CogBlogged from ‘March, 2011’

Actually I don’t want to… cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Martin_Heigan I enjoy sitting back and seeing how one small comment, remark, phrase sends by down a google lined wormhole of information (or pseudo-information). It’s not even from one link to another, it branches so much I cannot even try to diagram it. Yesterday morning I was reading through my borrowed copy of Bob Dylan in America (I promise Charles, you will get it back. Sorry about the food smudges and coffee spills) (just kidding). I was on the section describing the mad recording sessions for Blonde on Blonde… Crazy what happens when you search for images Something clicked on the curiosity light when I read What aloofness there was seems to come mainly from Dylan’s end. Kris Kristofferson, the an aspiring songwriter working as a janitor at the studio, recalls that police had [...]

While sanding my deck I am mulling over what I will do for the Web Story assignment in ds106. I have my target and plan in mind, and hope to hatch it over the next day or two. An idea I had discarded as pointless was doing one on Wikipedia- pointless because one can already edit the content. But then a flash came to me- what if I were to edit the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia, and hatch a story that it is a giant scam on the world, that we think we are freely editing, by we are really being manipulated by some malicious malefactor. It was starrting to resonate until I looked at the length and volume of content there. While I know I could remove parts, it was looking like a huge amount of effort. But I also saw it as a good chance to practice some [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I grabbed the mic for 15 minutes tonight to read a few more tales from The Thing at the Foot of the Bed. It occurred to me that this book was a bit like going back to the elementary school you attended and noting how much smaller everything is compared to your memory. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Dean Terry Thats what this book is like- I thought it was scary as a kid, and now I special order this book, and most of the stories are either dumb or just silly, not all that scary. At least one listener also had a memory of this book: For me, this old book still has a special spot in my memory cells, so tonight I read a few samples. That is, after reading maybe the [...]

THIS WEEK ARIZONA TRUTHS BROADCAST MAR 18, 2011 We look for the truth in Arizona, starting with the real age of the earth, as well as the headless bodies in the desert, legislators on ice, and something truly amazing buried in an old mine shaft. Where is the truth? We find it. —————————————————– This was the 30 minute audio assignment for ds106, I did in collaboration with my fellow proud Arizonan, Todd Conway. It is a blatant ripoff and mock of the greatest radioshow, This American Life, and we parody it to admire it. I do a very lame nasally imitation of Ira Glass, or on our show, Ira Cactus. Todd and I did our stories as separate segments, and I wove them together (thanks Todd for the great fake ad for Larry’s Gun shop). What could be better than an interview with a real headless body in the desert, [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by sendarko I have been deeply touched by the (most ever at CDB) comments to my Into the Great Wide Open post as well as the #roadsongs shared on ds106 radio yesterday, masterfully conducted by the dog’s favorite bava. Late last night (after midnight here on Left Coast Time), I grabbed the ds106 mic to play a set of my own songs, some road related, some about “the call” with a bit of stream of conscious rambling over and in between the songs. This time I managed to hit the Nicecast archive button… CogDog Rambling about Rambling on the Road The play list included: It’s My Life (The Animals) This Is A Call (Foo Fighters) Farewell Ride (Beck ) Rusty Old Ford (Danny Griego) Call Me The Breeze [Live] (J.J. Cale) Meet Me In The Morning (Bob Dylan) I’ll Be Glad [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Joe Lencioni The energy of ds106 radio continue to shine, with the almost impromptu music themes this week, from work songs to a fun day (was it Wednesday? just yesterday?) of “Songs to Grow By” — meaning songs you heard as a kid, or songs your parents/grandparents played or, as the Dr Garcia’s bumper went, “ones your aunt played as she drove you across the country not even stopping to get McDonald fries” (I am guessing that is not just a generic example, Dr G?). The thoughts that came to me were the eras of music that played out of the basement family room of our house in Suburban Baltimore, with the old tube powered record player in a wooden box. I assembled a mix of music and a few intros. Alan’s Songs to Grow By The song lists [...]

One of the tweets Nixon did not manage to erase in 1972… Just kidding. I found this great, fun tool Twister from Classtools (twitterbution to @John_larkin, about time I gave you one back). It is a simple web form where you can enter info about a historical figure, and create a fake status message from them, as if they were tweeting back then – like Beethoven complaining about his iPod, Monet pondering painting versus gardening, or Isaac Newton calling for a post apple falling beverage. It’s pretty simple, enter a fake twitter handle (be creative), their real name (used to pluck the images from sonewhere), the tweet they might have said (use hashtags! @people! bit.ly links!), and the date to put on the tweet. It’s late for the ds106 visual assignments, but this one is easy anyone can do it in about 5 minutes. I made the ones on this [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This photo from two days ago was a bit of foreshadowing… Today was my first day of unemployment. No, I was not fired…. I have walked away from likely the most plum position in education technology, Vice President of Community & CTO for the New Media Consortium, a spot I have held since April 2006. Working at NMC has been fantastic, from the world circling travel, to being part of the Horizon Report process, to helping run the conferences and webinars, to working with the most creative minds in our industry, heck even to running virtual conferences as a dog in Second Life. The typical question from a handful of people I have told of my decision is, “So where are you going?” The answer is “nowhere”.

I had a lot of fun with the GigaPan back in 2008 when I first was introduced to this device. It is a simple but elegant idea- a robot controller tat holds a camera and makes a series of images in a grid that can be combined in software to form a giant scene. A motor moves and pans the camera, and a mechanical arm clicks the shutter. I’d not done one in a while (my previous attempts are at http://gigapan.org/profiles/5381/). But I was inspired today to get out, and I aimed to hike up Strawberry Mountain, the peak I see from my back deck (behind the real Strawberry) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was a steep scramble up there, and man I felt my out of shapeness. There are not too many places where the trees afforded a view, but I got a [...]

Last week I got an email from someone who works for Millenium House publishers asking for permission to use one of my Gigapan images from Iceland in a new atlas they are doing. The Earth Platinum Atlast is a big ass book – it measures 6 x 4.5 feet: Can you imagine the coffee table you need for that thing? Or the book shelves you will have to construct for it? And what other books can you put on the shelf? How do you read it in bed? All questions that passed through my mind. Anyhow, they image they asked to use is actually a panoramic GigaPan scene (made of 88 photos) shot on my last day of my Iceland trip in 2008, at Thingvellir, a place at the nexus of earth history (where the earth is forming new material and spreading towards both Europe and North America) and human [...]