CogBlogged from ‘August, 2008’

On the Couches for Learning 2.008 by cogdogblog posted 31 Aug ’08, 9.04am MDT PST on flickr Just finished an early morning (for me, others in Asia it was evening) pre-conference session leading up to the Learning 2.008 Conference in Shanghai- I was a guest along with David Warlick whom I have to go all the way to Shanghai to meet in person. I’m so excited about this trip and what promises to be an amazing conference among International School educators Met with come colleagues in Second Life! Ah, I am disconnected next few days for the scenic ride home from Denver through Durango. Colorado is a breath taking state to see!

John P of One Mans Blog (great tagline: Specialization is for Insects) was a busy camera guy at WordCamp 2008. I just got word (via a flickr comment) that the video of my session on It’s All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner is now on viddler (and not exactly as it was/is billed as “The Future of Education and WP”): I am headed out the door ASAP for a weeklong roadtrip and am thus avoiding watching and counting my ums.

flickr photo Autoretrato com Colorado by Paulo Brabo Maybe two months from now will mark the 15th year I have been on the web. This will be October 29, exactly at 10:30am, 15 years to the minute when I inserted a floppy disk labeled “Mosaic” (in perhaps a Mac Quadra 900) that my Maricopa colleague Jim Walters had handed me, and had said, just with a smile, “Try this”. Profound moment indeed. In all this time, I have never lost a shred of excitement over those crazy serendipity happenings, connections, opportunities, that present themselves only because the web was there. Things that would not have happened otherwise, in that creepy parallel universe where there is no internet, no world wide web. So I am going to toss out a few and see if others pick up and share there own. My stipulation is that each story much have a link [...]

NOTE: Was I ever wrong and offbase on this one. Thanks to rapid responses to the Foxmarks folks on GetSatisfaction site, it looks like the culprit now is the delicious.com extension, which is now disabled and the beachballs / long syncs are gone. Sigh. My humble apologies to the makers of Foxmarks Doesn’t Uninstall mean go away? Remove yourself? Not if you are the Foxmarks extension for Firefox. Like trying to kill a vampire, even having the right tools does not get read of the nuisance. cc licensed flickr photo by JoshBerland19 I upgraded to Firefox 3 a few weeks ago and was sad to learn the Google Browser Sync extension was left out to dry and not upgrade to work in FF3. This as a flawless tool that kept my bookmarks matched between my Mac and PC, and not only that, kept my cookies and browser history in line [...]

I love tagging and still persist in vain hopes that I can encourage others to do some shared tagging, but feel lucky if I can get a handful of people to use a single tag. I am regularly tagging web sites in delicious with tags destined to be repurposed on at least 10 different web sites, and am starting to wonder what my cranial capacity is to remember what topics I am tagging for. photo credit: Steve Roe So its with some irony I saw some tagging “instructions” for a flickr group. I’ll likely lose my membership for posting this, but small beans. I liked the concept of this Project NetPop group — to “depict how the internet is changing life around you… Post pictures to show the impact of the Internet and technology on your life and the world around you.” In fact I was noodling about a blog [...]

Holy iPhone Screen Shots by cogdogblog posted 25 Aug ’08, 11.56pm MDT PST on flickr Enough n00b me trying to capture iPhone screens via a photo from my camera. Via comment by Guy K just press Power and Home button together: blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/08/the-art-of-ipho.html Compare to flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2798321033/ Emailed as if magic from my iPhone

Almost be sheer accident I just came across Qipit a service that allows you to take photos of sketches or whiteboards with your camera phone, email it to their site, and then have it available as a PDF or even be able to fax it. Chances are, you carry a cell phone with you everywhere you go. And more than likely, that cell phone has a camera. Qipit turns this handy device into a portable scanner, copier and fax machine, and the user-friendly Qipit service also works with your digital camera at home or the office. The patented image-processing science behind Qipit is complicated, but the concept is simple: use Qipit to capture and share anything written or printed. Whereever you’re at. Whenever you need it. I just quickly set up an account, and used my iPhone to take picture of a sketch diagram I have for some plans to [...]

photo credit: *TreMichLan* When you send an email (and it does not bounce back) you likely have the assumption it got to the intended person. If they never respond, do you begin conjuring stories? “Why did he ignore my request?” … “I hate companies that don’t reply to consumer”… “I guess she does not like me”… Well there are some dark dead ends of the internet where information goes to never return. Many domains for email addresses have one address that all messages go to if the server cannot find an account- the “catch-all” address. Or it just goes to a trash canned named dev-null. I monitor one of these accounts for NMC. Maybe every two weeks I sift it to find if there is something that was mis-addressed. Alot of it is spam, but there is a whole pile of dead email letters that are simply mis-addressed. There are [...]

I almost started to say something like “I Can’t” but I can’t do that. But I honestly know that organizational stuff (like keeping things neatly in file and making to do lists) are just practices I don’t gravitate to. The inane tweet above was more a mis-placed assumption that the GTD “movement” seems to end of more focused on the process of GTD than the Things part. I have no basis to make that assertion, yet that does not stop me. So I could give a hoot how many emails I have in my inbox. The only ones I say are the ones that fit my scroll bar, and rather than fart around with clever folders, I find ‘em the search way. I never profess to say my way is better than anyone elses. But now I offer for anyone looking for a short cut to this stuff, to join [...]

photo credit: minifig A post I made to the Apple Discussion forums this morning has been shown the back door, and I guess I have been slapped. They took my post off their site, who gives a rat’s arse when I can publish it here? I posted something because I have been stumped through other channels (documentation, help, asking on twitter, cussing) on how to delete an un-needed calendar on my iPhone. Unlike almost every other type of thing you put on an iPhone, there is no way to simply remove a calendar. The problem is some sort of weird sync issue. I have a few calendars in iCal that I sync to Google Calendar using Spanning Sync, an din turn, iCal also syncs with iPhone. The problem has been with the Birthdays calendar, which is generated in iCal automatically when you enter a birthday in the Address Book application. [...]