A while back, I watched the video for the movie The Gray. In that movie, Liam Neeson played the part of an oil rig worker who had crashed in the wilderness, forcing him to flee from a vicious pack of wolves who proceeded to pick the workers off one by one (including a female stewardess on the plane).
Conservationists working to save the wolf have succeeded all too well, by publishing beautiful calendars which portray wolves in benign ways that make viewers mistakenly conclude that wolves are misunderstood and persecuted animals. But watch this National Geographic video and notice that Arctic wolves are more than capable of hunting down musk oxen, one of the largest species of animals in the arctic. These ARE NOT dogs, and as the Liam Neeson character observes, they do not eat nuts and berries.
It's true that early settlers were so afraid of wolves that they hunted wolves to the point of near extinction in this nation and elsewhere. But there was a reason those settlers were afraid of wolves, and it came from primal memories of a time when human beings were constantly being threatened by wolves in terms of survival. Wolves are efficient killing machines, but they are not too bright, because other canines figured out long ago that it made sense to make nice to human beings, and to accept the offer of a nice warm spot by the fire. Wolves value their independence, even though their insistence on independence has made them a threatened species in many parts of the world.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Smarty Tags
You may have heard of QR Codes, but have you heard of "dynamic" QR codes?
Not long ago, I used the services of Smarty Tags (http://smartytags.com/) to generate a graphic code which, when scanned or uploaded to a decoder site, would lead to the following:
http://smartyt.ag/755187
If you were to click the above URL, you wouldn't think that much had happened, because it would lead you back to this blog. The reason is essentially that the URL is like one of the "URL shorteners" available via Google. It's basically a shortcut to the true URL of this particular blog. The actual text is probably harder to remember than a regular domain name, but that isn't the point, the point is that if you can scan the QR code, you shouldn't have to remember anything at all.
One advantage of dynamic URLs is that the information stored by the company which issued the dynamic QR code might have been entered incorrectly the first time around (for those of us prone to typos), or parts of that information might have changed. For instance, I may eventually use a web hosting service such as www.1and1.com, to offer the Chapel Network News in a more sophisticated way than I can with a simple and free blog. If I do that, the QR code will still lead to the new correct site, I merely need to edit the information stored by the company which issued the dynamic QR code. Or at least I think that's the way it is supposed to work. I still have some tests to run, but I believe that it will prove to be a good idea to use dynamic QR codes when promoting this site.
Not long ago, I used the services of Smarty Tags (http://smartytags.com/) to generate a graphic code which, when scanned or uploaded to a decoder site, would lead to the following:
http://smartyt.ag/755187
If you were to click the above URL, you wouldn't think that much had happened, because it would lead you back to this blog. The reason is essentially that the URL is like one of the "URL shorteners" available via Google. It's basically a shortcut to the true URL of this particular blog. The actual text is probably harder to remember than a regular domain name, but that isn't the point, the point is that if you can scan the QR code, you shouldn't have to remember anything at all.
One advantage of dynamic URLs is that the information stored by the company which issued the dynamic QR code might have been entered incorrectly the first time around (for those of us prone to typos), or parts of that information might have changed. For instance, I may eventually use a web hosting service such as www.1and1.com, to offer the Chapel Network News in a more sophisticated way than I can with a simple and free blog. If I do that, the QR code will still lead to the new correct site, I merely need to edit the information stored by the company which issued the dynamic QR code. Or at least I think that's the way it is supposed to work. I still have some tests to run, but I believe that it will prove to be a good idea to use dynamic QR codes when promoting this site.
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