Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
This could not be a more cool surprise to see in my twitters this morning, on all days, one of uncertainty. https://twitter.com/BryanMMathers/status/796013915251429376 This I am certain of, though, I am so fortunate to have someone like Bryan Mathers in my network, yet another internet friend I have yet to meet. I recall seeing Bryan's first, I think, in Catherine Cronin's 2014 ALT-C keynote Navigating the Marvelous (do yourself a favor and get distracted by her brilliant talk). [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by bryanmmathers (wapisasa) under a Creative Commons ( BY-ND ) license[/caption] This was not just visual notetaking; Bryan synthesized Catherine's message with a quote from a Joi Ito slide she used in the talk. I saw Bryan's work show up in the posts and presentations by Doug Belshaw and Reclaim Hosting's record store motif. Sometime last spring after blogging (again) about attribution and the Creative Commons Certification project I was just starting on, I got an email invite from Bryan for just an open conversation. He's spun out several images from that conversation, like: [caption id="attachment_63003" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Image by @bryanmmathers licensed CC BY-NC-ND[/caption] [caption id="attachment_63004" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Image by @bryanmmathers licensed CC BY-NC-ND[/caption] [caption id="attachment_63005" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Image by @bryanmmathers licensed CC BY-NC-ND[/caption] But his sketch today is now my favorite ;-) And what is eerie, is that I am fairly sure he has not seen what is on my arm: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] That image of my original CogDog Icon, Mickey, was made a permanent arm badge by an artist named Uncle Tim then in Kauai now in Carmel. It was a spontaneous idea for me rounding the half century mark. Gears, dogs, sketches, friends never met... it's all full circle. And it keeps happening. By the way, this was triggered by my donation to Bryan's Visual Stickery Indiegogo campaign -- and there are only three days left to support his art, and get yourself the best laptop stickers and BADGES-- FREAKIN' REAL STICK ON YOUR CLOTHES BADGES! Update: Bryan sent me a colored version, oh pretty! I am tempted to try it as a twitter avatar, butI'm rather find of Felix... It's now in my email footer and on my calling card site http://cog.dog Top / Featured Image: A sketch custom made for me by the utterly talented and generous Bryan Mathers. He did not specify, but I will add his usual Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license. Oh the wailing and despair that is bleating across the blogscape about MovableType's announcement of the fee$$$$$$$ for MT 3.0. I've not bothered too much as I prefer to wait until the dust settles, but I am reading of mad rushes to rampage, rapid switches to other platforms such as WordPress, Bloxsum, heck, maybe folks are running to Blogger. Yes, the pricing / features at the low end for us little folks looks dismal, contorted, and well, it is does not seem designed for ME. And nothing is chiseled in concrete. But just a minute-- It is not like any of our beautifully running installations of MT 2.6 and earlier will suddenly blink out or self-destruct in 5 minutes, Mr. Phelps. This insane rush to upgrade or jump seems awfully.... hasty. Sure down the road, there are going to perhaps be compelling technical, feature reasons to upgrade or switch blog platforms, but there is nothing wrong with staying where you are at. MT 2.X still works, eh? It's not broken, eh? So my strategy is to wait, perhaps there will be a different strategy handed down, as a reaction to the public tar and feathering that bloggers are applying to SixApart. Maybe it will be time to try something else. Maybe, but I cannot find a compelling reason to do anything different now. Upgrade when there is a reason to, not just because something just came out. I'm a stickin' and publshin' with 2.6, and that is ok. I have some feverish work to do this week on an upcoming presentation on, of all things, podcasting. (A previous post titled Sick of Podcasting was titled as a joke- I am not "sick" or "tired" of the concept, it was my own inertia of having done the same presentation twice in a week, and actually it was fun- new disclaimer coming on my titles, "not to be read at face value"). My focus on this session is "Podcasting On the Cheap"- the free/low/no coast ways of at least getting your feet wet. I've got my ideas lined up, but could use some help from anyone out there on sharing the sites available for posting the media files one can lump in a podcast feed. This is one of the missing or less clear links- where to hang the media files. I've always had my own servers available for stashing my media, but that is not the common option. The known suspects are OurMedia and perhaps YouTube. Others that pop up form some googling- anyone use these? I am looking for more than file storage places; they must have a publicly addressable URL so pop into an RSS feed. They cannot be ones where the media expires nor ones with low storage caps (like ones that offer 5 Mb) nor ones that offer "3 months free" * Bolt http://www.bolt.com/ * esnips http://www.esnips.com/ So where can you reliably hang some media for free? As a special request, how about using Odeo to tell me your thoughts: Send Me an Odeo Message Add an “X” to that photo… ACMI is a major museum on the center of it all at Federation Square, in Melbourne. It’s not a “film” museum, note that it’s name is the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. That’s smart. How I ended up there for an afternoon last week is a story in itself. The organizers of my visit asked if there were any local institutions or organizations I wanted to include visits to among the ones they scheduled for me. I was stumped for a while, but then I remember noticing that among people I follow in Instagram is Seb Chan. I met Seb through work a while ago at NMC and visited his team once at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Something clicked that I saw reference in his photos that he was now in Melbourne, and yes, as Chief Experience Officer for ACMI. So a few direct messages in Instagram, then email, then I was meeting him and many more people in person. Sheep This Way flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I should add that on the Sunday before we met, Seb had arranged tickets for me to see the Wallace & Gromit and Friends exhibit at ACMI. Just call that as a major highlight for the trip. Just their web site alone speaks loudly to the design ethos at ACMI – it’s “fresh and new”- to me aimed at mobile first but also plays well in the desktop, and just more welcoming than your typical vertical scroll site. It’s natural that Seb would be here in that role. After the museum visit, reading some of the reports shared with me, and the educational programs, I was a bit wondering what the heck I could tell them. Then I learned they are prepping for a complete gutting and renovation of the museum space, that it’s floor layout tended to have people think of them as different entities. Woah. It reminded me of what I recall mutual friend Peter Samis describing when SFMOMA did a major expansion which meant the museum was closed for 3 years, how they used the city itself as a place for art to be while the building was not available. It’s easy to see how the City of Melbourne is ripe for that. Anyhow, this is the long intro for the visit. Sophie Lieberman, Head of Public Programs and Education ACMI met me at the museum, for as it turned out, the place we met and where everyone works a bit of a walk away from Federation Square, across the Princes Bridge and behind the Arts Centre (big spire), in an exciting co-working facility, ACMI-X. I do wish I had looked around more, and sadly, I managed to take zero photos during my visit. Maybe that’s a sign of being nervous. And there was a conference room of people present, education staff, outreach staff, media and audio people, exhibit people, and the CEO of ACMI-X, Katrina Sedgwick. As it turns out many of them are new to ACMI, so there’s an energy of change happened. There was no presentation or screens shared, it was just a free flowing conversation. They actually asked me for my story of entrance into the ed-tech world (they got the condensed version). I spoke of my experience arc into the world of digital storytelling from someone who started in the field as a jump from being a graduate student in Geology. I talked some about my space of interest in open sharing, and open education, and of course, as much as one can describe it not as a cult, the cult of DS106. There was conversation about their attempts to design their public spaces, and their work with students, teachers, and schools. My memory is really faulty here, but it was a lively conversation for almost 2 hours. Cards were exchanged, I was able to later make a connection to someone from my previous day’s visit to The Song Room, and then I was walking back to my apartment. I may have felt like this walking into ACMI-X: 2017/365/317 Ga Ga on Swanston Street flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) but like all my visits here, everyone made me feel welcome and seemed interested in what I had to say. For me, it was a grand day in the ACMI garden! Thanks everyone. Gromit in the Garden flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Featured Image: Morning at ACMI flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I had fun this afternoon helping in a wiki workshop at South Mountain Community College. "Dr Coop" is Alisa Cooper, a gem of an English teacher who pretty much tries and finds almost every new technology- in a thoughtful and effective manner. She got turned onto PBWiki last year and has been using it extensively with her first year composition students- but she dabbles also in 2 other hosted wiki places, several blogs, Writely, YouTube, and like 10 more I am forgetting. Today she led a "What Can You Do With a Wiki?" Workshop: which, of course, was a workshop on wikkis, that used a wiki for the workshop. Get it? She does: http://drcoop.pbwiki.com/ it's been a few weeks since I'd been in PBWiki, and they keep adding cool new features. She paid the fee for the upgrade version, which gives you discussion areas on all pages, the ability to lock pages, and access to usage statistics. And along the way, I picked up a bag of Web X.0 tools I had never seen or used- * StickiPad a hosted wiki that offers a spreadsheet like functionality * Meebo a browser tool that allows you to run chats in AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, all in one interface. Slick. Nothing to do with wikis, but slick. * SeedWiki which I had heard of but never bothered to look- it has a full featured WYSIWIG editor which frees people from needing the bizarre wikis formatting codes which are never the same from wiki to wiki And check out the ways Dr. Coop has used Wikis: * English 101 Book Selection * ENG101: Freshman Composition Wiki -- used for classroom content presentation, student peer review, and posting of student writing; see the "Unit Projects" as well as the ones from fall 2005 * Deer Valley HS Track Team Wiki - ideally the coaches would post info about the events they support-- "This is the team wiki for a local high school. The other coaches haven't caught on to it yet, but the student athletes love it." (The Dr is also an athlete and coach- she even finds time to run marathons!) She is one of these faculty us IT folks dream to work with, and I will miss her after I am gone April 7-- keep on pushing all the envelopes, Dr. Coop! cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You can tweet but you cannot hide. If you mention "Clippy" in a tweet, that *#&$ing paper clip will hear you and reply, in that "I'm trying to be helpful but am annoying as biting ants in your shorts" way. Try it. Tweet something snarky about Clippy. Insult his bulging eyeball. Vow to Kill Clippy. And for the sake of humanity, do not follow http://twitter.com/">MSClippy Next thing you know, Bob will be tweeting too. Like a classic MOOC dropout artist, I've fallen so far off of my #western106 horse I can't even see the dust any more. I had grand hopes of running a DS106 in a genre of Western films/stories. I was doing trailers back in October for a planned online class to teaching at Kansas State University, flipped the theme on my 106tricks site, and heck, even bought a poncho. Some people did push and struggle with the genre, which seemed interesting as past DS106 has dealt with noir fiction and a TV show about drugs, violence and gangs. I never got where studying a genre says it has to be one you abide by. The class did not make, so I was cut loose. And then I thought I would still drive an open course version, ran a few intro videos, units, radio shows... and let it go. Excuses ensue. The magic sauce of DS106 often us having a core group of one, two, maybe more courses going of registered students with this dynamic cloud of open participants coming and going. The classes are often at University of Mary Washington, but as many have come from elsewhere, and for different kinds of courses. This is more than two layers; I've always felt the drive of students motivated by class mixed un with open participants who find their own motivation is a richer ecosystem then when you have just the self-interest driven participants. And it's a great thing that Paul Bond has kept the #western106 light burning in his current UMW course. Yet I had pushed out a "course-less" / "headless" ds106 in 2013 and rolled that into a still available open DS106 that people seem to pick up every now and then. https://twitter.com/xtina_you/status/718220155264901120 Look at the effort of Terry Greene - who is still on fire doing DS106 / Western 106 stuff on his on. I was talking to someone who's been around the DS106 corral and it was this person's contention that DS106 had "faded" suggesting in so many words it was past the top of a curve, and maybe it was missing a "charismatic leader". Many people who got crazy bit with ds106 in 2011, 2012 are not much less or non-active. That's not a problem, that's a natural curve of evolution. In the past, if someone tweeted they were going to do a live ds106 radio broadcast, a solid group would assemble to listen and talk back via twitter. Now hardly anyone goes live on the radio. Yet, this is a normal cycle. This is not 2011. But I think there's more, because if something has risen and fallen some peak, that's implying it is a single, trackable entity. I've maintained that a key part of DS106 is that there is no single DS106. It's not a thing defined by a syllabus or a course (take in all of its part iterations). Nearly every other open course is defined by the course; DS106 is beyond that scope. It's not course-ish. And there is much that is not right there in the tweeted