CogBlogged from ‘March, 2009’

CogDogBlog a la iPhone by cogdogblog posted 16 Mar ’09, 8.54pm MDT PST on flickr Thanks to Andy Rush for pointing out the WPtouch plugin which with a few clicks gave me this cool styled iPhone version of my wordpress blog (also Android phones see it as well, I understand). Oh this is so sweet! I am about to set this up on about 5 NMC WordPress blogs. The beauty of this plugin is that you upload it, optionally tweak a few settings in a WordPress settings pane, and your site is revved up for the mobile audience. I messed about 15 minutes with the PhotoShop template and made a custom icon, which not only appears here but also becomes the default icon when I make this a bookmark on the home screen of my iPhone. Harkening back to my rant about I’m a WordPress, You’re a Drupal I am [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by deadrobot Good gravy, if you are going to send me spam-mail, at least make it a worthy effort? This one “Your Tax Refund” from supposedly the “Canada Revenue Agency” makes those Kenyan inheritances and dutch lottos seem legit. I really expected more from Canadian Spam, and I am way disappointed in this attempt. After the last anual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $475.20 From 2009, we process refunds through your VISA / Mastercard Please fill the form below and e-mail it to canadarevenueagency@minister.com or simply reply it from this curent e-mail ! First Name: Last Name: Address: City: Province: Postal Code: Home Phone Number: Mother’s Maiden Name: Date of Birth: Social Insurance Number: Credit/Debit Card Number: Expiration date [ MM/YYYY ] : Card Verification Code: Card Signature/ATM PIN: Bank Name: We are [...]

Three Dog Week by cogdogblog posted 16 Mar ’09, 7.23pm MDT PST on flickr It’s a dog filled house now! I am dog-sitting for friends who went on a road trip. Looking up is Thumper, surrounded by Bobo (left) and Sufi (right) Meet the Crew! First, is noble “Bobo”… Followed by sweet “Sufi” and rounded out by jolly “Thumper”

speechless by serhio posted 18 Jun ’08, 9.30am MDT PST on flickr Words are awfully cheap now, they fly around at near light speed (not really, this is metaphor land). They go farther then ever, to unintended places, and thanks to the google-bot, they are out there for a long time. And we don’t see where, how they land. We are hyper-connected, yet at the same time, rather disconnected. I was recently part of some online antics that ended up very far from their intended path. People got hurt. There was mis-communication, too much communication, too little. I have seen friends deeply hurt by snarky banter in blog comments. I have talked to people physically anguishing over how to blog something they care deeply about and dreading how their naysayers will pick at them like eager starved crows. These things make those old listserv flame wars seem rather like just [...]

After all these years (like maybe 7? 8?) RSS is still so hot some regimes may wish to ban it, but it is the magic magic magic glue that makes content move around the web. Here is one little story. At NMC, I run a WordPress powered site to publish stories our Second Life work at the NMC Campus Observer, but we have only a handful of authors, and I must publish 98% of the content. Last year I had an idea to cleverly (I thought) embed a second WP site inside, as a NMC Campus Community Calendar, where people who were part of the NMC SL Community could post events. It is actually a second WP install in a sub directory, branded and designed to look like the main site (I wrote this up last year as Blog in a Blog). That is just the set up for the [...]

2009/365/67 AT&T Can’t Tell Time by cogdogblog posted 8 Mar ’09, 9.05pm MDT PST on flickr Went I went to be last night, my analog watch and my iPhone had the same time. This morning, after the start of daylight savings, my iphone (which is set to be automatic time zone for Phoenix) decided to "spring forward" despite the fact that Arizona does not do daylight savings. I tried several restarts. I tried toggling off my wireless. I read in the Apple discussion forums that there were some problems with AT&T towers in the southwest (New Mexico was having problems as well), and at the same time, AT&T claims their times come from elsewhere. I prefer to keep the iPhone set to automatic, so it picks up the correct time when I travel. That’s not too much to ask for? Finally, in total guess mode, I toggled off the automatic [...]

Maybe a flickr easter egg, but you cannot find this site from flickr’s explore, so check out the Flickr Clock. It presents a timeline of flickr videos: It may take a bit long to load as it seems to be hitting the flickr api pretty hard. So find an interval in time, and you can explore someone’s flickr posted video. It’s an interesting interface, the slits expand to play a video: But what is interesting is that if you use the blue buttons on the right or left to navigate in time, the next (or previous) videos will launch and play automatically, so you could just set this up and take a sample of people’s various videos from around the world, from drives in traffic or the train, to sunsets, to quirky sing alongs. I stumbled on a neat time lapse of a highway commute They are rather variable in [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Edd Dumbill I’ve done (more than) my share of posting complaints about companies. AT&T. Alltel. Dreamhost. Invariably, someone will chime in that either (a) they have not had an problems with Xxxxxxxx or that (b) Yyyyyyyyy is better. There is a problem of extending one’s individual experiences to everyone. My new theory is that even if your mobile/ISP/web host provider is not causing you problems, and you feel compelled to extoll their virtues, eventually, if you are around long enough, they will short you/cut you off/drop service/ break. Then you will be running to twitter or your blog to declare that “Zzzzz Sucks!”. That’s why I am a bit loathe to just hop from one to the other, and deal with all the transition tasks therein, when I am in the midst of some recurring “suckage”. Of course there is a breaking point, but I [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Erik K Veland Sometimes tagging is a lonely game, other times it is a wild lalapalooza fest. That’s the way the net bounces. Without going too deep into a zone of vacacity (!), I’m seeking some help tagging resources, examples, references related to the 6 topics to be published next week in the first K-12 Horizon Report, a new flavor of the yearly reports the NMC does on emerging technology. The Horizon Process is never about making the six a big secret, and the details have been open for the entire time in our wiki, including the short list of 12 semi-finalists, and even a pre-release draft of the final report. For the last 3 years I have been banging the drum for using tagging to collect resources for the Horizon Reports, and the activity has built nicely on the regular report (more than 1200 [...]

2009/365/63 Adoption Papers by cogdogblog posted 4 Mar ’09, 7.58pm MST PST on flickr Adoption is a serious consideration, one that requires planning. This is certainly not the case today. Be almost sheer accident, today I stumbled into Save The Words (Nancy White tweeted a ning site about visual poetry and I found the link there). The premise is that, language, as an evolving species, tends to lose words to lack of use. This site presents and amazing (Flash heavy, yes Hilary) site where you pan around a quilt of graphic representations of dying words. There is ambiant background voices, "save me!" "over here" that is both neat and creepy. When you click a word, it provides a definition, a pithy sometimes snarky example of it used in a sentence, and a form field where you can choose to adopt one. The adoption agreement is "I hereby promise to use [...]