CogBlogged from ‘August, 2011’

(I found another old post, hey is running this blog?) Note- this is 1000% snarky satire. Place your sarcasm sensors on high…. I typically include pictures of myself in my blog posts. Why? Well doesn’t it explain itself? Why just look at me. I just love looking at me so much, its quite natural the 90,000 daily blog readers I have and 3,677,035 followers I have on twitter feel the same. But really, I am not here to write about me, it’s all about YOU. Well, it’s about you reading about me, but hey, that’s still YOU, right? Pretty obvious I think. As many of you know, my consulting fees are not cheap. It’s not easy being me, it’s a HARD job, all the travel and speaking engagements (do you know how LONG that trip is to Davos?) and I can only stretch my talents so far. My clients can [...]

(I found this old post in my drafts, I guess I never clicked “publish”) I already tweeted this site, but the more I thought about how beautiful and fun it makes numbers, I wanted to share some more. Number Gossip is simple, and elegant, and makes it purpose clear: Enter a number and I’ll tell you everything you wanted to know about it but were afraid to ask. So since 42 is pretty obvious, I aimed at something more obscure… 41 or http://numbergossip.com/41 (Also I love sites that make URLs like this- you can build apps or link activities pretty easily into it). So what’s the gossip about 41? 41 is the smallest non-palindromic prime which on subtracting its reverse gives a perfect cube (i.e., 41 – 14 = 33) 41 is the smallest half-quartan prime: p = (x4 + y4)/2 41 is the smallest number such that the sum [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by The Rocketeer A number of things these days I find interesting are ones where you say “I can try and explain but you really had to be there” This includes they way people have described the Unplug’d conference (I’ve met like half on my road trip), and also very much ds106 radio. Usually these things are ones that you talk about so much that you may annoy people around you. The answer to almost anything becomes… “ds106 radio”. Well here is one more. Those I who have been around me know I don’t spend much time sleeping. I honestly find a lot of time sleeping tiring… and a waste of time! It’s like the way Keith Richards open’s his autobiography: For many years I slept, on average, twice a week. This means that I have been conscious for at [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog With the hundreds of tweets, emails, and thoughts I feel in the air regarding my Mom’s passing, I am more that “lifted” by my net. As Mom would say, “I am blown away”. I was asked to edit the audio part of her “Stories on ds106 radio” where she talks about butterflies. I’d heard her say this many times since my Dad passed away, that whenever you see a butterfly it represents the spirit of someone who passed. Now its easy to pass this off as not scientific, but I know it gave her a lot of comfort, and I found myself seeing a butterfly when I was doing my camping practice for this trip. And it makes me smile just thinking about her saying it. The photo above I took in Mom’s honor last August when I visited the [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog One day after talking to my Mom on the day marking 10 years since my Dad passed away, I got that call you never want to receive. A friend found Mom dead on her kitchen floor. My quasi plan trip now includes a sooner-than-charted dash south to Baltimore, where they are flying her body for the funeral. I was fortunate to be with friends Andy and Kent at dinner last night, who provided wonderful support, as was the response when I dropped my news in twitter. For some reason, the thought came into my head that I wanted to talk about Mom on ds106 radio. I am warmed by the love I felt over that hour and a half, plus even more the live singing later by olga. I did a chunk of talking about the route of my trip [...]

Those photos are both early release versions of myself and my Dad. Today is the date ten years ago that he passed away; I had seen him a few weeks earlier. I did have my calendar reminder ping me earlier, but was reminded just ow as I was telling someone the story of Mickey, the dog who has long marked my online presence. I got Mickey as a pup in July 2001, and it was my decision to name him after my Dad’s nickname. Mickey’s gone. Dad’s gone. I’m here and thinking of them both today. As usual, I link on this day to a web site I made for my Dad when I was trying to deal with those 5 months of knowing he was going – http://dommy.com/dad

As a followup to the May 2011 version of Amazing Stories of Openness, I got an email a few weeks back from Wendy Farmer with a nice post script. Her story was about a blog she had created with her kids to write about dinosaurs and how they connected with a professional paleontologist (click through for the video): From Wendy’s email, she recently reconnected with Dr Will who is at a new college– I wanted to thank you for asking the question about Amazing Stories. Sharing it with you got me thinking and so I started Googling around and found a Dr. Will Straight at Northern Virginia Community College and sent him an email to see if it was him. We are now reconnected. He still remembers us and will even point his students to our old blog sometimes. He’s teaching paleontology and geology. The boys are I are starting [...]

Big wheels keep on rolling, and the leg of travel through the more populated parts of Ontario produced two more nights in a row of meeting people and bringing them kicking and screaming into ds106 radio (just kidding, no kicking, no screaming, they ask). On Monday I drove to the part of Canada that is south of Detroit, the town Windsor, for one of the key meetups of the trip, a chance to meet Windsor Di (her name is not “winsordi”) a most gracious and outgoing host who provided the most detailed tours and photo suggestions of the trip. Our connection goes back to commenting on flickr, where Di is a Force of Good, and the Amazing Story where she made wood pens out of a log I emailed to Canada last Spring (original flickr photo where this started). Not only did Di give me the Best Welcome Hug of [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As promised, the scenery was epic along highway 17 tracing the north side of the Great Lakes in Ontario. Did I say it was long? I think it was over 2000km or maybe it was 20,000 or 200,000. I did 3 days in a row of 640km per day, about 12 hours behind the wheel. Several activities were attempted in the car to pass the time, one of which was singing out loud the lead guitar solos for a series of songs (thankfully not recorded). The kilometers piled up cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was a grind- mostly of my own making because I set up a stupidly ambitious schedule. I ought to have taken more time, but I was eager to reconnect with people on the other side. cc licensed ( BY ) [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On my current road odyssey, there us a continual growing list of people who have showered me with hospitality and generosity. One that deserves special mention is Donna Fry, someone I had not communicated with before, but when I tweeted something about planning the route around the Ontario North lakes, out of the blue she responded: I responded by direct message with my email, and got a super detailed list of what to see, what to skip, where to camp, etc. We got to meet up for lunch at the restaurant she suggested in Terrace Bay, and I really enjoyed hearing of her work as a principal at a number of local schools, and her bear/moose encounter stories. I could not resist asking her to explain why she would help a “stranger on the internet” Donna Fry talks about helping [...]