just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Just because something is available instantly to vision (*) does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. Or, in slightly more general terms: access is not synonymous with learning. What turns access into learning is time and strategic patience (*).via A lesson in strategic patience (*) by Nicholas Carr' (*).
anyone with a $300 laptop can use the very same tools as the people at the top of just about any industry. [..]via The very same software by Seth Godin.If you want to learn, do research, make a ruckus... your local library has access to the same tools as you'll find in a skyscraper in a big company.
I've realised this for a long time and now I have the opportunity to make something of it here at the Glebe Library. Really making some great progress with everything that Seth mentions in his post - The very same software - and I am excited about what I am creating.
''Part of who I am is, I think, I can empathise (*),'' he says. ''I used to think it was the most normal thing in the world but I realise it's one of the qualities I've been left with, for better or for worse.via 'The best music is written with conviction' (*) by Bernard Zuel (*).
''In songwriting, quite often you either come from a point of view of struggle … whether that be heartbreak or circumstances. That allows you to write with conviction.
''For me, I have often seen little windows of that struggle (*) or that heartbreak and it gives me an access point I don't necessarily fully understand. I look at those little cracks of light that come through as an invitation to look into it more.''
As you pursue your goals in life, that is to say your future, pursue your past. Let it be your guide. Insist on having a past and then you will have a future.Vern Gambetta wisely adds:
Ken Burns - 2004 Commencement Yale Class Day Speech (as pdf)
Be careful that you are not living in the past, learn from the past, use it as a reference point.And finally, LottieP warns:
"nostalgia is the enemy of the future"With the past in mind I thought I would dig into archive.org and drag out something from my past (it might explain the where eljeiffel came from). Here it is:
elj.com (Eiffel Liberty): Two Years On .. by Geoff Eldridge (04 Jul 1999)Funny to read this after all these years. Shows how strongly I felt about the Eiffel programming language and method (and still do, but not just as visible). I even chose to start this blog with some posts on Eiffel - not the language, but it's inspiration, the Eiffel Tower and it's creator, Gustave Eiffel.
Today is Indepedence Day in the USA which celebrates the 223rd birthday, being founded on 4 Jul 1776, with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This also represents a time of reflection for myself with elj.com (Eiffel Liberty).
It is two years ago since I registered elj.com. The name Eiffel Liberty was easy to come up with. It represented a vision and a hope for Eiffel that somehow it might be liberated from its miserable place in the language landscape (I thought how could such a great contribution, be so categorically and overwhelmingly dismissed by the programming community). Also, Emma Lazarus's words struck a chord with me, particularlyJust as America provided opportunity for many from other lands, I thought Eiffel could provide the same kind of opportunities for the syntactically and semantically battered from the other language landscapes :-)
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Also, the name Eiffel Liberty made what a I thought was a nice connection between two famous landmarks that Gustave Eiffel had contributed to, being the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty "Eiffel undertook the challenge of creating the steel structure because of the enormous challenge it afforded him".
The 4 Jul 1997 was to be the launch date for the Eiffel Liberty Journal. However, I came down with a very bad cold (too many late nights preparing for the initial launch) and I decided to publish the launch issue of the Eiffel Liberty Journal, not from my newly acquired elj.com but from my progsoc web pages (this would remain the case for another six months).
It was fun putting together the first issue as I received cooperation from all I contacted. These included:Also Bertrand Meyer's classic newsgroup posting from early May 97, Avoiding the second historic mistake (I remember Bertrand once referring to this as collective hypnosis :-) gave the opportunity to publish a few articles from the newsgroup thread that ensued - eg Jeffrey Stulin's If Eiffel is so great, why isn't it popular? and Thomas Beale's Eiffel: An Industry Experience.
- Bertrand Meyer who allowed to me publish some small extracts from OOSC2.
- John Potter (my Software Engineering Lecturer who introduced me to Eiffel in the spring of 1993) who specially wrote an article on
Project Bruce: Translating from Eiffel to Java- Victor Putz who wrote a great article titled Toymakers and tools: Why one game developer is switching to Eiffel. Victor is a game programmer by night and a helicopter pilot/instructor by day. I remember Victor making a special trip (about 30 km each way) to send me the article because of flooding in his area which made his normal internet access impossible. BTW, I have found that Victor shares and
articulates (much better than I ever could) my own vision for Eiffel.
I was delighted when Bjarne Stroustrup allowed me to publish Why C++ is not just an Object-Oriented Programming Language and Melier Page Jones allowed me to publish Object Orientation: Making the Transition
Two years on, elj.com has changed from a random journal to a daily random news update covering the Eiffel and related worlds. In many ways elj.com is really just a log of the links and resources I have stumbled across and that I might learn from (or even get a laugh from).
Eiffel certainly enjoys a wider exposure than it did back in 1997. I hope elj.com has helped in a small way. It is hard tell what impact elj.com has had as there is little feedback. However, occasionally I do get a note saying that elj.com helped someone get started with Eiffel, which seems to make it all worthwhile. I guess elj.com could have been much more effective but there is only so much time.
For a number of reasons I renamed Eiffel Liberty to elj.com Extraordinarily Large Jumble in Feb 99 (some of the reasoning behind this was that elj.com was and still is, an Extraordinarily Large Jumble of seemingly random links and more significantly there was little or no Eiffel news). Fortunately, there now appears to be more Eiffel news than I can handle/report manually and I am making efforts to address this through a more automated Eiffel news feed at elj-daily.
elj.com has amassed an incredible amount of links, quotes and resources relating to Eiffel and related worlds. The time has come for elj.com to be able to extract the information from this mass. A keyword/search facility is on the way.
I believe that for [open source] projects to thrive, information needs to readily at hand. I hope the new elj.com that you will see over the coming weeks/months (depends on how much time I get to work on this) will reflect the ability to provide this information efficiently and effectively.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support that Jenny has given me over the last few years. She has had to cope (in more ways than one) with more than anyone should reasonably have to tolerate.
[..] memories don’t seem to live ‘in’ the photographs. Instead, each photo is like a key, which triggers or accesses a memory (*) that actually lives in your mind. But without the photo to act as a key, there may be no other way to access the memory (*). What then? If a memory (*) is rendered inaccessible, it’s lost. Sometimes you lose memories by synaptic degradation; other times, by misplacing a photo.via Your Oddly-Shaped Mind (*) by Melting Asphalt (*).
Whatever our calling, whether we are scientists, engineers, poets, public servants, or parents, we all live in a complex, and ever-changing world, and all of us deserve what's in this toolbox: critical thinking skills; knowledge (*) of the past (*) and other cultures (*); an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics; access to the insights of great writers and artists; a willingness to experiment, to open up to change (*); and the ability to navigate ambiguity (*).via An MIT Dean's Defense of the Humanities (*) by AthanasiusKircher (*).
Photographs need to be seen with context in mind. Many photographs are created with a very specific context in mind [..] But context can also be an anchor that prevents access. [..] [some] speak directly to us; many of them escape their context and talk of the human condition [..] these photographs show what happens when a master photographer sets up her or his camera: The results will stand the test of time and, inevitably, they will want to break out of whatever context they might have found themselves originally in.via A few thoughts on Lewis Hine (*) by Jorg Colberg (*).
Can I suggest that you print out and save some of the digital images you currently take of family and friends? You may not always keep track of the digital work that we make these days but the sheer physical-ness of a printed object makes it a more valuable artifact. One that's easier to access and harder to throw away.via Old School Instagram. We used to call them Polaroids (*) by Kirk Tuck (*).
Amazing to me what power there is locked in a single image.
