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For me, when I learned of someone that I know has passed away, I immediately reflect upon the shared experiences that I had with him, wanting to hold dear to those moments, and finding the sad realization that one always want to remember more than one can retrieve.

Today I learned that my brother-in-law’s father has passed away. My mind immediately recalls a gentle and wise man from a previous generation, who I had several opportunities to chat with in different occassions.

Our first meeting was at a brunch gathering during Dim Sum. This is the first time that we met my brother-in-law’s family, and they were kind enough to entertain us with a bit of our culinary culture. Since then we have had other BBQ’s and dinner gatherings when we gossip about current events, economics, politics, etc.  

I would not say that I got to know him really well, but I would say that through these conversations, I learned that he was a kind and sensitive man.  What impressed me the most is his way of calmly conveying his past experience and perspective by delivering carefully chosen statements in a calm and measured fashion, while retaining a dose of good humour. If I am in search of a teacher, he certainly possessed the sensei qualities that I wanted in a master of life.

My brother-in-law and I spend a lot of time together during the weekends, riding our bikes. We of course talk a lot, and on many occassions he has praised his dad. Judging from his values, I know that the man who raises such a son must have high values of his own.

I selfishly write this piece so as to help me to recall more of these memories, with the hope that they will be retained, and in doing so, help me rationalize the good bye that I must say to the elder that I respect. 

Posted from: ON L4S 2G6, CanadaWe purchased the iPad camera kit today with the hope of storing videos that can be viewed on the iPad, since the iPad only has limited storage. It would be nice to store some videos on an USB stick for viewing during vacation, or a long business trip.

For this to work we discovered that we had to over come a couple of barriers, both are needed to mimic the USB stick as if it was a camera when connected to the iPad via the camera kit.

The first thing to ensure is that the USB stick must be formatted in FAT32, and has a DCIM sub-directory in it’s root directory. All images and videos must be stored in this directory.

The second thing is that the filenames cannot be exceedingly long. I followed the IMG_0001.JPG or MOV_0002.m4v formats, the former for pictures and the later for movies. Of course, the movie must be iPad compatible, which usually means H.264 video with AAC audio. The iTunes software can convert your video to this format.

I hope this helps any one who is trying to do the same.

Posted from: ON L4S 2E4, CanadaAnother hopefully constructive rant.

I just spent more than 6 hours aggregating photos from our Far East cruise and vacation from this past fall. And I think I only processed about 20% of them so far. I think the photos were taken with over 5 different cameras of various form and quality. The trip had over 25 individuals, and as you can imagine there were many cameras amongst us.

Many photos were blurry and others had weird colors due to improper white balance settings.

With today’s photo processing and sharing technologies, my advice is that when going on vacation with a large group, just have two designated cameras and photographers who know what they are doing. They don’t have to be pros but at the very least should understand the notion of shutter speed and focus.

Okay my rant is over and now back to processing the pics. Arghh!

Posted from: ON L4S 2G6, CanadaAfter seeing the following TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_chan…

By Clay Shirky on the topic of cognitive surplus, I was reminded of a discussion this week on Facebook. Parties to the discussion thought users of Facebook are sharing private information without knowing the full consequences of their deeds. Although this is a common argument that I’ve heard of countless times, it does have its merits. This is a popular argument against the use of social networking sites like Facebook by parents, trying to ward off their innocent teenagers against unknown threats. However, after watching this insightful video and the idea that we are transitioning from a crowd of information consumers to a population (or dare I say a generation) of content creators, I now see platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to have the potential of being the general enablers of cognitive surplus, which Clay Shirky defines in the video.

Another idea that I noted when watching the video is that the quality of the content is less important than the ability to generate and share the content. This brings me back to some of the same ideas introduced in the book, “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations”, published in 2004, written by James Surowiecki. I bring this up because it is easy to criticize mundane and stupid tweets on Twitter, such as when people tweet what they eat and when they go to bed. However the same pointless information may be useful in a different context. For example, a study on dietary habits or sleeping patterns. I guess in the world of cognitive surplus, it is better to have more information diluted by a spectrum of quality, than to have restricted information perhaps curated by a biased party.

Just jotting down some random thoughts after watching another inspirational TED video.