CogBlogged from ‘April, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo from irishdragongreen I’d heard from a colleague today that they got a Dear John email from Yahoo informing them that the online video editor app Jumpcut was going away, as confirmed by the “in the deadpool” story from TechCrunch. It’s little surprise, given the December 2008 move where Jumpcut removed the ability to upload video (kind of makes it hard to edit, eh- oh, you have to load it to flickr then use it in Jumpcut), and as TechCrunch snarked, promises are all pre-alpha in web 2.0 land: Yahoo’s closure of their Jumpcut video service feels like the slow peeling off of a bandaid. In December they announced that no new videos could be uploaded, but that they “will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future.” Apparently the foreseeable future ends in June, when the site will be shut down. I [...]

Oh if you caught Beautiful Depravity back when they were starting out, you’d know what pure true Metal music is all about. Of course by the time Thou Art Metal came out in 2002, they had already lost a lead guitarist to a bizarre accident with a welding torch, and their original keyboard player found Buddha and left the band. But still, with the big bang opener of Remorseless Promises, to the haunting chorus of Dark Wrath, the hypnotic chords of Decayed Chant of Desolation, and the epic closing arc of Grim Delirium, this album holds up as the inspiration for nearly every metal band that has followed. Are you still with me? Everything above is made up, of course. Starting with a band, album cover, and song list created by the Metallizer Heavy Metal Music – Random Album Generator . But more than a mere generator, the Metallizer provides [...]

Since it has been on going for almost as long as I have been in the ed tech field (going back to 1996), the annual Technology, Colleges and Community conference feels like a regular part of the changing seasons. This annual online conference may be the longest running international technology conference (I am sure someone will find an older one, go ahead, please) I cannot remember if I started participating in it maybe in 1999 or 2000 when it was really a discussion forum based. Since it has always been based out of the University of Hawaii, it was often called the “Hawaiian” virtual conference, which meant the only umbrella drinks on the beach were in your mind. It was at a 2003 League for Innovation Conference that I first met in person Bert Kimura, who got me more involved by getting my then employer, the Maricopa Community Colleges, on [...]

Doing the photo a day for the 2009/365 photos group is not all that much an effort; it has become more of a daily habit than regular dental care (don’t tell Dr Fow!). What almost takes more effort is keeping my count organized; I am naming them all this year with a title of 2009/365/x where “x” is the day number of the year, but I keep managing to get that off count, and as well, I just swept through my photo set on day 103 and found 105 photos (looks like I double dipped twice). I upload from iPhoto (yes an older version) using the Connected Flow flickr exporter, which allows me to tag them with my own 2009/365 tag and add the photo to my set and the group. There was a discussion a few photos back in the group on also creating a photo blog site for [...]

While shaking off the thick layers of coding dust in my Feed2JS efforts, I also took some time to update the code for my Five Card Flickr site- you can play with it now at http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/. Again, this is a variant of Five Card Nancy, where you are challenged to assemble 5 photos randomly plucked from ones on flickr with a given tag, and do so in a manner that creates some sort of “coherent” story. I first did this for Learning 2.008 in September and recast it for Northern Voice 2009– and somewhere in between did a little bit of explanation of the code. The first change was adding a rating system to allow anyone to “vote” on the shared stories. This turned out to be not to hard to add using Masuga Design’s Unobtrusive AJAX Rating Bar script. You can vote when viewing any single story, and the [...]

It’s been on my “one day I hope to” list to put some development effort into Feed2JS a thing I spawned back in the Cro-Magnum era of RSS as a tool to help people insert dynamic content into their web pages by a script that renders it via JavaScript. I totally got the idea from an earlier news feed generation code I found that was developed by David Carter-Todd when he was at the Virginia Community Colleges (I see a relict version of my early code is still there at http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php). I later made it available on a server at Maricopa (now gone), but before I was gone myself from Maricopa, I secured a domain, and was blessed that the folks from Modevia Web Services offered me free hosting for the service, which they have continued for the last 3 or 4 years. Give them a big hand. I’ve really [...]

Woah, Neo, I am back home. Yesterday started on a sailboat at Sampson Cay in the Bahamas, and 19 hours later I was home where it was 30 degrees. Ahh, back in action, but now I will reminisce on the last 10 days What did I miss?

It is actually only eight days so far bit the bliss of this vacation in the Bahamas is ocean deep. I flew to Ft Lauderdale March 30, had my last sips of the tubes (for the first time since I can’t recall I’m travelling without a laptop, just the iPhone- how free it is to be so light). The next day was a charter airline flight to Stanisl Cay in the Bahamas– I am here to meet up my sister and her husband (and Baily the sailing Sheltie) who have been retired and living on their 38 foot sailboat since leaving Annapolis in early October. Harriet has blogged and Google mapped their trip at a wordpress.com blog. I’ve not had such a long unstructured stretch of commitmentless time since… Beyond my memory banks. I’ve read 2.5 inconsequential books, snorkled colorful reefs, absorbed multiflabored rums, hiked, kayaked, and snoozed some long [...]