CogBlogged from ‘March, 2010’

Nothing is more fun on the internet then playing smack down with Jim Groom. He is relentless, but like a good tussle with that rubber stretch toy, I wont give in easily. Over the last few days, though, poor bava boy Jim was been shrinking in stature. It started out when his endless twitter stream of “iHate iPad Lovers” compelled me to conjure up from the archives this damning piece of evidence: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s his insane tirade of false superiority for being on the same lame WordPress template he stumped across (let’s not even dissect his mangled use of language claim of being “themogamous” — when really he is “monothematic”) and constant taunting me for the current theme I put in place recently that hatched an evil plan. What got me inspired about the HoPE theme I use here is the dynamic top right [...]

I was thumbing through the current issue of Wired Magazine (yes, my analog, arrived in snail mail, maybe delivered by Pony Express version). In very small print on the table of contents, under “New Media” was an interesting note. We’ve collaborated with Adobe to develop the Wired Reader, which will run on pretty much any platform: iPad, Android, Windows, and Linux. Woah, working with Adobe to make something run on an iPad? How in the blazing “no flash shalt ever be installed in thy iDevice” can that happen? Might Adobe be looking past Flash? Hardly, and this is not really new news. It was announced February 2010 at TED and there is a slick “demo” published on the Wired site “The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration” Last week Jeremy Clark from Adobe and I unveiled the first glimpse of the Wired Reader at TED. Above, you’ll see a video, [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by theilr It’s been a while since I did some WordPress hacking, and today I think it showed. Like a good bone I could not let go of a niggling little problem, and then after going around in circles, I found an obvious way that was much more simpler than where I was headed. But there are things even learned in a few trips around the roundabout. Here’s where I drove around in circles today… for a while, I have been publishing web versions of the NMC Horizon Reports in CommentPress format at http://wp.nmc.org — this is very useful for publications since it allows comments to be attached to individual paragraphs, so they are tied at a more micro level to the content. (Yeah they are in the old CommentPress mode, I know I should be using the newer digress.it and am ready to publish [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by daveograve@ I am not a happy pup. The volume of blog comment spam coming into my quiet little dog house is has reached DEFCON 4 on the scale of annoyance. So I am taking action against one company, Ubiquity Server Solutions which coddles spammers (see the updates and comments below- I cannot stand by this initial accusation; and they, in fact, have taken action). I have twice reported offending IP addresses they host that are sending spam to abuse@biquityservers.com, sending pertinent information: And below, I invite you to join me and ban them from your sites. I am getting large volumes of blog comment spam originating from servers on your network. Please let me know when you have canceled these persons accounts. ———- Forwarded message ———- From: WordPress <wordpress@cogdogblog.com> Date: Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 4:30 PM Subject: [CogDogBlog] Please moderate: "More Than Notes [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ice.bluess This week’s reading for Gardner Campbell’s New Media Faculty Seminar was video artist Bill Viola’s “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” a title that intrigued me and, even as Gardner explained it on our podcast, I’m still circling around its meaning. For whatever reason, I keep coming back to this essay- like some movies, there are some where you walk out of the theater and shrug, “meh” and others that swirl around your mind, and more swirling occurs as you talk and think about it. I admit having not heard of Viola before, but his video art is prolific on YouTube and his involvement with MIT’s Aspen Project from way back when, suggests he has done a lot of conceptualizing work of the implications of computer and video technology (for a side tangent, the Aspen Project as described in Wikipedia in 1978 [...]

This speaks for itself ;-) I’m lining up now for tickets.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Torley My, how virtual worlds have tarnished. From all the high expectations of 2006, people calling for the coming of the “3D web”, and its been a year since the crows on the wire started sqwaking the “Second Life is Dead” as the big corporations who responded to the flash of light packed up their virtual buildings and left. Or, now it is relegated as a niche or that it is only good for 50 people. Here is a code phrase to look out for- any statement that X is dead is suspect unless X is that skunk you ran over on the highway and has been flattened. Always question such assertions; ask to see the corpse. I’m just coming off of a two day utterly engaging experience in what we do at the NMC as online conferences- these are not your webinar slideshow [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jeremy Brooks There is a imprint from that boot labeled “copyright violation” across my face. I got stomped… and likely deserved it. I had a eight-baked idea to do a video response to Dave Cormier and George Siemens in their call for videos about the future of education for a short course they are teaching. I’m not big on pontifications or hanging predictions out in the air (me of the William F Gibson Model of the Future). Then after seeing that David Wiley took a well delivered prediction of continued same-ness (so clean you might not get the parody tag?), I figured the snark gloves were off– a wild idea emerged in my feverish undersized canine skull to do a little mashup of a popular movie with some substituted dialogue. And a few fun jabs at my friend and intertubes sparring buddy, Jim Groom. [...]

So you can’t get enough twitter action of the smackdowns of Reverend Jim “Bavaman” and his sidekicked D’Arcy Bike Wonder Norman? The Cabed Blogsader abhors anyone who dares to change out their blog theme, especially Norman! Stay tuned as the story unfolds! Make your own addition to this talke at http://www.batmancomic.info/

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Zach Dischner Did you ever have one of those experiences where you were struggling with a problem, and somehow your mind completely flipped it around to a solution you could never see on the first side? It’s more than a light bulb going off, it’s like turning your brain inside out. How does that happen? What is it in our minds that we can keep dogging the same side of the problem and turn it around? Sometimes it happens when someone else sees the situation differently. I had a miniscule, puny, example this weekend that got me thinking about it. It seems even smaller just writing about it. It’s my mailing address. You see, I live in a small town where the post office does not deliver mail to the house; I have a community mailbox area, so my postal mailing address is a [...]