CogBlogged from ‘May, 2009’

2009/365/139 Between Some Rocks and A…. by cogdogblog posted 19 May ’09, 10.45pm MDT PST on flickr Feeling like you have no where to go? Is life pressing you in? Do you not see options to get out of what is keeping you from where you want to be? Is some lumbering biped chasing you with a camera? Do not despair, there is an answer! Here at Sunny Lizard Philosophers, we have a program to help you scoot along the cracks, soak up the sun, and find joy in eating insects, all in the progress of discovering your inner gecko. This offer has no expiration date. Epligoue- When you are short of photos for your daily 356 Photo (and aren’t we around 1/3 the way), just make up some goofy captions. I managed 3 blurry unusable flower photos and got lucky chasing a lizard. Finis.

It’s been a while since I shot or even explored Gigapan, the amazing photo exploration tool that lets you see a wide range of zoom detail in a scene. I have not even captured a scene in a while (see my old ‘pans). But by sheer accidental link clicking from my RSS Reader (am I the last person on earth reading feeds while everyone else tweets their lunch?) I found on a neat site (see below) that you can now embed a gigagpan image.. So here goes one I took in November at the foot of the volcano Hekla: If you are interested in some applications of the gigapan I can think of few finer that the Geology ones by Ron Schott lots of structures and outcrops to study at many different scales. The thing that got me (linktribution to David Weinberger) here was a blog on Nano Gigapans, where [...]

This morning I drove down a new coding rode- I’ve never done a Greasemonkey script, so with some help poking around ones I have and Dive into Greasemonkey — here is my crude Flickr CC Attribution Helper. What is does is adds a box on the right side of flickr photo pages — only for photos with a Creative Commons License — some HTML you can copy and paste for a blog post. I found an existing script Flickr Photo Link but that was meant to grab the entire image URL (mine is meant for a caption assuming you have already inserted an image into a blog post or web page). Also, that 3 year old script did not even work because it was not parsing correctly for the user name the way it does the XPath search on the <b> tag (looks like flick added a foaf attribute), but [...]

It is May But… by cogdogblog posted 16 May ’09, 6.00pm MDT PST on flickr Usually in May, I see a glorious visual chorus of flowering irises– blues, purples, yellow, reds, and shades in between I did not know existed. Yet today, where I year ago I was snapping photos of blossoms, I see very few. I begin to wonder and… [next] Nudged by tweets and a blog post from Barbara Ganley, I tried to let my yard tell me a story through photos taken just today. I did not have one in mind, but shuffled them in a set, and connected them via captions. Somewhere it is called Spring My Discontent and it begins with something that did not happen…

WolframAlpha Knows It All by cogdogblog posted 16 May ’09, 8.44am MDT PST on flickr This is one smart thing! I now know that the meaning life has no quantity ;-) I’ve ignored following most of the pre-release on

Here’s a big twitterbution to robin2go (who was so cool to meet in person at Penn State) for sharing a really cool WordPress Plugin — Tagnetic Poetry. It displays your WordPress tags as something that looks like the magnets you make into poems for your fridge– and just as they do, in your blog you can re-arrange them (below is a screen shot; link to go to the real deal): I have this running on a page at http://cogdogblog.com/tag-poetry/. Now I am inspired to do more tagging of my posts, cause this is fun.

I sit brain dead in a plane heading west, home, after a New England road tour with stops at Baruch College in Manhattan, Penn State University, Middlebury Vermont, and wrapping yesterday in Salem, Massachusetts. The stop at Salem was an invited session for their sixth Future is Now conference a semester end gathering for faculty to look at technology and learning, very similar to the Ocotillo gigs I previously ran at Maricopa. Actually that had me on a double-header, first as the “post lunch wake ‘em up” plenary and right after I did a rapid fire version (45 minutes) of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. So round one was The More Things Change… the more things change, a remix/reprise of a version of this I did at Scottsdale Community College in January 2009. I have some audio I recorded with my LiveScribe pen, and hesitate to post [...]

Rhett Dashwood, a Creative Director in Melbourne Australia, has scoured Google Maps Satellite images to create an alphabet of landmarks found in his home state of Victoria. On Google Maps Typography, he describes it: Over the course of several months beginning October 2008 to April 2009 I’ve spent some of my spare time between commercial projects searching Google Maps hoping to discover land formations or buildings resembling letter forms. These are the results of my findings limited within the state of Victoria, Australia. With seeing the letterset, my mind leaped to spell with flickr, and a bit of copy paste got me a personalized logo courtesy of this alphabet. Australia, thus is calling me The sources are c o g d o g So maybe an interesting class/group assignment might be to find an alphabet in your own region… Hmmm, I know of a river bend on the Little Colorado [...]

I’ve never suffered the degradation of working in an organization that acted as my Net Mommy– one that told me I was not old enough or mature enough to monitor my own internet activity. I pity my colleagues in Australia where, as one emailed me tonight, some arbitrary machine of divine intelligence has decided that the organization I work for, the New Media Consortium is on the nasty list for the crime of … “Arts/Entertainment”: Yep, the NMC, which is a not-for profit educational organization that focuses on emerging technologies, that worked with Australia to provide its own Horizon Report, would be seen in some reppressive workplaces as worth banning… based on WTF? This strategy is one for which our court systems usually assume innocence until proven guilty, yet in the “Lock ‘em down tight” world of Firewalls, you are guilty until proven innocent. The assignment of “guilt” is not [...]

GE SmartGrid Virtual Solar Energy by cogdogblog posted 10 May ’09, 8.54pm MDT PST on flickr I’d seen this pass by the stream of cool technologies, but while visiting Bryan Alexander, he printed out the correct picture to generate this fun bit of video projection from the GE Smart Grid site ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid When you hold up the black and whilte paper to a computer camera, it somehow generates animation that overlays itself onto your reality, in this case, some virtual solar panels, plus saguaro cacti. Oh, and a sun. Now all I need is the real deal solar panels– here doing it upside down. I’ve not much of anything since spinning off my interest in solar energy, but it is still simmering in my tired brain. But the tech here is pretty cool.