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

I got roped into the obligation a few weeks back. I volunteered to help my department at the annual BCIT Open House. PELD had a table set up in order to hand out information and answer questions from potential students. Professional English Language Development is a part of Academic Studies. We offer upgrading courses for students who haven't completed English 12 from a high school here. Of course many of our clients are immigrants from the professions who need some additional language exposure. The ultimate goal for our standard courses is entry into the programs offered at BCIT.



For the first several hours, I manned the table and was able to talk with quite a few interested people. Then I grabbed a super-quick lunch and headed off to the NE1 Building to open the PELD computer lab. We encouraged visitors to try some of the software we use. For example, Pronunciation Power helps students with detailed analysis of the sounds of the language. Microphones and headsets are used. Unfortunately, as the location was a bit out of the way, it lacked the carnival atmosphere near the center of things. Still, there were a few who came in to look around and stayed. I had several long conversations with visitors.

All it all, it was a useful experience.

Labels: BCIT, feelings

An entry in my eJournal and images doesn't really have to amuse anybody but me. The fact that this one is going to be about getting new tires is a case in point. Today, I had an appointment at Walmart to have four new tires put on my truck. I had seen an advertisement earlier in the week and decided it was time to put new rubber on the old Ranger. There still appeared to be a sufficient amount tread but they were original equipment and getting on in years.

In 1996, when we first got here, I bought the new Ford Ranger. At the time, as I wasn't a permanent resident, it was relatively easy to make the purchase in Washington State. Well, a great deal of that ease was the fact that friends there were always kind enough to let me use their address. The fairly stripped pickup was advertised in a Sunday newspaper for something that turned out less then $12,000 when the whole tab was added up. I thought that'd be a relatively safe way to get rid of some cash as long as I could make it last a dozen years. A grand a year sounded reasonable. That was the plan.

Now that the truck is getting close to the self-imposed limit, I've decided to continue to hang on to it. I take good care of it but don't drive much at all. In fact, it'll soon need an oil change at 72,000 miles. I do so every 3,000. Other than a battery, and a bit of trouble with the horn, it's been entirely dependable. I want it to stay that way. Four new tires seemed like a good way to add peace of mind when heading out of the neighbourhood.

Leave it to me to be sentimental about old tires though. I fondly thought about how they had rolled us past or through most every landmark in Canada, out to the Cape Spear, the farthest point east possible on this continent. I couldn't but help remember the time we drove down to San Francisco to see Wally when he was ill. I remembered how we'd seen glaciers by running them on trips up to Northern BC. Numerous trips over to the Okanagan or down into Washington took place over those tires. The fact modern tires can last so long amazes me.

It was time to retire them; they'd been good to us.

Labels: maintenance, Ranger, road trip

It took a long time to get home after class finished at 5 o'clock this evening. I was planning to take Canada Way all the way into downtown New Westminster. It's called Eighth Street in our city's limits. I got into uptown and found police preventing traffic from going anywhere near the high school. Other than keeping all traffic from travelling on the near roads, they were not directing or re-routing traffic. After turning onto a side screen and being stuck for fifteen minutes, I did a U-turn and nearly doubled my route by going back up to Edmonds and down Kingsway, which becomes Twelfth Street in town. When I was stuck in the lines, cars going in the other direction were facing similar problems. One guy in a small car next to me asked if I'd heard what happened. He said he'd heard others talking about a high-school shooting.



I got home in about an hour whereas it usually takes about twenty minutes. The scary thing is realizing the impossibility of an evacuation by automobile. In the movies, generally people get out of town after a disaster. I realize how it'd be necessary to just leave the vehicle in the street and attempt to escape on foot.

I was home too late to catch any information on the news. I had to look on the Internet. At the present moment it seems as if the school is under lock-down just because someone maintained that they had seen a gun man. I guess everyone is erring on the side of caution. Although that's not good news, it's a damn sight better than finding out people had actually died from gunshot wounds.

Labels: cars, New Westminster

On weekends we tend to watch local news on Global, however, for the evening news I always turn to the CTV local news. Recently, they've been trying really hard to become new media. There is a 'Your Say' segment where people get a chance to share their opinions on a question via the Internet. Then, they report what people are thinking. Wooow, how trendy! Of course they're choosing the questions so it's not really viewer-driven content. Still, it's nice to see 'em trying. Our local CTV also gets out there in the community. I really believe that they have a positive impact on provincial government by their willingness to take on tough reporting. I certainly cannot say that about our local, taxpayer supported CBC station.

There is one fairly useless part of the evening CTV News though. Tamara Taggart is the weather girl and has been a popular personality for a long time. Tamara is back often doing the weather now that she's a new mom. Loyal viewers can remember when she got married and changed to her married name. In reality, the addition of the 7-day forecast is totally useless. We are affected by weather off the Pacific. It makes trying to determine what is coming very tricky. It's nearly impossible to make any reasonable guess beyond a three-day time frame. So, let's ditch continually offering 7-day fallacies. I bet the prognostication for the seventh day has never, ever been correct. Not once! Talk about a waste of breath and on-air time.

Labels: opinions, television

Sometimes, getting back into the groove gets me tired. After an afternoon with a new class, I barely have the energy to do the necessary errands, much less write an inspiring blog entry. Still having not skipped a day in so many years, I am obligated to post something.

As eventually I hope my eJournal and images will contain my complete history, I can use these times to include things from the past. I've done that a few times this week already but I can easily do it again. For example, on YouTube I have three, 1-minute clips from UAE days. I posted one here almost a year ago. This the last of the series. We were on a student-initiated outing to Ras Al-Khaimah on a weekend. We had already spent a fair part of the day at a camp. This was shot during four-wheeling time. We ran into this older guy up in the mountains. I would need a translation nowadays to recall many of the details but it's easy to see that they were getting him to introduce himself for the video camera of the early 1990's.

Labels: blogging, Dubai, YouTube

Ordinary stuff becomes more precious over time. There are many examples of this phenomenon. Most family heirlooms are only keepsakes because they've existed for so long. Some objects that people have thrown away eventually become retro and valued. Lastly, a public persona, such as Madonna, has become a diva simply by not vanishing from the scene.



I was stopped at this light waiting to cross Deer Lake Parkway and head up Royal Oak Avenue. Even a picture such as this will grow more important as time passes. Things change and people do too. I wish, I'd taken a snap of this location before the upgrade when I used to toboggan down the smaller street in my pickup truck. It's still visible to the right. I wish I had taken photos at various traffic lights on commutes from other points in my life. It'd be interesting to see any image on the way home from work during my overseas years, for example.

Nothing is too trivial to make a record of it.

Labels: driving, feelings

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

Labels: Flickr, Internet, Saudi Arabia, sharing