CogBlogged from ‘December, 2006’

I cannot say for most of my life that I really listened to, or was a fan of Johnny Cash. Somewhere I knew he was the “man in black” and had done a concert inside a prison. But I chalked him up to country music (like Jake and Elwood said, “yep, we got both kinds of music- country and western”). And as much as I liked the movie and respected what I got to know from Walk The Line, I cannot say I got any Cash tunes in my playlists, beyond perhaps the cover of Ring of Fire by Social Distortion. It was really after the NMC 2006 Summer Conference in Cleveland, at the Rock n Roll Museum jam session when Tim Svenonius from SFMOMA did the spot on cover of Folsum Prison Blues, that I cam home and spent some time combing through some Cash originals on the iTunes [...]

I’m still thumbs up on using Google Reader — remember kids, there is no “best” web application, and just because I say its great does not mean something else might work better for you. Not only am I prone to be wrong, but there is just no way in the fast changing webscape for anyone to say definitively “A” is better than “B”. That said, there is one major feature Google Reader is lapsing behind Bloglines on- the ability to have a cut and paste code “clip” to have Google Reader generate a blog roll on another site– their current code does an elegant job of being able to create JavaScript cutlets to display aggregated contents form folders or tags, so howmuch Google Brainpower would it take to just make something that returns a list with titles/links of subscribed feeds? The data is there, as it does provide an OPML [...]

flickr foto Deck Full of Snowavailable on flickr The weather reports this as an accumulation of "one inch" — my measurements are a bit off. What a beautiful distraction is outside my cabin window! Last night they were forecasting maybe 1-2 inches of snow, and there was about an inch when I went to bed. But this morning, it looks more like 10-12 inches had fallen overnight, and more is dropping right now here in downtown Strawberry, Arizona. Cadu is more than happy to play, the satellite dish is staying clear enough to be online, and perhaps I should be immersed outside.

Up here at my cabin, we have no TV reception, so we have a system of a DVD player, TV, and some Altec-Lansing computer speakers for audio. I’ve noticed when the TV and DVD are off, if I raise the audio cable, I can hear some low, static filled radio sound from the speakers. With some investigation, I found by extending the speaker’s audio input cable up and away, I get a medium strength radio signal, and matching it to a radio, my speakers are picking up FM 101.1: actual annotated photo on flickr I snagged a bit of the audio, switching between the speakers acting as a radio and the radio acting as a radio: http://cogdogblog.coom/wp-content/audio/speakers-radio.mp3 Too bad the music sucks. On other unworldy communication fronts, my refrigerator has been pinging Technorati with requests for refills, the coffee maker is publishing RSS feeds updated with each brew cycle, and [...]

D’Arcy, you with the apostrophe in your first name (!), tagged me with the Five Things meme. So here are five things likely not widely known about the human behind CogDogBlog: Until I was 22, I had not traveled farther west than the Appalachian Mountains (except for the 3 days I attended New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, a rather long story) I’ve taken lessons, owned a guitar since age of 15 and likely have never played an entire song in my life. I admit it! As a teen, I had THE poster of Farrah Fawcett in my bedroom (it was autographed!) I was married on top of Camelback Mountain in central Phoenix Despite years of shooting in manual mode with a 35mm camera (a really old, heavy Nikkormat) I’ve gotten lazy with my digital photography, most all images on my flickr site were done in automatic modes) — [...]

Living, working, sometimes too immersed in web technology, I am taken back by interactions where situations seem o cry for a more technological approach. My doctor’s office stuck out twice today. On a visit to a PA to deal with some ongoing leg pain (keeping me from running, grumble), she remarked as she was scribbling down notes in my 2 inch thick paper folder, “Writing up these notes is what consumes nearly all of my time!” The second was getting some info from a nurse on which physical therapy places I could go to on my insurance plan– after some unsuccessful rummaging through a list tacked to a board, she said, “You can find out much easier if you look it up on the web. We cannot do that here since all of our computers are [eye roll] DOS and cannot use the web.” Fortunately the medical treatment here, and [...]

After reading, Quentins nicely shared post of the WordPress plugins used on his site (and more shared in the comments), I thought, “Great idea! Let’s go into borrow mode!”. And it made sense to build one of those, um, colo– colofuns, coloph…. oh what the heck, Blog Bits, that describes some info about what’s under the hood here at CogDogBlog. To re-iterate, my plug-in pile: Dunstan’s Time Since Displays in human language how much time has passed since a post was published, “This entry was posted 6 days, 8 hours ago” Jerome’s Keywords Allows keywords to be associated with each post. Not very optimal, Bunny’s Technorati tag stopped working for me; need to look into Ultimate Tag Warrior. Optimal Title Allows <title>…</title> content to put the title first and blog name last, not as “good” if you are after search engine points, but of more use to web site taggers. [...]

It’s end of the year time to unplug, and transmit one more blog post (at least until Tuesday!). So take this one as a loud CogDogBlog Howling At the Moon wish for everyone to have some peace, reflection, and fun for whatever holidays you celebrate. I’m unplugging here at 6000 feet elevation in central Arizona, at our cabin hideaway in the sleepy town of Strawberry (zero gas stations, no stores, 2 restaurants, 2 bars…) and what a present today brought with fresh snowfall. So in many ways, this year has been one of interesting juxtapositions, like the odd combination of cactus and snow. I’m not feeling as eloquent as my friend and colleague in Victora, Scott, did with his holiday wishes (thanks! and the hot tub gets rather frequent use, so try and find a conference to attend in Phoenix sometime soon, and I’ll drag you up here.) It was [...]

More nifty sites marrying live data to maps – WeatherBonk Weather Bonk is a mashup that lets you view real time weather information on a map. This can provide some very interesting information, particularly in areas with microclimates, such as San Francisco. For example, summer in San Francisco can be particularly cold and foggy, and this map can help you to find a sunnier area of the city to visit. Clicking on the web cams give you a visual observation from a given location. Looking at wind direction can help you locate approaching weather fronts. The data comes from a combination of personal weather stations that are run from homes and schools as well as national weather services. Weather Underground, Weather Bug, Citizen Weather Observer Program, and National Weather Service are four of the major sites that compile this data. You search on cities, place names to set the location [...]

Woah, and before I thought gliffy was the best thing since (well I still like it for doing flow charts)… but the new fauxto (in beta, but open to play) is way beyond what I ever thought you might be able to have for paint tools as a web app. It is PhotoShop (lite) in a web browser, but you get paint tools, crop, text tools, smudge tool, marquee selection, canvas resize, color pickers, eye drop color picker, background/foreground colors, layers, layer opacity, filters, gradients, feathering, freaking LAYERS! So definitely it won’t replace PhotoShop, but for anyone on a budget, needing to do some basic image creation, for students, for anyone who wants to make awful and amateur images like mine, it may shine. Under the hood it is done in Flash. Nifty stuff!