Show 1043 Thursday 28 May
Watch today’s show at YouTube or BlipTV.
Hi, I’m Sarah, welcome to The Daily English Show.
The video I recommend to study today is a music video for a song by Alex Valentine. The song’s called Hurricane and the video’s a whole lot of images of four line poems. The poems have been written using part of a game called Boggle which I used to have when I was a child actually – I used to enjoy playing it.
I think it’s a very cool video and I like the poems.
Here a few of the poems:
KNOW
TRUE
LOVE
ONCE
LOOK
THEN
LOOK
ANEW
PUBS
SELL
SHIT
WINE
GUNS
MAIM
WHEN
USED
OGLE
THEN
FIND
ZERO
WILL
DEBT
RUIN
LIFE
TURN
FURY
INTO
LOVE
The Acadia Report
Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada
In the Acadia Report today I’d like to introduce a video about a game developer called HB Studios. The company is in Lunenburg in Nova Scotia. And I’ve been there which you might know if you’ve been watching The Daily English Show for a while. When we were at Acadia University we went on a trip with the English language students to Lunenburg to go on a boat trip and it was amazing. It was such a beautiful day. You can go and check out the video we made if you haven’t seen it already.
Anyway, back to the video about HB Studios – they interview some Acadia graduates who are working there and they talk about what they like about their jobs and what they learnt at university and advice for people who are thinking about getting into the industry.
For example, one of them says: I think the most valuable thing that I learnt at Acadia and in the school of computer science was how to learn and how to keep up with constantly changing technologies in the IT sector.
Acadia Grads Power HB Studios - Transcript
We started with nine people, ah, and now we’re 130, so there’s, there’s been some, some periods during that time where we’ve really grown extremely fast. The culture of our company is, ah, is a … a dynamic, ah, creative, um, vibrant culture. Um, I think a lot of that is established by the environment we’re in and industry itself, um, which is an extremely, ah, fast-paced, ah, creative industry.
I’ve worked on a couple of titles. My first one was Madden 07 for the Wii. And that was a Wii launch title, so we got to work with the hardware before people had … the general public had played with it. It was a really interesting and difficult project.
The thing I enjoy most is that it’s, it’s always changing and there’s always new things to learn. With a short development cycle, you’re always working on different projects and there’s always different areas to work on.
My favourite thing about working with HB is that, ah, there is a great sense of community here. Being in, ah, such a small town as Lunenburg, ah, we tend to, um, spend a lot of time together. Not just at work, but outside of work as well.
Our staff will invariably socialise with each other. And that’s actually been enormously beneficial for us in the quality of the work we do because when people are friendly and used to spending a lot of time with each other, um, that really has benefited us during, during crunch time. It just … it really helps with the creativity.
I guess I enjoy the toys. It’s always fun to get all this stuff, all this stuff I’ve got around my desk. Like, ah, right now I don’t have quite as much as I did a few months ago, when I had, like, the PlayStation 3 sitting next to the Xbox and the Wii. Any given time I was programming for any given subset of them.
I think the most valuable thing, ah, that I learned at Acadia and in the school of computer science was how to learn, ah, and how to keep up with, um, constantly changing technologies in the, ah, in the IT sector.
The advice I would give to a current computer science student would be to gain as much experience as possible.
A great piece of advice that’s pretty simple to … and straightforward would be to, ah, pay attention in maths class. Cause, ah, a lot of that stuff is going to come back. Stuff like polynomial algebria. Matrix algebra is huge for, um, doing stuff like 3d graphics … everything is linear and matrix algebra. Now you can actually, thanks to the internet and Microsoft’s got their own visual studio express program. So you can get your hands on a compiler and all the SDKs necessary to make a, ah, Windows game, like, at the same level as what we’re doing here. It’s all available on the internet for free. And there’s all these knowledge bases like MSDN, ah, just to give an example, that’s available on the internet. So you don’t actually have to wait to you get to university to try it out and see if this is something that might interest you.
STICK NEWS
Kia ora in Stick News today a new tourist attraction has opened in Hong Kong. The company that runs it says it’s the world’s only full-size replica of Noah’s Ark.
According to the bible, Noah’s Ark was a large vessel built by Noah, at God's command, that saved Noah, his family, and a representation of the world's animals from a great flood.
A big boat called Noah’s Ark has just been built in Hong Kong. The boat is 137 meters long and is a tourist attraction.
CNN reported that one of the attractions was lying in a coffin.
According to the official press release: The facility is full of happiness and positive messages … it will lift people's horizons with new knowledge and let them rethink life and experience love.
And that was Stick News for Thursday the 28th of May.
Kia ora.
Word of the Day
Today’s word is maim.
One of the poems in today’s video is:
GUNS
MAIM
WHEN
USED
So what does maim mean?
maim v. to injure sb seriously, causing permanent damage to their body
conversations with sarah
#659 What are you listening to?
Step 1: Repeat Kim’s lines.
Step 2: Read Kim’s lines and talk to Sarah.
Kim What are you listening to?
Sarah Oh, I was listening to a podcast.
Kim What was it about?
Sarah They were talking about this hikoi that happened in Auckland.
Kim What’s a hikoi?
Sarah It’s a kind of protest march.
Kim What’s the difference between a hikoi and a protest march?
Sarah Mm, good question. I think they’re the same thing. Just if it’s organized by Māori then they call it a hikoi. They had some funny chants, like: Move aside, Rodney Hide.
Kim Who’s Rodney Hide?
Sarah Oh, he’s a politician.
links
today's news
today's STICK NEWS pictures
music
show start
artist: Kevin MacLeod
track: Future Cha Cha
from: Brooklyn, NY, United States
artist site
The Acadia Report start
artist: DJ iPep's
album: Home Mix 2007
track: Concerto
from: EVREUX, France
album at Jamendo
artist at Jamendo
artist site
WOD start
artist: DJ iPep's
album: Home Mix 2007
track: Game Toy
from: EVREUX, France
album at Jamendo
artist at Jamendo
artist site
cws start
artist: Kevin MacLeod
track: The Jazz Woman
from: Brooklyn, NY, United States
artist site
qa start
artist: ioeo
album: triptracks
track: triptrack2
from: Saint Raphael, France
album at Jamendo
artist at Jamendo
artist site
qa bgm
artist: Cliffhanger
album: Comb your hair
track: Up against some hard fellows
from: Sweden
artist at Jamendo
album at Jamendo
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