Michael Shermer talks about why people believe strange things, including the belief that there are secret messages in popular music when it’s played backwards.
[ted id=22]
Jeff Milner Autobiography
A very short summary of my life:
Jeff Milner’s 2 minute autobiography.
(Made for one of my education classes).
Autobiographical writing and representation
By Jeff Milner
Due September 29, 2010
Images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffmilner/sets/72157624935640311/show/
(to be played simultaneously with the audio)
Transcript of the audio:
I began my school life in the autumn of my sixth year. Over the next 12 years as I finished elementary, jr. and sr. high I felt that I would never complete school. I spent winter evenings playing basketball at the gym and my summers in the pool. I developed a passion for travel. My family would often take road trips to the United States. At age 15 I took part in an international art camp in Japan.
I learned the value (and grind) of manual labor working on a huge vegetable farm packing corn and carrots. In the eleventh grade I decided not to rejoin the basketball team and instead took a job with a local computer shop fixing PCs and eliminating lemons by checking new computers before they left the store. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it sure beat packing corn.
At 19, I moved to Salt Lake City volunteering a year of service to my church. This remains one of the most memorable years of my life.
After returning, I got a job working for the City of Medicine Hat in their GIS department. Using an air photo covering the city limit I traced the outline of every building within the municipal boundary. It was during this time that I began to kayak.
The job only lasted for about a year and then I began work as a pre-press assistant at the Medicine Hat News. Working nights didn’t suit me, so I found a new job working for a local engineering company that did defense research at the nearby army base. My job was to bury electronic landmines for research purposes.
Moving from job to job and living at home, while building an interesting set of skills and experiences, did not give me the same satisfaction as the more stable and independent life I would find when I moved to Lethbridge to start university in 2002. I found a great source of friendship on the university swim team.
I completed a degree in New Media 4 years later with a work experience placement in Malaysia helping create channel identity clips for Southeast Asia’s music channel, Channel V. Although it was a wonderful opportunity I didn’t take full advantage of my time there because I was distracted with heartache due to the break-up with my university sweet-heart.
After convocation I went into web design and photography full tilt. My skills in kayaking improved and I also took a couple of teaching jobs in the summer at the University. I alternated between teaching the Movie Making, animation, and swim camps. I found a love for teaching there that in part inspired me to return to school and get a second degree in formal education. Sometimes I still feel like I will never finish school but now I look at the journey itself as my destination and it doesn’t bother me that I’m still not done. I’ll always keep growing.
Reflection on the process of creation:
I wanted to fit in as much as possible in just two minutes. This restraint left me with the arduous chore of deciding what to include and what to cut. I’m not sure I made the best choices as many very interesting things about myself didn’t make it. (I do have about 10 years more than most of the students, so perhaps if I had an extra minute I could have fit it all in there).
Some of the images fit perfectly with the story, while at times other images that I wish I had, just don’t exist.
The music that goes with the story ads a level of interest that I personally really like. Creating a podcast is something that I’ve been interested in for a long time and I’m glad this assignment pushed me into creating one.
Lethbridge Ultimate Club in the News
The Lethbridge Ultimate Club was in the news last week getting a little promotion for the idea of a full league here in town. It seems like a good idea and we’ve been getting a lot more people out to play. If you’re looking for a nice easy going sport in Lethbridge, come over to Gyro Park on Monday and Wednesday evenings at 6pm.
J’taime comme un fou – lipdub
During my “Music of Quebec” workshop at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres in the Explore program, together with almost 100 students, we created this “lipdub” music video. Students from the Summer 2010 session of the workshop participated in the video singing along to the song “J’taime comme un fou” [I love you like a fool] by Robert Charlebois.
New Personal Best
I swam a new personal best time for 1000m this afternoon. I did the whole thing in just 16:00. I never swam this fast (for long distances) even when I was with the Pronghorns. I can hardly wait for the alumni meet.
I wish I could say as much for my improvement in French. I’m learning, but it’s been tough.
Bomb Blast in Trois-Rivières
Yesterday at 3am, a bomb went off at the Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre in Centre Ville, Trois-Rivières. Nobody was hurt. Catch the CBC’s coverage here.
I am in Trois-Rivières this month studying French.
Flickr’s New Layout
When I heard about Flickr’s new layout changes, I was excited to see what improvements they were making. (For scale, the images below are 500px wide — that is the actual width of the photo in the old view.)
The old view:
The new view:
Things I dislike about the new Flickr preview.
- They removed the helpful url links when viewing “all sizes”.
