Wild-Heart.net

At the close of a week that seemed fought with the difficulties of the the dramas of the bus situation and school IEP compliance difficulties with Boy #1, and the struggles of attempting to get Boy #2 to focus on his homeschool work instead of drifting off into drawing and music applications, there have been a couple of positive things happen this week. They are very significantly positive things for me.

1. Bonus Boy’s mother and I are finally communicating.
2. My sister and I are communicating again after nearly two years of silence.

The week ended much better, really, than it started. I have to remind myself of that fact. Living in a testosterone ladened household tends to make it very difficult to see the trees for the forest at times. Any who. I’ll probably get grief for the song I’m about to leave you with but hey, it’s a feel good song and it’s a positive one.

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Yes, it would seem that we are on a Corrs kick here. I love this one. I could and have listened to it over and over.

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Was sitting here trying to come up with something for a Song Of The Day as it’s been a while. Baby Boy suggested this one. He likes The Corrs and this one is his favorite. Are they not an amazingly talented family?

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*Found via The Venomous One.

You Are a Club Sandwich

You are have a big personality. It’s hard for anyone to ignore you! You dream big. You think big. And you eat big. Some people consider you high maintenance, but you just know what you want… and when you want it. Your best friend: The Tuna Fish Sandwich Your mortal enemy: The Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich

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“[...]it is our strong recommendation that you make arrangements for your son to be picked up from school today instead of riding the bus home. It has been brought to our attention that further threats to his person have been made and until we have arrested those who forced their way onto the bus yesterday and attacked him, which should be later this afternoon, we recommend he not ride the school bus.”

That was from the phone call I received from Campus Police about an hour or so ago concerning the drama that occurred yesterday with Boy #1. I assume the “we” she was referring to was County Police/Deputies in cooperation with Campus Police. Yeap. Nothing like teen drama on a bus that serves quite the varied social populous. Seems that one of the kids who plays him as a fair weather friend played off some of his own remarks about one of these thugs little brothers and passed them off as Boy #1’s remarks. Impossible as Boy #1 no longer has anything to do with this kid since he gave him candy towards the end of the last school year and it turned out to be meth (took a $25 drug test to figure it out) and we spent several hours helping him go through the tweaking out phase of a first time user. Oh yes, as if parents don’t have enough to worry about, 12-14 year olds are actually giving meth away, telling other students that it’s candy because that’s the new trend, flavoring the crap so it tastes like candy. F*ckers. So the boy has had it out for Boy #1 since he and I reported it to the proper officials at the school and the police department.

Two neighborhood drop-out thugs from up the street forced their way onto the school bus yesterday afternoon and proceeded to pound the crud out of Boy #1. Had this happened out on the street I would have understood if he fought to defend himself. However, this was on the school bus and I’ve got to say that as sick as it might sound to others, I’m proud of him for keeping his hands to himself and not fighting back. I’m so very proud that he was able to maintain that much control of himself. Why should I be? Because he is normally very impulsive due to the bipolar disorder and being a teenager, he acts without thinking and in the past that has gotten him written up and suspended from the bus more times than I care to remember.

He maintained control. That means his meds are working. Belittle me if you wish but I’m proud of him. The result is that this time, the punks that started this are going to be charged with assault and battery and my son isn’t getting yet another mark on his school record.

• Linux bash commands - MAN Pages
  Useful refrence of bash commands
  (tags: linux bash commands reference howto)

Blogged about something you really enjoy? I mean something that brought an emmese amount of joy into your life on a daily basis. And then has the comments for that blog post made you absolutely sickened by that thing to the point that you mourn the loss of the joy it used to bring you?

Just wondering because that’s how I’m starting to feel about the song on this post. The popularity of that post and song thanks to that bleepity-bleeping M&M’s commercial is really starting to make me bitter.

When I saw this opportunity to tell you about element skateboards and zero skateboards I absolutely had to take it. For long time readers the reason should be obvious. With four boys in the house that means four skaters in the house which means that I’ve heard a LOT about Modern Skate & Surf Co. over the years. Their website is one of their regular stops when surfing the internet. Which always leads to a lot of, “Hey, Mom! Check out this board!”

In our neighborhood, skateboarding is one of those few things that I don’t mind the boys doing. Gods know we can’t keep a decent bike around here for long before it is stolen. In the last 3 years We’ve filed four police reports for stolen BMX style bikes but not a single one for a skateboard. Living in a townhome there is no room to bring 4 bikes in the house when they aren’t being used and yes we have even tried chaining and locking them. But skateboards slide right under beds and sofas. Not to mention they are just simply cool as heck. Have you seen the deck designs of some of these element skateboards and zero skateboards?

All to frequently, I am reminded that while I love to tinker and fight my way through Linux user difficulties and make my OS bend to my will, I never post my solutions. That’s rather thoughtless of me and I swear I’ll try to better from now on. This latest difficulty was getting an actual widescreen resolution that our Vizio HDTV would recognize and that my ATI video card would display.

