Humor4u

I spent last week at Devoxx , giving several talks with Romain Guy about Android (graphics, GUIs, performance, the latest developer features ... the usual). Now that I've recovered from a total system collapse over the weekend (apparently the body does insist on getting a little sleep now and then), I thought I'd post some thoughts and also the slides from our presentations. Thoughts Devoxx is my favorite developer conference. It is a perfect mix of highly technical (focused on developers, not business/marketing/PR), inexpensive (at 350-700 Euros, it's quite a deal for 2-5 days of full technical content of this caliber, even at the current exchange rate of 1 Euro == $97,000.02), and personal (it's a relatively small, single venue, so you're all together there in the talks, in the lobby, in the hallways, and on the show floor). And it's in an interesting venue (Antwerp, while not balmy in November, is a far more interesting location to return to than, say, San...

I'm starting to prepare presentations for the ~8 hours of talks that Romain and I are giving at Devoxx in a couple of weeks. "Preparing" generally entails mostly worrying, followed by a mad rush of writing slides and code at night, on the long flight, after beers, between talks, and sometimes during the talks. It's a busy time of year. I realized that the organizers of Devoxx had recently released all of the recorded talks from last year into the wild (read: they're free on parleys.com ), so it seemed worth linking to them in case anyone wanted to see what we had to say last time around. I'll give a plug for the conference and the Parleys site here. If there were an ad banner, it'd go here. Not because I'm paid (I would make a poor ad salesman, apparently), but because I think that both the conference and the parleys site rock. The organizers do a great job of putting it all together, and the recordings and presentation of the talks on parleys.com...

Another startling revelation - climates of planets SHIFT over time! WOW! According to a growing body of scientific work... it is now thought that planets are not isolated space bodies locked into a perpetual climatic state. After spending billions of dollars on research it is coming to light planets are in fact climatically dynamic and regardless of inhabitant activity have a tendency to move through what appears to be an endless cycle of climatic change. Here I was--being council-led that because I live and breath I was in fact the reason for change in our current "sweet spot" climate condition... and... if I did not mend my ways and/or pay exorbitant climate control taxes we would all surely perish from inclement and hostile climate conditions. I should have suspected a trick I suppose. That being said, humanity... or rather some human behaviors begat of stark naked greed and outright avarice have conspired over the years to rape, pill...

The 2011 global "Bribe Players Index" has been released showing a world economy greased by bribery! For some of us... that is hardly a startling revelation or surprise, it is fairly obvious to any student of corruption and shady practices--bribery being but one of these standard elitist greed plays. Bribe Something, such as money or a favor, offered or given to a person in a position of trust to influence that person's views or conduct. Something serving to influence or persuade.  Bribery, a form of corruption, is an act implying money or gift giving that alters the behavior of the recipient.  Bribery constitutes a crime and is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty. The bribe is the gift bestowed to influence the recipient's conduct. It may be any money, good, right in action, property, preferment, privile...

Sometime in March the day after the Oscar ceremony, one of my Facebook friends posted: Mazal Tov to the King's Speech! to which I replied: Leo Selivan   and Strangers No More - the best short documentary about Rogozin School in Tel Aviv 16 hours ago   ·   Like (I was rooting for the film to win since a little over a week earlier I had visited the school with a delegation from the UK ).  My comment prompted a somewhat sarky reply from another Facebooker (the name has been changed): Sarky Facebooker   I didn't realise that there an Oscar category for documentaries about the Rogozin School in Tel Aviv. Seems like a case of over-specialisation to me. 13 hours ago   ·   Like   ·    1 person Admittedly my sentence was not very well formed and had I been writing it, say for this blog, I should have written “and Strangers No More, a documentary about the Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, which won in the Best Short Documentary category” .  Bu...

Romain and I wrote this article for the Android developer blog about graphics and animation features (what else?) in the latest Android release. Enjoy... http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/11/android-40-graphics-and-animations.html

Students watch a few short clips and match them with different comedy genres. This video activity can be used to supplement a speaking activity in Innovations Advanced .  Innovations were the first series of textbooks that truly embraced the principles of the Lexical Approach (LA). While other books have started including collocation boxes and introducing some multi-word units, Innovations (published by Thomson Heinle or what is now known as Cengage) was the first one to embody the spirit of the LA focusing on chunks, formulaic expressions and dealing with aspects of grammar relevant to the spoken language which are rarely featured in other textbooks influenced by the written grammar of English. Innovations Upper-Intermediate is by far my favourite. (I may be biased here because upper-int. is my favourite level to teach). Not only does it have engaging, thought-provoking articles and refreshing topics (Women in boxing, rave parties and hair styles), it introduces the lexis that wil...