CogBlogged from ‘July, 2006’

Sigh, I am resigning myself that my MacBookPro may be a fruit more in the citrus family. Three days after a 12 day stint to the Apple Repair Facility in Somewhereville, the backlit screen is no longer lit, so off it goes again. “It will be a priority, but expect it to be a week”. What recourse really is there? How, besides my barking here, and my “you just shot my puppy face” can I shout “HOW THE *#&^#^# AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ANY CREATIVE WORK WHEN A REPAIRED MACHINE BREAKS 3 DAYS LATER?” I’ll make do using my 2002 G3 iBook. I’ve got my data backed up and accessible via my external FW drive. But I’ve got many applications I cannot run on this old iBook. But man, oh man, in 19 years of using Apple Computers, I’m singing “Step On”: He’s gonna step on you again, he’s [...]

Ahh, a fresh Wired magazine hits my door step, and right there in the “rants” section, who else leads but Stephen Downes correcting a myth published in their feature on Superman: “The Myth of Superman” (issue 14.06) tells this tale: “Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster … created [Superman] as a char-acter in a newspaper comic strip. But the strip didn’t sell, so they reformatted it and flipped it to a publisher hungry to buy content for one of the first comic books … It’s a classic American success story.” Wired is reiterating a myth. In the 1930s, as today, to “flip” a comic meant to give it away. The publisher retained all rights to the character. The pair sued DC Comics twice (in 1946 and 1978) in an attempt to recoup some of the hundreds of millions of dollars it made from their idea, but the resulting settlements were paltry [...]

I am ready to dump all of this technology stuff and go to work raking leaves or painting houses. It was just last week my MacBookPro came back from its two week vacation to replace its fan and logic board. And now today, its screen is dimmed to about 2% of its brightness, so much that I thought it was blanks and resorted to the resetting of PRAM, PMUs, etc. It was only by an accidental tilt under the light I could make out the dim background image and desk top icons, I cannot even locate the mouse. My guess is the screen backlight is now shot, and that means another trip to the shop. Heck, I might be ready for a Dell. No, not quite that bad. But that is nothing on the crap-around I am getting from Huhges on my diminishing satellite net connection. I cannot describe in [...]

Just as Tim noted Google Video is making it so we can pick an arbitrary start point to play a video clip, now you can do the same with audio clips on Odeo: Someone send me an email asking how to link to a specific part of a podcast in Odeo, which is a little-known feature we haven’t exposed much yet. But if you, for example, want to point to the part of Diggnation Episode #0055 where Kevin and Alex, um, dig on Calacanis for his offer to pay top Digg users to use Netscape, you would just make a link like so: http://odeo.com/audio/1556127/play/quote/8:05/11:30 The first time in there is the start time, and the second (optional) is the end time. Update Note: This sort of how it works- see comment below, it may not be just extracting the shorter clip, but fetching the whole stream and making the viewer [...]

flickr foto Cut on the Dotted Lines (1)available on flickr Phase 12 of our pool remodel job– half of our decking is in sad shape due to settling, so tomorrow it gets jack hammered out. Or this is yet another iteration of Levine’s Law of Presentations… "Start with the _______" A visual representation for so-called Levine’s Law of presentations. However, in this case, tomorrow morning, it stands for something that involves jack hammers.

flickr foto It’s Back!available on flickr There’s joy in Sun-ville! My MacBookPro has returned, outfitted with a new fan, logic board, and something else I am forgetting. And for speed, I added another 1 Gb of RAM. Let’s Rock! With all new guts… it was almost 2 weeks since I took in the MBP because of the extra-ordinary loud fan noises (much more than the rumor-ed “mooing” sounds). Yep, it’s fan was bad, along with some wiring doo-dad, and while it was in the Apple repair, it got a new logic board as well. I am eager to transfer back all the working files, and retire my 4 year old iBook which served admirably well as a backup.

Not that it matters on any cosmic scale, but for what it’s likely not worth, a blog funk has settled slowly in ’round here. I’m up to my ears in various web dabblings, way behind in checking out cool new stuff from elsewhere and others, still waiting for may MacBookPro to be fixed, still waiting for my lame hired contractors to finish work on our pool, not desperate enough to blog the weather (118 degrees last week in Phoenix, summer rains finally came Sunday night), lying about not blogging the weather, not running enough or at all, not feeling much inspired to take photos, just… funk. Nuff said (or babbled). Might be back later.

flickr foto Workshop in Dallasavailable on flickr Materials, binders and laptops, for our 3 day workshop for the NMC Marcus project. Storymining is the slick name of the 3-day workshop we (NMC) are doing in Dallas. This is part of our Marcus Project which is helping 24 art museums across the nation of Texas to become designers and producers of rich interactive web content using Pachyderm software and the approaches of digital storytelling (with help from Joe Lambert at the Center for Digital Storytelling). It’s an energetic group and by tomorrow, they will all be knee deep in doing pachy content, as we scramble to assist as well as give crash courses as needed in audio recording/editing, video interview techniquies, digital video editing, scanning and image manipulation, and the odd need to digitize cassettes or video tapes. The project web site is a definite placeholder, using the NMC existing statuc [...]

I want a job writing tabloid headlines. New from the Pew/Internet gang, comes Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers: The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world. A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family. Gee, they needed a survey and research to come to that conclusion? Shocking! Heck, I could have told them that years ago… That said, perhaps I will now read it [...]

I still cock my head sideways, stare at Technorati, and wonder, just what the bleep does it do? Watching this blog’s ego feed, weeks went by and none of the “new” lights came up in my RSS reader. Then, some start dribbling in, but a few links are ones I had seen weeks ago, and some pop up again and again as new 4 days in a row. Then come the interesting links to sites that I can smell have no relationship– these pop on and off, hopefully as they are being sprayed with hot pepper: The title for the item extended is left for the reader’s imagination. This was replaced an hour later with: So my best guess is that Technorati is some sort of random link accumulator.