Gheorghe Curelet-Balan Blog

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Bushmen fire puzzle

How do you escape from a savanna fire that surrounds you and it is fast approaching?

If you cannot figure it out, then you probably have to see "The Gods Must be Crazy" movies. I don't know if the solution is part of Bushmen wisdom but I find it as a clever one.

The pictures that follow were taken at the Kitchener exposition described below and are on purpose of bad quality as this was the organizers condition to post them.


Animals dominate Bushmen's art, stories and imagination, Laurens van der PostPosted by Hello


Did you know that there is no known antidote for the poison used in Bushmen's hunting arrows?
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Check this if you want to visit Kalahari. Posted by Hello


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Monday, June 28, 2004

Kalahari Bushmen art exposition

On June 24th the Kitchener City Hall Rotunda hosted the reception of the Kalahari Bushmen art exposition organized by Nharo! (a Kitchener-Waterloo organization dedicated to promoting the connection with San, the Kalahari Bushmen).

The Bushmen are well known for their "clicking" language, considered to be one of the oldest languages. They became more popular once the movies The Gods Must Be Crazy were released. Unfortunately the Bushmen image portrayed by these movies are far from reality as the first presenter at the reception, Mathias Guenther, said. Anthropologist at the local University, Wilfrid Laurier, Mathias Guenther is the leading expert on Nharo culture, art and religion. He discussed his time with the San of D'kar Botswana. Mr. Guenther's recommendation to better understand the Bushmen, was the works of Laurens van der Post.

His presentation was followed by two Bushmen stories told by Adwoa Badoe, a storyteller from Ghana. To warm up, she started with a story from Ghana and asked the audience to interrupt her from time to time with "interruption chants", like: "unbelievable! tell it well! tell it true!" as it is done in Ghana to keep the audience focused and awake:) After the warm up, the audience learned the Bushmen stories of the Sun and the Wind. There was no chance to take a nap as the audience was very eager to practice the "interruption chants" especially in cases when the action in the stories was indeed unbelievable :)

The reception ended with the dance performance of the Acholi Cultural Dance Group, founded by a group of South Sudanese Canadian immigrant families.

Check this for more insights on Bushmen realities.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Second picture from downtown Waterloo


The local Brick beer company is advertised. Posted by Hello

Works?

Lets try to fix this: using Hello and BloggerBot as a friend, click "Send Pictures" & get the picture from your hard drive using Explorer; use the slide bar under the image to select the image that will be published...and it works! Below is the first image taken in downtown Waterloo that I wanted to show in my previous post.


This is the hello.com placeholder:  Posted by Hello

First try to publish a picture using BloggerBot & hello.com

Waterloo's NEWEST Free outdoor festival.
The summer started in KW area with cold days :( That could be the reason why the last week's Waterloo festival didn't have too much audience. Only some country music fans and shoppers were brave enough to face the unusual cold weather. Nothing should surprise us though when we are dealing with the capricious Canadian weather :)

All of the above is the caption I wanted for my picture. As you can see the only image posted by BloggerBot is the  Posted by Hello hello.com placeholder. I'm missing something... I've extended the picture's caption with these explanations.

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Canada's reply to SpaceShipOne

Canada's reputation in aviation industry is well known since the extraordinary achievement of the Avro Arrow supersonic.

Lets hope that the all-volunteer da Vinci Canadian project will win the $10 million X prize.

In the mean time I found this nice link with SpaceShipOne flight, in pictures.

Monday, June 21, 2004

First outer space private travel

The rocket-plane SpaceShipOne reached 100 Km altitude for 3 minutes. The pilot Mike Melvill saw the earth curve and experienced weightlessness. It is the first time a private citizen flights out of space. Pal Allen, Microsoft's co-founder paid the bill of $20 million.

Next goal is to win the $10 million Ansari X award that is a "proof of concept" of space tourism for a couple. See: msnbc story.

Scary moments during the flight: a loud bang and failure of plane stabilization system during supersonic flight. For details, search www.wired.com for SpaceShipOne.

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Blog cleaning

Changed the title. Added another "Think" in the description since I've noticed that before "DO", some thinking needs to be done, most of the time :)

Changed the look and feel of the blog ("Template"). I hope you like it. If you want to do it check the Template tab.

Started reading on how to add images.

Saturday, June 19, 2004

Blogger history link.

Dan Bricklin, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet, tells it all in ... blogger history.

Staying fit.

Plea for exercise! A link that some are familiar with:
The Deadliest Sin.

May be we need a reminder once a week at least :)

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Free MIT Videos!

One of the most reputable education and research institution in the world Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers free videos online.

