CogBlogged from ‘January, 2007’

Just to show that any dog can click on random options of a web form: Which Programming Language are You? Yup, the only Java programming I have ever seen is by sheer accident. A fun diversion, and a linktribution to Scott Wilson.

Faux Ocotillo Resurrectedavailable on flickr When I left Maricopa last April, my colleague David Weaver gave me this plant as a stand in for an Ocotillo (a project I supported for like 10 years). I am not a good plant caretaker, and with a little bit of in-attention, this plant lost most its leaves a few months back .but some time spent outside, sun, and more regualr watering has brought it back to life. Hopefully the clutter of wires and electronic debris will not be abad influence. Working with David at maricopa was a true honor- he was one of the first faculty I met as a green rookie in 1992 (my first week was an Ocotillo retreat at Mormon Lake), and I can think of not too many others I worked with who put such an amount of energy into both teaching physics, but also embracing (and questioning) technology. [...]

Yet another instance where an attempt to use the Windows XP operating system has rendered it toast on the bottom side of my MacBookPro. Fortunately, I have a reliable OS on the front side. It’s bad enough that my latest web design effort includes 30% of the time developing and testing in a web standard browser, and then spending the other 190% of my time trying to find work arounds for Internet Explorer’s misbehaviors. I have my old Compaq PC laptop set up for testing in IE 6 (1/3 the sign of the devil). I had run my site through Browsershots and it showed good results for IE7, but somereports from the field suggested otherwise. So I booted up the MBP in Windows mode. For some inane reason, instead of going to the IE7 site, I went through Windows Update, and saw its suggestion of 19 “critical updates” including IE7. [...]

Remix of original cc-licensed flickr photo by crowulf Alas. my iPod Shuffle is gone, softly in the night. I’d noticed a few weeks ago that it refused to work in my car via my DLO Transpod FM transmitter, just blinked orange. Since it played music via my head phones, I thought it was the transpods fault, and for a bit I played it via the audio input. But trying to recharge it, the darn thing refused to mount on the desktop. It just blinked yellow. And then its juice ran out. With some googling, I found a number of others who have gone through the loss as well, and the Apple Reset tool could not revive it, could not even talk to the stiff. Inserted into my PC, Windows said, “Dead USB”. So it’s time to say goodbye to little Shufflt. I can remember fondly the day we met. Okay, [...]

Not writing much this week. Looking for nouns. Must find noun…. Just kidding (not that the world would wobble off its axis if I focused on work rather than badly typing about it). January is ramping up with project intensity, still working with our drupal developers on getting the NMC Web site’s 2.0 version ready for a beta release, rolling out a completely brand new WordPress powered web site (not a “blog”) but a whole site for a Big Huge Secret Project, working with a large group of artists for a big Second Life event next month, moving the entire NMC web site to a new web host, prepping for upcoming EDUCAUSE ELi conference followed right after by another 3 day pachyderm workshop, and… and…. In a few days I hope to be able to talk about both some neat new WordPress tricks learned as well dome digging into Media [...]

flickr foto Multiple Browsers = Impact of Web 2.0available on flickr For reasons likely harder to write, I now have numerous iterations of myself at multiple web application sites, including 3 Google accounts (mail, reader, docs, calendar), 2 del.icio.us accounts, 3 flickr accounts. I hate having to log in and log out to do tasks, so I rely on multiple web browsers I can have myself logged in as different entities, using Firefox, Safari, and added today, Camino. Firefox is for all of my cogdogblog stuff, a Google home page, a Google calendar (which actually mixes shared items from a series of other calendares I have in a separate NMC account), perusing my daily blog fixes in Google reader, a del.icio.us account that i tag for multiple projects, my primary cogdog flickr collection. In Safari, are a few services used exclusively for the NMC Campus Observer, our Second Life outpost. [...]

Note: I guess I was wrong here in my assertions below. Don’t miss Greg’s comment below. Can I still be eligible for the prize drawing? Cue up the guitar riff from Warren Zevon… Somewhere, several places in the world, there are scores of people who’s job it is to scrounge the net for usage of words construed as “copyrighted”. I have now had a second event where my usage of words as a metaphor has come under the scope, and legal threats arrive by mail. Previously, it was the Ripley’s folks who suggest no one can post a web site with the phrase “Believe It or Not” — that any such usage tarnishes their austere image. So yes, last time this happened on a Maricopa web page, I just took them out of the picture (yes we succumbed to threats, but there is no gain in a long fight and [...]

I have a soft sentimental spot for technology thats till works well after a 5+ year lifespan. Since 2003, on this blog, I have made use of Bryan Boyer’s IndyJunior Flash Mapping Module, which parses data from an external XML file to plot geographic locations that this dog travels to or has been before– see http://cogdogblog.com/indy.php. I’ve engineered this with my own custom PHP wrapper, making ti so I create a different XML file for each year’s data, storing it in a directory like wp-content/indy/2005.xml, wp-content/indy/2007.xml, wp-content/indy/2007.xml, etc. (see the manual for details on the data format, but it is XML I can ever understand). To execute my PHP, and to have a drop down menu with the years to select, I had to take this page out of the WordPress content flow; but you can easily create accessory pages that use the WP functions for building headers, styles, sidebars, [...]

This might be Chapter 57 of my tool brigade– I have known peripherally about LibraryThing for a while, and did play a while ago with a pale cousin named Reader2.. but holy #@^@%, Does LibraryThing (hereto-after referred to as LT) rock as a powerful social net app. It starts in email.. someone on the NMC Directors Listserv (email list for all contacts we have with NMC members) posted a request: I’m working on a subcommittee preparing for university accreditation and trying to think about what’s on and even over the horizon in regard to technology and pedagogy. What do you think I should read? Are there a couple of books or articles or reports that jump into mind that you could share? Like, right now I happen to be looking at Oblinger and Oblinger’s Educating the Net Generation (Educause 2005). Are there recent works like that or even older classics [...]

flickr foto 0.5 of a 43 Thingavailable on flickr One of my 43 Things is listed as "Sell a Photograph as Art". I think this comes close. A few months ago, maybe more, someone from a publishing company asked permission to use a rather old photo from my Sonoran Desert Sampler (actually it is a scan of a 35mm print), and offered payment for it! This is my first financial gain from a photo. At this rate, I wil; be able to retire in, oh, June of 3054. Maybe not art, but it was sold. It’s been a while since I paid attention to my “43 Thangs”, so updates are due… this typically happens when the calendar odometer rolls over. I’d really like to learn to build my own custom picture frames, using seasoned old woods pilfered from old barns and such, and than frame some of my favorite photos. [...]