Live

The Power of the Internet

I was just recently looking at my stats, and it seems that I have been visited by over 70 countries. Sure, many of my visitors might not have enjoyed my posts, or spent a lot of time here, but the fact remains that I more or less have reached countries all over the globe. This is what really inspired me to write this post. We each hold in our hands the power to immediately broadcast to the entire world. This is a first ever in history. This also means that for the first time ever, our parents have less experience in a field than their children. Think about it, in every specie on Earth, the parents would’ve experienced everything their children is experiencing… expect for the human race in the 21st century. This relatively new ability that we have gained is really miraculous. It’s a miracle. You are reading something that is immaterial. You can’t hold this in your hands, this is made of almost nothing. You can read this from anywhere on the globe, or even in space aboard the ISS. This blog is a miracle.

Speaking of miracles, I am a miracle. You are a miracle. So many things needed to go right in the right order for us to physically exist. In fact, this world is a huge miracle, The very fact that we are able to exist, to have the necessities to live, to build a civilization, to have this piece of technology that you are using to read this, is a miracle. A lot have changed in the past year for me personally, but I think the most important thing I learned is to live. To live this miracle, no matter how things are, no matter what is wrong, or what is right.

LIVE!

So get out there, and do what you have to do, and live. Enjoy as much of this miracle as you can. Make it count. Make this gift count. And help other people live too. Anything, from small to big. I can say from experience, that a gesture, no matter how small, counts. Live, and help those around you live. I think that is the most important thing… ever.

eBooks

If you have been reading this blog for quite some time, you would have known that I hated eBooks. I detested them. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read; softcovers or hardcovers, but ebooks just get me. It feels weird in your hands, it doesn’t look right, it’s uncomfortable, blah blah blah. But yesterday something remarkable happened. We can say the impossible became possible. I read two books, over 500 pages in total… on my iPad. When a software as elegant, efficient, simple, and advanced as Overdrive pops up, it becomes impossible to resist the electronic era. Why  carry a stack of books around when you can still have them all, literally on a thin piece of glass weighing less than 1.5 pounds?

I came home two days ago thinking “I totally forgot my book!!!” I didn’t want to go to the library, so I did the only thing I could. I opened up my iPad, slid my finger across my mirror image and tapped on Overdrive. I connected to our local library’s eBooks catalogue and found my book. Then after I plugged in my library card, I tapped open the cover. The experience wasn’t like what I remembered last year, maybe the app updated, maybe I changed  No matter, I enjoyed it and found myself drawn to tapping the “Get more books” icon and downloading the next few books in the series.

We, as in our Western 21st century generation are more than cyborgs now. We aren’t dependent on electronics and the internet. Our technologies are what we are made of. We don’t seem to see a difference between our beds, tables, or chairs and our computers, credit card, internet, or cell phones. Both lists are things that we need, things that if taken away will literally completely change our world.

I am not trying to say that anything is bad, just that if credit card companies’ servers were attacked, or if we have a shortage of computer chips, we would be in big trouble. Our minds are wired to rely on technology, I hope by 2012 being “the end of the world”, this is not what it means 🙂 . Anyways, onto my 3rd eBook!!!

My Pledge of Allegiance

I was listening to the radio one afternoon when CBC’s Vinyl Café came on. Stuart McLean decided to write his own “Pledge of Allegiance”, for all the children going to school in a couple of days. The podcast is linked here (choose “September 1st – Back to School”). Anyways, this is his pledge (transcribed by automated software, so the punctuation might mot be that great.)

Pledge of Allegiance – Stuart McLean

I pledge my allegiance to truth, under whatever flag it flies, for I know no one holds all truth. And I pledge my allegiance to kindness wherever I see it and understanding whenever it comes. I pledge my allegiance to sharing and hopefulness, and to speaking softly, and to love when I feel it, and to hope when I don’t. I pledge my allegiance to the children of the world. Boys and girls like me who are in this classroom, and who are far from here. Who are rich and who are poor and to all the schools here and not here and to the knowledge in the school libraries, and I pledge to follow the path of knowledge to the best of my abilities because with knowledge comes wisdom and with wisdom comes grace. I also pledge my allegiance to laughter because laughing makes people feel better. Finally I pledge my indivisible allegiance to recess. I pledge to play with a joyful and kind heart and I pledge to use my voice and not to hit because I know how I play is how I will live my life and I want to follow the path of peace and understanding and live softly on this good Earth.

