I’ve just got back from a week in the UK, a week that feels like a month in fact.
We did a ‘marginally deferred’ UK Christmas Day on the afternoon of the 26th when we arrived, doing the whole tree / presents thing followed by a proper* Christmas dinner. (* Where proper is defined by each individual as what they had as a child – in my case, my Mum’s Christmas dinner.)
The next two days were a trip to the English lake district with a group of old friends. Day one was an afternoon on Keswick’s indoor climbing wall, followed by fish and chips. The second day was a rather blustery** tromp up Cat Bells. (** where blustery is defined as howlin’ a bloomin’ gale)
The remaining four days were spent up in Scotland playing with my niece while pretending to do lots of other things but really just playing with K. It was a lovely four family days, and really what Christmas is all about for me.
The whole trip was topped off with an evening in the pub with old friends who I really get to see too rarely.
I was going to make this post something poignant and reflective, having been home at the turn of a new year, my 34th at that. To be honest though, I had such a great little holiday I’m going to leave here.
Some photos (mostly of the lake district trip) have made it to Flickr.
Oh, and a belated Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year to you all.
I’d like to introduce you to The Human Project. I’ve been following this project on kickstarter.com for some time and I’m really excited about it, it really resonates with me -”an epic conversation on the future of our species and the issues that face all of us”. The original Kickstarter project (now funded) is to create an iPad app that contains the following…
“A Human Manifesto that lays out the new, 21st century brand of human. A bigger identity. A bolder one.
Human Challenges—a definitive overview of all of the issues that threaten the survival and development of the species as a whole. Includes a review of other global lists from a species-wide perspective.
A Human Vision for 2050 – a bright snapshot of the future we should create given the nature of Human Challenges and the audacity of our imagination. Includes a review of other global visions from a species-wide perspective.
A 21st century Human Agenda to define our priorities and track our progress. The first species-wide agenda with an explicit rational.”
The authors recently spoke at TEDx Dubai the video is below. The video in the Kickstarter site gives a better overview of the project itself, the TEDx video a better introduction to the kind of challenges and solutions they’re talking about. I’m resisting the temptation to ‘do a toastmaster’ on this one.
I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do and I’m going to recommend that you buy a book I haven’t read.
I’d almost be tempted to do it just based on who is publishing it (Seth Godin and the Domino Project) and the list of authors, that reads like a veritable who’s who of people you should be reading. I’ve read books (or other content) by many of the contributors and I’m sure it’s great.
But there is an even more compelling reason why you should go and buy this book, right now.
From the announcement….
“You should buy a copy because today is End Malaria Day, and because we’re donating $20 from the sale of every copy in any format to Malaria No More. In fact, we never even see the money. The writers, the designers, the promoters and the Domino Project all worked for free for months to bring this book to you, so you could step up and save someone’s life.
[62] amazing authors [including Seth Godin] … a book about great work and finding insight and making a difference. It’s a bargain at $20 for the Kindle edition and $25 for the paperback (international pricing and availability varies, as always).”
As unlikely as it sounds, I think the world needs more acronyms for talking about time. The existing system of three letter acronyms is great when used properly but it so rarely is.
As examples…
I regularly get people talking to me about GMT when they mean BST (because it’s summer time), I tend to just assume that’s what they’ve done, because you look like a pedant correcting them but I do worry that one day they will actually mean GMT because they’ve used some conversion tool or work on the space programme or something and have not taken in to account summer time.
Then there is the issue of not knowing the acronym or not being sure the person you’re talking to does. It’s no good me sending a message talking about PST to someone if they going to assume I’m trying to tell them a secret and not talking about Pacific Standard Time. “psssst, let’s have a meeting”
Not to mention the down-right confusing stuff like is BST used as Beijing Standard Time instead of British Summer Time, which I have seen (should be CST for Chinese Standard Time in English, Beijing Time in Chinese, hence the confusion).
My proposed solution is simple…
yt = your time, as in I’m a nice guy and I’ve converted it to your time zone (or I think you are a moron who can’t count)
mt = my time, as I don’t know where you are or as in I’m too lazy, drunk or mathematically challenged to convert it for you
Examples…
I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, call you about 15:00 mt
I’d like to introduce you to MyRunPace (myrunpace.com) a very simple web based application for runner’s to calculate their pace. This is another project in the wild for me, which is very satisfying and also one that I really built for me.
I started building this because there were two things I couldn’t find in all of the existing calculators that I’d used…
Simplicity: I only need a calculator to convert between Pace/Speed, Distance & Time, and nothing else,
Share: I want a way to share my calculations, including some kind of commentary with Twitter/Facebook, but not every time.
