I'm relatively new to the world of Instructional Design and the development of eLearning material, but I've had a LOT of experience as a trainee. Much of that experience has been pretty painful (this should be no surprise to anyone). If you, as an Instructional Designer or course developer, want to keep me engaged in […]

IBM today announced that IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide IoT Platforms 2017 Vendor Assessment (Doc # US42033517, July 2017). The report highlights IBM’s Watson IoT Platform on IBM Cloud, which today is being used by thousands of clients and partners across six continents including BMW, KONE, HARMAN and more.

IBM MTN, a leading African telecommunications provider, Wageningen University (WU) in the Netherlands and Prodapt, today announced they are harnessing IBM Internet of Things (IoT) technology as part of the MTN Connected Wildlife Solution. The solution will help predict threats and combat the poaching of endangered rhinos at Welgevonden Game Reserve in South Africa, with the intent to expand the solution to other reserves in future.

Stacy and Angela painted the alphabet on the wall of their living room, hung lights, and it looks amazing. I built a web app that lets you compose and deliver a creepy message to a friend!

Not a gratitude practice; I'm really bad at that. Just, in spite of all the awfulness on a global scale, on a personal level my cup runneth over right now.

My extremely wonderful job was made permanent. I had been assured this would happen, but I'm really pleased to have it confirmed.

We finally managed to catch (at least the first act of) one of the many performances currently being made available online in response to the pandemic: the National Theatre's utterly amazing Twelfth Night from 2017. Lots of people have recommended it, so thank you for inspiring me to actually watch. It's on YouTube until 7 pm tomorrow (Thursday), and it's so, so, so good. So many amazing actors, and the set is great, and the direction is great, and I'm in awe, basically. Hope to watch Act II this evening.

We also really loved Knives Out. From publicity it didn't seem like my kind of thing at all, don't care about semi-parodic murder mysteries about awful people, but I saw enough reviews to convince me to give it a try and it's amazing. The comedy is actually funny, and very much punching up.

I have been having some wonderful distanced conversations with people I care about. Phone date with ghoti_mhic_uait. Phone call with hatam_soferet. Video chat with rysmiel, which we hadn't managed to coordinate for ages because of time zones and demanding jobs. Video chat with doseybat, who has been one of my favourite people to talk to for nearly a quarter century, and every extension of that enormous conversation makes my life better. I sympathize with all the people who dislike spending all their leisure time as well as in many cases their work time in calls, but for me, a one-to-one conversation with a friend goes a long way to balance the awfulness of lockdown.

Talking of which, ambyr, who also feels positive towards phonecalls, really kindly agreed to phone me to teach me Mystic Vale. It's a really pretty deck building game I'd heard good things about, but I couldn't make any sense of the interface on Yucata. And now ambyr has explained it to me and I'm really enjoying it. Plus I got to talk to someone I like and had only previously interacted with on DW.

And I have a regular call set up with angelofthenorth, who lives the other side of the country so we always have too much geography even in normal times. She had the brilliant idea of reading through a book about the Old Testament aimed at Christian ministers in training, SCM Studyguide: The Old Testament, by John Holdsworth, which I'm finding really fascinating. Mostly the conversation with angelofthenorth, who brings the perspective of an experienced Christian preacher and mentor of ordinands, whereas I'm a random Jewish person who obviously has a very different approach to the Bible. The book itself is written in a somewhat annoying style, but the content is good.

angelofthenorth, along with my sister, got me back into playing Scrabble using the rather dreadful official app from Electronic Arts. I'm really enjoying being able to ping anagrams back and forth as a minor distraction during the day.

Another friend who is completely wonderful is ewt, who transcribed for me the tune of the Psalm we use for special occasion grace after meals. This is particularly awesome because it's really hard to find any record of the Anglo-Jewish tunes I'm used to. Everything is transmitted within communities and not documented anywhere, and the internet is full of American and Israeli and Chassidic tunes, and I can't teach my own tunes because I'm not musical enough.

The final thing making me happy right now is the disco tardigrade. I have always loved tardigrades, and fluorescence microscopy, and this is just such a lovely image. It's my new 'squee' icon (cos nobody really understood the 'methane on Mars' one), and also my new Zoom background. Turns out, Zoom backgrounds are set per device not per account, so when I tried to put it on my personal account, it ended up showing up on work Zoom calls too. Luckily it's not embarrassing and my equally geeky colleagues love it too. (But in case anyone could stand to learn from my experience, don't put a work-unsuitable background on your Zoom if you use the same physical machine for work and personal calls.)

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Mornings go best when I’m ready to go before anyone else gets out of bed. I need to save my knees for my commute and cannot take the stairs at work. (Having discovered how much this helps, I am now reconsidering all the previous times in my life when my knee issue flared up.) I … Continue reading Things I learned in 4 months of full time employment

No doubt — this is a crazy, scary, sad, worrying time for everyone. Most of us are sheltering in place and trying our best to adjust to a new reality. While we are not performing heroic deeds like all the frontline healthcare workers and first responders, grocery store employees and delivery drivers, we can all … Continue reading nine cool things on a tuesday (stay home, save lives edition)

The transcript of Three Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Languages, a talk given by Peter Alvaro somewhere or other, is up at Info Q.

