CogBlogged from ‘March, 2009’

Lola on the beach by ambertq posted 22 Oct ’08, 12.48pm MDT PST on flickr I have to leave town tonight. I have a red-eye to Newark and hopefully a connection and some information when I get to the next place. You see, my older sister and her husband have not been home since November. Her house and car are in tact. They had retired, so they are not missing from work. There have been a few sporadic dispatches that would make it seem they are okay, but I have to go find them to be sure. Actually, I know exactly where they are! Cause they invited me out to meet them where they are wintering, in the freakin Bahamas! They have been living the life of carefree pups living on thei5 38 foot sailboat. I will fly out from Ft Lauderdale Tuesday morning, and hang with them, for a [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Photography by Chris Rob Wall’s excellent post on Unintended Consequences pinged me recently (Rob, you gotta stop selling yourself short on your writing, ok?). In reading it, however, a phrase I have read like a thousand times before, maybe even said myself, jumped out and get stuck in my fur: The google-bot is such an unforgiving beast since it forces us to deal with words that might have been written long ago and in a much different frame of mind than one might have today. Similar statements usually produce head nodding, saying we have to inform young people that their raucous drinking photos and myspace rants of their youthful antics may hurt them in the future when they look for a job. But what does that really say about us? It sounds like the under the bed monster fear of “looking bad” or “looking stupid” [...]

Emptied Anticipation by cogdogblog posted 27 Mar ’09, 8.29pm MDT PST on flickr Most every day I walk the one quarter mile walk to my mailbox. I have two choices of routes, and usually take the other back. I should know every detail of the way, but in search today of my 2009/365 photo, I again face head on that challenge of finding something unique in the ordinary. I passed by a neighbors yard that has a gate but no fence. I think it always would make a great shot, but the light is wrong and its crowded by trees. Another house has a very old rusted, cash register sitting against the base. That’s too easy. Also trespassing. But reaching sight of the mailboxes, thoughts of photos evaporate. How can there not be anticipation/excitement to see what the postal service delivers? What surprise awaits? maybe a gift? new issue of [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Laurie :: Liquid Paper You see that cute photo I used? You know the routine. I use compfight to search tags on creative commons licensed flickr photos with the tag peekabo. Then I download a copy, upload to my server, include in this post, provide attribution, and that is how it is supposed to work. 915 results. I love that. 915 peekaboo photos I can use. Or so I think. I was searching a few clicks back and came across this utterly fantastic photo (there is a reason you don’t see it here). I searched on creative commons licensed photos. It has a By Attribution Non Commercial license applied to it, linked under words “Some Rights Reserved”. But before I could reach for the “All Sizes” button I tripped over this: Please don’t use this image on websites, blogs or other media without my explicit [...]

This is long overdue for users of my Feed2JS service, which allows you to place a dynamic feed in your web page without having to know anything about RSS or parsing XML. This has been around since 2003 and seems to still be used a lot. I’ve hardly done much on the code for 2+ years, but have long known there are looming problems because the underlying code that deciphers RSS feeds, the MagpieRSS parser has not been updated since November 2005. Of course there are easier ways to embed with widgets in blogging platforms, but I still see a lot of use all over the place for Feed2JS. Via twitter I got some reports that Feed2JS was barfing on some WordPress 2.7 sites (included my own, yikes). I knew the recommendation was some surgery to replace MagpieRSS with SimplePie, a newer, cleaner, more versatile RSS parsing engine. So I [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by gary foulger. In high school I joined the group of kids who did not want to join groups. Maybe I’ve not changed much since then. But I try a lot of web services, especially as I see others in my network mentioning them. Tonight is WeFollow.com billed as a “user powered twitter directory”. People apparently opt in to add them selves to this site, pick 3 tags to describe themselves, where apparently they can be found. When you do this, it automatically tweets yourself entering the crowd. Of course, you wont ever be listed on the front page of WeFollow, since it is full of “people” like BrittXny S***ears (I will never ever use that full name in public), Barak, CNN Kevin Rose, ev, etc. but hey, maybe someday someone will look up your tag. I see these things sometimes and just want to game [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Miicha A. Ponce Between gorging on the tax payer supplied bailout, Citibank is going to even things out by gouging and sticking it to their own customers. I just found out that I contributed to their cause, without being aware of it. Back in October 2008, I decided to close out a CitiBank AT&T Mastercard I’ve had for like 9 years. I had called months earlier and asked if they could offer a lower interest rate- they did like from 14 to 13%, which seemed rather tight for a long time customer. And I had just gotten a Chase card at 9%, so I called CitiBank to cancel the account. I must have been weak, because I let the woman on the line talk me into keeping the card. “You can just keep it in a drawer for emergencies. It wont cost anything if you [...]

For some reason I’ve been having Cracker’s Teen Angst song in heavy iPod rotation; the lyrics are just ra ra (or is it la la la la). A new version might be: Cause, what the web needs now Is a new kind of resource collection. Cause people just cant do search location. Cause, what the world needs now Is another learning resource repository Like I need a hole in my head. This is triggered by a series of Academic Commons articles, starting with an intro Building a Network, Expanding the Commons, Shaping the Field: Two Perspectives on Developing a SOTL Repository. Gah, the word “repository” just gives me the way back feeling. As old as the web is is the idea we need to take time and effort to build neat organized cubby holes for the flow of information in it. It’s petty, but the very first sentence in this [...]

modified from cc licensed flickr image by espresso marco with tag cloud image from mediwiki I believe in tags. I love tags. After looking past at an excessive number of hash tags on twitter (and excessive ones in my flickr stream… and in my delicious account), I did start to wonder about the human capacity for remember tags at the time to tag. I have pushed out a long serious of tags for resources related to the NMC Horizon Project- hz07, hz08, hzau08, hz09, hzk09 plus sub category tags for each year… I resyndicate this on web sites. I ask people at NMC to share resources via the cooltechnmc tag which is pushed to our web site and various sidebars within. I tag Second Life resources in a dedicated delicious account which are pushed to another site . I have been plotting the ideas Jon Udell describes as using delicious.com [...]

My Next Blockbuster from the Movie Plot Generator by cogdogblog posted 18 Mar ’09, 2.23pm MDT PST on flickr You have to love random stuff. The Movie Plot Cookie Cutter Generator may be just the ticket you need to spring that creative idea that will see you polishing your acceptance speech and red carpet strut. My plot for "Dog Scream" is off to the storyboarding studio: 8< – – – 8< – – – 8< – – – Coming soon to a mall movie theatre near you. From the wise Production Illustrator Anna Sasin who worked hard on films like "The Son of Torrid " and the Wonderful "Everything you ever wanted to know about Baby ", the motion picture that critics are calling "the biggest baddest gayest movie this year ". Dog Scream He was a forgetful ladies man, who had a a friend who dealt Cocaine and a [...]