You know, i’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about teaching. I think I would enjoy teaching, not English or Math or whatever, but teaching. Like maybe high school, maybe college. I wouldn’t mind being a teacher, or a professor even. Now, it SOUNDS cool, but what are the ramifications? I wouldn’t probably make as much money, etc, but would the benefits of teaching outweigh it? I’m not entirely sure.

Here’s an idea I had. I would like to attempt to teach a group of high school kids how to do good web development. Perhaps it would be a two-year program, the first year is just basic stuff, and then the second year, we would get a local company to let us do some web development for them, pro-bono (for free, that is). Now, this wouldn’t be your “chalk and talk” class, but a hands-on class where each student has an account on a webserver (Linux, no less, tee-hee) and they could do what they wanted with it (and the lesson plan would involve their own sites). It wouldn’t take that much hardware, as most schools already have a computer lab of some sort, and the server wouldn’t need anything crazy (just like theLocust.org -snooch!)

It’s all just a pipe dream really, but I think optimally i would work for a couple of years, perhaps get my MBA or something, and then try teaching. But IS IT WORTH IT? Could I get the job I wanted? I don’t know. I view the established schools around here as a little stodgy, but anything could happen. Perhaps at Manual? But I’d really like to do it at Eastern, you know. Show that any bunch of kids could do this stuff, as long as they work at it.

Well, what do you think?

The Funky Flynn wrote in about the “I Look Like My Dog Contest“, to quote the Flynn “Ah, the inhumanity …”

Amazon.com was one of the first (if not THE first) online booksellers, and in many terms, defined what made a good e-commerce site. They keep in contact with their customers, charge decent prices, and in general make things pretty easy for Joe Schmo to buy a book (and now movies, music, toys, etc) online.

Well, a while back, they got a patent for 1-click shopping (which in my mind is a bunch of hooey), which also raised some eyebrows. Well, now they have gone yet another step further, and are charging different users different prices, for DVDs, anyway. According to the article, prices for the same DVD changed based upon browser type (higher for Internet Explorer users than Netscape).

This, in my humble opine, is pretty damned brave. They say they are just conducting an experiment on consumer trends, etc. Well, one could also assume from their test cases that people who use IE are stupid, too. Or Netscape users are cheap. Or Amazon likes Netscape better. Is this all some anti-Microsoft ploy? Well, all of those are probably completely false, but to make my point, this could turn out badly for Amazon, unless they cough up some answers.