Summer Strings Experience 2013

This year, the Saskatoon Suzuki Strings Summer Strings Experience is being held at Cornerstone Church.  It is a very beautiful and well designed building.  More than I expected (past SSE's were held at the University of Saskatchewan Education Building).  Here's Noah's Ark on the second floor:

The ark is actually made of wood (you can't really tell from this photo).  Click here for some audio of the performances.

2013 Infographic

These are the things that have driven my worklife these last few years.  I prefer Open Source technologies and tools because they allow anyone to customise them and use them for free (freedom in creativity and free from cost).  I was told last week during the Earth Science 30 curriculum writing, "you have more knowledge than money?".  Sadly, with the commodities crash, that is truer than ever.  Some of the Open Source tools I use include

• LibreOffice (office suite)
• Audacity (audio editing tool)
• VLC Player (media player)
• Ubuntu Linux
• Inkscape (vector drawing program)
• Python (programming language)
• PHP (programming language)
• MySQL Database
• Xibo digital signage

I've also been drawn to Creative Commons as a way to use and share knowledge freely (as with one of my best ideas from last year - analysing sound with Audacity).  Think Python, the textbook I use in CS30 is a Creative Commons resource.

Quite a few of the tools listed above involve computer programming and this skill has allowed me to be more efficient in my work and has saved others time as well.  The entry and collection of activity points data is not as onerous now as student numbers are not needed and PHP scripts can glean whatever data one desires from a MySQL database. I also use free tools like the visual languages Scratch and SNAP and these languages have allowed me to offer an alternate stream of CS20.  I still use a commercial language, Delphi, for Windows programming because I like Pascal and was never a C++ programmer.

The economy and politics are important interests of mine.  The consequences of the inverted demographic pyramid in developed countries is a concern practically and theoretically.  I do not subscribe to 'right wing' or 'left wing' because they are not useful ideas and just lead to divisions.  I found Niall Ferguson's Reith Lectures from 2012 to be quite illuminating.  The injustice of my homeland, Taiwan, being treated as a pariah nation and the largely forgotten San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 which is the rule of law which governs Taiwan's status are causes which are close to my heart.

My mentor, Jerry Mitrovica, is respectful of ideas.  This comment from an online chat a few years back illustrates his wisdom:

12:48 Comment From duncan rutherford: When you and your colleagues hear about things like the iranian cleric who said that women dressing provocatively can cause earthquakes, do you find it funny, or is it frustrating?
12:54 Jerry Mitrovica: I do not think it is funny, nor do I feel frustrated. We live in a world informed by complex cultural issues, and the important thing is for scientists to push for their research results into the public domain. We have an important role in society - to provide information gained through rigorous scientific methods - that is part of the reason I agreed to do this online chat.

Finally, music is of paramount importance in my family. My two boys prefer the violin to piano, but their dad's favorite playlist is heavily slanted towards piano:

• Mozart Piano Concerto 25, KV 503 (espcially the last movement)
• Beethoven's last piano sonata, Opus 111
• Schumann's Fantasie, Opus 17
• Chopin's Barcorolle, Opus 60
• Brahms Intermezzo Opus 118, Nr 2
• Bruch Violin Concerto Nr 1

 These glories reenforce my belief in the divine, for how else could one explain Beethoven's last three piano sonatas? Some day, I hope to fully enjoy the hundreds of CDs I have and listen to some of my favorite artists live! We had just such an opportunity this past summer at Mont Tremblant and Stratford!  We got to listen to the Gryphon Trio and Jan Lisiecki during a couple of summer music festivals!.

Stratford Summer Music 2013

Festival Classique des Hautes-Laurentides

A look at free GIS software

In preparation for teaching Earth Science 30 next January, I started looking at GIS in education.  I started with a link from DLSE.  This activity used an ancient piece of software called Arc Voyager which doesn't let you save anything.  I then tried Arc GIS Explorer.  I was trying to find some data and found this page with free Saskatchewan data.  I signed up so I could download Saskatoon elevation data from GeoBase.  I was looking at some of the info that came with the zip file and read it was raster data.  So, I added this to Arc GIS Explorer and got this:

Not sure what use this is.  I am now going to try Falcon View which was a 200 Mbyte download.

Well, I installed Falcon View, but I had to browse to the install folder to see where the app was.  Ran the app and it didn't do anything. Well, not a good start for this open source product!  Since it makes a folder called Xplan, I went to the start menu and tried to run the shortcut from the start menu (Xplan folder).  I saw that the error on the splash screen was initialisation failed.  Hmmmm.

Earlier today, I took the PDF of Elbow basement topography and saved it as a JPG.  I then imported this JPG into LoggerPro for photo analysis.  Unfortunately, I couldn't zoom in on the photo.  I was trying to do a profile on the map and get the x data (distance along the profile).  Later on, I was going to add the elevation data manually.  No luck since I can't zoom in on the image!  I was thinking of using Adobe Illustrator (or maybe Inkscape), but I haven't tried that yet.