Johannes’ Blog

Today we watched a video about the Berlin wall and how it fell. It was actually very amazing how virtually millions of people just gathered in front of the Brandenburg gate on the road ‘unter den linden’. On the day they opened the gates the German railway put old diesel locomotives that hadn’t been used for at least ten years back on the old non electrified rails that had been out of use for years because the rails had been cut to make way for the wall. They put the locomotive on the rails again to carry people to the wall as it came down. I saw a lady asking a police official wether she was now allowed to visit her mother on the western side. The official replied in beurocrat language and the lady didn’t really understand that so she asked “can I go over now?”and when the answer ‘yes’ came she kissed the official and ran over the border.

In fourteen hours the Olympics start in Beijing. china has been doing an awful lot to try and show the world what it can do and has been closing down factories, taking millions of cars off the roads on certain days and even banishing thousands of cars that are too polluting from the roads altogether. If you are seen driving on a day you are not allowed too and get caught you are required to pay a 100 yuan fine($15). In Beijing china is also exterminating cats to get them out of the way. China has also built the quite amazing Water cube and the Birds nest as the aquatic center and stadium respectively. China has also upgraded Beijing’s subway system to improve transport to and from the Olympic venue. But because of fears that not many people will come to the Olympics most hotel owners have cut their prices by up to 50%!

This term we are doing an inquiry about China. We have made our own wiki pages and have embedded glogster pages into them to make them look all pretty and flash, you can view my page here. There is a link to glogster here. You will need to register to create a profile and then you can create your glogs. You can also have friends and then you can chat with the friends you have, you can look at other peoples profiles and their glogs, you can embed them into wikispaces and you can even upload your own photos/images. Another site similar to glogster is wix but I have preferred glogster. wix also lets you embed the page you designed into wikispaces but I don’t know much more about wix as I’ve hardly used it.

On Thursday my cousin and his friend came over from Germany. They are 16 and 17 respectively and are staying for half a year and will go to school here at the college. They are year twelves but are finding the work here pretty easy because the evels in germany are quite a bit harder than here which I noticed when Ilast went to germany. I went in to year four and I couldn’t keep up even though I was in year six. They are very big (1.9 metres) and might not be able to get shoes here. I have learnt lots of things from him, I have spent hours on his laptop, he has (and will continue) to improve my german because I speak to him in german and best of all he is very fun to play with.

1. To reach group three in maths.

I have achieved this goal because I have put more effort into my maths.

2. To work on my time management skills.

I have also achieved this because I now get my work handed in on time because I don’t do every thing on the last minute.

1. To make more friends.

I have partly achieved this because I have made a few more friends but they are only half friends.

1. To learn some French and Japanese

I have learnt some French and Japanese but I could have learnt more if I had enjoyed it more.

1. To make my work neater.

I have made my work neater but I hardly need to write in books because we do most of our work on the computer.

1. And most of all to learn something.

I have actually learnt a lot of stuff in maths and computer skills.

Last weekend we went to the Fieldays in Mystery creek, Hamilton. They were biggest ever this year with more than one thousand exibitors and around half a million people. This was also the 40th time they got held and they are now the biggest fieldays in the southern hemisphere and the third biggest in the world. I was there from eight till seven but still only saw half the things there, I didn’t really like that. I also thought that the field days were a bit too big and I often couldn’t find the places where I wanted to go. But after that day I was glad that we could go home  because I had really tired feet. Click here for some more info

I found this on the PC World website - Toshiba on Tuesday launched a new ultraportable laptop that it claims is the world’s lightest, putting it in contention with vendors including Apple and Lenovo.

The company said the full-featured Portégé R500-S5007V weighs just 2.4 pounds (1.08 kilograms), compared to Apple’s MacBook Air, which weighs 3 pounds, and Lenovo’s Thinkpad X300, which weighs around 2.93 pounds. The laptop measures 0.77 inches at its thinnest point, according to Toshiba.

The company also claimed that the new laptop was the first to include a 128G-byte solid-state drive (SSD) to replace the hard drive. Laptops to date have had 64G bytes of storage, though both Lenovo and Apple provide 128G bytes of storage through two 64G-byte modules.

SSD has no moving parts like a hard drive, so it consumes less power that can give the battery more runtime. The laptop can run for an eight-hour runtime on a single battery charge, according to Toshiba. The company did not respond immediately to questions about the type of battery in the laptop.

Battery life is also preserved by the laptop’s transreflective 12.1-inch screen, which can shut down the LED (light-emitting diode) backlighting by reflecting the sun’s rays to illuminate the screen, according to Toshiba.

