Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Just be shear, dumb, web clicking serendipity, I came across flickrStorm: (now available as Wunderstock) FlickrStorm is a better search for Flickr! It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images... Be surprised! Okay, there are scads of flickr search tools, and it's not exactly clear what this "magic is", but they certainly have been double dipping their chips in the web 2.0 bowl. More less, you enter a search term and get results as small icons: Clicking the small square icon (it looks like the first set might be the ones by "interestingness") brings a preview on the right, where you can go to the flickr page for the cute dog picture, or "add to the tray" so it gets saved to a collection on the left. but wait, there's more. Clicking the "advanced" link brings a drop down menu filter that can help restrict the results by Creative Commons license, e.g. this search for ones by "freedom" as a term and "Non-Commercial & Share Alike": But wait, there's more... Clicking on your tray provides a single way to download all the images in your tray OR to make the tray available again via a public URL (can you say rip, mix, and share photo sets??): This was just a quick jaunt done while I should have been eating lunch, but pretty exciting. Maybe it could be something rolled into flickr... their search can certainly use some more spiffing up. What's the business model? Who cares... probably 'Make Something Cool so We Cn be Bought By Yahoo/Google/That other Company in Washington" Cannot wait to see more of the promised magic. A CogDogBlog wag to O'Reilly Radar for this site Update: flickrStorm is still there but no longer active. Fourteen some years after writing this post, I was asked to update the link to its current home as Wunderstock: https://wunderstock.com/ Just when you think you have exhausted all the oddly strange things people have cooked up in a blog, comes along just one more. One Red Paper Clip is documenting the North American (?) Dream: My name is Kyle MacDonald. I started with one red paperclip on July 12th, 2005 and I am making a series of trades for bigger or better things until I get a house. My current item up for trade is one recording contract. You can read current offers here. Do you want a recording contract? Please contact me with your offer at (oneredpaperclip@gmail.com) or phone (514-833-3980). I live in Montreal Canada but will go anywhere in the world for the right offer. - (click on pictures below for stories about each trade.) Only on the web can you get away with this. I love the strangeness of it, as well as the only way I found it was tracing back a Technorati link to History Mike's Musings (who purloined an image link to something buried on this site) and seeing Kyle's clip as his leading story. A toast to sweet web serendipity and the dumb luck of clicking out of curiosity. That is true - a beautiful month in Puerto Rico; that was my February of 2016 thanks to an invitation from Antonio Vantaggiato to spend a month with him and staff/students in the STEMmED project at Universidad del Sagrado del Corazón in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And it's not the first time Antonio has been so gracious; first was in 2013 and second was just this past October when he asked me to speak at their TEDx USagradoCorazon event. I put together a summary of the things there as a quasi portfolio type thing, but also so they knew where "stuff" was, as a page on the STEMmED site which included: Cool Stuff: Memes, GIFs, and the Open Web - a talk for students. No need to explain GIFs or Memes to them. Inside the World of Catfishing twice presented to students. Wow, I got a chance to talk in public about what seems to be my major blog topic? They mostly knew the term from the MTV show, and many had experiences with fake accounts being used for bullying/harassment (mean while Facebook fiddles while fake accounts freely burn people). Silly / Useful Web Tricks a workshop for faculty. It turns out that sharing links is still a good thing. I participated and planned a few things for Antonio's New Media class, INF115 where you can see a lot of ideas riffed from ds106 / connected courses. All the students write in their own wordpress.com space. I created a version of the Daily Create, in our case it was a Daily Photo site Una Foto Cata Día -- which up to today netted 298 responses to 38 challenges (and showed the intersection with the open, since we had outside participation by Sandy Jensen Brown and Claudia Ceraso, thanks friends). On the last day, I turned the keys over to the students; I made an editing account for them to use, so that they could keep the site going. When I checked yesterday, there were scheduled challenges well past mid-March.I set up a number of activities/assignments for the class, including doing some animated GIFs from videos, and audio exercise where they first used their mobile devices to ask people about their opinions of using Wikipedia as an academic tool, uploading to SoundCloud, and then editing with Audacity they are assembling Vox Populi type mixes of each others recordings. Last week, I did a demo of Hypothes.is where the students will be using it to annotate two different positions on the impact of mobile phones on how we converse Give 'em SPLOTS - I had hopes of getting SPLOT tools set up on their web site. I found a bit of Wordpress Multisite hijinks- their main site is set up to do multisite by domains, but I found out the sub-sites could only be seen on the campus network (I am guessing the DNS is not set up to allow wildcard subdomains). Then I thought, well I can set up a multisite as a sub directory stand alone site. Another dead end- without some other htaccess and sunrise.php juggling, you cannot have a multisite in a sub directory of another multisite. Boing.In the end, because it was my last few days, I set these up as stand alone WP installs, just so they would be there for Antonio and his students/staff to experiment with. An Image Pool, a TRU Writer, and a Bank [of Something]. Plus I made a copy of the Wordpress as Presenter site I used for the faculty workshop That was just a part of the experience. There was the beach I could walk to. The mofongo. A free library in the street (two locations). Old San Juan. The mix of decay and modern in just a few blocks of Ponce de Leon Avenue. Stunning street art and murals on small and large scale. A student I met named Jose who showed me the lively culture in the Rio Piedras area. And road trips with Antonio and his wife to see the mountains and shore areas outside of the city. And the warmth and welcome of people at Sagrado like Gladys, Bernabé, Sheila, Giovannie, Dorabel, John, Myra (a few Myras), and many more whose names I got mixed up. And stunning sunsets. Stunning. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] It's there in a few hundred photos and 42 blog posts (not all directly related, but hey). I wish I could say my Spanish improved significantly, but quizás un poco? Actually just walking around and reading as many signs as possible felt like it helped some. At least I will stop pronouncing it as "POR-toe REE-koh" It is a place of such contrasts. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] And always possibility. With all the challenges this place faces, I have seen much to be optimistic about. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: That's my own photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/24863152095 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. This is the original and main campus building of Universidad del Sagrado del Corazón in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As you can see they are catering to interests in social media with these signs that were set up- my first weekend was an open house for prospective students, quite a festive atmosphere. Oh Google, what you do with my keywords. Unexpected images, then leading me down some memories. It's mostly connected in loose strands of unexpected fibers. So I am working on an icon for a new secret half formed thing Brian Lamb and I are cooking up here at TRU. The metaphor is somewhat in the vein of a person looking into a video camera. I aimed my Google Images Search (preset with licensed for re-use, always) (almost always) to look for person movie camera icon. Without clicking (I TOLD YOU NOT TO CLICK!) what kinds of images do you expect to see? Yes, there are icons of movie camera, and photos of real ones, plus scenes that are on a movie set. And yet, way over in the side is a photo I have seen before, that seems out of whack. [caption id="attachment_38704" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Looking for an icon of a person behind a camera, one odd result in the mix...[/caption] Way down on the right-- [caption id="attachment_38705" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Tricky Dick and Elvis in the Whitehouse, 1970, from Wikimedia Commons[/caption] I am really loving the amount of information you get on a Wikimedia Commons entry; this very image is a featured image on both the English and Turkish language Wikipedia pages. It is "considered" to be one of the finest images. The caption says a lot: Elvis Presley meeting Richard Nixon. On December 21, 1970, at his own request, Presley met then-President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office of The White House. Elvis is on the right. Waggishly, this picture is said to be 'of the two greatest recording artists of the 20th century'. The Nixon Library & Birthplace sells a number of souvenir items with this photo and the caption, "The President & the King." The Two Greatest Recording Artists of the 20th century ;-) It's part of a National Archives exhibit on this meetup. You can freely download all of the photos and documents and transcripts (because it is a the work of a federal government office, it is all public domain). There out to be plenty of media assignments one could do based on this. The LA Times has a great detailed story of the event, including the part where Elvis pulled out a gun as a gift: Then it's time for gifts. Elvis pulls out the commemorative Colt 45 he had taken from his wall and carried into the White House, to the dismay of the Secret Service. ("We've got a little problem here; Elvis has brought a gun.") He presents it to Nixon. I think Johnny Cash did better on his 1972 Whitehouse visit, where he managed to play protest songs for Nixon. But back to that image of Nixon shaking hands with Elvis And His Big Belt Buckle. My mind goes back to my colleague at Maricopa, physics teacher David Weaver. [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] Always a trailblazer in teaching and teaching with technology, he was actually the first faculty I met on the job. He was the one who latched onto the web early in 1994 when I started talking about it. David claims (and I have no reason to doubt) is that he made the first college Physics Department web page. There's no record, since it was so early, it predates the Internet Archive. But... and I always forget the connection- that very first web page featured this very image of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley, and a very reasonable connection between the photo and the field of physics. Maybe Strange Forces? I will have to ask him to fill in my gaps. But this is how the web and my mind both work, one things leads to another to another and to another and back again and elsewhere. All at once. And next thing you know, it's Nixon and Elvis. Are you stressed, tired in the middle of your semester? Imagine your classrooms, campus, students not even sure if they have water, electricity, food, much less internet, just because the place they live was twice in the path of hurricanes. Imagine you are a citizen of the United States of America and hear its leader blame you for this problem, and not delivering a fraction of the aid seen in Texas and Florida. Imagine your syllabus when, as university professor teacher, your are hoping just to contact students, and figure out how to continue classes. Imagine. Like several of my colleagues, I have been very worried about our friend, colleague Antonio Vantaggiato (@avunque), and relieved when he was finally able to message us that he was okay. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918874554826665984 Antonio has been a generous soul in our field, arranging for me a slot at the TEDx event he organized plus a month long fellowship he arranged for me at Universidad del Sagrado Corazon. I don't think he bumped into Zuck's avatar. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918197863057907714 A few people have been asking how we can help, and Antonio is working to come up with some needs and suggestions. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918884158503604225 https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918884158503604225 As a very small thing I thought we could do now, I suggested we start a campaign of mailing postcards to he and his students just to say, that unlike our President.... we care. [caption id="attachment_65218" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Send a postcard to Antonio and hist students at Universidad de Sagrado Corazon[/caption] It's really simple. Do you know what the postage is to mail to Puerto Rico? Easy, the same as mailing something to me in Arizona or some clown in Washington DC. You seek, Puerto Rico is in the United States of America (someone mail that to the clown). That is 34 cents to mail from the USA to the USA. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918173234197159936 So I am asking as many people as possible to send a We Care About Puerto Rico postcard message to: Universidad del Sagrado Corazon Attn A. Vantaggiato Computer Science PO BOX 12383 San Juan PR 00914-8505 Also, some things Antonio and I have talked about: We will plan a DS106 Daily Create on Wednesday October 18 as another way to send a message of care. Ask people to tweet messages of support with #care4sagrado and/or any of his course tags: #inf103 or #inf115 or #inf1034 or #inf1037 As Antonio teaches his courses via blog syndication http://inf103.com/ and http://inf115.com/ (where you can already see some posts like Rebuilding after Maria), he's thinking about setting a way people could blog messages to his students via RSS feeds We are thinking about doing a podcast / storytelling project about teaching and learning under these conditions These are small, but as Antonio and his university develop their continuation plans, we will wait until he can share some more specific needs of his students. In my month in Puerto Rico, I experienced an overwhelming amount of friendliness, generosity, and spirit despite what were challenging conditions before the Hurricane. And I am horrified by the tone and lack of empathy our President is sending out; he does not speak for me. I'd like to think a pile of postcards might let our friends and fellow US citizens in Puerto Rico know that others feel like me. As I was scrambling to find a first card to send, I ony had a few left from some old movie postcards I bought last year. But the one I did pull was for the movie El Puente de Waterloo (The Waterloo Bridge) -- so with some editing via Sharpee pen, I want to declare it as part of a Bridge of Care to Puerto Rico. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/918938723273736192 I am drafting this post using a tool I rarely use for blogging: This tool choice might change. The current setting is Cori and seated in soft chairs settled in the middle of a small creek, water rushing beneath our seats and over our toes. It's cold, rather refreshing on a day when it is more than 30°C out in the full sun. Here though, the birds, bugs, butterflies hover and go about their business. Nestled in a crease in the hills of Southern Saskatchewan that defy your stereotyped picture of prairie, this perennial creek nourishes a lush pine forest. Firs and aspen hundreds of feet high loom above .Wild roses, raspberries and numerous purple, yellow, red flowers I am still learning are within sight. I don't write enough about Cori and I here in the blog (well the blogging itself has slowed, insert excuses here). You can infer correctly the immense happiness in our photos in flickr and more in Instagram. Shared photos is in the story of our meeting, but I have done a disservice by not writing as much of the us that is the us we relish and even marvel at the odds that there is us. There's been little let up of life's intensities since the pandemic "closed" much in March. It was not a surprise here; we both had been doom scrolling news since January with news from China, South Korea, Iran, Italy - there was no way that North America would avoid this (orange head delusionists tried). We started stocking up on food supplies in early February. I have in our back shed to large jugs with maybe 20 liters of fuel "just in case". I got a last withdrawal of cash, thinking it would be handy (not really thinking of how useless it would be). I always feel better with a few stashes of cash. