Chasing Down the Ghost Internet Tracks of Scottlo’s SRBs

Apparently writers with orders of magnitude more readers than I are penning saga length whinging rage posts about how terrible technology is. Oh they keep moving the buttons on me! Teams Sucks. Google Search is junk. Technology is terrible.

I don’t counter the disgust of bad software interfaces (oh reminds me I have a post to do about the interface of my air fryer, I digress). But I find reward in figuring things out that call for doing things beyond the front facing interface. Finding the end arounds. Doing some sleuthing.

Here is today’s tale, something again that started out with a speck of an idea, leading me to digging into old posts, shreds of web sites left on the internet archive, picking through some web source, and a wee bit of luck.

Now trying to write this– I pause and wonder, is this really a great story? Who cares?

Oh yes, this is for the Nobody who reads my blog. Them. Hi.

It’s about a character he came to know as The “Lo” who as the feature image goes, was definitely “cool”

The Simple Start

This began this morning’s team meeting with my colleagues at OEGlobal. I was doing my updates for Open Education Week (what you have not added anything? Get over there!). Most of the attention and things shared are events, which are fine, but truly, its webinar after webinar after webinar, zooms all the way down.

I try so hard to get other kinds of activities going, small things that let people explore or create something and share it. That’s my DS106 roots at work. I have been launching a few of them already in the DO OE Week Activities in our OEG Connect Community space. All very DS106ish. Some creative stuff with Bryan Mather’s Remixer Machine. Recasting an event title with ChatGPT to include cats. An exploration of the new Flickr Commons Maps. So far, well certainly that NOBODY character has been active there. I cant even get my colleagues to participate. I end up replying to myself or logging in as one of my sock puppet accounts.

Skipping the ennui over excuses to not participate, I was talking about ways people can share something of their global location. We had all started our meeting sharing our weather, which ranges from me right now at -28ºC and huge snow drifts to me colleagues in South Africa and Costa Rica in t-shirts talking about the heat. My colleague Heather suggested something where people do a short video showing their weather.

This started clicking off some neuron memories of something in the way way back early times of DS106, involving that legendary persona, Scott Lockman aka “Scottlo” who as a teacher of college age students in Tokyo, Japan had somehow found his way into the whacky anti-MOOC circus of DS106. Scott had oodles of media creativity and a bit of a snarky attitude. I recall he had worked as a radio broadcaster in the Army (?), knew a lot of practical chops about audio, and I am pretty sure its true that he was the first podcaster from Japan (I am pretty sure this guy is lying, but I will dig for evidence later).

Anyhow I remembered that Scottlo had put out a series of these short, like 30 second audio or video spots where he did some kind of daily update that included the date, time, and weather, and some kind of mood level.

I could not stop myself from opening the door to the rabbit hole.

The Digging Begins

I thought maybe it was something in the DS106 Assignment Bank, but nothing came up on a search for “Scottlo” (as it turns out from a later message, Eric Likness found a different assignment, with “Scott Lo” in the title, some kind of Oxford space issue?). I was pretty sure it was a Daily Create- a few hits came up referencing the guy on the current site, but none the target.

I would think it was on the first version of the Daily Create which was once online at https://tdc.ds106.us but no more. I trudged off to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, truly one of the swiss army knives of web research. I am shocked how few people even know it exists. Shrug.

I ended up paging back through the archives, starting with the most “recent” being TDC1334 the last on the old site before we moved to the current one. I tried paging back and doing a ctrl-F to look for “Scottlo” but each archive of the acrhive was not exactly consistent, and I could not seem to go back past a certain point (but I did find a few old assignments that I copied and put into the rotation for new ones in the next week or two – look for ’em at https://daily.ds106.us/ I think the one I added os scheduled for February 20.

Round 2: Sideways Searching

Was it there a reference in my old blog posts? In the early days many times I would write up a “making of” for a response to a DS106 challenge. I have 48 posts referencing the “lo” but none were what I sought (there was distraction re-reading old posts).