You might wonder why I would even want to go through this trouble. Well, this school year, instead of having one of the boys homeschooling using an online school, we have two and we really needed another computer running in our homeschool area of the livingroom. Both Boy #2 and Baby Boy are early risers and do their best work in the morning. With only one windows pc for their use it became obvious last week that we were going to struggle and fight if we didn’t build another frankenputer this weekend. But that left the question of where was my computer going to go? The only logical solution was to bring it upstairs. I honestly am not at my computer very often. I stop by and check my email and IM’s and downloads through the day but aside from that, I’m too busy with the boys. So here I now sit at the loveseat that is placed at the end of our bed with my computer attached to the 26″ HDTV.

For two days all I could get the television to work with the video card was a resolution of 1024×768. It wasn’t pretty. Well, It was pretty but it was also pretty stretched on the horizontal. No amount of configuration of xoorg.conf seemed to solve the problem. I searched the Ubuntu formums to no avail. Every solution found there failed. I did however find one mention of setting the modeline in xorg.conf for the monitor to be specific for the video card. It took me over 12 hours of more searching to find a way ti fingure out how to go about figuring what the modeline for my video card would be. Eventually I found this HOWTO Widescreen Resolutions on Gentoo-wiki.org.

As you can see their instructions are specific for an Nvidia card but the same theory applies for ATI/fglrx. If you have an ATI card and drivers insalled and having the same difficulties here are the lines in Xorg.0.log that we (yes, even Joseph happily joined in on the Linux fun this time) found and used to make my custom modeline for xorg.conf:

(II) fglrx(0): Supported additional Video Mode:
(II) fglrx(0): clock: 85.5 MHz Image Size: 1096 x 640 mm
(II) fglrx(0): h_active: 1360 h_sync: 1424 h_sync_end 1536 h_blank_end 1792 h_border: 0
(II) fglrx(0): v_active: 768 v_sync: 771 v_sync_end 777 v_blanking: 795 v_border: 0

From that information we were able to use the sample on the gentoo wiki page linked above to come up with the following custom modeline to add to Section: “Monitor”:

ModeLine "1360x768" 85.5 1360 1424 1536 1792 768 771 777 795

After that we also added the resolution that is listed in that modeline (1360×768) to all of the display lines. Saved everything and rebooted while saying prayers with crossed fingers and held breath. Viola! I now have a happy and perfectly displayed widescreen resolution with linux. I hope this can be of some help to someone out there because honestly the information on setting up xorg to work with a widescreen HDTV is very slim.

• National Atlas home page
  Another Homeschool resource. This one found via AllSewnUp.com
  (tags: homeschool free maps reference geography atlas usa mapping)
• » Why We Homeschool: Overview
  Kate did an excellent series of posts explaining why she chose homeschooling for her son.
  (tags: homeschool)

If any of you, and I know there at a LOT of you who read and never comment, happen to know where I could find coloring pages for/from the new Transformers movie I would be eternally grateful. I’ve got a 9 year old obsessed to the point of psychotic fixation insisting that he must have something from the new movie to do his next creative writing assignment with. Thanks in advance. And yes, I have exhausted Google.

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Yesterday was the first day of school for our household. Boy #2 and Baby Boy started their homeschool year and Boy #1 and Bonus Boy started their Public School year.

Already, OpenOffice.org is getting a workout. With the content controls enabled in IE7, Boy #2 cannot cheat when he uses OO.o for his various writing assignments. Yesterday he gave it a work out typing up definitions and sentences for his spelling words. This morning before 07:00 Baby Boy was at the desk and typing up his Creative Writing assignment for the day. He likes to find a coloring page and then write a story to go with it. He hates being corrected by adults but doesn’t mind the red squiggly line under misspelled words in a word processing application.

Boy #1 took to school his usual letter typed up by me for his teachers explaining his Other Health Impaired IEP seeing as the Special Services Department never gets the IEP’s to the schools prior to the start of the new school year. He seemed to really like all of his teachers and his homeroom teacher is male this year. We have a suspicion that will be a good thing as Greg responds much better to male authority figures than female authority figures.

Joseph called Bonus Boy’s mother last night and it would seem he also had an excellent first day. I wish I had pictures to share but Boy #1 has taken all of the batteries out of everything including my camera, yet again. Never fear. I shall be hunting their room for batteries out of RC cars later today (what goes around comes around) and will at least be able to take pictures of the two homeschoolers at work.

Yesterday evening was an amazingly early and quiet evening. We had all, except Baby Boy who was still sleeping, and Bonus Boy who had gone to his mother’s on Sunday, woke up at 04:00 so that goodbyes good be said and given to my mother as Joseph and I had to make the road trip with her to the Atlanta Airport and be there by 06:30. All of the children were asleep by 19:45 last night. Alas, Joseph and I were also so tired that we were both sound alseep before 22:00.

Here’s to the hope of another good day and beginning of what will hopefully be a fantastic school year!

*As a note. I apologize for leaving most of you on the blogroll neglected over the past couple of weeks. While my mom was here visiting it was just impossible to do much blog reading. By the end of the week I hope to get caught up with all of you as soon as I’ve finished upgrading to KDE 4. I’ve missed you all!

I don’t say this for pity. Pity is for suffering, not for surviving. However, in the last year there was some news that came about concerning Wynonna and abuse suffered by her daughter and the struggles they have gone through. We’ve gone through much the same with Baby Boy on top of everything else. This song is a beautiful one full of hope and calm and strength. Open it in a new window and share it with your families.

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Times may be turbulent. I might bitch a lot lately and have trouble communicating. In the end, one fact remains… I Belong To You.

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