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1287467132670771200 We did a lot of worrying how and when my step-daughter would get home from UBC, where Jessy Lee would miss the end of her last semester, and likely we would not be traveling there in May for graduation. We had all kinds of plans, who might risk flying, who would be able to drive, who might need to drive with the spare fuel cans. As it turns out, Jessy Lee as she does so well, organized a quick pack up, an early exit from her lease, an intense rush to pack everything (and leave some furniture) into a rented SUV, and drive across two provinces with minimal contact. This was no one's plans before. Before. Since then we have been Team Family, Jessy Lee doing our in town errands (me being Type 1 diabetic means avoid as much public contact). I've not been in Safeway so long I forget what aisles have what items (I kind of like grocery shopping, well I don't mind it). Oh our household has expanded by one more with Jessy Lee's adoption of an adorable kitten named Mags. We managed the dog/cat interface, and even beyond our wildest hopes, Felix and Mags are like best buddies. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50157065472 2020/366/207 Felix and Mags Lounging Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Cori's school year, like most, is at best crudely defined by the word "pivot". Both for her high school teaching and her class t University of Regina, she did whatever possible to teach and reach as she does so well (tutoring students via a distance of the hood of the car, running a read-a-thon). https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49934283456 2020/366/142 Starting the All Night Read flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Whatever we associated with that tired word "normal" is now grainy, faded snapshots in photo albums held in place with yellowed scotch tape. And we read the stats and news and announcements daily (more than daily likely), sigh. I frankly no longer recognize the country south of here I called home for 55 years. Or maybe it revealed itself to what I failed to see. I have had more stretches of doom and gloom and feeling mired than ever, and Cori has been more than just steadfast in being in this with me. She buoys me daily. But the us we have, our home, the feeling of not being alone in this, is the glint of light coming across the horizon. My own work has gotten super overloaded after a thin stretch of work as the pandemic opened, with now 3 concurrent major projects, plus 3 more running in the small spaces in between. I've not blogged much of them, and my SPLOT tinkering has been mostly put aside as well (unless I can wedge them into work). And I cannot say my focus and efficiency has been anything in sight if laser like. As Cori and I say when we glance up from news-- "effing pandemic". So here we sit now, in a creek, far from it all. No internet unless we walk up a hill. No news scanning No sighing over WTFJHT. With Cori I have a personal universe, we call it Ursa, the constellation hanging over our home, in sight during our night walks. In all that was terrible over the last 4 months, we've been doing what we love, turning our golf course grass yard into a wild prairie oasis, long grass in the back. We removed a large swath of sod our front, put down a patio of 100 year old brick, built a privacy fence, planted sage, wildflowers, roses, and just about finished building a split rail fence made from old field posts given to us by one of Cori's former students (who we got to see get married a few weeks ago, a socially distanced affair out in a field). Our trees are thriving and will hopefully be a small forest in a few years. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49767179518 All Along the Fence Line flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) We have our regular sunset walks, out the front door, across a field we call "ours", out the gravel road lined with wild roses, meeting up with the local horses (all named "Bob") and the odd llamas. We have our backyard with comfortable deck and a firepit for our home campfire. But Cori and I have not had any time away. Save one weekend for our anniversary, we've been at home. So now we have these 4 days carved away to do what we love and for four days, have no lists or agendas. We set up a campsite, our chairs, our books, our notebooks, our camera. It's a different feel of time. Our conversations often turn to the marvel of the odds that we would have met, much less found such an unimagined kind of fit with each other. I said on our drive out to where we are, "It was like our souls messaged each other before we did." Loving you Cori, is all I can want/need. And together, we can take on anything that comes our way. Meshing lives, floods, a malfunctioned fireplace, and yes, an effing pandemic. It's all no match for us, #ursahome. This. Is. Us. Featured Image: A composite of two of my own photos I Love this Woman flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and 2020/366/202 Us flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It has been a loooooong time since I looked at the Demotivational Posters from Despair, which I can remember from way back when the web was young and we spun HTML by hand. For a lover of sarcasm, this is one of the highest art forms, taking potshots at those motivational posters the PHBes put up in the office to "inpsire" your widget production. For some lost brain neuron snappage, I peeked back and plucked a few fun ones: Intimidation: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent, but you'd be a fool to withhold that from your superiors. Nothing like being the BIG dog! I should just end the post with this as a title. Leave 'em guessing, right? It was appropriate today started reading an utterly brilliant essay by Parimal Satyal, Rediscovering The Small Web (thanks to Jay Hoffman): Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting.https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/ I've spent like 30 minutes trying to pull the best quote, but read the whole darn thing. I'm going to use that small web handle, maybe even #hashtag it, a nice back nod to small pieces loosely joined. That reading set the table for maybe the best meeting title I ever entered into my calendar. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1287814063490097152 This tale weaves back to 2007, when that small web was still present. During the summer of that year, I was prepping workshops for a fall speaking tour across Australia (every major city in 2 weeks), and as the story is told, a listen to a Paul Simon concert set the stage for 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story. I rode that pony for a long time. I cannot pinpoint when or how during that summer when I was looking at any kind of web site that could be used to tell the story of me and my dog in multimedia format, that I came across the most silly and unlikely example- Blabberize. Or give him a go right here. The frivolity of Blabberize hit you right away at the front page- when you pressed "play", the alpaca's mouth flapped in proportion to the audio of a most unlikely, yet excited, over the top, East Indian accent boasting about "the most exciting technology of 2007." It was simple- upload an image of a face, use the tools to define the mouth area, and how far it should move, and upload an audio. And it was quite ridiculous. If you stopped there. I found examples later of more interesting ways students and teachers put it to use. It became one of my favorite things to include in my 50+Ways presentations. At one of my workshops, an administrator relayed how she put Blabberize to use-- during the workshop-- to remotely deal with a troublesome student back at her school. As time went by, I did less of these talks, most of the 50+Ways tools died, disappeared to the Island of Dead Tools, even the site where this and much of my other content lived, wikispaces, shit the web bed and disappeared, leaving a trail of broken links I am still fixing. I lost track of the alpaca. Until August, 2018, when the alpaca tweeted me! https://twitter.com/Blabberize/status/1030343036168036352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1030343036168036352%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcogdogblog.com%2F2018%2F08%2Fthe-internet-cant-be-that-bad%2F I did download the app, but admit I did not do much with it. You know, I was BUSY. And the app was a bit cumbersome to figure out. Since then, I see the alpaca sometimes favoriting tweets or mentioning me. It's kind of nice having a friendly alpaca as a follower. Then last week, I got a DM asking to meet up! How could I not be excited. In preparation, I thought it worthy to update the iOS app, and give it a try. It's a step above the web version, 2d on a screen- on the iOS platform, the "actors" you create become augmented reality figures in your videos. Here is my crude demo: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1288267298877272064 So today was the day to meet the alpaca and I finally got to talk via zoom to Mo Kakwan, the creator (and also the voice) behind Blabberize. I even got a fancy custom waiting room! Mo was kind enough to record the audio- we missed some in the middle and the end, and his audio has a bit of weird echo, but here is our conversation. Mo shared the origin story, how he had an opportunity in 2007 to be part of a Yahoo Hackathon event. He brought his group this idea of a "talking postcard", but they never seemed excited, and in fact abandoned him on the last night. Too bad, because his first demo stole the show! I forget when Mo said that was, but I think it was early in that summer of 2007. He had some interest, and put together a web site. Those were the days before cloud hosting, so literally he was adding server boxes to handle demand. I can't remember if I heard about Blabberize on twitter or maybe I came across one of the early stories on it (e.g, Mashable in July 2007). I know I made the Blabberize version of my Dominoe story September 11, 2007- why? Because Blabberize is still alive! #smallweb! It lives at https://blabberize.com/view/id/6943 And I first presented it in Hobart, Tasmania on October 15, 2007 (more #smallweb). What I did not know was the most avid use of Blabberize over time, and what kept it afloat, was educators. Mo described how his parents, his colleague's parents, everyone who worked on it seemed to have a link to a teacher. Thus there is an educator program at Blabberize. Mo also described his dream was always to do an AR version of Blabberize, how there was early attempts in Flash, that got killed when Steve Jobs squeezed flash out, and how the AR kit in iOS enabled a rebuilding of the platform, and focusing on HTML5 made it outlive the Flash demise-- including all of the old content, which they kept alive, and still works 13 years later. Mo shared as well the newest feature, to create Hello Blabbers- or Blabberize messages that can be sent shared via QR code or Augmented reality markers, so they will pop up an appear on screen. This made me think a bit of the old Zooburst tool (dead) that was once in the mix. Just as a fun tangent, when I tried to find info on Zooburst, the first link I got was a 2010 review of it by one Audrey Watters, who went on to bigger stuff. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1288600460794851331 Mo and I bantered more on web development, storytelling, education, and likely more I am forgetting. As much fun is it to keep saying "alpaca" repeatedly, it's more of a thankful appreciation for the spirit of people like Mo who don't let their web ideas just shrivel up and die, but also keep advancing them. Alpacas definitely ride the #smallweb. I do. Will you? Featured Image: A composite of the Blabberize Alpaca and my own logo (designed by Bryan Mathers) and shared under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. It's more than tattered and a while since I blabbed about the spurious nature of online practices of attribution. I was somewhat inspired here by interesting analysis of Why I Attribute made by Stephen Downes (who's busy biking somewhere, why do I need to write this?) based on a simple series of online posts/shares that goes down a layer signal to noise thought stream. I remain more on the ABA -- Always Be Attributing, more on the side of gratitude. But ya can't expect it at all. This unraveling came from the report from pixsy report that lets me know of places my flickr photos are matched "out there". I know pixsy's rap is bad because nefarious entities use it to set up take down scams. I only check it to peek at where my images appear, just for my own curiousity, and I never click any buttons to harass someone because, heck, I give away all my photos under mostly a CC0 license. It just get's interesting, and top of the report tonight was this fun photo of Felix in the first year I had him, with a tattered toy in his mouth. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/26139294803 2016/366/121 "Damn, I am Cute" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And look, I am ridiculous because (a) I am attributing my own photo, I don't HAVE to do that, right; and (b) It's shared into the public domain where the rules say I don;t have to attribute. But I do because it puts the practice out there. If I just follow rules, I set an example of non-attributing. ABA. I digress. My head swam when Pixsy reported matching this photo on 536 web sites. With CC0 for me it will always be 0s all the way across- Cases, Income, Takedowns. That's not what I'm after here. And sure enough I can find Felix and his chew toy on a blog "My Dog Killed a Raccoon! 4 Tips on What to Do Next", a facebook post by Best Buddy Trainer, and on it goes. My photo, all the way down. I can't count, but pretty much all results are unattributed, or have useless ones like attributing to other photo sites. My heart is not broken, I am not seeking the credit, I am more curious in the habits people do when making their web pages. Heck, actually I am proud of how far that cute photo has flown. That people will socur the web, find the photo somewhere, and say, "that's the perfect photo for my post!". And it goes even more wider on a reverse image search in Google, where Felix appears on "There's No Such Thing as Negative and Positive "Reinforcement" , All You Need to Know About Resource Guarding (And How to Reduce it), Fast Facts on Foreign Body Ingestion, and out to where I tire of scrolling. No matter what you do with images, or the way you license them, if you put 'em on the web, they will get used like this. And you know what, I'm really okay, because it just shows how vast and wide the web is, you think you see a lot, but you don't. And if you think you can really "control" what other people do with your stuff? Good luck. My mode has been to just give up on it, and enjoy the weirdness of it. Yes, it's weird to see my dog's photo on 500+ web pages, but I get the better end of the deal. I get to be with the dog. Featured Image: My dog, my photo, go ahead and slap it on your web page! 2016/366/121 "Damn, I am Cute" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I've had the itch for a while to do another in my series of WordPress themes based on HTML5Up templates. Here is the first demo version of WP-Eventually, built up the original HTML one that calls for hand coding. The compelling feature of the original is the subtle sliding images in the background. I've used it for a few sites, including the opening site for an Open Ed presentation and a demo site used for an Ontario Extend Domain Camp activity for learning how to install static sites in your domain. I find the HTML5Up themes easy to modify for my uses, but digging into manual HTML is not everyone's cup of tea. And the tricky thing about the Eventually theme is that the place where the images are defined is buried in the javascript code loaded into the theme (that means burrowing down to /assets/js/main.js and once even in there, knowing how to edit an array, maybe to add new files? // Slideshow Background. (function() { // Settings. var settings = { // Images (in the format of 'url': 'alignment'). images: { 'images/bg01.jpg': 'center', 'images/bg02.jpg': 'center', 'images/bg03.jpg': 'center' }, // Delay. delay: 6000 }; Without editing this for your own, you can only change out the default images the theme provides and you are limited to 3. To make this work, I wanted to use the part of the WordPress Customizer where you can upload header images; these are typically done to be a pool of images a theme can use, even randomized like we do on the Virtually Connecting site. So first I found a tip on how to access all of the images that have been uploaded as header images. That's pretty simple. But I was also interested in having the theme come with a default set of images. This came from a WPBeginner post on adding them to the Twenty Ten theme, which tells you how old the tip is (and like WordPress, it still works). My theme defines four my default (all are CC0 images from my flickr, because I can). function eventually_default_header_images() { return array( 'aspen' => array( 'url' => get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/headers/aspen.jpg', 'thumbnail_url' => get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/headers/aspen-thumbnail.jpg', /* translators: header image description */ 'description' => __( 'Aspen', 'eventually' ) ), 'open' => array( 'url' => get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/headers/open.jpg', 'thumbnail_url' => get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/headers/open-thumbnail.jpg', /* translators: header image description */ 'description' => __( 'Openness', 'eventually' ) ), 'through' => array( 'url' => get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/headers/through.jpg', 'thumbnail_url' => get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/headers/through-thumbnail.jpg', /* translators: header image description */ 'description' => __( 'Through road', 'eventually' ) ), 'turntable' => array( 'url' => get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/headers/turntable.jpg', 'thumbnail_url' => get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/headers/turntable-thumbnail.jpg', /* translators: header image description */ 'description' => __( 'Turntable', 'eventually' ) ), ); } This is called into action on a function hooked into the after_theme_setup. I got these parts working, but then figured out there was two ways to get these images as arrays; one is the array provided from the tip above if images had already been uploaded. But what about the first set up? This would be empty. So I have a helper function that first sees if there are any uploaded images; if not, it sends the default set the theme defines. function eventually_get_backgrounds() { // first look for uploaded header images $backgrounds = get_uploaded_header_images(); // if none found use the defaults if ( !