Miscellaneous | Betchablog

4Aug/071

I, Rearrangement Servant

Have you ever needed to create an anagram for a word or phrase? An anagram is where you take all the letters in the word or phrase and rearrrange them to form a new word or phrase.

For example, the word "betchaboy" can be rearranged into Hey Bobcat, Tabby Echo, Batch Obey, Ace Thy Bob or Echo by Tab. I never said they had to make sense, but they might make good names the next time you need an alias for some website login where you don't want to use your real name.

Short words are pretty easy to make anagrams from, but the longer they get, the harder it is to come up with something coherent. Unless you enlist the help of a bit ot technology to help you of course... try heading over to the Internet Anagram Server, type in your name, word or phrase and see what you get.

If you come up with anything really good, share it in the comments.

Tags: anagram

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2Aug/071

Lessons from Geese

Do you have as much sense as a Goose? I first read this little piece of writing many years ago and thought it was wonderful...

As each goose flaps its wings, it creates an "uplift" for the birds that follow. By flying in a ‘V’ formation, the whole flock adds 71% extra flying range. People who share a sense of community can help each other get where they are going more easily… because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.

When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back to take advantage of the lifting power of the birds in front. If we have as much sense as geese, we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.

When the lead goose tires, it drops back into the formation and another goose flies to the point position. It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks. We should respect and protect each other’s unique arrangement of skills, capabilities, talents and resources.

The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those up front to keep up with their speed. We need to make sure our honking is encouraging. In groups where there is encouragement, production is much greater. Individual empowerment results from quality honking.

When a goose gets sick, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times, as well as when we are strong.

Today I stumbled across a video version of it on YouTube, made by advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. I recall seeing it years ago, but had completely forgotten about it. It has some beautiful slo-mo footage of Canada Geese as the words float in and out over the images... I'd love to know where the music comes from too...

I shared the video with a group of students today, so I thought I'd share it with you here on the blog as well. Enjoy.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Tags: video, encouragement, geese

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26Jun/070

If I was a Superhero

Since my Year 7 students will be doing a unit of work next semester on Superheros, I was doing a little surfing around the web to find some resources. (Or should that be "silver surfing"?)

In the process I stumbled across this little quiz that asks you to select a bunch of your personality traits so it can tell you which famous superhero you are most like. Apparently, I would make a good Iron Man... Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Iron Man		75%
Spider-Man		75%
The Flash		70%
Supergirl		60%
Robin		55%
Hulk		55%
Superman		55%
Wonder Woman		50%
Green Lantern		50%
Catwoman		45%
Batman		45%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Not being a huge comic book fan, I've never actually heard of Iron Man. However, according to Wikipedia he was a Marvel Comic books character based loosely on the rich and eccentric Howard Hughes. "Howard Hughes was one of the most colorful men of our time. He was an inventor, an adventurer, a multi-millionaire, a ladies man and finally a nutcase." Hmmm, well, I'm not really a multi-millionaire yet and I don't quite have the superhero six-pack happening, but most of the rest of it could work.

Of course, if you need some more inspiration for becoming a whole new breed of superhero, you might like to try out Lee's Useless Superhero Generator... it helps you create a whole new class of superhero, such as VibroYak with his powers of Pyrokinesis and secret weapon of Vibro Needles! Yeah! Take that Spiderman!

So, which Super are you? Leave a comment!

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17Jun/070

Rumour. Open your ears;

You may have noticed that I changed the tagline at the top of my blog to the rather cryptic phrase "Rumour. Open your ears; ". You may be asking what that's all about...

I was looking through that recent post about monkeys and typewriters and discovered that there actually have been experiments where they have done exactly that ... set a bunch of simulated chimpanzees loose on a simulated typewriters to see what happens. Interestingly, so far they have not managed to recreate the entire works of William Shakespeare.

However, apparenty the 24 character string of "Rumour. Open your ears; " is so far the longest coherent phrase typed by a sim chimp randomly pressing keys on a typewriter. I don't know why I thought that was so funny, but I did.

And it seemed a perfect tagline for a blog.

technorati tags:chimps

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31May/070

These Boots were made for Walking

I blogged recently about my effort to raise funds for MS research by taking part in the MS Walk and Fun Run here in Sydney. Thanks to a great deal of support from friends, family and workmates I've managed to raise a decent amount of money for this great cause.

The people from MS Australia rang me recently to ask if I'd be prepared to do an interview with the local newspaper to help promote the event and naturally I said yes. So one of the journos from my local paper rang me at work the other day to ask a few questions, and organise a photographer to come by my house.

The angle I suggested to the journo was that I was really impressed by the online tools provided by MS Australia, such as the fundraising websites that are created when you register for the event, and that one of the reasons I have been able to raise as much as I have was due to the connections and tools that the Internet enables. I pointed out that many of my friends and aquaintances from the Blogosphere have been responsible for a lot of the support I've received so far and so a good angle on the story was how technology can be an enabler that lets us be more effective. I suppose they hinted at this angle in the article, but it's pretty tenuous. Anyway, that was the general idea I was suggesting.

