Horizon Dance by Kashiwagi Haruko

What would you do if you were thrown three years in to the future by an accident? What if this accident have caused you to not fully materialized when you reached your destination? How would you obtain help and attention from those around you so you can once again live a normal life? In Horizon Dance, Kashiwagi Haruko delivers a story based along this line of thoughts and after reading the first several chapters, the reader will be fully absorbed into the story.

I am classifying this manga as Science fiction mixed with Romance and comedy. On the SciFi scale, I would actually rank it near ‘traditional Gene’s style of Startrek’ as opposed to the Mars Troopers style, or maybe even Jules Vern’s style of Scifi. Kashiwagi have kept the characters rather down to earth, with normal human limitations. The second reason is the attempts of explaining advance physics theory within the manga to its reader. This is actually very typical in most Manga as we can see sample of this multiple times within the famous ‘Doraemon’ series by Fujiko F. Fujiko. Doraemon always attempts explaining to Nobita (and the audiences) the basic scientific theories behind the story, even if some of the theories are ridiculously unsound. Lastly, this story is definitely a love story and there are portions of the manga where the reader will simply laugh out loud.

Horizon Dance (aka Dancing on the Horizon) is a story circulating two scientists working at the Particle accelerator institute, like CERN but Japanese only. The protagonist is Kasuga Kotori, a female researcher of the institute and her fellow researcher Yuugaki Kunie, Kasuga’s love interest. During one of their wormhole experiments, Kotori was accidentally sucked into the wormhole. Is she still alive? What will happen to Kunie? These questions are all relatively intriguing to the questioning mind and Kashiwagi will tell us their story.

Tags: accident, Dance, Horizon, Horizon Dance, Kashiwagi, Kashiwagi Haruko, Kasuga, Kasuga Kotori, SciFi, Yuugaki Kunie

LMS battle round 1

It has been several months since the start of the LMS migration project. We now have both Blackboard Learn 9 and desire2learn in semi production. The funniest comment so far has been collected from two faculty training group is the fact that I am not alone in thinking that the eight years old WebCT system is still slightly more advance than these two supposedly state of the art systems.

I guess round one is a tie for the two systems as they seems to be equally incompetent

Tags: desire, funniest, LMS, migration, round

Mac OS X Lion mouse experience on Windows 7

As a dual Operating system user, I have a Macbook with OS X Lion and multiple machines with Windows on it. One thing I have noticed ever since I have upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion is that whenever I plug your mouse into my Macbook for usage, the mouse scroll wheel would reverse on me. When I scroll up, it would actually push the page down and when I scroll down it would push the page up. At first it was really annoying. I have been a computer user for over twenty years, starting with the good old Dos 5.0 and I have gotten used to a certain style of input settings over the years as these devices comes out.

The scrollwheel is a part of my daily computer input experience and with the reversed scrolling on the Lion, it took some time for me to adjust to it. I have opted out of reversing the scrolling back to the Snow Leopard because it is amazing on the touch pad. I loved how fluid the scrolls are with the new input style and was willing to adapt to the reverse scrolling on a mouse.

Now that I have been using Lion for awhile, I have grown accustomed to its inputs. I started experiencing issues when scrolling on my Windows machine instead. So I went on a hunt to find a solution to alter my windows experience so that it is more like my Mac experience. I recall Windows used to have the option of reversing your scrollwheel in the mouse control panel, but it seems to have disappeared in Windows 7. The same goes for Logitech’s Mouse control panel, it used to have the ability to reverse your scroll but seems to have disappeared. So after some search and googling, I believe I have found the solution to allow me to reverse the scrolling on my mouse.

I have found an application called X-Mouse Button Control, it allowed me ot reverse the scrolling of my scollwheel. Here are the steps to what I have done to reverse my scrolling on my Windows 7 Machine.

1. Download and install the application from the author’s site, http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm.
   
2. Let the program run automatically at startup and after you have finished installing the application.
   
3. The application should now exists in your system tray area represented by this icon .
   
4. Secondary click on the icon and a menu will pop up.
   
   
5. Click on setup and a new Window will appear.
   
   
6. In the drop down menu for Wheel Up, select ‘Mouse Wheel Down’.
   
   
7. In the Drop down menu for Wheel Down, select ‘Mouse wheel Up’.
   
   
8. Make other alterations if you desire, but I just wanted the scroll and nothing else so that is all the changes I have made.
   
9. Click on ‘Apply’ and ‘Close’.

If you are successful, your mouse wheel should be reversed when you scroll on your Windows Machine.

Tags: mouse control panel, Mouse wheel, scroll wheel, scrolling, Windows machine

Big geese on campus

The Canadian geese are back and it is not even March yet! I was walking from the ERC building towards the Gordon Wiley building and I noticed that a flock of geese have returned! They seems to be busy resting or indulging themselves with the fresh green grass on the lawn.

As I walked near them, the guarding goose started making a warning signal and the flock started walking away from me. It appears that is how these geese communicate. It actually make sense considering the advance flight pattern these birds travel in during their migration journey.

Canadian geese are migrating animals and tends to fly towards the south before winter and heads north before summer. They are amazing birds since they fly in patterns and formation. These birds also group together to ensure each other’s survival. I am always amazed with how the Canadian geese train their young and their sense of team.

Tags: amazing birds, building, Canadian geese, flock of geese, grass, lawn, sense, signal

Blackboard Learn 9 Essentials training done

Essentials training is finally over!! After four days of Blackboard Learn training, we have finally reached the end of the first week also known as the end of essentials. We were all introduced to Blackboard Learn 9 this week, some for the first time while others were given a basic playground version of it before hand.

After the overview of the of what Blackboard Learn can do, I have to say I am rather disappointed. There were more functions in the five-year old WebCT Vista than this state of the art replacement. One crucial point that I have noted is the reporting ability. In WebCT student activities are tracked to each ‘click’. Basically if you click on a link in WebCT, you are tracked. In Blackboard, the reports from the instructor side seem to only display the number of times the student have clicked on the link and the initial date and time the student have clicked on this module. This creates a dilemma where I cannot find out how long my student was actually staying on a particular screen. I cannot verify the number of attempts these students have on a particular area, or the time they access these areas.

A second gigantic disappointment is the lack of Javascript on the system. Aside from the modernized look, the WebUI of Blackboard Learn 9 feels like we are back in year 2002. As I click on each link, the entire page is refreshed. Sometimes it got to the point where if I made a choice, such as switch the color of a button on my course page, the entire setup page would refresh and I am taken back to the top of the page instead of where I was. This really does remind me of the old internet days.

Next week I am heading back in for Administration training, let’s see if there are more changes on the non-instructor side of things.

Overall, I still like the system simply because it uses my all time favorite language, Java.

Tags: Administration training, Blackboard, click, Essentials, Learn, link, number, WebCT, WebCT student