Trans Texas Corridor announcment today

From Dallasblog.com

Today we find out what land the Texas Department of Transportation has its eyes on for the proposed $184 billion Trans-Texas Corridor. Officials will be releasing the study area, plus a 4,000-page environmental impact statement, at a press conference at D/FW International Airport today.
TXDOT will identify a ten-mile-wide area, which will be the focus of additional studies, to determine the final route for roads, rail and utilities in the corridor. The principal study area is mainly along Interstate 35 from the Mexican border through Central Texas to the Oklahoma border, but alternative routes are also being considered that would shift the superhighway into East Texas.

I’m guessing the route will be somewhere between I-35 and I-45 and will go right through Ellis County. I’ll post more as I find out.

Students suspended

Students were suspended in Ennis for three days for participating in walk-out protests last week against US immigration policy.

About 23 seniors were blocked from going to their senior prom on Saturday. That’s understandable in my mind.

If you’re suspended, you’re suspended. The school told the students they would be suspended if they participated in protests. They warned the students and then the students wanted to get upset. I don’t think they have a right to be upset when they were warned.

But I’m wondering about the district’s policy. Should a student be suspended because they skip school?

According to state law, a student may have 10 unexcused absences within a school year.

Let’s say a white student decided to skip school on Thursday to stay home and play X-Box, would they be suspended for three days?

Or what if an Hispanic student decided to skip school and visit a friend at college?

My editor said the district’s policy is that anytime a student skips school they are suspended for three days.

So here’s a thought/question… if a student skips one day – the school automatically says, you’re suspended for three days. Where’s the logic in that? “We don’t want them skipping school, so we’re going to suspend them from coming to school.”

Do you really think a student who skipped school in the first place is going to feel punished because they missed three additional days?

I may be miss-understanding the rule here, but if a student is suspended for three days, does that count as an unexcused or excused absence. In other words, could a student skip 10 days and get 30 days of excused absences?

Am I missing something here? Let me know if I am.

Morning quotes

“Ah the blogosphere – the place of little accountablility” – Eric Lidji
“The President said recently that Americans are addicted to oil. I’ve been addicted to a lot of things, but I didn’t know I was addicted to oil. Now I’m going to get off of it as soon as possible.” – Willie Nelson at a press conference in Carl’s Corner Saturday.

Get your jazz trance on


Thomas* posted some info on an album by Jonah Dempcy/Revolution Void.
From Milieu:

Revolution Void is a project by producer and jazz pianist Jonah Dempcy, mixing jazz and breakbeat. You may remember acclaimed musicians who decided to produce drum and bass, and it turning out as complete garbage: nothing there for jazz fans, nothing there for drum and bass fans. Increase the Dosage, however, combines breakbeat and melodic electronica in a charming way that makes for something not only worth listening to, but also something you’ll keep coming back to for years to come.
With bass by Matthew Garrison, sax by Seamus Blake and Darryl Estes, and guitars by Nicolas Manel, there’s a lot of serious musicians contributing some excellent material to the album. This, and careful production, makes Increase the Dosage an exceptional package. Surprisingly, it’s free to download, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license.

It’s a great jazz/trance album. Especially from a 21 year old producer. And you can download the whole mix for free from the website.
The downside is that I had to do a weird conversion on the ID tags to get it to play in Windows Media or Yahoo Player. I had to tell my computer to open each file in iTunes and then went to Advanced > Convert ID3 Tags before it would play in my media player. But otherwise, great album. Check it out.

*Someone should invent a patch for blogger that lets you do a keyboard shortcut for common links and phrases. But thanks again Thomas for another great headsup.