So then I decided to write my own pledge. Here it is:

Pledge of Allegiance – Bill

I pledge my allegiance to protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, to allow my children, and their children, and all the generations to come to enjoy these resources. I pledge my allegiance to happiness, in any and all forms. To doing things we love, and loving the things we do. I pledge my allegiance to all of our differences. To all children and adults alike, no matter which air they breath, or which sea they see. I pledge my allegiance to security, I pledge to love and support the people around me in return for the same. I pledge my allegiance to teddy bears, to all the comforting hands in times of need. I pledge my allegiance to learning. Learning in and out of school. Learning how to live my life, learning how to succeed, learning wisdom of all kinds, for no one can know everything. I pledge my allegiance to freedom, to being able to do whatever whenever, to being able to be joyful. Finally, I pledge my indivisible allegiance to changing to world. To leaving a mark, to making our home, what we call Earth better than when I first set foot on it. I pledge to walk off this Earth knowing that I have helped this world and the people on this Earth become a little better.

Dear Mr. House

Dear Mr/Ms. House,

I have happily lived in you for over seven years. I’ve happily sat on your sofas, and watched your fat screen tv, especially in the recent days, during the London Olympics. I have gladly slept on your bed for over  25,000 hours. I ate on your table more than 8,000 times. There was the days when your head cracked, and rain leaked inside. But we gave you surgery, and after the metal replacement, you were better than new. Yes that was candle wax on your carpet a couple months ago, but hey, we cleaned it up. And even though you burned, cut, scraped, and bruised me a couple of times, I never complained. So why are you giving me such a hard time now?

Ok fine, I am leaving your skin and bones behind , but for heaven’s sake, I don’t even know how to start packing and moving your insides. Should I first pack the wires and cables? Maybe some of it, but who knows what I’ll need. What about my brigade of pens, can I pack those? I don’t want them geting lost, so I think I’ll pack them later. You see, you have left me in quite a conundrum. With less than 2 weeks to go,  how can I move everything?

Should I pack this, should I pack that, Should I pack some of it, should I pack all of it. What have I done to you to deserve this? Don’t worry, if you cooperate this will be painless… and if you don’t, this is going to be a nightmare. Ok, fine, its going to be more of a nightmare for me, but I’ll somehow hurt you if you don’t cooperate…

Love,

Bill

Lion’s Head

Source: Wikipedia

Today I decided to share another one of my personal preferences. This one is about food. It wasn’t a long time ago when I tried the soup “Lion’s Head Soup”. It is basically the head of a lion cut up, just kidding 🙂 , it actually has nothing to do with lions, or heads. I have no clue how it got its name. Anyways, it is one huge meatball (for real this time) with cabbage in soup. The meatball has bits of potato in it (another one of my favourite food), and is uniquely seasoned. Anyways, I fell in love with it, and thought I’d share the recipe.

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Preparation: 20 minutes

Cook: 1 hour

Serves: 4

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Ingredients:

1 pound of ground pork

1 small potato

A little bit of green onion and ginger (to taste)

A tablespoon of cooking wine

Salt to taste

4 big bai chai (Chinese white cabbage) leaves

A cup of chicken soup

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Directions:

Boil potatoes until thoroughly soft, then mash as fine as possible. Leave the potatoes aside. Then grind the green onion and ginger, after that, mix with ground pork, cooking wine, and salt.

Now take the potatoes and mix with the ground pork mixture. Divide this into four pieces. Shape the four pieces into meatballs and wrap with bai chai.

Pour the chicken soup into a pot and place the four meatballs. Add just enough water to cover the meatballs. Cover the pot and let the soup boil on high. When the soup is boiled, turn down to low and let it simmer for an hour.

Serve in 4 bowls.

