Now with Kids of Their Own

Today's picture is not new to the blog. In fact it was first published on November 1, 2005.

At the time, I mentioned that I had earnestly started to scan some old photographs for Flickr. The picture to the right was taken during my time in Taif, Saudi Arabia. On an outing one weekend, which occur on Thursday and Friday there, we used to venture around the mountain city. These boys were playing in a rural neighbourhood. In the very conservative parts of the Kingdom, taking photographs of people was frowned upon. Still, these kids were very happy to be the center of attention. This picture was mostly likely taken in 1985, so 23 years later I never again expected to hear about them.

I'm only including a re-posting of the photo because of this very interesting email that I received yesterday:

I was searching for Taif City on the Internet, accidentally arrived to your web site and luckily and I saw the photo of the two kids from Taif, there are my cousins, the kid on the right side of the photo is now a high school teacher and the other on the left of the photo, now he is Saudi Airlines Employee and the area where you have took the photo it is my home point in Taif. I have sent the photo to the two guys, they remember it and they were so happy. The two guys are married and both have kids.

Best Regards,
Abdullatif Al-Fageeh

I Work for Toys

I'm going to think of it as a very expensive remote. I am not a game player, but my Sony PS3 just seemed to cry out for some company. I use the PlayStation 3 to play Blu-ray discs and increasingly as a media server. Its name on my home network is The Black Box.

I read something about how a PlayStation Portable (PSP) can be used to access its larger stationery cousin. I had sort of fallen in love with Sony's XrossMediaBar. The XMB is just a simple graphical interface on these devices. I wanted to see it on a smaller screen too.



So I ran to the Superstore and bought a PSP. Imagine, I'm not even that keen on games! I did, however, have to pick up a $20 copy of Daxter just so I could see a real example of the neat little proprietary-format optical disc. Sony tried hard to sell movies in that format but it never took wings. I will never buy a film on one as I can rip a DVD into mpeg4 file. I sure wish I hadn't needed to also pick up another of Sony's other proprietary inventions, the Memory Stick. I already have enough SD memory around the house.

I love the device as it's wifi capable. I went down to an unsecured network connection on the first floor of our building and turned on my PS3 from there. I was able to listen to an MP3 file on my computer's external hard drive. I can have my whole 40GB music collection whereever there's a wifi connection. It wasn't too long ago that I rambled on in one of my so called Furturecasts about my ideas of networking in the future. It has already happened.

Television via Torrent

I get excited by the potenital but frustrated by the implementation. Let's say I have a file I wish to share with the world. Imagine there are 100,000 people out there who may be interested in it. Rather than having those 100,000 come directly to download from me, I'd rather they all run some specialized software. Then, as soon as a few get the download or even a partial copy, the other 999,998 could start relying on them too. If, by chance, everyone wanted a copy at the same moment, then we could all both download and upload the missing bits simultaneously. Most assuredly some copies would be closer to another recipient than my original copy. In fact, a neighbour on the same ISP might push along the data to them at breakneck speeds. That's the theory, at least.

Even our public broadcaster is trying out distribution this way. At the beginning of the week, after broadcasting on air, the CBC released Canada's Next Great Prime Minister through a torrent. You'll see the BITTORRENT reference and link right on the page. It took a while to link up but right at the moment I'm hitting download rates which are averaging about 140 kB/s.

You'd think as the content would be primarily shared by people on the few broadband carriers in Canada, it'd be a breeze. Most probably Telus started 'shaping' my packets as soon it appeared I was running a torrent. I'm estimating that it'll take half again as long to get hold of the show than actually watch it. The promise of digital is that it be faster than analog. I commend CBC but this will never become a replacement for traditional distribution until we have much more bandwidth with no throttling by Internet providers.

The Troubles of Narcissus

To prevent me from staring at my own reflection all alone, please click my name or the screen image below. I don't want to fall any more deeply in love with myself and end up as a mere flower but it's not easy being drop-dead handsome and so very photogenic!

