CogBlogged from ‘March, 2007’

I sat down to the computer tonight to take care of some quick tasks. What a cool surprise in that one of by blog run projects, the NMC Virtual Worlds site got included in a list of “Truly Unique and Outstanding Blogs” (Ouch, sounds a bit like a 5% Point thang). Taking a peek at the site to make sure it was okay, I was surprised to see the public one was running WP 2.0.6 as I thought I had done a 2.1 upgrade… well I had done it on my local test machine, but never got to updating the main site. And a good thing I dawdled since my local copy was the dangerous 2.1.1 version. And than I got fuzzy on the template changes I had to wrangle due to a few database changes in the new code. And I forgot my custom function I bury in the [...]

If you are a text messager, try this on your mobile: 41411 cogdog The latest, goofiest, likely mispelliest headline from CogDogBlog. Just what the world needs. This was created with TextMarks, a free service where you can set up a keyword so when someone TXTs it will get back either fixed response, or as I have set it up, text from any web page (we;; 125 chars of it). I think you can also message the service from your phone so you change the response. So while this post is top of the heap, you will get something like the image to the right. I can really not think of an actual use yet, as I did this solely to see how it works. Other available textmarks include getting movie ratings from IMDB, translate English to Spanish, the location of someone’s yacht, Work Schedule for Richard Herman Walker, and hundreds [...]

Blog comment spam is one thing, but when you get an email like: Hello Alan, I’ve been reading Cogdogblog and I love the work you are putting out. My name is Xxxxx xxxxxx. I work with Xxxx XXXXX Xxxx in Xxxxxx, Xxxxx. I would love the opportunity to chat with you about potential partnership opportunities. We are always looking for new ways to raise awareness and engage new audiences. This could be a great way for us to come together to spread the word about issues we both care about. : ; [snip] It ought to seem genuine. Wow, this person is a long time blog reader? Wow, they are with some cool company in Xxxxxx. Might be my big breal! Hold the bus! The writer’s job title is something like “Viral Media Outreach”. Makes me a bit suspicious… Hmm… And yeah, I del.icio.us tagged something from the same outfit [...]

My twitter curiosity rose to a nice sharp peak and fell off given there’s real work to do. Like just about everyone else, my pre-twitter perspective was, “What kind of person with too much time to spend would bother IMing every time they scratched their leg?”, and then having tried it, found this strange multi-layered communication patterns that was… well interesting. Uh back a step. Twitter is a web-service where you create buddies/contacts, and you can use several devices (web form, IM buddy, SMS, even messages form Second Life) to send a short (~140 character) message about what you are doing in the moment. Like D’Arcy called it, “nano-blogging”. And Cole was really giving it a good go at Penn State as a project group “letting them know what I am doing” tool. There’s something there, I am just not sure of it. But I dropped off a bit, the [...]

So yeah, flickr was swallowed by the big fish Yahoo, and piss off the old skoolers. At least the site still surprises with some bursts of quirky personality syndrome, as a search today just resulted in a Bill The Cat response: You gotta love an error that says, “Ack”! It makes you want to say, “Thbbbt”. In stark contrast, compare to the warm and fuzzy, make you smile, error messages from ‘other’ systems: I’ll take the Ack, please.

It seems to be a human condition to extend our own experiences to generalities. So for example, in hours trying to help my wife and her computer woes (like Windows not being able to open desktop windows), I can say with confidence, “Windows Sucks”. Or when I put in a telephone call to my insurance company and get passed around a phone tree and disconnected, “XXXXXXX has bad customer service.” Or if I experiment with Second Life, walk into walls and get accosted by a giant furry waving a phallus, I might conclude, “Second Life is useless!” So it goes with web hosting services. Last week I noticed that while I was getting RSS feeds from Stuart’s Using Wiki in Education blog, every time I followed a story, and for that matter every one of his URLs went to a blank page. He emailed back, citing bad experience with WordPress [...]