CogBlogged from ‘June, 2007’

My own photo taken a few days ago in La Crosse, Wisconsin I hope when the blog starts up tomorrow, I have some Really Net Neat Stuff to read, find, and blab about. I’m just coming off a 10 day stretch of very little time on the machine, as my wife and I did some family visits and touring in rural Minnesota. This was on the heels of the whirlwind known as the 2007 NMC Summer Conference in Indianapolis, itself something fading into the background w/o due blog diligence. I tried getting in gear tonight with a Second Life meetup with Leigh and others that was goofy fun and then pandemonium as we boarded hang gliders, crashing in different directions, and left with hanging avatars. Oh well, work starts tomorrow. Neat Stuff awaits! BTW- What the heck is borked with flickr’s Blog This Photo? It fails on every site, account [...]

Shown by Apple’s Don henderson today at the closing of the 2007 NMC Summer Conference, An Empty Cubicle is a film created by students at the Art Institute of Seattle and a winner of the Insomnia Film Festival. It is well worth a watch! But hey Apple, sniff the Web 2.0 fumes and provide cut and paste code to embed videos like these into web sites.

The expedia jingle (and their annoying 1-800 number) has that annoying… “DOT COMMMMMM” – but I am ready to change it to “dot crap”. I am currently stranded unexpectedly in Chicago as Expedia booked my on a flight that does not exist. I planned travel following the NMC Summer Conference to fly from Indianapolis to Minneapolis via Chicago. Getting from Indy to here was no problem, and was even fun as the airport was full of NMC Conference attendees, so time as spent chatting with Andy, Ruben, Tim, Morgan, plus down the wing Jen and Sam from Maricopa, David from Princeton (on the phone, just like in the NMC 2008 Summer conference preview video), and two guys form USC. It was like another conference session. The hitch was when I got to Chicago for my connection. I had gobs of time, but could not find any listing for my flight. [...]

A double dose of WordPress pressure from Jerry and Andy (at NMC Summer Conference). Where is the Reverend when you need him? Had fun hanging out in Indy with Gardner, Jerry, Andy, Martha and Jen of the UMW Gang. They run at the same high level of fun energy I saw at faculty Academy. And Dr Glu had some serious fun at the jam!

Previously, I’ve noted a cool video site, dotSUB, that takes an interesting approach to ultimately add multi-lingual captions to video– allowing visitors to the site to add translations of the captions into any of the numerous other languages supported on the site.. or, as I call it, “user generated video captioning”. Today, I chatted with the CEO who offered to allow us to post a video to make available for captioning and they offered to do the first transcript in English. I posted our NMC Campus Seriously Engaging video (see the original). You can scroll through the video in any language…, And this is where you can participate– if you create a free account on dotSUB, you can add captions for any other language by translating the English version of the captions just by clicking on the movie above. Please jump in! There is more to dotSUB’s approach, but this [...]

Twitter has grown up and disbanded the silly and annoying cat in the server photos for times when the service is off kilter. They’ve gone uptown with a new bird warning: Dogs rule!

Courtesy of an airline magazine, on the way to Indianapolis, I found some gem quality quotes from a last interview with Kurt Vonnegut. Among the quotables was one that really spoke to me, especially in response to Martha’s thoughtful post on why blog: I speak with real painters and real artists from time to time about when they get their rocks off, and it’s the process of actually doing it. The rest of it — rave reviews or flops, or whatever — is just noise to them. It’s the doing that matters, the becoming. The rest of it doesn’t really matter. One ore time- its not about the reviews (comments, trackbacks, etc), what people say about what you do, ” It’s the doing that matters, the becoming.” That most succinctly hits the “why” factor for more- in the doing of blogging, I am rewarded, it is my own sense of [...]

As we exited from a fabulous seafood dinner at the Oceanaire in downtown Indianapolis, our tourist eyes were caught by the flashing light animation up the street- looked like a electronic dancer, an avatar maybe. When we asked the valet what that was, he quickly explained it: Waste of Taxpayers Money Gotta like the honesty here.

It’s the day before I board the Big Old Jet Airliner to the NMC Summer Conference and I am piling on the Web 2.0 Tagging goodness, or zaniness. This recap is as much to document as to thanks those I lean on. Last year, at the 2006 Summer conference in Cleveland, being my first one in the fold of NMC employment, I rolled out a Tag This Conference page, mixing up del.icio.us, flickr, and hopefully technorati content all tagged with nmc2006, the page doing so with some help from a local version of feed2js. Repeated this tagging for the 2006 Regional Conference in San Antonio. So without too much extension, the Web 1.0ish page is up for next week’s conference spiffed up a bit by bringing it also up as a Tumblog, which presents the feeds from the same 3 sources a bit more stylishly. Okay, that is good, but…