Occasionally Wright

Education Uproar in New Brunswick

It would seem that the education system in the province of New Brunswick is falling apart. I haven't lived there since the late 90's and I'll probably never live there again, but four of my eight nieces and both of my nephews live there, so it's not as if it has no impact on me.

The crux of the issue is that the government of the only bilingual province in Canada wants to shut down the early immersion program that allows children to become more less fluent before they hit grade five. Everyone that knows anything about second language acquisition will tell you that the younger the child is the easier it is for them to learn a new language. Apparently that doesn't matter in New Brunswick.

To learn more about the fight to keep early immersion in New Brunswick check out this site. The video below includes a snippet of my niece Hannah, who wouldn't have been able to read or write the letter she read in both French and English without early immersion.

Micosoft Publisher

I've been using Microsoft FrontPage on my work laptop for just about three years now and it perfectly suits my needs. I don't have a copy of it at home but we just got a dirt cheap version of Office Enterprise 2007 for the home PC. I installed it tonight and I've been poking around in Publisher 2007 to see if it'll get the job done for me if I want to leave the laptop at the office.

Publisher has a web publishing app but for the life of me I can't find a way to view a given page in code view. The 'Help' option didn't live up to its name and Google came up short. Surely a fellow web geek can help me out? How do I view the source code of a page I've built in Publisher?

The Storm Has Been Weathered

For those who were wondering, we made it through the tornado fine. It was downtown and we were not. On Saturday afternoon we got some severe hail, and I'll put up a picture or two and a video clip later.

Philips Arena escaped the storms relatively unscathed. I don't think it even lost a window. My office building on the other hand sustained some damage, though our floors were more or less fine. we have double paned glass and a few windows lost their outer panes. Windows on other floors got completely blown out, but we did a lot better than other buildings in the area.

Here are some pictures that a co-worker took this morning. My building is the big glass one with the "V" at the top. The tangled mess of aluminum siding with the Philips logo above it is the facing of our parking deck.garage. Just cosmetic damage.