Beens' Blog

Last week I visited an exhibition of Vivian Maier’s photography at the Chicago Cultural Center. I had learned about Vivian Maier earlier through the Kickstarter website and blogged about it here . To say I was impressed with the exhibit is an understatement. The whole story about her work being discovered and shared with the world is incredibly fascinating and inspirational, so much so, that I decided to visit Chicago to see her pictures in person. Sadly, there weren’t any books of her photos for me to buy to bring home as a memory, so I decided to assemble a group of her photos into a slideshow instead.  I’ve made an attempt to organize the photos into groups, to try to educate myself as to how she viewed the world, and maybe get a glimpse into what her thoughts were as she wandered alone, taking her photos. They are loosely organized into the following themes: self-portraits legs people that don't know they are being photographed people that do know they are being ...

Another great day in Chicago. Breakfast was at Ditka's, which is conveniently attached to our hotel. We then went to a Hottix outlet around the corner and bought some tickets for Hair, then stopped off to buy a 3-day pass for the hop on-hop off tour bus service they have here in Chicago. Our first attraction for the day was the Museum of Contemporary Art. I can't declare myself an educated art aficionado, but I do appreciate the imagination and work involved in the creation of any artwork worthy enough to be displayed in this gallery. But WTH? Some pieces of work were just blurry, badly composed photographs made really large and had a frame slapped on them. Heck, I could do that! But for every "bad" piece of art there were easily ten pieces that truly made you think about what inspired the artist. If you happen to find yourself in Chicago, this gallery is a must-see. (photos to follow) We then hopped on the bus and took it down to the Millennium Park stop so we could...

It was a great 1st day in Chicago, although my feet are a little sore from all the walking! We did a loop from our hotel, walking down Michigan Ave to the river for some night pictures, and then back up Rush St to find our target for the deep dish pizza we were craving -- Giordano's. It took 90 minutes from the time we arrived at Giordano's 'til we got our pizza, but it was worth the wait! Our small "special" (sausage, green peppers, mushrooms, onions, and LOTS of cheese!) was delicious, and too big for two of us to finish! BTW this is the first pizzeria I've seen that not only delivers their pizza, they ship them as well! www.giordanos.com If you're a shopper, then you'd love Chicago! Escada, Cole Haan, Neiman Marcus, Nordstroms, yes, Chicago has them all. But I'm a simpler shopper, and I was quite happy with the Hershey's and Ghirardelli's chocolate stores (the aroma in these stores is fantastic!), and of course the Apple store (nope, d...

The manager for a coffee house in Russia emailed me about a theme he was working on for Valentine's Day and asked if he could use a picture I took entitled "Couple in Love #1". When I took the picture, I wasn't really very happy with it. It was taken with a cheap point-and-shoot camera and the overall quality wasn't great (proving that often the best camera is the one you have with you!), the lines in the photo didn't align, and it just generally didn't grab me like some of my other photos do. Nevertheless, I posted it after a little manipulation and was surprised that it became the 3rd most popular photo in my flickr account in terms of its "interestingness" ( http://www.flickriver.com/photos/pbeens/popular-interesting/ ). The manager asked if he could print my photo and display it in a gallery in his coffee house. There was no hesitation in saying "yes", as it's quite an an honour for me anytime a photo of mine is recognized...

Today's 24-hour-only Maczot offer got me interested: "NimbleKit is the fastest way to create applications for iOS. You don't need to know Objective-C or the iOS SDK. All you need is to know how to write an HTML page with Javascript code." NimbleKit normally sells for $99, but for today only, it's half price . Many of you know I'm a supporter of app development in the classroom, having been one of the first high school teachers to experiment with Google's App Inventor with my students. (see my App Inventor presentation here .) Being the cheapskate teacher I am (meaning I have a very small budget!), I contacted the folks at NimbleKit  to see if I could use my license on the three Macs I have in the classroom. Here was their reply: Hello Peter, We all been students and understand how important to make learning material interesting and how big influence it can have, therefore we support educational organizations. You will need to have 1 valid license...

When I did the provincial training for the new Tech Ed curriculum back in 2009, I created mail lists in Google Groups as a way for the teachers to network, both as part of the training and afterwards. A number of these mail lists have become hugely successful, with lots of dialogue about anything from field trips to textbooks, and what I am most happy about, with teachers creating and freely sharing resources that they have developed. To join any of these lists, you have to have a Google account. If you have a Gmail account, then you already have a Google account, so you can just use that address to join. If you don't have a Google account, you'll have to create one, which you can easily do by following the directions after you click on one of the links below. Note that you do not have to create and use a Gmail account to join; you are welcome to use your school board or personal email address. To join any of these mail lists, just click on the appropriate link below : A...