spotlight. Paul has his class going, there is another professional development flavored one happening now from CU Denver, and there is some other class from Chadron State College doing something alongside DS106. One is challenged to find the boundaries in the hashtag. While I have no data, I do get some notification or indication that many more make use of the Assignment Bank and/or the Daily Create. If your open course has logins, signups, well than you can collect metrics and make graphs and stuff, and know fairly well what kind of pulse it has. But if it's wide open, well, then you don't have quantifiable chart ready data. I've been reverberating on a video about metrics/measurement called Is Anything Worth Maximizing. It brought home this point that nearly all the stuff done based on metrics / analytics is gathering, charting, and acting on behavior actions in online spaces... because, well, that's easier to quantify. But it misses out on the meatier and more interesting reasons why people are there at all. Take it in. https://vimeo.com/155525207 And I don't know why a post that started lamenting the letting loose of a DS106 concept and ended up railing against metrics. It's late here, and I would have written something more coherent earlier if I had not tried to compose first on a WhyPad. And so like any MOOC whose wheels fell off the bus, I am reaching for some rationalization why I dropped it. And I don't have one. I had a blast and a half doing whacky videos, and I'll be hanged if there's not something I got out of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHIUSNXl08k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8JkZPk9GDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZQRfHj29fw And people are musing another genre for ds106 https://twitter.com/scottlo/status/719193274397892608 Riffing happens https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/719228236375273472 https://twitter.com/noiseprofessor/status/719237836809981953 https://twitter.com/DrGarcia/status/719294124436926464 https://twitter.com/phb256/status/719338726170718208 And as it does, as it has always done, DS106 morphs / mutates / zygotes itself... because it is not one single thing. And it is not capable of being put into a neat and tidy MOOC / open course box. Top / Featured Image: A hat that spent 2 years out on the back deck; my photo, my hat; flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/26337429906 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I'm a fan of Wired, sifting through the slick ads for the sometimes good writing... and I lifted the Wired. Tired. Expired. theme for a recent presentation. But however "cool" a magazine may pass itself off for, underneath it is a business and there are bean counters and bottom liners working to milk my money. I loathe the "urgent" reminders that start 5 months before my subscription expired and I deliberately ignore them until a month before. What do I get out of giving interest free loans (okay, I provide this service to the US Government). But this latest "personalized" note from "Jeffrey Stone, Office of the Publisher" makes me wonder if they are working under the P.T. Barnum School of Business: (more…) I've dialed back the level energy I spent in January and February writing about catfishing. It consumes me with negativeness, and frankly-- nothing is really going to ever change at a systemic scale. Do you really think Facebook is unaware of this problem? Given the number of reports that happen, the presence of catfishing support groups un Facebook- how can they possibly not know? And given that they know, what does it mean that they avoid responsibility? They are thus complicit. Check out this telling video where Alec Couros demonstrates a face matching tool available on a Russian dating site that is surely within the realm of Facebook's technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnu1IhbtRwc And ask yourself- why is Facebook not providing its users a tools to face match potential "friends"? If Facebook eats the web, I sure hope the choke on some fish bones. So do not expect Facebook to do anything except pile up advertising profit. One catfishing victim I've heard from off and on for a few months, an artist, emailed recently and said that after moving trough her stages of WTF/shame/rage, she decided to work on a piece of art related to her feelings. That may be the most sound course of action I have heard from a victim. Another victim contacted me today, and sent some photos of some Euro-dude's dating profile site with all my photos, 4 out of six in the flickr set I keep stocked with photos known to be used by catfishers. She asked for resources. I was about to send her my Catfishing Info page, but thought about one of her comments. Once she found out she was considering just letting the scammer keep going at it: I'm gonna play on for a little while until I figure out a way how to nail the bastard (or the group) Just for grins, I pointed out some problems with one of the photos of supposedly this oil drill operator at work: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640"] flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Just a little zooming in on the "oil drill platform" one sees the equipment is made by "Mauer Manufacturing" - an Iowa company that makes agricultural equipment, not oil drilling machinery. You can see reflected in the front window of the supposed oil rig, not ocean or rock, but a field of grain. And that big tub shooting in the back? I am not sure what it's called, but the machine is actually a combine owned by a farmer friend I visited in Ontario. That's where the grain gets shot into the big bin in back. It takes very little to find problems in the photos, even before victims do a reverse image search and find that the face they knew as "James" or "Malle" belongs to some guy named Alan. This whole thing reminded me of the TED Talk James Vietch did when he decided to do the atypical reaction to spam email- he replied to see how far the scammer would go: And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? And that’s what I’ve been doing for three years on your behalf. Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. It’s really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. I don’t think what I’m doing is mean. There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. All I’m doing is wasting their time. And I think any time they’re spending with me is time they’re not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right? It's well worth a watch: https://youtu.be/_QdPW8JrYzQ But his message again got me thinking-- "All I’m doing is wasting their time. And I think any time they’re spending with me is time they’re not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right?" Catfishing victims have almost no recourse. Facebook does absolutely nothing; and I've shown more than once how flawed their so-called reporting system really is. There is almost no legal recourse because the scammers are overseas, virtually untraceable, and I've been told because victims willingly give up money, the burden of proof of a crime is proving psychological damage. And frankly, I think I lot of people in general look down on victims as almost being responsible for being fooled. But here is something victim can do. I am not sure how many would really want to do this, but imagine if A LOT of them did? Victims can waste the scammers time. They can continue acting like the romance is alive. Like a catfosh on a line, rather than cutting the line, let that fish swim and swim and swim and tire itself out. "the more time [a scammer] is spending with me is time they're spending scamming [others]" And there would be, I expect, a bit of satisfaction in flipping the con, because now a victim is armed with the truth of the scammers deceit, but the scammer would not know it. Their con is a long game, they spend weeks or more courting victims. If you can make them spend more wasted time chasing an knowledgeable victim who won't ever send them money- it's that much time they are not entangling women who are not in the know. So thus I added this bit to by Catfishing Info Page: If You Really Want Revenge– Waste Their Time! Let Them Think They are Still Fooling You… While I doubt many victims would want to do this, if you really want to get back at them– you might consider how you can waste their time and effort. What I mean is continue to, like the fish, play them out, continue to act like you are in love, and do whatever you can to make them expend effort to fool you. That's right, take action, and scam the scammers. Imagine if this happened on a massive scale. Imagine an organized effort, as organized as the scammer's operation. Imagine all those catfish just swimming around, going nowhere, and becoming worn out, starved from exhaustion. [caption id="attachment_56162" align="aligncenter" width="630"] From chathamdailynews.ca[/caption] It seems beautiful. Update: See also Scambaiting https://www.419eater.com/ Top / Featured Image: I had hard time with the search engines. I was not even sure of the fishing term when you avoid reeling in a fish and let it swim and tire out. I finally figured it was "palying out the line" but when you combine "play" and "fish" you get a lot of cute graphics of video games or drawings representing the game "Go Fish". The image I found is from a Dutch fishing blog post-- it carries no license or credit (as it seems 98% of the web), so while it's not strictly re-usable, I am giving more credit than they are. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Lee Jordan In about 24 hours I will be running a live show on ds106 radio featuring the radio shows my UMW students have been [joyfully] working on the last 3 weeks for their mid-term audio assignment. This will take place Monday night from 8-11:30pm EST. Please tune in and give them an audience, tweet back comments and questions with a #ds106 hash tag. To tune in use the web player at http://ds106rad.io/listen or dip directly into the stream. The shows have been recorded ahead of time, but this is the premiere we will play live, and members of the teams will be available to talk about their show and answer questions. You can catch the lineup at http://ds106.us/2013/03/17/spring-is-for-radio-shows/... if all the knobs and buttons work for me (doing this from 12 hours in the future from Hong Kong). Hope to see you there! Nossa ferramenta de RSS est¬… jogando agora em Brasil Conversor RSS para JS [demo]. I cannot really write Portuguese without the help of the fish, but this is saying that our RSS tool is playing now in Brazil. More scanning of the referring site sin our web server log showed that the RSS2JS demo has been translated into a Spanish version which is very cool, hosted on what looks like an entire Portuguese language site about RSS. Updates While I am at it, Spanish language: Recursos sobre RSS (Resources on RSS) with some RSS specific articiles written in Spanish. In exploring some new tools for rich media publishing, I took a return visit to http://jux.com a site for publishing magazine style media sites, that fill the screen. In many ways, it could be a blog-ish like thing, or a portfolio, or a tumblr that is not just another tunblr. Maybe I don't know what it is, that's why I play with it. Each time you reload the front page, the items shuffle around a bit. And it also changes the display to fit a mobile browser You have 6 different kinds of content, slideshows, single photos, video, articles (like a blog post), countdown (not sure yet what that is), and blockquote. Images can be uploaded or yanked from photo sharing services; videos can come directly from youtube or video. There are some basic layout editing tools for fonts, size, colors (the fonts seem not all work across browsers)- not super sophisticated, but to me, geared towards doing simpler layouts. So for my experiment, I am creating another site for the StoryBox, and playing with releasing some media that is from inside the box (single photo and a slideshow) and other things like the mashup I blogged about recently. Jux also offers embed tools (though it seems to curiously be available only to the author when logged in, WTF?), like this summary of the PirateBox (which sadly is cutting off the bottom of the text, the font sizing from jux appears to be inconsistent). i'm going to monkey a little more with this as a publishing tool, it has a very "un-web page-ish" feel that appeals to me. Twas not my plan to make a mocked up book cover, even before breakfast. But so it goes, when the urge worms its way into my cranium. I cannot let go til I try it out. I woke up to back scroll twitter, finding the eminently sarcastic, funny, insightful, and a large number of standard deviations off the norm Pat Lockley ranting a bit on the difficulty of having to log in to a web site to leave a comment on a post, knowing he'd get no conversation. https://twitter.com/patlockley/status/636485892014784512 https://twitter.com/patlockley/status/636561173853401088 Oh uh, neurons activated. Pat tweeting alone... leads me to think of Robert Putnam's (excellent) book, Bowling Alone. And so, the Photoshop was opened to produce this: In my own bit of self amusement, I still maintain a folder on my computer for ds106 stuff like this... and I have not actively participated nor taught it for almost 2 years. My method for this, of course relies, on Photoshop layers. You cannot do this in MS Paint or some point and click app. In the last year I have made much more use of layer masks to combine elements, and the Edit -> Paste Special -> Paste Into or Edit -> Paste Special -> Paste Behind. The big thing is that it makes your layers non-destructive- you can always go to the mask layer and paint/fill in black or white to show or hide elements. Here's a snapshot of my layers and where they ended up (sorry for all the crossing arrows). [caption id="attachment_46694" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Photoshop layers[/caption] Comments, from the bottom up: Layer 1: I always make a duplicate of the source layer as a reference, one is hidden. On the copy layer I use the clone tool to wipe out elements by painting in from other parts of the image. I also use it to define selection areas (like the man figure) for things I want to mask. "Cryptic...." Text Layer Try to copy the quote from the original, Times New Roman the lazy choice. I do not bother with getting fonts exact, close enough is good. Here is what I do when trying to redo text- I put it first in as a crazy color, like hot pink (Hi @amyburvall), and play with fonts, size, kerning to match the original text. Then I write my "new and improved" text. Then hide the text layer. Go to the background layer and with clone brush or fill (in this case the blue from the background of the book) to hide the original. Then show my layer, and change the text color (the eye drop tool on the text color palette is the big cheese or the dogs bollocks). Layer 3 is Pat's avatar, lifted