CogBlogged from ‘August, 2009’

I’ve done a handful of web projects this year where it made sense to store data in Google Spreadsheets, and then use a bit of PHP code to make them be dynamically displayed on a web site. In many cases, these are tables of data that are parsed and presented nicely in the web site, but for a few NMC projects, it made sense as a way for a staff person to update data on our web pages w/o having to touch the pages. As a first example, I am cleaning up an older WordPress site I use for logging my running/training; in the past, I kept a spreadsheet on my desktop for keeping a run log and then manually transferred the totals/averages/graphs to my web site by pasting into some text files (they are embedded with a PHP include). It worked, but it did have that tedious manual smell [...]

from original by cogdogblog After a long break, I’ve started running again (that’s another yet blogged bit, but not the point today), and am doing so listening on the iPOd to Chris Anderson’s book Free on audiobook (the one I packaged from his free mp3 recordings) So there’s a section where he’s talking about Moore’s Law and how computing power has become almost free (the part of figuring a transistor costs $0000000.something was powerful). In the 1960s access to the CPU was guarded by sys admins so thus the use of CPU cycles was designed to be sparse. A few pioneers wondered what it would take to move beyond this, what Chris as “wasting” CPUs essentially using more of it than just for tasks, and some envisioned even then that it would be a computer in the home. Yet no one could figure out what anyone would do with a [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Mark Strozier The CogDog flies low under the radar. Are you curious what stick man is in peril? Just stay tuned!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Another August 27th clicks by, another notch marking one more year since my Dad passed away (2001). I love this picture of him (not sure how old) at Coney Island (he grew up in Newark, NJ)- he looks sort of serious in is driving role and his suit (people got more dressed up in the 1940s to go to amusement parks), yet there is a very very faint twinkle in his eye, or at least I want it to be. This is from a series of old photos I had scanned when I last visited my Mom, and part of the project to continue digitizing the stories recorded in 1994 by my grandmother (his mother). In one segment she described a series event that happened when Dad was 7- he and so neighborhood kids were playing King of the Hill on a pile [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by KE-TA I cannot claim organization as one of my attributes, but have had an interesting process the last few months in getting a tad closer to being more organized in my digital photography. The 12,000+ photos in flickr accumulated since March 2004 are but the tip of a glacier looming in a plastic box in my closet that contains maybe 80 CDs/DVDs with digital photos back to 1999. For the last few years I have taken a lazy approach– I had in my disk a copy of Apple’s Aperture which I knew subconsciously was the “right” way to go (part of my typical strategy of DWDD- Do What D’Arcy Does), but my lazy forte into the software left me bewildered. So I’d been importing into iPhoto, doing basic editing there or more complex external in PhotoShop, exporting to flickr, and periodically archiving the photos [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Turning an original photo of Vancouver from the Burrard Street Bridge into something like a toy train model is now easy! I’ve done some toying around with the tilt-shift effect using various techniques in PhotoShop, but the Tilt Shift Generator is a fun and easy way to create these types of images via a web interface labs.artandmobile.com/tiltshift/ What is cool is that you can make it a circular or linear type “lens” and play with the color effects (saturation especially) that give images a more false-real like effect. Found via the always fun Generator Blog

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cindy47452 I cannot recall who it was, but I knew someone in the tech biz who talked about taking an occasional “Amish weekend” where he and his spouse turned off their computers, cell phones, TVs etc for 2 days as a means of focusing on life, free of gadgets. For some reason, I decided to stretch it out a bit longer, and spent more than a week off the grid- the laptop closed down, no email, twitter, blogs, etc. Nearly everyone I work with at NMC had lovely exotic vacation travel plans the same week, but given the amount of travel I have done this year, I wanted to experiment with spending some time away from the hubub. I did have a personal commitment to be elsewhere in Arizona the last day of the Open Education conference regretfully necessitating an early exit, and I [...]

My session yesterday at the Open Education Conference was absolutely the most fun thing I have put together for a conference. it was so fun I did not wait til the night before to finish it. The images above were totally not necessary, but I found myself up at 1:30am mocking up old covers from a collection of scans of the original Amazing Stories magazines (for which, I openly admit, I may not have permission to do). So if you want to watch the presentation, you can do so via the UStream recording but to be honest, it is better explored via the Amazing Stories site— the CoolIris version of the presentation (more or less a glossy way to browse the stories), or the individual stories as launchable videos, or the URLs relevant to the stories, or even a flash player to play them all sequentially at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/. The Idea [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog "Open" is the theme as I arrived to a wet soggy grey Vancouver for this week’s Open Education Conference. So while I cannot expect stores to be 100% open all the time (and this liquor store does pretty damned good to be open), I have higher hopes for content and media and ideas and people.

Randomly surfing flickr for photos for a new video project. Sometimes, when I find a photo (usually via a compfight search) i like that’s part of a set, I look at the whole set. On one today, I found it was generated automatically by something called Flickr Set Manager: Flickr Set Manager allows you to automatically create new sets on Flickr based on various criteria such as interestingness, date posted and tags, or even from a random set of photographs. This sounded… hmmmm… “interesting”? I was thinking of creating a set of my favorites, but with this tool, I can let flickr decide- just based on its own interestingness filter of my own photos, this tool created this set for me: Those were not so surprising- the ones that get a lot of comments. I tried the “least interesting” option, but they were all pictures of me ;-) Then I [...]