Fuzzy Baby Pandas Look Like Pink Rubber Toys

Anybody who knows me well is aware that I've been a huge massive fan of Giant Pandas longer than my mom can remember when or why. As a fourth-grader I went around counting all of the panda items I had collected, and they numbered over 100. I'm not even going to waste my time attempting to recount that figure these days!

My friend Damon always manages to find the coolest panda photos recently posted on the web to then send to me. Well this is the coolest set I've seen in a long time! They are development photos from the first three months of a Giant Panda cub's life! They're simply adorable, and to see what I mean about "pink rubber toys" I urge you to check them out here! :-)

Jason from Franklin, TN is auditioning for the TONTINE Reality Show

My friend Jason Madden, who was the youth pastor at New River Fellowship in Franklin, TN for a while when I lived there, recently sent me a link to his video on YouTube and explained that he's been chosen to audition for a new reality TV show called "TONTINE." TONTINE is described as "the biggest prize in Reality TV history"... $10 MILLION DOLLARS. To hear Jason's humorous story, I encourage you to watch the video above and if you have a YouTube account (or wouldn't mind quickly signing up for one), vote for him by adding this video to your favorites (click the red heart next to SAVE), "Add to your Playlists", and/or leave a comment.

The person with the highest views/rating/favorites/and comments will win $10,000 and be on the show. Then that person and 14 more contestants will spend 100 days in the TONTINE Challenge which spans all 7 continents! Jason is contestant #100303.

Read more about TONTINE here: http://www.jointhetontine.com/

Learning 2.0... Librarian-Style!

Being a bit of a web-geek myself, I often find it difficult to convince friends and family to embrace new online technologies as quickly as I discover them. For many of them, it seems that I have to set up a one-on-one training session with them to show them how it works before I can convince them to switch over to using the new online tool or web gizmo.

Yet today I read an article on Wired.com about a VERY COOL website that was set up by the Charlotte Mecklenburg County public library to teach their staff these new technologies and reward them for doing "23 Things" over a period of 9 weeks. The topics range from setting up a blog, to tagging and using newsreaders, to podcasting. They rewarded staff with a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop. Apparently it was quite a hit with library staff and even more so with other libraries - the Learning 2.0 blog boasts a list of at least 100 other libraries and groups around the world who have adopted this system for their own use!

So if you don't know what the terms RSS and Wiki stand for, or you just want to hone your already tech-savvy skills, give the 23 Things Challenge a go. You just might learn something new!

Math Book Helps Girls Embrace Their Inner Mathematician

Anybody in their late twenties or older will remember the much daydreamed-about "Winnie Cooper" from the hit TV Series, "The Wonder Years." Personally I was more obsessed with Fred Savage who played the handsome young Kevin Arnold (he was only a year older than I was when the series premiered), but yet each week I would lay on my stomach in front of the TV, giddy to see what would happen between the two adolescent "on again, off again" lovebirds.

Well apparently that on-set tutoring that the young actors received during their teenage years of filming the show really paid off for Danica McKellar who played Winnie. She later graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with a degree in mathematics among other achievements, and has now written a magazine-style math book for teenage girls entitled, "Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail."

I don't much like the idea of the horoscopes inside, but otherwise I know this will be a book that my Math-major husband will someday want to buy for our kids (at least our daughters)! Hopefully he'll wait past kindergarten before making them start reading it...

Check out the article about Danica's book here:
http://www.wired.com/culture/education/news/2007/08/winniecooper_QA?currentPage=all