Next idea. I used to respond to Daily Creates in some web site that had a frog logo– no it was some kind of bird, the name was something like “fritter”? (I joke, right?) I flushed my entire account a few months ago, but thanks to some long ago genius of a wizard named Martin Hawksey, I have a full, searchable archive of my twittering (well through June 13, 2023 when the Dark Lord Elmo yanked the plug on the API, a thousand cockroaches should infest his bed).

The first searches like “Scottlo weather” or “Scottlo forecast” came up dry. But resorting to just “Scottlo” as a search got me 767 matches. I quickly scanned for something that looked like maybe my own video reply when he put this out as a challenge. About 1/8 the scroll down all results, this looked like a possibility.

The View on Twitter is dead, but the hyperlinks in the text do work.

Nope, but it was a fun trip of a goofy cover song I did for the Lo’s birthday.

Scroll on we go, and not too long until I hit jackpot. It’s a tweet mentioning doing a @scottlo SRB Daily Update from Strawberry– that’s what this thing was called!

Jumping to my video, well heck, it was fun, I will embed it–

In the YouTube caption I included the link to the daily create I was responding too- most likely, this would be the source. Here is another lesson in ther value of writing captions or descriptions on uploaded media- extra info.

But now I have the url for Daily Create that likely explains what a “SRB Daily update” is all about — http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc696

Going Back to the Wayback Machine

To access this Daily Create, we have to go back into the Wayback Machine, Peabody. And we find Daily Create TDC 696 from December 4, 2013 which is “Create a @Scottlo Radio Broadcast (SRB) Daily Update Video” and we know what SRB is.

The instructions are:

• Announce the full date “Today is December 4, 2013?
• Announce your geographic location
• Announce the current time
• Announce the current weather conditions (include outside temperature)
• Rate your day on your own special 1-10 rating scale

Daily Create TDC 696: Create a @Scottlo Radio Broadcast (SRB) Daily Update Video

But no video embed! Are we doomed? Do I go on a rant at how effing bad the web is? Nope, I go into View Source, find the iframe for the video embed.

It needs to be pried out of the weyback machine link, but now I can plunk into a web browser http://www.youtube.com/embed/jZk7jLUKGh0 which is the full screen, I can then click the title to have the YouTube link to embed here.

This is Scottlo himself, quite young, sardonic, and in his style you think he is serious but if you know his shtick, you realize he is playing it up. But this is the definitive SRB Daily Update:

From ther YouTube page, one can find Scottlo’s profile and another style of the SRB Update from a few days earlier. This is more the style I remember, where hes shows a local scene- one does not have to do as a selfie style, and it seems more interesting to see a visual of this place in the world.

And Why Did I go to this Extent?

Well that mnight take some psychological profiling. I enjoy the chase, and finding clues, not giving up. It is rewarding to use the search engine that everyone talks about as being useless, and then some intuition and some luck.

If I expect my software alone or some faceless algorithm to spit out an answer like a vending machine, I am yeilding my curioisty and inquiry thinking to a piece of software.

It ain’t about the technology or the interface, folks- its what we do with our grey matter upstairs.

Now I can write up a 2025 version of the SRB Daily update, record an example, and post it on our OE Week activity space– likel;y to sit there un replied.

But I ain’t stopping. Being creative, making things, figuring out how to end around when the systems fail? That’s delight with technology. not dreading its crappiness.

Yo, Lo, where ever you are, I hope you got your voice in a radio mic.

Postscript

Scottlo let his domain and blog go, and now https://scottlo.com is an Indonesian site selling slot machines. So it goes. In one of those old archived tweets I saw a link for a Blogger one he set up I think when was in his stage of creating personas. or Internet Sock Puppets, the blog of one Otto Paertz full of DS106 assignment responses.

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Featured Image: My own photo of a stove top control, it’s the details that are fun to find in the world. More fun than typing words in a box and looking at what is spit out for you. I am a Fan of The Lo flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license