Yesterday one of my colleagues expressed how one has to watch the footage of the tsunami to really understand the scale and power of what just happened in Japan.  Up to that time, I had read about it, but not watched any footage.  I decided to do as he suggested,…

One of the things we use a lot in our audio and canvas demos and libraries, is Typed Arrays.  A typed array looks and feels a lot like a native JavaScript array, but for situations where your data is uniform, and of the same type (cf. buffers of sound or…

PBS is writing about our work with them this week on the President's State of the Union Speech and Mozilla, so I thought I'd write something, too. This week my team and I at Seneca's CDOT were handed a great opportunity.  My colleague Brett Gaylor was in Washington, meeting with…

Our girls are taking piano lessons, and really enjoying it, in no small part because their teacher is so good.  Her approach, which favours understanding over memorization and a reasonable learning pace over a standards approach, means that they are much more willing to experiment beyond the sheet music they've…

One of the things I love about twitter is the very thing that so many point to as its great weakness, namely, that everything gets boiled down to something so short it can't help be lack for content.  When people say this, they imagine that we always talk about something…

Yesterday I spent the day in various curriculum meetings with my colleagues at Seneca.  We were discussing, among other things, how best to update our Internet programming courses (conclusions: html5, more js, jquery), where we're at with our programming stream, and how best to deal with the need for more…

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I don't typically feel the need to write New Year's reflections, or make predictions about the future.  Not usually.  However, I have been thinking about 2010 over the holidays, and trying to distill for myself some of what was significant. My blog's readership increased by a factor of 10 in…

While reading George MacDonald's "At the Back of the North Wind" this afternoon, I was forced to halt my reading in order that I might satisfy an etymological question raised by the text.  At one point, while riding a top a horse led by his father through London,…

I wanted to lay two posts beside one another for you, two posts written by two James.  The first is by James Shelley, and is about the real meaning of passion, as rooted in suffering: The word passion comes from the Latin passio, which implied suffering and the endurance of…