3236 Posts Categorized "Blog Pile"

Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.

Blog Pile

Upping WP

WordPress 2.5 has been out a few days, what am I waiting for? Actually for my Dreamhost hosted sites, the upgrade is a brainless click with its One Click install/upgrades. I am done. Well not completely, the whole admin interface is different! It has that new car WordPress.com smell, the old blue is gone, we […]

Blog Pile

Chaos / Order

Chaos / Order by cogdogblog posted 30 Mar ’08, 11.54am MDT PST on flickr I finally got the pieces of my office desk up here, and with some cussing, drilling, glue managed to re-assemble it (a few of those cam/post things got mangled in my hast of packing up). So on the right side, meet […]

Blog Pile

News, Lack of Location, Maps, Sleuthing

The travel route for where I live now in Strawberry to Phoenix is a lovely drive down highway 87, the “Beeline Highway”, that romps up and down some fabulous jumbled up geology, connecting the Sonoran desert to the forest plateau. Ir cab be idyllic… until something happens to close the highway, as the alternative routes can be 60, 80 miles of detour. Lats summer a fuel truck lost control on a steep downhill, crashed, and the northbound highway lanes “melted” from the heat of the explosion.

And just Friday, I heard, that a landslide caused by water running below the surface which loosened rock, buckled the highway, and it is still closed as repairs continue. So with some curiosity I’ve been Google mapping some bits and pieces, and have been dismayed that none of the news actually provides the map location of this incident. Shouldn’t most online news be geocoded to map??

So, in normal conditions, the drive from Strawberry to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix is 107 miles, calculated simply by plugging in these end points into the driving directions tool on GMaps.

to-phx-airport.jpg

If I had to drive today, with Highway 87 closed from Bush Highway to State Rt 188, I’d have to take 188 to Globe, and then Highway 60 into Phoenix. I’m not sure how many people know tis, but with one of the Google Maps driving directions displayed, I can click on spot on that path, say where highway 87 meets State Route 188, and I can drag the path onto 188 to change the route. This detour makes a total distance of 176 miles, a 69 mile detour!

Blog Pile

Register Soon to Mash It Up With NMC

photo credit: ekai Don’t miss out on the 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups – early registration ends this Sunday. Stop reading (or at least skim), and register now. This is another one of the NMC’s online conferences, and to fit with the theme, we are even mashing up our venues between the 3D world of […]

Blog Pile

Late Uber Mega SXSW Post

Blue, Red, and White Are Just Colors


It’s well over a week that my first experience attending SXSW Interactive ended, and a blog post is just wriggling out. I wavered, wafted, and decided on a different, lazy (lame) strategy… to just soak it all in and write something prophetic later. Well, this will likely fall short on most accounts.

And this is also a year when I am trying a few conferences out of the normal education technology realm, so I was wanting to be more reflective and… okay, I am lazy.

The idea of doing detailed sessions posts was not all attractive; earlier in my blogging I would try and do session blogging, but am not enthralled at being a stenographer. Second, I decided on a new tech strategy- I left the laptop in the hotel, and “lugged” (meaning slipped it in a pocket), my new iPod Touch. The hangup there was the wireless network at the Austin Convention Center got bogged down, so even a quick tweet was a long affair.

Blog Pile

That Was Bowling

That Was Bowling by cogdogblog posted 15 Mar ’08, 1.46pm MDT PST on flickr "That’s a pretty…. wild style of guitar playing, how’d you learn that?" "That was bowling" "Yeah, bowling.. I could tell" I’m digging the British Invasion exhibit at the Museum of Music, Infotainment Island, in Second Life at slurl.com/secondlife/Infotainment%20Island/65/228/43 Join us 9:00 […]

Blog Pile

MiniLegends Squashed: Who Is the Mommy?

Sometime last year before my trip to Australia, I discovered the amazing work Al Upton was doing with year 3 students at at Adelaide Australia primary school. The 8 and 9 year old “miniLegends” were blogging, doing creative writing, and getting a fabulous experience in web technology. So it was exciting this year when Al […]

Blog Pile

SXSW Session on “Mashing Up ARGs and Video Games”

Late in the afternoon I lurked in the session on “Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs” a panel session with Tony Walsh (Phantom Compass), Dan Hon (Six to Start), Dee Cook (addlepated.net) all people involved with creating top shelf ARGs (look it up yourself). It seemed the audience was pretty knowledgeable about Alternate […]