integrating technology
grades K - 12 tofu
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integrating technology
grades K - 12 tofu
It is so fundamental but the loo can so govern the day, especially in China.
(Loo being Australian/British and etc. for toilet: (From Wikipedia: “When people flung their potty waste out of the window, they
would shout "Gardez l'eau"
[gar-day low]. That's French for "watch out for the water". We
probably get the word "loo" from this expression, although some
people think it comes from "Room 100" which is what European people
used to call the bathroom.” “The word
appears to originate no earlier than James Joyce's usage in Ulysses in 1922 --
"O yes, mon loup. How
much cost? Waterloo. water closet." -- perhaps
Joyce came up with it.”)
My favorite is at the Shangri-La in Shanghai with
a remote control for many functions; spray water, various forms of heat and
many buttons that I did not try. The loo at the Vutup
Dentist Clinic at the Shangri-La Hotel Dalian is a treat. As soon as the door
is open the seat pops up, it is warm and it too has buttons. I have yet to be
game to push them but Narda tried one and it gave her
a bit of a spray wash – she did not try the other buttons. OK the picture does not give much of the
pleasure of use but compared to the usual toilets in China, even at the ultra-
modern new Dalian North Railroad station, it is a real find. I hate squat
toilets and in my two years here have not used one except to pee. Anything else
waits until I get home or find a western hotel. Last week a woman’s baby got
flushed down one (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/chinese-baby-flushed-down-toilet-1923771)
and survived. I always thought that someday I should have therapy about the
fact I was put in an orphanage and taken out three times then finally adopted
by some mad-cap Christians in 1950 but this person is going to really need therapy.
Narda has the technique down – the squatting part and
does not mind too much. She has demonstrated to whomever is interested – not in
real-action, but showing 
us a good squat position to make things move
along. The worst toilets are in the Jinshitan Market where, if one can get past the smells,
even the women just squat along a wall with an open trough. Narda,
a user of said trough, could not understand the gestures of a woman squatting
next to her one time. She kept point a finger in the air – not the finger but a
finger – this is China where people are not as rude as us Westerners. Then Narda realised the woman was
telling her to put her bag on a hook on the wall so it would not touch the foul
floor.
Toilets in Holland I find difficult
too, and though they are proper sit-down toilets the drain is placed in the
front so everything sits not in water but on the base, stinking up the room
until flushed. I suppose if one watched heaps of ER shows, or Grey’s Anatomy
and had an interest in what their deposits in the loo looked like they could
easily observe it in a Dutch toilet.
Not sure how I got onto this topic when
there was so much other I wanted to note to remember the past two weeks, but at
one am I was so wide awake and it being
Saturday night well actually Sunday morning I thought I would write a bit then
go back to bed. It is now three AM and my concern is that I will be sleepy for Sunday
which I suppose is fine as all we will do is shop at the local Longshawn Village for veggies and tofu for the week. Couple
with the fact that I have taken photos of loos for some odd reason – maybe just
to appreciate what a proper one with heat, spray and the what-not incorporated
within. I think adding music would be good – something classical – though hip-hop
could be OK. Even country and western would be fine – they are always talking
about loss. Then there are the blues, surely we could have some really good B
King tunes play when we sat and shat. The one at the Vutup Clinic is adequate though. As soon as the door is
open the seat cover pops up and when you leave it goes back down. It does not
differentiate between male or female so the seat ring thing is still down and needs
to be lifted for the male release thing.
It is three am so I will try once again
to go to sleep. I had already lain awake for an hour before getting up at one
am. My mind is so active. Not sure why. School is full-on, we leave for the
summer in two and a half weeks for the States a couple of weeks then Australia
for four weeks and a side trip to Malaysia so it is all pretty chilled and no
reason not to sleep. I tried to contact the inner Self and find peace and
solace using techniques I learned back in the 1970s when I was a brother in the
Holy Order of Mans but they did not work and I question these past few years
whether all what I once believed in whilst in my decade long metaphysical stupor
was real or are we just caught up in evolution’s game being nothing more than
the ones who prepare the next generation who will do the same and within all
that the species evolves toward something or the other?
nto three words on the signs though in reality, my
reality, they are really one word: Jin Shi Tan, Xiao Yao Wan (the stop for the
future city, Wolong Bay, that is being built – see my youtube video from last year at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drgVo45WWs) DD Port, Bao
Shu Qui, Kai Fai Qu (5 colur city see my clip of Kaifaiqu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAz3eqFzfRg), Jim Ma Li, Da Lian
Wan (in the Ganjingzi District of Dalian City), Hou Yan, Auan
Shui (markets), Jin Jai Jie,
Xiang Lu Jiao (Metro, Sams Club, Decathlon sports store
- 迪卡侬(香炉礁店, Ikea) and finally stopping at the last
stop - Dalian Station. The school’s shopping
bus stops at Metro where we fill boxes and suitcases of what we need for a
month then put it on the bus and go off for the day. The bus driver unloads our
crap back at Campus Village and we collect it whenever we drag our sorry asses
back home.
