BartHumphries

You're right, I meant KC9DDI. By the way, is that your call sign? I'm KJ6BWB for Bart. Anyway, I think that if they allow *some* third parties to create superior interfaces to the database, they should allow *other* third parties to create the same thing. At the very least, they should at least let me know what would be required to be considered to be one of those competing third parties. They're obviously not "selling" particular markets since all of the current competing products are competing geographically and for troops/teams/whatever, so it's not a standard franchise situation where they are legally bound to not allow a competing player into the area where someone has already purchased a "monopoly" (such as Southern CA where the Domino's Pizzas are privately held and corporate Domino's aren't allowed to open in the franchised Southern CA market).

I'd love to know, would it require a payment? How big would the payment be? Would it be a flat rate or a royalty on programs sold or both and if a flat rate would it be a one-time fee or a yearly licensing fee or what? And would anything be different if I gave the program away gratis to make it easier for troops (and packs/crews/whatever) to keep records on their people?

I'm kind of offended that I haven't received any reply at all. I wouldn't mind signing an NDA -- I've signed plenty of those before and I know how and when to keep my mouth shut, but this complete lack of a reply in any form is somewhat irksome and indicative of larger problems beneath the surface, in my opinion.

Ok, so now when are they going to combine a new "OA" knot with devices for Order, Brotherhood, Vigil, with the current OA Distinguished Service knot? That'll let people stop wearing a folded up sash tucked into their belt and National would make a heck of a lot of money selling those to every OA member.

Perhaps I am reading more into that rule that was meant. Perhaps a man isn't required when boys are going camping as long as you have at least two women.

That being said, why do co-ed crews require co-ed leadership? Because some things are more easily discussed with a member of the same sex. To be blunt and avoid beating around the bush in response to the inevitable, "but only girls have periods and bathroom problems", etc., for a boy this might involve having to air out his sleeping bag after a wet dream. I remember one nine-year old home-schooled boy on a church campout who had no idea how to urinate while standing up -- the possibility of such had apparently never even crossed his mind since his father had run off when he was a very little kid. He had no brothers. He was about to go in his pants before it was explained to him that he didn't have to wait for an open stall but could go off into the woods. When asked later, his mom said simply that men who stand up to urinate always make a mess so she'd just taught him that you always have to sit down. I could go on with other examples, but lets just say that girls aren't the only ones who can get really embarrassed when trying to explain something to an adult leader of the opposite sex. I may be reading more into the rule than is explicitly mentioned, but I think the spirit of the rule is that you have to have at least one adult of "matching" gender for the youth that are going, and at least two adults of whatever gender overall.

The proper way to motivate Scouts and what happens after that:

So, officially, every youth has to know which leader to report to, and most often every youth will have their "own" leader, but there's no official requirement for how many Cubs can report to the same adult leader?

There must be at least one adult of the same gender as every youth who goes on a Scouting outing. This mostly comes up in mixed-gender Venture crews, where you need at least one female adult leader if there are girls going on the campout, but yeah if it's a regular Scout troop and there's a boy going then you need at least one of the adults to be male.(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

Yes, the USA does that. I'd think a young college age kid that wanted to volunteer with Scouts would be doing it because he liked Scouting. Well, that or trying to pad his resume with a lot of volunteer hours, but either way I wouldn't say no.

I haven't ever worked with Cubs as an adult. I still am not, I'm working with Boy Scouts. I just heard that Cub Scout summer camp requires that a parent attend for every Cub Scout? Doesn't that effectively double the cost to send a Cub Scout to camp, as well as having to take a week off work? Parents actually do this?

Back when I was a Cub Scout, my parents would drop me off with my sleeping bag, etc., at the camp and I'd be assigned to a group of maybe 10 boys? As I remember it, there was one primary leader who was with us all the time and one other leader who came around every so often, but mostly it was just the group doing activities with the leader supervising us. Have things changed that much or was that camp wholly out of line (I admit, with two-deep leadership you'd need at least two adults with a group of boys all the time now, so that's one thing that's different at least, but maybe I just wasn't paying any attention to an adult leader who rarely talked, I don't know). This would have been back in the late 80's.

Which link?

So, The Blancmange, you're saying that Google and Facebook should stop allowing websites to interface with Google and Facebook accounts? Because those monolithic companies do publicly provide information on how to interface with those accounts.