Image Search Yahoo: dennis hurd

(Beginning at about page 14, lots of images from my blog start appearing in the mix. Also, you may see quite a few of Tim's mis-tagged Flickr images.)



Do I have an Internet presence, or what?

Taking P2P for a Spin

Frankly, I never saw much need for using peer-to-peer downloading.

Firstly, I cannot think why I really would need to spend a whole day downloading the copy of a poor-quality movie from a far corner of the world. After all, I subsribe to an all-you-can-eat DVD subscription via regular mail. That gives me the original 8-gig discs with all the extras. Secondly, I've got a large enough collection of music already in .mp3 or .wma format and generally find myself not having enough time to even listen to the podcasts which I aggregate for my little Zen. It'd hardly be worth my effort trying to find a whole album at a good bitrate with files following my naming conventions. It just does not seem worth it.

Knowing that I am not up to date with the technology finally forced to download BitComet. I can certainly appreciate the concept of using torrents. It'd surely be of benefit to organizations with sizeable amounts of data for distribution. I suppose when I have some extra time, I'll probably have to set up a torrent. What shall I share?

Gold in Them, Ther' Hills

Quick calculation shows the blog is now is its 216th week. As I have never missed a day, that means there are over 1,500 unique days of blog postings. Granted, some of the entries may lack any throught-proking concepts and, at other times, I've undoubtedly, repeated the exact same thoughts.

Regardless, it is time to mention that even if you've arrived for the first time today, over four years of my yacking doesn't have to be inaccessible. In fact, there's an entire page devoted to sussing out my previously written tidbits of wisdom. You can check by:

typing in a search term,

picking a label,

or choosing a specific week.

Click on the screen image above. Or you may even try adding a customized IE 7 search of my eJournal and images to your toolbar by reading this entry from last year.

Not a Bird

I feel very sad that nobody I know, Twitters.
I was born way too early, I guess.

A Little Cross-Promotion

If you have ever visited my eJournal and images in the past, you know that I mumble about something or another here every day. Yet, if you knock off the slash-b-l-o-g then you may land at information at my primary site.

For a decade and a half, I've kept the online equivalent of a resume. I was right at it again this morning. I added the newest trip data into my travel page. Please, feel free to click so my efforts won't go unnoticed.

An Old Fellow's Ivory

Being such a global warehouse of images makes Flickr a common resource for those working on projects.  All uploads can be restricted in a number of ways, but I choose not to do that.  I occasionally get requests for the use of particular pictures.  The image of the elephant in this entry was taken during the 2004 trip to Sri Lanka.  Just yesterday, I got this nice note asking permission for its use.  Of course I am happy when something I've 'captured' is useful to others.

Hello Dennis,

My name is Steve Lane. I am Keeper (Curator) of Natural History at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, UK. I am currently working on an exciting and innovative Permanent Exhibition called 'Elements'. The Gallery themed around the four elements. earth, air, fire and water, will run for around ten-fifteen years and it will be a multi-sensory celebration of natural objects and landscapes. Creative interactive content will feature throughout and the exhibition will be particularly attractive to the main target audience - people with disabilities. Interactives will include experiencing bird songs through sound, vibration and associated visual moving images. Visitors will also be able to create their own sculpture and land art using sea-shore debris and create and record their own landscape music using a range of natural instruments. Fabulous sea shell and mineral collections will also be displayed in the space.

Entrance to the Gallery and to the Museum as a whole will be free. The Museum operates as part of Coventry City Council Local Authority. It is a non-profit making service.

I am currently sourcing images for the gallery. All photographers whose work is included will be acknowledged and credited within the Gallery space. They will also be invited to the opening of the Gallery.

I am particularly interested in the photograph displayed on the flickr website of the elephant 'Big Tusker'. I would like to make the connection between the tusks in the photo and tusk shells from the indo-pacific oceans. I am therefore enquiring if you would be happy for us to use this image in the Gallery space and if so, how you would like to be acknowledged.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Kind Regards,

Steve Lane (Keeper of Natural History) UK, 02476 785313

There's More Than One Way ...