$backgrounds ) $backgrounds = eventually_default_header_images(); $headers = array(); // construct array with urls as index, format used by template foreach ($backgrounds as $image) { $headers[$image['url']] = 'center'; } return ($headers); } It returns a rather funky kind of associative array where the keys are the urls for the images and the values are a crop setting of center. That's because it's what the Eventually theme uses in Javascript. And this is where that little bit of experimentation for another project paid off- that using wp_localize_script means I could pass the arrays I was generating in PHP to the Eventually Javascript function, without really needing to rewrite it too much. My theme sends the script this data (after testing that a PHP associative array ends up in a similar object structure in JavaScript). As I do in these themes, I enqueue the HTMLUp scripts, in this case I inserted a function to send it this array im a global JS object known as theTransporter wp_register_script( 'eventually-main' , get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/assets/js/main.js', array( 'jquery' ), false, true ); // send to the script an array of the header images wp_localize_script( 'eventually-main', 'theTransporter', array( 'backgrounds' => eventually_get_backgrounds() ) ); wp_enqueue_script( 'eventually-main' ); which means the hard coded defining images above now is much shorter, and dynamic: // Slideshow Background. (function() { // Settings. var settings = { // Images (in the format of 'url': 'alignment', in this theme they are transported in from WordPress). images: theTransporter.backgrounds, // Delay. delay: 6000 }; If that's too much code, here is the interface for adding images i n the Customizer. Like the other themes in the mix, this one makes use of a Font Awesome 4 Menus plugin (the original one is abandoned and frozen with the Font Awesome 4.7 menus, I forked it and made a version that works with the version 5 ones) to enable a social media set of icon links that is managed as a WordPress menu. The managing of the theme is done in the WordPress Customizer; as mentioned earlier images are uploaded there to become the set of ones shown in the background. I also create a means to run a site in different "modes" for where the content comes from: I originally thought of making the main content be an editor in the customizer, even removing Posts completely. But then it seemed more useful to have the site's front come from Posts. So only one post is shown on front, the most recent. There are options for how one could run the site: The latest post appears all by itself (shown above). This makes for a simple one screen site, like a landing page / calling card / event splash. Or if it was content that was updated, like announcements, the site is updated with just adding a new post.Paging Through Posts. This works the same, except with simple arrow navigation links so visitors could step through previous content. There might be a use case for stepping through a series of screens. Random. This was neat to toss in. It's the same as the first option, there's only one place to go on the site, but this could be a collection of things like quotes, trivia, historical facts, and they are all posts. When the site loads, you get one at random. So Posts run the show. There is a Page template, so you could create more content that is linked from the front (there are no built in menus beyond the social media icon one). A few other nice tweaks in the Customizer as I play with the Range control in the customizer (why the BLEEP does it not display the range values? I've seen some hacks worth trying.). Sometimes the images behind seem dark, so there is a slider to change the opacity: And there is also one to control the size of the social icons, this ought to fold into my other themes soon. I think it's pretty nifty, and at this point, I have it pretty well sorted how to set these themes up using HTML5up templates. You can find the others hanging in my Github home http://cogdog.github.io/#wpcards (itself using one of the themes). Three of them are available to Reclaim Hosting customers as one click installs from their cpanel. What I like about doing these in WordPress is that it makes them much more accessible for others to use without needing to manually edit HTML, but I am able to extend the capability of what can be done in a site. Got a template you'd like to see as a WordPress theme? I'm available for hire! Tips accepted too. Featured Image: 2014/365/109 Out of the Shell / Into the World flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license It's some very small things in web sites that clearly point out to me that they were (a) designed by programmers; or (b) never run through usability testing by humans. Here is today's morsel... An email notification arrived telling of a new message posted to some discussion forum I cannot recall visiting for a project I barely remember. I really hate notifications that just say "Something new has been posted by Kerry Polangalog, click here to read". It would take no overhead to provide the text of the posting or at least a 500 character snippet. How do I judge whether it is worth my time to click to a site, log in, and read what old Kerry has said? What if it is just a "I agree!" posting? How motivated will I be to have spent the effort to get that? But wait, that is just the pre-amble, not the bad design part. I get to the login page, it requires a username and password. Have I ever been here? I try some of my usual combinations. No. I try my email address, often it is the user name (though it helps when sites like flickr let you know clearly that your username IS your email). Nope, the form field does not take enough characters. But no worries, there is a "Forgot Your Password" [moron?] button. Now is where it gets stupid: The password recovery field not only asks me for an email address, like most well designed sites use, so it can just email the password or reset it if it finds your address in the database. Nooooooo, this one requires that I enter my username and fails to work without it. Now, if its been months since I've been here, and I cannot remember my password, what are the odds I remember my username too? Do you really need a PhD in cognitive psychology to sense this? Bad dog. The end around does not work either- I try creating a new account and it tells me one exists already for me. So now, I have to poke around to find a tech-support email contact, and say, "Excuse me, but how do I get in the door?" Needless to say, at this point, I have virtually no interest in what old Kerry has posted. Yes, this is small potatoes, and maybe I am petty, but it is some of these small annoyances that trip up people not immersed in technology. If even the minimal amount of usability testing was done, it should have surfaced this as an issue. The sites that have done any amount of design and user-center thinking feature both a "lost your password" function and a "Forgot your username" recovery method. 24 hours later Update: My gut was correct; all the effort to log in was a TFWT (Totaol Friggin' Waste of Time) on irrelevant topic posts. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yeah, I go an iPad with the coolest wallpaper available. Heck, I'll share it with anyone who wants it. Frankly, I am uttering a collective yawn at the irrational exuberance at one end and the irrational vitriol at the other of the iPad spectrum. It's just static filled noise to me. For me, you cannot understand a technology by making your opinions based on other people's opinions. You have to get your paws on it. So I have to say in your hand, not even powered on, the iPad is seductive. It is much smaller, thinner, lighter than I imagined. It's thinner than my iPhone. It's thinner, smaller, and close to the weight of my recent issued of Wired, and its a freaking computer. The battery life is astounding. The quality of photos and video is stunning. The responsiveness of the orientation change when you turn it is immediate (as apposed to my iPhone which I am always wrist whipping to turn to my desired orientation). I've been reading eBooks in Kindle app and Stanza on the iphone, and its flipping pages every other paragraph, but with the iPad, I get whole paragraphs. And actually, for my hunt and peck typing style, the keyboard is quite fine (and hold the shift key, you can send messages in ALL BAVA CAPS) Still, I will use my laptop for the bulk of my work, and for work related travel, I will be taking the laptop, the iPad, and the iPhone (on vacation, the laptop can stay home.. maybe- I will still want it for daily photo editing). I never saw it as a laptop replacement. But I can see at conferences, leaving the laptop at the hotel if I am just surfing or tweeting. It's another piece in the spectrum of mobile technologies, which to me is about being mobile with tech, not about phones. Last November, when I was doing NaNoWriMo, I could so see writing with the iPad on the plane, rather than hunched over with my wrists bent at angles cause Big Leroy in the seat ion front of me is leaned all the way back. For all the crying and moaning about how locked and closed and limited it is-- the thing just came out. The first iPhones were extremely limited in apps and capabilities. Three years later? The iPad at 1.0 is hardly an endpoint. I did not get it to watch Netflix or download glitzy versions of ailing newspapers. I want to understand what it might mean as a publishing platform, and if it can offer something new for presenting media and information. I'm working now on getting our publications in ePub format and looking to see what others come along (I am less interested in iPad only forms). But I am in no place to be drawing the sweeping conclusions of gloom or glory others are. We are not even close to knowing what people can do with it until they get to do things with it. There are, like most technologies, quirks I'd hope will change. Most if not all I would guess others have already ID-ed. A few I noted in 2 days of light use. Content transfer sucks. I hate having to move things through iTunes sync. It hardly makes sense to be the Everyperson's media platform, if Everyperson needs a computer with iTunes to use the thing. I would hope someday it can be used by someone w/o requiring iTunes on a computer. There are apps that talk to desktop apps though a local IP addresses. Apps are pricier than iPhone ones, and sometimes you need both different versions. That said, there are a decent number of free apps, and the app tidal wave has just started. Where is the basic apps for writing w/o having to buy one? Oh, "Notes" which after al this time does the most squirrely method to syncs- with the Mail.app on the computer, which I dont use. Every book or magazine issue as its own app is dumb. can you say Padtop clutter? The iTunes Store Organization for Books is .... well fill in an expletive. Where do you find books in iTunes Store? There is no "books" tab. Why, silly, they are listed in the App store (that makes no sense at all). Worse, when you go to the books section of the App store area, what you get are a mixture of book titles and titles for apps that work with books. Its hard to tell whats a book. I hope they talk to a librarian and get some decent organizational structure in there. I don't have any regard for people who are hurling insults and taunts at those who are exploring a new platform, or the glee hards who are predicting it will save or change some industry. I am not finding any of the posturing from the ends to be very constructive to understanding. Sure, express your views but respect mine, and don't hoist your position so much as a "truth" to brow beat others with it who may just want to extend that natural human trait of curiosity. No device makes me or keeps me from being creative-- creativity is what we do with our things, not any force they exert on us. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe DISCLAIMER: This is mostly a brain dump. Little coherent ideas emerge. Typos will occur. You have been warned. This session I participated in at Open Education 2012 was proposed by Julià Minguillón titled "Analyzing and supporting interaction in complex scenarios: the case of DS106" - the idea as Julià outlined it was to try and find useful patterns and meaning in the large amount of networked activity that happens in this universe. I've been interested in this for a while but ow sure how to wrap my arms around it. Because of the syndication model set up in our site, we have essentially a copy of every blog post that the site has subscribed to since before January 2011 - over 20,000 posts (unlike those other high priced enterprise systems, our open source fueled site actually keeps all of its content). Within the wordpress database is a lot of key information- when and how often activity happens, what kind of link relationships there might be, possibly an ability to connect to twitter or commenting actions as well. But more curiously, the only way we represent the things that go on here are the old school reverse chronological listing of posts, something that is a river when there are 500 blogs the site attends to. One thing I would like to know is if there is a more visual or meaningful way to represent all of this on the front of the web site? As Julià wrote in the abstract: ... visualizing all the activity around DS106 is not a trivial issue. Interaction in such a complex scenario implies receiving information from multiple channels and maintaining a personal collection of resources, as the course has a very flexible structure so students can focus on a particular subject according to their interests (i.e. visual assignments exposed through flickr) and/or enter and leave the course at any moment. Regarding people, maintaining a network of colleagues implies maintaining multiple identities through the ds106 site in itself, but also twitter, blogs, and so. The totality of DS106 is a very complex learning scenario which is the result of hundreds of personal infrastructures hooked up to the ds106 blog. We would like to discuss how interactions in this networking infrastructure can be analyzed in order to support all the elements (students, resources, comments, assignments, etc.) so additional services can be devised and implemented without interfering with the natural flow of the course. With only 22.5 minutes, it was a quick journey through this universe- here is the prezi we used (more…) This was not the post I thought I was writing. But as blogging does, I went in to write one thing, and in looking for some information I was digging.... Not that I gaze at the blog stats a lot, but my post is will be about the silly posts that end up getting noticed (not that it is a goal). So I went into the JetPack stats, and wound my way to the summary of top viewed posts, a screenshot shows it but is not useful. WHAT ABOUT THOSE LINKS! [caption id="attachment_64977" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Look at my stats! That's all I can do, you can't.