CogBlogged from ‘March, 2011’

I was way overdue in rolling some updates into the source code (available on google code) for my Five Card Flickr Stories site. Before my departure from NMC, I moved the site from their servers to my own, so the new main site is at http://5card.cogdogblog.com/ (I left a URL redirect on the NMC site, so all old URLs should cleanly jump to the new). This site was completely inspired by an activity I had seen Ruben Puentedura use in his workshops on comics. As a creative exercise, he used the Five Card Nancy game (originall devised by comics guru Scott McCloud) as it has been done by a nifty web version at 741.5 Comics. In this activity, you are dealt 5 different panels from Nancy comics, that have been detached from their originals. In turn, Ruben would have the audience choose a panel that made the most sense in [...]

As a variation on the Google Maps Story assignment for ds106, I was thinking of some other creations one could do via the maps. This was mulling through me head as I was driving this morning to Flagstaff via one of the prettiest highways, the Lake Mary Road north of Clints Well. So my game was, what sort of (loosely used) poetry could one make from place names? So here is my entry, using 5 cities/towns, with a little embellishing faked to look like states/province abbreviations (or go to map) Starring: Golden, Colorado Superior, Arizona Why, Arizona Boring, Maryland Humble, Texas It’s rather forced, but was fun to look for place names in Google maps. Try one? One could always start with a town in Pennsylvania and go who knows where? Update! I was hungry, and thought of all the Burger Towns out there, so here is my Hold the [...]

Whew, I finished my ds106 Video Essay assignment on Lonely are the Brave, the 1962 not-western starring Kirk Douglas. The movie is based on Edward Abbey’s second published novel, The Brave Cowboy. According to the extras on the DVD, Douglas was very taken by the novel and personally was driven to see that it was made into a movie. The story focuses on Jack W, Burns, who lives an old school cowboy life that is beeing squeezed out by the modern (1960s that is) life of Albuquerque. Intending to help his friend Paul, who is in jail as part of a protest (ironically, Paul is jailed for providing help to illegal Mexican immigrants), Burns actually breaks into jail, where he hopes to talk Paul into making a jail break. Paul refuses (on his moral grounds, but also out of concern for his wife and child), so Burns busts out himself, [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today’s excursion in the Fossil Springs Wilderness Area was both mind cleansing but also connected me with the memory of another trip, to a much bigger stream, back in 1991 when I did a 9 day Grand Canyon river trip. I was also reminded after discovering under a pile of dust, my copy of Raging River Lonely Trail, a book of poems/stories that one of the river guides used to read out loud during the calmer sections. I decided to read two selections on ds106 radio, and most fun was reading Floyd’s Void, an ode to Floyd Dominy, the maverick leader of the Bureau of Reclamation during their days of addictions to building dams on western rivers. Fot an amazing read on this part of history, I cannot more highly recommend John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, in which the [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by OiMax Last Friday I was a remote facilitator for the group at Houston Community College’s New Media Faculty Seminar being coordinated by Tom Haymes. With my changes at NMC and gardner Campbell’s transition to Virginia Tech, we’ve not been very active, but Gardner is cooking up big plans to launch the networked seminar in the fall of 2011. Tom is doing a great job of keeping two groups going at HCCS and he had invited me to be guest via Skype before my announcement of leaving the NMC building. So I joined the group there from my home in Arizona: The reading for this discussion was video artist Bill Viola’s Will There be Condominiums in Data Space. To set the stage, Tom played the YouTube video of Viola talking about his “Ocean Without a Shore” work As noted by one of [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Profound Whatever One of my long time favorite web site references is the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), not only because of its comprehensive depth and breadth of information about movies and TV shows, but also because it is rich in data- you can go from a movie summary to follow the works of its director or lead actors, via hyperlinks. It is the site I reach to for learning about or making links to movies. And IMDb now has a new feature I really like- lists you can make and share. But before that, a little more honor about IMDb- I can recall coming across it from my earliest web days in 1993- it is one of the oldest reference web sites I can think of- way before Wikipedia, way before search engines. In fact, it celebrated its 20th [...]

This is the final chapter to the story I wrote earlier this month of how a photo of some potential firewood I posted on flickr led me to mailing a log to Canada… and now Di has worked her magic wood turning and returned to me two lovely pens made from my wood! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I love these intertwingly tubes!

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by deep_schismic I don’t know if this will be picked up by anyone else, but I wanted to try and propose a theme for a day on ds106 radio — it probably hinges on someone pushing for it in the morning. But oh well, you can’t do more than try. My friend’s brother was a DJ on a station back in the old days, and I remember him talking about CCR’s version of “Heard it on the Grapevine” (which I do like) at 15:45 was the ideal disc to play when he had to take a crap. My idea is to celebrate the long songs, ones that double the old 3 and a half minute single, that is songs longer than 7 minutes. I am sure someone will reach for the ultra marathoner In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (I won’t). So my rules are that [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by KLK Photos I’ve been un-employed a week, and still soaking in the incredible response to my announcement and road plans… and now there are even more dots on the map to connect. That adventure will start sometime in June. I have yet to spend a day on the couch or even to sit around and watch movies. My biggest current project is sanding and painting my two decks; the smaller one has already taken much longer than anticipated just to get to the point of painting (tomorrow). But that does not mean I am vanishing from my edtech interests. I’m still doing my stuff for ds106, even now setting up some times for a show ida tomorrow for ds106 radio. I’ll be part of a rowdy panel on this at Northern Voice as well as doing another solo presentation [...]

This turned out to be a love/hate/love assignment for ds106- Telling Stories in/on the web. It was a brilliant, creative, and challenging assignment cooked up by Martha. The task is to re-write a public web page to have it tell a new story, using only code (especially the Firebug plugin for Firefox). I’ll b&m about Firebug later, but first, it is story time! I went for an IMDb profile page for a movie to have it portrary a well known movie radically different. I chose Dirty Harry, partly because I love the series, but also saw the Harry Callahan character as one to be turned inside out. I present the full version of Soiled Harry online at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/soiled/ – the screen below is just what is above the fold you can enjoy a full screen version. Basically, I transformed Harry the tough “do you fell lucky, punk” bad-ass into a [...]