For US$2,999, users can get a laptop powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 processor at 1.33GHz, with 2M bytes of cache and 2G bytes of RAM. It will come with Windows Vista Business OS, which is also downgradable to Windows XP Professional. The laptop includes a SuperMulti optical drive that can read and rewrite DVD and CD media, wired and wireless 802.11 a/g/n networking, Bluetooth 2.0 support and built-in safety features to protect laptop data during falls.

Toshiba said the laptop includes a specially built motherboard that can provide the same functionality of boards found in 15.4-inch laptops, but is one-third the size.

The laptop will start shipping in the third quarter this year, according to the company. The company wasn’t available to comment on worldwide availability.

I found this on Yahoo!

It’s finally here: Firefox 3, the open-source browser that I overwhelmingly recommend for all users from novice to expert, arrives on Tuesday. Here it is.

I’ve been using the final beta for a few days now, and it’s really an impressive upgrade. Some thoughts. …

Most importantly: The browser is fast, renders accurately, and (so far in my testing) doesn’t crash. Multiple tabs or windows, complex pages, lots of embedded content … Firefox 3 can handle it all with no fuss.

In fact, it actually renders some pages better than Firefox 2, specifically some pop-up forms that I regularly use in our Yahoo! publishing tool, which didn’t display with the right width under Firefox 2. With Firefox 3 they execute perfectly.

I’m still getting used to the new URL history and search system. when you start typing into the address bar, you no longer just see the beginnings of URLs in your history file. Now Firefox searches your history and your bookmarks for any text that matches what you’re typing, not just the URLs but the descriptions, too.

When I type “tech” into the URL bar, for example, I not only get popups for tech.yahoo.com and techmeme.com, but also Wired and Valleywag, because they have the word “Tech” in their site descriptions.

On one hand this is very useful, but it also clutters up the drop-down box. Having two lines for each entry instead of one also adds to the overwhelming nature of the display. Like I said, it’s got pros and cons, but I’m getting used to it slowly.

Most plug-ins work well so far. I had one lingering problem with one, not-critical, add-on that I ultimately had to disable. I’m hoping the developer patches it soon.

The interface is freshened up but is largely the same as before. Unlike IE7’s changes, you won’t have trouble finding things in the menu system or the toolbars. There are some small changes to the way text selection works (which I won’t go into here); very minor bugs that will likely be addressed in upcoming versions.

The malware prevention system really seems to work well. It took me some searching, but I finally managed to find an infected site. Rather than load the page, Firefox 3 threw up a huge, red warning page urging me not to visit. No one’s going to miss this alert.

Overall: No matter what browser you’re using, there’s really no reason not to upgrade.

Elephants are the largest and second tallest land animals. They are fully grown in 25 years but may live up to 65 years. That is for both the African and Asian Elephant.

The African Elephant is bigger than the Asian Elephant, it is 2-4 metres tall and weighs up to 7500 kilograms. The Asian Elephant has smaller ears whose upper edge is curled forward and as opposed to the African Elephant, only the male has tusks. An elephant’s skin is 2-4 centimetres thick grey and quite sensitive. It also has deep wrinkles in it which assist in cooling the elephant. Its 1.5 metre long ivory tusks are virtually teeth. They are continually growing, weigh up to 45kg and are used for digging, fighting, feeding and lifting stuff.

Elephants have small brown eyes protected by long eyelashes. They are also colour blind and have limited vision in strong light. Elephant’s ears are unique just like our fingerprints and are also used for cooling as elephants have the ability to flap them. An elephant’s trunk is really its nose and is its most important sense. With it an elephant breathes, picks up food, sucks up liquid and most importantly smells.

Elephants eat grass, leaves, roots, oats, hay, potatoes and occasionally meat.

Elephants sleep only two-four hours a day and can sleep lying down or standing. They communicate either by trumpeting, bellowing, crying or snorting or they touch each other or move parts of their bodies for example: they touch trunks and if there is danger they flap their ears and the herd gathers. Elephants live in groups also called herds and all family members protect the young. An impressing fact is that elephants swim well. They actually swim underwater and use their trunk as a snorkel.

Elephant’s habitat is in
Africa,
India and southern
Asia. They live in the desert, tropical forest and even mountains. They are endangered due to the fact that their habitat is being destroyed.

There was a toaster that could toast two slices of bread at a time but only one side at a time each side takes 30 seconds. You want to toast 3 pieces of bread which would normally take two minutes. Find out how to reduce this time to one minute thirty seconds. Answer is in the comments section