CogBlogged from ‘January, 2005’

Yes, I may be grumpy. No I did not get an iPod for Christmas. Despite this extreme hinderance, I have sampled a few more, and am still feeling a yawn reflex or hearing the strumming of lowdown 12-bar blues. I was thinking of the old (and still alive) Movie-A-Minute site: Let’s face it. There’s a lot of movies out there and very little time to watch them in. Well sit back and relax, because your troubles are solved! We here at Movie-A-Minute have come up with a solution. We’ve taken several classic and contemporary movies and extracted the important stuff, cutting out all the filler. (You’d be surprised how much filler there is sometimes.) With our ultra-condensed versions of your favorite films, you can experience whole movies in just one minute! As an added bonus, Movie-A-Minute protects against torture by bad movies — if you don’t have to sit through [...]

Anders is doing something link worthy- offering to dotate $1 for every blogger who posts a list of relief agencies and posts it on a public blog. That’s right, just post some links and/or make your own dontation, blog about it, and he chips in to the relief fund. I’d already Amazon-ed a contribution last week, but here’s Anders’ requested links: International aid organizations: UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) United Nations’ World Food Programme Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders (donate!) CARE International The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies UK/Europe: Disasters Emergency Comittee (DEC) – comprises a raft of aid agencies, including the below and others British Red Cross Oxfam Save the Children UK North America: American Red Cross Canadian Red Cross Save The Children Oxfam America Anders Jacobsen: Webloggers: Give to tsunami victims and I’ll give too! That’s right, rather than blithering announcing/”selling out” [...]

Yes, the blog bubble is mushrooming. Soon we may see less quizzical looks generated by the word. (remember when you had to explain what a mouse was or what a URL really provided?). I just skimmed some nice perspectives on blogs ppublished in LORE: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing. The Digressions section features the words of mostly graduate students and adjunct faculty, with the current issue on the “B” word: In the past few years, blogging has become something of a national pastime, and academics are becoming a core group using blogs for personal and professional reasons. Yet even though many people embrace blogging, many others have no idea what it is or why anyone would do it. In this issue of Lore, we explore the role that blogging plays for academics both in and out of the classroom. The 13 short essays are a nice mix as they [...]

Roll back your time clock to the mid 1990s and consider your reaction to this statement (lifted out of context from a comment about BitTorrent): Yesterday, it took me 2.5 hours to download a measly 39 megs. I remember being hesitant to download something as large as 5 Mb (even on the LAN at work), that used to be outrageously large. “Measly” 39 Mb indeed. What might be measly in 2010?

With access to newspapers and highspeed net access after a week away, the graphic imagery and harsh realities of the post-tsumani impacts make anything complained about here last night seem infinitesimally insignificant. Like others, I have been contacting friends and colleagues with families in Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand, and fortunately for them, their losses have been mostly material. Perhaps, pie in the sky, those engaged in armed aggression might give the same pause and question what they are doing. The world weeps for those suffering and hopefully comes closer together. Like I said, pie in the sky…

Readers of the CogDog may know we are not that gentle towards bad service from big corporate entities. My recent experience with AT&T Universal and Phone Company (and whatever the other percentage of the universe they own) has earned them the all time Pile of Stinky Poop Award for doing just that with their service. Bear with this tragic tale… The December statement on my AT&T Universal MasterCard showed a November 11 phone call charge to my AT&T Universal Calling Card from a pay phone in Vermont to some number I did not recognize in Wilmington Delaware. The minor problems with this was that I was in Auckland New Zealand on that date, and since no one else has access to my card, well it ought to be addressed. Now the irony of all this is that the call was billed $1.05 and by the time all the charges are [...]

flickr foto No Photoshop At Allavailable on my flickr This looks like something one does by compositing and feather-edging layers in PhotoShop, but I can vouch that this is an un-retouched photo. The view is looking in the window of the Strawberry Schoolhouse (the oldest standing school house in Arizona!), and I thought the light shining in both windows as well as the reflection on the right might be interesting. I am the blob in the middle. I love shots like this where you sense that there might be something special (often not). One aspect of traditional film photograpy is the process of visualizing the image in your mind, and the delayed gratification (or disgust) when you finally see the print– there is something magical in that lag time between seeing it in your mind and then in your hand. On the other hand, I have not plopped a roll [...]

I’ve got some back of the cranium wonderings about educational uses of BitTorrent — if this has not yet crossed your scope, check out the January 2005 Wired article The BitTorrent Effect (no, the article does not star Ashton Kutcher as BT creator Bram Cohen): BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3. Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet. Ok, the primary use the record and movie companies quiver about is the illegal trading of copyrighted movies and music (cue the violins). But the way the technology works to enable fast downloading of files is of interest. The problem with P2P file-sharing networks like Kazaa, he reasoned, is that uploading and downloading do not [...]

It’s mid morning the first day of 2005, relaxing peacefully in our hideaway cabin ion Strawberry, a warm fire is in the stove, and the sky out the window is heavy with clouds– and it looks like spam is failing from the sky, in big ugly clumps. Yup, on a quick check of email this morning, I have notification from some of our web sites that allow (honest) people to submit relevant information, spam infested gunk just where it makes no sense. These are forms that do not post anything to a web page, will not enhance the rank of their target sites in anyway, just plain stupid efforts. Yes, the new spam creedo seems to be to try and stick their piles of URLs in any hole they can find on your web sites- any forms that have a text area input can expect to be stuffed with the [...]