... to Skin a Cat?

Information is useless without a quick way to access it. Realizing this has become more important as I approach my fourth year of daily blog entries. My blog's archive vault holds all the words I've typed here since September 2003.



There are three ways in which to access old data. First, the most powerful way is to do a complete search. One simply types a word into the box and clicks a button. This will return pages that contain specific words. Secondly, it's possible to check the label categories which I've set up as a way to describe entries. This can point to general directions, but it may be difficult to locate specific material as these pages can grow quite large over time. The final way to see previous entries is to browse through week by week. This would not be a very efficient way of finding an exact entry, but you might well find some interesting things along the way. These three ways increase the value of old entries in this blog by making the information more accessible.

Say, What?

I sometimes wonder if the words in my eJournal and images really end up being a representative repository of my thoughts and ideas. After all, on an ordinary day, we all have a deluge of ideas during waking hours. Well, I surely do, and although it may prove suspect, I'd like to think that most of those around me spend at least part of their days with their brains engaged. So, why might these blog entries not capture the spirit of my thoughts for a day?

First, I believe one major impediment to a more balanced expression of ideas is that I still have to be at a keyboard when entering data. I simply do not spend the majority of my day near a PC; therefore, I might not be able to capture the good ones when they're available.

Then, there's the very complex process of sorting and deciding what to say. Of the millions of possible ideas I could express, most simply don't fit well into a box of typed text. Perhaps some of my thoughts today have never even made it into language form.

Also, many of my ideas might have been fleeting. Others may have lacked coherence. I cannot think of an appropriate term for the smaller material of which thoughts are composed. Let's call them atoms. I would venture that the single atoms of thought, do not a blog entry make.

Lastly, on some days, and today may just be an example, I may simply not have any useful thoughts or ideas to share.

The Moving Image

I could be Martin Scorsese. Okay, well maybe not.

When I was a kid I used to shoot 3-minute rolls of Super8 film. My family often spent weekends camping at Waterville Valley in the NH White Mountains. Although it was about 70 miles we'd stay at a campground in the National Forest. In the autumn of 1973, at the age of 14, I spliced together a whole summer's worth of movies onto a bigger reel. I added commentary and music on a cassette tape. I'd synch 'em up and put on a show. In that decade, I never could've imagined the day we'd have digital tape.

Now it is frightfully easy to capture adventures. I only need to plug the Firewire cable into my old Sony HC-40. Instantly, I'm given the option to copy to the drive from inside Ulead's Movie Factory 5. I've tried others, but paid for Movie Factory because it's designed to go through the process the same way I think. It takes a while to get the data on the drive. Then, I simply cut out parts I don't want, select a menu and write to DVD. The results are easy to access once on disc and inherently copyable in that form. This discs are full of colour and sound in a way which still-photography can't match.

This afternoon, I mailed a copy of our vacation in Sri Lanka to Jay's brother. He's working out of the country. It's been a long time since he's seen his wife, daughters, and the construction on a new home. He will love watching the DVD, I'm sure.

I don't know why I'm not creative more often. Doing a project today is a hell of a lot simpler than playing with Super8 film and a cassette!

.mht PowerPoint Format

Yesterday, half of my class completed their oral presentations. Today, the other half will do the same. When I teach this level, I always demand an 8 to 10 minute presentation on a business in Vancouver. Primary and secondary research is mandatory. The students must choose a focus that is related to their career and interview someone. They must consider the needs of the audience too.

This class is a nice mix of international students and Canadian immigrants. One student is currently working in a firm that creates DVDs. He used a PowerPoint presentation that he kindly sent to me by email. I thought it was interesting and I'd like to take the opportunity to let my readers take a look too.