My local paper is caller The Leader, and although they do a fairly good job of reporting local news, they have a habit of sometimes only getting the facts close-to-correct (and hence are sometimes referred to as The Mis-Leader). So in the interests of more accurate journalism, I just wanted to correct a few almost-facts...

1) It was my friend's mum, not my mum's friend, but yes I really do have a friend whose mother died of MS. However, it was a very long time ago, not just "a few years"... it was more like 20+ years. That friend made a very generous sponsorship of this event, so I just wanted to set that fact right out of respect for his mum.

2) The people from Canada and Chicago who sponsored me are very dear friends, and not "strangers", as the article suggests. Yes I did get support from a number of people who I have never met other than through the blogosphere, but my North American connections are certainly not strangers.

And the address for my sponsorship page is http://sydney.mswalk.org.au/?betchaboy if you still want to help me hit my goal of $2000. I'm pretty close!!

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26May/070

Monkey Business

I like this cartoon. It reminded me of that old story about an infinite number of monkeys tapping away on an infinite number of typewriters, and how they would eventually rewrite all the great works of Shakespearian literature. Infinity is a big number. Someone, somewhere, is bound to write something worthwhile eventually.

A little bit like the blogosphere perhaps.

technorati tags:blogging

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2May/073

Celebrity Spotting

When I started teaching at a girls' school after many years teaching boys, I was surprised when one of the students came up to me one day and said "Sir, has anyone ever told you that you look like Russell Crowe?" In fact, at that point in my life, nobody ever had. In fact, it had never really even crossed my mind that I looked like anyone at all. Over the next few months at the school however, I heard the "has anyone ever told you that you look like Russell Crowe?" comment quite a few times. I had never really considered it.

Funnily enough, over the next year or so I started to hear the same comment from people outside the school as well, which was odd because in my previous 40-something years of life, no one had ever said it to me. It wasn't until I arrived in Canada during the year of my teaching exchange that one of the neighbours said to me one day "Do you know who you look like?"... "Russell Crowe!" that I started to wonder if there really was something to this whole resemblance thing. For the next 12 months I was called Russell by a group of the neighbours who thought it was pretty funny. Just to complete the illusion, I even dressed as a Gladiator for Halloween that year!

Anyway, I had to laugh the other day when I took a group of Year 7 kids on an excursion into the NSW Art Gallery to see the Archibald Prize. As we walked down the path to the Botanical Gardens later that day to have lunch, one of the other teachers excitedly told us that she had seen the real Russell Crowe pushing his baby carriage through the park, which makes sense because I understand that Russell has a place not far from there, down on the Finger Wharf.

I was disappointed to have missed seeing the real Mr Crowe for myself. Not that I am at all starstruck by Hollywood celebrities. Far from it. I just wished I had seen him so I could have taken the opportunity to walk up to him, look in in the eye and say "Hey Russell, has anyone ever told you that you look like Chris Betcher?"

So what do you think? Is it just an overactive imagination or is there something to this resemblance thing?

Technorati Tags: Chris Betcher, Russell Crowe

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16Jan/071

Funny but Flat

A friend sent me an email with this note in it. I had a chuckle at the intended humour, and quickly realised just how close to the mark it really was. I made a few minor modifications to it, but here it is...

Question: What is the truest definition of Globalization?

Answer: Princess Diana's death.

You ask why? An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian who was drunk on Scottish whisky followed closely by Italian Paparazzi on Japanese motorcycles; treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian medicines.

This is posted to an Australian blog site, using American technology, and you're probably reading this on a computer that use Taiwanese chips and a Korean monitor, assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant.

That, my friends - is Globalization!

I realise there are probably a couple of liberties taken with the truth there, but on the whole it is amazing when you start to think about just how global the world has become in the last couple of decades.

The point is, how do we tap into that level of diversity in our schools? The world has become one big village, and more and more people in the world of business and government seem to know how important is is to be able to share and collaborate together in that village. The one environment where we still forget (or ignore) this global village concept seems to be in our school system, where working globally is still largely seen as a novel approach to teaching moreso than a necessity of a 21st century education.

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13Jan/071

So Many Places

Following on from the "Five Things" meme that floated through the edublogosphere recently, Kim Cofino's blog had a nice little post about listing the places in the world she's been to. I was impressed by her map, and thought I'd give it a go too. This website will let you highlight the places in the world you've been, and I thought it very cool.

I have to admit that mine probably looks a little more impressive than it really is... There are places I've been to that were short localised visits, but this tool highlights the whole country. So although I've only been to Hong Kong, the map shows all of China. Likewise, I certainly haven't seen all that much of North America yet. And yes, I have been to a lot of islands throughout the Pacific, but it was with my parents when I was much, much younger, so really, I haven't travelled nearly as much as I wish I had.

Not travelling more extensively is one of my biggest regrets in life actually, although I guess it's never too late to make up for lost time. I'll certainly be encouraging my own kids to see as much of the world as possible when they get older.

For what it's worth, here is a breakdown of the US States... still plenty of room to explore there too!