Dave Kellam

One week of camp down, seven left to go. Last week was kindergarten to grade 3, it’ll be the same this week. The highlight probably had to be one of the kids in my group on our trip to the zoo. One of the kids in my group had a really whiny high-pitch voice, but he was well-mannered and easy to look after.

We were at a fence in front of the lion’s cage, and he had his head down inbetween the bars, looking at the cage. Me and Michael here him say, “Excuse me, Excuse me.”, in his whiny high-pitch voice. Michael looks down at him and says, “Is your head stuck between the bars?” He says, “Yes.” in the whiny high-pitch voice, and kind of trailing off. It might not come out so well without the live imitation of the voice, but it was really cute and funny. His head wasn’t really stuck, he just misjudged it a bit because his hat was pretty thick.

If I stay in Canada after school ends, I’ll probably end up living in Vancouver; temperate climate with snow and cold one hour away by car. If I go abroad, it’s likely that I’ll be back in Canada by 2010, the year Vancouver gets to host the olympic winter games.

International organization declares Toronto disease free! Elsewhere national organization promotes concert that will allow disease to propagate to foreign countries if it hasn’t actually disappeared yet.

My sidebar thing doesn’t seem to be updating anymore, it could be this new version of kunglog, but that doesn’t seem quite right. First day of camp tomorrow, i must prepare for the onslaught of little ones. Be brave. Be brave.

Update: of course it wasn’t the software, it was a human error: no closee off anchor tag mean no link appears.

I haven’t really been up to a whole lot lately. We’ve been doing planning and whatnot for camp, that’s where the day goes. The night goes to me sleeping, watching movies and touring around town. I’ve been trying to do some more reading lately; been through You Shall Know Our Velocity (it had me laughing out loud) and the first Harry Potter book, i figure that i should be done the first three in a couple of days. Go summer!

Some schools have decided that a D is no longer a passing grade. Apparently, the schools are sick of students just barely scraping by and wanted to raise the standards. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can’t see it making a whole lot of difference. On the other hand at Queen’s they don’t even bother giving us D’s. The reality is, you’re taking an arbitrary system of judgment along a scale and shifting that scale in one direction. So, all you’ve done is change the arbitrary values that are being awarded. You’re still going to have students that are only doing enough to get by, you’ve just changed how your school is perceived against other arbitrary numerical scales. It makes those schools look worse, but not many schools have a tendency of showing off their mediocre students anyway.

The Incas appear to used a form of binary as their primary form of non-verbal communication. It also appears to be the first three dimensional language. It used a series of knotted ropes that had over 1500 possible permutations.

I’ve been doing workshops all day for the last few days, early ones too. Teaching kids all day wears you out, so I haven’t really been browsing the internet and finding interesting shit to talk about. Here’s a new comprehensive computer programming textbook that you can download as a pdf. It’s a heft nine hundred page read, but it seems to cover a lot of language styles and concepts. I’ve read a little ways into the preface but that’s about it for now.

I’ve finally taken the time to collate all of the old stuff that I’ve done. There’s a bunch of it missing from various hard drive failures over the years, but there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. I designed a front page for it but from there on out I went lazy with directory listings. Without further ado, I present Box.

These wee little bitty things inside me are really kicking my ass. Turns out I actually do have mono, things were looking on the up n’up last week but then my throat decided to get all patch, sore as fuck and leave an opening about the size of dime. It’s a great way to start the summer.

Lets move on to something a little bit more interesting. Here’s an internal memo from Warner Music Group to their employees. The internal memo has a link to a bunch of legal sites or initiatives that they’ve started. The link seems to be down for me, maybe it’s getting a lot of traffic.

You also may want to take this opportunity to consider whether any peer-to-peer services are being used on computers in your home. Please keep in mind that use of peer-to-peer services to download copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright owner, whether in your office or your home, is illegal. It is also unfair to all of the talented individuals (including yourself) who contribute to the creation and marketing of creative works.

The part of that paragraph that made me laugh was the “(including youself)”, aww way to be a team player. That’s pretty much how the memo ends to, it’s great.

There’s seems to be an outbreak of monkeypox in the mid-eastern United States. We should probably issue a health warning and travel ban to prevent the spread of this disease. Apparently, it’s similar to smallpox but not as bad and it actually is named monkeypox. The say that the likely cause were ill prairie dogs that were taken in as family pets. You don’t want the monkeypox.

Update: They are searching for the source of the monkeypox outbreak. The best thing they can come up with right now is an exotic pet dealer in Villa Park, Ind. called Phil’s Pocket Pets. They also have several other best-selling diseased exotic pocket pets like hamster tied to mouse and ball of fuzz.

Here’s an applet for a 4D Rubik’s Cube. The creators also offer some explanation and description of the puzzle and how to solve it. Apparently, there are 1 756 772 880 709 135 843 168 526 079 081 025 059 614 484 630 149 557 651 477 156 021 733 236 798 970 168 550 600 274 887 650 082 354 207 129 600 000 000 000 000 possible states in the 4D cube.