Of Hand Mowers And Grass-cutters

Blogfather Glenn Reynolds had this to say about hand-powered mowers and grass-cutters:

Still, the unpowered reel mower that they test -- it's very similar to the one that I own -- gets high marks:

This archaic, human-powered technology still has its strengths. At a run, it was faster than the walk-behind mower. It was the most maneuverable and lightest machine, and the easiest to store in a crowded garage. The sweat level was high, but it scored well on moral superiority: No emissions, little noise, and the only fuel to buy was Gatorade. Big complaint: It rolls over weeds without cutting them — a real drawback at my place.

That is the main drawback, one that I deal with by using one of these. Another advantage of the unpowered mower is that you can start your kids mowing with them earlier -- my daughter mowed her first lawn at the age of 9. And the PopMech advice to wear earplugs when using any kind of power mower is good advice -- I've done that since I was a teenager (also for live music and shooting), and my hearing remains surprisingly good.

And I use exactly the same kind of tools, a hand-powered mower ably assisted by an electric grass-cutter or weed-whacker. Long extension cord recommended.

And I see absolutely no-drawbacks, all beneficial results. Since I jog regularly, what better exercise for one’s upper body than mowing your lawn – this way.

And economic benefits, too. Got this mower over 15 years ago and the grass-cutter, a relatively new addition, about 3 years since the previous one got retired. The old one was commissioned many times for hard-labor duties, cutting over-grown weeds and small brushes. Still that one loyally served for over 20 years.

The Man In Black: Spidey

The 3rd sequel of Spiderman is out and promises to be another summer blockbuster as were the previous two. Or is it a prequel?

Something different has been introduced. Spidey in a black foreboding costume.

Nothing new. For serious Spidey comic book enthusiasts.

Click to read more.

Are You Taken Over By The Internet?

The McPaper of the US, USA Today, has started a “book of lists” series to celebrate its quarter-century existence.

The latest and the sixth is entitled How the Internet Took Over.

For us, consumers/proponents/devotees of the Internet, it might be entertaining to slither through memory lane, just on a 25-year span, to relate with nostalgia how the 25 items on the list personally touched and affected us on a personal basis.

Twenty-five years ago the Internet as we now know it was in the process of being birthed by the National Science Foundation. Since then it's been an information explosion. From e-mail to eBay, communication and shopping have forever changed.

So, let’s start with No. 1.

1 World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee created user-friendly “Web pages” that could travel over the Internet, a network built to shuttle research between universities. The world logged on: 747 million adults in January.

The ubiquitous 3 Ws in each URL we had to type constantly reminded us that we were accessing and becoming part of that Web. But that didn’t preclude our puzzlement over how to distinguish it from the Internet that some had grown accustomed to. It was initially quite difficult to create a mental image of the differences between the web and the Internet, even after consulting their respective definitions.

In review, we present their differentiating definitions:

The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly available worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using a standardized Internet Protocol (IP) and many other protocols. It is made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, domestic and government networks. It carries various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.

A hypermedia-based system for browsing Internet sites. It is named the Web because it is made of many sites linked together; users can travel from one site to another by clicking on hyperlinks. Or "The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." - Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Are we clear now?

2 E-mail
Tech’s answer to the Pony Express. Programs such as 1988’s Eudora made it easy to use. In-boxes have been filling up ever since. Nearly 97 billion e-mails are sent each day.

E-mail gave us the term, snail mail. Just a little pejorative to drive deeper the world of difference between the former with other forms of traditional mail – whether through the postal system, or those private mailing companies like UPS and FedEx. Mail through the speed of light is now our standard measure for efficiency and effectiveness of our communications.

Never got to install Eudora, since I started with the Netscape Navigator email client, which came and gained fame before MS Outlook. When Internet Explorer got bundled with MS Windows operating system, starting with the 95 version, that too signaled the demise of Netscape and its other services. Although the “bundling” got Microsoft back to the courts and into a number of litigation against it. Nevertheless, Internet Explorer was well on its way to its unchallenged monopoly, that is until recently when open-source FireFox threw down its gauntlet for a mighty challenge.

Anyway, back to email.

Now, many users are partial to web-based email services which can be accessed from anywhere internet access can be had.

Can any Internet or Web user now live without one, whether web-based or computer-resident?

3 Graphical user interface (GUI)
Most computer displays were blinking lines of text until Apple featured clickable icons and other graphic tools in its 1984 Mac. Microsoft’s Windows took GUI — pronounced “gooey” — to the masses.

I can remember Apple’s Macintosh proudly display its initial version of GUI, still quite coarse and very low resolution. We can also remember how Windows beat Apple to the draw in capitalizing on GUI, clearly sealing the defeat with the introduction of Windows 95 in 1995. This heavy loss most probably drove Apple to the courts to seek redress, claiming it had prior proprietary rights to graphical interface. No such luck, since the courts ruled against Apple after some years passed. Now GUI is so commonplace that most users now suffer selective amnesia when asked what came before it.

