Sunday Quotes #1: The Difference Love Makes

We cannot do great things on this earth, just small things with great love.

- Mother Teresa

I think there is wisdom in this. As we approach life, the things that ultimately will have the greatest impact are those actions that make someone feel loved greatly. At least that's the case for me - the moments that I remember touching (and changing) me the most happened on the background of knowing I was loved. So go love someone today!

Picture by Túrelio, from Wikipedia Commons

Introduction to Sunday Quotes

I've always been fascinated with quotes. Perhaps it is an offshoot of my ability to remember randoms bits, but I've always appreciated the humour or wisdom a good quote can bring. So, I've decided to share some of my favorites, along with some personal comments, with you! I'd like for them to appear regularly on Sundays, and it will be a while before I run out of material, so there's hope for a good run. If there's a quote you'd like to appear, email me and I'll see what I can do. I'll start this week with a quote on the power of love from Mother Teresa. Enjoy!

Bretona Corner

School projects make for interesting things to post. This time, it’s the presentation from a class I took in traffic modelling. I started playing with the images I wanted to use in PowerPoint and I realized that it would probably be easier (and more fun) to just put everything into a video! So I played my in-class presentation from YouTube! The presentation is on the junction of Highway 14 and the Anthony Henday (Highway 216) on the southeast corner of Edmonton.

For the technical side, the video was put together using Microsoft PhotoStory 3 for the image sequences, the base map put together of screenshots from Google Maps in Adobe Photoshop, the music videos pulled from YouTube, and everything put together in Windows Movie Maker 2.6. I’m a little disappointed in the quality of the YouTube video, but I’m not sure how much of that to blame on the export settings I used in Movie Maker and how much is YouTube’s compression. Truth be told, it doesn't look too bad at this size (as above).

The simulation was completed in VISSIM 5.10 using many of the built-in parameters, traffic volumes provided by Alberta Transportation’s 2008 manual turning movement counts (i.e. real world data), but I set the speed distribution to (cumulative) 35% slower than 100km/h, 65% slower than 110km/h, and 85% slower than 130km/h. I suppose I could play with VISSIM to get nicer output, but even if it reminds me of a ten year old video game, it’s fun to think I made it!

Many pleasant trails to you!