CogBlogged from ‘August, 2006’

flickr foto I M A U-M B-N. U R N N-M-Lavailable on flickr Thanks, Steve Gilbert for the nice gift of one of my first favorite books, CDB! by William Steig, which I sort of cobbled into the name of this blog. S N-E-1 N?

Just be shear, dumb, web clicking serendipity, I came across flickrStorm: FlickrStorm is a better search for Flickr! It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images… Be suprised! Okay, there are scads of flickr search tools, and it’s not exactly clear what this “magic is”, but they certainly have been double dipping their chips in the web 2.0 bowl. More less, you enter a search term and get results as small icons: Clicking the small square icon (it looks like the first set might be the ones by “interestingness”) brings a preview on the right, where you can go to the flickr page for the cute dog picture, or “add to the tray” so it gets saved to a collection on the left. but wait, there’s more. Clicking the “advanced” link brings a drop down menu filter that can help restrict [...]

flickr foto The Dim Screen of Deathavailable on flickr This is as bright as my MacBookPro gets– this has happened 3 different times, once while I was watching the screen. And not, the F1/F2 keys do not help. The only way I have found to resurrect it is to shut it down for a few hours, and then reset the Power Management Unit. This same MBP spent 2 weeks at Apple for a fan assembly repair and logic board swap- the first screen dim happened 3 days after it returned. I’m trucking it into the Apple Store today and asking for a replacement. I want an Apple, not a Lemon The sage of my lemon MacBookPro is in its next chapter. I was waiting until I had visible proof before carting it to the Apple Store. I am taking the advice tossed my way and asking for an instore replacement. [...]

flickr foto NMC Conference DVD is Hereavailable on flickr Cleveland Rocked! So did NMC at the 2006 Summer Conference, and rocks even more since this year each participant gets their own DVD… there are the keynotes, the amazing jam session at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, examples of digital stories from the workshops, and more. Not much else to say, expcet I am putting the disk in now to enjoy for the rest of the workday. In years past, it was only the NMC rep from each member school that goe these disks (and it used to be about 10 minutes of video)– now every conference attendee gets a disc, and it is jam packed to the very edge of the disk… gotta jump now to see the Johnny Cash channeling by Tim from SFMOMA….

Long before “Web 2.0″, “social software”, the big web buzzword was “portals”– A portal, or enterprise information portal (EIP), is a Web site that integrates an organization’s knowledge base and all related applications into a single user-customizable environment. This environment acts as a one-stop shop, or “gateway,” for users’ information and system needs. So it was with a bit of cynicism when a GSFSE (Google Search For Something Else) landed me on Zimbio a home of “portals” or “community sites about specific topics”. But these are not your Grandpa’s Enterprise Portals of say… 4 years ago; these are sites fueled by RSS, aggregation, etc… maybe even (can I really write this?)… “Portals 2.0″ Gasp. From a quick glance, it looks like these Zimbio sites offer special interest groups some tools to build a community site that is able to pull content from RSS sources, photos from image sites like flickr, [...]

A new book on synchronous learning strategies has just come out– Learning in Real Time by Jonathan Finkelstein, and there is a new web site companion for the book. Disclaimer: I got to read a preview of the book last Spring, and was asked to write a few remarks for the back cover… I write less than to give some PR for a colleague’s book, and more so since I have “known” Jonathan for years via various online events run through his company’s services (LearningTimes)… a few of the TCC Online conferences, another event where I did a keynote for a group in Australia, and more recently through the NMC Online Conferences. But we never met in real life until this year’s NMC Summer Conference in Cleveland, yet I already felt like I knew him for years. I’ve never seen anyone so smoothly handle the logistics and facilitation of the [...]

Just plain fun, and original by Alan Becker, posted on DeviantArt- Animator vs Animation: An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find – the brush tool, the eraser tool – to get back at his tormentor. It’s resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself. – This took three long months.. i think it’s worth it. Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART By way of a del.icio.us for:cogdog tag from nessman (thanks nessman!)

Sigh, back to the seven levels of technical hell. Nope, I have advanced beyond a code ID 10T. Just 10 minutes ago, I am talking on my telephone, watching the screen of my laptop, and it blinks/flashes twice, and the screen goes dim again, Crikie! I did a PMU reset, and on the start the screen only flashed bright once before starting up in its useless, dimmed screen state. So I called my buddies at ReMac, who held my machine a week, where everyone in the store saw the same issue, until it got to Brian the Tech guy, who magically got the screen to turn on. The were helpful, but still “it has to go back to Apple” who need to see the problem before doing something. So again, for the 3rd time in 6 weeks, I am facing a period of no machine to perform my for anywhere [...]

This is for my own “to do” list most of all, but I have a wheelbarrow full of stuff I’ve been immersed in (and 3 more palettes piled high with new things to do), but to be blogged sometime between tomorrow and the end of time…. * A Drupal State of Mind: in line with a previously successful strategy of using the technology that D’Arcy does, I am on the learning cliff to get a new site going that will be a dynamic web community for the 1999 vintage NMC main site. But as powerful as Drupal is, it is hard to find the right toe hold climbing up; the terminology, the billions of modules, the trillion of forum suggestions… well it is daunting. My plan is not to tinker in the lab and produce a nice shiny site, but to actually build it out in public view, sort of [...]

flickr foto Searching for the Ideal Streaming Technology posteravailable on flickr Searching for the Ideal Streaming Technology poster as reprised on the NMC Campus in Second Life (July 2006), This was a study done in Spring 2006, and a number of NMC members had participated. Authors Dr. Edgar Huang and Clifford Marsiglio from IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) presented this as a poster session at the 2006 NMC Summer Conference and was even reprised in Second Life when we held the poster sessions there in July. But even better, the authors have published their study, aling with a pile of video resources (tutorials and screencasts about the 5 video technologies studied) as a web site- see Searching for the Ideal Streaming Technology: In August of 2006, we completed a study that examined five video streaming technologies in terms of their image quality, streaming quality, accessibility, encoding and Web-authoring efficiency, and [...]