Dear diary: My 2009 Hyundai Sonata that I bought at Performance Hyundai in St. Catharines, Ontario is a POS. The car is only 20 months old, and in that short time... - had the disk rotors machined because of vibration (which didn't solve the problem), - when it's cold out, the radio occasionally refuses the let AM or FM work (they couldn't find anything wrong), - had a headlight assembly replaced because it had condensation in it, - had an oil leak on the engine repaired, - had a temperature sensor replaced after the heater failed, - has a loud buzzing in the exhaust in certain conditions (cold, low revs, pulling strongly, like up a hill) that they say is "normal", - and now, at only 20 months of age, has a seized brake that has completely worn out a disk pad and caused major damage to the rotor. My car is now limp in the driveway until the brake parts come in next week so it can be repaired. Thank goodness I have a carpool partner that can pick me u...

This is a story of a full-time nanny/part-time street photographer in Chicago named Vivian Maier. Vivian sadly passed away in April of 2009, with her photographic work totally unknown to the world. It took a local real estate agent named John Maloof to uncover her amazing talent after purchasing her negatives at an auction. He hadn't heard of Vivian, and only bought the negatives in a search for some content for a book he was writing. It was when he was scanning the negatives that he realized what he had. John didn't know what to do with this amazing body of work, so he started by putting together a blog to showcase some of the photos. He then reached out to the flickr community  for ideas. It was there that someone recommended John look for funding on Kickstarter.com , which is how I learned about it. John is looking for $20,000 to help fund the pre-production of a documentary movie he'd like to put together about Vivian and her work. The fundraising started two weeks a...

Last night I had the good fortune to attend a private showing of Forty: The Sabres in the NHL  at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. This exhibit features over 200 photographs and videos highlighting the Sabres' 40 year career. It was very interesting to listen to  Louis Grachos, Director of the Albright-Knox, explain some of the history of the Sabres getting their start in Buffalo, as well as how this particular project got off the ground. For me, the highlight was seeing how the photographs evolved over the history -- the evolution of black and white to colour, as well as the evolution of the uniforms and the "character" of the game. If you're a hockey fan, a photography buff, or are just interested in Buffalo history, you owe it to yourself to visit the AK and visit this exhibit.  For more information, visit  http://www.albrightknox.org/exhibitions/Forty_Team.html .  ( Google Map link ) (Many thanks to the volunteers that m...

I love Facebook. And I hate it. I love it because it’s an amazing tool to keep in touch with friends. And I hate it because Facebook can’t be trusted with my private data, so I consequently don’t use as much as I think I’d like to. I was reminded of this when I read an article that stated: The Boy Billionaire, aka Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has done it again. His proposal to turn Facebook messaging into a sort of universal communications platform is probably the worst idea of the year. It's bad for the privacy of users and for corporate IT, which will have to deal with a huge spike in hard-to-defend Webmail. Ultimately, it may well be bad for Facebook, which will likely see its fairly pristine messaging service overrun by spammers and hackers. It then went on to state: A company that can't or won't take steps to protect the personal information entrusted to it by millions of users is about to vastly increase the volume of communication flowing through it...

I'm finding my Dropbox account to be more and more valuable for online backups and file access, especially when I'm on the road and only have my iPhone with me. If you don't have an account already, you can use this link to get an account and you'll automatically get extra storage space (I think 250 MB): https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTExMDUxNjk If you're not sure what Dropbox is, check out this video: https://www.dropbox.com/screencast If you're a student or teacher with a .edu email address, visit   http://www.dropbox.com/edu after you create your account to confirm your edu address (which does not have to be your Dropbox ID), then you will automatically get double the storage for each referral!

Will we reach 100,000 views by Christmas?

I’m normally a patient person, but when I sit down and actually think about the things that have gone wrong with my 2009 Hyundai Sonata, my patience starts to wear thin. For a car that's only a bit over a year old, it: had its brake rotors machined due to pitting, had a headlight enclosure replaced due to condensation, has had the radio turn off intermittently (no trouble found), had an oil leak fixed (replaced gasket?), has an exhaust noise when cold and accelerating through 2500 RPM (was told that this is normal), has a bad vibration between 80-120 km/h when cold (initially scanned and and told that it was engine-related, but then when they couldn't figure out how to fix it, they blamed the problem on the tires which of course were then out of warranty), and… …and now the heater system stops working intermittently. Here’s a video I shot showing the heater problem: At what point will Hyundai admit they sold me a lemon and act accordingly?

