CogBlogged from ‘November, 2011’

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You might wait for someone/something to condone your credentials. To me, it is of even more importance that you always be doing that effort yourself to make sure there is evident of what you are capable of. Why wait passively for some sticker? Yes, I am side stepping the badges wumpus. With my travel, I’ve honestly not had enough time to try and parse out the bits, so I am holding off judgement. But my gut says there is a whole lot of excitement over something that is still conceptual. Not that there is anything wrong, but look how Tim Berners Lee went about his miracle creation of the web- he built the thing and made it visible before trumpeting it. If he ever did trumpeting. I digress. Again. Even if badges turn out to be meaningful, viable, and in [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Hambo The travel is wearing on me. I am not complaining (much). This whole experience is wrapped up in the gift of my god mother’s memory for making it posible, and the stream of memories of connections made, re-made, made new by people I have visited. Yet, my energy is slipping, and I find myself focused on the finish line. I am again, like ost of this trip, driven by the schedule. If I can do one more long push (620) miles, I can get home tomorrow night from tonight’s stop in Amarillo. The last 3 days have been 500+ miles days on average. There is a reason, as a week from tomorrow, I am off for Australia for a 2 week trip, and I’d like as much refresh time at home as possible. i am stopping less for [...]

Day four of the Fort Myers (FL) to Strawberry (AZ) CogDog Express. It’s been drive, drive, drive. Today was the stretch of Texas from Dallas to Amarillo, and the dry southwest land I know and feel just slowly, every slowly merged – the big sky, the sparse plants, the space- big wide space. With a population density approaching zero I cannot help buy wonder about the creatures that tirelessly pound away at the land, over and over again. Like giant metal dog monsters, they just cried to be animated GIF-like. What do they say to each other? You know what Freud said, sometimes an oil well is just an oil well… These are done in the same manner as my other photo animated GIFS- Taking a series on multiple shots on the DSLR, bringing into PhotoShop with the file menu script “import into stack”. spread out on time line, crop [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What could be more appropriate for this trip than Kerouac? I picked this book up… on the road? and started reading it on a beach in Virginia. I violated my rule of writing my review before reading any others; I usually want to make sure I am giving my own impression- but I lapsed and peeked at what the folks wrote at Goodreads. Like most things reviewed, the range is from “THIS SUCKS” to “This is teh awesome”. This is probably the worst book I have ever finished, and I’m forever indebted to the deeply personality-disordered college professor who assigned it, because if it hadn’t been for that class I never would’ve gotten through, and I gotta tell you, this is the book I love to hate. I deeply cherish but don’t know that I fully agree with Truman Capote’s [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Ѕolo I’m far from the first (or last) person to note this, but twitter is patrolled by some interesting automated bots. The obvious ones are cute- I noticed this a few months back, when I tweeted some snarky reference to Lebowski, that the @BotLobowksi would respond with some mention to something like tying the room together. It’s cute, right? I had another one today- I saw Dean Shareski tweet something about a failed food preparation, and it reminded me a bit of Office Space, so I tweeted something about he should not forgot to fill out his TPS Reports. Ha ha, me just being a smart-ass (and Dean is still not replying much to my taunting tweets; I am losing my touch). But in a matter of minutes, I get a relevant response from @Initech_Bill: Again, cute- but look [...]

I can hardly resist the ds106 call to Remix and Album Cover: Find an iconic album cover and remix it to represent a something different. It can be a play on the title, the image, the aesthetic, genre, etc. See the visual example featuring Snoop Dog and Dr Dre as Chronic Youth (a play on Sonic Youth’s album cover Goo). There is a whole google search results page of sources of album art, e.g. http://albumart.org/. This one was done in about 20 minutes, harkening back to the 1970s Rock Era of ds106: It’s hard to find a die with a 0 on the side! Based on Bad Company’s Straight Shooter, songs on ds106 Company’s GIF Animator features: “Good Giffin’ Gone Bad” – 3:35 “Feel Like Makin’ Mashups” – 5:12 “Dailyshoot No More” – 3:59 “Scottlo Star” – 6:16 “Deal With the Bava” – 5:01 “Wild Fire Haiku” – 4:32 “Macguffa” [...]

Like most interesting sites, I stumbled across CreativeLIVE from reading something in an RSS feed that linked to the site– so its not what you follow on line, what is key is what the people you follow, follow. Get it? They run free (in person is free) classes creative tools and techniques, with what I find is an interesting financial model. And these are not cheesy one offs of someone standing in front of web cam in their dining room- these look like well delivered courses. Did I say you can tap into this for free? creativeLIVE is about providing the best free, live creative education on the web. From our studio in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, we offer free online workshops in photography, video, web and graphic design, app development and a wide array of other creative topics. All of our live creative workshops are available to watch [...]

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by gagilas I am aiming to get some flack for this, but I do not really get gushing over mind maps. (ducking). Wait a minute– I all for the power of sketching out ideas, of brainstorming on visually on paper, of thinking visually– see I do it for planning projects, web sites: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But to me, that is visual thinking, not mind maps, the stuff people crank out of software and web tools, the neat diagrams with text labeled boxes and ovals and lines. I guess what I bristle at is the assumption that they are always useful– for everyone. I see them in people’s blog posts, especially mind maps of talks, and I glaze. It is ideal activity for the mindmap maker- but looking at the map on its own, I [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 140 Miles Driven: 12,675 Most Recent 1000 mile marker: 12,000 miles, south of Atlanta, GA on October 30 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 24 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 5 Status of #occupycanada: currently occupying! Money spent on gas: $3512 Cheapest gas price: $3.08/gallon (Fountain Inn, SC). Highest gas price: $5.64/gallon (CA$1.39/liter) (Wawa, ON). Scariest things in trip: clowns. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Photos posted: 2792 (that is an average of 19.9 per day) Worst Drivers in the Universe: South Florida where the rules are go as slow as you want in all lanes. Most scenic foliage drive: Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina. Second was highway 58 in southwest Virginia Best alternative to Interstate- US 19, the Georgia-Florida Parkway. Number of books read: 13 (Most recent: Jack Kerouac [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Basajaun I flinch a bit at such generalization, but “based on research” means something- in Wired, Clive Thompson speculates “Why Kids Can’t Search”: We’re often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list. But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also [...]