CogBlogged from ‘February, 2005’

Liz Lawly recently shared a great collection of edublogger’s explanations for why they blog: I keep getting asked this question by colleagues here at RIT and elsewhere, and I find myself sending them the same links over and over again. So here’s what I give people who ask me this, in an attempt to clarify the value of blogging to those of us in academia. It’s not all about personal confessionals. Really. These are great, useful, but in a way, like asking devout Apple users “Why they use a Mac?” I am curious about the flip side, why academics do NOT blog, what keeps them from it, what are the barriers, perceived or real? I’ve been musing on this for a while, as I have created blogs for teachers and techies in our system that have various life spans from weeks to months. It is also curious in light of [...]

Among the chaff of email spam are a few gems. Here is one from Ian in Spain who has figured out how to leverage RSS, blogs, and Feed2JS to generate a dynamic site: Hi Your rss2js service is first class. I love the code generator and the service itself – what a great job! I have a web site ‘

Woah, nellie! I had no idea when I clicked a link that said, “do not, I REPEAT, do not go here” (the old teacher reports read “Alan does not listen well to instructions”) that I’d find this wildly fantastic flickr graph tool: Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs. Basically it lets you visualize and generate a dynamic social network the friends and friends of fiends and the friends of friends of friends as defined in flickr. Each node you click on, moves to the center and blossoms with the network for that person. Whichever node is in the center has a link to “view pics” or to load their flickr page So starting with Will’s network I re-organize to put mine in the network…. Now I must admit I’ve not spent much time going [...]

A “web good dog” to Will Richardson for sharing a link to his Learning Times presentation– see Now THAT Was Fun…and Educational (What a Concept!). His blogging/RSS presentation is available for FREE as a streaming audio narrated show, where he is able to talk over and demo things like Bloglines, etc. But the cool thing that happened was when one of my Ocotillo co-Chair colleagues (Hi Donna ;-) told me today that Will’s presentation clicked in with her. I’ve been nudging/nagging our folks to blog everything possible and in the moment as not only a record for them of their work on the projects, but as a public “face” to their projects, and as a thinking grounds. She told me: I have about 500 people telling me it only takes 2 minutes to blog (that adds up!)- but I always put it aside as something to get back to “eventually” [...]

A tale of two sequential spam emails, in sequential order. First was philosophical spam (one does not see too many of these): Both the material and spiritual worlds are full of opulence, beauty and knowledge, but the spiritual realm is more magnificent due to its being full of knowledge, bliss and eternity. The material creations are manifested for some time as perverted shadows of the spiritual kingdom. followed disjointedly by one from “Mrs Alez <wyxlysqws@address.com>” Heyyy it’s me Brittany… husband left me home alone again you can come and chat with me, i have an online profile…if you want, we can have a date and get to know each other much closer Not being much of choice of paths in the wood, both are swept to the trash. But, with apologies to Robert Frost (second reference in two days, do poets get Trackbacks?) Two spam diverged in my inbox, And [...]

This really happened. I promise. While biking home tonight, I came up on what I took to be a father riding along side a boy, perhaps 10 or younger. As my speed was greater, as I approached, Dad swung out far to the left, so I had to pass between the two. Dad says How ya doing? Just trying to show my boy the rules of the road! That was not encouraging, considering Dad was lacking a bike helmet and chatting on his cell phone. I must have the wrong set of rules, again.

For the last 12 years at maricopa, my e-mail signature has been “Was Geologist, Now Technologist” a Readers Digest condensed version of my tale of transforming from a graduate student in Geology to a techie at Maricopa. Last night, I attended an event at Arizona State University, for one night of flashback nostalgia. The event was the Department of Geological Sciences 2005 Robert S. Dietz Lecture, featuring Phil Christensen on “The Evolution of Mars: Changing Views of a Changing World”. While I recall playing volleyball and drinking beer at his house, Phil has achieved a long list of amazing planetary science work at ASU, most recently with his team’s spectroscopy devices that have gone on both Mars Rovers and the Mars orbiting space craft. Phil’s talk covered the range of our ever changing views and knowledge of this neighbor planet, from the “red dot in the sky” to Huygens’ first [...]

Just having set up some stats reports on this server, I find with no surprise the big consumer of activity is our Feed2JS script, which according to the data, in the last 7 days felt: 3,182,586 hits (96% of the total) 455,000 hits per day 18,943 hits per hour 315 hits per minute The server is fine and there is no intent to shut this down. I monitor the CPU usage and am trying to unravel some periodic swings where it maxes 100% of the CPU. There are some patterns there to try and detective my way through. We run another server at a different address off the same XServe, and that site was getting way too much crawling action, so knocking out all the bots with a robots.txt exclusion seemed to help the whole box out alot. As mentioned before, at sometime in the next month or two, I [...]

Just got a headset for doing audio chatting… too much feedback from the laptop speakers and crappy built in micorphone. C’mon Skype me! “How about a super kids meal? C’mom, trans-fats are fun”I never worked fast food ;-)

NBC’s “hit show” Medium is about a psychic who is helping solve cases in what is purported to be Phoenix, Arizona. I believe it is the “Phoenix, near Burbank”. It looks like they are not wasting any money on location shots, because I have yet to see a cactus, a desert rabbit, a creosote bush, a snake or any recognizable building structures or streets. The clincher was tonight’s episode (playing in the background before the news comes on, I am not absorbed in this drivel) where the main character is frantically calling 911 on her cell phone “I am on the corner of Chaparral and Miller, please hurry!” an intersection rather close to my home, and I see nothing that is even close to how the scene looks. Those palm tree lined burbs are most definitely southern California. Okay, it is not a documentary or reality, but hey, at least stick [...]