Wheeee! Today, I started teaching at Humber College. My first class was at 11:45am and is called "Web Production for Fashion". I'm teaching for the Humber School of Business, and soon I'll have a key to the school of business office after hours, where I'll have my own desk, and where I already have my own mailbox. How cool is that!

My students? 43 fashion arts students who neither like computers, nor are savvy with them, but who think the course "could be neat".

I got there a bit early and booted up my laptop, and started playing some Portishead and Mojave3 for while they were coming in. I thought that was cool of me :)

Some of them were initially like "We already made websites last year!!" and I was like "Uh, I'm redundant?!" but after discussion they were like "Yeah, at Geocities" and i was like "Ahhh.... Class, I'd like to introduce you to Notepad.exe" hehe... THEN they gave me respect :)

So, today I was just expecting to go over a little internet history, and how to create new files, and how to organize folders, and how to use the "search" feature of windows to find files you may have lost. BUT, that only took an hour, out of 3.

So, then I covered the html, hr, body, head, and title tags, as well as ordered and unordered lists, bold, italic, and underline. Wheeee! They were all able to create a basic HTML document, and find it on their hard drives, and open it in IE by the end of the class. Not too shabby for my first time :)

I'll be teaching this weekly, and will also be teaching an Internet Management class (Client-side scripting) for the School of Media Studies at Humber. This is just the beginning...

Okay, so on Friday a former professor of mine invited me on a tour of Seneca@York's multi-media lab. Sounded great, so I met him there at 10:30am.

What he actually *meant* was "would you like to be a Trent Alumni Association Representative" in some negotiations between Seneca College's computer studies department and Trent University's.

So, I did get a tour, and it was awesome because they had lots to gain from giving us the *full* tour (Read: degrees for their college students).

Their facilities are AMAZING!
Think full fibre-optic network with 4 Terabytes of storage!
Think **hundreds** of Mac G4s, with 256 RAM, AND DVD BURNERS!
Their "Pentium Labs" actually contain P4 machines with DUAL CPUs, running Windows 2000, with 1 GIG of RAM each, and 60 Gig harddrives.
Think a $2 million virtual television studio (virtual sets, real studio).
Think another tv studio, and 17 audio editing labs, and 1 real radio station, and a 24 hour radio station.
Not to mention their pair of Silicon Graphics Onyx2 machines, and their SGI Supercomputer.

I was flabbergasted.

After they bought us a nice Japanese meal, we discussed things more, then the prof and the other "Alumni Rep" and I left to discuss things more.... at the Buttonville Airport. Don't ask me why we went there. The prof loves to watch airplanes. I have no more explanation than that :)

I forgot to mention that I saw a few movies this week! First off, Planet of the Apes. Tim Roth as General Thade is definitely the best thing this movie has to offer, along with Helena Bonham Carter, whose emotions and makeup were amazing! They really look like *great* apes! Thade is a massively frightening & powerful character. Marky Mark is also a good anti-hero (he's a wimp in the movie).

Second, Memento
This was one of the most unexpected gems of a movie I have come across. Almost no promotion or commercials about it. I suppose that is because it is one of those movies that requires moviegoers to actually *think* and not be passive.... thus eluding most north american audiences. Guy Pearce and Carrie Anne Moss are excellente :) It's about a guy who has *no* short term memory. He knows who he is, but cannot make any new memories. Someone murders his wife, and he tries to be a detective, but without memory, it's hard.

Last, O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Excellent movie!!! Wow. George Clooney gets muchos respectos from me for this little treat. The story (apparently loosely based on Homer's "The Odyssey") of 3 partners in crime in the old South of the US. Funny stuff!

I was just going through some photos and came across this one. I am completely filthy... Yes, you guessed it... that was taken when I got home from working in the oil field last summer. I looked like that every day for 4 months. It was insane. DO you know what it feels like to be covered in black goo when it's 40 degrees out and you're in the sun all day wearing full coveralls and steel-toed work boots? Oh man. What a nutty time!

Last night I went to the Canadian Premier of Rush Hour 2, as my friend Steve somehow managed to score 2 free passes from 2 gorgeous women, who we went with. Sounded good to me!

Okay, this movie made everyone laugh out loud... a lot! It's very funny. Chris Tucker makes the movie. Jackie Chan's english is noticeably improved over any of his previous movies. The out-takes at the end are brutally funny as well :) He doesn't do as much wham-bam action as usual. This is more of a traditional cop movie in that sense. It's a lot more about the relationship between Jackie and Chris than Rush Hour 1.

When I got home I watched the making of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon... and they said that the title refers to a tiger who is sleeping. The fact that the tiger looks all nice and peaceful, doesn't mean there isn't a fierce dragon hidden inside. The title was referring to the young sword-fighting woman/villain of the movie. She was a crouching tiger, with a hidden dragon.

Ah ha!