Topics covered: Architecture, Arts, Biotechnology, Business/Leadership, Defense/Military, Economics, Education, Engineering, Environment/Energy, Exploration/Travel, History, Innovation/Invention, International Affairs, Media, Medicine, MIT, MIT Alumnus/a, National Security, Public Policy, Science, Technology.

Go MITworld (http://mitworld.mit.edu).

Here are some titles I found interesting on the main page:

- "The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future", by Laurence J. Kotlikoff. Is the richest country in the world, actually bankrupt? Storm between generations? Looks like interesting... Go and find out! Laurence's advice: be kind to your kids since they will pay for your retirement :)

- "The Origin of Mass and the Feebleness of Gravity", by Frank Wilczek.

- "Fractals in Science", by Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

- "The Militarization of Science and Space", by Noam Chomsky.

Aren't these interesting?

No need to click anything to view my Profile.

You just look to the right. Blogger.com is playing again its "delay thing" against me :) Sorry...

Added Education and other links to the Profile

Click: "View My Complete Profile" on the right side pane under "About Me" to see the update I've made.

Here are more links if you are interested in the history of people and places listed in my Profile Update:

- Scroll this page to read about the "perls of Bucovina".
- Stephen the Great, the great Moldavian king.
- More info on Suceava County.
- Click the "Galerie Photo" in the "Stefan Cel Mare" high school link.
- Another link about Suceava history .
- I hope you clicked the image Iasi town to see more pictures.
- More info on Iasi.

Yeah, yeah, I know...it's the grammar

I've made already 2 English grammar mistakes: an "this" where "these" should be and a "start" instead of "starts". I promise that I'll try not to.

Too bad that this thing (blogger.com) doesn't have syntax/grammar checking or I don't know about it. Or maybe it is better to write the post with an editor first and paste it here before posting.

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Blogs in corporate world

A new term is born: "corporate blogging". Business advantages of blogging are: reach out the customer, improve internal/external communication, employees "bottom-up empowerment", openess (in the limits of internal corporate policies, of course, you'll not post in a blog your latest patent idea or some secret documents :), etc.

So, big guys are up in full force. Check for example Gates Pushes 'Power to the People' Message or Sun Microsystems blogging policy.

If you want a sample of what is going on in a corporate blog check Microsoft's blogs or Sun's blogs . Every day new guys start to blog.

Microsoft's near term goal is 1000 bloggers.

Fixed Profile Err!

Be patient! Blogger has a delay of few minutes when is updating. After signing out I've came back and could edit the Profile. So, I've fixed it. Added extra info in the Profile: Country, province, city required by blogger.com.

Changed also the Title and Description since the web page template I've used doesn't reveal clearly what's mine & what's provided by default. Added "My..." stuff.

Note: be also patient when you try to correct a draft post. It looks like the delay is caused by their servers.

Lets see how the page looks now.

How cool "Blogging" is?

If you want to know, click weblogs.com . When I've clicked a few minutes ago, there were 2836 posts in the last hour. And this are, I guess, only those that are public! In the minute 49 of the hour there were 45 posts, so we can say that we have almost one per second on average.

Another cool site is blogpulse.com that does all kinds of trends analysis of the "blogmania" (popular links, people featured in today's blogs entries, last day burstiest blogs themes, etc). Blogmania is like a living thing ready to react immediately at what is happenning in the world and in the same time records in the background information that will be referenced probably in the future.

As you can see this is my 3rd post (entry) in my blog. Isn't this cool?

George

Profile Err

I've added info about me (see my page www.ghcb.blogspot.com ) in the Profile section of Blogger and made the mistake of putting Kitchener twice. Blogger will not let me correct this. Will call the support guys. Until then bare with 2 Kitchener :)

If you want to add your profile, look for "Profile" link when you log into blogger.com. You can add even your picture if you want!

Welcome

Welcome to my "blog" or "weblog", that is a public online diary.

It looks like I'm joining the "blogging mania" that is picking up in the society and corporate world.

If you want to know more on blogging see what blogging is?.

If you are wondering why I'm doing this, then my answer is that I have something to share with you.

Do you have something to share... then what are you waiting for? Just go to www.blogger.com and start "blogging".

George

Last blogger.com rant, I hope :)

It looks like I don't like blogger.com so much anymore :)

I've changed Time zone to mine but on their sys is LA. Go figure! Lesson: don't trust what sys is saying :) For example it say that I have 5 posts but when I'm trying to add a new one it shows only 3... Anyway if you start reading my page start from "Welcome" and go up.

This is for the guys that dare to try using blogger.com.

Hey, the first step is hard! As for the rest... the appetite comes while you eat :)

Lets see what time stamp I get now...since I've saved it as Canada Eastern.

Fixed Time stamp to Canada Eastern in my Blogger page

Go Settings tab then click Formatting & look for Time Zone.