CogBlogged from ‘October, 2009’

I love the Chronicle of Higher Education. Whenever I am low on ideas, they generate “stories” that are just begging for parody. I bet Tom feels the same way, there is never a shortage of Chronically Bad Articles to Lampoon. This blog owes its seedy root to Cole’s post questioning the notion of “Google Wave as the Next CMS” emanating The Chron’s Article today. Could Google Wave Replace Course-Management Systems? While lacking formal expertise in journalism (heck it does not stop them), really, this kind of “writing” is akin to the things I am subjected to waiting to pay for my groceries: This is obviously a parody, eh? Of course Sweet Briar is not dumping their CMS, heck I don;t even know if they use Blackboard. . This research this headline story is based on comes from a blog post by prof Steve Bragaw at Sweet Briar College. It is [...]

I’m testing a new embed feature thingie. I hope they don’t get made I am doing this on my blog. They did not say “shush”…. and I did ask. Maybe this feature is already out. It’s doing a CoolIris embed from my flickr tag “dog” (what else?) Cool. Iris. Here is another one, this time using the MediaRSS feed I made for my Real Time Web presentation at Tulanw but it is now placed right in the page– http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/tulane09/embed.html and it now offers the same embed code to pass it around elsewhere. Cool. Iris. Cool

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yes, sadly, I remain dogless. It’s not for lack of desire for canine company; it’s that my schedule keeps getting more filled with travel that make it feel unfair to take in a dog and then be boarding him/her 50% of the time. It’s hard to avoid the pleas from the Humane Society shelter in Payson, the stories of good dogs needing homes in the local papers, and the bulletin board photos outside the Ponderosa Market. But maybe its time to get more creative, or start saying "no" to travel, and get my priorities in order. How can the "CogDog" have no Dog? I would be just a Cog, and at that, I am not biking all that much, so then you can just call me ""!

Twitter is being taken over by humans. I’ve asked a lot of people, even people who do serious research on twitter activity, about something I’ve casually observed over the last few months. I have no data, no real backing to what is merely a casual observation. It seemed a while back, that the icons people chose for themselves on twitter were often cartoons, symbols, graphics, logos… I knew some people that would change icons more frequently then clothes (it seemed). Lately I noticed, as I scan tweetdeck, that people (well the ones in my network) have really gone to showing their own face: I have staunchly remained with the same icon I started with in twitter, not even succumbing to the Green Protest Phase (I tried to tell people I turned my avatar brown in protest of everything wrong in the world. No one noticed). I remain my dog profile [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by sailn1 Bailey studies up on his RADAR skills My sister’s sheltie, Bailey, is a rather experienced sailor– he and his “parents” have just left their summer land berth near Annapolis for another venture down the Atlantic coast and a winter in the Bahamas. Not to shabby a life. I am hoping to catch up with them again in the Spring like I did last year — if Bailey will let me on board. I’m rather proud of my “little/big” sister (little cause she is smaller, big cause she is older) who has seriously taken up blogging/flickr posting/google mapping to record their travel and stay in touch with friends… wow, sailors are really a connected network on many levels- she gets more regular comments than I do! Like a good blogger, Harriet is compulsive to post, not always easy when the internet is spotting. Follow [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I was down today at a friend’s antique store in Pine, and decided to grab this old Viewmaster, which I remember fondly as a kid, clicking my way through the seven wonders of the world, seeing the Grand Canyon in its tinted technicolor. Now I need to find some discs. Take that, Toy Boy Jim Groom, you have no monopoly on love of toys! Perhaps this was one my early interests in multimedia.

I am but one among millions that get a TED experience by sampling the videos they freely share. I did get a faintwhiff of a TED halo experience as the NMC 2009 Summer Conference was held in the original TED venue at Monterey Bay, so I stood on the stage where TEDness happened.. What I like about TED (wow, now I was thinking of a parody of the song by the Romantics…) is the surprise factor of getting something out of a speaker or subject I did not expect. I typically download a few almost by random choice, as videos I can watch on my iphone during long plane flights. On my flight to New Orleans last week, I was completely, blown away by this guitar performance by Kaki King Whether you buy that she has been called “the next guitar god” (and wow, the comment flow on the TED [...]

I am at the same time honored and deeply scared that a lot of people use my Feed2JS tool created like in 2003 or 2004 for helping people embed RSS feeds in their site using cut and paste JavaScript. If my stats are right, in the 6 hours since the cache was cleaned out (daily), 45,000 some unique feeds have been run through here, which is about 60 feeds per minute. I hardly do anything to the code and I hope it does not blow up on anyone. There may have been some issues since the time I was trying to implement a new parser (which killed the server which for years has been kindly donated for free by the kind folks at Modevia Web Services)…. in restoring it I may have put a deprecated version of MagpieRSS; I just re-adjusted and the old FeedMachine seems to be working. For [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Vermin Inc Thanks for people who keep trying to get me

I’ve been late to the game to jump for joy over Evernote, and I am just beginning to see it as being more than just a place to store bits of information. It pretty much can capture any kind of information, be it text, image, sound, document- store it in the cloud, and syncs it with your computer and almost every flavor of mobile device. It’s been on my machines for months, and to date, my great use of it has been to store my airline frequent flyer numbers, my prescriptions, and someone;s flight details I saved when I had to go to down to the Phoenix Airport. But it was reading Guy Kawasaki’s 14 Practical Ways to Use Evernote that some neurons began to snap, like: Photograph business cards. Rather than collecting a pile of business cards that you’ll never go through, photograph them with your iPhone and send [...]