a hodge podge blog of music, travel and news.
It seems a number of people in Australia collect unemployment and surf all day because it pays the bills. The government is talking about cracking down on this with the ol’ “work for your welfare” plan.
And with that, I’m going surfing up the north coast of NSW for the week. Cheers.
photo by tomhide
I geotag most of my photos when I travel as I feel it is a great way to remember where they were taken, and when the geotagging technology becomes more mature, it is a great way to share and explore the world by photo. I posted before about flickr providing kml feeds of your photos that can be viewed in Google Earth. Recently I stumbled across a piece of script that grabs a set of photos from flickr and creates a kml for them that can then be viewed in Google Earth or on Google Maps. The code was written by Adam Franco and can be run from his site, or you can host it on your own server.
Essentially what this allows me to do now, is create a map of part of my trip (or an entire trip) that shows the path I took with images also visible, and then embed it into a post via Google Maps. Below is a test that outlines my month long tour of Australia.
I bought digital music. Crazy.
Call me old fashioned but I still like to own a physical compact disc so that I have the music in it’s full bitrate form, and if my hard drive ever crashes I can just spend a few weekends re-ripping my music. Also, for that day when we find a better format than MP3 I won’t be stuck with low-quality music, because I can just rip to the new format. But I digress.
I recently heard music by Octoberman on the R3-30 and CBCRadio 3 podcasts and was immediately drawn to their indie-pop harmonies. Visiting their website and downloading the 4 free songs solidified my need to own this entire album. But how could I do this living in Australia? Enter Zunior.com. Zunior sells Canadian music DRM-free at 192 kbps in the MP3 format, and all the albums cost $8.88 (CAD). $8.88 is a very accessible price so I created an account and bought the album. To my gleeful surprise I received $1 off my first purchase as a ‘hello, thanks for checking us out’ from Zunior. Thus, for a grand total of $8.41 I am the owner of Octoberman – Run From Safety, plus a bonus track and the album cover/liner notes in PDF. Not to shabby.
Octoberman has a number of shows coming up on Southern Ontario through the month of October (coincidence?), so if you have a chance check them out. The song that started this post is Run From Safety but I’d like to share ‘X-Pat’ a track from the 2005 album These Trails Are Old And New.
Lastly, their t-shirts merchandise are great for people born in the month of October.
(* My first digital purchase was the Vaccination Scar single in 2004 from Puretracks, and my second was the Wolf Parade EP from iTunes in 2005. Oh, and a live Watchmen concert from MapleMusic. But other than those three, this is my first.)
NBC has announced that they will provide a service where viewers can download new episodes of their programs after they air, and will be able to watch the episode for one week before they expire. Sadly I imagine this will only exist in the US (similarly to their streaming service). I think this will satisfy most people who currently download episodes from the Internet. I for one typically only want to watch the episode once, and if I really like the series I’ll purchase it on DVD. Of interest is that NBC will be serving these episodes via P2P, which throws a wrench at ISP’s who throttle most P2P traffic because it is ‘always’ caused by piracy activity.
While Canadians are among the most educated in the world, universities are failing to keep pace in turning out science graduates, says a report that compares Canada to more than two dozen developed countries. [source: Canada.com]
Canada is turning out about 1,163 science grads per 100,000 graduates. One of the potential reasons for this is that most scientific research occurs within universities, so students who are motivated by the job market might not want to study science. They also suggest that since women comprise the majority of university students, more must be done to attract them to science and engineering.
I’d say now is as good a time as any to pursue science at a post-secondary level. New opportunities in science related fields are emerging everyday as we work to make technology an integral part of our daily lives.
George Lucas wants us to turns computers into pencils in a talk he gave at Dreamforce. He suggests that the education process should be very project based and that technology should be used to facilitate learning. Kids shouldn’t be learning WordPerfect (yes, George said WordPerfect) two days a week as an elective, they should be using that tool to accomplish other work. I find my ideology of teaching lines up well with one thing George said in the talk:
You teach kids how to find information, you teach them how to assess that information and see how true it is, and then you use it in a creative endeavor, to build something, to do something. [George Lucas at Dreamforce (video)]
The fact is children these days have access to information like no previous generation ever has. They can learn more from a 45 minute program on the Discovery Channel than they typically do in a 1 hour classroom period, and they can search the Internet to fill in the gaps. I strongly feel that the role of the teacher in the 21st century is to help students find information, help them to decide what is good information (or a good source of information) and why that is a good source, then work to help them find meaning in that information and organize it into logical ideas. Being able to filter information and assess its validity is already an essential skill, and the need for it will only grow stronger.
George Lucas funds Edutopia (through The George Lucas Educational Foundation) a website and publication that works to help educators use technology to facilitate learning, and not just for technologies sake.
Google recently announced that they would provide the ability to search candidates and key issues from a single location.
It then scours parliamentary transcripts and the politician’s personal website to find any statements on the issue, allowing voters to check whether their representatives are being consistent.
It also gives voters electoral information through a range of online tools including YouTube, GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps. Google said it was the first time so many features had been available on a single election website. [source: Google]
You can add an elections tab to your iGoogle home page full of useful news gathering widgets, as well as play with some fun and informative map layers via Google Maps. An impressive collection of tools I wish were in place for the current Ontario election (not that there is much debate in who will win).
The upcoming Federal election in Australia gives Google a chance to test out the service with a relatively small population before the US Election in 2008. Check out the service and discover how the candidates stack up.
It is interesting to consider that many of our units of measure were created through completely arbitrary methods. A metre was roughly the distance between two scratches on a bar. CNN is reporting that the 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight. It currently weighs 50 micrograms less than the average weight of a dozen copies. Apparently this change in weight can have a drastic affect on high order calculations. Scientists are working to redefine the kilogram into something that is more concrete. One of the leading alternatives for a 21st-century kilogram is a sphere made out of a Silicon-28 isotope crystal, which would involve a single type of atom and have a fixed mass. [source: CNN Technology]
The Globe and Mail reports that Stephen is returning Australia’s oldest printed document, a 211 year old play bill, after he address the Australian Parliament. I wonder if the play was any good that night? No one is sure how the document arrived in Canada.
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