Enjoy 🙂

Green

I logged onto my blog today staring at my tagline. My Life, My Story, and thought: Why don’t I write something about myself. And after much consideration, here is my poem about my favourite colour: GREEN

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GREEN

As soft as grass, and as crunchy as the Granny Smith

Swaying in the breeze on Hawaii’s shore

Bright when young, and dark when old, on the leaves of the Bracken Fern

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Found at Christmas amidst the snow

Hanging on houses street on street

Up high and down low lighting the night

Like a spirit glowing bright

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On the bottle beside the BBQ

Fuelling hot summer nights

Telling people to go, and drive away

Controlling traffic on busy streets

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Kermit the Frog may also be green

But most of all its to signify

That we care

We care about the environment

We care about the air we breathe

We care about the water we drink

We care about the food we eat

We care about OUR future

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Staying on the topic of caring for the future, I saw a quote on the back of a SUV that I later found out was from Hendrix:

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace” – J. Hendrix

The world will not only see peace, but everything else we try to stop and create will be within reach. There won’t be as much gangs, crime, wars, etc. There will be friendships between former enemies, and the world will have more tolerance, to just name a few benefits.

Mountain Lion: Is It Any Good?

Well, it’s here, the long awaited operating system: OS X Mountain Lion (The word Mac is officially dropped from OS X). Even though it’s here, I don’t think it’s any good. However, Mountain Lion is needed to ever upgrade again, say the next operating system next year. That means if you want to ever get a new operating system, you need to get Mountain Lion. Anyways, here’s what’s new:

As more and more people are enjoying the iPad and iPhone, Apple decided to put their popular IOS features into the Mac. From IOS, there is Game Centre, Notification Centre, Notes, iMessages, Reminders, and enhanced iCloud. Personally, I don’t really use any of these features, so it makes no difference to me. Plus, Growl is a perfect substitution for Notification Centre, and I also have Anxiety as an alternative to Reminders. Even though Apple thinks making the Mac as similar as the iPad and iPhone, with Launchpad and the new Mail app from Lion, and now all these new apps, is good, I don’t really care for it very much.

Other than the IOS features, there is security updates, and other little details. For example, Power Nap can update mail, apps, and so on when the laptop is closed. The littler things include new autosave functions, sharing options, airplay mirroring, accessibility enhancements, etc..

I don’t believe Mountain Lion is worth getting, but again, isn’t it better to get Mountain Lion, use it, then upgrade, instead of getting Mountain Lion then an actually significant upgrade next year or the year after?

Anyways, putting the debate over getting Mountain Lion aside, what I really want to know is what Apple will name their operating system after Mountain Lion. It seems that Apple was running out of options: Pumas, Cougars, and other cats are also Mountain Lions. You could say Mac OS X 10.3 was Mountain Lion, even though OS X 10.8 is actually named Mountain Lion. I really can’t think of any other cat that’s better than Mountain Lion. Maybe OS X 10.9 would not be a cat. I wonder…

EDIT: Apologies, the images that are linked seem to no longer exist, please ignore them for the moment.

Behind the Stage

Old fashioned light board…

Over the last week I was learning the ropes of being a technician for live theatre. The picture above, is of a pretty old light board. New ones are touch screen and all that, but first: above the stage.

What everyone sees is the stage and a little booth behind the audience. However, on the series of catwalks above the audience and stage, is where some of the lighting, and all of the follow spots (spots) are. The spots are the hardest to use, compared to everything else a technician has to do. They are big and bulky. When the director wants the spots to be opened, they have to be opened at exactly that time on whoever needs to be lighted. That means that the spots have to be aimed before opening the cover (in front of the spots so they can be easily doused and used). Aiming is pretty much guessing, then lining up the front of the spots to the person. It all happens so fast that there is no time to properly aim before opening the cover. Sometimes the spot doesn’t open where you want it to be, and it looks really bad.

This is it, a follow spot.

Anyways, the other thing that’s cool is a light with a couple of mirrors. The mirrors can be moved using the sliders on the sound board, thus moving the light. Newer light boards can actually be paired with an iPad, and the light can be moved be dragging a dot using a finger. Where would we be without technology huh? Speaking of lights, everything on the catwalk is secured with aircraft grade steel safety backup cables. Those cables can support cars! One time at another theatre I heard the safety cable wasn’t secured and the light went tumbling right down. Luckily it landed in a aisle, but if it was a bit off, it could have easily killed someone. Safety cables are also used on all lights above the stage. Some of those lights on stage actually have multiple coloured films (gel) that can be changed to easily be able to light the stage in different colours.

