You may have already seen Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture". If not, I've stuck it at the end of this post.
He's a university computer science lecturer who has pancreatic cancer and at the time of writing is estimated to have less than six months to live.
This is another lecture he gave, on time management. The topic may sound a little dry, but in case you've not seen him before, he's an excellent speaker. Funny, witty expressive, but to the point.
Definitely worth watching. As Life Hacker said, you may want to skip forward to around the twelve minute mark, if you're short on time.
After posting about Forvo yesterday, I put it to the test.
I looked up the lists of French, German and Italian mathematicians included in Wikipedia and added requests to Forvo for all those whose pronunciation I was unsure of.
I arrived home this evening ... after enjoying a nice classical concert in Crows Nest, with my good friends Gavin and Linda ... to discover that twenty of those names now have pronunciations.
That may, in fact, be all of them; I didn't count how many I requested. Anyway, I think that's proof positive that Forvo works!
In it, he tells the story of how the One Laptop Per Child project came about, and how it is progressing.
One point he made, that reminded me of my beloved MacBook Air, was that the cost to build a computer with a given set of specs will halve over a period of roughly eighteen months.
So, in theory, one would expect the price of decent hardware to keep dropping as time goes on.
Of course, that's no good for the manufacturer's bottom line. So, instead, they simply keep bumping the specs sufficiently to be able to charge the same price.
In reality, the benefit of these escalating specs, to the average user, ceased a long time ago. Most people use their computers for word processing, e-mail and web surfing. The greatest demand they're likely to place on their machine is asking it to recalculate a spreadsheet.
The reason this reminds me of the Air is not that it's cheap ... I wish! ... but the fact that while my precious has a relatively feeble processor, by current standards, it handles everything I throw at it admirably.
Anyway, I think the podcast tells an interesting story, so here's a link to the MP3 on the ABC site.
"Every time you spend a dollar, you sacrifice a bit of your future."
"Everywhere I looked around me in that apartment, I saw stuff I didn’t need. Video game consoles piled high under the television, along with a small mountain of games for the consoles. Over a thousand DVDs. A gigantic television set that dwarfed our living room, looking almost comically out of place."
I can certainly empathise with this. Over the years, I've spent a phenomenal amount of money on "stuff" ... some of which I threw out just a couple of months ago, and some of which still awaits ejection.
Every time I think of the thousands of dollars I've thrown away on CDs and DVDs, computers, gadgets, expensive dinners, nights out drinking and taxis, I feel just a little ill.
Fortunately, I've mended my ways ... apart from the occasional Apple lovefest :-) ... but if the description above sounds like you, I highly recommend the article.
Since I'm a shower person, for the past five years my bathtub has been a container for all my cleaning products. Yesterday, I realised that I had an opportunity for a dual decluttering!
I've had a nice decoupaged bin (bought from someone at Bondi Markets years ago) sitting in the hallway for months. I moved that into the bathroom to fill up a wasted area under the sink and hid all of the cleaning gear inside it.
So, now the bathtub is empty ... apart from five years' worth of accumulated dust.
I like the idea of turning it into a huge planter box, as illustrated here:
However, it seems like a lot more effort than I'd be willing to go to ... and I'd prefer to avoid killing off any more plants with my notoriously black thumb :-).
Instead, I have an idea to use it for further decluttering ... I could purchase a sheet of wood large enough to cover the entire tub, turning it into a kind of chest.
That would allow me to use an otherwise completely wasted space to hold all of the out-of-season clothes that are currently an eyesore in my bedroom.
As you know, gentle reader, a couple of months ago, I gave away or threw out a heap of redundant gear that was consuming space in my apartment.
Ever since then, any time I notice clutter, I try to do something about it.
Just this week, for example, I cleaned out the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and removed from the wardrobe any clothes I won't be wearing in the short term.
Every time I see an area that I've reorganised, I get a nice warm feeling inside :-).
Suffice it to say, I hope that these efforts will eliminate any chance of me ever ending up in the same state as the poor bastards depicted in this film!
Apparently, Robert Scoble came up with the idea for this. He must have plenty of time on his hands.
As technology improves, or just changes, various skills that were once of value ... and perhaps even impressed one's friends ... become totally redundant.
Some examples: adjusting the tracking on a VCR, keeping score in tenpin bowling and reading a table of logarithms.
If you want to see a longer list, or can think of any good ones you'd like to add, check out the Obsolete Skills Wiki.
