CogBlogged from ‘January, 2010’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In the morning I noticed my DVD player was still on after watching a movie last night. I’m not sure why I started thinking this, but the machine just sits there flashing "No Disc" for hours, for ever if I let it. Maybe it’s just a patient entity, "I am just waiting for you Alan. I really should be turned off, but if you want to waste electricity and my components, that’s okay. I will wait here for ever. I wont get annoyed if you do not pay me attention." Or maybe its just dumb. "Doh doh. I got no disk, Nope, Where am I gonna get a disk? Nope. Dope. Doh. Maybe I have disc. Where is it? Where is that guy? Do i have a disk?" And maybe it is just an inert machine, no thoughts at all. Reality and rationality [...]

Here’s another episode where Alan Discovers Something That Has Been Out A While and Maybe Everyone Else Calls it Old News but….. This morning I was doing a Google Image search (more often these days I am using the advanced options to filter out images licensed for re-use) and was surprised/curious about what I saw at the bottom of the results: Google Social Search was rolled out in October but I missed that one. From what I saw, it’s not only pulling media from your “social circle” but also from things and people they create or link to. A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend’s New York blog probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I’ll find are some well-known and official sites. We’ve taken steps to [...]

I was impressed with posterous when I first set my paws on it in August 2008. It is the web site you can build a blog, even a shared collaborative one, via the complex blog authoring platform — email. You can set up a site instantly, with no account needed upfront, and that in itself is humbly elegant, but the real fun is when you send an email with a link to media in it, an attached image or video– and it knows how to render those media types right in the page, even with embedded players for audio and video. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while; I’d set up some sites at NMC with the hopes others would contribute things like cool technology or stuff for the Horizon Report. Not a whole lot happened there besides me and one colleague, and then a bunch of [...]

I have an old JavaScript bookmark tool I made five years ago– it allows me, from no matter where I am on the web, to either select some text in a page (or enter in a box) and run a search for it in my own blog. This came from realizing that the basic wordpress search URL was always something like: http://www.myfreakyblog.org/index.php?s=cheddar+cheese And with my mediocre JavaScript tools, I made a site that allows anyone yo make one for their own blog– the Make A WordPress Search Bookmarklet tool — which to my utter surprise, still works. It’s prety easy- you enter the name of the blog, its base URL, and click “Build The Bookmark”- drag the generated JavaScript link to your toolbar, and you are done. So for example, let’s say I have some B movie blog I want to make the tool for, I enter its name, the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Harumph, that’s me reading an analog book and marking it up. WTF? A few months ago and an NMC Board meeting, Gardner Campbell conjectured the idea to try and create some sort of online reading group among our community. The idea bubbled a bit (I was pondering using BookGlutton, I love their way of sharing readings of e-texts), but Gardner circled back with another interesting idea we are now experimenting with. Over in Texas where he directs the Academy of Teaching and Learning and Baylor University, Gardner was already planning to host a New Media Seminar for faculty, more or less, applying the syllabus he has done so successfully for years as an undergraduate course From Memex to YouTube: An Introduction to New Media Studies. I cannot give justice to a description, but if you ever had heard Gardner do a presentation, you [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by storem Some of my favorite software moments are accidentally discovering something new in a tool I’ve been using for some time. This happened recently my my current iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2. I’m not writing about this app, but I’d heard people rave about it, shrugged them off, then eventually later found out they were right. It is smartly designed. I’d noticed when looking at someone’s profile that there is a number below their icon… (and actually I was not ego-ing my own profile, its just an example) (seriously) (I swear). So what is #740,343? Perhaps its obvious, but I wanted to know. Maybe it is some sort of ranking, like I am the 740,343rd ranked tweeter. Yeah, I could only dream to rank that high. My hunch was/is that it is more or less my database ID in twitter, a user number, and [...]

This blog post has no mention of a certain length of time since a certain kind of writing was….. er…. blogged. One can always try to blog like NOBODY. But that’s not the point either. On my travels, I’ve been reading bits of Armageddon in Retrospect, the collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s post—, um….. stuff written after he died. It was not Kurt’s words that lept from the page, but those in the intro written by his son Mark (trying to imagine growing up with Kurt Vonnegut as a father). Reading and writing are themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by hans s “You’ve got two empty halves of coconut and you’re bangin’ ‘em together.” Since I began banging coconuts in instructional technology in 1992, I’ve heard of this quest for the holy grail, the mythical database of who’s doing what with technology. I held back writing this for maybe a day, but could not let it go– I stay in email contact with a group of my former colleagues at the Maricopa Community Colleges, where they hired some green horned mullet head drop out PhD geology student 18 years ago. This group, CyberSalonAZ is worthy of a separate write up, but what started as a small informal group who gathered monthly to share technology and beer, is in some ways, served to provide the networking and open sharing that was inside the system when I worked there, but seems a bit more evaporated now. [...]

I always provide links back to the source as attribution for the flickr creative commons photos I use. Today I ran into the not so surprising case of wondering what to do, and what the ramifications for, if the original is no longer there? Here’s the case. A dark night in a web that knows how to keep its secrets, but one dog is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions. Me. Oops, wrong story. I was working on a site which has a banner collage made of 5 or 6 flickr cc licensed images. When I did the original, I downloaded them in 500px size (I keep the original cryptic file names, like “196478990_e68fe3c25a.jpg”). I also, and I wish I could say always, kept a text file with the credits info. In making a credits page on the new site, I reached for my favorite tool, [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by foreversouls My blog crashed this afternoon. I was not driving, but with some lucky bits of intervention and guessing, I was able to roll it over and get it back on the road. This was after spending a good chunk on Sunday on a side blog that had gotten hacked (By the way, Donncha’s Exploit Scanner was a crucial key to cleaning up that one, tho it needs a bump to WP 2.9.1). But today’s episode of “Blog and Order” was a different game. I thought I’d share some of the things I did- but keep in mind that when something like this happens, there is rarely one single recipe; and like most, I try all kinds of things, though the whole box of tricks at the wall and see what sticks. So I went to my own blog today to look something up [...]