Peter Alavaro's main research interest is in taming distributed systems. He starts his talk with the provocative thesis, "In the future, all radical new languages will be domain-specific languages." He talks of the evolution of his ideas about dealing with distributed systems:

1. Little interest by designers of programming-language designers in filling huge difficulty of debugging in context of distributed systems;
2. PLs often make handling of data somewhat implicit, even with functional programming, which he says is dangerous in distributed programming;
3. To talk about the flow of data properly, we need to talk about time;
4. Two things that influenced him as a grad student: Jeff Ullman's claim that encapsulation and declarativity are in tension, and Fagin's theorem (the existential fragment of second-order logic characterises NP);
5. Idea that distributed systems can be considered as protocols specified a bit like SQL or Datalog queries;
6. Triviality with query languages of characterising the idea of place in distributive systems: they are just another relation parameter;
7. Describing evolution of a system in time can be done with two other things: counters and negation, leading to Bertram Ludäscher's language Statelog. But this way of doing things leads to the kind of low-level overexpressive modelling he was trying to avoid;
8. "What is it about...protocols that they seem to require negation to express?” Turns out that if you drop negation, you characterise the protocols that deliver messages deterministically.

He summarises by saying the only good reason to design a programming language (I assume he means a radically novel language) is to shape your understanding of the problem. No regrets of being the only user of his first language, Datalist, because the point is that it shaped all his later thought in his research.

If you're brand new ot creating websites or blogs you may feel a little like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck when it comes to figuring out what things your site needs. There are thousands of things to choose from such as GIF files, videos, widgets, slide shows etc. But before you start getting carried away adding these things you need to add the basics, call them your core fundamentals if you will. Without these your site won't be as effective as what it could be, and won't attract the traffic that you want.

When it comes to making a bug out bag, or having an emergency bag for long road trips, or camping, and hiking trips. One of if not the most important items you need for your emergency gear is a first aid kit. And while they can be bought almost anywhere, there contents can vary depending on there size or price range. Regardless of your budget there are some items you should always have present in your first aid kit. Here is a list of 12 things I recommend everyone have that aren’t always included in an off the shelf first aid kit.

So you’ve created your website, now all you have to is launch it and just sit back and let the hordes of traffic come to you………right? Wrong just because you slapped a few pages together doesn’t mean your website is ready for the world. There are some very important things to do before you launch your website to give it the best possible chance. Using a pre-launch checklist before you launch your website is your opportunity to fix any problems and add any last minute changes before that all important launch. In this post I’ll give you a list of what to do before you launch your website...........

Traffic, if you have a website or a blog you want to get website traffic and as much of it as possible. It doesn’t matter if your site is to make money, to connect with others, for a business, or display your love for all things kittens, if you’re a site owner you want traffic. So how do you go about getting website traffic? Here is a list I put together of 100 different things you can do to get traffic to your website. These aren’t in any particular order of importance and not all of them will work for each site the same way. Some sites will have better results with some of these options then others..................

Maybe you’re new to SEO and you’re not really sure what to do. Perhaps you own a business and need your name out there fast, or you just don‘t have the time and need the extra help to get your website out there to the world. Whatever the reason you’ve decided to go with an SEO company or consultant. When choosing an SEO consultant there are a lot of things you need to look into before you spend anything. Here’s a list of 6 things you need to look at before choosing an SEO consultant or company....................

Go onto any site like Yahoo Answers and your going to see a lot of questions about YouTube. Questions like how to get more views, how to get your videos to the top of search results, how to be a YouTube partner, etc etc. However one of the most common is people asking others what they think of their videos. While some of these videos are good (I’m no video expert myself) most are well for lack of a better term crap. So here is a list of 4 things to avoid when making videos..........

Even if Fabuloso is the staple of your cleaning routine, there are probably a few tricks you didn't know you could try. READ MORE...

Huge, wonderful news. Five films! Melissa has seen the first ten minutes of Fantastic Beasts, and there are feelings to discuss. In this episode, John takes his Patronus test for the first time.

Clusterfuck Nation For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page They’re kidding, right? Joe Biden? The former vice-president and US champeen influence grifter came back from the dead this Super Tuesday to save the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders Venezuelizing what’s left of America (after you subtract our awesome more »

The post Things Get Interesting appeared first on Kunstler.

Clusterfuck Nation For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Around the same time that most Americans set their clocks ahead this weekend, something more momentous shoved the world into an epic phase-change, and the modern era, with all its mighty baggage, was finally swept away, along with that more »

The post Things Take a Turn appeared first on Kunstler.

  Clusterfuck Nation For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page At least in wartime, the bars stay open. That’s how you know this is a different thing altogether from whatever else you’ve seen in your lifetime. Even those of us who signed up for this trip — that is, more »

The post Things Have Changed appeared first on Kunstler.

Life has not been cancelled. Babies are still being born, flowers are blooming, bees are floating around, people are falling in love, artists are making some of their most incredible work. Your existence is not OVER. The circumstances have changed, that’s all — and it won’t be like this forever. But in case you’ve been […]

The post 100 Things To Be Grateful For Right Now appeared first on Gala Darling.

By Lydia Bugg  Published: May 07th, 2020 

Show notes for Episode #3: Subscribe to the Internet Musician Podcast with iTunes: Also in this episode, I discuss the five things you must believe cultivate your DIY music attitude, including: 1. The business has been lying to you. Major label artists are not getting rich off of record sales. Radio is fake. Don’t belive […]

The first issue of my new Boom!Box series, WICKED THINGS, is out today (March 18)! The Giant Days team of me (writing), Max Sarin (art), Whitney Cogar (colours) and Jim Campbell (letters) reunite for an all-new story of Bad Machinery’s Charlotte Grote (and Little Claire), as they are sucked into a fiendish world of metropolitan mystery. 

Get it from your local comic shop (if you can’t get there, you can order it from Page 45 in the UK and Midtown Comics in the USA) or digitally on Comixology.

Here’s an interview I did with CBR about the new series and here’s a six-page preview of issue 1.