I really can’t believe no one has thought of this yet.

Two out of every five people to test the new design proudly reported no lasting eye damage.

I spotted this on the Rebecca Writes blog and pasted in one of my previous posts:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

That’s quite a compliment, although it appears that it uses a simple reading level algorithm for matches. David and I both tend toward long words and long sentences.

Try it out yourself: iwl.me

I can’t think of all that much else to write. The title is pretty self-explanatory.

We dropped it off this afternoon and protected it from the elements as best we could. All the drawers, legs, and fasteners are included.

Artist's conception of free desk left leaning against the free store shed. Not exactly as shown.

The desk looks something like the photograph to the right, but is a bit darker and made with thigh-bruising sharp corners.

I hope someone can give it a home before the next rain shower de-laminates the edge trim even further. The top surfaces are in very good shape.

It’s built like a tank, so bring a friend and a truck to cart it away.

I bought it from a used furniture store in Kingston about 20 years ago and it has served me faithfully for all that time.

I guess I could think of more to write after all. Sniff. Goodbye ol’ Desky McDeskerton. Sniff, sniff.

In my early teens I found my grandfather’s straight razor at the bottom of a dusty leather trunk. I managed to shave my wispy whiskers twice with that wicked thing, nicking only a few minor arteries with my trembling hand. Having neither skill nor honing strop, I abandoned the project, turning to an old Remington electric model for the next dozen years.

Eventually I cottoned to the fact that electric razors don’t work well for lazy shavers in humid climates, so I bought a Gillette Atra, and its pivoting double blades have kept me scruff-free since.

In recent years I’ve grown ever more worried that Mr. Gillette would halt production of my Atra cartridges, in a bid to force me to upgrade to his latest exorbitant pentablade contraption. The Atra cartridges are expensive enough after all, and they date back to the 1970s.

It then occurred to me that I could turn to an old and nearly forgotten technology: the safety razor.

Remember when airplane and hotel bathrooms had little slits for disposing of your used razor blades? If you do, you also remember when watches were wound, telephones were dialed, and the remote control was a younger sibling positioned in front of the tube.

Yes, progress has marched inexorably forward, but miraculously, you can still buy safety razor handles and blades. While in Vancouver this past week, I picked out a Merkur 83C matte barber-pole model for about the cost of four sets of Atra cartridges:

Single blade, front & back. No lubricating strip. No vibrating action. No reverse moustache and sideburns trimmer. Just 100% pure manliness carved out of a quarter-pound of chrome steel.

I’m still learning the proper technique for shaving with this bad boy, but the good news is that the blades are less than half the cost of my old cartridges.

I guess I’ll need to install a disposal slit in the bathroom.

It’s the last week of the on-line Instructional Media course that I’ve been taking as part of the BC Provincial Instructor Diploma Program. For our final project, students create a choice of an educational blog, wiki, podcast, video, or any other digital media artefact. Having had some experience with most of those, I decided to tackle something new for me: a screencast.

For added challenge, I also chose not to produce a narrated screencast, but instead one that uses text to explain the proceedings. That turned out to be much more difficult than I first imagined.

The topic of my screencast is “What If?” analysis using spreadsheets. It’s a simple enough concept — play with the numbers until the spreadsheet calculates an appealing result — but it’s a good introduction to the power of spreadsheets for students that previously used them to store checklists or addresses, if they used them at all. “What If?” analysis also demonstrates everything that computers are good at: repetition, calculation, and graphical presentation. That’s really the underlying theme of the Practical Computer Fluency course that I regularly teach at the College.

The product of my efforts is below. The text is a bit small, so you may instead want to view the full-size version. In either case, you can click the little button at the bottom-right of the player to expand the video to the entire screen.

I’m pleased with the outcome, even though its educational value is limited. You will notice that it’s quite difficult to follow in places; my test audience had to repeat sections over and over again.

If you find that the tune begins to wear after some six minutes, try editing a video with that as the soundtrack. Makes one pine for the dulcet tone of a vuvuzela.