History Trippin' 

Wordle.net.  I found this site recently and I’m utterly hooked.  I thought I’d pass it along, just for the sheer fun of it.  Here’s how it works…Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text, so if you list the word Driven to Educate 10 times, Driven to Educate will appear larger than the other words you’ve listed.  You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like, and I can think of lots of different things to do with them. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Check out ours!

With the Beijing Olympics just a month away we thought it fitting to tour the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and see where our nation’s best athletes prepare to compete.  The tour is free and if you’re lucky you’ll get to see the athletes practicing.  Unlike other countries, the training facility gets no money from the government – it is completely run off of sponsorships –like Coke, 24 Hour Fitness, and others.  The sponsors donate the things that the athletes need, like gym equipment and clothing.  Every year the top athletes, from gymnasts to basketball players to marksmen, apply for an opportunity to move to the training complex and make training for the Olympics their life.  If they get accepted the sponsors cover all of their living expenses – lodging on campus, meals, calling cards – everything.  Their only job is to focus on training.  They are also provided with the best sports medicine available, at no cost.  Doctors from around the country volunteer to do a 2 year rotation at the training center, which apparently looks really good on a resume.  The waiting list to work with the athletes is about 7 years long!