The light boards controls which colour to use. Again, the old ones rely on a system of numbers and sliders, but the new boards can change the lights’ colour by using a finger to tap a colour on a colour wheel on an iPad. The light boards regardless of their age can also be programmed to do different things at different times. That way everything can be pre-configured prior to the show. During the show, simply tapping a button will activate a series of lighting effects.

But what’s more complex than the lighting boards are sound boards.

Old fashioned sound board…

Modern sound board… Thank god, less controls.

Ok fine, the sound boards do more things, but really is only a teeny bit more complicated than light boards. The sound boards allow technicians to combine multiple inputs into one speaker. Not only that, but it allows the technicians to mix the sound. That means adjusting the pitch, gain, volume, etc of every individual mic, cd, etc. based on each individual person’s voice, instrument, etc.

Well, the show is next week, stay tuned to see is I succeed or fail…

 

UPDATE:

It was a success!!!

Block Party 2012

As with tradition, once again, our street comes alive during the 4th annual Block Party!

In Preparation…

As with every other year, there were live music, plenty of food, singing, dancing, fireworks, talking, and… fun! It was pretty awesome. All the equipment in the photographs above belongs to our neighbour two houses down. He is a professional musician. For the last years he has been performing and hosting the party. The party probably wouldn’t have been this successful if it wasn’t for the food. In fact, I wasn’t able to snap a photo before the food was all gone. But I can tell you that as with any potluck, there was a huge variety of food, in every colour. My favourite was the tortilla chip and dip, and the meringue pie. The pie was good, but the craziness made everything better. There is a lot of toddlers on our street, so that’s why there was the improvised stage (see above), and mini piano. This was the same as every other year, and  so was the fireworks, although quite unfortunately, one had a dead fuse. The others were small, but spectacular. The fun was definitely felt throughout the afternoon/night.

Speaking of fun, nothing really unfortunate happend this year, even though it was on Friday the 13th (oooohhhh). The purple spray paint wasn’t even used! You see, another tradition is spraying purple paint on the street wherever someone got hurt. Last year there was a biking accident… :-(…

Ok, fine maybe there was a small problem. It could be avoided though, if maybe someone could remind the city that delivering the barricades an hour late isn’t appreciated as much as if it was delivered a little earlier.

Behind the city barricades, we made improvised ones

Anyways, It is always a pleasant surprised to see this neighbourhood is so friendly to each other, young and old. I wish we didn’t have to move houses, but adapting to change is what separates humans from robots. If humans aren’t flexible, robots and humans wouldn’t have any distinction. Well, this is a great way to end the 7 years I have lived here. This might be the last block party I will ever have, but even if I do go to another, I believe none in the world will beat this.

The First Camping Trip

I can not rant on about how terrible our first camping trip was because it wasn’t. Actually, it was on the contrary. It was pretty amazing. The weather held up, or should I say started cooking us alive. Other than that, the fire burned well, and the food tasted pretty good. We are definitely going to go again, and maybe stay a little longer. We were quite lucky to not have forgotten something, or realize that we need something essential that we don’t have. I guess all the planning and searching for camping checklists payed off.

Here’s the break down:

The tent was put up on a slant, so because of the forces of gravity, we all slid down. By the time we woke up, we were all at the bottom of the tent. Luckily, we have a huge tent, so that didn’t matter.

The war with bugs was on. Luckily I didn’t get bitten, but I can”t say that for the others. Even with extra strength bug spray on our clothes, and around the campsite, the bugs started drinking hot chocolate and lemonade.

Then there was jeans in water. Future note: Always bring swimsuits along when going to the beach. Water tends to stay on jeans for quite a while. But then again, the sun dried it pretty quickly.

We did run out of firewood, trying to keep a fire going for four hours. However, we were able to buy some wood.

I also want to extend an apology on behalf of our family to a couple potatoes which we burned mercilessly in the fire.

Also, when we got bored at night there was an awkward game of charades, at one point or another, my chest started hurting from laughter. But that was quite enjoyable.

We did get lost on a trail (well, actually loop), but saw a huge Douglas Fir.

Again, the trip was a success.

I won’t bother going over the other details, but this experimental trip may lead to weeks of camping all the way along road trips. I wonder how that might turn out? Anyways, its another adventure, that went well.