CogBlogged from ‘March, 2008’

Thanks to Twitter, I Have a Tweet Cloud by cogdogblog posted 31 Mar ’08, 10.03pm MDT PST on flickr I was intrigued when the Good Doctor Bryan Alexander blogged his discovery of a twitter cloud tool. Tweetclouds generates this once granted your tiwtter user name. I wanted one! Bryan has one! But when I tried (several times) all I got were blanks. No clouds. No tags. Sadness. So I offered a tweet: Get off of My Twitter Cloud? Each time I try www.tweetclouds.com/ I get blank. Jealous of @BryanAlexander and his cloud and in less than an hour, the creator of TweetClouds, John Krutch heard me and replied: @cogdog tweetclouds can only get 80 tweets per api request with a limit of 70 requests per user so if you have more than 5600 tweets no good But hey John, I only have about 3000! Before I could even reply, he [...]

WordPress 2.5 has been out a few days, what am I waiting for? Actually for my Dreamhost hosted sites, the upgrade is a brainless click with its One Click install/upgrades. I am done. Well not completely, the whole admin interface is different! It has that new car WordPress.com smell, the old blue is gone, we have pastels, and woah, all the stuff is in a different place. Its just an adjustment phase, like wiping the crud from your eyeglasses. Back up th This post is not about the virtues of WP2.5 as they ought to unveil themselves through use (time to get serious about tagging though). I am thinking more about the fleet of 4 or 5 WP sites I have at NMC (#6 is in the oven) and the upgrade path for them. WP2.5 has in place upgrades for plugins and at NorthernVoice, Matt hinted that it might someday [...]

Chaos / Order by cogdogblog posted 30 Mar ’08, 11.54am MDT PST on flickr I finally got the pieces of my office desk up here, and with some cussing, drilling, glue managed to re-assemble it (a few of those cam/post things got mangled in my hast of packing up). So on the right side, meet Order, the most clean and neat this office will be once I start sitting in the chair. On the left, is the prevailing Chaos of piles of crap- books, notes, cables, sloppily labeled CDs, papers, old conference programs, dirty coffee cups… who shall prevail? FYI – I created the panorama images using the stitch mode in the Canon Powershot- it show the previous shot to help you line up good overlap. The PhotoSticher utility that comes with the camera was crap – it was curvy, and had huge mis-matches. To get a quailuty image, I [...]

I cannot even remember what I was doing poking around San Francisco with Google Maps, but I was looking around The City with the Street View option turned on it was along a stretch of a street I notice that as I move around, I was following the same car. This makes sense as the images are taken from a special camera mounted on top of a vehicle. And then a flash- I could navigate around with this camera and collect still frames.. or do a screen capture. and make a movie. I call my first effort “The Streetview(s) of San Francisco” as I took a spin down Lombard Street, the “Crookedest Street in the World” I did this in about 20 minutes on My MacBookPro. Located Lombard Street on Google Maps with Street View turned on Opened up iShowU, the Mac app for capturing screen action onto QuickTime. Set [...]

+ = I have documented the hungry actions of the squirrels who raid my bird feeders and again. Fresa, the cutest beagle in the world just gets wild when she spots the squirrel, and gets riles up in chase/hunt mode. As I just got my Canon Powershot back from repair, I was equipped today to get a video of her squealing chase sequence. Whats even funnier, is hours later, as I play this video and upload to YouTube, every time she hears her own baying sound on the video, she gets wired up again and runs outside to look for squirrel prey. I am not sure if the squirrels got the message, they keep coming back.

A majority of my blog posts are spontaneous spurts, yet sometimes, an idea takes root somewhere in the gray matter, and just sits there quietly demanding to be let out. This one has been rattling around, and tonight demands to see that publish button clicked. So there is a strand here, some storytelling, and a cliche metaphor to be trotted out. This in many ways a commentary on the work we do in this poorly defined field I’ll call “Instructional Technology”. I think it was triggered by Laura’s post on Fear 2.5: Afterthoughts following the excellent session she and colleagues did at EDUCAUSE ELI 2008. She openly shares her fear: A fear I have that I don’t think I articulated was a fear of being irrelevant and unnecessary. How important is my position, really, to the institution as a whole? If my position disappeared, would anyone really notice? Most of [...]

The travel route for where I live now in Strawberry to Phoenix is a lovely drive down highway 87, the “Beeline Highway”, that romps up and down some fabulous jumbled up geology, connecting the Sonoran desert to the forest plateau. Ir cab be idyllic… until something happens to close the highway, as the alternative routes can be 60, 80 miles of detour. Lats summer a fuel truck lost control on a steep downhill, crashed, and the northbound highway lanes “melted” from the heat of the explosion. And just Friday, I heard, that a landslide caused by water running below the surface which loosened rock, buckled the highway, and it is still closed as repairs continue. So with some curiosity I’ve been Google mapping some bits and pieces, and have been dismayed that none of the news actually provides the map location of this incident. Shouldn’t most online news be geocoded [...]

I am a die hard Google junkie. For more than 2 years, iGoogle has been home on every computer I use, while others clamor about their RSS tools, I just dig and dig Google reader, Gmail is my hub for all my non-twitter communication ;-) and I put all my time into Google calendar. Yet, I have a gripe. It’s the menus that are supposed to make it easy to be moving around my Googlespace. For the longest time, there were no menus in Google Reader. Then a few weeks ago, Reader just disappeared from all menus. But lately I am just looking at these menus, static, and saying, “Boy are you dumb.” Let’s say I start in Gmail…

I’ve just swapped the spam “defense” here from SpamKarma2 to Askimet. The word is that Dr Dave is going to top updating it. Sk2 has sure needed regular attention lately, a lot of moderation, and then I found out that friends of mine were being tossed its captcha, and I hate bad captchas. Bad news. And then I recall at Northern Voice 2008 when keynoter Matt Mullenweg said he created Askiment for his Mom top be able to blog w/o worry of spam… well he had me. So now I am running Askimet. No spam fence is w/o problems, so I am holding off any celebration.

Caveat Emptor- this blog post has nothing to do with technology, learning, spam, WordPress, twitter, or the other junk that makes up the focus here. Its just about what I did with a tree. I could make a stretch and leap to something about learning objects, re-usable content… but that can be an exercise left for the reader. Now that I am living in Strawberry Arizona, a small town in the middle of a National Forest, at 6000 feet elevation, a number of environment differences are obvious. First, form where I lived before in Scottsdale, the city has a progressive recycling program- paper, cans, bottles, plastic go in a big giant can, it disappears, and we assume it is all recycled. That story is another blog post. But in a small town, recycling, transporting, etc is likely cost prohibitive. There is a collection for aluminum can at the fire station, [...]