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

Being the good little consumers we are, today we headed to South Surrey to check out the new Wal-mart SuperCenter. It's easy to forget just how large the city of Surrey is. I think of it as the city on the other side of the river. If I had a strong enough arm, I could nearly skip a rock across the narrow section just down river from the Patullo Bridge.

The new shopping is nearly down in White Rock though. We went over the Alex Fraser and out on 91 to 99. Then we exited and drove around the area trying to find 160th Street and 24th Avenue. The whole area is rapidly developing. Old farm land is being bulldozed and transformed into mega-project residences. Along with all the influx of people comes big-box shopping.

The whole experience was a little disappointing as there is not nearly enough parking to support the acres of building. It also appears as they had rushed the opening to have it occur over our long weekend. There were hardly any frozen or refrigerated products on display. Little signs read about a power disruption but I'd venture that was hardly the truth. They'd just not met expected schedules. In addition, the checkout person bar-code swiped several items twice forcing us to check the bill and then visit customer service for the refund.

Grocery shopping in an unfamiliar store is disconcerting at best, and more likely a headache. Even within the same store brand, navigating a format that is even slightly different makes my head swim. We came back via the King George Highway and stopped at a Canadian Superstore, but it didn't match up with our usual one in Coquitlam. The items were right; it just seemed they were all in the wrong places.



It seemed weird to travel 16 miles back from a shopping trip but then I remembered that when growing up, that's how far we used to drive weekly to shop. Now, North American society seems to think it is a birthright to have a mammoth shopping complex at every other corner.

Labels: complaints, Fraser River, Q3_2008, Walmart

I get the concept. It's easy to glimpse how an increasingly wired world may work. One example involves watching a regular television screen. First, in the middle of the last century, we got television through the air. Eventually, cable allowed more channels to be delivered into our houses. Even more recently, our programming has been splashing down via a satellite dish on the roof.

The underpinning has already changed. Television is nothing more than viewable files nowadays. They can be easily sent along the same pathway as email and web pages. Of course there's a lot more data in video. There's even a higher amount in high-definition video. That's why I'm more likely to watch ten minute segments of specialized programming than normal fare. The satellite is going to have to remain an expense for a lot longer, I fear.



I do get some some chunks of programming via the Internet. Most of the video is subscribed and automatically downloaded via tversity media server software. I play mostly HD files from my hard drive and through my PlayStation 3.

For example, I can keep up on computer happenings via CNET's Buzz Out Loud. I can watch lions and all sorts of creatures via Earth-Touch. NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs send out periodic space news. At the moment, I am about to view some HD news via the Washington Post.

Eventually, there will be unimaginably-wide access to global, on-demand programming on any subject one desires. You will be what you watch. There will be no excuse for simply viewing 'what's on'.

Labels: HDTV, Internet, PS3, Q3_2008, television

I hate it. My alarm clock rang at 6:43 this morning and it took me at least six beeps before I was aware enough to shut it off. Teaching mornings this month hasn't really been difficult and being at work at 8:30 doesn't sound like a chore. The main problem stems from the fact I didn't want to go to bed any earlier than usual.

Getting a mere seven hours of sleep is okay on occasion but it's not enough for me over the long haul. If fact, I often feel I'm more an eight and half-hour guy.

When one has really had enough sleep, I think a person wakes up before the alarm. It can even become uncanny when one's eyes automatically pop open a few minutes before the noise starts.

Anyway, the discussion is of no concern for a while. It's not important for quite a while. My class completed their final examinations today. The levels I teach are not even offered during August this year. That is a forced break. After that comes my voluntary vacation. We're leaving for Rome in mid-September, so I will not be able to start classes that begin that month. It's possible I might not even be in a classroom until the latter part of October.

I have nearly three months of complete freedom from my dreaded, screaming alarm clock.

Labels: complaints, Q3_2008

Every week I get an email from Ticketmaster.ca informing me of event tickets which are on sale in the Vancouver area. I got one today. Summers tend to be quieter times as there are fewer new ticket releases at this time of year. I did notice that Tony Bennett tickets will go on sale tomorrow. He'll be playing at the River Rock Show Theatre in Richmond in October. Tickets for Alicia Keys at a different venue go on sale on August 1st.



That seems an unlikely pair to show up in the same paragraph, doesn't it? I love my present age but I'm too young to listen to Tony Bennett and too old for Alicia Keys.

Well, perhaps that's not really correct. Both these artists do exist on my external 500GB drive. Lots and lots of music exists there and I'm now making it a habit to play those files. My computer contains a audio card that outputs in Dolby Digital and DTS. I have a long optical toslink cable running to a switch on my home theatre system.

So, I can sample both the artists mentioned here as I'm typing out this entry. I suppose it's not really necessary to keep music files in a file folder on a hard drive. I mean, after all, I could simply choose to listen to music from more than a dozen themed channels on the satellite TV box. Or I could play continuous music from thousands of Internet radio stations. I wonder why I have a desire to collect digital music files. I guess a trip to ebay could prove that people are born collectors; it's in our genes.

