Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.
Thank Jeremy Hiebert for sharing via his blog Old-School Adminstration of Online Learning’ÄÝ . Jeremy is very favorable of his online learning experience at Memorial University, which is a miracle considering the administrative hurdles placed before him. It is amazing students manage to learn online despite that our institutions are still operating in the wrong […]
Awesome, this is a step up in usefulness for Bloglinesthe online RSS aggregator. You can now make the collections of feeds you post on BlogLines public, and thus collections of feeds can be shared via a simple URL. Actually I had submitted this as a suggested feature when I looked at the site a few […]
Dynamic RSS feeds are available now from searches performed at my.OAI, the tool for digging through a series of idatabases available as Open Archives. my.OAI is a full-featured search engine to a selected list of metadata databases from the Open Archives Initiative project. All searches performed at my.OAI, even is guest mode are returned with […]
Still getting used to my new iSight, a nifty fireware camera for Apple OSX computers coupled with iChat AV allows beautifully clear, sharp, audio/video chat via broadband connections.
Not only is it well-designed in typical Apple fashion (oops, there goes my bias), but what I also enjoyed was the cleverness of the package it came in and a refreshingly small but clear instruction guide which unlike 90% of other computer manuals, makes sense to most humans without leafing thorugh 90 pages of gibberish in 18 languages.
Let’s open up the box…
The wiki for TheFuss has moved to a new, more nicely presented location (thanks to CSS and Brian!).
TheFuss wiki is a growing resource about RSS, learning objects, etc that myself, Brian Lamb, and D’Arcy Norman presented July 11, 2003 for the LOVCOP teleconference
(LOVCOP=Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice).
We have barked about MERLOT’s lack of RSS feeds for some time. Not that anyone really listens, or that this is even announced in the woods where trees makes sounds, but you can actually find MERLOT RSS feeds. Now the question- is this a smooth vintage or supermarket swill?
Here is what is wrong with RSS a la MERLOT (read on!)
A very well written introduction to RSS: RSS – A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers (I cannot locate quickly what the “EEVL” acronym stands for but it is a UK resource for engineers). I like the plain language yet the forways into some of the details of producing RSS. <tiphat>Tip of the blog hat […]
I am all for expanding the use of RSS, and new things are popping up every day. However, stuffing an entire newsletter inside an RSS feed as listed at Lockergnome (referring to Barbara Feldman’s “Ezine-Tips” on Using RSS to Deliver Newsletters seems to me a bad trend of stuffing a lot of things into RSS […]
Wow. If you are just reading some of the buzz (it’s about time!) about RSS, check out RSSlets – Functional RSS Feeds a series of prototypes for getting at RSS content that may be on the fringe of your idea scope. These are a whole raft of new services that are creative ways to syndicate […]
Lines at the gas stations, tempers flaring… Wow- it is almost a flashback to the 1973 oil embargo but this is 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona where a pipeline shutdown fuels gas shortage.
The events in ’73 are a bit fuzzy, but I recall my Dad waiting in long lines for hours to get gasoline that had spiked from 35 cents a gallon to (oh my gosh) more than $1.00 a gallon.
But Phoenix citizens cannot balme the oil cartel here, although theories abound on other conspiracy theories. IN a nutshell- all of the gasoline that is consumed (and much is) in Phoenix, arrives by fuel lines from the west (LA and imports) and the east (the big refineries in Texas). The problem is a rupture midway between Phoenix and Tucson in the 50 year old pipe for the Texas supply, normally 35% of what we consume.
Although the supply from the west has been beefed up considerably, the problem is not getting the fuel into town– it is getting from the pump stations into trucks and distributed to gas stations. There are also fishy rumors about the company that runs the pipeline- that they could have run it at 80% capacity after the break was addressed but decided to shut it down completely and other ideas about the delay of federal inspectors on the repair.
Combine a shortage of trucks, panic among citizens, and you see what I did today- most gas stations with pumps closed (no gas) and the few that did have lines 30-50 cars long, a reported 2-3 hour wait for gas priced anwyhere from $2 per gallon to $5 (price fluctuactions are always suspect, and by some coincidence, prices are always higher in Scottsdale, where the per capita income is higher- I live in the part of Scottsdale that helps keep that average low but pay for gas that scales to the monster SUV culture here).
Looks like a good class lesson in economics and public psychology/mob behavior (there is more….)
