Some beautiful homes designed by Saota, an architecture firm in Cape Town South Africa. Their website is also extremely well designed.  One of my favorite homes is the Sow House – Lake Geneva which was featured in a design blog.

“According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: ‘Do parents have the right to know which of their kids’ teachers are the most and least effective? That’s the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times’s Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The newspaper’s announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city’s elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers’ union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.’ According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was ‘an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.’”

Source: Newsweek.com and Slashdot.com

I’m a fan on Boston.com’s “Big Picture” site which shows big pictures of current events going on around the world.  Check out part one and part two of their Tour de France pics.

4 more months and I’m done with the iPhone mess…bring on Android.

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Have you checked out FoodSpotting.com yet?  I just did and it is pretty interesting.  According to their website their site “makes finding and sharing food recommendations easier: Instead of reading and writing reviews of restaurants, you can share photos of specific foods you recommend and see what’s good wherever you go.

Finding recommendations is as easy as looking in a bakery window and seeing what looks good. You can discover foods around you, find whatever you’re craving and see what’s good at a particular restaurant.

Sharing a recommendation is as easy as taking a picture of your food, saying what it was and where you found it. You can earn virtual tips and real rewards for sharing things others love.”

What man in your life wouldn’t love this bearded stocking hat?