The Place I Call Home

Wildlife. There are bears, deer, coyotes, raccoons, squirrels and birds, not to mention the friendly bugs. You can smell trees, ferns and wild plants growing everywhere. Living in the middle of a jungle can really change your life.

Our road

It is really an adventure to live with wild animals. There were the two times when a black bear strode into my backyard, causing considerable damage to my fence. Bears might do damage, but it is the deer that’s the most adorable, sly, clever, and a tad bit annoying all at once. First, there was one time where the back door was left slightly ajar, and then the next morning, my bowl of sweets was nothing but a bowl of wrappers. The deer was so excited, that paw prints was on my door for a while after the incident. Also in the spring, deer would eat up all the bulbs in the neighbourhood!

Not you again...

During the winter, my family put bird feeders out for the birds until last year when squirrels somehow climbed on to the feeder and stole all the food in no more than a couple of hours! No wonder why my neighbours hang their feeders on the tip of the tree. But the beauties of the place are without question the birds. They are magnificent, from stellar jays and humming birds to robins and seagulls.

Plants are equally amazing as well (fighting with the animals :-)). The aroma of roses and other flowers are astonishing. After one whiff, you’re hooked. We also have 100% organic, non-fertilized and non-chemical sprayed blackberries, raspberries, salmonberries, strawberries, chives, green onions, pumpkins, and corns. The only problem is that the strawberries turn out to be miniscule (now think about CFIA or USDA certified organic…), and the little fury creatures running around eat all the pumpkins. A con is the weeds; they grow everywhere! It is almost impossible to clear them.

It is amazing what you can see and all the adventures you’ll be able to enjoy living in a rainforest. But now, our population at 7 billion and counting, with more and more species going extinct, and thoughts about not wasting money on endangered ones, will the next generations be able to experience this luxury we are able to enjoy today? Will they be able to see the deep blue sea and swim in it like me?

UPDATE: Cars 2 AppMATes

Zoom! Now you never know if it is a Hot wheel on a carpet with tracks all over it, or an electric go-kart. But more recently, it could have been a car on an iPad.

I know I mentioned it before and gave it an account, but know that it is actually out, this is a review after I tried out the game (if you do not owe the physical toy, like me, it is possible to play with two fingers and a, icon named “Paper Lightning”). The introduction is here. Also, the MAT in AppMATes is a acronym for “Mobile Application Toys”.

As I was saying, I, owing an iPad, decided to check out the new application by Disney that pairs a physical toy with the iPad. I found it entertaining, but there are a few minor problems.

One, was that the car moves the fastest in the middle of the screen so the backdrop can move. But the problem is that humans have a natural tendency to push objects to accelerate its speed. When you do push the car, a voice tells you to move it back to the center, and sometimes glitches.

Another minor problem is that the game is slow. Because it has to load so many collisions, and graphics, it make the gameplay glitch up a bit when it is loading many tasks. This only occasionally happens, but is still a bit annoying.

Lastly, the arrow that points you to places you want/need to go leads you from A-B directly. It discourages you to use the roads, but go on top of buildings, cars, signs, etc. This is fine, except that I personally like following the road.

This is a great idea and come as a surprise to me that no one really took the advantage of being able to blur the line between physical and  digital objects with the iPad and other iDevices. But then again, it didn’t come to me either. But blurring the lines of reality isn’t new at all. For one, there’s the SMART Board (an interactive white board).

The app is available here (US and CAN, iPad 1 and 2)

The cars are available in the US Apple store, US Toys R Us, and Disney store (20 bucks for 2 cars).

Overall, I like this concept of blurring the lines using everyday products we actually (normal citizens) have. I believe more and more companies will start to do this. I suspect that in 50 years, we won’t know what’s real or what’s fake. I wonder  what life will be like then…

A Strawberry

It’s hard to imagine that the whole entire internet only weighs the same as a strawberry, but it’s true.

First, something a bit smaller. According to John Kubiatowicz (a scientist), the Kindle technically gains 0.000000000000000001 grams of weight when it is filled to its capacity (4GB).

The internet at any given moment weighs 50 grams because of the electrons in motion.

To me, the guys who figured these things out must have been incredibly curious and had nothing to do at the moment, I mean, when would we ever need to know how much the internet weighs? Or that the Kindle gains an amount of weight so minuscule that our most accurate scales can’t measure?

Here’s the link to the Kindle report: click me!

Here’s the link to the strawberry report: click me!

And here’s the video:

The Internet

The internet is so powerful and it is capable of so many things. It is amazing what it can do.

The actual video:

This is just one of the many samples of the Internet.

The most important thing about the internet is that now we can communicate even easier than ever. We can know what happened seconds after it occurred. If a plane crashed, seconds after, reporters and journalist would do live blogs and reports updated minutely, allowing us to know what happened no matter where we are.

Communicating through the internet can also mean life, when death was supposed to happen. If meteorologists predict an earthquake is going to occur, the public can be warned and cautioned. The Internet really saved us.

It’s also easier to get famous, or be heard. With one click of a button, you can tell the world anything.

But with any privilege is responsibility. This is why it is so sad that the Internet is abused everyday. Every good has a bad, every bad has a good. There are people who put or take stuff they shouldn’t.

I believe that the world has gone too long trying to make the people better. Our thought has been “if the people are better, the world will be better”, but from experience, it just can’t be done. Laws too, they were meant to be broken, if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have created fines and punishments for when we do break the law.