Donorweb revamped!

The good folk at DonorWeb have revamped their webpage and it has an even more attractive and clear front page now.

The blog is peppered with original Youtube videos and I found the Blood donation excuses funny. I’ve head it all and like the advert never indulge in a hard sell. The advert is mild and ends with a “just do it” sort of message with one of the Champion Donors. No spoken words in all of its 47s (there is a shorter 32s version).

There are also some new IT tools such as the enhanced donorweb bloodmobiles calendar (using GCal). It really makes it easy for you to pick a bloodmobile location and date and find yourself in Google Maps, ready to get directions to the site. The pledge uses Google Docs so its also another example of good use of these free tools by the DonorWeb volunteers, who are IT geeks of the highest order!

Entries are also being contributed by members of the Blood Donor Recruitment Programme, Singapore Red Cross – this is indicated in their blog userids which is a smart idea! Hence there is better coverage of Learning Journey tours by school visits – with some posts by the students themselves!

Looks like this nice and long-term collaboration between volunteers (donorweb.org), Red Cross Staff and the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) just got better!

Replacement route for Marina South ride?

I am looking for candidates to replace my 6am, 32km Marina South ride that had us meeting at the Kent Ridge marker stone at 5.45am and hitting campus by 7.30am. So I plotted the Inner Central Route which turned out to be 42.4km, after avoiding Bukit Timah and entering the Ulu Pandam Park Connector for the last bit.

It’s 10km (i.e. half hour) longer than the Marina South ride. Estimated intersection with traffic/roads are:

• 6.30am – Upper Thomson Road near AMK Ave 1
• 7.00am – Mandai Road (after Seletar E’way)
• 7.30am – Bukit Batok Road
• 7.45am – Boon Lay Way
• 7.50am – enter park connector

Its obvious that for this route to be safe, I’d have to leave at 5am instead. Sheeesh. I’ll look some more.

Postscript – Not that the old route was wonderfully safe, but its good to consider when planning at least!

7.30am along West Coast Road

Blinking Brink says Goodbye JBJ

I missed this in my feeds, Blinking Brink saying goodbye to JBJ. See the thoughts penned in accompaniment to the drawing.

Enjoy the other cartoons too!

Early morning Deepavali ride: Western Lopp

 

Deepavali @ Varanasi -IFA film feature on Discovery

Deepavali a.k.a. the Festival of Lights is celebrated by Hindus around the world. The festival is some two thousand years old and symbolises the victory of Good over Evil.

IFA Films and Discovery Channel have produced a feature filmed from inside Varanasi and its showing on Discovery at these times:

Repeats (South-East Asia):
27 October 2008, 0000-0100hrs
27 October 2008, 0800-0900hrs
27 October 2008, 1400-1500hrs
01 November 2008, 1400-1500hrs
02 November 2008, 0800-0900hrs

See the facebook event, “Revealed: Diwali“.

Before google

Scratching our heads sheepishly, all three Pasir Panjang Guides present could not remember the name of the author of Singapore Samurai. We’ve raved about his exploits, watched some National Archives footage in fascination and all of us read his book in just one sitting.

I wished I had access to my blog post at that point. Strain as I might, I could only see the book cover of both the first and second edition but no bells rang.

Meanwhile, Ladybug had begun fiddling with her phone and eventually she blurted out “Penrod Dean!”

“Ah,” I said in relief, “you googled it!”

She replied, “No, I asked Kenneth.” [One of the other guides]

She’d SMS-ed him.

Oooh.

The Pasir Panjang heritage walks are conducted in February, May and July. I think we need a fourth session later in the year to help us keep that information fresh!

Holland Village – Changi Village LOOP

Ride yesterday morning: dst 72.42km, tms 3:40:54, avs 19.7kmh, mxs 43.0km/h. Longer route than last week but flatter profile and it was cloudy. So an easier ride.

The Bikely route is only vaguely correct for ECP and Marina. Lots of squiggles there but I’ll fine tune it another day.

The Weather Underground (2002)

A couple of years ago, I found this VCD called The Weather Under-Ground, a 2002 movie that had received many honours including a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

This covered a curious episode in US history in 1969 to the 70′s that I had not heard of and typically I did some follow up on the internet after, including Wikipedia. I got lost following the sources but eventually emerged.

Enough to have referenced it during some lunchtime conversation for I lent it to Kenneth, another history enthusiast to whom it was news as well.

It has been collecting dust ever since in some corner of my table, and just reappeared while I was searching for firewire cables the other night.

The Weather Underground Organisation has been referenced in a sadly desperate attempt by the McCain-Palin ticket to make some headway on their rival.

Still, that means there might a little more curiosity about them now, so the dust might stay off for awhile.

John reflects on Hypercard journeys

My kaki John Larkin Down Under was in Wagga recently, and a core message to the educators there who are about to stick their toes into cold water—chose a passionate element in the curricular, seek to combine with an online tool you have some confidence in and keep the project simple, for starters.

The germ of that idea came from his (relatively ancient) experience with Hypercard. It was sweet to hear that application name again and I can see the black and grey pixels on a small screen:

I was given a quick demo of HyperCard by Dr John Hedberg, during a promotional presentation for a new course being offered by the University of Wollongong. … [It] convinced me to enrol in the Graduate Certificate of History Education at the UOW … [which] … was brilliant. It changed my life.

John applied these principles to the story of his dad’s POW experience in WWII. The students reaction? Amongst others, “they were amused by the fact that the were attending History lessons in the computer laboratory.”

And of course “that HyperCard stack took me outside my comfort zone and set me on a journey…” – and part of that journey led to us crossing paths.

Read the post, “Education technology for beginners,” by John Larkin. Watershed, 25 Oct 2008.

iPod for Keynote, pdf and text

I conduct quite a few lectures and have recently started wondering if an iPod could be used to review the pdfs of a lecture and even project a Keynote. I recall some discussion about the latter but have never seen it done.

My lecture keynotes are in the range of 30-50MB each so even a Nano could carry an entire series. I looked briefly for leads and found this for iPods with tvout support: iPresent It – a slideshow-to-iPod utility to convert PowerPoint, PDF or Keynote presentations into slideshows synced with an iPod. “This makes iPresent It particularly suited for doing presentations on the go: never carry a laptop into a presentation again.”

There is also have iPDA for handling and syncing docs, rss feeds and the like.

iPresentIt apparently works with digital cameras too! Very nice, I have to try this.

What about my humble 4GB iPod Mini? Well it can present text in 4kb files, and there is an online script to do that for you at ebookhood.com!

P.s. Its worth mentioning that my phone is only for making calls, or evading them.