CogBlogged from ‘August, 2008’

Silly Map / 13000 Views by cogdogblog posted 22 Aug ’08, 11.56am MDT PST on flickr How crazy, crazy, crazy. My play last May of Make Starbucks say "Large" at asking people to add a node on a GoogleMap if they could get someone at Starbucks to refer to a large coffee as "Large" — has a map with 13,000 views! There are only 12 points on the map, is the task too challenging Nutso. What are y’all doing? See the crazy map for yourself. I think I’ll have a triple latte mocha yabbo jabbo

How could I resist a title in my RSS Reader from the TED Blog called “Nellie McKay: The Dog Song”: If you need a companion Just go to the pound get yourself a hound and make the dog proud. That’s what it’s all about It’s a lot of fun; even downloaded the MP4 to have it on my iPhone. There are so many things to like about the TED videos- besides an amazing array of top speakers on compelling topics (like dogs!), the fact that they are not long monologues, the way it is provided online, in several formats, is top notch. But there was more when i was watching the video is how great the video production is– not really my expertise, but some key things about the TED video style: * Very clear audio nothing breaks a good video than lousy audio, crackly audio, audio levels wrong. TED [...]

I feel your fatigue. I feel mine. But I keep finding them interesting! Call me a fanboy (it’s a legit word in the dictionary). Tossing a linktribution to HeyJude (HeyJude! Hi) who has clued me into many new tools, I gave a go at Posterous: Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email. We launched in July 2008 and we’ve been steadily growing and adding features. We love sharing thoughts, photos, audio, and files with our friends and family, but we didn’t like how hard it was… so we made a better way. That’s posterous. We’re super excited to see what happens when blogging becomes as easy as email, and we hope you enjoy posterous as much as we do. How wild- you can set up an account without… setting up an account! So more or less, any way you can email something- text, words, pictures, [...]

photo credit: Mike Disharoon I doubt I lack company for people who grew up hooked on James Bond movies. After all, he was so suave, had cool toys, fast cars, girls in bikinis, traveled the world, license to kill! I want that job. And I’ll get heat, but there is only one genuine Bond persona for me, later ones were so plastic (excepting Daniel Craig for the newer Casino Royale). I remember as a kid even having a plastic James Bond briefcase, that opened to reveal plastic weapons. There was even a button on the top that would fire a rubber edged dart from the secret hole in the side (wow, violent toys, look what they have done to me!) So how cool is this online exhibit from the TimesOnline: To celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth, Times Online have created an exclusive 100 year interactive Fleming and Bond [...]

photo credit: pcesarperez People are so hung up with being labeled n00bs- it’s time for the bulk of us in that category to let our n00bility to bask in the sunshine, not hide in a closet of shame. Here are some suggestions for pumping up your n00b factor: Keep those generic icons that come with every account, grey generic silhouettes are unique, almost no one uses that brown twitter icon. Send thousands of invitations via linkedin to people in your address book(s) and be sure to use the custom text, “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” Everyone will thik you sent them a personal email. Tag everything in delicious “cool”, but don’t waste time adding more descriptive tags because that just messes up the database. The perfect text to describe your WordPress blog is creating an About page that says “This is an example of [...]

Jen starts out a post on Fire in the Kitchen with a statement, “I Can’t Cook”– she follows a nice thought path of using that as a metaphor for her ideas (and frustrations) on what she sees (I think) as an overemphasis on the tools of Web 2.0 and a frustration at one size fits all “recipes” for using such technology in education. I like/respect Jen. She was fun last year as a twitter-a-holic, and then she has recently pulled back to seriously ponder the mania. She’s asking herself some tough questions. And I got to meet her at Northern Voice and she’s just as cool in person. At the same time, I dont fully grok her discontent, but am interested to see it play out. But as one who reaches for them often, too often perhaps– metaphors are at last 2 edged devices. It was her opening statement of [...]

flickr cc image credit: Cats and Dogs, Living Together! by kmevans In my photography I’ve had a slight passing interest this year in creating panorama images (flickr has evidence). Since discovering my little Canon SD800 has a panorama shooting mode – it presents a screen with overlap to help with aligning when taking a series of images intended for stitching– I have been doing a few here and there. Until recently, I have been using a demo version of Autostitch software developed by Matthew Brown and David Lowe at the University of British Columbia. Autostitch™ is the world’s first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a great new technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical). I usually say [...]

photo credit: Mr.Tea It’s 6am here and after prepping once cup of fresh coffee, I flip the laptop open to check the weather… and next thing you know am getting pinged in Australia from my colleagues in Australia. Stephan, Robyn, and Alex want to talk about a breaking story there in the Sydney Morning Herald, Phone a friend in exams. Apparently, the Presbyterian Ladies’ College (remember ‘college’ there is high school here), is experimenting with allowing students in certain Year 9 exams to be able to use their mobile technology during exams. A SYDNEY girls’ school is redefining the concept of cheating by allowing students to “phone a friend” and use the internet and i-Pods during exams. Presbyterian Ladies’ College at Croydon is giving the assessment method a trial run with year 9 English students and plans to expand it to all subjects by the end of the year. An [...]

Hammock as rain gauge by cogdogblog posted 20 Aug ’08, 12.11am MDT PST on flickr Lots of rain in Strawberry this summer; the hammock has been used more to catch water that to catch naps. photo taken with iphone and uploaded with Mobile Fotos app- awesome! it automatically geo locates! The photo here is not the real subject of this post, but yes, my hammock is a bit messy and not all that inviting. What was cool is that I took the photo on my new iPhone, and as I was testing the Mobile Fotos app I purchased ($2.99) for uploading directly to flickr, I was excited to see an option to geocode it with my current location. This is the first built in geo-tagging camera I have ever had. Okay, the accuracy is off by 1/4 mile for this particular photo, but darn close. And automatic.

I Can Has iPhone! by cogdogblog posted 19 Aug ’08, 6.43pm MDT PST on flickr I’ve been wrong in my assumptions of AT&T service here in Strawberry. You cannot know w/o a phone to be sure. Maybe AT&T has been busy at woprk since I began barking about them. There is no 3G (network is EDGE) but for phone I am getting 4-5 bars. I dont care about network; I have wireless at home, and I want this baby for the road. So although I’ve been nasty PO-ed about the path to getting one, it’s all rear view window now. And it says something about the slick thing that I love it despite the hassles. I love the iPhone. I love my iPhone. Go ahead, tell me I am trapped in some operating system I cannot hack. I dont want to hack my iPhone, I want to use it.