CogBlogged from ‘January, 2008’

Oh flickr, how I adore thee! my love runneth over… But after a lot of blog rants, its just so nice to say some nice things about nice people. Nice! I always get extra excited when my RSS feed for comments on my pix lights up in that “unread” color, so I checked out a link today, and ugh! It had no context to the photo, and it linked to some wretched site about increasing your web site ranks. Spam comment links in my flickr stream! Tell me it ain’t so! I followed the “Report Abuse” link on the bottom of the screen and saw several categories. Yep, spam. But then it suggested I send it from the profile page of the abuser. Well what a surprise! There were no photos loaded for the scum bag. So I fired off a note, included to the link where the spammer dribble [...]

Blog Danger Code Level Yellow posted 6 Jan ’08, 10.31am MST PST on flickr Word choice on CogDogBlog has earned me a code yellow, Elevated: Tom Cruise might ask me for spare change. The Airbag Blog Advisory System was just quirky enough I had to take time and try. In these dark times you can never be too careful that’s why we at the Airbag Department of Security created a Blog Advisory System so that Website Masters can alert their users to the threat condition of words being used. Do you use words like crap, damn, hell, poop, kakka in your blog posts and/or comments? Then consider adding the an Airbag Department of Security Blog Advisory System badge to your site to prevent people from becoming victims of your freedom hating content. Sticks and stones sure, but believe me pal, the power of the blog comment is mightier than a [...]

Thanks to the precedent setting and helpful nudge of D’Arcy Norman (who did this last year), in 2008, I am pledging myself to take and post to flickr every day a photo that best captures what I as doing, or at least what I photographed that day. As D’Arcy notes, it is not easy, but what it does is (I think) stretches your imagination and skills of photography. So while you can find mine as 2008/366 photo set on flickr, the above slide show below was made with SlideFlickr a free web tool that “will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds.” Slideflickr provides extra options, such as the music track. I went to ccMixter, a fab source for free music, where I rummaged a bit and chose this electronic remix: jaspertine lab sound 3.

Forget the Social Graph, Here’s the Twitter Graph! posted 4 Jan ’08, 11.15pm MST PST on flickr Hardly a day passes now that there is not some other new web tool doing something interesting with data grabbed from twitter’s open APIs. This just in is Twitter Stats, which helps you analyze your (or someone else’s) twitter ing trends: This is a totally ugly engine to produce some stats from your Twitter feed and present them with the Google Charts API, including Tweets per hour of the day, total Tweets per day/month, top @replies and top overall @s. My own trends pretty much show I twitter most of the work day (uh-oh, dont tellt he boss), with a sharp spike before I knock off at 6pm. And apparently, I do the bukl of my twitter mid-week. This is the good feeling stuff about web 2.0 orn whatever you want to call [...]

I’m on a video spree tonight; playing around with the goofy squirrel movie got me thinking about another video I slapped together last May for a presentation I did at University of Mary Washington- this was the first go around for “Being There” which turned out in some ways to be “Alan’s Favorite Things and Odd Stuff on the Web”. I had this one slide and effort to make a connection between teaching and cover bands. I actually got so carried away by the video I made to emphasize the point, it was later it dawned on me that maybe while fun, it sort of was a stretch from the supposed topic- a pitfall when you get hooked on media. Here I tried to make the connection between teaching and cover bands. If you go to a bar and the music is a Beatles cover band, you pretty much expect [...]

Yesterday I dutifully filled the bird feeders for all the numerous finches, jays, acorn wood peckers that I imagine are pretty hungry in the cold winter up on the Mogollon Rim, Arizona. As i was working today, out my window about 3 feet away, I watched this gray suited thug empty the feeder in about 15 minutes, and grabbed a video on my Canon PowerShot shooting through the window. I cannot explain why I bothered to edit or even post this, just felt like it. Music is from the Internet Archive’s 78RPM Collection, Ernest Thompson – Red Wing (April 15, 1924). Hmmm, perhaps I need a predator…

Good golly, 2008 is not even 24 hours in the bag, and I am blogging about spammers. You can certainly see something I did not put on my resolution list (which, in fact, is another one of those zero item lists). Spotting spam sometimes takes some detection, but other times its a simple matter of: * is the comment relevant to the blog post subject? I wrote the darn thing, so I can sure tell the difference * is the comment hoisting a link to another site, which has no relevance either to the blog post So I get one that tries to be “clever” in declaring that it is not spam. But it fails on both accounts. Spam is spam and it goes back in the can. When I write a blog post about my first effort of doing a daily flickr photo post, does it take a nuclear [...]

A Llama Named Mike posted 1 Jan ’08, 4.52pm MST PST on flickr "Mike" was one of three llamas we hiked with from Strawberry Llama Ranch for a New Years Day trek into Fossil Creek Canyon. Mike was the alpha of the three, so he mostly had to march in front, and spent a lot of time munching juniper, oak, and dried grass. These animals are amazing in their gentleness and ability to carry lots of stuff. We hiked down about halfway, a lot of the trail that was in the shade was still iced over from snow two weeks ago. The vistas are amazing, revealing some of the same strata that makes up the Grand Canyon. His owners told us Mike was named after Michael Jordan, for reasons not explained, and we felt like he deserved a more dignified name like Miguel or Fernando. Like many things I have [...]