CogBlogged from ‘September, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by star5112 Wow, I feel so horrible for all the millions of people who have not gotten their Google Wave invite, wow are you missing out on the coolest experience since glow in the dark yo-yos… Ring-Dings…disco… Even in just a few hours, I am finding my every conception of what I do in the web is electrified into a live real time full on head plunge! It’s like twitter on crank, its got me going so I cant jump off. Wave here, wave there, its all connected in the Real Time GooglePlex. And you should see the cool moves Martin Weller is doing on his wave– I’ve never seen such wild dexterity in the tube. Oh yeah, I am blowing wave smoke. I got no invite. I got no wave. I got nothing but BS. I am standing like in Iowa wondering how far [...]

In my late night fiddling with my stream of Weird S*** Web sites, I stumbled into “Sponsors of Tomorrow”, which takes an uploaded photo of you, and melds it into a hideous video of some dorko Tom Cruis-ish type character. The photo used was my mugshot-like passport photo. I warned you of the weirdness: How much engineer fun is that? Though I cannot imagine what this great technological advance offers for the ladies.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mikebaird Twitter retweets are an interesting phenemona; another example of the informal communication started by users– to RT means more or less to forward another person’s tweet out to your own network. On one level it seems to be an action of acknowledgment, say, if I retweet something that Joan tweeted, I am saying what she tweeted is important. Another level is the act creates amplification of ideas, and spreads it to different sub networks that usually extend beyond the range of the original. People with a lot more analytical skills than me have been analyzing retweets- danah boyd shared a draft of a paper she co-authored with her Microsoft Research colleagues- Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Social and viral media “scientist” (his title) Dan Zarella has shared a lot of research on The Science of ReTweets and his work [...]

modified from cc licensed flickr image by mag3737 I was pleased to be invited to give a keynote on Friday at Tulane University’s Tech Day… they run a great free event open not only to the Tulane community but they offer it to other local institutions: Tech Day is an opportunity for the Tulane community to come together and celebrate the technology that makes life on our campus what it is. It is a day of toys, tech, food and fun. We will have academic and technical presentations as well as games and door prizes. Come show your licks at Guitar Hero or your moves in Dance Dance Revolution. Or come learn about the new trends in technology and education with presentations from our faculty and the vendors that provide us with the technology you use every day. Tech Day is free and open to the public. A few months [...]

Earlier this month I had some fun satirizing Wired magazine for what I thought was a real non-story as a cover item (like they care what I think?). What I neglected to add later was as I read the issue, they had a real cover worthy story in Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear? where they profiled people like Mathew Sheppard who tried to make his life troubles go away by faking his own death and attempting to vanish. The point being, superficially, that it is harder these days to pull it off given our digital footprints. That is a surface summary- in the article, the failure of the vanishing act is nearly always not the superiority of the tracking, but how tracking makes it easy to find the human failures of the vanishees- when they contact someone, when they use something under their old name, etc– [...]

see more Funny Graphs Need any more data for the superiority of dogs?

This may be closest the cogdog gets to bavanography… And here’s a tip, blogsters- posting a lot of crap does not count any more than good cogdog crap.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Carplips I have had a hair tearing hacked WordPress blog experience here over the last 2 days. I don’t know why, but it really knocked my knees out, and I am reeling to figure out why this has gotten to me on an emotional level. That even sounds silly seeing those words. But I am not rolling over. Yet. It all surface, like many things, in the act of doing something else. I left a comment Sunday on someone’s blog about something rather inconsequential, and got an email later asking me if I knew my blog was riddles with spam links. Sure enough, I looked at the source code, and at the bottom, written with CSS to hide the display (but not hide from google) was a long list of every variation of PPC (pill/porn/casino) link one could imagine, maybe 120 of them. It’s [...]

One of my chief enjoyable moments is when I accidentally learn something. Here’s another one for the pile. On a trip earlier this month to San Francisco for a meeting, I was in a rather nice hotel, which meant that, according to Alexander’s Law, the internet would be sucky (Bryan Alexander has collected data to ascertain that the more expensive the hotel, the slower and more un-reliable the wireless internet service will be). And thus it was; and I also got poor performance on my mobile wireless internet. In all of this I was trying to upload flickr photos, both by the ConnectedFlow flickr export plugin for Aperture, and it failed twice after having entered all my titles and captions. It also failed when I let 2 photos try to run via the flickr uploader (that in turn was a sign). ConnectedFlow runs its feedback via GetSatisfaction, and after finding [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was not until I was done with placing these last stepping stones for my walkway, that I noticed that my playfulness with the angled rocks created an HTML tag. My yard now has italic text and will ruin the layout of the rest of the neighborhood since I did not close my tag.