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

In order to add a quick photo today, I raided an image from this week's trip to the Okanagan.

This is a reststop on the Route 1 (Trans-Canada Highway). The city of Kamloops, BC is at the end of this lake. In the opposite direction the lake extends another fourty kilometers too.

We are blessed with a province with a diversity of geography. If one drives a mere half day away from the coast, there are all sorts of different climates and vistas.

Labels: British Columbia, driving, Okanagan, road trip

The first days in Canada were almost exactly nine years ago. During that summer, Jay and I had visited Hell's Gate, a traditional tourist venue about 150 kilometers from Vancouver. It's where, to quote a video, the immense Fraser River "turns on its side" to fit down through a narrow canyon. Didn't I also hear that more water moves through the Hell's Gate channel than over Niagara Falls? This time riding down the gondola was fun as they other guys found it a new experience.

Labels: Fraser River

It was already time to head home. Before hitting the road, we ate a traditional breakfast at a little greasy spoon. We drove along through Kamloops and stuck to Route 1 through the desert, grasslands, and finally thick forests of the coast. The mini-van showed around 1300 kilometers for the total trip by the time we'd parked here at 8:00 pm.

Labels: British Columbia, driving, Okanagan, road trip

The second day saw us driving up the valley. We did winery tours and had a nice leisurely picnic lunch at a roadside BC park. This was my day to drive. Although we thought we might stay in Kelowna, the crowds prompted us to continue along to Vernon. After a short evening shower, we saw the most intense rainbow that I've ever witnessed. The night was spent in a somewhat cheaper suite. Everything all seems to work out well without reservations of any type.

Labels: British Columbia, driving, Okanagan, road trip

It was a good day. We were able to pack the rented mini-van and get on the road by 9:15 am. After sliding out to the city of Hope, we took Route 3 to Osoyoos. It was 35 degrees Celsius upon our arrival. We stayed on the third floor in a suite overlooking the lake.

Labels: British Columbia, driving, Okanagan, road trip, Tim

Showcasing a class photo on my eJournal and images has become quite standard fare by now.



This one was taken at about 4:00 pm yesterday afternoon. We waited for the sun to come out then went outside to the common area near the buildings at the south-east corner of the Burnaby Campus. We smiled patiently while an onlooker snapped our photo. This was the very first time I`ve been involved in BCIT picture taking on a Sunday though. An eighty-four hour course over six consecutive weekends is surely a demonstration of fortitude!

Here are other pages with photos of previous Intensive COMM 0003 courses: December 2003 - February 2004 - March 2004 - November 2004 .

Labels: BCIT (Page 1), students

When given the chance to explain an idea, I gravitate towards words. Expressing ideas through mathematics was never a forte. Yesterday's entry, about adding RAM to my computer, prompted me to dust off a calculator. I blithely mentioned having a gigabyte and a half of memory now. Somehow, this number no longer seems astronomical as digital cameras and mp3 players now sport comparable numbers.

Still, from a historical perspective, that's a lot of memory. I could probably use RAM size as a means of sequencing events in my life. For example, when moving to Canada, my computer had just 128 megabytes. Further back, in the middle of my tenure at the Higher Colleges of Technology, the average computer had 2 megabytes. Retreating to my first IBM compatible reminds me that I once did all my computing in 640K because the space between there and one megabyte was used for 'system housekeeping'. Wait, I can go back further to college days! My trusty and true TRS-80 had a whopping 16 kilobytes which is about the same as the file of this calculator image. I had upgraded the Radio Shack device from an original 4K.

Let's take a look at the bytes represented in those abbreviations:

TRS-80 Model 1
4,096 bytes

RAM in Current PC
1,536,000,000 bytes

Damn, my calculator doesn't have enough digits! Again, remembering that I'm no math genius, I think that's an increase of around three hundred and seventy five thousand percent. I wish my bank account had increased as dramatically in the last 25 years!

Labels: computers, Hardware