from hist twitter profile. Cat with a hat. Rather than try to get a clean selection, I create a mask based loosely on the head in the original, and work the edges of the mask with a black and white paint brush, to make the edges clean. To match the graphic style of the original, I apply the Cutout Filter (lets you tweak it more than Posterize), which makes the photo look more graphic. Layer 2 I overlaid a screenshot of my Tweetdeck to replace the bowling alley in the original. I thought this was pretty darned clever as a metaphor. The mask was made by starting with a selection of the entire rectangle in the middle, then subtracting out a selection (hold the option key then start selecting using magnetic lasso to subtract). Again the beauty of layer masks are the need not be precise, you can fine tine by painting in the mask layer. Bees Knees. "@patlockley" text layer There goes Robert B. Putnam. In this case, an exact font match is not needed, just something chunk that is serif. I chose the oddly named Haettenschweiler, then just filled the Layer 1 with black to kick out Putnam. Not Metaphorically. "TWEETING" text layer to replace the BOWLING one in the original. The font is Helvetica Neue Condensed- not an exactly match, but again, horseshoe/hand grenade rules apply. I try to get the baseline font size close, fiddle with the tracking (inter-text spacing, +75 here). Here is my secret trick, use the Scale tool on text to stretch it to fit. I got a close enough BOWLING match, filled the background with blue, changed it to TWEETING. To wide. Just squeeze it a bit more. Add a bit of Layer -> Layer Style -> Stroke to get the red boundary and for being extra attentive, a tad bit of Layer -> Layer Style -> Outer Glow to match. I could have done the ALONE over too, but left it there. It kind of signifies the original. "The Collapse" text layer Hah in doing this post I see I forgot to turn this layer on. BINGO! Fixed. It is a mimic of the original text that appears on the book cover over the bowling alley lane, got it to match with the Helvetica Neue Condensed font, rotated and skewed a bit to match. White works better as a text color. Layer 4 - replace the bowling ball with a smart phone. Did a google image search on "mobile phone back png" to find one to use- PNG images always are better for layering. I needed to remove the bowling ball in the Layer 1 image, use the clone brush to paint out with bits of the dudes shirt. Then I did a selection around both of his hands (SHIFT- select to combine separate areas), then used Edit -> Paste Special -> Paste Behind to create a Layer mask that put the phone behind his hands. A bit of rotation and resized... perfect. If you want to poke around, you can download and open my source file in Photoshop. Get yer game into Layer Masks! It's better than sliced bread! More powerful than a steaming pile of clichés! I like this one. I think Pat does too (not the reason for doing this-- WHAT THE HECK IS THE REASON FOR THIS MADNESS?) And why would I spend another hour+ blogging about it? Yes, some is to share the method a la how we teach ds106, but I see so much these days of the predominance of Mike Caulfied's Stream Flow. We just toss little bits of whatever into the river of twitter, or tumblr. There's nothing wrong with that as part of a greater mix of being online, but I see people who represent their public elf as just a stream of retumbled stuff made by other people https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/636190248796471297 And I see this and wonder- where is the context? Why did you share that thing? And what can you deduce from it if you find it 3 years later? For most people it means nothing. It's All About the Now, the Stream. In writing this up, it's way more for me to mark my own evolution in thought and digital skills, and where the ideas for stuff comes from (one tweet). If all you have is a stream of digital jetsam and flotsam what do you make of it as a larger whole. And even in writing this up, I found something I forgot to add. I pass no judgment (well maybe a little) on people who fill their time online with liking, reblogging, retweeting. But to me, that adds up to not much. So I stay here, doing the blog thing even though Blogs Are Dead and The Web Is Lost. You go ahead and stream like everyone else. See ya in the future. Top / Featured Image credits: My own whacked out remix of the cover of Putnam's book. It's as clear as sludge (well not to me) whether this is infringement or artistic parody. If you think there are hard and fast rules in this space, well #BeachFrontPropertyAvailableInArizona I got this message late Friday afternoon: I am a college student at Syracuse University. I am writing an article about weblogs. I understand you do a bit of "blogging" yourself. I would love to ask you a few questions about weblogging. Unfortunately, my deadline is tonight by midnight. I'd appreciate your help and eagerly await your response.. what are the benefits of weblogging? i've talked to a handful of colleges that are using current students to write weblogs. Admissions are using the weblogs to attract prospective students. do you think this will become a trend? have you heard anything about this? what do you think are the cons of blogging? I guess I am not the only person who works up to the deadlines. The best I could do is dash off some quick thoughts likely too late for Courtney's deadline (is there a lesson there, Court?) especially for such broad open questions. How would you reply? My response follow.... (more…) There's more to the Fediverse than trying to rejig your foregone twitter experience into Mastodon, indeed it is a party of distributed platforms. Given my love of photos, I've been casually exploring Pixelfed, the platform for photo sharing. Not that I will ever tear away from my firm flickr love, but I was curious to see the connections and possibilities. While my main Fediverse channel is Mastodon, tooting along there as @cogdog@social.fossdle.org or via the web address https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog (a key fediverse skill is ping-ponging from @handle to URL and back). I'd heard of Pixelfed while back, but was not seeing much to try there, until I read somewhere (in Mastodon), that one could create a Pixelfed account and login using a Mastodon account. That seemed easy to try, so I started at the main Pixelfed instance https://pixelfed.social though like Mastodon, you have different instances to plant your photos in. Indeed I created an account on the main ship, and tossed a few pictures in. So I am on board as https://pixelfed.social/@cogdog. https://pixelfed.social/@cogdog A single post is a photo, with a caption, comments, like activity, and a handy overlay of a Creative Commons license (if selected to use). Nothing exotic, but also clean (and hover shows support for alt-text). One can also make collections of your own photos (example) and there is also a new portfolio feature to highlight your best stuff. https://pixelfed.social/p/cogdog/623740398602822539 You can make a "post "with a single photo or up to 10 together (instagram-like), and stories that vanish (ditto). It seems to aim to be more IG like than flickr. Like Mastodon, you can follow accounts on different instances, follow a local timeline of photos, or a global one. There's nice options to choose a default license, require alt-text, and more. So that's all fine and easy. Where it gets interesting, is seeing the interfediversisness in action. In Mastodon, a Pixelfed account can be followed, as I have done by searching there for @cogdog@pixelfed.social So I will see all my photos posted to my new pixelfed account in Mastodon, see how the URLs get routed as https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog@pixelfed.social/111298521972514097 And any replies made in Mastodon, e.g. https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog/111298529553831156 show up in the pixelfed post for this photo. Everything is intertwingly, connected. And it works the other way too- in Pixelfed, I can search for and follow a Mastodon account, like @judell@social.coop, where I can see a representation of just Mastodon posts where Jon has uploaded an image Perhaps this just makes your brain spin and so something like Googling recursion but I found it rather beautifully connected. Embedding Pixelfed Posts in WordPress Last year I added to this Wordpress site some custom code to enable the auto embedding of Mastodon posts just by pasting a url on a blank line. I wanted to see if I can do this for Pixelfed URLs, so let's see if this works for the public share link for a photo say if I enter into a blank block (or embed block) this URL https://pixelfed.social/p/cogdog/622914235908003754 Will it work? https://pixelfed.social/p/cogdog/622914235908003754 Yes, it does! I wanted to make this so the pattern to match a pixelfed site need not be specified by a instance, so the pattern of an embeddable pixelfed URL is https://blah.instance/p/username/idstring This is the basic code, but tweaking might be needed for CSS fit of the iframe: add_action( 'init', 'cdb_register_embeds' ); function cdb_register_embeds() { // handler for pixelfed wp_embed_register_handler( 'pixelfed', '#^https?:\/\/((?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]{0,61}[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]{0,61}[a-z0-9])\/p\/[a-zA-Z0-9\_]+\/(\d+)$#i', 'cdb_handler_pixelfed' ); } function cdb_handler_pixelfed( $matches, $attr, $url, $rawattr ) { // handler for pixelfed embeds $embed = '<iframe src="' . esc_attr($matches[0]) . '/embed?caption=false&likes=false&layout=compact" class="pixelfed__embed" style="max-width:100%; min-height:600px; border:0" width="600" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe><script async defer src="https:/' . esc_attr($matches[1]) . '/embed.js" async="async"></script>'; return $embed; } If it is not too flawed, I can add this to my plugin that has a few more extra autoembed goodies. This is just a first bit of play with pixelfed... I won't be making it a primary photo home (especially with storage limits). I also am not quite as thrilled that pixelfed strips out all photo EXIF data (done to protect location info I understand, but it could be a bit more flexible to make that a choice). I'd also like some ability to say automatically post to pixelfed, maybe through IFTTT, say flickr photos tagged with a marker tag --I made a few feeble attempts following the approach I use to post tagged pinboard posts to mastodon but could not get pixelfed to accept the incoming request. If anything, this has been fun to tinker with. Featured Image: Photo by @cogdog licensed under Public Domain (CC0) -- that attribution was a direct copy/paste from pixelfed, woot! I mentioned recently how one of our faculty members had created an electronic portfolio for his faculty evaluation process. Well something funny happened in a very short time span. John was contacted by the link in his eportfolio by two students on the east coast who had searched Google for "online anatomy physiology course" and his eportfolio was within the first 10 hits. One has already registered for his next course at Phoenix College, and the other one asked first if the course was accredited (and it is and very transferrable), and she and her husband are registering this week. John was rather astounded at how this happened. Does this give any indication as to how todays students make their choices? Also, this likely will not happen again. the ePortfolio is on a new server, and we had neglected to place a robots exclusion rule on the web site-- I really do not want Google crawling student and faculty eportfolios, so we are excluding all robots until someone thinks of a reason not to worry about this (and I am questioning about how well robots obey the rules). But John is quick-- he saw right away he could put an entry for his eportfolio in the Maricopa Learning eXchange, which does get indexed by Google, and he would still be able to make the connection. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ayeshamus Just sayin' I'm not talking about anyone in particular, so stop getting all defensive and looking for DMs you've ignored (no you should go look). But if you are such a freaking big shot that you cannot reply to someone's message, especially if you have had prior ones, well you are saying, "I am important... and you are not." We get a large amount of impersonal communications. I can tell the auto generated emails that are sent by machines. It fails to make me feel warm inside. Last week, i was working on a web site where I was failing to get a scheduled script to run (I know how to cron, but the host seemed to have de-activated useful tools like wget and curl). I had remembered using web services that do this, and the second one I tried (the first one said free, but that was 30 days before an upsell kicks in). I ended up using SetCronJob. It just worked. The next day I got an email: Hi Alan Levine, I just wanted to see how things are going with your SetCronJob account xxxxxxxx@xxxx.zzz. Is everything working to your satisfaction? Please feel free to let me know if you have any question :-) Best regards, Nguyen An Thuan. http://www.setcronjob.com/ Now this very much could be generated by a script. Maybe it was. But I replied. Yes it is, this is working perfectly on a webhost not set up for curl or wget to which I got a reply Hi Alan, I'm glad that it works for you :-) If you need any help, feel free to email me. Best regards, Nguyen An Thuan. This is called a human communication. I like it. It makes me feel nice. I feel heard, maybe te most understated and mis managed human communication pattern- being acknowledged. Do you know how huge that is? It may matter a hill of pinto beans, and maybe for a giant conglomerate responding individually to emails does not scale. I am not interested in that kind of scaling. I know at some level it might be impossible for people to respond to messages. They may have to have responder robots, or exective assistances who scan their messages, or turn their email off when they travel. Such a burden to have that much communication coming in. I hope to stay well below that level. I will respond to everything sent my way (except spam) (well sometimes spam cause its fun). I likely have trouble knowing when to stop responding. This is how I roll. What you do is your gig. I don't want to be that dude above in the photo. Guess what keyword I used to find him in compfight.com? big fish Last month I managed to clean off two partly read books, now I am moving on to a book I really have enjoyed, but has been sitting, partly read, on my coffee table, Jill Lepore's Secret History of Wonder Woman [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640"] flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I got the book last June, when I was getting ready for a project visit to VCU, where the book was featured as part of their Common Book program. Oops, apparently I already wrote this post!: I’m finding an interesting hyperlinking experience without any hyperlinks, from all things, a printed book. The idea of linking ideas is not limited by stuff you can wrap in an <a href="....">...