4 AOL
AOL turned people on to Web portals, chat rooms and instant messaging. Early subscribers paid by the hour. AOL once boasted 35 million subscribers. It bought Time Warner for $106 billion in 2001.

AOL blazed through the entire web, decimating whatever competition was already extant. It became the ISP to be a member of. And Steve Case of AOL became the darling of consumer technology enabling AOL to gobble up giant Time Warner.

Say, whatever happened to Steve Case and how is AOL doing?

5 Broadband
The answer to the drip-drip-drip of dial-up, high-speed Internet service fuels online entertainment. About 78% of home Internet users in the U.S. have broadband, up from less than 1% in 1998.

Yes, broad against narrow band of dial-up. Yet even during the drip-drip-drip period of AOL, I shied away and consorted with the “freebies”, starting with Bigger.net and then moving on to Netzero.net before it became for-pay. With Bigger.net and Netzero.net one simply allowed ad sponsors clutter to colonize one’s monitor screen to get free access.

In a couple of years Bigger.net went kaput to be replaced by Netzero.net. The latter has survived to this day but subscription is now for pay. Still cheaper compared to AOL.

Broadband now comes in different flavors – DSL, cable, or satellite/wireless/microwave, and even using your home electric wiring system.

6 Google
So popular it’s a verb. The search powerhouse, with a market capitalization of nearly $149 billion, perfected how we find info on the Web. Google sites had nearly 500 million visitors in December.

What more can one say about Google. The search engine of search engines.

And who were the precursor webcrawlers?

7 Mosaic/Netscape
Created by Marc Andreessen and others, Mosaic was the first widely-used multimedia Web browser. Spin-off Netscape Navigator ruled the ‘90s until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer took off around ‘98.

I still have somewhere the earliest version of Netscape Navigator stored on floppy disks. Numbering 2 or 3 maybe, each holding 1.44Mb of data? But remember during those times, the entire Windows 95 suite resided on 12 floppy disks.

8 eBay
Thanks to eBay, we can all now buy and sell almost anything (skip the body parts). eBay has 230 million customers worldwide who engage in 100 million auctions at any given time.

And who has not gone through the eBay site, either to browse or purchase, and if the latter, kept coming back to find out how your bid(s) did? I still maintain an inactive account since I haven’t purchased any lately. I was for a while quite active on obscure rival, uBid, though.

9 Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos’ baby began as an always-in-stock book seller. It survived the tech bubble and now is the definitive big box online store. It was the second most-visited online retailer in December, after eBay.

Any book buyer worth his salt must have gone through Amazon. And of course, those who write and publish books. But still a funny name for a company selling essentially books and other publications.

10 Wi-Fi
Have coffee shop, will compute: Wireless fidelity lets us lug our laptops out of the office and connect to the Net on the fly. More than 200 million Wi-Fi equipped products sold last year.

For many years, Ethernet was the buzz word for wired networking with its bulkier and more robust wiring, which was double that of your ordinary phone line. Cat5(Category 5), then Cat6, were the standards for PCs connecting to the network, and eventually to the Internet/WWW. And we thought that further future development was heading and winding in that direction, until wireless reared its head and made the wired network connection go limp for many.

Whatever happened to Gigabit Ethernet?

11 Instant Messaging
LOL! Web surfers began to “laugh out loud” and BRB (“be right back”) in the mid-‘90s, with the launch of ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger. Millions use it to swap messages and photos, even telephone pals.

Was never a devotee of IM, but I could decently frame and send SMS, which is very popular in the old homeland since it is quite cheap, sometimes even free, to send and receive text messages.

12 Yahoo!
Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created this popular Web portal in 1994. It remains a favorite for email, photo sharing (it owns Flickr) and other services.

Okay, so I use Yahoo!Groups where I participate in at least a dozen email lists, being a moderator in at least one. But Iwon continues to be my home portal, with a customized MyIwon page. One good reason? Using it gives one the opportunity to win various cash prizes, and great items, too.

(To be continued.)

Which Language To Emphasize And How To Teach It?

I have been hearing the phrase, teaching English as a second or secondary language, since I finished high school in the Philippines, and since I have been here in the US way back in 1980.

The only part of the methodology of teaching English as a second language that I have been exposed to and therefore familiar with has been that whereas before English had been taught primarily through the total immersion process with very neglectful regard to the native dialects of the learners, it is now being taught on top of and with deferential regard for the primary languages that migrant or foreign students are born with.

Using a poor analogy for the latter, it is much like using and learning Windows on top of DOS, which was the situation prior to Windows XP. (Though many would still contend that WInXP continues to have remnants of DOS.)

Tracing then my contemporaries’ journey in learning English, we can vouch that the old ways were “imposed” on us in earnest and with obvious noble intentions. While we had Filipino English teachers in grade school, most if not all of our English teachers in high school were young American Jesuits who spoke no other languages, both foreign and local. Additionally, since the school administrators were also American Jesuits, all English teachers starting from the primary grades had strict instructions to follow total immersion “techniques” in teaching English. (And I believe the concept or art of teaching English as a second language had not germinated then. At least not in that milieu that we were exposed to.) A quite tangible, and not easily forgettable, imposition was the draconian rule that only English could be spoken within campus. And sanctions were strictly imposed on violations, which for us was a possible unwanted trip to the office of the Dean of Discipline for a “jug” sign-up.

