CogBlogged from ‘March, 2010’

Stephen Downes highlighted today one of those wonderful simple ideas that can go (and has gone) a long way. In An Idea That Keeps Growing Doug Peterson shows how his simple idea took off– to use online maps to create a walking tour of the place he grew up. As Stephen suggested where he plotted his own tour of Metcalfe Ontario, this is a great simple activity one can do for some online storytelling- now with Google Street view, you can literally snap photos of your old neighborhood, and mix that with your memories, and shazam! Digital story. It’s something most every person could do, assuming they have a childhood they don’t mind recalling. But hee hee, it is not often one gets to say he did something way before Stephen, but (cough cough), I posted a memory map in flickr back in 2005 when a group started to collect [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by h.koppdelaney I spoke to my Mom last night, one of our almost weekly phone calls. It was a bit ominous when she called me at 8:00am this morning… she shared the sad news that my Aunt Martha had passed away. Martha lived alone in Baltimore. Ten days ago, the people who clean her place found her unconscious, she had suffered a stroke and never came out of it. Now here is the thing about Aunt Martha- she was not really my aunt. She grew up in the same neighborhood as my Mom, Martha and her husband George (yes a couple of same first names as the Washingtons) became close friends with my parents– George was a mentor for my father, got him involved in the Masons. They were actually my godparents, but they always felt like family. I have fuzzy memories of visiting their [...]

Bear with me on what my unravel as a long strand here, Im trying to weave into one a stream that’s been flowing all day. Never one to write in that organized a fashion, I see a path: celebration of some incredibly original, creative video forms- and I want more; reading something way out my normal scope; which leads me to an incredible video experience about a box, but its more than the video; and speaking of the mystery box; the overarching reach of an education connection. Are you ready? Please place your minds into the upright and locked open position…

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mrphancy I’ve been a few weeks into using Google Chrome, and sorry Old Fox, the shiny metal is looking and feeling good. With Firefox, it was a long running period of spending time I’d rather be browsing waiting for Mac Beachballs to stop spinning, or that pause when a cursor goes into a form field and the fox must be tapping its feet or scratching itself before allowing me to enter anything. The tipping point for me was the direct availability in Google Chrome of most of some 40,000 Greasemonkey scripts. I’m not going hog wild with scripts and extensions, my lean set now includes: Flick CC Attribution Helper my own humble script that adds to any Flickr photo page that is cc licensed, two different cut and past attribution html codes- one for embedding in blog posts (used above) and another just for [...]

This same thing happened a year ago. In some fluke of nature because, as a state with leading indicators of worse budget deficit, lowest numbers of high school graduation rates, Arizona is somehow ahead of the curve in terms of not following the confusion of shifting clocks for daylight savings. Yes, all of the wheat farmers here have to deal with the vagaries of the natural changes of sunrise/sunset. Our clocks stay the same year round. For electronic devices, the code logic necessary to deal with setting the time must be simple. function ArizonaDSTTimeAdjust() {   # code for adjusting daylight savings time zones in Arizona.   #ummm. we don't need any code. bye } My computers use network timeserver to set the correct time; both my Mac and PC are correct. My atomic wall clock is correct. My wrist watch is correct. Yet, my iPhone is not. With settings in Automatic [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by JPLatting from the idle wonderings department…and summoning my best Andy Rooney voice Did you ever notice…. how short/brief flickr comments are? “nice photo” “Awesome!” “great shot” — heck you could fit 4 or 5 in a single tweet. Think about it- a good meaty blog post (the kind not typically found here), if read in their fullest take quite a bit of mental fuel to process. For example, if Stephen Downes takes only half an hour to write his deep posts -they might take me 4 times that to read to (partial) meaning. And such content that takes time to process yields comments sometimes in the multiple paragraph form. I’ve seen blog posts where the comments are longer than the posts. Yet a photo you can take in within a few seconds or more, is lucky if it illicit a full sentence in a [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Stéfan That little search field and button in WordPress has not changed in function one bit since i started with WordPress. Oh sure, you can pop words in there, and get list of results. That works. But it is really limiting, especially when you have a few years heaped up of posts. Let me be more specific. If I want to find something I wrote about Jim Groom and car toys, if I type in the search field Jim Groom Car Toys My results will include posts that mention Jim Morrison, ones about Jim beam, Ones about not wanting to be a bride of a groom, ones about Dean Groom, onces about Car Shows, ones about Toys are us, and maybe after I page through 5 pages of results, I might find the one I want. You see, the WordPress search is all OR. [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by aliceskr It’s been rattling around in the grey matter since Saturday, an un-organized strand of thoughts about the TEDxNYED event– and lacking a clever title, I made it a past tense verb (and that is something I expect no one to even spot as clever). Just to set the baseline, I only saw about 1/3 of the sessions on the live video stream; after al it was a nice Saturday, and I had a pile of firewood to cut. So I cannot give a full opinion of the event based on the portions of the elephant I touched. First of all, it is no small feat that the Livestream site supported 20,000 viewers. That is astounding. For anyone who has had the ulcer inducing job of managing a live stream, there’s little joy. You hear a tsunami wave of complaints when the stream fails [...]

It’s been on my to do list since August, but I finally got the last mile of code done to restore my Five Card Flickr stories site to life. If you had not played with this before, the initial description tells it all: I’ve been ultra interested in the idea of telling stories in pictures. Ever since I saw Ruben Puentadora’s workshop on web comics back in 2007 (and later at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference) a little idea has been brewing. Ruben does this fantastic group activity based on work from Scott McCloud, that makes creative work, from all things, of old Nancy cartoons. Using the Five-Card Nancy web version of Scott’s original card game, Ruben conducts an exercise in visual story weaving. Basically, you get a shuffled deck of five panels from different Nancy cartoons, and you have to pick one at a time to, in five steps, [...]

Again, nothing warms this web dog’;s heart that accidentally discovering something useful. With my two daily photo habits (@dailyshoot and 2010/365 photos) I am continually having to seek out specific bits of information. For dailyshoot I check in the morning what the assignment is usually by a visit to their twitter page or checking an RSS feed). For naming of my daily photos, I use a title based on the day number of the year (today is the 64th day of the year). I usually flip open a Mac OS X dashboard widget I found 2 years ago, but I have to enter the date for it to calculate the day of the year. In one tweet, I now have a more elegant solution, and learned something I did not know was possible. @dailyshoot shared this message: Tip from @lyzadanger on a great way to keep up with the Daily [...]