</a> tag. I have yet to figure out what it is about Lepore's writing that sends my down interesting web holes of exploration. But you do not need someone else's constructed hyperlink to make your own connection. This time it was on page 192, in the "As Lovely as Aphrodite" chapter where Leopre describes how Henry George Peter came to be the comic artist to draw the first Wonder Woman comics. For some reason the last sentence here sparked a curiosity: By 1906 he was a staff artist for the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper that, in 1907, published the first daily comic strip. It's not even essential to the story, just that Peter worked for a newspaper that was a pioneer in the use of comics. What was that first daily comic strip, and was it really published in the Chronicle? I first ventured the wrong way, finding references to earlier comic strips in newspapers, but the key phrase is first daily comic strip. But Wikipedia provided the indicator, and thie first daily comic indeed was in the San Francisco Chronicle. And it was a comic featuring a dog- Mutt and Jeff or more properly "A Mutt" Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff is commonly regarded as the first daily comic strip, launched November 15, 1907 (under its initial title, A. Mutt) on the sports pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. The featured character had previously appeared in sports cartoons by Fisher but was unnamed. Fisher had approached his editor, John P. Young, about doing a regular strip as early as 1905 but was turned down. According to Fisher, Young told him, "It would take up too much room, and readers are used to reading down the page, and not horizontally. That alone is a rich piece of history. And usually in teaching students to research, we have them move from more general to specific, but I went backwards, to look more broadly at Wikipedia's article on the History of Comics which opens with: The history of comics has followed different paths in different parts of the world. It can be traced back to early precursors such as Trajan's Column, in Rome, Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Bayeux Tapestry. What the heck is the "Bayeux Tapestry"? It's a 230 foot long, almost 1000 years old, 50 panel graphic story of the Norman Conquest of England -- and it's done as a woven tapestry. That's wild! (oops, technically it is embroidery... that changes nothing of my interest). You want to see it all? It's only an image 39,866 × 360 pixels: Because it resembles a modern comic strip or movie storyboard, is widely recognised, and is so distinctive in its artistic style, the Bayeux Tapestry has frequently been used or reimagined in a variety of different popular culture contexts. It has been cited by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics as an example of early narrative art; and Bryan Talbot, a British comic book artist, has called it "the first known British comic strip". I could go on and on, and I am interested in studying the details more, maybe making it into a future graphic assignment, but now I am just scratching my head at the series of steps that got me to something I am interested. The thing is-- I was not looking for a 1000 year old graphic depiction of history; I more or less stumbled into it following my own trail of curiosity. And it makes me think with programmed, "adaptive" teaching, would this ever happen? What is the place of fostering a sense of curiosity and wonder in the work we do as educators? There was no existing link from a passage in a book about Wonder Woman to this piece of history. I made it myself. And I am not even sure what I do with this, though I might expect Mike Caulfield to make a case why I should be making notes in his Wikity thing-a-ma-bob. And I just might start. UPDATE Mar 16, 2016: I should have known that Amy Burvall had this covered in a history music video! https://twitter.com/amyburvall/status/710134215774318592 Top / Featured Image: My own mashup. I started with a public domain image from Wikimedia Commons of a section of the tapestry showing "Odo, half brother to William the Great, cheering his troops forward." I actually clone brushed Odo out in Photoshop, and superimposed a PNG image of Wonder Woman done in deviant art by user pablodiablo. Playing with the Hue and Saturation adjustment I was able to get the her colors a bit closer to the ones in the Tapestry. Pretty neat if you ask me. Did you ask me? It took some alarm clock action, but was worth it to get up early for a Skype call with Antonio Vantaggiato and his INF115 students at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. It seems like a while ago, but only a few weeks since I left Puerto Rico, having spent a month at the University and helping Antonio with ideas for his class. I'm eager to see the final video projects the students are working to finish this week, and we had some conversations today about identity online, choosing how much to put there, usefulness of blogging, establishing one's own presence (GET A DOMAIN!), managing the flow of information. One student has been consistently active on twitter; just 2 days ago Nydia tweeted me this video https://twitter.com/ndavilama89/status/729177693808267264 which does an effective job of an emotional appeal to make a case for not being so busy to stay in touch with your family... though I felt the old man's strategy to get attention was manipulative. What say you? In response to a request from Nydia, I had told the students that I keep a running list of "cool" technologies I see by tagging them "cooltech" in pinboard (Antonio and I had hopes of introducing them to social bookmarking). I had been meaning to add this to my site, and then went down a small rabbit hole of trying to hack the Pinboard Wordpress plugin to have a shortcode (I just need to test). But hey, why not do the classic route, and use the Feed2JS tool I wrote back in 2002-- it still works. So Nydia, see my new Cool Tech page, or you can get an RSS feed from my pinboard link https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/t:cooltech. Cool? Go there! Do you know what is really cool? All the blogging those IN115 students have been doing- check it out http://inf115.com/ Top / Featured Image: What place is cooler than Cool California? I took the classic sign on a pass through there in 2012. And do you know what is cool? My cool photo of the Cool California town sign (flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6706527857 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license) is used in the Wikipedia entry for the town. Cool! There are a few threads to this story. I had seen an odd thing on one of our new XHTML designed web sites-- this one uses an HTML <ul> list and CSS for rollover effects and graphic-looking buttons for the navigation. In Internet Explorer 6 (and then reports came in for IE5 users) the text to the right of the 4 first navigation links was hidden, or the text would disappear of you moused over one of the navigation links. The text would show up if you scrolled down and came back. I Googled a bit on "IE CSS bug" scoured some CSS listservs and came up with some things that sounded related but were different situations. I then added "+disappear" to my Google search query and came up with 2 links that were a bit closer to my situation... but one of these sites had a link to an awesome CSS site called "Position Is Everything" and from there got quickly to the page describing the Peek-a-boo IE6 bug. Holly 'n John offered a few ideas, but it seemed to clue in to IE issues with breaking content that had been floated. Bingo! It was suggestion under the "Update!" label that was the fix-- adding a line-height specification to the div that held the content-- it is certainly counter-intuitive, but it worked like a charm. One lesson here is that you need to avoid an over-reliance on Google as the be-all to finding information. It is not. It distorts some relevancy by bubbling popular links up. I have had more than a handful of examples where sites I explored off the top Google returns had related links that had exactly what I needed, but were not sites that showed up on the search results. Almost as a matter of practice, when I am one click off a Google search, I scan for links that offer promise. The other issue is almost the sheer lunacy one faces in CSS web design and the varying bugs, workarounds, and frankly voodoo effects between Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0-- all of them have behaviors completely out of synch with the w3 standards. And the problem with Microsoft (well at least one problem) is that it only allows one version of their browser to exist at a time-- any updates wipe out your older version. But there is nothing wrong with other PC web browsers (NetScape, Mozilla...) to have multiple instances of different versioned software... But there is an answer. Recently while digging around, I stumbled (I relish serendipitous clicks) on Ryan Parman's post on how to install multiple versions of IE. It can be done a a manual process as described elsewhere, but Ryan has put together a collection of zipped archived of the needed files for versions of IE from 3,4,5,5.5,6, just download and unzip. In about 15 minutes, I had dl-ed IE5 and IE5.5 to my office PC and had them running side by side with IE6. Watch out as in any of these the "About Explorer" link in the help menu reports only the version of the current installation. And if you have 2 or three different versions running, it can be hard to tell them apart. But heck, this works! I can now test web sites on the 3 main PC browser platforms, and do this all from one PC. flickr foto Obligatory WIki Photoavailable on my flickr Having landed at the Honolulu airport, I paid the computer technogeek's homage to Ward Cunningham by taking the obligatory photo of the "Wiki Wiki" bus. Wow, is Hawaii heavenly on what? And I get the honor of shuttling between airport terminals on the legendary Wiki Wiki busses, crammed full of fellow touristimos, driven by a feisty woman who barked out orders into the microphone. I rode the wiki! Woo hoo! In all the frenzied exodus from the deck of the Musk Boat, mass acts of tweet deletion, self announcements in the fediverse, I wonder about how far we've come from Mike Caulfield's classic (to me) pondering of the Garden and the Stream. Pretty much the last few years the garden has been left dusty for mainly old web hankerers and the scales have more than tipped to the stream. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1099089250564354048 Sure those toots 'n tweets may pile up likes and views, some immediate gratification, but they have low potential for ever doing more than flowing downstream. Ah, but a blogged post, on a site you own or control, with it's permalink, acts as a magical potentiometer for the unexpected. When it's antennae sizzle, you may never know. But there is nothing more magical, more fulfilling than something you cast out into the pile of stuff on the web, many years later comes to life, like an unexpected radio call out to you. While I have many times turned my own revelry with web-serendipity into a collection of Amazing Stories. While not always Unknown Flower caliber, the small ones can feel big. That was a five paragraph introduction! It was more than eight years ago that my curiosity of an antique hand fruit juicer led me looking up old patents and inventors and the first product that founded a large appliance corporation. This is usual web rabbit holing stuff. https://cogdogblog.com/2014/06/a-juicy-associative-trail/ In September 2022, eight years after this post was published, Shane somehow finds it, and asks a question Was lead used to make these? I have one and I’m slightly concerned this might be the case.https://cogdogblog.com/2014/06/a-juicy-associative-trail/comment-page-1/#comment-1207504 I never even considered this, and I have drank juice from this machine. But I do my own searching, and this post Vintage stand hand citrus juicer: 2,254 ppm Lead on the bare metal food contact surface. 90 ppm is unsafe for children suggests, while not exactly the same model, suggests it's likely made from lead metal (this is a blog by Tamara Rubin, who identifies as the Lead Safe Mama). The patent I had found from Joseph Majewski, Jr had no mention of the materials. There's no magic story there. I replied with what I found. But I thought about a recent tweet that went viral (that might be a quaint phrase soon) https://twitter.com/MLE_Online/status/1584794484134805504 I don't know how this assertion can be "true" (if there is such a thing) when of all the places on the internet, Shane found my post about the Juice-O-Mat and I found Tamara's blog about antiques with lead analysis. Maybe it's because I hate malls in general... But to me this drives home the truth (yes, now I will be absolute) that planting posts in your garden creates much more powerful potential for web serendipity than just dumping tweets down the stream (says a person who never went viral). It lead to and from this. Updates Just after publishing, another comment came in on a 2017 post about my brother's old rocking chair that seems to have turned my blog into an antique market for Temple Stuart furniture. This is a comment to a comment offering the hinges another commenter was seeking. Yup. Here again I hear joyful music in the dead mall. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4399721227 Definitely Leaded flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Timitrius Tomorrow I hit the road again, actually so Saturday I can hit the rails. This is the start of a 3 week trek to the East coast and back. Having done a lot of airline travel, and in 2011-2012 going back and forth by driving, I got this idea/hallucination that it would be fun to travel by train. That way, I go at a slower pace than flying, am not squeezed into a tiny spot, but am not responsible for driving. You know, I am just sitting there looking wistfully out the window, or reading intense novels, or getting caught up in all night poker games. Standard stuff (that happens in movies). The reasons for doing this are two events, a May 21 workshop at The College of Wooster (Ohio). For the past few years, Jon Breitenbucher has invited me in via Skype to do a 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story workshop for the Wooster Faculty Fellows program. I suggested to Jon that it might be better to do this in person! And he bought that one. The second event is the Schwartz Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction at Baruch College on May 31. I've had the opportunity to participate as a facilitator a few times; this time its that was well as co-presenting a workshop in storytelling with none other than Barbara Ganley. Here's the plan, green is eastbound, pink is west: View CogDog on the Rails in a larger map So my grand scheme was to do both trips together, and try the train as a means to get there. Ask me how this plan looks after the first 48+ hour leg. I am able to catch Amtrak out of Flagstaff (friends will drive me there and back). It's not quite the friendly departure, since I leave 4:40am Saturday morning. I get to Chicago 36 hours later, and with a 6 hour layover, I hope to meet up with GNA Garcia for dinner. I then motor out in the evening to get to Cleveland on May 20. I will have a few extra days to hang out in Wooster; on the May 25 I have another crazy early train out of Cleveland, a stop in Schenectady, and then on to Rutland, Vermont. I get a few days to visit and stay with Barbara Ganley in Middlebury (and hopefully a trip up the mountain to see Bryan Alexander). I then travel with Barbara into New York for the symposium at Baruch. After the event, I'll visit Mikhail Gershovich for a Memorial Day BBQ, and ten start the route back in June 2. I've planned a few days in Chicago so I can visit longer with GNA as well as to catch up with Steve Dembo (and maybe David Jakes if he is around). I aim back to Arizona on June 6, getting to Flagstaff on June 7. I might have stretched it more, but I am scheduled to do a Grand Canyon Rim to Rim hike on June 13. The fun part comes tomorrow morning as I try to get 3 weeks of clothes in my small bag cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I am hoping the train is a relaxing mode to go, between seeing the country roll by, getting to read, listen to podcasts, etc, usual contemplate meaning of life stuff. As internet allows, I will see what kind of ds106 radio I can pump out. Yep, dog on the train! cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by contemplative imaging All aboard! It will be funky on the Night Trains, but can you dig the dog? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAS0gSLakiU cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Alex E. Proimos For some reason this image came up (among a whole raft of ones I would never use) in a flickr search for "ass" (surprise, eh?). All day I have been feeling my own pangs of regret over the shot from the hip downward critical post about the use of videos by some of my colleagues. There are times I really miss the mark, and this is one, and I do owe some apology to Martin and Stephen. I've written an addendum to the post, and as I believe in leaving my mistakes out in public, I won't remove the post. Mom would have scolded me about "if you don't have anything constructive to say..." and what I would rather have focused on, and as Zack got to in his comments, the ways to help people be more creative and expressive in video. Video is a new expressive form to many folks, and who I am to cast criticism? Most of my YouTube videos have less than 100 views, many less than 20. Yes I think that in spaces like ds106 and others, we have places to practice, experiment, and develop our skills in the video form. I owe ya boys a few rounds. In the messy petri dish of ds106, a simple daily create, spawns, mutates, and morphs into things like It begins with a rather counter intuitive Daily Create for Dec 2, 2013 #ds106 #dailycreate: Make the Most Boring Video on YouTube http://t.co/jHb0RcIezZ — ds106 Daily Create (@ds106dc) December 2, 2013 One I really enjoyed was by Rochelle Lockridge, the penultimate more dull than watching paint drip of her faucet I think I suggested making it a GIF< and sure enough @Rockylou pulls out her GIFachrome camera @Cogdog You're right. Water dripping makes for a boring video AND a boring GIFStrip. ;-) #ds106 http://t.co/rOn2uCDG74 — Rochelle Lockridge (@Rockylou22) December 4, 2013 And then @JaapSoft jumps in with a matching sink stopper waiting @Rockylou22 @Cogdog this is more boring: wait and see http://t.co/0oQFIc0hxH — Jaap Bosman (@JaapSoft) December 4, 2013 And thus, I could not avoid wanting to mashup them up. The video was done n iMovie, with both source videos downloaded from the YouTube as MP4s. I simply put them it at first 8 seconds each; I then selected both clips, pasted, and shorted each clip to 4 seconds, then 2, then 1. I then used the advanced editing feature to put them in Side by Side mode, and repeated i reverse order the original sequence. It needed some sound, so from Freesound I got: Faucet Drip http://www.freesound.org/people/mwmarsh/sounds/85911/ Low Hum http://www.freesound.org/people/unfa/sounds/154902/ (this was an .ogg file, so I used Audacity to export it as AIFF which iMovie can import) I put the Faucet Drip sound under the faucet clips and the low hum on for the sink bottom (and overlapped them both for the side by side theme). Do not ask me why I did this, it just seemed like the next logical step. For day 2 od the digital story a day month, I am strong. I am not wavering. In honor of the crazy movement that started ds106 even before it started, I made an animated GIF of my good friend Bryan Alexander. I visited with him and his family yesterday, and besides playing nerf gun wars in the woods, his son also had me playing Halo 3, Bioshock, and Fallout 3. In between, Bryan graciously agree to record a short video for an upcoming version of Amazing Stories of Openness. I asked him to do a shot outdoors, maybe holding his iconic axe. He just naturally gestured with it! For a quick and dirty process, from the video I pulled 5 frames (opened in QuickTime Player 7, I did a copy from each frame, and when you open a new doc in the Preview app, it inserts what is on the clipboard which I saved as a PNG. From there, I opened all 5 in photoshop, one per layer, and used the Animation window to put them on a timeline. Resized and save as GIF, and we are done. Only rhizomes can explain why this idea popped into my head. Maybe it was seeing the #rhizo15 tweets. But there it was, a song going in my head. In the middle of the day I was looking up the tabs. I waited at least until after dinner to write some lyrics. And then practice a few times. And maybe 3 takes. For what it's worth, an honest (warbly on the vocals) tribute to the real Rhizome Cowboy https://soundcloud.com/cogdogroo/rhizome-cowboy The words/chords ( a few of the extras, like the walking bass line are in the tabs) C I've been talking about it so long Connectin' it all along G (Gsus4 G) I know every node in these rootlike links on the web F But metric's the name of the game Dm F C Complex theories ignored because of their length G There's been a load of compromisin' F c And not much synthesizing F Dm G (Dm G) But I'm gonna be where the roots are linking' with me F G C (F C) Like a rhizome cowboy C Cmaj7 G C G Rooting out like a tuber spreading under the ground F G C (F C) Like a rhizome cowboy C Cmaj7 G C G Getting tweets and emails from people out of my network G F (walk) And offers comin' to write a book C Well, I really don't mind your course Rigid as bones of my horse G (GSus4 G) But so much of learning today is takin' the wrong way F And I dream that it's not too late Dm F C With a hashtag, open doc, syllabus we all create G Why don't you read Deleuze and Guattari F c You cant teach the same I'm sorry F Dm G (Dm G) I'm walking around with them atop the high plateau F G C (F C) Like a rhizome cowboy C Cmaj7 G C G Rooting out like a tuber spreading under the ground F G C (F C) Like a rhizome cowboy C Cmaj7 G C G Getting tweets and emails from people out of my network And since Soundcloud truncates the graphic a bit... the album cover: [caption id="attachment_41800" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Not available in stores![/caption] Top / Featured image credit Creative Commons licensed (BY-ND) flickr photo by Forest Farming: http://flickr.com/photos/forestfarming/10855036253 flickr foto Northern Voicedavailable on my flickr The coveted t-shirt from the Northern Voice 2006 conference. It's been one day of favorable rest since the close of the Northern Voice 2006 conference here in Vancouver... and I still struggle to capture all thoughts and impressions. The flickr tag stream for northern voice photos was impressive and made it to the list of "hot" tags. You may also trace the wide impact via Technorati space. Apologies to the EdTechTalk guys Dave and Doug-- I pretty much slept through any chance of a Skyperview. Hopefully in the future. Firstly, there is definitely more of a community spirit at this grass-roots organized conference, purposefully kept simple to keep the fees low. All the logisitcal stuff was very smooth at the UBC downtown Robson campus. If anything, being down below in the concrete made us unaware of the gorgeous clear weather hovering outside. And as it was discussed by several in the Moosecamp session on Community Building, there is some true magic in meeting other bloggers face to face, as well as meeting some new people as well. To me, there seemed to be a tad more presentation heavy sessions than discussion/conversation, and the 2 days felt pretty crammed full on the schedule. It made the Moosecamp not all the differentiated from the main conference- I had thought the former would be something mroe akin to one of those hack-athon things where you sit around trade code/ideas, and build stuff. There's also something else I've had truble putting my paw on... The blogosphere is (and was here) described as an "ecosystem", and I am comfortable being just a small insect scurrying around on the floor. Down here, we don;t blog for ego, or advertising, or technorati points, or attention-- we just do it to put our voice out and to connect with other. At NorthernVoice, there seemed to be a clique of "cool" bloggers, who all reference each other by first names, etc, who I guess are some of the larger creatures in the same ecosystem. Hey, I grew up outside the "cool people" so this was no new revelation. While the "Blogging in the Bedroom" session was amusing (it was about relationships between people who blog), my main reaction was, "Who cares about the publicly displayed details of personal lives?" I support the notion of blogs as being a place for everything, but this sort of celebrity like fascnination with personalities is why I do not watch soap operas, read tabloids, or watch Entertainment Tonight. It was very silly stuff, when it could have been a better discussion about personal disclosure, online representation of self, it turned out to be more like the "Dating Game". So in sloppy summary, being here was great, hanging out and co-presenting and debriefing with my blog amigos was electrically energizing, I picked up some good photo and podcasting tips, made a good number of new connections, it all just did not seem as kinetic/electric as what I seemed to read about the first NV conference last year. But really, I did also come here to get a sense of what a conference is like that is unlike the big EduTech extravaganzas, and those are some things I am going to let percolate a little longer. This is like one of those things where by the time you find a solution to a problem it has already fixed itself (see also, rebooting). And it hardly merits a blog post, but heck, I can write about what I want to write about. If you've been around the blog a while, you might notice I bark a lot about flickr. I seem to be searching it for photos frequently mostly using the still valuable 10 years later, thanks Chris Lott, the Gift of Time where I can type f TAB cactus snow in the URL bar and instantly search my own flickr photos for one of those desert plants I adore in the white frozen stuff. For a few days this week I have been noticing this unwanted, strip of not my photos sitting atop the search results I wanted, under a heading of "From the Print Shop". WTF are you doing flickr? Always the same photos. What is this "Print Shop" cruft, flickr? I ignored it a few days, but after seeing it again today (and the same 3 photos) I took a sniff in the flickr help forums and read of others asking the same question, Can you disable "from the print shop" in searches? The answers seemed to be "no" - but also it was a beta feature, and as described in a blog post, it seemed as others pointed out inserting ads into the interface of Flickr Pro members, who pay for, amongst other things, to not see advertisements. I decided to investigate, and in the Browser inspector I did find that putting a little bit of CSS in, I could hide it at least in principle. .search-prints-results { display: none; } But that won't stop it everywhere. I remembered Tom Woodward making use of the browser extension Stylebot, which allows you to create custom CSS to apply at a domain level (and more fine tuning with patterns). I installed it, created a new pattern for the url flickr.com and entered the CSS above, and BOOM! The Print Shop cruft was gone. Victory! I posted my "solution" (aka internet duct tape) in the help forum and anticipated/hoped for some adulation or maybe a thanks or a wow. As it turns out a few hours later there was a report that Flickr had heard the outcry and removed the Print Shop from search results. So yes, my Stylebot cleverness was now rendered obsolete, pineal eye and all. But the gain in all of this is a wee bit of hands on knowledge and better awareness of Stylebot. Somewhere down this line, I will need it again. And just in case I forget some details, my blog has this record. And, as well, because I can, some snow on a cactus. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/31309211525 The Obligatory Snow on Cactus Photo flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And that was how I spent my lunch break today. In and out of a shorter web rabbit hole, maybe without a significant find, but a good little shred. Featured Image: Mine! Found with flickr search and nary a Print Shop bling in sight. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4328620063 delete or enter? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Multitool Evolved posted 30 Jun '07, 9.33pm MDT PST on flickr I'm commencing looking in a few minutes, but am casting out the Lazyweb request (no echoes via twitter) for a web tool-- I need a web-based discussion board/ forum tool (gazillions exist) that would allow me to have my own custom scripts (from outside the tool) that would generate new threads-- the web forum would simply be a place to go for people to reply. The need is for an app I am building in Second Life that will generate content that gets posted; what we need is a web interface for people to register replies. On thought is simply setting up a WordPress blog; I could script form SL a way to register a new blog post, and thus the replies could come through comments, but I think the client is expecting more of a threaded discussion board format. But I'd like to avoid Rolling my Own (Sloppy) Code. Ideas? Oh, it it ought to me PHP/MySQL flavors. Doth I Asketh too Much? flickr foto Books, Books, Booksavailable on my flickr Where do all the books come from that find their way to a thrift store in Flagstaff? More blogging via flickr... Maybe 1 or 2 readers may recall I've been doing all my personal book purchases at thrift stores. Sometimes, staring at a room stuffed full of books available for 25 cents each, how each one represents the intense labor and grand hopes of almost as countless authors. And beyond that, how many authors out there are not represented as they were not "lucky" enough to get their work in dead tree mode? I have unlimited respect for anyone who goes through the arduous taskl of putting their ideas from imagination to paper. They dream big, of making an impact, of affecting others, of sharing ideas that might matter to someone else... hey, it sounds like blogging? But do their dreams include lining the shelf of HodgePodge Thrift Store in Flagstaff, Arizona (a great place that benefits a local hospice)? Is that really a bad thing? So many questions, so many books to scan, so many quarters to spend. Medaling is Just Finishing posted 9 Dec '07, 12.05pm MST PST on flickr Award for completing the 2007 Fiesta Bowl Half Marathon, in Scottsdale (2:21 slow going!) -- this is just the half way in prep for my first Marathon a month from now. I've casually watched, and greatly impressed, by the ways people are using web technology to raise money for causes- Beth Kanter has not only documented this to a tee but done some tremendous world building good in her efforts to help send Cambodian students to college. Stuff that matters. So I will give it a try, but certainly with not all the clever chip-in campaigns and Facebook/Twitter strategizing that Beth perfected-- I'll just resort to old fashioned begging for contributions. As my own personal challenge, because I have always hated running, 2 years ago I took on running my first half marathon- and to prep for this I luckily managed to find a local group here, Team Diabetes here that offers training in return for participants raising funds for the American Diabetes Association-- all very fitting since I have been diabetic myself for 37 years. Being a geek, I decided to blog my efforts in a site I honestly called... I Hate Running -doing this appealed to my compulsive nature, and kept me honest as I made myself blog every practice run, and managed to run my first half marathon, the PF Changs Run in Phoenix, in January 2006. And I did it again last year, along with 2 other ones in between, I still don't like running. For those first 2 fund raisers, I pretty much emailed everyone I knew, friend, family, and people graciously responded, so I raised about $3200 over the last 2 years. I even got a $100 pledge from someone I did not know, who had found my blog will googling on "diabetes" and was moved because his teen son was recently diagnosed. Typical for the blog experience, just hanging a site out in the Googled winds have brought several connections from previous strangers, who have perhaps a common connection (or suggestion for sore shins) But I know that feeling when I sponsor someone onces for a charity walk/run/ride, and they keep coming back each year... when I hear from Paul in October it's because he wants a pledge... going back to the well. So this year I decided on a different tact. I would not pester any of my friends or family. I actually got lucky, and got a consulting gig that pretty much provided the funds to meet my minimum amount to be on the team. But minimum is pretty... well minimal. So I am trying this tack, of asking people I sort of know, or don't know, to ask for support so I can at least bump my contribution up another $500 (or more, hey?)-- by putting it on my blog. Actually I have had a link on the signature of my GMail account for a few months, but so far the only action on my web form were some bogus $5 pledges from spammers fishing in the web forms (and they never coughed up the dough, cretins). These days, with the increasing rates of diabetes, its hard not to know a family member, friend, co-worker affected by the disease. My blog has a whole set of random facts and trivia if that helps. Or that our local group that runs this is very grass roots and does not spend much of anything, so 87% of the funds raised go directly to research, education, etc. Or maybe if I just beg, pretty please? with sugar free substitute on top? Just visit my blog or use the online sponsor form: http://dommy.com/ihaterunning/sponsor.php There is an option for a secure credit card method contribution that goes directly to the ADA. Or even if you don't have the funds, just an encouraging comment (and I loathe that spammers shall follow the link, oh well). Please? I will ask only once. And then I will run on January 13. And probably will not like it. Because the movie about dentists was such a gag fest, I am tweaking my post title to lob some rocks at Apple. But before that, my long disclaimer. I love Apple products. I am one who's "stone cold death grip" would be clamped on a PowerBook. I've done programming, multimedia, CD-ROMs, internet-ing all in the Mac OS for almost 20 years. I run all of my web server apps on a humble Powerbook. Back in 1987, I was hooked as a Geology grad student put in charge of a lab of new Mac Plus-es. I loved those little guys, even swapping floppies in and out, System 6, Word 3.0, a blazing fast 300 baud modem. Later, for some visualization research, I had primary access to the two color Mac IIs in the open lab- I could boot anyone off if I had some research to do. Then I moved up with some more research projects using a Mac IIci, with that fast 68030 chip. Dropping the grad school game and coming to work for Maricopa in 1992, my lineage included a high end Quadra, then an PowerMac 8500, then a G3 Pismo laptop, and two more later G4 TiBooks. The first web server in Maricopa was a Mac SE/30 I plugged in the net in 1993 running MacHTTP. My home machines have been a Mac Classic, a Performa, an early G3 tower, and an iBook. And now, for my new gig at NMC, I am blessed with a MacBookPro (blessed so far, though it has not been stressed). When my hand slips and slices across a keyboard, the blood is rainbow colored. I bleed those colors. But as much as I love the Mac environment, I've never been all that enamored with the Apple 'mystique'. No pilgrimages to MacWorld, no immersion in MacRumor forums, no turning old macs into gumball machines or aqauriums, no secret posters of "Steve" on the back of my door nor are there black turtlenecks in the closet. I have to say, though, after getting a bit of a whiff of the hype over Apple's iTunes U, trying almost in vain to summon collaboration and interest at Maricopa, and barking about it in this blog, I am completely lost on how their strategy of keeping the product a secret has a snowball's chance on a Spring day on Phoenix asphalt. Our local iTunesU rep is out of contact with the software engineers and as much in waiting to hear what iTunes will do as we are. We never got a response to the invited "application" submitted more than 4 weeks ago. All we heard is, "all will be revealed May 15". And the only information left to share is the PR plaff that has not changed since it was hoisted in January. What can I tell our faculty? "Education beyond the classroom"? How about our technical folks? "Easy as pi"? This might be a successful strategy for unveiling a new iPod or some sexy hardware, but in terms of a service to education, I cannot say enough wretched things about "The Secret Lives of Apple Products" approach of keeping educators in the dark. If that is the plan, then they should not have stirred up the hype machine with a veil of cliche phrases. And to be honest, at this point, I don't even care. Maybe iTunesU will be an uber cool technology, and will revolutionize education, and be a floor wax too. Frankly I feel like we are made to be fools stuck beyond the velvet ropes. So the flick "The Secret Lives of Apple Products" may never leave the shelves at Blockbuster. I'd almost rather be forced to watch an endless loop of "Broken Flowers". mod of flickr creative commons image: Diner Sign by D.F. Shapinsky (pingnews) That's the camp title I came up for my short invited presentation this Saturday at WordCamp San Francisco. My blurb is: Among the 100+ million/gazillion blogs estimated that are "out there" quite a few belong to educators using several flavors of WordPress. Edublogs.org (WordPress MultiUser) alone provides free blogs to nearly 200,000 educators. The spread goes far beyond teachers blogging their experience. We'll start with an appetizer of ways we at the NMC have tinkered with the WordPress recipe to power full featured websites. Moving on to the main buffet, we'll sample ways WordPress is used to provide university hosted blogging services for students, as a place for elementary age students to stories, as electronic portfolios, as electronic publishing platforms, as nifty plugins that connect learning resources, as alternatives for course management systems, as resources for home schooled students, as platforms for narrative, as sites for projects. and more. If there is room for dessert, we'll see what people have tagged at http://delicious.com/tag/wpeducation I'll pretty much zip through some loaded sites in browser tabs. As a resource, I popped what I have accumulated so far into an open wikispace (heavily weighted towards University of Mary Washington only because Jim Grom sent so many links). Its impossible to cover everything done in education with WordPress, but if you want to toss another plate on the table, either edit the wiki or tag something in delicious as wpeducation. Load me up with great examples, so I can wow the WordPress-erati. I have a gripe (surprised?) about nearly every hotel. It's coffee and packaging. Every hotel I have been to has in room coffee maker (which I love). But daily they only give me one regular coffee (which is about 20-20% of my daily consumption). Usually the housekeeping staff has no problem keeping me stocked. But what feels wasteful and annoying is the packaging of sugar, artificial sweetener (which is what I only use), creamer, stirrers, napkins into plastic wrapped sets, a blob of material I have to de-couple. All I need is my one pink packet of Sweet n' Low. I dump the sugar, the creamers, the straw, napkin. It sounds like trivial whining just writing this, but I hate the waste. In the name of quicker and "efficient" supply control, hotels are participating in typical American waste of materials. But I am thinking about the lack of personalization in being giving a mass produced product, which gives me things I do not want or need, and forces me to participate in contributing to the stream of waste we send out of sight. I cannot unbundle the parts I need, and all of this is in the name of what is easiest for the large organization. Is there a metaphor here? And then do not get me started about the $4 can of 25 Pringle potato chips... Leave it to diabetic to use a sugary metaphor to a candy slogan. Okay, WordPress, you have these two ways to organize posts, Tags and Categories (yes, there are more than "uncategorized"). I'm working on a new project where I am going to not have my usual freedom for custom theme coding, so I am finding all the things I can do within the box. I have a Category taxonomy with 3 items, each with 10 sub items. But I am going to need ways to list posts also within each ones as "recommended" or "optional." I was wondering about ways of finding posts with a category AND a specific tag. Were I coding, doing a custom query would be a snatch. And this little thing I found will work as a link, but not much else, but seemed like something worth noting. So I have a category link on this here blog for WordPress cayetorized posts - https://cogdogblog.com/category/wp/ and by the time I publish this one, there will be 180 posts there. But I can add a second query parameter via the URL to get posts categorized WordPress and tagged splot like this (41 results) https://cogdogblog.com/category/wp/?tag=splot And when this one gets published! https://cogdogblog.com/category/wp/?tag=peanutbutter Just by playing with URLs you can get slices of taxonomies across the two kinds WordPress gives you. Featured Image: Image by pixel1 from Pixabay The blog may be blinking in and out for a week. I'm currently visiting family in San Diego through Monday (look for some pix soon of Sani, my step-son's cute 'little' Great Dane puppy) and a hope flight back to Phoenix to catch a Tuesday morning flight to Hawaii for the 2005 NMC Summer Conference. Looking forward to visiting there with the great bunch of people who go to NMC events, as well as colleague Bert Kimura, who I've worked with on the TCC Online Conferences the past few years (via iChat, Bert's been teaching me the key Hawaiian language expressions, mahalo, Bert). Yes, someone has to go to Hawaii, so I raised my paw. Blogging on the beach? I doubt it. Hope to be a bloggin at the conference, until then I have to cram in some, ahem, last minute work on my presentations. Surely with all the algorithms, a cartoon image should be easy to find... (and no, Google, I will not stop calling you Shirley). I got a message from Mariana Funes who wants to use this image on her Daily Stillness site. A she is a zealous diligent open educator, she is unwilling to do so without knowing and sharing the source. I support that kind of zealousness. It's a simple cartoon with a not so subtle message about the life long pursuit of money: [caption id="attachment_65410" align="aligncenter" width="750"] What is the source for this image? I cannot add attribution without it.[/caption] It's compact, as comics go, and delivers it's message without stating it explicitly. But, the question is, who made it? Insert update here, see below. Adam Croom finds the answer in under an hour... Don't waste time as she and I did, performing reverse image searches (and I tried multiple services such as Tin-Eye, Bing, et al). All you get are un attributed copies, 14 click pages worth from Google Images. [caption id="attachment_65411" align="aligncenter" width="760"] What happens when you use the power to locate the source of an unattributed image? why 160 more places same image is used the same way.