Responding to the Prior Entry

I never know from day to day what will become part of this blog. I think, in a way, not knowing is good. It allows me to think of each entry as an opportunity. For example, I could write poetry tomorrow. I could share newly-found wisdom with the world. It'd be possible to use the space to explain a photograph. Or I suppose I could just complain about something or someone.

Today, I've chosen to do none of the above. I will include a response I got to yesterday's entry. Thank you for writing, Mr. Dusan. How humbled I feel to have a regular reader in Slovakia! Getting a personal note from a place to which I've never been demonstrates the power of this medium. This message will prove to be great encouragement on those days when I need a little coaxing to get something online.

Dear Dennis,

I've learnt English for many years (with some longer pauses about 25 years). But I'm not very gifted to learn languages. I've learnt something and after some time I've forgotten it! But now I have strong motivation. I have to learn English in my job. I have 5 strong and busy classmates and an agreeable teacher.

I agree with you! - idea to keep things moving. The best lesson for me is that one if I don't watch the time. And grammar exercise can be very boring topic...

I like to listening podcasts. My favourite one is www.eslpod.com. I've never been to any English speaking country yet and so I am not very experienced listener. It is very good idea to speak slowly! But I'm trying to pick up Voice of America's MP3 files or NASA podcast too.

My learning is time-consuming (reading, listening, preparing for classes). Thanks to Internet is my learning nearly connected to real life and therefore it is more enjoyable.

So, have a nice day
Dusan.

A Boy and His Dog

I always watch the local British Columbia CTV evening news at 6:00. Today, most of the news was preempted by a news event. Channel 9 hasn't even had its helicopter for very many years.



In the red box which I added there is a boy and his dog in peril. Luckily a companion called the North Shore Fire and Rescue. Although it took 40 minutes of air-time, I didn't mind watching the successful rescue. I am not sure how I would've felt about live TV if they'd gone tumbling over the side.

Learning from the Students

Today, half of my class will do oral presentations. I always look forward to hearing what they've come up with. The assignment is to choose a business in the Vancouver area and organize an eight to ten minute presentation. They are to use primary research and choose information that is related to their present or future careers.

As the presentations are progressing they also mark the speeches using these criteria:

Complete Introduction

Level of Self Confidence

Adequate Eye Contact

Logical Flow

Kept My Interest

Loud/Clear Voice

I Learned New Material

Useful Summary

Transparency Quality

Overall Mark.

I am excited today, as there's never been a presentation day where I haven't learned new and useful information.

Just Hangin' Around

A few times a year, I include a picture of the household pet. This one was adopted back in November of 2004 so he's getting a little long in the tooth. Hamsters generally live between two and three years. I've heard some say their lifespan is 1,000 days.

I include an entry about him in the blog every once in a while for his original owners. Even though now down-under, they can see how he's doing. Obviously, he's still strong and quite greedy!


This little guy knows that fortitude means stick-to-it-tivness.

Blog as Eventual Autobiography

Earlier this week, I was saying here how we've been in Canada approaching a decade. As I've got this growing online reservoir of recollections, people searching for data often stop by to ask questions. After a few more years of story-telling, I'll be nearer a complete autobiography; it just won't be in sequential order. Here's an email note I received out of the blue from a stranger this week:

Dennis,

I see you taught at TINS in Saudi Arabia too. I was there 12 years ago. Meanwhile I've been in Germany and am now back in Dhahran in KSA. I left the medical school at Arabian Gulf University on Bahrain after just 4 months. Terrible place. The worst ELT department I've ever encountered. That is apart from the students. They're mainly Saudi girls. Some the most gifted students I ever taught.

Anyway, over there I was living down the road from the BDF base near Riffa and heard that they run English courses. I'd be really grateful if you could let me know who I could contact there. I'd love to get back to Bahrain some time. I'm eagerly waiting for my exit/re-entry visa so I can go over for the weekend.

Personality Test: Results

These are results for the personality test found at the December 3rd entry. If you've not choosen a graphic, skip to that page to choose your favourite graphic. Then, you may return here to find the assessment.

