My younger son isn't doing so well with his academic career.  At least so far.  Luckily, it's just kindergarten.  But according to his teacher, he's at the very bottom of his class in both numbers and letters. 

He's 5.  And can only count to 13.  Can't spell his name and hasn't quite gotten the whole alphabet down.  The teacher explained this to us in our parent-teacher conference.

I asked, "Well, is it possible that he's...well...you know..just..dumb?" 

Once I regained consciousness, my wife suggested I not take that path.  So we've been working on helping him get up to speed more.  In a couple of days, he's up to counting to 30 and can spell his name.  But it's been more of a struggle. 

His older brother was reading at 3 on his own.  We didn't teach him or anything, he just sort of "picked it up".  So it's proving to be a real challenge in trying to bring the little guy up to par on these matters.  I actually don't think he's dumb.  If I had to guess, I'd say he was just developing at a slightly slower pace than the other kids.  I had similar issues when I was a kid, I was a slow learner and didn't get really caught up until 5th grade. 

At least it was caught early.  We have good teachers in our school district and they were able to bring his letter and number issues up to us matter of factly without any attempt to arm-chair diagnose or even jumping to any conclusions at all other than to provide us with some materials that might help us help him at home.  She said later in the year we can see how he's progressing and try to figure out what the best course is at that point.

Atrophe. I think that's how you spell it. I could look it up but that would be work. And that brings me to my problem - I've become so lazy that my muscles are starting to atrophe.  I think I should do something about that..but yet..the chair beckons..

Okay everything should be back to normal now.

So many things on the plate today:

 

Gaming Nexus has an interview with me on GalCiv II's new featuers and a look back at what went right and wrong with GalCiv I.

Gamer's Temple has a brief first look at Galactic Civilizations II.  They will shortly have an interview up that we just did with them.

Boomtown has an excellent preview of Galactic Civilizations II.  Check it out.

The relations system in GalCiv 1 was dynamic but hard to understand.  The AI would look at where it currently was in terms of how it felt about you, go through a load of calculations, and then adjust its relations.  The problem was that it was often hard to understand.

So this time, I've started making it so that the AI calculates its relations with you from scratch each turn rather than adjusting up and down.

Different situations given different points for and against you.  Ironically, a system similar to this is in Civ IV so at least there's others that feel a system like this makes more sense.  Here's what I've got so far:

 

 

1	You are militarily more powerful
2 to 3	You are significantly more powerful.
4 to 5	You are massively more powerful militarily
1	You are trading with them
2	Trade with you represents a substantial part of their economy
3	Trade with you represents a major part of their economy
1	You are ethically evil and so are they
2	You are ethically neutral and so are they
3	You are ethically good and so are they
1	You have helped them in the past.
2 to 3	You have provided significant help to them.
1	You have recently paid tribute
1	You are natural friends (humans & Altarians)
1 to 3	You are diplomatically more sophisticated
1	They have planets in your influence sphere
1 to 2	They are pacifistic
1 to 4	You are a historic friend (after 2228 + galaxy size) players friendly players become friendlier with 1 point per year)
-2	You are evil and they are neutral
-4	You are evil and they are good
-3	You are  good and they are evil
-2	You are good and they are neutral
-1	You are neutral and they are evil
-2	You are neutral and they are good
-1	They are more powerful than you are.
-2 to -3	They are significantly more powerful than you are.
-4 to -5	They are massively more powerful than you are.
-1 to -2	They are militaristic
-1	You are natural enemies (Drengin and Torians)
-1	You are the Yor (or you’re not the Yor)
-1 to -4	You are a historic adversary
-1 to -3	You are diplomatically less sophisticated
-1 to -4	“Unlucky” event affects you (assassination for instance)

Stardock has released Aquarium Desktop 2006. Aquarium Desktop isn't a screensaver. The fish actually "live" on your Windows desktop happily swimming within the borders of your screen. The fish, rendered with exquisite detail in 3D, swim, turn, and simply look amazing.

Aquarium Desktop 2006 comes with several fish to start with. User can choose which fish to display on their desktop and even have multiple fish of the same underlying model. As a result, user can have as many or few fish as they want swimming. It also comes with a host of different plants that, like the fish, have been rendered from 3D models for very lifelike animation and detail. It also comes with multiple wallpapers, aquatic sound effects, and more.

The program is highly configurable. Plants can be sized. Sound effects added or disabled. And it is designed to be intelligent in its CPU usage. If the fish are covered (and when people are working, they tend to have windows on their desktops) the rendering goes into idle mode so that the fish don't slow down your computer. The graphics are also compressed in memory to minimize how much memory it's using.

Aquarium Desktop 2006 is a great fun way to liven up your desktop. For user who had the original Aquarium Desktop, they can upgrade to Aquarium Desktop 2006 at a reduced price and get access to additional fish. Additional "fish packs" will be made available as Christmas nears.

Aquarium Desktop Home Page

Aquarium Desktop at DesktopGadgets.com

Wired has a really interesting article on History's Worst Software Bugs.  These bugs aren't where you would normally expect them (i.e. in PC's) but rather in serious real-world applications such as space probes, gas pipelines, etc.