Puzzlepieces – February, 2007

warning: long personal story

When I was in grade four, we started learning about verbs and how to conjugate them in French class. I immedately found them very easy to learn; a nice logical system. By grade eight, we’d obviously learned much more about verb conjugation, and yet many of my classmates were struggling to understand even the basics that we had learned four years prior. Those years included many instances of me trying to explain them to others, but this can hardly be done in a few seconds or minutes.

So I gave in and decided to write it all down. I believe it took me about two weeks to finish my first version of the guide, simply entitled “French Verbs” (with my copyright, of course), and was something along the lines of eleven (8.5x11) pages. Oh, the days of writing in WordPerfect (can’t quite recall the version). The need was obviously there, because when I showed it to my French teacher (who actually cried, but that’s a longer story), and she asked if anyone wanted copies, something around 100% of the class asked for one.

I think it was extremely well done, and I continued making corrections and additions to it (okay, I went a little crazy including the many-page verb dictionary and then starting an excersize book and solutions manual…). In grade nine, my last year of taking French, I started but never completed a second edition to incorporate what we learned that year.

I didn’t totally abandon French verbs, as in my grade ten computer class (when I learned to program, and in Turing) my final project was a French verb conjugater. And a pretty good one, if you ask me

It occurred to me today that it is still probably a useful resource (admittedly I haven’t seen what else is out there on the web today) and that it would be really neat to bring it back and publish it on the web.

So the question is, do I simply upload the original files (I have some of them at least) or do I convert it to HTML? I really should do the latter, but what then… should I try to reproduce the original formatting with CSS, or do I make it look good as I would design it today. And if I find my incomplete second edition, should I complete it (this would require me relearning a bunch), or leave it as is?

Fortunately, it’s not as if I have several thousand other unfinished projects to occupy my time with..

These Come From Trees Blog - what a great idea. Via Seth Godin.

thetruth.com - when I first saw thetruth’s tv commercials a few years ago I thought that they were amazingly well-done, I rarely seem ads that good. I’ve seen a few new ones they’ve done lately and they also seem incredible. I wonder if they’re being affective?

Truly social profiles - hmn, it would be kind of neat if instead of filling out your profile, it was created by summing and averaging data given by your friends

Review: Swivel vs. Many Eyes | EagerEyes.org - Robert’s really done a comprehensive overview here; very useful. Both websites would do well to read it.

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll — New York Magazine - a much-needed article, although I’m still reading it. One the one side, privacy is now in crisis mode, with everything publicly available; on the other hand, the younger generation is paradigm shifting, and embrases the privacylessness wholeheartedly.

If a tree falls, and it is doesn’t have a permalink, did it really happen? How would we know if it did, there’s not even a video of it…

Via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog.

The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids — New York Magazine - there is a lot wrong with education in North America, and work like this can make a huge difference. In my opinion, we already know how to make education vastly better, we simply don’t employ those practices.

Pictures of Numbers: False Advertising - for those who seem to wonder why I care so much about my information graphics - this is what happens when you don’t care.

Productivity Boost: How to start your day at 5:00 AM - lifehack.org - I get up rather later than 5:00am, but my problem with this article is that almost all the tips are for how to fight with your alarm clock.

I’ve been living without an alarm clock since mid-summer. Since early January I’ve had class at 8:30am five days a week, and aside from being a few minutes late one day, I’ve had no problem getting to class on time. Waking up naturally feels infinitely better, and I challenge anyone to try it themselves. If you can’t do it, it seems clear that you are not getting enough sleep, and knowing that is pretty sobering.

In early 2005 I paid $0.99 USD before tax for a regular Walgreens-brand Chap-Aid stick. I haven’t seen it in a couple of months, and with my lips extremely dry, I caved in and bought some ChapStick yesterday. Only the brand-name stuff, and only strawberry available, which I settled for.

Mentioning it to a friend, he was surprised that I’d kept my previous one so long. It would seem that people always lose them before finishing them. Sounds like a problem to me. A twist-tie and small piece of duct tape later, I have my solution:

Before I risk a new venture, I took the prudent step of doing due diligence. Apparently it’s not quite new. Ah well, I still like mine.

argh. I noticed today that my blog appeared to be completely down, in the sense that all the pages were blank.. hmn… the Wordpress admin interface still worked…

Took me about a half our to track down the problem, which was solved by disabling a plugin that I don’t use anyway. I have no idea why, but can hardly be bothered to figure that out now.

DeWitt Clinton » Blog Archive » What a day!

Microsoft is supporting OpenID and Apple is denouncing DRM.

no comment by me is even needed here

Google Webmaster Tools - Webmaster Tools - this will now show you all links that Google knows of to your own pages.

Some things I noticed

• there is a lot of spam, especially search result pages and wikipedia clones
• Google’s indexing multiple versions of wiki pages on pbwiki.com

So I was looking at the stats for Fagan Finder; it’s always nice to see new data, and I’ve never been very good at keeping track of it all myself. According to Google, 64% of the links are to the Translation Wizard. In second place is my article on RSS at 13%, and URLinfo at 8%. 98% of links to the Translation Wizard are websites using the translate this page feature. I had to play with the data in Excel to arrive at this.

Clearly there’s a power law going on here. And this is yet another confirmation that the Translation Wizard was a huge winner, and since it is largely broken now, seriously needs an update. I just do not have the time. Ideas, anyone?