Surfergeeks

Here we go! It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Rant From Rob™. I’m a little out of practice so it may not be up to the standards I’ve set with my previous rants.

The Western Fair District has, over the past few months, completely embraced the social media that is Twitter and Facebook. As part of this endeavour they had a contest where five people would be chosen to be “Real Serious Bloggers”. In exchange for daily admission to the fair, their task would be to blog about the experience as well as tweet and hopefully be able to post videos as well. This contest was not simply a random drawing of names. To enter it was necessary to submit a sample writing and the winners would be judged based on the submitted writing. The rules stated that preference would be given to those with a twitter account but it was NOT necessary to win the contest.

Today the winners were announced (Congrats to @JayCMenard, @phronk, @evilflu! I know all three of you and know that you will do an awesome job! Also congrats to @erinflattery and @KimberBogema – I don’t know you but obviously you some writing chops!) and needless to say, there are some pretty sore losers out there. I’m not going to name names as I really don’t want to give them any more attention than is necessary but if you really want to know, a simple search should help you out.

As you can tell above, I was not one of the people that won. Am I disappointed? Sure – who wouldn’t be? It was a creative contest with a desireable reward. Sadly, it seems that two of the people who weren’t chosen have taken to Twitter to complain about their loss. It seems that these people are totally comfortable to point the fingers at other people for their loss. Both of the loudest people complaining seem to be focused in with laser-like precision on it being all about the number of twitter followers that the entrant has. At no point do they acknowledge that they simply may have sub-par writing skills. I tried reading through both feeds but it seems that most of the tweets in the their timelines are for contest entries. There seems to be some discussion with other tweeters but nothing of substance. For what it’s worth, I didn’t really notice any terribly glaring grammar errors but when you’re only retweeting contest entries it’s kind of hard to screw that up. One of the other things being brought up was that supposedly one of the winners had their tweets protected. When I went to check none of the five accounts had protected tweets. It could be that they were asked to unprotect their tweets as a condition of winning. It could be that the person was being malicious. Regardless, tweets are unprotected now. Those complaining simply need to accept the fact that their writing, along with mine, was not as good as some of the other entries that were received.

I want to thank Western Fair District (still not sure if I should be putting a ‘the’ in front of that or not) for running this contest. It was a great concept and also kickstarted my writing again. Even though I didn’t win, I’ll still be writing a blog entry (to be posted here, not on the Real Serious Bloggers blog site) and will almost certainly be tweeting from the fair.

Whee! Time for another rant. Apparently there are rumblings in the news-o-sphere that London may be looking to close some more under-utilized schools. Needless to say, all the people who have kids that currently go to these schools are up in arms about the prospect of losing their school. If my kid’s school was to be closing it would suck but if the TVDSB made a good argument for it then so be it. If the school is only half full, or can’t even really make 1 graduating class, then maybe it’s time to look at selling off the surplus. So my kid has to go to the school down the road. It’s not like they’re going to bus him an hour across the city. Assuming the Board is intelligent about it they would move him to one of the schools within a mile on either side of his current school. Hell, the one school is close enough that he could EASILY walk there as there as well. The other school is a bit further – it would be about a 25 minute walk I think.

So here’s my solution. When they announce a school is going to be closed (based on a set criteria – usually lack of enrollment) the parents that don’t want the school to close should be given an option to keep it open. The cost of maintaining the school above and beyond the regular costs would be split amongst the parents who wish to keep their little precious at that school. I’m not talking about teacher salaries (although if there isn’t a full class that may have to be addressed). I’m talking about physical upkeep costs, maintenance staff, etc. So if a school that is built to hold 1300 students only has 600 enrolled then the axe should be sharpened. If 250 of those 600 want to keep little Bill and Sally right where they are then those 250 would submit papers agreeing to pay 1/250th of the upkeep costs. I would be willing to go out on a limb and say that once The 250 found out the cost they’d be more than happy to send Billy an extra mile or two down the road.