(1) Introspective
Sensitive / Reflective
You come to grips more frequently and thoroughly with yourself and your environment than do most people. You detest superficiality; you'd rather be alone than have to suffer through small talk. But your relationships with your friends are highly intensive, which gives you the inner tranquility and harmony that you need in order to feel good. However it is no problem for you to be alone for extended periods of time, without becoming bored.

(2) Independent
Unconventional / Unfettered
You demand a free and unattached life for yourself that allows you to determine your own course. You have an artistic bend in your work or leisure activities. Your urge for freedom sometimes causes you to do exactly the opposite of what expected of you. Your lifestyle is highly individualistic. You would never blindly imitate what is "in"; on the contrary, you seek to live according to your own ideas and convictions, even if this means swimming against the tide.

(3) Dynamic
Active / Extroverted
You are quite willing to accept certain risks and to make a strong committment in exchange for interesting and varied work. Routine, in contrast, tends to have a paralyzing effect on you. What you like most is to be able to play an active role in events. In doing so, your initiative is highly pronounced.

(4) Down to Earth
Well-Balanced / Harmonious
You value a natural style and love that which is uncomplicated. People admire you because you have both feet planted firmly on the ground and they can depend on you. You give those who are close to you security and space. You are perceived as being warm and human. You reject everything that is garish and trite. You tend to be skeptical toward the whims of fashion trends. For you, clothing has to be practical and unobtrusively elegant.

(5) Professional
Pragmatic / Self-Assured
You take charge of your life, and place less faith in your luck and more in your own deeds. You solve problems in a practical, uncomplicated manner. You take a realistic view of the things in your daily life and tackle them without wavering. You are given a great deal of responsibility at work, because people know that you can be depended upon. Your pronounced strength of will projects your self-assurance to others. You are never fully satisfied until you have accomplished your ideas.

(6) Peaceful
Discreet / Non-Aggressive
You are easy-going yet discreet. You make friends effortlessly, yet enjoy your privacy and independence. You like to get away from it all and be alone from time to time to contemplate the meaning of life and enjoy yourself. You need space, so you escape to beautiful hideaways, but you are not a loner. You are at peace with yourself and the world, and you appreciate life and what this world has to offer.

(7) Carefree
Playful / Cheerful
You love a free and spontaneous life. And you attempt to enjoy it to the fullest, in accordance with the motto: "You only live once. You are very curious and open about everything new; you thrive on change. Nothing is worse than when you feel tied down. You experience your environment as being versatile and always good for a surprise.

(8) Romantic
Dreamy / Emotional
You are a very sensitive person. You refuse to view things only from a sober, rational standpoint. What your feelings tell you is just as important to you. In fact, you feel it is important to have dreams in life, too. You reject people who scorn romanticism and are guided only by rationality. You refuse to let anything confine the rich variety of your moods and emotions.


(9) Analytical
Trustworthy / Self-Assured
Your momentary sensitivity represents that which is of high quality and durable. Consequently, you like to surround yourself with little "gems," which you discover wherever they are overlooked by others. Thus, culture plays a special role in your life. You have found your own personal style, which is elegant and exclusive, free from the whims of fashion. Your ideal, upon which you base your life, is cultured pleasure. You value a certain level of culture on the part of the people with whom you associate.

Personality Test

A former student sent me this as an email attachment a number of years ago. The document was in Chinese and English and I am not sure of the origin of this test. The MS Word file said to select the shape below that appeals to you the most.


1)   2)  3) 

4)  5)  6) 

7)  8)  9) 

It continued by saying: "These shapes were developed by a psychologist. They have been tested worldwide, over a period of several years. As we received feedback from our research, we carefully adjusted the color and/or form of each shape, then tested again, until we were left with a highly successful set of shapes. These represent nine basic personality types."

To find the results, click here to go the entry of December 4th on another page.