CogBlogged from ‘July, 2005’

flickr foto Round Peg, Not So Round Sweaty Holeavailable on my flickr The iPod ear buds work fine foir sitting on your butt on the couch, in class, on the bus, but for running in our desert heat, I am finding the fit just does not work. Yes, the ear buds are cheap. I am not audi snob, so the sound quality is not a burning issue for me. But when I go for a run, the pounding on the ground, the swinging of the pod, and the sweat pouring down my head (it can be well over 110 degrees here) make for a slippery fit that is not very useful. Or more likely, my body is mis-shaped to typical specifications. Not the first time for that! I could go out and get the fancy custom buds, but hanging $200 phones on a Shuffle seems off kilter. Does anyone have [...]

flickr foto MessPodavailable on my flickr Every transfer of my iPod to and from my pocket or backpack results in this twisted spaghetti mess of ear bud cable. I guess I should just never remove it from my head? I’d like to have back number of cumulative hours spent untangling the ear bud cables on my iPod. And this picture is s aimple version of what usually emerges from my backpack.

Among the boatload of Chinese spam, enlargement/shrinkage offers, gambling teasers, celebrity nude photos that grace my daily email comes a genuine nice message today from Steve Dembo: Hey, I really enjoy reading your blog. Definitely in my top 5. However, every I want to find an article of yours or link back to your site, I can never remember what the domain of it is! So I either have to do a google search for Alan Levine or Cogdogblog, or I have to go into bloglines, find your feed and go through the link there. So for entirely selfish reasons, can I donate a few bucks to the cause to get cogdogblog.com (which is still currently open) registered and forwarded to your actual site? I’m totally serious! And if you don’t want to deal with it, I’ll register it myself and forward it on. I just would rather have you [...]

Bear with me on a long introduction here, but later in this post I am asking for ideas and possible remote participation in an upcoming presentation. In an email exchange a few months back, Phil Long had asked me and Stephen Downes (I am the little leg on this stool) thoughts on a presentation on internet collaboration tools. I jotted some ideas down, clicked send, and did not realize that I had missed the point that Phil was asking us to co-present this session at the EDUCAUSE Seminars on Academic Computing (SAC). It hit me a few weeks ago when someone from EDUCAUSE emailed with reminders of registration and an inquiry as to who this “A. Levine” was. So I’m signed up for SAC.. it’s almost like getting let in the back door to the ritzy country club, as this event has been referred to as “Snowmass” for its high [...]

He’s hip but he may not be available to entertain at your cousin’s wedding… see how Stephen Downes’ voice, Powerpoints, and a little backbeat are set up smoothly in a 6 minute video crafted by Zach Chandler at Colby College: http://studio.colby.edu/people/zach/reusable_media_lg.mov It could be a whole new art form of compressing presentations to their bare essentials and ripping back out as streamin’ vidcasts. Rock on.

Mastercards with flickr uses the gazillion images found in flickr to create the familiar game of image matching. The site creator gives the nod to the version from Games For the Brain (a nice collection of stuff), but isn’t this really the old game of “Concentration”? Here is the game I played using a flickr tag of “newzealand” (“G’day to you, Richard E and friends in the Pumphouse!”) Alas, no secret messages were revealed below. In fact, there were no trumpet fan fares, bells, or prizes awarded. But it is more neat stuff with flickr. Peeking at the flickr tags, it took the most recent images from the tag set. More flickr fun.

My wife rightfully chided me the other night for a junior high school habit of issuing a loud yell of “bulls***” at the same time I sneeze. I have almost the same reaction when I read cruft like “Free Website Content – The Future of RSS is Not Blogs”- the claim being the majority, the writer suggests, only. use of RSS in the future is not what made it publisher, feeds published by blogs, but by “businesses using RSS as a communication vehicle are able to create keyword-rich, themed content, establishing trust, reputation, and ongoing communication with current and prospective customers.” I feel a sneeze coming on… Like the Internet when it first started, blogs were emboldened by the “cool factor”. As the novelty of being new and cool wears off, Internet webmasters and bloggers alike are realizing that maintaining a website or blog is time-consuming. “Coolness” often wears off [...]

Some hapless two-bit kiddie spam roach has been spamming an old Maricopa Learning eXchange comments script (it should have been yanked long ago, that is my own hapless two-bit error)– it did not do anything but send out false notifications to the faculty in our system who have shared their ideas/projects in the MLX, and I have been trying to explain to them the rationale of the nano-brained, no-integrity lowlife who spam a non profit educational site. Hey spam roaches, keep spamming this! I’m logging and tracking ya! I got a big steel toed boot that’s gonna drop hard one day on you. You will need all the PPC you can get.

I lost track of how many tangential clicks off what I set out to do on the web this morning, but cannot help but admire, and absorb more deeply Ten Tips for New Trainers/Teachers: Just because you’ve used lots of software doesn’t mean you can write code. Just because you’ve been in lots of buildings doesn’t mean you can be an architect. And just because you’ve logged a million frequent flyer miles doesn’t mean you can fly a plane. But if that’s all ridiculously obvious, why do some people believe that just because they’ve taken classes, they can teach? (Or just because they’ve read lots of books, they can write one?) The problem isn’t thinking that they can do it, the problem is thinking they can do it without having to learn, study, or practice. I’m amazed (and more than a little disheartened) how many people believe that simply by [...]

flickr foto A Bit More Resolutionavailable on my flickr No Photoshop fudging was done to generate this temperature! This is not that kind of scale… this dial is the temperature in my back yard in Phoenix, and actually the thermometer is shaded by a patio roof (though the cement wall likely bumps it up a notch). Pick your pain, be it Fahrenheit (118) or Celsius (48). Our pool temperature is a refreshing 91 degrees (F). No matter how many times you mutter about it being “a dry heat”, it’s a “hot heat” in Phoenix now. We’re hoping for the summer thunderstorms to get their act together and produce some real rain. Yes it is all relative– we are cooler than Death Valley.