On March 20, the day spring officially arrived, NOAA published its April-to-June forecast. For Western Washington, it’s looking pretty good, people. Think warmer and drier weather. Here’s what NOAA said: “For precipitation, odds favor drier-than-normal conditions for the Alaska panhandle, western Washington and Oregon. …”  And  temps will be  “warmer-than-normal” for western Washington. Sure, we’ll […]

One reader captured this excellent shot of a stunning wood duck wading across the water, showing that self-isolation sometimes really all it’s quacked up to be.

As always, a big “thank you” to our front-line workers for their selfless, tireless service — and, in this instance, for sharing a hopeful image of the Seattle skyline, shot from West Seattle on a recent morning.

RAVE to Hi-Liners Musical Theatre in Burien. My 5-year-old is like a whole different kid after her weekly Zoom theater class. The improv, imagination and fun teacher Allison brings to the group gives our daughter an important creative outlet, and big smiles to our whole family during quarantine. RANT to the woman at the West […]

RANT to visitors who don’t clean up after themselves. It’s tulip time in Skagit Valley and while the numbers of tulip seekers are fewer than other years, there are still substantial numbers of people visiting the valley and the town of La Conner. There are about five restaurants and a couple of cafes open for takeout. Overflowing […]

RANT to whoever stole the face masks my sister has attempted to mail to her family and friends. The masks were made with love, care and the best of intentions. None of the masks reached their destinations. I am disgusted by the depths of your uncaring, self-centered behavior. RAVE to our beautiful, clear skies and […]

RAVE to the anonymous person in Mountlake Terrace who found my phone when it fell out of my pocket and left it where Robert could find it. Another huge rave to Robert, for taking the trouble to track me down and reunite me with my phone. RANT to grocery stores that don’t train their clerks […]

RANT to the professional football players and their agents for quibbling over whether or not they should get $20 million a year instead of $18 million in their contracts. Especially now when there are so many people who don’t know if they can afford this month’s rent or next week’s groceries, for that matter. With all […]

RANT to people who don’t follow leash laws. Please keep your dog on a leash like all the other dogs! Leash laws pertain to ALL dogs! No one gets a pass on this. RAVE to Ridwell, a locally grown company, that picks up plastic film (Saran wrap, etc.), plastic bags, chip bags, plastic seal wraps from […]

RANT AND RAVE Rant to the building security guard, who seemed to lack any empathy as he told a mother and son they couldn’t draw with chalk in the building courtyard. With things as they currently are, I look forward to seeing these ephemeral art displays. Rave to others in Bellevue leaving chalk flowers, cats and […]

RAVE to the person who found my credit card that fell out of my pocket at the Fourth Avenue Costco! I didn’t realize I had lost it until I got home. I called Costco and sure enough, they had it. Thank you for your honesty and thanks to the Costco staff who held on to […]

RAVE to the Washington State Employment Security Department. I had never submitted an unemployment claim before and wasn’t sure what to expect, particularly as I am self-employed. The process was explained clearly and took about 25 minutes. The money was in my account in two days. I am so grateful that I plan to contribute […]

RANT to families that are not social distancing their kids from others. Including those families from Western Washington that come to weekend homes in Central and Eastern Washington and don’t wear masks or social distance. RAVE to the O’Reilly employee who not only helped me, but took the time to teach me how to change […]

Connecting to the cloud was big in 2016 for IBM middleware users and continues to be in 2017 as more environments move to the cloud. Learn which Connect series articles our readers and editor chose as their favorites from the developerWorks library.

New to remote work? We've compiled some of the best resources Automatticians have created on the topic.

All-in-one External cardreader

Woohoo!!! SPARK made the Florida Sunshine State Young Readers Award 2020-21 list! Thanks so much, Florida librarians! You have absolutely made my day!

https://www.floridamediaed.org/ssyra.html 

 

ETA: You guys are amazing. I was really not expecting to get so many volunteers! I have more than enough people for now. I'm happy to add any additional names to the list for future opportunities. I can't add any more volunteers for this course, otherwise it would end up being all my friends which isn't great for diversity.

My awesome job involves creating free online courses about genomics. The first course I've been fully in charge of is about to go live, and it needs some final quality checks. It's quite exciting IMO: it's about using genomics to identify and avoid antibiotic resistance.

We need people who can put in a couple of hours in the next week, and just play around with the course and see if there are any obvious problems, whether that's technical issues like display problems for your particular hardware and software, or conceptual problems like confusing instructions or something that doesn't make sense. We are definitely not expecting any one individual to go through the whole course in detail, and we're not looking for copy editing or proofreading. I mean, if you have the sort of brain that can't help spotting typos, we don't mind reports of those, but we're mainly looking for something more general than that.

We want people from all backgrounds, so a mix of people who know something about microbiology and genomics, and people who have no idea. I will say that the course is fairly technical, though, so you probably don't want to volunteer if sciencey stuff is hateful or scary to you. We are especially happy to have beta readers who aren't completely fluent in English to be more representative of our target audience.

Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested. The number of available slots is somewhat flexible, probably in the range of 3-5.

comments

1. Readers respond to the COVIDSafe app's launch  Sydney Morning Herald
2. Australian Gov releases source code for CovidSafe app as promised  techAU
3. Government's lack of honesty on virus app is a problem  The New Daily
4. What You Should Know About COVIDSafe's Issues And Bluetooth-Related Risks  Gizmodo Australia
5. Covidsafe app: how to download Australia’s coronavirus contact tracing app, how it works, what it does and problems  The Guardian
6. View Full coverage on Google News

Haggis_30 says: "My kitten Mowgli thought my brand new mohair scarf would make a perfect blanket on a cold night. He is always burying himself in clothing and blankets. Very cute!"

Mowgli knows what every squee kitty knows, humans can't say 'no' to a warm, snuggly cat!

-Sally Squeeps

Do you have a squee pet that you want to share with the world? Send us your pet pictures and stories, and they could end up on Daily Squee!

MidnightRayne says: "This is my Hedgehog Albert all snuggled up in a towel after a pampering bath!"

What a lucky hog! Getting the full fancy spa treatment.

- Sally Squeeps

Do you have a squee pet that you want to share with the world? Send us your pet pictures and stories, and they could end up on Daily Squee!

Vikki says: "This is my bunny Rambo washing his face, or perhaps praying for more snow."

Snow snow snow snow...

Do you have a squee pet that you want to share with the world? Send us your pet pictures and stories, and they could end up on Daily Squee!

Joint activities, joint projects and improved cooperation: SPIEGEL ONLINE and SPIEGEL WISSEN are looking for the best ideas for creating a vibrant neighborhood. Send us your proposal by August 31!

Manhattan: With no sports to watch, I’m relying on my memory for gratification. My greatest sports memory happens to coincide with the great moment in New York Knicks’ history, which happened 50 years ago today, on May 8, 1970, when the team won its first championship.

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500 RSS Subscribers: I am pretty happy to announce that Blog on travel finally passed the psychological barrier of 500 subscribers to its RSS feed today (via feedburner). It has been quite a long way to achieve this, you can see this in the graph below that shows the RSS Subscribers of this blog from the [...]

The former Virginia governor's book tour about white supremacy and Charlottesville was interrupted by activists who faulted McAuliffe for siding with the Virginia city's government and police.

Confession I always had students who entered my fourth grade class reading significantly below grade level. And each year, when I passed them on to fifth grade, those students were still behind. I did everything I knew how to do — I taught Guided Reading lessons, provided independent reading time, found them books to love, replied to readers’ response journals- but no matter what I tried in my Balanced Literacy classroom, the achievement gap persisted.