CogBlogged from ‘June, 2006’

I cannot complains anymore that flickr is not responding to my mad barkings… as the last attempt got a response in just a few hours. Yay! But the contents or just more of the same… “We think Second Life photos are screen shots, you are still NIPSA”: From: “Flickr Support” <ase103599@support.flickr.com> Date: June 13, 2006 2:41:21 PM MST To: slcampus@nmc.org Subject: [Flickr Case 103599] Re: Flickr Help Mail from slcampus@nmc.org Reply-To: case103599@support.flickr.com I’m sorry for your frustration, but at the present time, your account will remain NIPSAed given that the content of your account are screenshots and not photographs. While I can appreciate your contention that the the photos are taken with a camera within 2nd life, a virtual camera is beyond Flickr’s current definition of what constitutes a photograph. This isn’t to say that our definition won’t change in the future as we expand to embrace more media. Heather [...]

For anyone besides me keeping count on my sags of Flickr slapping me NIPSA, it has been 11 days since I emailed flickr, and more than 21 days since the last previous attempt. I have received a lot of interesting commentary, and support from the bone I had to pick with flickr about a new pro account being designated not public due to the imagery being all snapshots taken in Second Life. The response I did not get, sadly, was from Ana at case88575@support.flickr.com whom I had last asked an appeal. Most interesting, and useful as ammo, was the comment from Tao, who actually shared a smoking gun URL to flickr’s own blog where it refers to a Second Life images as a “photo”. That should be very clear where flickr stands on these images, eh? To date, the sum total of their responses has been… let’s see, sum the [...]

This afternoon I did some minor editing (cutting some files into smaller pieces) from the audio recordings provided by the media team at Case for last week’s NMC Summer Conference, and in addition, posted a 5 minute video that was shown at the Second Life launch session. The audio quality is mostly good, with some bad moments of echos and volumes drops as the Case staff struggled to deal with the media capability of the hotel. Editing required popping the audio files to the Windows side of the MacBookPro since Audacity is not a Universal option yet. See how handy this machine is? So hold on to your mouse… below is a slew of ‘casts…

There is no place like it, even when the outside temps are a moderate 112 degrees ;-) After about 9 days straight of work for last week’s NMC Conference in Cleveland, I have a few days set aside for catching up on home stuff like: * replacing a cracked disposal in the kitchen sink * trimming some tree limbs * converting our swimming pool from the un-lovely shade of green it turned Already crossed off my “todo” list was watching the last episode of Lost, something I had taped a few weeks back and had not gotten around to watching. That is my one televised addiction. Since taking the NMC job and working at home, my wife and I have downsized ot one vehicle (thought the pick-up is not all that fuel economical) and are trying a lot to minimize our vehicle use. So today, for example, I needed to [...]

Well shoot, I thought Google Calendar was going to be a killer app. I had set one up for our NMC Second Life blog site, hoping the calendar sharing features might allow others we give access the ability to schedule their events. Well, it does do that. But noted by someone in an email who was asking about sorting, I now see by looking at the raw XML, that the items are dated not by the event date, but when the entry was last updated… and that sort of sorting is pretty useless for using RSS unless you just happen to edit your calendar in reverse chronological order. That is just squirrelly weird… the event dates are lumped into summary and item descriptions, which throws up all kinds of new coding challenges to parse and sort. I cannot find too much use for this kind of calendar feeding. So in [...]

I’m on a sardine can packed flight back home to Phoenix from Cleveland (judging from the airport, the local population must be down 80% in numbers), and thinking already about the backload of blogging that may just get pushed aside. Working for the organization running a conference, is 180 degrees (or 540) from the experience of attending– I should have known so having been responsible for a number of large events in my days at Maricopa, but a several day conference is jam full of behind the scenes things, worries, concerns that are all kept out of participant views. I am not complaining, but it left no time for blogging the experience, the scant sessions I was able to partake, and the huge numbers of great people I met, like Stewart, creator of Using Wiki in Education who is doing some fabulous wiki work there as well as the Science [...]

I feel moderately good about our experiment of “tagging” the NMC Summer Conference this year. We put it in the printed program that we were asking participants to tag blog posts, flickr photos, and del.icio.us bookmarks with an “official” tag of nmc2006. I used a local copy of Feed2JS and flickr’s Javascript badge to bring them together into one page at http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php. I was going to SuprGlu ‘em too, but had trouble getting to their site the night before the conference. So how did it go? Well, of course, I had a fair bit in there since it was my idea and I wanted it seeded with “stuff.” And I appreciate the numbers of people who did jump in. The aggregation is quite nice. In summary: Tagging with Technorati is the most complex of them all. Unless you have added a plugin to your blog software, getting the content o [...]

I am astounded people take my blog as marginally credible, or more so that they read it, so it takes me back when people attach some importance or meaning to what is really my own meandering streams of thoughts and complaints (or more properly termed as my Kiwi friends say, “whinges“). So yes, back in March, before I left Maricopa, I wrote some sharp whinging about Apple’s iTunesU. As it turns out, people mistook my intent as a whinge about the technology or concept, when my major whinge was a combination of wanting to raise interest at Maricopa in what I saw as a great service for us, not being able to get a high level leader out in front to help drive it, and having no info I could share with my colleges– just ad copy posted months ago and a link to Stanford. So I whinged, and got [...]

I have a gripe (surprised?) about nearly every hotel. It’s coffee and packaging. Every hotel I have been to has in room coffee maker (which I love). But daily they only give me one regular coffee (which is about 20-20% of my daily consumption). Usually the housekeeping staff has no problem keeping me stocked. But what feels wasteful and annoying is the packaging of sugar, artificial sweetener (which is what I only use), creamer, stirrers, napkins into plastic wrapped sets, a blob of material I have to de-couple. All I need is my one pink packet of Sweet n’ Low. I dump the sugar, the creamers, the straw, napkin. It sounds like trivial whining just writing this, but I hate the waste. In the name of quicker and “efficient” supply control, hotels are participating in typical American waste of materials. But I am thinking about the lack of personalization in [...]

flickr foto Real and Virtual Convergeavailable on flickr On the screen in the Gonick Amphitheater is streamed a live video from the Friday plenary session at the NMC Summer Conference in Cleveland. Featured is Giff Constable and Sara Van Gorden from the Electric Sheep Company, as they give an overview of the NMC Campus to both audiences. Wow, it all worked… and worked amazingly well (despite the snafus of the hotel internet connectivity). For the Friday night session at the NMC 2006 Summer Conference, we brought together our in-person audience in Cleveland and those present virtually in the NMC Second Life Campus On the center screen of the Gonick Ampitheater (pictured above), is the live video stream from the conference, thanks to some amazing support from the tech staff at Case Western. Our guests were Giff Constable and Sara Van Gorden of the Electric Sheep Company, part of the creative [...]