Labels: hard disk, music, Q3_2008, Vancouver

I'm up to my old tricks again. When I don't feel like blogging about a worthy or interesting topic, I merely blog about blogging. It's okay as I have the right to do so. After all, I'm just a few months shy of doing this for five years! I cannot find many other examples on the Internet where an ordinary person (who, me?) has kept a daily blog for so long. If you see a similar example of this type of bizarre behaviour in your Net travels, please do forward the URL to me. Misery loves company, as they say.

Actually, I feel really lucky to have a space to say whatever I wish. I am happy to have a location in which I can build up a collection of my ideas. Even on those weeks when work or other circumstances keep me occupied, I always find time to put at least a few new words or pictures on this page.

Of course, as I've been at this so long, I have had visitors from many corners of the globe. In fact around two to three thousand people drop in per month, on average. The list to the right in red shows a ranking of the Top 25 countries with the most visitors. A full one third of the people come from an IP address that resolves to .com extension. Canadian visitors come in a close second with around 27% of the page views from addresses which end with a .ca suffix. Surprisingly, around 14% of the net addresses are unresolvable meaning that they are not properly identified on the Internet with correct domain registration. After that, the stats plunge with visitors from Europe in the single digits. There is a bump in guests from the Middle East as I mention the Gulf countries a fair bit due to having worked there.

What I thought was interesting is the following list. A few people from these countries have visited my eJournal and images. Yet, I have logged fewer than ten visitors from these locations. I bet you wouldn't have known the Internet designation for many of them. Let's be honest; you may not even know where some of them are!

.ad Andorra
.af Afghanistan
.al Albania
.am Armenia
.an Netherlands Antilles
.az Azerbaijan
.ba Bosnia and Herzegovina
.bb Barbados
.bj Benin
.bm Bermuda
.bn Brunei Darussalam
.bo Bolivia
.bs Bahamas
.bt Bhutan
.by Belarus
.bz Belize
.ci Cote D'Ivoire
.cy Cyprus
.dj Djibouti
.dm Dominica
.do Dominican Republic
.dz Algeria
.ec Ecuador
.et Ethiopia
.ge Georgia
.gh Ghana
.gt Guatemala
.gu Guam
.gw Guinea-Bissau
.hn Honduras
.ht Haiti
.iq Iraq
.jm Jamaica
.ke Kenya
.ky Cayman Islands
.lb Lebanon
.lc Saint Lucia
.ly Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
.mh Marshall Islands
.mk Macedonia
.mn Mongolia
.mo Macao
.mt Malta
.ni Nicaragua
.np Nepal
.pa Panama
.py Paraguay
.sd Sudan
.sn Senegal
.sv El Salvador
.sy Syrian Arab Republic
.tn Tunisia
.tt Trinidad and Tobago
.tz Tanzania
.ua Ukraine
.uy Uruguay
.vg Virgin Islands, British
.vi Virgin Islands, US

Labels: blogging, Internet, Q3_2008

I guess as the name of this blog suggests, it's a place for me to keep a public journal. Although I have always earned a living by helping people express themselves in words, I often rely on the inclusion of images in my eJournal and images.

I often try to check with my Chinese-speaking students to see whether the English idiom in which we attribute a picture being worth a thousand words is actually from their language. I can't recall getting a straight answer on that.

Today, I have a million half-formed ideas of what to write in an entry. None of them seems very crucial. So, I will venture back for a historical representation of the last several times we called the day July 28th. My Daily Picture Parade continues on Flickr. This is the only reason I can so quickly put my hands on these images.

2005
We were heading back across the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington.

2006
I was watching a class at BCIT complete final exams. I'll do that again this Thursday.

2007
I took this of a neighbour kid at our strata's barbeque. They may have moved away from our buldings as I never see this kid anymore.

2008
This was today's photo from the second floor in NE 1 at BCIT. We were on break.

Labels: blogging, Flickr, Q3_2008

Alas, yesterday, I saw no goose named Gertrude!

Yesterday afternoon we did go to see the 3D showing of the new Journey to the Center of the Earth. The plot was not outstanding but it was a wise move for them to take it out of the Jules Verne era. There was more than a faint didactic mention of praise for the act of reading; that's something not common in a summer movie.

I'm taking the time here not to showcase the movie but the technology. This isn't the 3-D of your parents ... or depending on your age, the 3-D movie experience of your grandparents! I imagine the extra $3 over standard tickets was something to do with the polarized glasses a viewer can take when leaving. Those specs were not much larger than my present prescription lenses but they fit over my own and did not interfere with the show.

The movie, of course, had typical 3-D shots. Who couldn't appreciate the effect of dinosaur drool splashing down on them? Yet, I was quite happy just seeing the closeups of the characters. It is so much more immersive when it feels like you could actually reach out and grab a person's head; not that I'd suggest that in real life unless you know them quite well!

I just had to look up the technology behind Real D. It's interesting to see the whole process is digital. It's probably the 72 frames per second which prevented me from leaving the cinema with a traditional 3-D headache. The company seem positioned to increase its presence in the marketplace. Working with Disney is a plus for them.

Now, I'm ready to watch see something like this at home on the flat panel. We'd all put up with having to adorn glasses if it meant a journey into the third dimension.

Labels: movies, Q3_2008, technology