ScoutNET already requires passwords. Any program that interfaces with it has to provide the correct passwords (which already exist and are already in place). I just think that ScoutNET itself isn't really secure and that National is relying on that old "security through obfuscation" technique instead of actually fixing whatever problems exist. Either that or even National doesn't really know how it all works anymore, so since they can't fix whatever problems exist they're just trying to roll out something new then migrate all the data from the old program to whatever they come out with next.(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

I was a four-year letterman in Cross Country in high school, amongst other things that I lettered in. I hate, hate those metal devices, they keep falling off. You can try whatever you want to get them to stick on but eventually they're going to fall off. Even hot glue on the back of the little metal things doesn't work forever, maybe only a year or so.

My Oscar de la Renta Scout pants finally wore out a couple months ago after 15 years because I've grown too big in the waist. A leg zipper on my Centennial pants just broke in an ordinary load of laundry after only 2 months of use. These little metal pins are just more of the cheap junk that National is coming out with now instead of the good uniforms that we used to have -- stuff whose planned obsolescence is measured in months instead of years, to drive more sales in their stores.

On the other hand, if they ever come out with knots with the "devices" embroidered into the knot, I'd buy those.(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

In http://www.scouter.com/Forums/viewThread.asp?threadID=330019 I posted about how I was trying to figure out how to interface with ScoutNet so that I could build a better interface tool. To date, I have received no official reply. No emails, no letters, no phone calls -- I gave them all of my contact information so if they haven't gotten back to me yet it's because National doesn't want to get back to me.

Perhaps some day they'll leave the Cone of Silence and Get Smart. (If you remember that TV show, it'll be funny.)

Because it gives you an excuse to have a campfire. You can use stoves to cook with, solar lights that recharge themselves every day for light, why do you need a messy dangerous trace-leaving campfire? To retire the flag with.(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

This past week I was riding a motorcycle in ~70 MPH Santa Ana winds. It was extremely gusty, but nothing that I wouldn't camp in -- it was just wind. Now, mix that in with rain and I might start having second thoughts. This weekend I'll be camping right by a canyon, one of the main places where the Santa Ana winds blow into the San Bernardino valley and it's projected to rain. I'm still going -- I'll just bring a couple extra towels, some extra clothes, some plastic clothes to go over whatever else I'm wearing.

Then again, perhaps I'm just used to it. The School District up here purchased the land that the high school is on for $1 because the winds were so strong that nobody wanted to build there. It was initially an elementary school and during periods of high wind the teachers used to line up and hang onto kids jackets as the kids walked to the buses.

I certainly wouldn't mountain climb in high winds or hike the Grand Canyon or something like that, but ordinary camping? No problem.

Lightning, on the other hand, that'll cancel a campout for me fairly quickly. I never did like the idea of that "crouch down and huddle as close to the ground as you can with only your feet on the ground".

Doesn't one of the three sections of the blue card say something about "for the council" or something?

I imagine virtually every organization who has had adults working with youth have, at one time or another, had the problem of an adult preying on a child. I imagine that most of them, decades ago, acted the same way. I'm not excusing them or saying that they shouldn't be held accountable for the emotional trauma which might otherwise have been prevented, but it was a different time with unfortunately different practices.

This is why there is such an emphasis on two-deep leadership in Scouts -- do not let yourself be in a position where such an occurrence is even possible. Nowdays, we know about the abnormally high rate of recidivism for sexual offenders. We live in different times and a transgression in that regard will now ban a person for life. We can be thankful that people are more willing to call in the police.(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

Seriously? A literal paycheck for building a Scout program for minority youth?(This message has been edited by BartHumphries)

If you really want 5-star meals for when you're camping, just go to http://www.reynoldspkg.com/reynoldskitchens/en/recipes/recipe_search.asp?KeyIngredient=0&Course=0&CookingTime=0&CookingMethod=8&strCrit=&Step=Results&subStep=advSearch

Yeah, long link, but I can't find their simple foil dinner pages, so I had to search for all recipes that can be cooked wrapped in foil and dumped in the coals. Really easy to cook, and fabulous recipes. Garlic and Parmesan potatoes with a little london broil slipped in on one side? Delicious and possible for a couple dollars per person (presuming you're cooking for 6-8).

Say, for example, a First Class Scout is using Swimming, First Aid, Camping, Family Life, Pottery, and Indian Lore MBs to meet requirement 3 of the Star Rank: Earn 6 merit badges, including 4 from the required list for Eagle.*

Ok, not a problem so far. That's j, a, k, l, and two non-required so they fit just fine.

But in the course of the BOR when asking questions related to his overall scouting expereince it comes out that some of the requirements for these MBs were not completed, so what is the BOR to do?

Well, an EBoR is supposed to sign off on what the Scout's attitude is, right? If he said something like, "Gee, I should fix that!" Then I'd say that's the proper attitude. If he said something like, "Eh, who cares, it's old and done and my Scoutmaster gave me the merit badge." Well, that may not be the proper attitude.