It should be noted that an all-girls college across town, run and operated by an all Filipino complement of nuns, also followed this total immersion process, complete with pecuniary sanctions on violations to the English-only rule. As I recall, each violation divested the violator of 10 centavos, quite a fortune during those idyllic times.

Then on the way to the forum, certain things changed. English would be taught as a second language. New books, still in English as were all the other textbooks in school, were published and given adequate promotion incorporating this new methodology, mode, or approach. I can’t really recall what brought this wind of change. It just happened. There were no pious or remorseful admissions that we, the prior recipients of the older method of teaching English, were incorrectly taught.

We in no way considered ourselves deprived, under-taught, or any such thing in our learned English. I suppose this whole thing was pretty much like the onset of the new Math (remember that?) which came about the same time. Was that then considered a period of Renaissance or Enlightenment in the education process?

Who knows? But whatever happened to new Math, anyway? Consigned to the dustbin of best-forgotten history?

Anyway, when we arrived in California in 1980 with school-age children, we unerringly got exposed to bi-lingual education in the public school system, with focus on teaching English as a second or secondary language. At that point, we had what they called education centers for the major minorities, such as Chinese and Filipinos, and of course, Hispanics, whose numbers had outstripped all others. New immigrant schoolchildren went through these centers prior to being sent to “mainstream” schools, ostensibly to get a better grasp of English before being diluted with the rest of the student population.

It all sounded good on paper. But when overall student scores started falling, specifically in English proficiency and in the sciences, questions about bi-lingual education started being asked. And relevantly so, when California students compared negatively with the rest of the country.

Nowadays, bi-lingual education has lost a good portion of its luster, and its once-avid proponents in the education field appear to have cooled off.

Imagine callers to San Francisco city hall complaining that they could hardly understand the English of staff members answering phones. Or that newly-hired airport screeners had to undergo intensive re-training in English prior to being deployed to their respective assignments, most requiring interaction with the riding public. And US citizenship is required for the position. Or that call center operators in the Philippines, India, or maybe, China, are being hired at a premium based on their English proficiency.

But those described above and much more are the realities, not only in the US but arguably for the rest of the globalized world.

So how are the various authorities responsible for general education responding to the situation?

World countries, states, and provinces where English is the official language are dark blue; countries, states, and provinces where it is an official, but not a primary language are light blue.

English as a global language

Because English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "global language", the lingua franca of the modern era. While English is not an official language in many countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a second language around the world. It is also, by international treaty, the official language for aircraft/airport and maritime communication, as well as being one of the official languages of both the European Union and the United Nations, and of most international athletic organizations, including the Olympic Committee. Books, magazines, and newspapers written in English are available in many countries around the world. English is also the most commonly used language in the sciences. In 1997, the Science Citation Index reported that 95% of its articles were written in English, even though only half of them came from authors in English-speaking countries.

From Manchester Central School of English

When The End is Not The End

On the 25th of the current month, we are re-confirmed for our flight back to the place which we now call home – for us, our married children, and the grandkids. The temperate haven that is Northern California.

The two-month trip is nearing its end, though it seemed only yesterday that our connecting domestic flight brought us back to the big island of Mindanao, to a place in its northern section called Cagayan de Oro, which is just a little over an hour’s flight from the capital region called Metro Manila.

Having taken this same trip route for many times over the over quarter century that we left the old homeland, this latest one seemed no different from a reflex act, one not requiring much focus and thought.

It just happened. And nearly two months later, it will be ending.

The very hectic weeks can be blamed for the rather hasty flight of time, which did not allow for much slack time for reflection and careful introspection. They just happened and things were done. And looking around and back, my wearied eyes survey the visible results of the works done – a few renovations in the residence, more time-consuming sprucing up in the commercial building, charitable endeavors planned and executed for proper discharge when we are gone, and various odds and ends not worthy of mention.

Reading this so far one may be predisposed to think that I must not only be self-satisfied with what has been done, but must welcome the winding-down phase to happily make way for pleasant thoughts about home, family, and the familiarity of place and routine.

But my cross mind will have none of that. It seems to work on the premise that there are still a lot of sticky loose ends to attend to before one can truly write finis to this episode. And my acutely critical self would seem to confirm this.

There appears still a myriad of little chores to be done, the kind that requires time for its germination and resolution. They cannot be hurried if one desires proper resolution. My trusty little yellow-pad note still has pages of uncrossed-out hand-printed notes that cry for attention.

Thus, when the 25th day of the current month comes, the end will not be ushered in. Rather, it will simply provide the temporal and causal link to yet another planned return trip precisely to attend to still unfinished business.

The over 14-hour return trip notwithstanding, the next few months promise to be yet another long drawn-out episode in this continuing saga to cram as much of life in a solitary lifetime as possible.

So, life, here I go again. Be swift and be kind.