The other motivation, at the time that I started building it, was that I hadn’t done anything in HTML/CSS for ages and wanted to ‘reactivate’ those skills.
The application does exactly what I wanted an application to do: you enter values in one or more of Pace, Speed, Distance, Time and the application will calculate all others possible. There are also buttons to share the calculation via Twitter of Facebook.
Wow, so that’s my Boston Marathon qualifying target 4:30 per k to run 42k in 3:8:59
My favourite part though is that there is also Google Gadget for your iGoogle homepage.
Check the app out now at myrunpace.com – I’d love to hear what you think about the app.
I’ve been trying to be a bit more consistent in engaging with Twitter. I think this infographic (from http://visual.ly/twitter)Â which analyses my use of Twitter suggests I’m still a bit rubbish at it!
And, I’d love to know what the alogorithm is that decides, based on my tweets, that I’m wearing a pink shirt and a waist-coat. The book obsession looks right though.
I’d like to introduce you to MeCizinec, my Czech language learning blog that is going to keep me focused on learning Czech and hopefully help a few others towards this lofty goal. A project in the wild is always a satisfying thing. It’s not finished per se, as it’s an ongoing endeavor but it’s nonetheless satisfying, I’m very please to be able to say it’s been ‘live’ for 2 months now.
First and foremost MeCizinec is about me learning to speak Czech. The accountability, I have to get 2 posts out a week or someone will notice, is good motivator for me but also learning something well enough to try to explain it to others is a good way to make sure I’m really learning what I think I’m learning. I also very much like creating things, it’s just fun.
It’s more than that though. I have some ideas about how I think language learning should be different to the way it is ‘normally’ done. In short, I think you have to take responsibility for your language learning and for finding your own path to meet your own goals.
More specifically…
learning a language ‘in country’ or anywhere where you have good access to native speakers and native language resources ought to be different to the traditional school-room, / night-class approach,
being spoon-fed by a book or class alone will just take too long,
the right approach for you will be unique to you, to your life, what interests you and how you learn,
you have to go to class and learn the nuts and bolts, there is no question about that,
the goal in the first instance is always communication, not elegance or finesse,
the fastest way to learn is to get yourself as fast as possible into situations where you can interact with the language in a natural way hearing it / reading it / using it (and the traditional path doesn’t always do this).
MeCizinec, then is just one component of my (still evolving) strategy of how I’m going to do this with Czech. The rough approach with MeCizinec then is as follows…
to first lay a foundation of enough grammar and enough of the language ‘glue’,
to then add the context specific vocabularly,
so I can read and converse in situations that are relevant to my life and interesting to me,
OK, OK, I know it’s February but here are your updated 2011 (in fact, this time they’re good for a decade) daily task and weekly goal planners.
I know a few of you out there in the internets still use these, if you’re not familiar you can read all about your day to week effectiveness here.
Few changes this time round…
Date format is 201 Â – Â – Â so they’re good for the next ten years.
There is an updated version of the Weekly Goal planner which allows for variable numbers of goals for a project. (The picture below shows this in action, along with an Example of the Daily Task Planner)
I’ve added a really simple weekly hours tracker which I use to keep track of hours against a project as I now have to do this.
I’ve put the whole lot, including original word files and example online. Go nuts.
There has been a lot of discussion in our office about ebooks, ebook reader devices and ebook reader applications for other devices (i.e. iPad, etc) over the last couple of months.
I love books, I love reading, I love the way they smell, I love having them on a bookshelf at home so I can refer to them, lend them or just for the vanity of it.
But for me the advantages (especially living abroad) of an ebook reader have tipped the balance in favour of ebooks and a ebook reader. I read a couple of books using the Kindle and Stanza apps on the iPhone and was very excited to receive a Kindle for Christmas.
At some point during the ‘discussion’ in the office someone sent me this video (which is very clever)…
But I have to be honest my first thoughts having watched it were, yeah but…
How do I search it?
How many 1000s of them can I carry in the palm of my hand?
How do I share it with people elsewhere in the world?
How do I annotate it and then edit / remove the annotations later?
What happens if lose / damage it, where can I re-download it from?
How does it get updated when there are changes?
If it refers to another source how do I jump to that address?
How do blind people use it?
How do I switch it to ‘speak’ mode so I can listen to it?
How do I increase the font size (as I get older )?
How do I access the built in dictionary to look up words I’m not familiar with?
How do I get out-of-copyright versions for free?
How do I create my own for free and send them all over the world?
