From more in the “where would we be without the web” department. I was chatting with a friend about movies, not a subject I can dare seriously enter with series film freaks, but in talking about “obscure” foreign films, I was trying to remember the name of a Russian one I saw a few years […]

I try not to begrudge what others do, but as much as I use (and talk about) mining flickr for creative commons licensed images, I dont know what to make of those who uses a photo sharing site to post photos All Rights Reserved?

Okay, I do begrudge.

But I dont spent much time there- what is more interesting, uplifting, is the magic that happens when you give something away, when you don’t attach statements of what you cannot do with media you’ve created, but attach statements of what you can do. I have pretty much given away every photo, crappy software, document I have ever created.

I gave away a picture of my old car in death valley and got a free music CD. I gave away copies of my old HTML Tutorial, a teacher translated it into Icelandic, and a few years later, I got invited to visit Iceland to do web workshops.

Its not richness of things showered on me that I value, its richness of people I meet, connections made. The more you give, the more you get. Just don’t stand there with your palms out waiting for it.

Recently I had lunch with Jim, a long time friend. He and his wife retired 2 years ago, and they each took up art. I recall Jim asking for photos they could practice from, so I sent my flickr tags for flowers and dogs, etc. I have a nice pencil drawing of good old Mickey (my yellow labrador icon), but Jim showed me some of the lovely pastels his wife has done– see the photo and the painting version below.

Flickr Wordle by cogdogblog posted 29 Jun ’08, 9.26pm MDT PST on flickr Everybody and their mother blogger has noted Wordle, the lovely tag generator. I thigk I was one of the first to note it, but hey, who gives a flying fart about being web first except blog-o–ego-maniacs. Okay I was just google chatting […]

I only like email spam when it is creatively subtle in cleverness– this one comes close. In this sneaky approach, the email references victims of Nigerian spammers with a supposed offer to submit for reimbursement courtesy of the government of Nigeria and the United Nations. So if you were really moronic enough to fall for […]

Here’s another interesting tool for visualizing relationships in twitter, Jeff Clark’s TwitArcs: I’ve combined some visuals from a side project related to linguistics with twitter data to create TwitArcs. It takes the latest 100 tweets for a twitter ID or term of interest and creates a list representation that has arcs connecting messages sent to […]

Real Time Satellite and Space Shuttle Tracking by cogdogblog posted 27 Jun ’08, 4.45pm MDT PST on flickr Nifty site for getting info about satellites and tracking them in real time on a google map. This shows locations of GPS satellites and my home location. www.n2yo.com/

I love the cleverness of Ken Rodoff’s description of the teacher you don’t want to be in “an unexamined summer“. I’d say more, but don’t want to give it away. linkribution across the seas to Graham Wegner

After waiting for a replacement camera battery and a new 8 Gb memory card, I was eager to try out a first Gigapan image. I was introduced to this nifty technology by Keene Haywood at University of Texas, Austin; since Keene knows the developer of the robotic camera control developed by CharmedLabs, he got me […]

Captain Westley by cogdogblog posted 30 Oct ’07, 10.50am MDT PST on flickr Westley organized a great way to end my trip with this rowing expedition in the Sydney Harbour I’m headed down to the Phoenix airport to pick up my friend/colleague Westley Field who I got to know last October during the Australia tour. […]