Categories
life work

A Glimpse

After a not so great day teaching at a local high school I wondered about my choices that brought me here, a decade into my teaching career and back to subbing. I understood the irony in that if I just worked at that school more I would actually have better days but I couldn’t help but think I should just stick to the one school that I’ve really been loving this year even if it means not working every day.

I contemplated my day of students showing disrespect, constantly on their phones, and just plain refusing to even pretend to do the assignments as I walked out of the building. Though feeling sorry for myself, I noticed a student that I didn’t recognize chatting with a friend and said good afternoon to his friend. He looked up and said, “Hey, are you Jeff Milner?”

“Yes,” I said hesitantly, while wondering how in the world does he know my name.

His face lit up and he exclaimed, “You taught me how to draw, last year, in Eva’s class!” I remembered the class but I couldn’t believe I had made such an impression. After asking him to remind me his name, I headed out and thought, it’s moments like these why I actually do love teaching.

Categories
Google

Google Doing its Best to Destroy the Web

URL shorteners are a good idea when it comes to sharing a longer address that you know will need to be typed manually. They are a bad idea for anything that a user might want to use over a longer period of time.

Case in point, in 2018 Google deprecated its URL shortener and in July announced that it will also be sunsetting currently shortened URLs in August of 2025.

In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.
Over time, these existing URLs saw less and less traffic as the years went on — in fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month.

As such, we will be turning off Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this may impact you.

Who is impacted?
Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025. We recommend transitioning these links to another URL shortener provider.

It’s baffling that Google is as popular as it is as a citizen of the web when they seem to have no conception of respect for users or of the web itself. It’s also crazy that their advice is to just find a different URL shortener: NO! If you haven’t realized this yet, using a shortener breaks the web. Every time one of these shorteners goes under all of their collective use suddenly dies with it.

I guess people just need to learn you can’t trust Google. Don’t be evil… indeed.

Categories
Art

Cabel Sasser at the 2024 XOXO Festival

Just in time for Thanksgiving1, Cabel Sasser gave a talk at the 2024 XOXO Festival about the importance of appreciation for art and craftsmanship in this 20 minute talk. I’d say more, but trust me when I say the unfolding of this journey is worth it.

Hi, I’m Cabel. I was driving to Seattle and got hungry, so I stopped at a McDonalds in Centralia, WA. And when I went inside, I saw something incredible.

Here, let me tell you my story:

Here’s a newly launched archive of nearly lost Wes Cook work.

  1. Canadian Thanksgiving[↩]
Categories
Apple

Submerged

One of the complaints I’ve heard about the Apple Vision Pro is that there isn’t enough content made for the device. Apple has been quietly working on it and today debuts the first scripted film captured in Apple Immersive Video.

From Apple News:

Submerged: This immersive fiction thriller, available to Apple Vision Pro users around the world for free, invites viewers onto a WWII-era submarine and follows its crew as they wrestle to combat a harrowing attack. This adrenaline-pumping thrill ride showcases the unique storytelling experiences made possible by Apple Immersive Video.

Here is the behind the scenes documentary:

Categories
education

Can They Read?

This week I read an article in the Atlantic this week about the growing perception that today’s elite university students lack of ability to read books to the end1.

Here’s an excellent follow-up / rebuttal by Carrie Santo-Thomas, a teacher interviewed for the piece.

I was not surprised by Horowitch’s hypothesis. She attributes undergrads’ lack of reading stamina to lowered expectations in high school literature curricula, specifically arguing that limiting full-length novels and replacing long-form content with excerpts and summaries has weakened readers’ constitutions. She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones.

It is a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it’s wrong. This is not to say that there aren’t external factors affecting students’ reading stamina, but to line up such a simple series of dominoes to topple oversimplifies a complex challenge and places undue blame on the shoulders of discerning young readers and the public school teachers who work tirelessly to support them.

