A Collection of Daily Wisdom by Dennis Sylvester Hurd since September 2003.

I have taken students into computer labs since the days when PC's had just 640K of RAM. I still schedule an hour of lab time every week. I tend to encourage students to use computers as more of a research and work tool than for computer-assisted instruction.

Doing useful things in the lab is easy because of the Internet and a tool offered at BCIT. I frequently make use of myBCIT, a web portal for the Institute. As soon as a student registers in class, he / she is provided with access to the portal and an accompanying email address. Most school paperwork and documentation can be provided though an electronic pipeline. When logging on, students are presented with their class lists and an accompanying work area for each class.

I have easy means to add links, supervise a class message board, initiate an online chat, add to our course calendar, or email the entire group in one step. That is a whole lot easier than when I needed to collect email addresses during the first scheduled class! Computers greatly impact our private lives, so it should not be considered unusual that they affect how we teach and learn.

Labels: computer lab, Internet, myBCIT, software, students

Even if you've switched over to digital photography, you can probably still remember putting a new film in your old camera. You used to take a couple of shots just to get the roll lined up for the first picture.

Yesterday, I knew I was going to take my digital camera to BCIT for a class photograph. I still had this useless need to click a shot from the balcony before I left for Burnaby. What for? (It's an old habit, I guess, and a little like when we insist on dialing a phone number, although we've actually been pushing buttons for decades.)

Fraser River & SkyTrain Bridge

Labels: balcony, BCIT, camera, transit

... but there have been lots of blog entries at my eJournal and images. In fact, there are now twenty-eight weeks of archives and that means I've been blogging for more than a half year. Imagine, I haven't missed a single day!

"I can only see 7 entries," you say.

"Look to the right, under my face," Dennis answers. "You will find several ways to access previous entries."

The most obvious method is to enter My Archive Vault. Entries are automatically organized into weekly pages which rest in the vault. Don't worry; it's neither damp nor musty. You won't find a single spider web in there either!

Right under the vault link, an alternate way to sample previous entries involves doing a blog search. Simply type in a name or phrase and see if I've said anything about it during the last 28 weeks!

Labels: blogging, file archives

I'm not sure that I really understand the implications of the Adobe's new, barcode-enabled PDF files. Yet, anyone who's ever fiddled around by trying to print a file on another computer knows the advantages of a 'portable' document. I would guess that most Internet users have installed the free reader that they offer.

Below there's a large example document I found on a site that sells musical transcriptions. Try creating this document in MS Word!

The Ragtime Dance.

Labels: software

Wouldn't ya know, I'm always near the crest of trends as mentioned in HUBCanada.com! I cancelled www.zip.ca just before the free, trial membership ended though. The service seems fine (if one lives in Ontario) but they are too far away for prompt delivery. How come I didn't find www.dvdflix.ca before? They've only got 5,000 titles on hand, but they're in North Vancouver, so Canada Post should be able to get the discs to me in a reasonable amount of time. The locally-based online rental store is also cheaper at $19.95 / month; so, if we manage to watch just five per month, it'd be cheaper than Blockbuster or Rogers Video.

Labels: movies, zip.ca

Rather than actually think of something useful or meaningful to say today, I thought I'd scan a photo. (If I manage to scan one every so often then my suitcase full of aging photos will eventually be digitized, eh?) Here's a picture that was taken in 1998. We took a trip to Hawaii. This is a rental jeep in which we explored Oahu:

Labels: Hawaii, places

After turning a few years into their 40's, people start to be a bit more concerned with health matters. Do the number of supplements in the cupboard automatically increase with age?

In 2000, I had my first cholesterol testing and my triglyceride levels were 620 mg/dL (7 mmol/L). That's way too high.

Now I am more 'lipid conscience'. I'm on daily regimen of 200 mg of Fenofibrate, a capsule each of fish / flaxseed oil, 2500 mg of Niacin, 4 mg of folic acid, and a coated aspirin. Oh, I cannot forget my glass of red wine a day! (It's more fun than an apple a day!)

I just went in for results the other week and my 'score' was in the respectable lower range at 160 mg/dL (1.8 mmol/L). If only some of my dead relatives had been around when lipid testing was a normal procedure, they might have been around longer!


It isn't too much of a stretch to include
this 1975 Neil Sedaka song here, is it?

Labels: opinions, weight loss

Yesterday, the guys were over for a visit. Tim hadn't been to the 'Y' for his Saturday swim; therefore, he made use of the pool here. He went in the pool and didn't stop! After 40 minutes he was still going strong, so I decided to come up and prepare this picture for the blog. What a fish!

Labels: Tim