My school board (DSBN) is embarking on a program called the "Woodend Living Campus", and its goal is "to create an environment that will inspire students and the community at large to recognize their responsibility for the world we live in and empower students through exploration, discovery and teamwork". It looks like an ambitious project, and one I am fully willing to support with a daily vote. The project proposal is being hosted on the Aviva Community Fund website. I hadn't heard of this website before, but it looks like they have $1,000,000 to help sponsor programs that "create positive change in Communities across Canada". If you'd like to learn more about the Aviva Community Fund and my school board's Woodend Living Campus proposal, please visit http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf8867?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4cd213050cc785e0,0 If you decide to vote, you will have to create an account, which only takes a few minutes. It...

This is just a quick test blog from Windows Live Writer, which I’m testing at the recommendation of @dougpete in his “ An Upgrade Worth Having ” blog. I’m going to test if it can post a draft to my blog that can be opened on Blogger, as well as a quick test to see where it stores pictures that I attach from my computer. After I confirm that this gets uploaded correctly as a draft, I’ll finish editing it in Blogger and report on where it stores the picture. UPDATE The draft uploaded properly to Blogger (which is where I am finishing the editing), although it appears that some of my paragraph formatting got messed up somewhere along the way, so I've had to fix that before posting. The picture has been uploaded to http://lh4.ggpht.com, which turns out to be a server owned by Google. I assume that's a function of this blog being on Blogger (which is owned by Google), not a function of Live Writer. Overall, the test seemed to pass, other than some formatting i...

From Sandy Graham, chair of ACSE: Registration for the 11th Annual ACSE conference closes on Friday, October 22nd. This year's conference is being held at the University of Toronto - St. George Campus. The conference is on Saturday, October 30th, 2010 from 8:30am to 4:00pm. Follow this link to the registration page: http://cemc2.math.uwaterloo.ca/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ACSE . More information on the conference including the session offerings and descriptions can be found at the ACSE wiki: http://wiki.acse.net/index.php/11th_Conference Look forward to seeing you there!

11th Conference - ACSEWiki tags : ACSE conference wiki 201010 TEJ TEJxx ICS ICSxx Ministry of Education & Ontario Teachers Federation Curriculum Forum Meeting Notes - October, 2010 - Google Docs tags : 201010 MoE_OTF Meeting My Notes Beens education meeting Ontario Educational Resource Bank tags : MoE_OTF Meeting 201010 education resources online Ontario Quillsoft - WordQ writing software and SpeakQ speech recognition tags : OSAPAC software MoE_OTF Meeting licensed literacy ELL_ESL WordQ ...

C'mon Apple! Surely if you can design amazingly engineered products like my iPhone 4 (minus the antenna problem!) and my MacBook Pro you can figure out how to detect if iTunes is installed on my computer... (click image to enlarge)

Have you ever driven by something many times and said to yourself you must stop and take a picture of it? Yesterday was the day I finally stopped. My good camera was in the car, the weather was perfect for picture taking (when isn't it!), and I was ready to try to capture what I pictured in my mind. Here is one of the photos I shot, shot at 0  EV  (Exposure Value). I then took four more exposures of the same scene, first underexposing at -2 EV and -1 EV, and then overexposing at +1 EV, and +2 EV. The five images were then processed in Photomatix Pro to produce the following HDR : Honestly, the additional detail of the HDR just didn't work for me. It was certainly very clear, but like many HDRs, it had a certain "painted" look that just didn't appeal to me for this scene. So after a little more experimenting, I finally decided to desaturate all the colours except blue. Here is the result, with a frame added to make it stand out better from the page: ...

The Ontario Teachers' Federation Curriculum Forum is spearheading an initiative to identify the main obstacles to being more successful in the classroom. A preliminary survey was sent to the members of the Curriculum Forum, and the following broad categories were identified: Access to Current Technology Access to Self-Directed PD Bureaucracy Class Size/Composition Opportunities for Collaboration Pace of Change Resources Student Attitude Union Work/Life Balance Workload A second survey has now been prepared, and input is being solicited from as many OTF classroom teachers as possible. The results of the survey will be used to help inform discussions about how we can overcome some of these obstacles. My hope, as a member of the OTF Curriculum Forum Steering Committee, is that this will be the start of an ongoing dialogue amongst all interested parties in an effort to overcome these obstacles. If you are interested in completing the survey, please visit: http://bit.l...