They no longer have a “browse” link to take you to the flickr stream page where that photo appearsLooks like they fixed this, the photostream link now takes you to a specific page.- The map on the side is way to prominent. Seriously, is the map more important than the other photos?
- They removed speed options, viewing of descriptions, and ability to see what’s coming up in their new lightbox mode (instead of slideshow – I don’t love flash, but I liked the slideshow feature.).
- They turned the quick links above a photo into pull down menus. One more click to get what you want is never preferable.
- The spacing between photos on the photostream view is too wide. Just because some people have large monitors, doesn’t mean that the photos should look unbalanced to fill up the space.
- Titles need to go above photos, not below them.
- “Click here to add a title” no longer disappears, but sits there cluttering untitled images. (At least for my own photos when I’m logged in.)
- The column width for comments is now wider making comments harder to read.
- The commenter’s icon is smaller and doesn’t look as nice. Ironic considering they could have used the icon to fill up the space so that the text column wouldn’t need to be quite as wide.
Things I like:
- I like the new 640px default size, though things load a bit slower.
I admit, when viewing the small images above, I like the look of the new version because the bigger photo is nicer. However, all the other concerns make me feel like this one positive is not worth all the other negatives.
In my opinion, Flickr should hire the type of people that started the company: people passionate about photography and user interfaces.
My “pro” account is expiring next week. I am thinking about migrating my photos to Picasa before then. That doesn’t leave me much time.
Trans Canada Highway Shut Down
On Friday I took a little trip to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. When we noticed the sign warning us of a police barricade ahead, we thought we might have to wait for an accident to be cleared.
It turns out that due to all the rain, the highway was “washed out”. It ended up not really affecting our trip, we just turned north sooner than we had planned, but I understand the flood waters have been very terrible for the people in Maple Creek and Irvine (among other places).
Here’s some footage of the “wash out” on the highway. I had no idea.
(Thx, Kim)
Three River Rendezvous 2010
Over the long weekend my friend Andy and I went to the Castle River Rodeo Grounds to take part in the biggest whitewater festival in Canada, the Three River Rendezvous. My decision to go wavered when I read that the weather forecast predicted cool temperatures, variable cloudiness, and sprinkled showers. Luckily we pressed on and, as it turns out, the weather wasn’t actually that bad, and for most of the time, it was actually sunny — I even got a little burned on my face.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck on Sunday night. After we had returned from our trip running the Five-Alive feature on Carbondale River a couple of times, Chuck Lee, the organiser of the event broke the news that one of the participants had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. He explained that a group of kayakers were going over Lundbreck Falls and that on this particular run the boater was held under the falls for several minutes. He was revived once or twice but that’s all he let us know at the time. He emphasized again the need to always be vigilant and to remember that these kinds of things don’t just happen in other places, they can happen here too. We held a moment of silence in respect for the victim.
It was a sobering thought because I had never heard of anyone getting caught in the flow of water under the falls, and to think I, myself, have braved the 12 meter drop and walked away without so much as a scratch.
Jeff Milner going over Lundbreck Falls in June 2008.
I found out later that night who was involved in the accident. I had hoped that it would be someone that I didn’t know but that’s not how it turned out. His name is Jaron and I had bumped into him just the morning before at the put-in for the Upper Castle run. I have paddled with him and his twin brother Dave a couple of times over the last two years.
I looked up some old paddling footage and found some with him in it:
He’s the one in the yellow and orange boat, yellow jacket, and blue helmet. His twin brother is also in the video.
I didn’t know him that well, but it was obvious that he had a passion for kayaking. Both he and Dave are the kind of enthusiastic friendly people that you want to spend a sunny day with floating down the river and enjoying nature. I remember talking to Dave for a long time about his decision to become a teacher and although I have many other influences for my decision to go back to school, it was that conversation that tipped me over the edge.
Kayaking isn’t always considered an extreme sport where you expect to hear about someone dying but every year there are a few news stories where someone drowns in a river. Almost always they are inexperienced or not wearing PFDs, or there is alcohol involved somehow so Jaron’s death comes as a great shock to the paddling community.
House Warming
I’ve been down in the dumps for the past week thinking about how things didn’t pan out so well with Kim and me during her last week here before field season. I talked to her on the phone the other day and that seemed to help but I didn’t really ask her the question I really wanted to, and that is, why did she do it?
Moving on, or at least trying to, I’m going over to Susan’s place this evening for a house warming party. I feel like I should be taking something over there, but I’ve got no ideas. I’m half afraid to drive anywhere after getting those tickets yesterday.