[/caption] But it's there in my Dashboard as a table. View Source... nope, it is some API / javascript / jquery / json / jujubee voodoo. Here is a trick, in Chrome, I go to File -> Save As and use the option to save as Web Page Complete What I get is an HTML file and all the other junk it needs to render on my browser as a local file, graphics, javascript, plus other crumbs and feathers. [caption id="attachment_64978" align="aligncenter" width="760"] A local copy of the stats page from my Wordpress Dashboard[/caption] So I open the main HTML file and start looking to see how I can peel out the Wordpress interface... nah, that's convoluted. But I can see the entire HTML table of the part I want: [caption id="attachment_64979" align="aligncenter" width="760"] That's my stats, in an HTML table![/caption] In my text editor, the ever beloved BBEdit, I can click the sideways triangle and fold up that entire HTML table, and copy it. Boom! [caption id="attachment_64980" align="aligncenter" width="760"] One click and that 400+ row HTML table is neatly folded![/caption] I paste that into a blank text document. There are a few rows I can see worth deleting, like the stats count for just the home page. I can, like above, find the row, fold it, and delete. Then I notice something else I will need to change- that little icon for the stats next to the account? Well in my local saved archive, it references a local image file. This HTML will not work! So I just find that image file in my archive, upload it to my server as http://cogdogblog.com/images/stats-icon.png. Then a global search for src="./Site Stats ‹ CogDogBlog — WordPress_files/stats-icon.png" and replace with src="http://cogdogblog.com/images/stats-icon.png". I have an HTML table that is clean. I can then create a new page, and pop that HTML in it, Voila see the Top of the Dog House! [caption id="attachment_64981" align="aligncenter" width="760"] This is now a public page with real living links[/caption] Now this is all manual, and if Tom Woodward was here he would be tsk tsking me into fetching the live data... but for the purposes of that blog post, this is Good Enough. And this is how I get distracted arou--- oh wait what if I do a ..... Featured image: 2012-10-22 Digging a Hole flickr photo by Eselsmann™ shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license The You Show has left the gate with our first week of activity, and as usual (well twice in a row), Brian and I return in our dual roles as hosts and back stage techs. In The You Show and the Shape of Stories (Episode 1) we are setting up the activities for Unit 1. Part of my weird plan is to have the elements of our show gradually improve, so the hand drawn logo from episode 0 Purposefully rough sketched logo is now slightly improved as drawn on the computer. I did this by doing some edge tracing filters in Photoshop on the graphic I have been using around the site (the words superimposed on an icon of a movie camera) sketeched logo now as digital file Again, we narrated our intro banter (recording in the iTalk app on my iPad) and used this in iMovie over a sound track Brian found on the Free Music Archive So the logo improves a bit, and we get some better music. This section in iMovie looks like iMovie Tracks for opening sequence The still image dragged into the track can be extended as needed. It seemed a tad long, so I split the clip and used some filters to invert the colors, and the puzzle translation to create a cheesy effect. The audio settings on our narration is set to lower the volume of the music — “lower volume of other tracks” is essentially “ducking” meaning that when there is sound in the primary track, the background is automatically reduced. I rely always on Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant segment on the shape of stories and so I wanted to bring him in somehow. I got this flash of an idea to have Vonnegut’s video be there as a background using green screen effect, and thus we set up in the Open Learning Innovation lab (we meaning Jon Fulton did) a back screen Green Screen set up More generally known as Chroma Key, the green screen (sometimes blue) is the classic technique you see weather forecasters use, as well as in movies. Everything filmed with the camera that is the single key color (green) becomes transparent in editing to another video layer. So with our setup we can be seen standing in front of Kurt Vonnegut. I’m glad Brian is such a good sport for being goofy- to play on our ideas as somewhat clueless hosts, Brian mistakes my email and shows up wearing a green shirt, which means that his chest will be ghost like in the video. As an added touch, Jon kicked in the big green bow tie. In iMovie, the background video, Vonnegut, goes in the main track, and the video of us in the green screen goes above, and it’s mode is set as Green Screen in the Video Overlay settings I just noticed there are some “clean up” tools I could have used to fine tune the overlay (such as when Jon, filming the side footage with my iPhone, accidentally gets his hand in the shot). It worked quite well IMHO. I use some splits for the segments- while Brian and I talk, I mute the audio on Kurt Vonnegut’s track, and then switch this when we turn around to listen in. This was actually my first time green screen editing, and was unsure how the scale and positioning would match up. Either I had a good hunch or I got lucky, but it works. Brian and I continually stood there in front of the screen doing ridiculous gesturing to use as footage when we switch to the view of us as the techs, using Jon’s (real tech) office as the “back room”. Again, I use my open laptop as a place to use the Picture in Picture overlay to have a small clip of Brian and I on the green screen appear on a video monitor. Jon offered to hand hold the iPad I was using to video with, and there’s some movement, but it adds to the amateur quality I was aiming for. In hindsight, I should have positioned the laptop to be more square on, since in iMovie, the picture in picture is pretty much a rectangle. Second scene, the back room commentary I try to get fancy on the transition to get my last sentence in audio to come as if from the screen, than the green screen track audio is muted so we can here the techies talk. We then switch back for the last bits, and close out with a credits sequence Closing Credits I like using the “Pull Focus” title which makes the backing video go out of focus, and we have the music track as an outro. Once again, we did all of our audio / video sequences in one take. I think I might start adding a “One Take” productions to the videos. This was sketched out ahead of time as a script / flow in a google doc, but its rather minimal, it just hirs the highlights. I am thinking as well, that was we go, the one stage Brian and Alan will get more savvy and the back stage techs will get less critical– so not only does the production quality evolve, but also the skills and perspectives of the people in the video. I really love doing these, though it is somewhat a chunk of extra time that may not be mission critical. It took less than an hour to shoot the video, and the editing was maybe 2.5 hours, some what helped since I had a flow from the first video. It will be interesting to see if we can keep up the pace. But this is your back stage narrator, signing out. 2009/365/58: One Turntable by cogdogblog posted 27 Feb '09, 10.38pm MST PST on flickr Baylor University Ray I. Riley Digitization Center. I got a nice tour today of their equipment. See www.baylormag.com/story.php?story=006232 This is a special audio lab set up for the The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project contentdm.baylor.edu/cdm4/index_03gospel.php?CISOROOT=/03... Gardner Campbell, my host, had a spiritual moment talking audio tech with the sound engineer here. I had a fantabulous time here at Baylor University today, including tours with thew facilities of the Electronic Library team, and notable the high end equipment being put to use in the Ray I. Riley Digitization Center. We got to see some of the existing labs, electronic classrooms, video/graphic production suite, video conferencing rooms. It was no big deal, but apparently getting access to the wireless network requires an appeal to a higher power I lack. Gardner heroically submitted paper work, I showed my ID to a nice lady who tried to go the extra mile, but in the end, I could not get authorized (spinning discs of network access) Luckily my ALLtel wireless access card performed like a champ. It registers a Spock-like eyebrow raise when the folks at Mashable.com are wowed by a new tool, so check out Tag Galaxy. This is a visually engaging tool to explore flickr photos by tags. That alone does not say much, but what this site does is create a planetary like display for showing how tags are related, and the interface invites you to fly in deeper and deeper. So in a Tag Galaxy not very long ago (yesterday) and not far away... You start by entering a tag as the beginning of your journey, and immediately you feel some sort of Force: In the center of my planetary flickr system is Arizona, with circling planetoids (size proportional to number of photos in flickr) are ones to explore -Grand Canyon, Tucson, Saguaro, Desert, Sunset, each revolving around the start point (I am not sure of the distance from the center has meaning). So I decided to explore the rocky planet named Saguaro, (roll your "g" softly sah-WAR-ro) Now my system is defined by the photos that have both the tags of "Arizona" and "Saguaro", and I could continue to refine by picking other "planets", but now I choose to explore, and click the center of the solar system. This was cool to watch unfold, and I missed the screen shot that captured it, but the photos of saguaro cacti start flying in and covering the surface of the center body: And more- you can click and drag the orb to rotate in any direction, and then click to see the individual photo. I had a great time exploring the planetary flickr-system. Yes there are a gazillion visual flickr explorers, and this again is another subtle attribute to what happens when a service like flickr opens their data for people to do interesting things with the data. Open, baby, is it. Ever think you could explore your Bb classes this way? That is a galaxy long long long long long long long long long... That image above has more red than blue, but is far from mostly red, or all red. But for the "change" we are all getting in 2017, it might as well be all red. And while Arizona is a "red" state, looking at the tallies from the 2016 Presidential election, the Republican candidate "took" the state with 1,252,401 votes over his opponent's 1,161,167. That is a win, but not a sweeping one. And let's note that write in candidates Robert Buchanan got 56 votes, more than Willie Felix Carter who only got 42, but both of them crushed "Rocky" Roque de la Fuente with 29 or Cherunda Fox who only got 14 votes and poor Michael Corsetti who only got 3 votes (Mom, Dad, and wife?) One of those red dots is my US Representative from Arizona's 4th Congressional District, a rather oddly shape region that stretches almost north to south along the left side of the state. It's a lot of land. From the article in Wikipedia: The current 4th was created after the 2010 census from portions of the old 1st, 2nd, 5th and 5th districts. It is the only district that is not a geographic or demographic successor to one of the districts in the 2003-2013 map. Prior to 2013, the 4th District was a majority-Latino district located entirely in Maricopa County; most of that area is now the 7th District. Things did change a lot in 2013, as that was when the current Representative, Paul Gosar was elected. He was re-elected in 2016 with something like a 70% margin. That's a lot, but it's not 100%. I've been getting his email updates for several years. Generally they could be summed up asL Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Here is a photo of me fishing with veterans. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. Obama sucks. He still has graphics on his web site with Obama illustrated as a thief. I would think he might develop some new material, but he seems to be riding Obama for a while. There is also this highly enhanced image of the border, I guess that is supposed to make us full of fear. The gates are wide open! Brown people are pouring into Arizona! I already wrote of my experience listening to his "teletownhall" which was completely stacked with calls from supporters. The question is-- how is Representative Gosar representing the 4th District? Does he just act on the wishes of the 70% wearing red hats? I do not expect to have much impact in communicating with him, but I do call, send emails, letters, and am looking forward to showing up if he ever makes appearances relatively near me. I was very incensed with the latest child tantrums of our Tweeter in Chief, who not only falsely accused President Obama of wiretapping his penthouse, but had to lop on insults. I had some tiny hope that my Members of Congress, Gosar plus Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain (especially McCain) might hold some amount of respect on the office of the President. So this was my email message to each sent Sunday: While your disagreement and perhaps even dislike of President Obama has been clear, hopefully your patriotism and belief in the American system of government includes a high degree of respect for that office. However, it's current occupant, with all the powers and intelligence resources of the NSA, CIA, and FBI available to him, instead turns to Breitbart "news" to not only level an unsubstantiated accusation at his predecessor, but also uses his platform to hurl insults too. Many of my friends and neighbors here in the Rim Country of Arizona are disgusted by crass behavior if a sitting President. We urge you, as the arm of the US Government to check the powers of the President, to encourage him to act more in a manner that characterizes the dignity of his most powerful position. Please pressure him to stop using a personal twitter account like a petulant child, and to use the official account of his office in the manner of a President the same as 44 men did before him. Yes, his voters sought "change" but that does not justify behavior that tarnishes the position he was elected to. (I also tried Tiny Hands Mail which supposedly sends hand written postcards of what you fill in to your Senators; I sent one to Senator Flake). Believe I have no illusion any of this gets in front of their eyes, but would like to think a volume of message reported by staff ought to have an impact somewhere. Somewhere. I did get a "response" from Representative Gosar, which never acknowledged my message, and was more like: Thanks for your message. Let me ignore it and instead cut and paste several paragraphs of rah rah. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Trump is great. Oh, and Obama sucks. Well, that's my interpretation. you can judge: PAUL A. GOSAR, D.D.S. Fourth District, Arizona 2057 Rayburn House Office Bldg Washington, DC 20515(202) 225-2315 122 N. Cortez St., Ste. 104 Prescott, AZ 86301(928) 445-1683 6499 South Kings Ranch Road, Suite 4 Gold Canyon, AZ 85118(480) 882-2697 220 N. 4th St. Kingman, AZ 86401(928) 445-1683 WWW.GOSAR.HOUSE.GOV COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM SUBCOMMITTEES Interior Information Technology COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES SUBCOMMITTEES Vice Chairman, Water, Power and Oceans Energy and Mineral Resources Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs March 6, 2017 Mr. Alan H. Levine Strawberry, AZ Dear Mr. Levine, Thank you for contacting me regarding President Donald Trump. I appreciate your thoughts on this issue and welcome the opportunity to respond. The 2016 election will be remembered as the year of the silent majority that put a stop to business as usual in Washington D.C. After more than eight years of big government policies from an Administration detached from the actual challenges facing millions of Americans, Donald Trump offered an alternative path forward, fighting to end the status quo and dysfunction in a broken political system. He understood the frustrations shared by millions across this country and ran a commonsense campaign focused on standing up for everyday people. Voters across this country - including in Arizona and particularly in the counties that comprise our district - elected him President as a result. Now that his term has begun, I plan on working closely with the Trump Administration to build a safer America that works for everyone and empowers individual liberty, not big government control. I support his efforts to enforce existing immigration laws that are already on the books to undo the dangerous routine of non-enforcement set by the Obama Administration. President Trump's executive order related to border security and ending sanctuary cities will save American lives and help to finally protect the American people and enforce the rule of law.Further, after the suffocating implications of Obamacare, I look forward to working with the president and Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Tom Price to repeal the disastrous legislation. At last, Congress and the American people have a president who will not turn a blind eye to the staggering premium increases, disappearing healthcare options and plummetingpatient satisfaction that have plagued this beleaguered law. Perhaps most importantly, I will work with the Trump Administration and my colleagues in the House of Representatives to utilize the Congressional Review Act (CRA) and other tools to fight the crippling legacy of unilateral. Obama-era regulations. After eight years where small business owners, farmers, and ranchers saw their bottom lines shrink as more than 600 major job-killing regulations and policies were implemented by the Obama Administration, it is time forcommonsense policy that works for the American people. Despite public outcry and legitimateconstitutional push-back Congress, the Obama Administration consistently jammed through regulations - especially in his waning days as president. These misguided regulations cannot stand and I am hard at work with my colleagues to undo the damage these costly rules have wrought. As the Chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus, I am also pleased to see President Trump tap a variety of knowledgeable Westerners to key cabinet positions. In particular, Iapplauded his selection of former Representative Ryan Zinke, previously a member of the Western Caucus, to the critical position of Secretary of the Interior. This nomination will put a public servant well-versed in land issues in a key post for facilitating cooperation between the federal government and the American West, where nearly half of all land is under federal control. Additionally, President Trump made a wise decision in tapping my fellow Freedom Caucus member Mick Mulvaney, a consistent, principled budget hawk, as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. For too long, our country has turned a blind eye to the growing threat of our enormous, $19 trillion debt - but no longer. We can expect more well-reasoned choices by President Trump as he continues to fill out his cabinet and other advisors. I look forward to working with the Trump Administration to advance common-sense policies that will help make America great again. At the same time, rest assured that I will continue touphold constitutional checks and balances to keep the Executive Branch and all federal government accountable to the American people it serves. Congress must, and will, continue to serve as a check against federal overreach. I fought this consistently under President Obama and will continue to ensure the separation of powers is upheld under President Trump. Our founders wisely set up three distinct branches of government, each responsible for their own sphere of authority and to serve as a check on the other branches. This is a responsibility I take seriously,as the very existence of our Democratic Republic depends on it. I look forward to working alongside my colleagues in the House of Representatives and the Senate to dutifully carry out this responsibility. Again, I appreciate hearing your thoughts and concerns. It is an honor to serve Arizona as part of its congressional delegation. Your suggestions are always welcome, and if I may ever be of assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me. To receive the latest legislative updates and news you can sign up for my e-newsletter at gosar.house.gov. Sincerely, Paul A. Gosar, D.D.S. Member of Congress PG/JA That's funny, I do not recall requesting a stump speech on how great the new President is. Now I know this is done by staffer (with initials "JA"), but this is how my representative communicates. By not even acknowledging the issue I raised. That makes me feel so ____________ (you can fill the blank). I bet if I asked about opening up Government Lands for mining, I'd get a lot of praise. Gosar likes that stuff. Just for fun, I replied: While I appreciate a quick response, I do not appreciate the lack of addressing my message, and instead copy/pasting me your boiler plate campaign rhetoric. That is all smoke. The President's behavior is a stain on the office, and your message tells me you approve. I do not. I imagine at some level many Republicans felt un-heard when Democrats held the numbers. But the glee with which this new regime is sacking, pillaging, and looting our Government is nothing I have lived through before. Sigh. I will continue to keep the flood of messages going, knowing it is as pointless as shouting in a well. But the real work is getting them out of office, and questioning them at every possible opportunity. I wonder what having a listening Representative is like? Or is that a fairy tale all around? Featured Image: "United States House of Representatives 2017" is a Wikimedia Commons image place in the public domain. My self-imposed sentence of hard labor is not over. The next phase of our backyard landscaping project involved a delivery of 20 tons of 3/8 inch minus coral granite on our driveway. This is everything that passes through the finest sieve at the rock quarry (folks in the know just call it "minus"), so it is pretty much sand. Landscaping in arid Arizona should not involve grass (though many people try to replicate Midwest/ East Coast greens here). In the 7 years we have owned our house, we have had two deliveries of crushed granite and one of rounded "river rock" gravel that has been moved by wheel barrow front and back. Where has it gone? This latest effort is meant to provide a more level look to the back-- because of poor drainage we could not extend much of our cement deck, so we needed a more porous surface. So since the big pink pile was dumped Tuesday, my wife and I have spent 2 hours the last 2 nights shoveling and hauling sand. Our neighbor across the street mentioned something about "why break your backs? Just hire some guys at $10 an hour to haul it." The remark has stuck with me-- it's not that we cannot afford to hire help, but we have this silly pride in doing work ourselves. Is that like some old Puritan work ethic? We enjoy the physical exertion, especially after a full day of desk jobs. This has no direct relevance to anything blogged here, but then again, there is something to the "do it hands on" approach rather than taking the easy way out and just paying someone to do the work, be it tons of sand or technology. Or not.... ask my back in a few days. This one ought to be added to the Amazing Stories of Sharing, all enabled via flickr photosharing. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by windsordi Back in December, I posted a photo of some really solid oak that had been split for me (it was like iron) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Di, who is among the most prolific of kind commenting in flickr, was a bit horrified at the thought of my burning the wood- as she does creative things with wood, turning them (literally) into pens: I'm crying right now... as I look at some of the spalting in that gnarly wood, I'm seeing GREAT pen turning opportunities... I've added some notes to a couple of the logs... here's what I'd be doing with them... www.flickr.com/photos/windsordi/5230785038/ Feel like cleaning up a block or two of the wood? (no bark across the border) and I'll send you back a pen? ;-) How could I resist that? I don't want to see a grown creative woman cry! So I picked a log with interesting internal texture, packaged it up, and had it sent o Canada (not, it is not really cheap, but as you see above worth it!) It's really worth looking at her set to see how an ordinary log gets made into a beautiful pen. I am at the Houston airpot now, eager to get back to Strawberry, and hopefully being able to post a photo soon of my new pen. Thanks, Di! And I still have a lot of that wood saved in the shed. Amazing! Leave it to Zeldman to cut Web 2.0 hype to the bone. I relish the bite and fury of the words (plus the beautiful, elegant, Web Standard layout of A List Apart): To you who are toiling over an AJAX- and Ruby-powered social software product, good luck, God bless, and have fun. Remember that 20 other people are working on the same idea. So keep it simple, and ship it before they do, and maintain your sense of humor whether you get rich or go broke. Especially if you get rich. Nothing is more unsightly than a solemn multi-millionaire. To you who feel like failures because you spent last year honing your web skills and serving clients, or running a business, or perhaps publishing content, you are special and lovely, so hold that pretty head high, and never let them see the tears. As for me, I'm cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait? If I read between the yummy sarcastic lines, Zeldman's seeing a bit of dot-com bubble euphoria. It's not at all that what is being created is bad or not worthy, much to the contrary: Well, there are several good things, it seems to me. Some small teams of sharp people"”people who once, perhaps, worked for those with dimmer visions"”are now following their own muses and designing smart web applications. Products like Flickr and Basecamp are fun and well-made and easy to use. That may not sound like much. But ours is a medium in which, more often than not, big teams have slowly and expensively labored to produce overly complex web applications whose usability was near nil on behalf of clients with at best vague goals. The realization that small, self-directed teams powered by Pareto's Principle can quickly create sleeker stuff that works better is not merely bracing but dynamic. As 100 garage bands sprang from every Velvet Underground record sold, so the realization that one small team can make good prompts 100 others to try. The best and most famous of these new web products (i.e. the two I just mentioned) foster community and collaboration, offering new or improved modes of personal and business interaction. By virtue of their virtues, they own their categories, which is good for the creators, because they get paid. I add emphasis there on the "best and most famous". Zeldman is in awe of flickr, and, like myself, seems even humbled by their technology (now that is scary) and the continual discovery of hidden flickr-ness gems. How does that same quote go for educational applications? Are our mainstays the ones where "big teams have slowly and expensively labored to produce overly complex web applications whose usability was near nil on behalf of clients with at best vague goals"? Do the "best and most famous" of new educational apps "foster community and collaboration, offering new or improved modes of personal and business [or learning] interaction"? And what I was privately musing under by subconscious is wondering if the new wave of success stories involve small groups of motivated, self funded geeks, exploding a new, novel app, in rapid fashion, get it on a fast meme trail, and then hope it has enough momentum to be scooped up for megabucks by YahooGoogle? Is that bad or even matter? Is that the path for Writely, which after just a few forays, I think is in the same insanely great category as flickr (and fortunately did not get cute by domain-ing themselves as wri.te.ly). I started writing this thinking I would end up with a point or a conclusion. I put Zeldman's writing in the category of those movies you are just not sure what you liked about them (or even fully understood), but are truly worthy because they get you talking, thinking, and re-analyzing long after you've left the theater. Heck, I might reach for Web 5.0. I am composing this in the way the ancient ones blogged. Archaically, pen to paper. Content-wise, nothing is different than writing here in WordPress, it's just a jumble of words. In what I conjure as an annual semi-tradition (i have convinced myself I have done this before, now that I think of it, last year's effort is still inside a notebook) (and I have not even explained what I refer to) (sue me for bad literary practice). The location is being settled into a place of delightful secret exception to whatever mental image you might summon for the Saskatchewan prairie (flat fields of wheat?). In a narrow cleft of a hill (yes, we have real topography), I am surrounded by dense forest of spruce, fir, aspen, think underbrush of wild rose, hazelnut, fleabane, native grass et al. Just beyond my feet is a gurgling creek maybe 4 feet wide. Technically, fittingly, this is Swift Current Creek (stay tuned for why the name matters). On one of our first outings together, Cori brought me to this special place, Pine Cree in the Cypress Hills of southern Saskatchewan. We have returned to camp here every summer. There is no cell signal, you have to walk up the hill out of the valley to "connect" which sounds even more disconnected than the connection one feels by the creek. The temperature is maybe 10 degrees cooler than the entrance maybe 300 feet above. Yes, I wrote the draft for this post on paper. I don't like having drafts linger in my WordPress dashboard, but the paper one from last year sits unfinished (hmm, where did that notebook go?). Rules, being designed to be busted, right? These theme of things being undone, amplified, distorted through some kind of Pandemic Effects pedal has been sitting heavy on me for... months. Modified the name and labels from my own Distortion effects pedal from my own image Thanks to a Friend, My Growing Noise Chain flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Yes, the Not Done list includes my electric guitar, not touched since arriving in a shipping box to our new home, where of all things, I have a MUSIC ROOM. I won't go on with making a list like this, but it whispers in my inner ear constantly. Tools are not organized, the garage is still Stuff Piled Up. Fence projects, the compost bins, not done. We've done only 2 bike rides. My daily photos are maybe 20? 