The teaching fun is back

I’ve always enjoyed teaching. There is something in it that makes me feel good. I don’t know what is that though. Maybe I feel the satisfaction from the process. Maybe it is easier to see the results. Maybe it’s all the communications envolved. Or maybe I like well defined goals.

Anyway, it seems that I will be enjoying whatever is that I am enjoying so much about it again. This time though it is teaching on steroids. Instead of single students, I will have a whole group of about 10 people. I will give them a 12-hour course (3 hours a week for one month) on effective data mining. It’s just a fancy title for a bunch of common knowledge though.

The course will include a brief overview of search engines, detailed coverage of Google, and a bunch of new tools and services such as RSS, Atom, blogosphere, Bloglines, Delicious, Technorati, Flickr, and stuff like that. I don’t yet have course notes or anything for that matter except for course outline, but I hope I will develop all I need during the next week and a half. The course will start from the beginning of October and I think I have plenty of time to do everything properly.

In the meantime, if you have any links that you might think I will find useful, let me know via comments.

Progress with the Gallery2

I am satisfied with the process of my migration to Gallery2. Most of the things work already. Here is a brief round-up:

  • All images and albums are imported, sorted, and thumbnailed.
  • Few albums are tagged for easier searching.
  • Old style of URLs is configured and working. All old links should be fine now.
  • I have familiarized myself with Gallery2 internals a bit. Maybe even more than I intended to.

Continue reading Progress with the Gallery2

The One

Jet Li is almost a guarantee of a good action movie with lots of martial arts. Not yet, but he is surely getting there. I rented “The One“, because I was too lazy to look for something else and I agreed to watch a Jet Li movie.

Directed by: James Wong
Genres: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Cast: Jet Li, Carla Gugino, Delroy Lindo, Jason Statham, James Morrison, Dylan Bruno, Archie Kao, Richard Steinmetz, Steve Rankin, Tucker Smallwood, Harriet Sansom Harris, David Keats, Dean Norris, Ron Zimmerman, Darin Morgan
IMDB raintg: 5.4
My rating: 6.0 [rate 6.0]

Continue reading The One

Is it love?

After all our doctors’ appointments, Olga, Maxim, and I went to Pizza Hut for lunch. And there she was – a waiter. Maxim and she looked like they fell in love from the first sight. She grabbed him from my weakend hands, hugged him, and kissed him. He smiled at her and was charmingly flirting with her. She carried him all around the Pizza Hut from our table to the kitchen and back. He laughed and talked to her. She gave him a present – one of those crazy Japanese toys collection. He didn’t want to leave.

They definetely had their romantic moment there. I wonder is it love or will it pass…

One down, two to go

We’ve been sorting out Maxim’s doctors’ appointments today. There are some good news, and there are some news expectations. Luckily – no bad news for today.

But first things first. We went to the oculist office again to check on the status of Maxim’s eye. As you can remember, we were doing the vision check five days ago and discovered that there is a scratch on his right retina. Doctor confirmed that everything is OK now and that the scratch is gone and fully healed. These are the good news.

Continue reading One down, two to go