CogBlogged from ‘October, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Looking outside a window of the ruins of Scorpion Gulch, a home in south Phoenix built in the 1930s of local rock. southmountainhistory.blogspot.com/2009/05/scorpion-gulch-… Okay I admit the colors have been super scooched with Vibrancy and Saturation for a false color effect on the Palo Verde tree Words are not doing much justice to the view… The only thing missing was the big roadrunner who… ran across the road as I got out of my car.

On a daily basis, life presents me metaphors. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Frosted Peppercorn When I stepped in the shower this morning, I notice a medium sized, non threatening black spider in the bath tub. My first, and normal reaction is to quickly grab a tissue, so I can squash the bugger, toss it, so I can go about my day. It’s in the way. And I did grab a wad of tissue. But I hesitated. I remembered a time when I was with a friend, and some others were bothered by flies in the room buzzing against the window. Several people reacted with the intent to squash, but Barb deftly whipped her arm around, cupped the flies in her hand, walked outside, and set them free. She did not make a speech about this, and just mumbled something about it not taking too much more effort to [...]

My own Google wave spun through Photoshop As much as I recall being smitten by the original Google Wave Preview video (I watched the whole demo, its still on my iPhone), I’ve felt not more than tiny ripples of interest, and until just a few minutes ago, was curious why I was not feeling the giddy euphoria I see elsewhere. Yes, I am still on my medication (just kidding, the only meds I take are the ones my pancreas stopped making in 1970). Maybe it was the let down of all the anticipating for my golden ticket invite, after barking a lot on twitter, I ended up with about 6 invites. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Witheyes After all that, well, if I was a cliche movie figure, I’d be in bed smoking a cigarette wondering if the invite had been good for her. Over my years in the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Supposedly businesses are getting more "green" and focused on not wasting resources. Supposedly. In my postal mail were two examples that say to me, that it is far more "efficient" for them to waste paper, postage, delivery time to send me irrelevant crap. Magazines, in some sense maybe a dying breed, have long annoyed me with their aggressive renewal tactics- sending me messages warning me that my subscription is in danger of running out– when I know for a fact my renewal date is 7 months away. The fill their publications with those wasteful subscription cards. Today MacWorld is warning me again how is is my LAST chance to renew "before the early renewal discount ends" OH DEAR. But my subscription also is good through June 2010, so what do I gain my letting them have my money 8 months before I really [...]

I wish I could remember that light bulb turning on moment when I realized succeeding in the school game had little to do with studying, knowledge, or intelligence– but learning how to score on multiple choice exams. My skills carried me through many standardized tests and college exams where I can really say I got better at figuring out the answer than knowing it. But I am not sure I can fully yank off the Emperors Statistical Clothes. Instead I offer a trivial example, which may not extrapolate as far as I believe. In my combing of the corner of my RSS reader where I collect Weird/Funny/Strange stories (the Google Reader tag is “odds-and-ends” sounds like I am playing Jeopardy… “I’ll take Neatorama for $200, Alex”), I found tonight a fun thing to try– the M*A*S*H trivia quiz. While I have not seen an episode of this iconic TV series [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On a recent flight I got to playing around with the TiltShift iPhone app, a really fun way to do convert normal photos to something that looks like a miniature train set like model by a clever blur that imposes a false depth of field, and yanking up the saturation to make people and objects look more like little plastic figurines,. I first learned it via recedinghairline.co.uk/tutorials/fakemodel/ and have had fun experimenting with it www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/tags/tiltshift This is from a photo www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2588838331/ I took at the last baseball game I went to back in June of 2008 (gulp)– www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/tags/camdenyards/ which actually was one of the most exciting games I have ever seen (and I did see a lot of games in my youth at old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore) There is also a great web tool for doing this as well http://labs.artandmobile.com/tiltshift/

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I went to the local Chili Cook Off contest today wearing my Open Education 2009 conference t-shirt with this logo. One local guy dishing out his chili looked at it and asked me, "What language is that written in?" I was stunned a moment, trying to sort out how serious a question this was. The best I could manage was, "That’s New English". Maybe "Techlish" would have been better. In the scale of world populations, us technical geeks are a really really small pool, eh?

My daily routine is regularly interrupted by half baked ideas for sarcasm I think might be funny, knowing full well the standard deviation for who else might think it is funny is about 0.5 people. Oh well. I had a moment today where I might have ended up creating the laugh roaring graphics from scratch, but lo and behold, the web opens and several people have done it for me. Hallelujah. But I let ahead of myself. Catching up on the Everest sized mountain of RSS feeds that piled up while traveling last week, I saw Mashable’s story on lu.ly: http://lu.ly/ Lu.ly is a browser extension for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari (Safari currently in alpha) that lets you see your friends Twitter and Facebook status updates in real-time via scrolling text within the Lu.ly toolbar. Lu.ly also lets you share web pages on Twitter or Facebook (and automatically shortens [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by antonio.tombolini We just closed one of our NMC Two Minute Surveys- these have been fun to do over the last few months; we set them tightly as 3 questions, all with multiple choice answers done in Google Forms (makes it easy to us the generated chart summaries, though I wish they gave better access to the generated charts). These are not really projected as being definitive, and it is more like taking a pulse more than anything. This last one was on eBooks — we had 217 people respond to the survey and I just posted results at http://www.nmc.org/2minute-survey/ebooks. Not surprising that many people have not read an eBook this year (38%), though the largest response for those that did was in the 205 eBooks read range, and 11% read more than 10 eBooks last year: Most people reported reading eBooks on their computers, [...]

With all I love about expression in digital media, all of tis forms, I’ve never found the way to formulate what’s bubbled as a thought– that at the root of the best stuff is really, simple good writing, the clever use of words, shades of meaning, etc. Yep, plain old text. I was reminded of it over the weekend when I had a flashback trip to recasting of my first high school music love- getting turned onto The Who, primarily via The Kids are Alright. I rekindled it by putting the retrospective Amazing Journey DVD on while I took care of some house tasks. And talking about “Can’t Explain” it was always something about the opening of The Kids are Alright with The Who’s 1967 appearance on US network TV on the Smothers Brothers show, ending their first big US tour. I listened to that opening shtick to “My Generation” [...]