30 days behind. SPLOT work I've shelved. I've dropped communications with friends and family. And when blogging turns to blogging about not blogging you have arrived at the low levels of topics... My family here lovingly reminds me of all the things that have gotten done- including a full house move in the middle of Canadian winter, managing more work projects over the winter than I have ever had before, and yes learning how to maneuver a large tractor. Oh, we planted 320 trees. Rooted and transplanted willow. Fenced a 150x60 foot garden, fought the weeds, planted fruit trees, berry bushes, squash, pumpkin, zucchini, green beans, potato, lettuce. We've just started shaping this small oasis into a natural habitat, and have adopted a family of foxes that have taken summer shelter in the old barn. Stuff done and not done. And is the pandemic a factor or an excuse? Of course there is no definitive answer, but this riddle of time's nature that might be of driving interest to physicists, but too simple I think to compare to this creek at my feet. Does time flow? The creek moves steadily, on it's own decree from a source upstream I have not seen to some destination downstream unknown to me. This of course can be traced, but not from the comfort of this chair. I remain fixed, the water goes by. Does time really flow? Is the metaphor fitting here? Are they ever? I reach for them all the time. And as if on cue I remember from the book I plucked to read on the trip (Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) (I am pretty sure I had bought and read this before but this copy is Cori's, we fit like that). In the early part of the book, and the context I forget, Christopher shares this delightful explanation of "metaphor": The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek word ???? (which means from one place to another) and ???? (which means to carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means the word metaphor is a metaphor.The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time p 15 This delights me as much as Googling recursion. But this creek, this time, does not care much about me, nor does it really stop (yes the metaphor falls with the human or Castor canadensis ability to build dams, but ignore that). In listening too one might jump to think it's speed is uniform, but toss in the effects of heavy precipitation, spring melt, drought, then really it is going at a variable pace. But then to know it, you have to be measuring it often. The notebook I am writing in (a loving gift from Cori) has its own measure of the past year. I have a few of these, with intent to have them organized with ones for work notes and others for home to do lists, but I am not even close to being that organized. So I can flip back, and see bits of the creek's upstream (or is it downstream, oh the metaphor is unraveling so quickly). As I flip pages in time there are numbers or reminders to call a plumber or locksmith, lists of web pages to fix, lists of lumber to pickup, sketches of conference web sites, php functions to look up, notes from meetings, all jumbled together, flowing back to July 13, 2020. This is some faint feint of an attempt to be organized, but I'd know less of the last year without it. But this is no full record, it's more like dried puddles, old ripple marks in mud, debris stuck in branches. Like everyone, or most, or... hell I cannot make such sweeping judgements about how others think about this (or any) time. At points I had some inkling that there could be something to bring a world together to focus on an issue affecting all of its corners, but the present of dealing with covid, like William Gibson once wrote wittingly and now almost quaintly about future - is also unevenly distributed. The creek does not flow around a corner labeled "Same 'Normal' As 20 Clicks Upstream." Adding text "Navigating to Normal" to public domain image Naval Reserve School from the Library of Congress. Who in their right mind bothers to attribute public domain (me). Doesn't that just mean "take and use"? What is the long term impact of what is normalized and that being uncertainty? I can't even get my mouth, much less brain, formulate the phrase "back to normal." Normal is clump of leaves that have floated over the rocks and around the corner. It smacks of being out of date as much as bell bottom jeans or Polaroid photos of the 1970s. We see the pre-time through some odd colored lenses. https://www.instagram.com/p/CSgxoEdhUgu/ I am not going to even come close to finding the words to describe what this time is like, or means. Leave it to future historians (definitely not some random blogger). Does "funk" (not that kind) get close? And what am I warbling about? I have a house surrounded by natural space, love, solid work. Comfort. Safety. Love. Love. And Love. Food. Yeah food. Shall I marvel at the logistics of food supply chain that enable me to make fresh guacamole here at a campsite with fresh avocado and jalapeño pepper that find their way to the Safeway in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Anarchy is here when I cannot make guac. The creek just keeps going, over rocks, under logs, not mattering at the scribblings of this author on its banks. It has no awareness or needs none of me. It. Just. Goes. One might jump to say it flows with purpose, but really it's just laws of physics. The narrator steps back to notice he has flipped over 5 pages of notebook paper without any sign of a purpose. Creek 1, Alan 0. Still here at it like it was 2013 with pointless, incessant barking... https://cogdogblog.com/2013/01/pointless-incessant-barking/ How much water has flowed by since I started here? 100 gallons? 1000? We measure time so precisely yet the feel of it going by has the opposite sensation. My feelings of "Not Doneness" with stuff rings a few bells back to the BP (Before Pandemic) concept of messiness, uncertainty, untidiness in educational technology of Not-Yetness co-created by Amy Collier and Jen Ross. Where does Not-yetness play out now with the day to day shifts in what form learning will happen, who will/will not require masks/vaccines? Not-yetness is not satisfying every condition, not fully understanding something, not check-listing everything, not tidying everything, not trying to solve every problem…but creating space for emergence to take us to new and unpredictable places, to help us better understand the problems we are trying to solve.http://redpincushion.us/blog/teaching-and-learning/not-yetness/ How does not-yetness play out now in this period of ongoing Not-Knowingness? I feel like it's almost... quaint. Or maybe something to look back at with some forward sight on. Alas the creek and time have both slid past me in this chair, I have scribbled pen to paper, crossed out much, (and later transcribed to WordPress) and doubting maybe the Publish button gets clicked -- well I'd bet that it does, because why spend 1000 gallons of flow time doing this and just chucking it all? But if anything, over the last (pulling out the calculator do do the subtraction) 18 years, writing in this space has reliably done something, often unexpected for me. Even if a post starts without a destination nor achieves one, something happens in the act. And so, little creek, keep on flowing, and maybe, just maybe, something serendipitous will be carried around the bend to me. And so it flows. Past, around, me. And this creek, in its humble way, generates peacefulness. Can I carry that with me when we have to leave? Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/51387744516 Ready to Draft a Blog Post flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I could not resist coming up with a cute name for a blogspace for Steve Gilbert, Stephen Ehrmann, and Steve Saltzberg, all with the TLTGroup (Teaching, Learning, Technology Group)- hence 3 Steves And a Blog. This started when I proposed to the Charles Ansorge, the current maintainer of the TLTGroup's "Low Threshold Applications of the Week" site (a static, hand coded, Front-page encrusted zeppelin) that it could be done more easily (and with more style) publishing as a blog, in the MovableType prototype I concocted. The next thing I knew, I was on a conference call with the 3 Steves, trying to explain the benefits of CSS web design, and backing far away from any veiled promise of doing a web site design for the whole TLTgroup (I do not even do that for my own institution). Anyhow, to help them understand blog publishing, the best way was to drop them into a sandbox, hence the 3 Steves blog. Who knows what, if anything, will mushroom there. Already Steve E has jumped in quite nicely. Each MT blog I crank out of the free 2.661 version I am able to come closer to some mosre workable and repeatable design approaches. On this site, it was easy to set up archives and RSS feeds for each author (simply creating templates that filter <$MTEntries> tags by <$MTEntries author="steve_g"> . The left navigation bar used on every template is a module, so it only takes one edit to modify. There is so much one can do beyond the basic templates MT gives you just by sticking your nose into the template tag reference guide. There is no reason to have so many carbon copy looking MT sites, my best estimates are that 35% of educators using MT are publishing that basic content templates and the Georgia Blue (or worse) Plain Jane style sheet. There is more I have gotten a handle on for MT roll-outs, and hope to publish a series later this month summarizing all of these techniques. Sure it will apply less to MT3 and other platforms, but I will say that just about every blog publishing tool does archives the wrong way. (Huh?) Stay tuned to the CogDog. One content chunk I have already re-used from another site is an 8-part illustrated authoring guide- rather than a series of posts or static HTML, I have a PHP template and a collage of content files, making it easy to deploy for different blog sites. It was rather critical for this group of new bloggers to provide concise directions for authoring, and what you see is an evoluation of our BlogShop. But enough of that.. let's give the Steves some time to roll our more entries, or jump in and send some comments. My new unlocked 4s is in action here in Canada. I went to a Virgin Mobile kiosk in a mall here in Welland and got a pay as you go plan set up, the sim card installed, and unlike my experience with Yes Optus in Australia, it worked right away. So now in Canada, I have a new phone number, can SMS, and most key, have 3G data wherever I go (and where it is). The other gain here is that I can swap in my AT&T sim when I go south of the .ca border and be back on their network-- and I don't have to renew my contract with them when I got the new iPhone (though it cost much more; it ought to make me more careful with it!) I've been tweeting since January 2007 (and am infasionable not yet a Deleter). Big deal. For all the times I have crafted a tweet thinking it would put some ripples in the pond, or make commentary, I can say the sum results of all this is crickets. No biggie. So it gives me some smile, when a tweet that went out with no thought at all comes bouncing back. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1027343849537056770 Surely (and yes I am calling you Shirley) you know of Lorem ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. I tend to reach for it on web site projects where I am still waiting on (or never get) content to put into my designs and demos. I fell in love a few years ago with Meet The Ipsums especially Bacon Ipsum. When working on the site for the Mural UDG project I tried Taco Ipsum but found Hipster Ipsum was more fun. It's one of those things where you see a crumb on the internet floor, and look under the rug, and see giant rabbit hole. Today's came around because I am doing stuff for a site that will be used in a government agency. The closest I came was the Ministry of Ipsum but its generated from U.K. government documents, and baffles me. Thus I ended up with Office Ipsum You get great stuff like (I like breaking it up into non equal length paragraphs) Overcome key issues to meet key milestones get six alpha pups in here for a focus group. Time to open the kimono clear blue water drink the Kool-aid. Dog and pony show when does this sunset? productize meeting assassin knowledge process outsourcing. Personal development three-martini lunch, and going forward for to be inspired is to become creative, innovative and energized we want this philosophy to trickle down to all our stakeholders. Quick win enough to wash your face wiggle room, and reach out touch base. Execute touch base. Ramp up customer centric red flag, for organic growth, yet Bob called an all-hands this afternoon, or thinking outside the box, or closer to the metal. Pushback. Today shall be a cloudy day, thanks to blue sky thinking, we can now deploy our new ui to the cloud are we in agreeance moving the goalposts put your feelers out we just need to put these last issues to bed. Beef up core competencies, clear blue water. This is a no-brainer back of the net even dead cats bounce make sure to include in your wheelhouse. Time vampire. It's not new to me-- back when I was working on a project for Creative Commons, the same thing happened. I decided to roll up my JavaScript sleeves and built CC IP-SUM - a text filler generator that pulls content from the Creative Commons FAQ. This yields nuggets like: Additionally, jurisdiction ports of earlier versions of CC licenses often contain versions of the moral rights language designed to account for moral rights legislation in a particular jurisdiction. If you give $50 or more, you can get a special-edition t-shirt only available to CC supporters. To avoid confusing those who may mistakenly believe the work is licensed under standard CC terms, we must insist that in these instances licensors not use our trademarks, names, and logos in connection with their custom licensing arrangement. Creative Commons licenses provide an easy way to manage the copyright terms that attach automatically to all creative material under copyright. In addition to our licenses, the CC0 Public Domain Dedication may be used on databases to maximize reuse of databases. The database model refers to how a database is structured and organized, including database tables and table indexes. This came handy on a project I'm working on for a bike/hike trail system. My clients were just not writing me trail descriptions, so I harvested a bunch from some other site, and created Bicycle Ipsum (yeah I re-used the same HTML5 Up theme, sue me). Spin the crank on this and you get: The climb up from Marlette Lake trail is pretty tough, but relatively short. The start of the dirt road is marked on the Google Map directions on this page. Normally most of the hikers don't make it to Otero Upper so that section is a little more clear and you can let it hang out a little more. Few sections rutted out but great experience for my first ride there! This trail is the cherry on top when riding Porcupine rim! Sections have the tendency to get rutted out. Hymasa is a bit easier, so if you are unsure of your skill, start there, and then climb back up Hymasa to do Captain Ahab. The trails all run parallel to the Fountain Place paved road so they can be shuttled by car. Some of the densely covered trails are damp, but still rideable. Logs embedded in the trail have been installed to signal technical terrain. Rad! Why use someone else's generator when you can crank your own? My buddy from Maricopa, Sam asked: https://twitter.com/samfraulino/status/1027650397853216768 Well heck yes. Those two examples above are on github (see the repo for CC IP-SUM and repo for Bicycle Ipsum). But I also posted a plain, unformatted Simple Ipsum generator, see https://github.com/cogdog/simple-ipsum. The demo for it generates stuff based on a list of my blog post titles. So what is needed? Well you need a lot of sentences, each in quotes, and separated by commas. This makes the array that the site reads in from the file source.js at https://github.com/cogdog/simple-ipsum/blob/master/docs/assets/js/source.js You just need to get your stuff in the same format. Like if my stuff was lifted from lyrics from songs by The Who, mine might look like window.all_lines = [ "We'll be fighting in the streets.", "With our children at our feet.", "And the morals that they worship will be gone.", "And the men who spurred us on.", "Sit in judgement of all wrong.", "They decide and the shotgun sings the song.", "You're alone above the street somewhere.", "Wondering how you'll ever count out there.", "You can walk, you can talk, you can fight.", "But inside you've got something to write.", "In your hand you hold your only friend.", "Never spend your guitar or your pen.", : : ]; You will want of course hundreds of lines. And your Who Ipsum might generate stuff like: With our children at our feet. Sit in judgement of all wrong. And the men who spurred us on. In your hand you hold your only friend. And the men who spurred us on. You're alone above the street somewhere. We'll be fighting in the streets. We'll be fighting in the streets. Sit in judgement of all wrong. But inside you've got something to write. But inside you've got something to write. Never spend your guitar or your pen. With our children at our feet. You're alone above the street somewhere. Sit in judgement of all wrong. Never spend your guitar or your pen. You're alone above the street somewhere. They decide and the shotgun sings the song. But inside you've got something to write. But inside you've got something to write. Never spend your guitar or your pen. Sit in judgement of all wrong. You can walk, you can talk, you can fight. Why would anyone spend time doing this? Because we can. While Twitter burns and shrivels and twists in the wind, I'm aiming on the silly. Featured Image: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]You are so silly flickr photo by smkybear shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license[/caption] There was a moment at the [brilliant] #OER24 conference keynote duo by Catherine Cronin and Laura Czernowicz "The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at a crossroads" when they asked the audience to Menti respond to a question about what we should do as an action. Watching the responses roll by when I saw one that said "Blog!" I leaned forward and tapped Martin Weller on the shoulder to whisper "I see you!" Let's say I have been slow on that front (as Martin keeps punding