The Wheel of Brisbane II

Check this out. It's only been 3 days from my last post, but look what I saw this afternoon:

Looks like they finally got their act together and have been working! Won't be too much longer, hopefully.

The Wheel of Brisbane

Lookie what I saw today.

A partially built ferris wheel. An unusual sight, and in the middle of South Bank no less. After a bit of googling research, I discovered that what I had seen was the embryonic form of the R60 Big Wheel, the world's largest transportable ferris wheel, now in Brisbane! Fully assembled, it soars 60m above the ground, and has a maximum capacity of 336 people, in 42 air-conditioned gondolas. Pretty impressive.

What was not impressive, however, was the fact that the wheel was scheduled to be completed by May 10 this year, in time for celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the World Expo '88. Then in early June, an article by the Courier Mail reported that the opening of the Wheel had been delayed once more; the next best estimate was late June, said Stuart Schramm, GM of the South Bank Corporation. Well, it's almost August! What's going on?

Having said all that, I am rather excited about the Brisbane Wheel. I don't think I've ever been on a ferris wheel before; definitely not one of this scale. $15 for an adult ticket gives you a 13 minute vertical ride offering stunning views of the Brisbane river and CBD, so it boasts. I think I'll give it a shot, if they ever finish assembling it.

For those of you who can't wait, here's what it's meant to look like. And once it's ready, you can find online booking details and forms here.

Kidmapped Trailer

One of my current subjects is an introduction to teaching junior highschool mathematics, that is, grade 8-10 maths. For a recent group assignment, we had to create a maths resource using ICTs. Kidmapped was the result - a choose-your-own-adventure styled video activity, where students would solve maths problems and choose which paths to take based on their answers. It was hard work creating it, but it was well worth it.

Here's a trailer of the whole kidmapped video series.

ESREVER - Backwards Video

This is an ingenious video that my friend Andrew Gentle made. Using videos to manipulate the length and even direction of time is magical, in my opinion.

"ESREVER" Backwards Video - video powered by Metacafe

Still thanking

It's still going!

thankgod.blogsome.com

Fish and rainbows

Just a couple of cool photos my nokia n82 allowed me to take recently.

Lu Ke Wen - Australia's prime minister

I've known for quite a while now that Kevin Rudd (Australia's current prime minister) could speak Chinese; funny thing is, I've never thought much about it. Last week I randomly decided to see if I could find anything on youtube showing Rudd speaking Chinese, and well, I was fairly impressed.

I continued searching, and found a whole interview with him in mandarin. He's completely fluent!!

I was extremely impressed. I myself had to watch that interview 3 times to understand most of it. And even still some bits of it evade me. Most peculiar though was the whole Lao Lu and Xiao Rui business. I figured that Rudd was Lao Lu because his chinese name was Lu Ke Wen, but Xiao Rui?! Someone please watch that interview and see if you can make any sense of it.

Meanwhile, I better start brushing up on my mandarin. My prime minister has inspired me!