?"

I would argue that education makes us safer than bombs. Providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare are not mutually exclusive. Bush II has proved that stupid U.S. presidents kill more Americans than evil terrorist leaders.

And deserving college students get scholarships all the time! My only point is that all US citizens are deserving of a college education.

Friday, March 14, 2008

ToDo

I wrote a little applescript to make ToDo entries from Quicksilver. Of course, you need to put the script in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions first. :-)

To make a ToDo, enter text in Quicksilver (or load some selected text) and run the script.

It prompts you for a title, tag, and a due date. This is important to me because I use tags as contexts for my ToDo list. So my tags are @phone, @computer, etc...

You should see a new ToDo in Journler with your title, tag, and due date with the selected text as the body. I got the idea from some scripts by jgrafix and wyzewoman in the Journler forums.

I might also mention that I use Daniel-Jens Kusterer's excellent ToDo2iCal script for putting Journaler ToDo items into iCal. Anxiety makes it easy to see those ToDos that end up in Mail.ical.