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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?”

russell1.jpg chris2.JPG russell2.jpg chris1.JPG

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

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Introducing the Book

This video is doing the rounds at the moment and has appeared on a few other blogs, but just in case you haven’t seen it, I thought I’d post about it here.  Set in medieval times, it tells the story of a new book user, just making the transition from the tried and tested scroll.  He can’t figure out a few things about this new fangled technology, so he calls the helpdesk.  Know any teachers like this?

Make sure you stay right to the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek
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Funny Name, Great Tool

Ecto ImageI’ve shifted houses recently and my access to good quality broadband has been a patchy, which explains why I’ve been a bit sporadic with these blog posts. I’m not always online when I get the urge to write. I could write it in Word and do a cut-and-paste I suppose, but I just don’t seem to like doing it that way.

Enter Ecto. Ecto is an offline blogging tool. I bought a copy a while back, simply on the basis that it was a damn good idea, even though I didn’t use it all that much and tended to just blog directly into WordPress or Blogger or whatever. But with my sporadic broadband lately I’ve rediscovered just what a cool tool Ecto is. It let’s you write your blog posts offline, with all the features you would get when online. It even handles Technorati tags directly in the application (which makes sense since the author of the software apparently works for Technorati Japan.) It has great support for linking and embedding stuff into your posts, including iPhoto and iTunes integration, time stamp adjustments, word counts, draft and publish control and so on… my only complaint is that I’d like to see better support for image alignment and text wrapping options, but maybe I just haven’t found that yet.

I never understood the name, but according to my dictionary the word Ecto means outer; external; on the outside, so I now see how that concept relates to an offline blogging editor. It’s available for both Windows and Macintosh, and you can check it out at http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

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