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

There can be a blush of excitement after scanning an old photo. One realizes that the actual paper artifact has been granted an entirely new digital life. It cannot fade further. Multiple copies can exist. It can even be easily passed around via email or a web page. I most recently added a blog entry along these lines a month ago.

Similarly, after languishing on 8mm video tape in a drawer for sixteen years, I helped this video capture from Thailand make its escape. That country was a common vacation destination for colleagues in the Gulf. In fact, we went up to visit another teacher, Mr. Don Richardson. This particular clip was made in old Chaing Mai. We were on break when living in Bahrain. Later that summer, I finished my work there and took up teaching duties in Dubai.

This grainy, 2 1/2-minute clip does not accurately show the environment. It does, however, show personal events that until recently were difficult to access and impossible to share.

Labels: Bahrain, Don, Thailand, world, YouTube

As a follow up to yesterday's entry, I rolled another three tapes through an old 8mm analog camcorder and onto my hard disk via a capture card. I selected a trio of tapes from 1991. It was a spring vacation from Bahrain. We first flew into Sri Lanka and spent a few days with the family; subsequently, we went on to Thailand. We, of course, landed in Bangkok. Next, we made our way up to Changmai. We met colleague Don Richardson there. We also made it south to see both Pattaya and Phuket.

It was interesting pulling up these images on my computer and television screens. Although a far cry from HDTV, they are more than sufficient to bring back forgotten memories. Movement and sound add a lot. Why doesn't my present digital camcorder ever leave the drawer, I wonder? I couldn't help but notice how much thinner I was fifteen years ago. Jay's the same size, he just had a lot of hair then. Small conversations were interesting. For example, I mentioned to a tourist that we were beginning to notice the black clouds from the Kuwaiti oil fires, down on our little island of residence. Those were the days of Gulf War I.

Getting this information burnt to DVDs is a long and boring process. It becomes so much more accessible when it is the new format though. I didn't even want to cut out the long sequences we shot when we were new to shooting video. With the remote that comes with the DVD player, it is very easy to rush through boring patches at 16X or greater.

The creative side of me thought about using editing software to remove mistakes and add music and transitions. Yet the archivist in me contends that capturing exactly what was on the tapes is a purer rendition of history.

Labels: Don, Thailand, world

Yesterday in the evening, we headed on the SkyTrain through Burnaby and into the downtown core of Vancouver. Even though all was damp and dark, the mountains which shoulder the city, were obvious. We were on our way to a dinner at the apartment of friends. Early on, the host put on a disc which included family photos on the DVD player. We saw people, houses, and land in south-eastern Nepal. A bit later in the evening, there was a discussion of New Years in various cultures and first hand accounts from countries such as Japan, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. Later in the evening the discussion turned to the current world affairs regarding the cartoons of Mohammad and some spoke of knowledge from the living and working in the Middle East. There were many other topics too, of course. A flight attendant had to leave a bit early as today he's on his way to Dallas and connecting to work a flight to Osaka.

When coming home, I discovered my actual life had turned out to be as interesting as those National Geographic magazines I collected as an adolescent.

Labels: Thailand, Vancouver