CogBlogged from ‘December, 2008’

Today’s photo was just another day, just another photo, a string of 366 of them since Mike the Lllama on Jan 1 , 2008 when D’Arcy Norman prompted me to follow along with the post a photo a day game (see more back story in One Day One Photo where this all started). At last count, the 366 Photos group on flickr was up to 59 members, all amazing since it was all unplanned, un-led, and during the year, I found myself connecting to photographers I knew and did not knew, from here and far away. In reviewing my 366 photos, I found in my photos: 3 of cacti 22 of friends and colleagues 22 of dogs (plus 3 more of non-canine animals) 22 of signs 10 including alcohol photos from many places in Arizona, plus Vancouver, Victoria, Austin, Orlando, Sanibel Island, Los Angeles, San Diego (hotel room), Princeton, Newark [...]

Did you know that airlines can take your money for tickets, and then keep it when their own delays cause you to miss connections? There is a word for that. Did you know they can ignore requests for customer service? Not reply to messages they acknowledge they will? Did you know that the Bush administration has putt handcuffs on the Department of Transportation’s ability to respond to consumer complaints? Sure DOT says file a complaint online, but in September 2007 according to New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg this is an empty pursuit: The Secretary of Transportation has the authority to regulate airlines and issue fines up to $2,500 to carriers for violations of federal airline consumer protection rules. But the Bush Administration has chosen to limit the number of passenger complaints DOT can follow up on. Claiming budgetary shortfalls, the DOT only follows up on complaints related to discrimination and [...]

Do you use the TwitterTools plugin on your own WordPress site to send your blog posts to your tweet stream? Wanna feel like a real WordPress hack jockey? Here is a little code editing you can do without needing to know diddly squat about PHP. Here’s the thing, when TwitterTools published your new sexy blog post to Twitter, it always prefixes it with the same intro text that everyone else gets: New blog post: Video of My Big Blah Blah Blah Got Stuck in the Blah… http://tinyurl.com/xxxxx Do you really want to post like everyone else? That is so lemming like. Sheep. Conformist. Not for me. Long ago, I dug into the code and found a line to edit to change it, so my blog posts to twitter are always uniquely mine as Just CogDogBlogged: This is so easy, all you need to be able to do is to edit [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by SiRi About the most reliable prediction one can make this end time of year is the flood of people posting their own predictions for 2009, lots of them in the technology space (e.g. ReadWriteWeb, EDITing in the Dark, and Stephen Downes takes out the 10 year scope in an amazing essay I need some hours to read by the fire). What is it about predictions? Why do people play the game? It seems a lot of it is wanting to be “right”, to look back from the future, and pat our backs on hitting the target, as it thus proves our prescience. Heck, I’d like to have accurate predictions (emphasize “pre” like before) on say lottery numbers, horse races, implosions of the economy…) but as much certainty is written into the language, there is littler certainty. They are educated (sometimes) hunches. cc licensed flickr photo [...]

JamStudio is a nifty online music mixer where you can compose and publish your own tunes. You put music keys on the score, select instruments, set tempo, etc: You can create multiple “pages” of music; I just played quickly to create two “originals” (hah, just quick futzing around): Cowboy Glitter [448k MP3] Rain on the Road [568l MP3] See this video for how it works: You can play around with it for free, to save as MP3 (which are emailed to you as links), you have to get a $10/month account, but there is a 10 day full feature trial period. However, I did notice at the bottom (which ugh is flash, so you cannot copy text to paste as a description), they offer free accounts for teachers and students, which might be a useful for schools lacking music instruments?? Wanna Jam? You can do it w/o any music knowledge, [...]

Fast Food (Roadrunner) by Nick Chill posted 11 Nov ’08, 4.11pm MST PST on flickr Here is another of the Greater Roadrunner, actually running across the road. He was very challenging to shoot. View On Black 20081108-088 As astutely commented by John Larkin another Twitteronema (Twitter+Phenomena) is how fast software and web site creators respond when you toss a blog post, more more likely, tweet message into the tubes. I’ve got my own long list of stories where this has happened, and sure I am not surprised as it is smart, maybe even necessary, for not only software makers, manufacturers, but any organization, blogger, group to be actively tracking mentions of it in the xxxxxx-osphere. But the speed of response still makes me gasp sometimes. At 2:11 PM MST I posted my complaint about the Animoto iPhone app not working. Through my TwitterTools WP Plug-in, it was tweeted about a [...]

I was excited to try Animoto‘s new app for the iPhone that allows you to create videos from iPhone photos and their music selection. So I loaded up 16 photos, arranged them, and selected my music. Then when I went to create the video, I keep getting told my phone is offline, despite the 5 bar wireless connectivity to my home network (I am sitting 3 feet from the router, could not get a better signal): Which makes no sense, since every other app on my iPhone has no trouble getting to the net, including here my Google Reader showing in fact my previously tweeted message reflecting the situation: I am guessing it is a bug or something that will be fixed. But for now, this puppy is not much fun. Getting ready to lift my leg on this one….

Road Dog by cogdogblog posted 23 Dec ’08, 9.39am MST PST on flickr Happy to be done traveling for 2008! Stuff organized by TripIt www.tripit.com/people/cogdog Woot! I shall not see the inside of another airport for a long while (well, til January 15). It was quite a thrill to place the blue dots as tracked by my TripIt profile. In the beginning of the year, I was wavering between TripIt and dopplr which really are quite comparable. The beauty of these travel organizing sites is all you have to do is forward your emailed itineraries and they parse and post it. I cannot say why I might favor one more than another, except than running 2 of them seems silly. It’s a lesson I have trouble formulating, as often people ask “what is the best technology/web site/ software for doing X?” — and the answer usually is, “What I have [...]

20/20 by cogdogblog posted 23 Dec ’08, 9.07am MST PST on flickr Make your own Custom Eye Chart www.eyechartmaker.com No cheating, cover the left eye and read the smallest line you can see clearly.

I will tap into a generational nerve (if you get no response, read someone else’s blog post) with a curiosity as to how, over time, the answer to that sacred answer was changed: Yes, I never liked the Owl’s cheap answer, and always thought the number of licks to get to the center of a Tootsle Pop was a few orders of magnitude higher. Even the FAQ cops out (What kind of FAQ does not provide an A?): How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? It depends on a variety of factors such as the size of your mouth, the amount of saliva, etc. Basically, the world may never know. If you go the wiki route, you get variable answers from 1 to 10,000. So this answer is not really fixed, and it gets more complex given the trend of product downsizing, [...]