Humor4u

Alliteration is used in a variety of genres: poetry and nursery rhymes (“ t inker,   t ailor,   s oldier,   s ailor”), advertising slogans and pop culture ( M ickey M ouse) as well as everyday life ( B ed &   B reakfast, cr edit  cr unch). Also, research shows that learners find alliterated expressions easier to remember. This song is packed with alliteration (see Version 1) and some good rhymes too! (see Version 2). Click HERE to download or preview below: To introduce the concept of alliteration, you can play the Alliterative Adjectives game - a popular ice-breaker where students (in pairs) think of an adjective that best sums up their personality and starts with the same letter as their first name, e.g. Mysterious Miriam or Daring Daniel. Then ask students to introduce their partner to the rest of the class. See detailed procedure as well as other lexical ice-breakers HERE .

I've gotten some questions about how the video in my recent animation article as well as the video of Romain's excellent photo viewing app were created. I thought I'd spend a few words on it in case anyone else wants to do something similar. I can tell you how I did it, but it'll cost you. About $200, in fact; that's how much I paid Amazon for the setup I used. First, the reasons I wanted the device: Debugging animations is hard: So many of the issues I chase with animations are timing-dependent. So the typical approach of step-debugging doesn't work; as soon as you stop in the debugger, you've lost the stream of whatever is causing the issue.. Nor does it help to hack the code and add tracing output everywhere, because sometimes you can't easily access the code in question (although this is what I end up doing in many cases where I can change the code). Sometimes it helps to dramatically sloooooooow down the animations, so that you can see it unfold i...

I've posted an article, Animation in Honeycomb , on the Android Developers blog . The article gives an overview of the new property animation system in Android 3.0. Check it out . And while you wait, here's the demo reel for the article . I wanted to show some of the home screen interactions and API demos from the SDK that take advantage of the new animation framework. The sound track has nothing whatsoever to do with Android, but the video seemed to want audio. It was a sound decision.

The new political landscape, Perverted Democracy Enabling Scavenger Capitalism? The original quote was, "As Goes GM, So Goes the Nation", but since GM and Detroit were about one and the same, it maybe fair enough to adjust the quotation, or refresh it to meet the times. The times are hallmarked by 40 months of global economic strife bought on by crass corruption, deceit, larceny and a thousand elitist corporate and political administration "blind eyes" who willfully ignored the progress of what turned out to be an orchestrated global Ponzi scheme--a travesty afflicting untold misery upon the populations of the world--to the enormous advantage of a few who are impervious on account of their accounts which are far too big to fail. The official, "expert" response to the mass fleecing of citizens was a shrug and the statement "We did not see it coming." These same persons are now in "charge" of fixing things. "How will they do that?...

Summary of my talk at the MOFET  Institute on 15 February 2011 Post-intermediate EFL learners already have a command of grammar structures , reasonable vocabulary , with particularly good receptive skills , and can generally communicate well in a variety of situations. What they need now is to extend the range of vocabulary to be able to convey subtler meanings and use language appropriately , and make the all-too-difficult transition from receptive to productive use. There are several paths they can take to improve their English language proficiency and move beyond the notorious "intermediate plateau". In my workshop I highlighted the following areas which often pose difficulty for post-intermediate learners: 1. conceptual metaphors 2. formulaic language 3. multi-part verbs 4. collocational competence These areas of difficulty have been pointed out by a number of studies which compared native-speaker and non-native speaker corpora and which were referred to in my talk. F...

The international book tour for Flex 4 Fun began last November in Antwerp, Belgium (the home of diamonds, chocolate, and GUI toolkit programming books). It was a gray a rainy day, which is unusual for Antwerp except for the months between September and June. The tour began as all such things do: parties dripping with scantily-clad programming celebrities, mobs of teeming fans fighting for autographs and shreds of clothing, and all-night hacking orgies. It was unforgettable, it was a blur of over-caffeinated memory, it was ... just another book tour. The tour came to an abrupt end. I can't confirm that it was because of overcrowded venues and rabid crowds that overwhelmed Interpol forces. I can only say that I had to leave the town anonymously, quickly, and with only 10 pounds of chocolate as a memory of the experience. Or... I gave a talk on Flex 4 Fun at Devoxx . The presentation gave an overview of some of the graphics and animation features in Flex 4, and worked through an exa...