I’ve always had this fascination in the large scale effects from small points of change, punctuated equilbrium not just in evolution and white water rafter trips, but also in human nature (anyone with me on that one?)

Actually, I was thinking about a vocal faculty member in our college system that for sake of vagueness, I refer to as non-gender specific “Pat”. The frequency of Pat’s antics vary, but Pat is well known in our system for the loud (in email) finger-pointing, administration bashing, emails blitzed system wide. On a much lower level of frequency, Pat sends out a meaningful story related to life or learning, but usually it is a rant against Pat’s department, Pat’s college leadership, the dark forces of our District office, etc. Anyone who rebuts Pat, whether to the entire system by email or even privately in a direct email to Pat, is then publicly lambasted by Pat in (again a system-wide) email. The best way to deal with Pat is to ignore Pat, logic and reason fail if Pat disagrees.

As I write, my G4 TiBook is evolving from a Jaguar (wow, no links left at Apple)to Panther. I was getting worried about those messages every few days warning that iChat was going to expire. Then I heard about the Mars sim program Maestro that was supposed to be awesome, but on Mac required OSX…. […]

Looking at the goofy banner on this blog and the reasons behind naming CDB, it is apparent that for 2003, I did lots of bloggin’, plenty of doggin’ (complaining about everything), but very little coggin’ So this month, I am back in the mountain bike saddle, riding 11 miles to work 2-3 times per week. […]

Brian shares yet another brilliant article draft “Wikis: Hypertext on Steroids”, worth reading and following links from if you are looking for what may be the next edge-like instructional technology. For those who have not “wiki-d” it is an intensively interlinked web site where any visitor can edit and create new information. It bends your […]

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..

Ahhh, there is nothing like literate, thoughtful email feedback… if only it happened more often than Arizona blizzards. For more than 9 years, we have gotten a stream of emails via our free, online Writing HTML Tutorial, most coming from lesson 12 where we teach you how to write a hyperlink that triggers an email. […]