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

Here's a quick, scanned photo pulled from my Flickr collection. This sort of thing is bound to happen when work demands eat up my time or energy.



Since arriving in Canada in 1996, we've taken overseas and domestic trips. As well as an annual vacation away from the continent, we generally manage one or two vacations per year in either Canada or the USA. In this scan, I'm standing at a Holiday Inn in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The year was 2000. We flew into Ft. Lauderdale but also rented a car and hit the southern state's highways. We visited both Key West and Orlando.

Labels: road trip

We had a teachers' meeting this afternoon, so I went to the Burnaby campus. It was going to be my free day for the week in theory. Yet, I hadn't seen all my colleagues for a while. It was worth using the time to attend. After all, I will have four, seperate days in November in which I don't have to go into school. Teaching a weekday and weekend course is brutal but not impossible.

On the way home I had a yearning to stop at the Future Shop at Metrotown. I had no particular item in mind, but I knew I had extra money! I decided to pick up a new cell phone. I hated the design of the old one; it was not so much its size, but the fact the ringer volume often changed just staying in my pocket. I frequently missed calls because I couldn't hear it ring.

I said once that I'm not one to keep up with the Jones' phone. I don't care that the new phone has Bluetooth technology, as I'm most interested knowing that when it rings, I'll be able to hear it.

Labels: telephone

Okay, I've been blogging for over four years and I have never, ever just pasted in one of those 'cutie' emails that one sometimes receives. You know who I mean. Everybody has at least one acquaintance or family member who frequently sends out junk to a huge list of people. I got this and I figured it does sort of fit here.

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning .. uphill BOTH ways .. Yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that... I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email! ! We had to actually write somebody a letter .. with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600 with games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked! Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove or go build a friggin' fire ... Imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled!

You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

Regards,
The Over-30 Crowd

Labels: lists, opinions, PS3

I see us sending a larger and larger amount of money each year to Chinese factories so they can pollute the environment by creating silly, plastic ornaments for today's non-holiday. Over the last 25 years, those kids who used to dress up and run around the neighbourhood now actually go to their professional places of employment in costume.

I tried to make known my thoughts about Halloween last year and they haven't changed.

Just because we're free to behave however we wish, doesn't mean that it makes any sense whatsoever. Also, just because it's possible to waste time and money, doesn't mean we have to. I can think of more useful and responsible ways of spending both of them.

Labels: complaints, opinions

I hadn't planned on making any comments about computers today.

I did successfully find a new home for the machine that used to be the main PC. The new owners stopped by this morning and lugged the enormous beige box away. That didn't require a blog entry. My students are busy checking information on the individualized course homepages at my.bcit.ca. I've gone on and on about that many times before, so it didn't require even the briefest mention here today.

I find myself complaining here as my notebook computer seems to be on its way out. The bottom third of the screen appears washed out now. This makes using it impossible. I've had a rather love/hate relationship with this particular piece of equipment, I suppose. I was happy with the 14 inch screen as compared to all those people lugging around much wider beasts. The little notebook worked well when overseas on separate trips to Europe and a month in Asia. On the other hand, Gateway product support did not impress me at all.

This means I probably will have to start looking for something new. I don't want to replace my home computer, so I do not want anything large. In fact I think it'd be rather nice to have something with less than a 12-inch screen. I want something that's not a pain in the back, literally, to carry around. If it weren't for the fact they're a bit overpriced for what you get, I'd absolutely love one of these new ...

Labels: computers, opinions

This afternoon I started my regular COMM 0004 course. These students plus those in the weekend class mean I have about fourty new names to connect with faces. I already know the trouble makers!

Needless to say, I don't have very much ... What word was in today's module? Vigor. So as a follow up to yesterday's entry, I'll add the actual photo that was printed on page 16 in the magazine article about Hambantota, Sri Lanka. It was scanned from an old photo from the 1980's.

Labels: world

The second day of class went well. I like this group as they seem truly interested and motivated. That, in turn, motivates me. Motivation is important when doing fourteen hours of weekend classes.

I have to admit; it sure seems nice to kick back with my shoes off this evening. I was just looking through an actual paper magazine called travelsrilanka. In fact, I'm featured in this very issue. Well, not me exactly, rather a photograph of mine is featured. It was chosen by the staff as they found it on Flickr. On that site, I do have hundreds of pictures of Sri Lanka as we returned in 2004 and 2006 for month-long visits. Yet, I first went to the island in 1986. Interestingly the picture they chose was an old scan from a cheap camera well before the invention of digital ones.

Things do continue to develop in spite of the war that seemingly has no end in sight. In the glossy pages of the magazine was an advertisement for an whole, enormous apartment complex being built right in Colombo city. Such ambitious plans for the little island amaze me. Click on the image below to visit the web site.

Labels: Sri Lanka 2004, Sri Lanka 2006, world