CogBlogged from ‘October, 2010’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by pocketwiley I had not identified it before, but after watching The Road last night on DVD, I realized I have a fascination with post-apocalyptic films, as one reviewers describes as “near future” views of our world. Maybe it was first watch of the Road Warrior I saw as a teen, but on my flight home from Austin Friday I found myself again watching I am Legend (I think Sam is the real star in the movie). Unlike most science fiction, these movies are easy extrapolations from the world we know today, and ones in which we cannot blame meteors, volcanoes, tornados, aliens for taking away our world- humanity does it to itself. And then there is the wondering, would I survive in this new grim world (doubtful) (but there is only one way to know) (and then I would not be here blogging about [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Horrortaxi Among the clever Shirkyisms is his observation on people tagging spam target links Back In The Day, when I was trying to explain what I meant when I was talking about social software, but before Coates pulled my fat out of the fire by doing the work for me, I had all these wicked abstruse definitions that made everyone’s eyes glaze over. The only definition I ever found that created the lighbulb moment I was feeling was “Social software is stuff that gets spammed.” Not a perfect definition, but servicable in its way. Today was twitter spam day for me- I blocked the turd makers already via tweetdeck, but two were from someone claiming by photo to be a sheepish gal with links to online money making sites attributed “via @cogdog” and another was some get money for cameras @ed to me. This [...]

While I’m on the code doc kick… this one is not mine, but something I applied on my site. A week or so ago I came across (from RSS feeds? nah, I think it was in twitter? maybe a squirrel stepped o my keyboard?) Steph Gray’s Reading: keeping on top of stuff I save, some code he rolled. The way he describes the need rang a resonant bell with me: Like a lot of people, I use services like Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious and Instapaper to help me find and store interesting links to articles, tools, apps or whatever. Personally, when I don’t have time to read it right now, I tend to star an item in Google Reader, ‘favourite’ it in Twitter, or mark it to ‘Read later’ in Instapaper – often five or ten things a day. I also save interesting stuff to Delicious, particularly where I think [...]

I spent about 15 minutes writing a small PHP function for one of my sites, and then another hour writing it up. What for? Well, let’s back up. If you are running online events where people might come from anywhere, there can always be challenges for getting the right time to people. For our NMC events, while our office is in Austin, we have staff in 3 other time zones, and people in our community from maybe another 14 or more zones on top of that. If I say something starts at 2:00pm Central Time, then it puts it on everyone else to figure out when that is (and I’ve seen event sites where they do not even provide the reference time zone). If were all proper and versatile, we’d use Greenwich Mean Time, since everyone knows their offset, right? (I am -7 what are you?) Most of the time [...]

I’m coming off of a fantastic closing session at the NMC Symposium by the Future by Ruben Puentedura on Of Maps, Systems, and Stories: Visualization for Sustainability (we are still processing the recorded audio but there is a gold mine in his slides). Ruben’s examples and ideas on visualization have me inspired to carve up some time and get down to learning to use processing. Until then, I went back to my RSS feeds in visual design/info-stuff-matics and within a post or 10, found a reference to Hipmunk, which provides a fresher, visual way of doing flight planning as opposed to the list views we see elsewhere: We make it faster and easier to find the flight you want. Most flight search sites haven’t changed in years. They have an intimidating search page and endless pages of flight results. Finding the right flight often takes all afternoon—or all week. At [...]

What happened to brave men like Jake W. Burns? I found out tonight, watching my newest DVD, Lonely are the Brave (1962) which, IMHO is a completely under-rated classic. The tag line is “Life can never cage a man like this…” I watched it because, like the star Kirk Douglas, had enjoyed Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy, and Douglas, already then a big star, wanted to make Abbey’s story into a movie, but it took a long time to convince the studios. Douglas wanted to call it “The Last Cowboy” but the studios forced this cheesier title. Douglas’ character, Jack Burns, is the idealized version of Abbey’s self image- a man who lives on the land, at home in the desert or mountains, has no address, no social security card, no license, a loner. I didn’t want a house. I didn’t want all those pots and pans… ‘Cause I’m a [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been maybe two years since I bought a package of bottled water form the supermarket, but I’m always grabbing one at convenience stores while on the road. Living in the dry state of Arizona (dry as in lack of moisture) you learn to not go far without water in reach. I’ve kept a fleet in my fridge, using them for runs, and yes, I refill them from my tap. Someone will respond and inform me that this is a cancer risk (Snopes is mixed). If you look around all the objects in any room in your house, you could probably find some study somewhere that anything is linked to cancer. But that’s straying from the point. A blog post from Heather turned me on to the Story of Bottled Water. Wow, I may be the only one on my twitter list who [...]

I’m finally getting my health and schedule back into the readings for Gardner Campbell’s Networked Seminar, where this week the reading (or maybe it was last week) was Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s Personal Dynamic Media (it is available as a free chapter download from the Nee Media Reader). It’s easy to focus on the technology described so visionary like in the late 1960s, especially holding something like an iPad (or a notebook, maybe, or an ereader) in your hands. And people often then go on to describe why or why not the iPad is like a Dynabook. It’s very tempting, but its not really important to say how they are different- they are certainly part of an evolutionary arc of technologies, and one does not need to be sitting in Steve Job’s shoulder to guess that he was influenced by this seemingly work (“stealing” is a bit extreme IMHO). [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Rocketeer Who ever thought the word “repository” was a good idea? C’mon, nearly every one’s connotations go elsewhere and sure, I’m going to be encouraged to go add something (or fond something) I created to something that sounds like something that goes up your butt? But I digress. I always hated that term. Last month Stephen Downes wrote in response to some discussions about JISC Repositories a post about his reasoning for running as much of his online resources on his own servers (Not the Institutional Web Server)- in one bullet point he said: my online work has also outlived most every initiative that has been created to provide a ‘permanent’ home for such work; projects in Canada like CAREO and eduSource are now history. I’m sure people in Britain can create their own list of shuttered initiatives. I’m rather proud that the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bored-now Dear United Airlines, Coming from a satisfying long relationship with Continental Airlines (where I am Platinum Elite, flying 60,000 – 75,000 per year for work and vacation), given the merger with my former partner, I tried to enter this new situation with an open mind. But not only do you seem to have trouble managing guitars, your reservation system is a byzantine rat trap that flat out does not work. It took me more over an hour and a half today to make a simple reservation, one that I already had the flight details (thanks kayak, your site works), ultimately forcing me to do this over the phone. I would think in these economic times you’d be focused in efficiency but I saw no sign of it today. So I sat down at my computer this morning to book a vacation on your [...]