CogBlogged from ‘June, 2011’

In watching the first episode of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace I became mesmerized by the shifting, laser like movement of Ayn Rand’s eyes in the interview sequence. It lulled me into a trance, mumbling zombie-like “Must make animated GIF… Must make animated GIF… Must make animated GIF… Must make animated GIF… “ Was it these eyes that lulled in Alan Greenspan? I had no idea of the breadth and reach of Rand. I recall that a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” was one of the many titles lodged in the basement shelves of books in my parent’s house, but I dont think I read it. Why was the book there? Where my parents “in the circle”? Those eyes, those eyes, those eyes…

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Maybe. This afternoon I went out for a bike ride, and enjoying the tranquility of my small time life, I left my house unlocked. That was my first mistake. Apparently my hippy neighbor, one Maynerd G. Cosmo, decided to make himself at home in my house. Cosmo is a lost hippy, someone stuck in the 1960s. He made a mess of the place, leaving crushed fritos all over the floor, and some unidentified sticky drink residue all over my table. He also helped himself to my stash! But my mistake was leaving my laptop out, and that dirty hippy not only helped himself to my twitter stream, polluting it ith his goofball philosophy, but he went on the ds106radio and did a Trippy Hippy radio show! Trippy Hippy Hour (Maynerd G. Cosmo) (82.5 Mb 1:25:56). The playlist Cosmo infected the [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Gary Denness I did something dumb on the internet. I should have known better. I should not have clicked. I should not have filled out the form. But, I did. The thing is, when you are cruising through the z-space, your 99.99% vigilance is not always quite good enough. Fortunately, the stakes are minuscule and the only thing damaged is my intuition. Previously, I had written about discovering, enjoying the old book, Sands of the Kalahari, and I wondered that it sure seemed something ripe for hollywood treatment. In fact, it was made into a movie in 1965, but seems hard to locate a (legal) copy. Amazon had it listed for I guess a re-release on DVD, but it was not available until August… I want it now! So… errr…. I clean googling the film title along with words [...]

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by Lori Greig Ye old CogDogBlog seems to be teeter-tottering long; I am seeing a lot of 404s and Internal Server Error 500s, and the error logs are rife with unhelpful details like “premature end of script headers”. My last round of tweaks aimed at memory shortages has not helped, and it seems time for a round fo straw grabbing. What i think I know is that PHP is running out of memory before it can finish executing a big request, hence the death by early script headers. The next step of sleeve rolling up involves putting the blog on the hoist and banging the wrench on a few pipes underneath. I’ve already stripped my plugins down to a core set, and zapped a side bar external javascript widget. I have a choice: Try to identify a RAM sucking plugin. This [...]

Seems the obvious choice for a ds106 bumper sticker

I am composing this blog post completely by speaking to my iPhone and using the Dragon dictate at Janelly record and transcribe what I say I’m getting this idea reading the June 2011 issue of wired magazine Clive Thompson’s article hold that thought subtitle voice recognition software is changing how we write maybe even have I’m intrigued by this idea and it might be something I can use on my upcoming trip what I am finding him his test today is that it helps to pause between sentences so Dragon knows where to put the damn. It’s not perfect and if you wanted perfect. You may have to edit but it does a pretty good job. ————– That portion above was copied directly from the Dragon Dictation app on my iPhone. You get about that much in a recording, but I am seriously intrigued by the idea of capturing ideas [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Digital storytelling expert Happy Camper has analyzed the facts of ds106, and to him the number are clear. Add the number of user generated assignments plus the bitrate for ds106radio plus the number of blogs publishing to the ds106 website reveal the number 279; the 279th day of the year is October 6– that is, 10/6! Camper predicts the end of times at 1:06pm on 10/6 when those who have not been blogging ds106 digital stories will perish in earthquakes and upheavals, while the faithful will enjoy the joys of all days, limitless bandwidth, and trippy music in the ether. The Rupture is coming! To avoid perishing with the faithless, sign up now to be part of ds106 and get posting your animated GIFs, radio shows, mashups, visual stories– and Camper assures that YOU WILL BE SAVED. “The whole world is under Storytelling [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dinstereo With returning from Nelson for what my California speaking friends would call “beautifully trippy” time, I am coming to grips soon with next steps in my journey, leading to a departure June 23 for my Road Trip Odyssey. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of trips, presentations, conferences, all packaged up neatly now in the box labeled done. Among the things I won’t be doing in the foreseeable future, I have for now done, at least for the next few months: my last plane flight trip my last conference attendence (and last presentation) my last road trip to/from Phoenix my last firmly scheduled obligation. That last one (get it?) is key, as my modus operandi for the road trip is to avoid being pinned to being in a certain place at a certain time. To make [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog To trod a word into the ground of repetition, my trip to Nelson BC was…. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by tuppus … for many reasons. The excuse was to present at and attend the ETUG (Educational Technology Users Group) Spring workshop. I was invited to do a version of Amazing Stories of Openness, for which I assembled all new videos. I’m not exactly complaining, but I only had a handful submitted; most of them I had to record them myself. All were done in one take, and really, took but 2-3 minutes from the person I interviewed, and assembled on my web site in the CoolIris method, as well as individual videos, and a playlist viewer. For this go around, the bulk of the new videos were ones I snagged on earlier trips last month to [...]

Scott Leslie was feeling his ds106 radio love at the ETUG meeting… I’m thinking of trying some more multiple camera shots to animGIF-ize. We all had quite a bit of fun with http://bigassmessage.com… for example, Try this one on.