Bugs, Ad-Aware, Spybot, Video game education

It took me a little over an hour to start reading email. Why? Because of yesterday's experience. I was watching the news and decided that since I wasn't on the computer I would run a scan for spyware using Ad-Aware. Well, yesterday, it found 4 'critical' bugs, which I let Ad-Aware remove. But after I restarted the computer and ran another scan, it found 1 'critical' bug, which was one of the 4 I thought had been removed. After running SpyBot and Ad-Aware, the bug was *still* there. So, I went on-line and got an update for Ad-Aware and of course ran another scan, which *didn't* find any bugs. Back to this morning. I came over to the computer and decided to run a scan to see if yesterday's bug came back. It didn't, but AA found a different one. And again, I couldn't get it to go away permanently until I got another update for Ad-Aware. So I don't know it the bug it found before the update was a false-positive, or if the update somehow made the removal work better. Anyway, after scanning, restarting, scanning, updating, scanning and restarting for an hour, I finally didn't have any bugs in the computer and opened our email program. Got the emails read, and responded to those I felt compelled to.

Then I thought about blogging, but couldn't think of what to write, so I went to one of my favorite news sites at Alternet.org Couldn't decide what to read, so I picked an article about video games and education called "Reading, Writing, and Video Gaming". I think it's a good article. If you've got kids, especially between the ages of 9 to 11 that you think are turning into "zombies", maybe they're not really. Perhaps they're learning more than you think. There is apparently a teacher in England ("Tim Rylands, the most popular teacher at the small elementary school Chew Magna, in the village of the same name near the English city of Bristol.") who uses video games, successfully, to teach his students. Now I wish *I* would've had a teacher like THAT when I was in school, maybe then I would've actually liked school! He says that it helped boys the most in raising their literacy levels, including "spelling, grammar, vocabulary, etc.". I think that's great! They talk to the guy who founded Atari (Nolan Bushnell). The article even go on to say how Mr. Bushnell would love to start a school using video games exclusively to teach because he says, "We don't need books," and "Sure, kids need to read, but not necessarily books. Books are obsolete." Now I don't think books will ever be completely obsolete, but perhaps just because some kids aren't reading books, that doesn't mean they're not reading. I know in fact that my own son basically taught himself how to read because he got tired of waiting for people to read the game instructions for the video game that were on the screen. Now, he will read the entire booklet that comes with a game before playing it, and understand the game better than his sister who doesn't read the booklets. *smile*