On the kuai-gui 快轨 home, about a 45 minute ride, Narda managed to rush onto the train at the Dalian Station
and get a seat. I was fast but when a hundred Chinese are going for a couple of
dozen seats it is the really quick who get a seat and I was left standing to analyze
my poor strategy for getting a seat. Never the one to shy away from strangers I
saw Narda and the girl next to her passing the girl’s
cell phone back and forth. They did this all the way to the Kai Fai Qu station where suddenly Narda
moved over giving me a space to sit. They were using the phone to carry on a
conversation with both translating back and forth and the topic of discussion was
that when the girl got off I would have a seat. At the start of their ‘conversation’
the girl wrote that Narda could help her with
learning English. This is what is so enjoyable about living here; people will
find a way to communicate whether they share a common language or not.
Last weekend Narda’s
sister, Carolin and her husband Michael stopped in
for a couple of days. They are celebrating being fifty and are on the way to
Holland, England, France and places like that. On Saturday evening we went into
Dalian on the light rail - kuai-gui to stay overnight at the Harbour View Hotel and we went to see the Beijing Beatles on
the rooftop at the Lenbach German Restaurant ( Xinghai Square). They were
sponsored by the International Club of Dalian. I have a short video clip at http://youtu.be/WzsnK6uUQx8 without watching the clip let it
suffice to say they were quite terrible sounding. Narda
had just done a Beatles concert a few days earlier with her elementary children
and they were much better. A couple of Narda’s
fourth/fifth graders were at the gig and they went on stage and told the
Beijing Beatles who by the way are from Australian and great
Britain - that they sang the wrong words for Yellow Submarine. The children
would know that one as they sand it for weeks before their concert. I heard
them daily as my video-film studio at Dalian American International School is
next door to Narda’s music room. A lot of my little
video shows I do twice weekly with my students for the school to play has her
children singing off in the background because of our thin walls. There were a
lot of expats at the show – many from our school and it was enjoyable no matter
the fact that they were not in harmony, missed lyrics, and were just generally
horrible. They have a website which make them sound good http://thebeijingbeatles.com/ but in
reality – think of a college piss-up where everyone knows the lyrics because it
is the Beatles and there is a lot of drinking going on and no one really cares
how bad the band sounds because it is so easy to sing along.
We have two weeks
left of work then we are off to the States (NYC, upstate New York, and
Atlanta), Malaysia, and Australia then back at the start of August. As usual
life is hectic at school with so many things to deal with. In my little world
things are great with my film class and our setting up a film program and
studio. We have been going nuts with blue screens and having lots of
interesting backgrounds. I am still looking for a proper professional camera
for next school year with little luck. I will probably have to wait until
Australia to get one. It has been an amazing year for me both as technology
integration coordinator as we move toward a one-to-one device program. It is a
challenge with so many devices and operating systems. Back at Albany Academy
when I was the Director of Technology it was straight forward, we all used macs
and that was it. In my video production class thanks to an Intel grant we are
getting set up well and coming with good products, looking forward to next
school year.
In my little self-centred world I have been creating web pages since the
early 1990s when the World Wide Web was first invented. I have created
thousands of pages and have many domains as any self-serving Leo would:
neuage.org, neuage.me, neuage.mobi, neuage.us, neuage.info, to name just a few.
Last week I put a tracker-cookie on 590 pages (about ten percent of my pages)
so I could have a better idea of where people go so I could improve and change
them to more mobile friendly and perhaps start creating neuage
apps for my tofu pages or my picture poems, children stories, many blogs and
etc. I thought it would give me a good idea of where the masses are flocking to.
As a night-mare on Leo Street would have it after three days I had one hit to
one page out of 590. I think I could be in a record book for having the fewest
visits to the most created pages on the web. Narda does
not understand why I would care if anyone visited any of my webpages but she is
a Gemini so I understand her confusion. I have Mars conjunct Uranus in Gemini
so I do have a little bit of non-Leo in my makeup and I know that part of me;
Mars and Uranus confuse me often as well as those around me.
When Narda’s sister and brother-in-law were here last weekend we
went to the Jinshitan Markets –
And in Dalian to the
Korean Market
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