[/caption] What you get (and what Google suggests for a meaning because Google AI has no I only A) is Indonesian, e.g. top result: https://twitter.com/infosuporter/status/836420237843025920 or Bekerjalah seolah olah kamu hidup 1000 tahun. Beribadahlah seolah olah kamu besok akan mati. which is (machine translated by Bing YMMV): Work as though you live 1000 years. Serve as though you were going to die tomorrow. Ironically Google Translate diverges slightly: Work as if you lived 1000 years. Worship as though you were dead tomorrow. I've page through most of the results and saw nothing but un-attributed uses all the way down. All. The. Way. Down. Feel free to try. My next strategy was to try normal searches for words that I thought might be in an article that used such an image (the last one I am joking): comic man life chasing money cartoon man life chasing money vain pursuit money life end vain chasing money life end comic man chasing life end cliff trump life philosophy I did not go super deep, but this kind of media is rather unfindable by these means (until someone comments below that they did). I also gave a try to Millionshort.com where you can slice off the head of Google search results to sift among the tail. De nada. So here is the next effort, aka the lazy web (though I do not fit the definition, I tried first). Asking out loud in public. That's not lazy at all. To my eye, it's the style of comic that would appear in a print magazine, like Readers Digest. It looks like it was drawn, zoom in close: But also likely, the pixelation could be simply do to image compression artifact. Zooming in on the figure of the man, his outline seems neatly about the same poxel width, leading me to rethink that this was computer generated. What do I know? I'm not a comic analyst. Regardless, unless someone reads this (small chance) and actually recalls seeing it elsewhere seems to be the only way to find it. Or maybe I need to send a LC HELP 911.1 call to me favorite research librarian. For now, I ask this tiny audience-- any ideas where this is from? I shall offer the grand prize the amount of money this first chase send, $19, or your own ~quasi personalized audio recording of joyous Felix howls. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Pensive Felix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Go find it! [caption id="attachment_65410" align="aligncenter" width="750"] What is the source for this image? I cannot add attribution without it.[/caption] Adam Croom Wins the Race In less than an hour Adam Croom found the source. https://twitter.com/acroom/status/935631772976545792 and here is where he reveals his method. File this one under Croom Beats Machine. Choose your prize, Adam! We did not hear from Adam, so Felix chose the prize; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yX5bb0LOS0 Featured Image: [128/365] Study in Pink flickr photo by pasukaru76 shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed flickr photo shared by StayRAW In the previous posts in this series of using the new WordPress 3 Custom Post Types (I keep calling them custom content types, same thing), I overviewed the plans for the MIDEA web site, we set up the places to create the new content types, and diverged into some set up magic using child themes. That was the easy stuff. Now I get into the parts I had to more or less invent on my own (well, with some good leg ups from others)- how to add all of the form field elements to my new content types so I could add extra information to them. This are fields for say, my Organization content types, to have a field to enter their web site address, latitude/longitude for doing some mapping, etc. Now I did this all in custom code, and as hopefully I stated earlier, I have no expectation that this is the way it will be dobe going forward. I foresee a raft of new plugins coming in that will take away this manual code layer, and maybe, when WordPress 3.7 or 4.1 comes out, it might be built in. I have no idea. I did this to show the WP platform can do this. (more…) A new year. Time to look around the house and tidy up. I had grandiose plans for some new weblog features here at CDB, but like many year-end resolutions, fell a bit short. One thing I did (and partially messed up) was to change the URL and location of the individual archives created by MovableType. Out of the box, you typically end of with your blog postings having URLs such as: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/archives/000379.html e.g. creating sequentially numbered URLs which are nice if you are a database and like references such as "000379", but the URL itself says nothing about the content at all. I decided to make some changes, with the resulting same post now residing at: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/archives/2003/12/22/rss_winterfest.html Which lets you know by looking at the URL (with some guessing) that this post is was made December 22, 2003 and has something to do with RSS and a winter festival (maybe). Here was the path.. (more…) In my story of Dorothy getting bored in Kansas, I wanted to have a way for her to go back to Oz, and the easiest way would be via the Play It Backward, Jack ds106 assignment: Things always look super weird when you play them in reverse, don't they? So take a video of something in your life--someone running, the toilet flushing, the sink dripping, someone spitting, whatever--and reverse it! They not only look weird, but they sound weird. I used the "No Place Like Home" clip from YouTube, already saved as mp4 from my previous work. I brought this into iMovie, and edited the Clip to make it go in reverse. I added a bit of fade out on the end, visual effect of "Cartoon" and Audio effect of "Echo", all to give it a freaky kind of satanic feel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2am4_OAh-7M Just keep repeating that, and you might go back to Oz, Dorothy. Like Scott, i believe I was tagged too by Sir D'Arcy. (Hah Scott, I'm not letting you kill the game of tag!) Four jobs I've had - Laying the lines for little league baseball (very crooked ones at that) - Soil Compaction Tester - Running a golf driving range (yes, driving the cart that all you yahoos aimed at) - Campus mail delivery Four movies I can (and do) watch over and over - Forrest Gump - The Bridge over the River Kwai ("Madness! Madness!") - Memento (there is something new each time) - Ben Hur Four places I've lived - Baltimore, MD (started) - Newark, DE - Los Alamos, NM (9 of the weirdest months of my life) - Flagstaff, AZ (almost heaven) Four TV shows I('ve) love(d) - Lost (I am hooked, and cannot let go) - Six Feet Under (ditto, thanks to DVDs, no HBO here) - M*A*S*H - Twilight Zone Four places I've vacationed - Vancouver Island - South Island of New Zealand (is heaven) - Grand Gulch (backpack days) - Northern New Mexico (road trip) Four of my favorite dishes - steamed Chesapeake Bay Crabs - Thrashers french fries from Ocean City, MD - my wife's chimichangas (baked not fried) - New York steak on my barbecue Four sites I visit daily - My personalized Google home page - MLX (just in case someone actually submitted something) - flickr - not many, i spend to much time in my RSS Four places I would rather be right now - at my cabin in Strawberry, AZ - Floating down the Colorado River - Any beach on the Coromandel, NZ - Spring time in the Sonoran desert Four books (or series) I love - Desert Solitaire - The Brave Cowboy - The River Why - The Crossing Four video games I can (and do or did) play over and over - Yikes, I have hardly played any video games in my life. I had a mild early 1980s addiction to Ms Pac Man. Four bloggers I am tagging I will tag some Bloggers I crossed paths with at Northern Voice: - Kirsten - Nancy - Jason - Jon The meme lives, you Victoria maniac! Something like 98.5% (a totally made up number) of WordPress sites are bloggy- a front page of posts arranged in reverse chronological order, be just a vertical stack or little square icons. Hence when I say “WordPress” most people see “Blog.” We’ve covered in Unit 5 of The You Show one way to subvert this- create a static Page with the information you want, and set that to be the front of your blog. But I just had a use case where I want to just take over the normal order that posts appear. Often I will just hack the theme do this, rewrite query. But sometimes I try to bend WordPress without resorting to this. For an upcoming presentation with Brian, I want to use a luscious theme as our presentation platform (I snicker every time a conference organizer assumes I will need “Powerpoint Slides” – I have not used Powerpoint in Public since 2008). I was going to do the tedious thing of changing the published date to control the order (make the first slide the most recent). That is a PITA. Plus, the navigation arrows at the bottom work counter to expectation. So I just reached into the plugins and found the perfect thing the Post Types Order plugin. Under the Posts menu is now a new item Re-Order and this lets me drag and drop my posts to the order I want. I actually do went them listed in reverse presentation order, and this makes it a snap to change. Changing the order of posts via drag and drop I would not use this one a huge site, but for a moderate sized portfolio, this can let you use the organizing feature of categories and tags, but make them appear in the order you see useful. (This is now available as a plugin for users on our TRUbox server). Left for another day is how I am hiding and re-arranging stuff with custom CSS…. Yes, you. That’s who I am talking too. I put out this idea a few weeks ago asking people to do an imagination exercise to tell us first what place a Creative Commons Certification might have for them, and how they might envision such a thing working. To me, it’s an interesting approach in this design phase; specifically, I like to get people’s ideas before I try to explain the project, so they are truly doing a visualizing exercise. I’m really excited with the seventeen videos that have already come in, and they are already informing our process (that future post is yours, Paul!). And its certainly valid when people tell us they cannot see a value themselves for a certificate. We want to hear that too. But I’m never satisfied with 17. I bet I get at least twice as many retweets and mentions of it. Some people have told me privately that “others have responded more elegantly” or “what are you looking for?”. What I want is no important, we want to hear your ideas. And I really hope this can go out beyond the people in my contact circles. So if you do not do one, could you ask a colleague? We need people who can pipe in too on the Library and Government perspectives too. What? You don’t want to be on camera? You do not have too. Others have done voice over videos. Or you could even submit an audio shared to SoundCloud. All the info and a friendly little web form are waiting for you at https://certificates.creativecommons.org/what-if/add/. Shall I beg now? Not to proud… Please. For those that care about such things, the form is driven by the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin– I am a big fan of this tool, and the ways I can customize what it does, way beyond feedback forms. The info on the form is rather understandable; behind the scenes there is an additional admin form item itself, called “verified” such that the default answer, meaning what the form comes in with, is set to “no”: This acts as a moderation filter, so on getting notice of a new video (e.g. THE ONE YOU WILL SEND ME TODAY?), I can preview it, and then edit the gravity form data to toggle it to “yes”. I did a bit of custom templating to create the gallery view; because this project is that open, you can find the page template code on our GitHub repo for the theme for this site. More or less, it uses the Gravity Form API functions to get all active form responses, and then loads into an array all ones that have the value of “yes” for verified. I then deploy a tricky PHP move to pull six array items out and random, these are displayed as embeds (because WordPress has automatic video embedding chops), while the full list is displayed at the bottom. On that bottom, I use the WP Video Lightbox plugin to display YouTube or vimeo content in an overlay on the page. Hold the phone, I am going deep in technical details (I’m kind of proud of how it works, I always learn new stuff when setting these things up). What will it take to have toy do a video for us? Or do some arm twisting for us? It’s not for me, it’s to help us shape this project. Stop reading this, and do a quick video, ok? Go! Top / Featured Image: Remix of a flickr photo… that ironically is mine! I started by searching Google Images for open licensed photos of “wants you” and somehow I found my own photo. The flickr photo by cogdogblog https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4693089024 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. Strange as it sounds, today I had to email my Mom a scanned copy of a copy of my own birth certificate to prove her own birth record. And perhaps the most challenging was helping her decode the email attachment so she could print the record. It goes like this. Her Florida drivers license is up for renewal and some new regulation (she says) requires her to bring a copy of her birth certificate. The problem is that back in 1929 Baltimore, records were not so rigorously recorded. The daughter of immigrants, whom-ever took the record information probably could not understand the name her mom reported, so Mom's birth certificate lists her as Baby H********** (Polish sounding name); a later attempt by her parents to update it recorded the wrong name- her name is "Alyce" but the thick accent ended up with her official name being listed as "Ellis". But apparently, there is some way for the Maryland authorities to generate a legal certificate if her name appears on the birth certificate of one of her children. I had one in my safety deposit box, so I drove down to Payson today (after rummaging 20 minutes to locate the darn key), and got a xeroxed copy that I planned to scan at home and email. Interesting information I see in my own Certificate of Live Birth (whew, I was born alive) - coming into this world at 9:22pm in April 1963 at a hospital that no longer exists. Also interesting to note is that it lists my father's occupation, but there is not even a blank for one if my mother had an occupation. Yes, not that long ago... Even more sobering is noticing that my parents were 36 and 34 when I was born, getting to 10 years younger than I am now. That makes for some kind of time distortion field effect. So I got home, scanned the docs and emailed them to Mom, knowing full well she suffered with attachment challenges (the email kind). Sure enough, I get a call, when she tried to print they came out way too small. I was trying to sort out what the problem was, and dreading trying to remotely troubleshoot her NetZero web based email. But we persevered, What worked was I was able to log into her account, see the same screens-- and OMG what an interface travesty that is, I do not blame her confusion. It showed only small previews of the images, and to print them, I had to talk her through the steps to download the image (and ignore some Windows attempt to have her upgrade some crappy photo software package). And then since we had to wait 4 minutes to download the files via her dial-up modem, we had time to chat ;-) Finally, she had the document printed, and she was rather excited (and technically worn out). I tried to soft pedal offering regular tech support, but she is my Mom, I will oblige. After all of this, she should be able to get her license renewed. Now if I wanted to keep her off the roads, I might have.... just kidding. Mom, consider yourself certified. modified from cc licensed flickr photo shared by pfala Sneaky. Damn sneaky. I got a nice $100 Visa gift card for my birthday last month.