CogBlogged from ‘December, 2008’

I’ve already waxed on the demise of the television I grew up with. So long. I just finished watching a funny episode of the Simpsons, but my TV is still off (actually it gets no reception); I watched Mypods and Boomsticks on Hulu which in true form, poked some fun at “Mapple”, it’s “MyPods” and CEO (using an underwater Jeff Han-like interface) Steve Mobs: This is hardly new, as hulu has been around a while, and there are plenty of sites to watch full shows, etc. But can you imagine the inner panic at the network television empires? Their era is gone. Over. Kaput. Adios. Yes, I know hulu cannot be seen out of the USA (I experienced that black screen in Iceland). And the AT&T ads are super cheesy annoying, but they are only 15 seconds. Maybe there is a Greasemonkey Tivo. But as far as I am concerned, [...]

Ow, my head. Modified from cc licensed flickr photo by bionerd I’ve complained about the insanity of conference presentations for longer than I have blogged. To no end, I find myself continually in come sort of presentation induced coma again and again– and as often as not these too are online presentations. You can whack me over the head with a dull session even remotely. My doctors can only guess about the long term damage to the cortex. For the most part, it can feel like 95% of presentations I see are in the vein of a lecture- a 50 minute speech to a passive audience. My head hurts. The fires are stirred up again with a recent post by Chris Brogan on Own the Crowd with Better Speaking – I’ve heard this name before via twitter and such, but had never ventured into his blog space. Apparently, he is [...]

New Flickr mobile by cogdogblog posted 5 Dec ’08, 9.25am MST PST on flickr Flickr has spiffed up their mobile page see m.Flickr.com including video playback! The new flickr mobile url is worth adding to the iPhone desktop icons. I was eager to see some of my videos, but missed the fine print that it only affects videos uploaded since this new feature was added. I went back to my last video, but unlike photos, there is no option to “replace this video”. It looks like, viewing a few of the videos I found under the More … Explore videos link, that they are cross encoding video to QuickTime format to make them playable on the iPhone/iPod Touch (thou shalt not have flash video for now). You can see it pass the view to a range of static IP address servers such as 209.73.191.57 which resolve as Yahoo addresses. I [...]

Good / Bad by cogdogblog posted 5 Dec ’08, 12.11am MST PST on flickr This has been a year of travel clocking close to 60k miles so far in 2008. I wanted to take this opportunity to hang some travel providers on appropriate hooks (I seem to be lacking a hook for “Ugly”) for my most recent trip. When travel plans go awry there is not much you can do except bitch about it. And then you realize, stuck on some city you did not plan to stay in, that there’s not much you can do being more or less a mere human package which may or may not get shipped to its desired location. On the Bad Hook is Icelandair- my Nov 29 flight from Reykjavik was fine (and they may get a good hook for the in seat video screens in coach), but landed at Logan Airport in [...]