Sadly, most of the shots I took inside are either horribly out of focus or blurred due to hand movement. I must set aside some time for experimenting, to find the best settings my poor old camera has for low light conditions.
Anyway, with that warning in place, here are a few photos of the event. As you can see, many of my former classmates are far better preserved than yours truly ... quite surprising, given the effort I have put in over the years to pickle myself :-).
Just to prove that it wasn't operator error, here's one that was obviously not snapped by your host ...
Due to the dim lighting, I only took a couple of videos. Most are too short to bother uploading ... and one I will keep to myself, to protect the privacy of the two participants!
So, here's the only useful one; everyone doing their best to remember the school song :-).
When the club closed, a small group moved on to the Balmain Leagues Club, just around the corner from where I lived during our schooldays.
Unfortunately, getting in was a tad painful ... not because we were excessively inebriated, but due to their requirement that visitors have evidence that they don't live close to the club.
A number of us, not being drivers, had no such documentation on our persons. Eventually, the night manager relented, so we were able to enter and more than quadruple their late night patronage.
They threw us out at around 0600. Most people went off at that point, but three of us popped into the city for a coffee, finally pulling the pin at 0730.
All in all, it was a wonderful evening ... 11 hours, actually. Hopefully, it won't be another ten years until the next one!
It's unlikely you will receive any interesting posts from me today, gentle reader.
The time is a few minutes on the other side of 0750 and I've just arrived home from my 30th anniversary school reunion.
I am absolutely shattered, and will be jumping straight into bed, to reappear sometime late today.
However, lest you think "the poor old fart just can't take it anymore" note this ... I was one of a trio who survived into the wee small hours. Everyone else will have been tucked up in their beds for hours by now!
So, I will bid you a fond good morning and post about the aforementioned festivities some hours from now ...
Fear not, gentle reader, I have not passed on to steatopygous pastures in the great beyond:-).
For the last three days, I've been at a developer conference put on by Sun Microsystems at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre.
In addition, over the last couple of evenings, I've been out with friends. So, there just haven't been enough spare hours in the day to do justice to this blogging thing.
Normal service will resume shortly ... once I catch up with all the news that's built up during my absence.
Here's a shot of Greg and Flynn, taken last night, while we were waiting for our Indian take away ...
Sure, it's a little out of focus, but it's still fairly impressive, when you consider that the photographer was young Damon ...
As of around 1400 today, I'm now enrolled in a Graduate Diploma in Education, via distance learning, through the University of New England.
You may know, gentle reader, that it has been a long time plan of mine to teach mathematics, either at high school or TAFE.
Well, I decided a few weeks ago that it was time to start working towards that goal. Of course, as usual, I'd left it far too late and the only course that was still accepting applications was UNE's.
I then discovered that although applications hadn't closed, one component of the course, a residential school, had already happened ... back in January! The lecturer who told me that said it was a mandatory component and I should wait until 2009. So, I gave up at that point.
However, I got a call from someone at the admissions centre yesterday. It turned out that while the other person wasn't completely wrong, they hadn't told me the whole story. Having missed that component just means I can't finish the diploma in one year; it doesn't stop me from doing some of the other subjects.
So, to cut a long story short, I'm back studying again, which I love, and am happily strolling down the path to a new career.
As to when I'll actually leave computing and move on to teaching, who knows ... I'm sure that decision will be mainly based on how painful (or wonderful!) prac teaching ends up being :-).
Last night, over dinner with my mate Dave, I mentioned that I enjoy shows like Boston Legal because they often cover topical issues or simply alert me to things I've not come across before.
As if to shine a spotlight on this, the latest episode of BL includes a case revolving around a Viatical Settlement.
This rather ghoulish concept has been around for some time, but surged during the nineteen eighties, when AIDS sufferers had little hope of efficacious medical treatment, because no drugs had yet been developed to retard the syndrome's effects.
Basically, the way a viatical settlement works is that a terminally ill person sells their life insurance policy for an immediate cash settlement and the purchaser makes a profit when they die.
While I can see the benefit to the policy holder, in that they have access to funds to make their remaining days easier, it seems incredibly mercenary for someone to profit from the imminent death of another human being.
Of course, often a patient will enter into such a transaction because they can't afford to pay the significant costs of their treatment. So, it is more prevalent in places where medical care is expensive and where there is little, or no, publicly funded health system, like the United States.
