Darren Holloway

When I did my undergraduate degree, I took a minor in Soviet Studies. This means I took ten courses studying a nation that doesn’t exist anymore. But it could have been worse – I could have been a Classics major and taken 20 courses on nations that don’t exist anymore.

One of the benefits (?) was I took three years of university-level Russian language. But, given I had no opportunity to practice it, it’s pretty much gone from my brain, except for a few words and phrases. And I find that when I’m listening to someone speak Russian, every once in a while, a word or phrase jumps out. It’s kind of like the cocktail party effect; no matter how loud the room is, you can always hear your own name.

So, having not learnt my lesson about studying languages generally only spoken on the other side of the world, I’ve been taking a Japanese course this fall. One or two nights a week, I take my textbooks over to Starbucks and study for a few hours.

This afternoon, I was sitting outside in the nice warm sunshine, studying and drinking my cappuccino, when suddenly a large group of Russian people sat down at the table next to mine and started talking. And I suddenly discovered that I seem to only have one part of my brain that can handle foreign languages; I’d be merrily studying away, I would overhear one Russian word, and my brain would switch from Japanese to Russian.

I decided to investigate the amount of spam email that I actually receive in a month. For October 2008, it was 3,741 messages. 37% of these were missed by my spam filter, and needed to be manually deleted.

And no, this graph was not just an excuse to experiment with a new font. :)

Several weeks ago, while I was at work and googling for information about databases, one of the pages I examined mentioned a contest. And, of course, I spent about 15 minutes solving the puzzle and sent in an entry.

As it turns out I won, which is cool, because I never win anything.

So now I’m waiting for my ipod nano to arrive; when it arrives, I can stack it atop my iphone and my video ipod…

I am now excessively i’ed.

So where have I travelled?

Create your own visited map of The World

I like to think I’ve travelled a lot, but this really shows me how little of the world I’ve seen…

I bought my current digital camera, a Canon 20D, in 2003. That’s five years ago, or about 3 trillion in camera years.

Every year, I’d watch the trade shows, hoping that my dream camera, a replacement for the Canon 5D, would come out. Every year, a new upgrade of my camera would come out, but still no 5D replacement.

And every year, I’d hold off upgrading my camera because the one I really wanted wasn’t out yet. Even when the autofocus stopped working. Even when the aperture stopped working reliably. Because I knew, if I upgraded, the camera I really wanted would come out the next day.

And it finally has! Yay! The Canon 5D Mark II!

I’ve already pre-ordered it through Amazon. Unfortunately, now I have to wait until at least November to get it. :(