CogBlogged from ‘December, 2006’

The traveling shoes are on. I’m at the Phoenix airport, as always bowing my thanks towards the city mayor for sponsoring this lovely and free wireless access at Sky Harbor Airport. I’m off to San Francisco for 2 days, one an NMC staff meeting and Friday is one of our quarterly NMC Board meetings. For the latter we get to meet at Adobe, where I fondly remember the fun days on the mid 1990s visiting the company formerly known as Macromedia, the coincidental trip when almost by chance I got in the fron door for the beta version of Shockwave. I wonder if they still have the big yellow sliding board? I went through one of those air puff machines for the first time at the TSA security. There is that really awkward moment standing in the chamber, being told to wait for the green light (when the doors open)… [...]

(Cue the E.R. Music) Previously… on CogDogBlog: PowerPoint is 2.0-fied with SlideShare It has been a few weeks since I looked at slideshare, and today uncovered some things that likely were always there. I am swiping the notion from Bryan Alexander’s vocabulary in terms of talking about “microcontent” — each slide in an uploaded PowerPoint, that gets convetreted to Flash, is addressable as a URL. This is big, but means you can direct link to a specified slide in any show: http://slideshare.net/sam_the_mc/pokemon/4 http://slideshare.net/pedronr3/premios-de-fotojornalismo-2005/8 http://slideshare.net/pedrobeltrao/modularity-and-evolvability/18 http://slideshare.net/cjin/061203futurewebappstempo/43 it is a matter of taking the URl for any slideshow presentation… say, http://slideshare.net/cogdog/talking-about-rss/ and just appending the number of the slide you want to link to say, slide 7. If those shideshare folks are listening, what might be cool is a way to bookmark or favorite a specific screen, and then have a tool to create mashup from different shows! I learned that by [...]

It was a few months ago I shared my use of Google’s Personal Home page, (get yours now) which has been for some time the home page on the 4 or so computers I use. I was recently helping Rachel set up hers with some modules and decided it was time to clean up and add some new decoration to my own home page. First of all, for some inexplicable, “forgot my human interface design rules” reason, Google made it much harder to add any RSS feed to be syndicated to your home page. Previously it was clearly available form the lower left side of the “available content” categories. This has led more than one blogger to deduce you could not even add your own feeds. [1] [2]. Hello, Google? For those trying to figure out the magic incantation, you need to click the “add more stuff” link from your [...]

I’m not one to look a several thousand dollar windfall gift horse in the eye, but I do believe paying for things I agreed to pay for. But I cannot seem to pay what I owe, not for lack of trying. We had a soft water filtration system installed on our 30 year old Arizona house to deal with the issues of desert relentless “hard” water. The installers were on time, courteous, did a great job, and we now have smooth showers and no more calcium carbonate residue in our pots and pans. But this work was done 7 weeks ago, I paid with a credit card number called in, and I have yet to see a charge. I called the company that did the work, and they say they have been paid, and provided a credit card authorization number. But my credit card company says that no such payment [...]

This is fun. The huge database of more than 7 million books people have collected in their accounts at LibraryThing (oops, that one is on my list of things yet tried) is mined in a way you might have not thought anyone would want. The “UnSuggestor” takes a book title you enter, and from the accumulated data, picks the book least likely owned in the same collection: Unsuggester takes “people who like this also like that” and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest. The unsuggestions come from LibraryThing data, not from Amazon. LibraryThing also produces great suggestions. So consider yourself odd if you own both pairs of books? Well-rounded? a Library? I am not sure what one might use this for, [...]

This is weird. About a day or 2 ago, I started getting a stream of Trackback notices by email. At first, I feared it was something Beth warned about after my use of a spam enticing word. But no, this was a string of trackbacks triggered from my own posts, going back to a year ago, to either the same entry or another old post. So my blog, on its own, is sending trackbacks to itself. Weird. I updated WP to 2.0.5 a few weeks ago, and have not done anything to the code in the last 2 days. So who is out there putting voodoo on my blog? Weird.

Someone should be worried. With just a few sniffs, I might be getting hooked on Google Reader for my RSS habits. I’ve not really like using web-based RSS readers for scanning, as checking each site’s news required a wait for a web transcation, whereas a desktop reader grabs allt he stuff quickly, or in the background, allowing me t paw through it quickly. But Google Reader’s ajax scented interface is fast. And the keyboard shortcuts make going through items even quicker than my desktop reader. First off all, there is easy in and easy out via an OPML input/export of your feeds. So I was able to grab my list from either my Bloglines collection or my desktop reader’s export functions, toss them into Google Reader, and was off to the races. And it kept my folder structure for organizing my feeds. And you can select an entire folder to [...]