( I am not looking you in the mouth, Gift Horse). These look like credit card numbers, have numbers like credit cards. But there is is something tricky there- it's nearly impossible to spend them down to zero. I ordered well over the amount on Amazon, thinking I could pay the rest with my regular credit card. However, my order of 4 items was split to two retailers, so one part was processed ($57 worth) but because the rest was more than what was left on the card, Amazon asked for a new card. So the only way to use up the card is keep chipping away at it until it is next to nothing (or nothing). But how many people really do that? I read reports that said 6-10% of gift cards in general don't get used at all. But I wonder for the ones that are used, how much extra fluff on the card the sellers get to keep. Even if it is 5% per card, that would add up. It works like this- you give a merchant $100 real dollars. They give me a chunk of plastic, and even if I am diligent, I may only spend $90 of it. Look what they get. Give cash. I don't want to play cards with those fellas. I managed to spend mine down to 43 cents left. If anyone wants to spend that, let me know, I'll slide you my number. Doing the photo a day for the 2009/365 photos group is not all that much an effort; it has become more of a daily habit than regular dental care (don't tell Dr Fow!). What almost takes more effort is keeping my count organized; I am naming them all this year with a title of 2009/365/x where "x" is the day number of the year, but I keep managing to get that off count, and as well, I just swept through my photo set on day 103 and found 105 photos (looks like I double dipped twice). I upload from iPhoto (yes an older version) using the Connected Flow flickr exporter, which allows me to tag them with my own 2009/365 tag and add the photo to my set and the group. There was a discussion a few photos back in the group on also creating a photo blog site for ones collection. My first thought was No way! Not another blog post thing to do, but I did seek out (and find) a solution that I am able to do this with just one click of effort. One click to make a blog, that works. I mean that, just one click. So I set up my photo blog site as a free one on WordPress.com which is my tongue twisting CogDogPhotoBlog I am using the amazing zen-like Monotone theme -- it is geared for a photoblog, and each entry has a background that is color matched to a dominant color on your photo, so each post may have a different color background. It also re-sizes it's one column based on the image width. Like many things I have found success with, it is an idea I copied from D'Arcy ;-) But here is the easy part. Since I am already posting my photos to flickr, I just use flickr's built in capability to publish directly to a blog. I set up my flickr account to publish to this wordpress.com site, and made a template simplified from the "large" layout: {photo_desc} The only downside is the max width size I can do is 500px, the default image size on a flickr page. I decided I could live with that rather than doing manual posting. So once I post my flickr image daily, my one step is to go to that pic in flickr, and select the blog from the Blog This icon over the image: This is about as easy as running a blog can be, right? The Monotone template also creates a nice archive view as well: So far the only extra effort has been in making some changes when I have had t back fill photos (like after my 10 days offline). The Quick Edit option in the newest version of Wordpress makes it easy to do this quikcly to change the publication date (this gets them in the correct order too). Blogging is like sooooooooo hard. Not. I am curious if other educators have heard this from students newly introduced to weblogs- from the interviews I did last week for a photoblogging presentation and at other times, I have heard more than one student refer to a blog hosting web site such as TypePad, Blogger, Buzznet, as "The Blog"-- like it were a singular entity (or a movie monster), e.g. "The first time I was introduced to The Blog I was thinking...." We started using The Blog in our english course to write reflections..." Maybe it is just my failing memory, but it seems recurrent, and seems to symbolize that a student's experience with one particular blog site becomes in their mind, everything there is to blogging. Maybe it is juts a phase. Maybe it is a nice short hand. Coming to a neighborhood near you... THE BLOG!!!!! On a side note, the Breezed version fo my PhotoBlogging presentation got finished in one day-- well much of the graphics and Powerpoints were done the day before, but yesterday, I got all of my sound recorded, edited, and assembled for a 45 minute show. Too long, again. It might have taken less time- I did all of my recording, or thought I did, but somehow, it got lost in the wind, so got a second chance to record myself. I also had about 30 minutes of audio interviews with four students and one instructor to edit down. I use my Canon DV-1 camera to record with a lavaleer microphone, no video, just the audio. For quick and dirty, I digitized clips and assembled in iMovie, exported via QuickTime as .wav files that Breeze likes. Also noted, I now can easily identify what "umm" looks like in waveform-- I must have plucked out about 50 of them from my own recordings: "umm" looks like... I've not have much time over last days weeks more to do much SPLOT tinkering (well there is one experimental feature in the works). But I got a burst of positive energy this week from the passing of a green Scooby Doo type van labeled Reclaim Roadshow. Some tweets were spotted about their current online workshop happening Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, and I noted there was some SPLOT-age on the agenda. Ears perked up. This is warming, for to misquote Chico Escuela, "Reclaim Hosting has been berry berry good, to me" in that they have made both SPLOT tools and some Calling Card templates part of their single click installers. And I got an invite in 2018 to be part of a DoOO workshop in Fredericksburg (back when that was a thing). I DM-ed Lauren Hanks in twitter asking if I could listen in to the SPLOT session and she graciously offered a seat in the studio with her and Jim Groom. Yes, that Jim Groom. The format of their workshops is very active for online events, you can see it was honed from the way they supported the OERxDomains21 conference. Sessions are mixed pre-recorded intros and live discussions (not slide show talk overs) broadcast via Streamyard, all atop an ongoing conversation space in Discord. I did not get a chance to listen to their pre-record, but watched it post-game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEvnq4-8RAo As always they are respectful of the SPLOT origin story which is better when told differently. I will make one note that my SPLOTs are not just WordPress, the last one added to the site was actually designed to be GitHub based (or technically just static HTML). The Permutator is meant to produce the same random acronym word shuffle that adorns the splot.ca header- that is no GIF but some jQuery/JSON dancing (see the demo). But despite how it is read here, it's not all about the Glory of the SPLOT- the important part of what Reclaim offers in their Domain of One's Own platform for institutions is the ability to set up premade built out sites, not just WordPress, that can be offered easily to educators creating sites. So it's also Tiny Tools and templates (think of having portfolio template sites specific for a university/college department's need. I got to come on the live segment and probably blabbed a bit much, but hey, they gave me a microphone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PJiafXhDyQ A rather fun highlight was the demo of TRU Collector set up on Jim's bavaradio site when the demo install went awry- it's more or less a One Man SPLOT but Groom enthusiasm knows no limits. So Lauren showed how the submission form works, that it's moderated for approval. The funny part was when Jim shared that content published at Bavaradio (e.g. Lauren's demo) is automatically syndicated/republished on Jim's blog (voila, though sans featured image). My mind was spinning about putting things in Jim's SPLOT that would go to his blog (go ahead Jim, approve that new item submitted). But that's just the silly background. The thing I was pleased to see was a number of examples of SPLOTs used by other folks, a few I had not seen before. And that is the real reward. I use them myself for my own projects, but seeing how others have taken them on makes a SPLOT Daddy proud. I had seen an earlier iteration of Tineke D’Haeseleer's use of TRU Collector for the Material Culture Of China In A Global Context, it's a great use of a directory install of that within the domain for the class that ties together nicely. Tons of great DoOO are happening at Muhlenberg College, much with the support of the creative spirit of Tim Clarke. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1407438345563672578 Plus see how separate SPLOTs tie a whole site together (via WordPress menus) shared by Jim Luke at Lansing Community College (let's give some big nods to a community college doing Domains of One's Own). Their Live Together, Learn Together site offers both in Words (TRu Writer) and in Images (TRU Collector) the stories of LCC faculty and students pandemic survival experiences in a public space. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1407438803766288389 But wait, Lansing Community College is not done! I am just head over heels excited to see the Starscapes collection of student presentations of their media projects, all collected in a SPLOTbox powered site. Also noteworthy is the use of a static page front for the site to explain itself rather than starting with the raw flow of content. I have known that Middlebury College has put SPLOTs to use, and they took on again one of the more complex ones, the DS106 Assignment Bank theme (and sorry Amy Collier I still need to fix that bug!) to produce the Middlebury Teaching & Learning Knowledge Base "a repository of teaching ideas contributed by Middlebury faculty, for Middlebury faculty". They've also taken on well the task of making the theme look prettier than I made it. And they have a new hired hand who will do much more creative things than my SPLOT fiddling. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1407439204624355333 I had suggested to Reclaim that they get SPLOTbox in their mix, and jim mentioned it was something that were considering. As usual I was curious to find new examples, so I put The Google to work using the specific identifying text I put in the theme's footer. I did come across another SPLOTbox that, as Mom used to say, "blew me away" from University of Washington-Bothell https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1407463358941515780 The Becoming a Learner media collection is for the course BCUSP 100: General Learning Strategies, and it appears that for Spring 0f 2021, students were asked to used media to create/share stories about Time Management. This says much about what their goal was: Students will create posts for the site in order to illustrate their personal connections to the course content and their ideas around student learning and success.Students will reflect on their experiences and the experiences of their peers through the site, in order to recognize and discover their challenges and growth in college.Students will get experience sharing their work in an open learning environment, which encourages sharing and collaboration while breaking down traditional information barriers such as cost or log-ins.https://uwb.ds.lib.uw.edu/becomingalearner/about/ Seeing what folks design and collect with the SPLOTs is a priceless reward. The Discord conversation at Reclaim Roadshow did come up with a request I've grappled and failed before. How can SPLOTbox display the same way media from Kaltura media servers? I did try a few months or more ago when asked by Robin at KPU. The challenge is that SPLOTbox makes use of either media from sites WordPress already supports via an automatic embed (where you can paste in the URL for a YouTube page, and WordPress makes it an in page video player) plus a few more I have been able to add by creating custom functions to provide the same feature (Internet Archive, Vocaroo, Adobe Spark, and Loom). Two things need to be in place for me to add support for a service: There must be a structure in the URL (usually the domain) that can identify by pattern matching which service it is, so SPLOTbox is tossed a URL, and it can test if it is SoundCLoud or Adobe Spark. There is no way to do this from Kaltura media servers. The domains names vary with institution. The only consistent part of a Kaltura URLs is a /media after the domain, and that is not quite unique (someone with real grep chops might do better than me).But that's the easier condition. The real trick is being able to take that URL and extract from it an iframe embed code. For most services this is easy, it is usually a manner of finding a string in the URL that represents a database ID, the url in the embed code is usually just slightly different. But Kaltura is design to obfuscate media, and I could find no way for this to work without instituion specific codes. Tom Woodward did share a plugin used at University of Wisconsn-Madison that makes this work via an oEmbed web address, which Kaltura does provide. I had tried doing this for a specific media server, using what I thought was the correct approach with wp_add_ombed_provider but It Just Did Not Work. Now that I am looking at the structure of the UWM plugin, it's more likely Alan Did Not Enter The URL Pattern Correctly. But also, I get the sense there is something that needs to be enabled on the Kaltura Media server side to make it work. UPDATE: SAME DAY LATE AT NIGHT! I took another attempt and have a crude test version running that uses the SPLOTbox Extender plugin I updated to allow code to be added to add Kaltura servers (it's all done in code), with this site now enabled to use media from BC Campus and servers. Now I think there might be a Kaltura path again. It's possible, the trick is how can it be made easier to add sources. It also has to make clear that these nes require the oEmbed URL available from the share button on the source. I was musing another approach though. It is quite possible I imagine to have a SPLOTbox option to list domain patterns to whitelist for iframe code that is allowed. This would open the door to another of other options. Stay tuned. No matter how shiny the box, it's never quite done. Thanks again Reclaim Hosting for giving me a chance to fire up some experimentation again. Featured Image: Old wood box, metal hasp, handmade, recycled, used case goods, South Seattle, Washington, USA flickr photo by Wonderlane shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by Alan Levine to include a SPLOT logo on the front.