That being said, it's entirely possible to not remember anything about a merit badge earned, even if it was done recently. Unfortunately, a lot of the time boys are tested on what's in their relatively short-term memory... just like most all of their math classes. It's generally not until the mid-term or a comprehensive final that a person is truly tested on everything they've learned about math that year.

Apparently I was wrong earlier. It seems that an EBoR is not a comprehensive "final" or a graduate thesis or something that delves deeply into everything the Scout has done through the last eight years of his life (depending on how old he is when he has his EBoR). Check to make sure the paperwork seems to be ok (going with all merit badges as presented as "passed"), check out his attitude/demeanor/etc., and pass on any further problems for the Council to worry about as they can better check the paperwork and resolve any problems that may have arisen during the EBoR.

I think the point of the new rules is that the EBoR isn't supposed to be delving into merit badge minutia so as to avoid a youth saying that he was "robbed of his Eagle" because "some board of old men didn't believe that he'd done what he'd said he'd done". If it really is clear that he hasn't done the work, if a Scout were to say something like, "Yeah, I didn't even do X but the merit badge counselor signed off #Y anyway, or something like that" then yeah the EBoR shouldn't pass the Scout.

From http://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/BoyScouts/GuideforMeritBadgeCounselors/RankAdvanceFAQ.aspx

Question: What is an Eagle board of review?

Answer: The Eagle board of review is a bit different from other boards of review because it is the last major step for an Eagle Scout candidate. All his efforts peak at the Eagle board of review. It's akin to a job interview, but it allows the panel to determine whether the candidate is worthy of the recognition. The interview focuses on the Eagle candidate's attitude and his acceptance of Scouting's ideals.

The Scout has already had numerous Scoutmaster interviews and boards of review along the path to Eagle. This final board of review can be an overview of what's happened but it's more to determine whether he acts like an Eagle. What's his attitude like? Does he accept Scouting's ideals?

There's a sidebar on that scouting.org Rank Advancement FAQ page which spells it out again:

The Eagle board of review is not a test; nor is it used to review the Scout's rank or Scouting skills.

For a First Class candidate, "So did you enjoy cooking for your patrol?"

Scout: "I guess."

BOR: "Well, what was on the menu?"

Scout: "Don't remember."

BOR: "What campout did you cook on?"

Scout: "Maybe last year sometime."

BOR: "Can you tell us about some of the other times you've cooked for your patrol?"

Scout: "I don't really like to cook."

BOR: "It really doesn't sound like you completed this requirement. Are you sure?"

If I was to do something that I don't like just so I could complete the requirement, I sure wouldn't mentally mark that event off and be able to remember the exact details and what was on the menu a year or so later. Shoot, I just got back from a LNT Master Educator weekend and a month from now I'd likely be hard pressed to remember exactly what we had for any meal (let alone trying to remember a year from now).

An API is a ruleset -- if connection is made with CSV's, then the API should say to use comma separated fields.

Thanks, UCEagle72. I was just looking around at the advancement tools that interface with the official online advancement tool and it seemed that most of these programs had been created back in the 90's or something, maybe with Access '97 or something. Some of the free "programs" are just really massive Excel sheets. It seems that I could make a better looking, faster acting, more responsive program, but I'd need to know how to interface with the online advancement tool, what sort of API I'd have to code in.

If they want to charge me money to sell the program, then I'm perfectly fine with just giving it away after I finish it, if that'll reduce the amount I'm charged, but I haven't been able to find anything public on what API they have going (i.e. what sort of coding rules I have to follow to interface with their program). I think some of the current costs for advancement tracking tools are a little outrageous -- $60/year? Come on, this isn't Microsoft Office we're talking about here. I know I can do better than what's already out there for cheaper.

Anyway, I went to that site and filled out the form, requesting to be contacted, so we'll see what National has to say about this. I'm sort of half skeptical, thinking that perhaps it was the guys who created Scoutnet who then went and created the more popular advancement tools (or maybe the other way around. the guys who created those tools getting together to create Scoutnet), so that maybe there isn't a public API, just insider knowledge, which would also explain why the online advancement tool is so bad, almost necessitating a 3rd party advancement tool. We'll see.

Here's a bit of a tracking database that I created back in 2006 with Access '97 -- I can do better now:

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a66/bubbajoe12345/classsubform.jpg

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a66/bubbajoe12345/classcontrols.jpg

http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a66/bubbajoe12345/nongreycells.jpg

Regarding programs that interface with the online advancement tool, what is Scoutnet certified and how would I get a program that I wrote to become such?

Oh, good idea, Jamboree over the Internet is coming up soon, isn't it?