  1. Apple News Link[↩]
Categories
life swimming

Swimming

I tried signing up for a membership at the Lethbridge YMCA at the very last day of August to have my membership start in September. As I was about to sign up I learned that if I waited until September 1 I would get seven days free and not have to pay fees to reinstate my account. I also learned that the pool would be closed for the majority of the month making my membership that month basically worthless 2.

A month has passed, so after I skipped the bedtime routine with my kids I popped over to the Y today to sign up. The lady at the counter looked at me like I was crazy when I said I wanted the seven days free trial. I explained that I just called someone on the phone right before and they said I could get a prorated rate for October after the seven days are up. She responded that they don’t have a free trial for people that have already ever had a membership — they did have that exact promotion last month 3 but there wasn’t anything she could do for me. I was so irritated by the whole ordeal that I just thought I’ll do my swimming at the University, thank you very much, and I walked out of there.

When I arrived at the university I found their pool empty and undergoing maintenance that had no end date in sight 4. It’s looking more and more like a dryland training month for this swimmer. I wanted to exercise my body, instead all I got was an exercise in futility. At least I made it home in time to put the kids to bed.

  1. ie. the next day[↩]
  2. I only use it for swimming.[↩]
  3. ie. yesterday.[↩]
  4. It was supposed to be done on October 7th but they found more issues.[↩]
Categories
life

Work

Last year I took a leave of absence from my job teaching grade five. This year I quit outright. I was a little back and forth about the idea knowing that I was leaving a permanent contract but ultimately what sealed the deal was that my hours were fluctuating every year and over the past few years had been shrinking and were now down to half time. When I asked my principal if there was any hope for me at the school she gave the most telling answer possible. She said nothing. It was a kick in the face.

Will I land on my feet? I guess it doesn’t matter too much when before I was just crawling through the mud anyway. I’m enjoying the flexibility of subbing and although the paycheque is weak we are doing fine.

Categories
games

Gisnep!

David Friedman recently created a daily word puzzle called Gisnep! I’ve been hooked on it ever since I discovered it last week. As a non-coder, he created it using a form of guess-and-check programming with ChatGPT and other AI large language models.

Years ago I was inspired by his 50 States in 10 Minutes game and made my own copycats.

Categories
family life travel

The Claw

The kids played the claw machine today in downtown Whitehorse, Yukon. When I saw Andrea getting her $5 changed into tokens, I thought it was a total waste of money. Andrea’s $5 gave them each five tries to capture a stuffy. By some fluke of nature, my daughter Nesslin actually succeeded on her third try.

The two of them used up the rest of the tokens and, of course, Ian had nothing. He begged and cried for just one more go but we were insistent that there was no way we were dropping more cash on this thing. The kind little old lady who was running the machine volunteered one last token for Ian. I just shook my head thinking we’re only delaying the inevitable. I gave him a pep-talk that if he doesn’t win, that he’s going to accept the loss and move on.

Quite a few people had gathered around watching as Ian went for it, then a Christmas miracle happened. The crowd cheered as he dropped the exact stuffy he had been going for the whole time. The lady who gave him the token gave him a big hug and I have to admit, I was wrong: that $5 was money well spent.

Categories
bad review revue

The Bad Review Revue

Despicable Me 4: “Talk about despicable.” — Zaki Hasan, San Francisco Chronicle

Doctor Jekyll: “You don’t call a movie Doctor Jekyll and expect that we won’t know what’s going in it.” — Mark Dujsik, Mark Reviews Movies

The Instigators: “Cannot live up to the Ocean’s movies of which Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are two of the 11. Perhaps they should not attempt heists without Brad Pitt or George Clooney.” — Fred Topel, United Press International

Harold and the Purple Crayon: “A film that pays lip service to the importance of creativity without ever displaying a demonstrable shred of it during its seemingly interminable run time.” — Peter Sobczynski, RogerEbert.com

Trap: “Trap is crap.” — David Poland, Hot Button