them out), I have still a draft on in my brain from the conference. That's not this one. I am actually just attempting to open the blocked blog flow here, with just a little nothing note, that as of this post, this WordPress powered blog (so old fashioned, eh?) is now, err once again, pumping out the posts, when/if they actually happen, directly to the Fediverse, to Mastodon, via the ActivityPub plugin. Zzzzz. Hardly worth a blog post, is it? Well I did a short run with it before it became part of the Automattic ship, back in maybe November 2022. it worked indeed publishing as an entity known as @topdog@cogdogblog,com, but for me, I was really looking for the means to publish to my existing Mastodon, after all it's my stuff, and I want to reply to replies if there were anything, as me. I went down a different route, using a duct taped approach of an IFTTT applet that listened to my blog's RSS feed and posted to my Mastodon account via a webhook. I've since made a batch of these, some to post stuff to Mastodon I have tagged in Pinboard, even having my flickr photos tagged with my dog's name posted to his own Mastodon account (this approach got nicked when IFTTT took away the ability to use web hooks from the free accounts, and I have been moving some to make.com which is vastly more powerful service). I like having stuff flow into my own stream, not some other one. Plus with these tools, I had some flexibility to customize the output, you know , my personal touch, like putting "Just CogDogBlogged:" before the title and slapping a hashtag on the end. https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/112164819314566446 But I have been seeing more use of the WordPress plugin and mentions of more features. Just on a whim, last week, I added the ActivityPub plugin to the OE Global Voices podcast site I managed (on WordPress) just to see how easy it was to set up. Dead easy. https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/112254927447474810 And then, one of those little things happen than remind me the human connections in this ginormous ball of web yarn is what makes it worth it. I am fortunate that someone like Jon Udell follows my posts, and replies, and as its done, he mentions Matthias Pfefferle who is the genius behind the plugin, and then Matthias is asking me questions about my set up for podcasting, and lets me know of a new audio feature coming out this week. If somehow my spitting out a mention of a small experiment leads me to talking directly to the person who builds the software? well heck, that is something I would latch on to rather than foaming on about prompt engineering. And hence, IU am thinking, why not set it up again here on the home blog, my roost since 2003. That's something you don't get cashing in your chips to blog on Wix or tossing it all into email newsletter platforms. I am of the dwindling mindset of those who not only want to own my own web corner and platform, I want to play with it, tinker, and pop the hood once in a while to admire the engine. Well this was more than a Hello World thing to test how this will spawn out into the Fedivserse. But that is my human, far from efficient way to do things. It will thus be spit out twice to the fediverse, using each approach. Like anyone cares about my repetition and redundancy. Now that the blog gate is open, maybe more words can get out the door here. Featured Image: My own remix of Botticelli Birth of Venus as an homage to the blog loving Jim Groom, with the faces of the original DTLT team admiring his blog form. Tell Me Again About My Blog! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license There is a lot of new stuff happening with web technology every day, hour, minute, and then there ones that just make you stand back, like Neo, and say , "Woah" I just had that after playing with the BBC Dimensions site http://howbigreally.com/ - it describes itself well: Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are. Or more detail Dimensions is an experimental prototype for the BBC. We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. The D-Day landing beaches measured from London to Norfolk in the UK. How far would the Titanic stretch down your street? Dimensions simply juxtaposes the size of historical events with your home and neighbourhood, overlaying important places, events and things on a satellite view of where you live. Certain "Dimensions" can be transformed into short walks, so you can get a physical appreciation of the distances involved. It is a fantastic way to put historical and current events on a human scale, but overlaying the extent of ancient cities, natural disaters, even the moon, on any where you pick on a Google Map (usually your house). Here were a few I played with in about 10 minutes: The Great Wall of China Built Over Phoenix Arizona Some people in the US really want a wall on the southern border- China has experience in projects like this. http://howbigreally.com/dimension/ancient_worlds/great_wall_of_china#phoenix_az The 2010 Gulf Oil Spill Happening in the Grand Canyon This is why we do not allow oil drilling in our national parks (well also because there is not much oil down near Phantom Ranch) http://howbigreally.com/dimension/environmental_disasters/gulf_oil_spill#grand_canyon_az The Mars Rover Roaming From My Home Town The Mars rover could easily drive up AZ 87 to the top of the RIM- that off road stuff is going to be tricky as it dashes down a canyon. http://howbigreally.com/dimension/space/mars_rover_route#strawberry_az I can see all kinds of potential for learning activities using this tool -and you can see that once you do an overlay, you can easily share the URL for others to look at, use, modify. Dimensions has categories of Woah. I am just now waiting to see if my favorite cycnical historian has criticism ;-) Woah! This poster session demo was probably the coolest thing I have seen here at the EDUCAUSE 2004 conference. It is so cool I do not think I can describe it, See the Croquet Project WHAT IF... ...we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could we go? What kinds of decisions would we make that we might have been unable to even consider 20 or 30 years ago, when the current set of operating systems were first created? ...we could collaborate with one another in an online dimension to create or simulate anything we wanted to? ...we had the robustness of a 3D immersive technology, the diversity of the Internet, and the degree of social interaction we have in the real world? Enter Croquet. CROQUET IS... ...a combination of open source computer software and network architecture that supports deep collaboration and resource sharing among large numbers of users. Such collaboration is carried out within the context of a large-scale distributed information system. The software and architecture define a framework for delivering a scalable, persistent, and extensible interface to network delivered resources. The integrated 2D and 3D Croquet interface allows for co-creativity, knowledge sharing, and deep social presence among large numbers of people. Within Croquet's 3D wide-area environments, participants enjoy synchronous telepresence with one another. Moreover, users enjoy secure, shared access to Internet and other network-deliverable information resources, as well as the ability to design complex spaces individually or while working with others. Every visualization and simulation within Croquet is a collaborative object, as Croquet is fully modifiable at all times. There were two computers (PC and Mac) linked to each other and shared a virtual landscape of "portals" that were entrances to other VR worlds or application interfaces. Everything is the environment is described as "objects" with properties, and they demo-ed chanign the object properties dynamically while the environment was still running (no need to recompile). I think the whole thing is a peer to peer application and runs in SmallTalk. Again, I cannot really describe it as it is so visual, but need to go back to the site and dig a bit more. It looks like a whole new way to organize your computer experience- away from the tired old desktop metaphors. It is out there! Thanks to a tweet from Doug Belshaw I found a nifty service for moving photos between different photo sharing sites- while functionally useful, pixelpipe or http://pi.pe is an interesting model to look at data transfer. https://twitter.com/dajbelshaw/status/231787637093064705 You authenticate with the service via either Facebook or a Google account (I hear you cringing), and then in pi.pe you authenticate again the photo services you use, in my case, I enabled flickr, Instragram, Picasa, and 500px (which I never have used) It's a straight forward process, you pick the source (I started with Instagram), choose the images you want to copy (I chose all 60 it provided), and lastly, choose the destination (I chose Picasa, which I giess is Google Plus Photos). I did not clock how long it took, but I got an email notification when it was done, and all of those Istragrams are now in my Google+ space (If I set it up to Google Drive, I guess I could download them). Of course Google+ makes the ugliest URLs since ... well you name it, but my collection of Intsagram images are over in the new space (Equally baffling is why Google has no easy outward sharing options, no permalink or embed) (Oh shating in Google+ means sharing WITH Google+) (-1). I also gave a try to moving some flickr photos to 500x, but I can only do 10 at a time on a free 500px account and the pi.pe selection tools got squirrely as I scrolled down in a flickr set (it selected them all), but it worked cleanly om my seldom-used account: Hmmm, 500px is kind of elegant! I might have to ponder how I might use it - I like the Stories feature... But what I like here is how this service can easily move media from site to site, using open APIs and authentication schemes. What of other media was this easily moved around? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As part of doing some sessions at UBC in June, I got some gift cards to use at the bookstore, and picked up some heavy pieces of literature. That was sarcasm, but I also got a Philip K Dick novel, a mini guide to post structalism (WTF that is that's why I got the book), and a copy of Jaron Laniers I am Not a Gadget. The main criteria might have been the portability of what i could cram in an already overstuffed suitcase. Anyhow, Sharon Creech's little book was perfect for the day in Montreal I hiked the top of Mt Royal in the mid day stinking heat, to read in one setting under a tree. And on a literal level, it is an easy read- a story of entries (almost blog like) written by the boy Jack from September 13 6 through June 6, a school year. Jack's tale unveils in his own poetic verse, with the echoing voice of his responses to Miss Stretchberry (the name alone conjures images of the teacher), as he discovers a voice for poetry, starting from: I don't want to because boys don;t write poetry. Girls do. Along the way, jack does write poetry, at first because it is an assignment. We rea din response his questions of poems Miss Stretchberry introduces to class, but they way the author weaves it in is in side the head of Jack. He does not understand the "poem about the little red wheelbarrow and the white chickens" and he says so. This is a subtle reference to something I had to look up (before realizing all referenced poems are in the back of the book) - almost super minimalist poem by William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Which has this rather simple imagery and pacing. Its an example where the thing created, be it a poem, an image, a painting, is an opening to thinking what is about, not so explicit in itself, and the reason I like so much the minimalistic assignments we set up in ds106- it is more powerful to say more with less. And Jack is asked to post his first written poems on the BOARD, he does not want it read allowed, or seen, or be known that he wrote it -- doesn't this ring true to how we find people reluctant to be open, to blog, to let their work be seen? His response when his teacher asks him to explain the meaning of his first verse is brilliant: What do you mean-- Why does so much depend upon a blue car? You didn't say before that I had to tell why. The wheelbarrow guy didn't tell why. The fact that Jack is questioning is key. His creative juice is yet tainted to produce when hew think is expected. I am coming across this often in ds106, when often the students seem so focused on just achieving, accomplishing the assignment, that when they blog their work, it is pretty much-- "here is my assignment, I made it in GIMP" -- what we are having to remind students is that we want to rad more about the idea behind what they made; what are the influences, what is the meaning to them, how does it tie into storytelling? Or even to take the liberty to do the assignment a different way. To remake it. We are not grading one how much they do the assignment to a T, but how they flex their creativity. As one of many examples, see how Mikhail Gershovich starts with what might be an assignment of making an animated GIF about an old cigarette ad his father-in-law starred in, but goes deeper and more into story as he draws us into the connection to the culture of the 1970s and the personal connection for being able to re-interpret a commercial of all things. This is why we need tostand up strong for our rights to re-use our media culture: I'm also fascinated by how a simple activity of deriving something simple like an animated GIF of a few frames from an artifact of cultural history as Scott and I did can be, potentially, an act of critical cultural preservation. In taking that bit of the ad and engaging it in a new way, I created an opportunity to reflect on its historical context and cultural significance, not to mention the sentimental value it holds for me. There's great potential here for us digital pedagogues. This whole do the assignment just to do the assignment rubs me wrong, but it is the conditioning school creates in students. Stimulus and response. Perhaps I have unrealistic expectations for what people will do. Perhaps. Stuff that out the far side of your rubric. Bust that rubric to shreds. Blow it up. Anyhow, back to Jack, and we see in the process of his year, the entries every few weeks, that he continues the exploration and questioning of the poems Miss Stretchberry (giggle again at that name) provides- and again, there is subtle reference to the poems, not explicit, so we are nudged to dig for that on our own (two from Robert Frost, the first stanza from Blake's Tiger poem). Jack's evolution in writing poems again makes me think about how people evolve as bloggers. He begins to feel more open to having his work in public, even more so when there is some feedback. He begins to riff from the work of others. His writing takes his own form, and then he questions the form he is "supposed to do" (actually it is in the excerpt for the follow up "Hate That Cat" Although . . . my uncle Bill who is a teacher in a college said those words I wrote about Sky were NOT poems. He said they were just words coming out of my head and that a poem has to rhyme and have regular meter and SYMBOLS and METAPHORS and omomoto-something and aliter-something. And I wanted to punch him. in the middle, and I will not give it away, Jack's poem about the yellow Dog (sky) is posted, and we understand there is a personal drive for this kid's creativity. Something beyond an assignment. No give aways here. And like what happens in open blogging, Jack makes a connection with an outside expert. One of his poems is "inspired" by Mr Walter Dead Myers, and through his teacher, Jack writes a letter of invitation to the published poet-- and just like it happens in blogging, the author sometimes not only responds, but connects, and in Jack's case, visits his school. Any guesses as to what this experience does to people's motivation to create? So yes, this little book about a little kid and his dog poem has me mulling about the parallels to writing in the open, and why we have to knock down this "do assignments to the letter" mindset. We have to make room for students to do and create stuff that matters, not just for points and badges and shit, And it keeps coming back to why blogging in your own space matters more in the short and long run over what will be the ephemeral spaces of social media- Sometimes when you are trying not to think about something it keeps popping back into your head you can't help it you think about it and think about it and think about it and think about it until your brain feels like a squashed pea. That is exactly what happens when a blog idea gets rattling around me head, just like it did by picking up this little tiny book about a dog. Love that dog, love that kid. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by roinks Imitation and flattery aside, just curious if anyone thinks RSS-to-Javascript bears any resemblance at all to our Feed2JS? I do not really care all that much since Feed2JS code is open source but some credit would be nice, egos can always use some stroking now and then... Ours was pretty much inspired by David Carter-Tod's Wytheville Community College News Service first appearing as a concept in May 2003, with the first version of RSS2JS (using the now dormant OnyxPHP RSS Parser) to the current Feed2JS (using MagpieRSS). I'm a big fan of randomness. I mean in the web sites I build- they introduce variety to the experience (e.g random blog headers) or to the experience. Something I have rolled into most of my syndicated connected course type sites is a little custom template code that allows me to have links that can redirect the site visitor to a random blog post from the pile of syndicated posts. Why? Because I can? partly. Usually it's rolled into a place where I talk about commenting. A challenge for people is picking which post out of 50, 200, 1200... they should comment on. A random picker seems like it works. This is my usual approach, and is based upon creating a category hierarchy for the syndicated content (see the details on this on part 2 of my Feed Wordpress 101 series). I set up Feed Wordpress to add a category of "Syndicated" to every syndicated post (or sometimes O use one called "Flow", and then create sub-categories below that that are applied to different blog feeds. For my current project at DML Commons the category structure for syndicated content is: Flow (all syndicated content) Twitter (syndicated tweets) Blogs (all syndicated blogs) Design Research Blog Posts (all syndicated posts in the Design Research track Professional Pathways Blog Posts (all syndicated posts in the Professional Pathways track For the Random Post Spinner Thingamgic, we do not want random from all posts on the site, but within this category structure. The first thing to put this in action calls for adding code to the functions.php file (yes, this technique requires theme hacking). And before you modify any themes file, consider first making use of a Child Theme. So in your functions.php we need something that will allow us to send a variable to our random gizmo, one that will tell it what category in the tree above to pick from. We pass the variable through appending to the url something like ?c=booger where we pass the script a variable that says find a random post in the "Booger" category (the variable that is passed is the category "slug" or the short name used for it when it is part of a URL. This is what goes into functions.php (if this is the first thing you add to a child theme, well you have to create a blank file, and wrap its contents in PHP code tags). /* ----- add allowable url parameter for urls */ add_filter('query_vars', 'dmlhub_parameter_queryvars' ); function dmlhub_parameter_queryvars( $qvars ) // allow parameters to be passed in wordpress query strings { $qvars[] = 'c'; // when we need to pass a category return $qvars; } When we use add_filter it creates a placeholder in the Wordpress logic that says "when we deal with the part of wordpress that deals with query variable, call our custom function dmlhub_parameter_queryvars ) I try to name my custom functions with a prefix to make it unique to my code). And this little function lets Wordpress deal with a c=XXXXXXX in the URL. It does not do anything with the info yet, but it lets it get passed inside of Wordpress. Next I create a Wordpress Page called "Random". I put nothing in it. Boring. But my creating a file in my child theme called page-random.php it gets used rather than the general page.php template only for the page with a slug name of "random". And so page-random.php can contain any code I want it to have, and is called only for a URL on my site http://www.mygroovysite.com/random. This is what goes inside: What we do is an extra check for a d= parameter to get the number of days to look backward in time, and if a value like d=7 is used, we add to the arguments array a construct that says to look for posts after 7 days ago in time (a time value of - 7 days). Because we might not get any results, I added a conditional that returns an error message if no random posts would be found. This appears to be working for the DML Cmmons site, examples: A random syndicated blog post published in the last 24 hours (1 day) http://dmlcommons.net/random/?d=1 A random syndicated Professional Pathways blog post published in the last week http://dmlcommons.net/random/?c=pp&d=7 A random syndicated tweet from the last month http://dmlcommons.net/random/?c=twitter&d=30 And that is how we had some time ranges to the random spinner. Some may want a more specific time range, e.g. "the week of February 3, 2015". This is doable, yes, but... well "left as an exercise to the reader". Spin on! Public Domain Pixabay Image by MirellaST http://pixabay.com/en/roulette-game-gaming-money-colors-252390/ cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 48 Miles Driven: 50905 5095 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 9 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 1 Money spent on gas: $1132.56 Photos posted: 1247 (that is an average of 26.0 per day) Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 9 Number of nights camping: 15 Most Number of consecutive nights camping: 5 (continuing into next week) Most Number of consecutive days without a shower: 5 (see previous) Weird Large Roadside Objects: 2 (Dog Bark Park, Cottonwood ID; Pysanka Egg, Vegreville AB) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Friend/Relatives Homes Visited/Mooched Upon: 12 Best Bike Ride: Canmore to Banff and back with D'Arcy Norman, 23 miles. And beer. Laundry Stops: 4 Boxes of Synders Pretzels Consumed: 2 (most recent lasted from Freeland, WA to Vancouver, BC) Cans of Pringles Snorted in Car: 5 Number of Breweries Visited: 3 (Revolution Brewing, Paonia CO; Laughing Dog Brewing, Sandpoint ID; Grizzly Paw, Canmore AB). cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Best Campground and Experience (likely never to be knocked off this list): Canoeing to Wallace Island, BC with Scott Leslie; Least Impressive: Haag Cove, Washington Number of new dogs met: 19 Number of Cousin Bobby Style postcards sent to Mom: 5 (Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, British Columbia, Alberta) Most Unusual Not Your Met or MOMA Museums: 2 (EBR-1 Nuclear Breeder Reactor Museum, Idaho; Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington AB) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of friends known online met for first time: 6 (This week added Rob Wall and Heather Ross) Number of things shared in StoryBox: 327 (where are your contributions?) Number of Storybox Public Appearances: 14 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I've been pretty knocked flat by a cold I picked up on my flight home last Monday, most noticeably not having much energy to do much photography. Having suffered twice in the fall (October in DC, and December after Australia), I am convinced my immune system is gone for a sabbatical. My health food friends will likely chide me for my diet. Touché. For at least the last few mornings, I have slept in until noon or 1pm. I tend to become vertical by mid afternoon, have a resurgence of energy nto the early evening, and then a few rounds of barking cough until collapsing. I'm in a precarious position of having my previous health insurance lapse in january (contorted state laws prevented my continuation of COBRA coverage from my work at NMC to last only 9 months) and waiting for my new position to become solidified. Believe me, if you lack insurance, I doubt you rail against Obamacare. I want mine now. All that said, it was worthwhile to venture outside and soak in some sunshine, here along the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg; it seemed fun to play with what was a pretty non interesting picture in Instagram (I have another reason for posting to flickr from there for a future post). I am hoping to have the view righted and more clear tomorrow. As elementary school student in the early 1970s, our schedules at Bedford Elementary (like schools everywhere likely) were periodically interrupted for full school assemblies. We'd line up our chairs in the gymnasium trying to see the activity on what then were giant TVs mounted on carts. We did this for all of the Apollo mission liftoffs, but it was the space returns that were really exciting- seeing that tiny capsule parachute down and splash in the rough seas, waiting for the hatch to open, the little heroes crawling out on rafts, and then being plucked by ladder into a helicopter. The over-riding feeling then was one of unbridled optimism and excitement. We could send humans to the moon and back, we could do anything. The space shuttle perhaps made space travel all a bit more mundane like just commercial airline travel (though seeing photos of the shuttle piggybacked on a transport plane was neat), and then we witnessed what happens when it went terribly wrong. I thought that was nostalgia and lost until a guitar playing tweeting Canadian showed the world how to be part of an adventure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo How sadly strange and unique does it seem to find a public figure who inspires, yet is humble, has fun, and lights that spirit of optimism. It does not happen in politics, our sports figures and pop culture celebrities ring more as ego focused money chasers. Why are there so few who humbly inspire by example? If there is ever a place for people to emulate this approach, it is in the classroom- be it a room or online. Good teachers do this all the time, with no or little fanfare. When they act human (faults and all), humble, when they reach out and contact and respond to others. We need a bit more space oddity in many corners of society, not just NASA. There's a lot we can learn from Commander Hadfield- let me be in a long line of people to thank him for keeping the optimism light on. Now let's get our act together and go to Mars. And beyond. What a Deal for my DeadPod posted 30 Sep '07, 11.06am MDT PST on flickr I liked the concept of BuyMyBrokeniPod: We offer a fast, simple, and eco-friendly way for you to get money for used, new or broken iPods and iPhones. We accept Classic, Touch, Video, Photo, Nano, Mini, iPhones & Generation 4 to 1 iPods. We don't care if your iPod has a cracked screen, the a busted hard drive busted, or shows a sad face, has buttons that don't work, is acting weird, is old and creepy, has water damage, or if the battery is dead. We will pay you top dollar for your unwanted iPod MP3 Player or iPhone guaranteed! Keep your old iPod out of the landfill and you get cash in return! What do they do with them? Who knows? Just for fun, I filled out the form for my 1st Generation Shuffle, admittedly not having even much value when it was purchased. A few years ago, I found it no longer was recognized when plugged into the USB port (of any computer, even tried a PeeCee). It would recharge okay, but I was pretty much stuck with the "Last Sync". So should I ship it off to them to get my $0.00 via PayPal? And, on another front, I am glad to hear that scientists are hard at work to quantify why those headphone cords get so tangled. Bids are now open to beat this offer. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On Saturday I drove down the hill to meet up with some of my former Maricopa colleagues at the TEDxPHX, the local independent TED event. If it were not for the CybersalonAZ pals, I might not have gone. Previously, I made have thumbed my nose at what looks like an elite crowd among the TEDdies. Lats year I had tried to get tickets to the TEDx in Austin, and you had to fill out an application I guess yo see if you were hip enough to be allowed inside the ropes (I was not). The Phoenix version had no such application (maybe we're not hip enough); you just had to get word early enough to buy tickets (though I saw people were still abel to get them last week). cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This event was held at the PBS studies at the ASU downtown campus, a very modern building on the burgeoning university campus where previously stood empty lots and run down buildings in this are just north of the tiny downtown part of Phoenix. A bonus thrill was my first ride on the Phoenix Light Rail to get there. I have to say over all it was a very stimulating day. Some was the mix of presentations in the 18 minute short form, but mostly it was fresh stuff beyond what is feeling more like in education conferences the way adults sound to the Peanuts kids. A downside, is that for the audience, it is purely passive. Well, yes, we could tweet. But at TEDthings, the audience is there to be in audience. If it is Ideas Worth Spreading, well, someone has to be the toast where the jam gets spread. That said, the speakers were very approachable, and they stayed the day. What was rewarding was seeing that there was a lot of innovation, creativity, and good ideas that are local. That's no surprise, given the size of this city, but I had to stop the gasps of "wow" during a number of the sessions. There was some mundane sessions, some sub par, and some that did not really spark me. But there others more than made up for it. A few quick highlights. Maybe one of the most inspiring people was Helen Neville, who had just turned 50, and as a nurse, decided to take on a challenge to raise awareness of health issues- she ran across the country on the southern route-- in the summer. That's insanity squared. No woman had ever done that route, and she not only finished, she set the record. She was so down to earth (and even more so when I had a chance to chat during the break for like 20 minutes). I'm still in my I Hate Running state of mind, and was dreading the 10k run I was signed up for the next day. Here was a woman who would run 25 miles a day in the summer heat (sometimes 50), and still would afterward go out to visit hospitals. She's not resting; she told us she was planning her next route, from Vancouver to Tijuana. Louis Basile started out what sounded like a typical corporate blah blah speech talking about his philosophy as running Wildflower Bread Company, a wildly successful Arizona chain of excellent food/coffee stores (I keep forgetting they are not nationwide, they seem that successful). But he has a bigger spark, and extends a refreshingly humane operation to his company that must be inspiring down to the employee that cleans the toilets. He's part of a movement of Conscious Capitalism, which, if I had to make a summary, says, its okay to make a profit as a business as long as you are doing something with ti to better society. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Jay Rogers was electric in his message about Local Motors, a new kind of car company that completely breathes and embodies the principles of open source- for designing and building cars. He made an interesting case for how co-creation was a different, and maybe for this, more effective concept than crowd sourcing.They have more than 8000 contributors to their car designs, and I dare say that people into building cars have as much passion, or more, than people who are into building linux kernals. I'd say it would be well worth it to attend one of their Burgers, Cars, and Welding sessions every week. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Goran Konjevod folds paper. Into some insanely unreal sculptures, from single sheets of paper, in what he described as "organic orgami" that goes way beyond paper swans. It's all very mathematical and artistic at the same time. Plus he must have a zen guru level of patience! Check out hos work at http://organicorigami.com. Syed Toufeeq Ahmed made a case for the power of search beyond what we can do via google- he has ideas how to enable people to get more quickly to results that might take days through current Google capable searches. He has focused on the online published articles and abstracts (e.g. PubMed) that are mostly unstructured data. His Bioeve Discovery Engine goes beyond search by fully indexing these articles and making cross references via key terms that act like tags. He showed in a demo how quickly one could narrow from a general search on a symptom with hundreds of results, in 4 clicks down via specific symptoms or drugs, to get to 1-5 key papers. Bioeve is open for use; what I was curious about is if the software that produces it is also something one can use for other information domains (probably not, it seems worth being purchased by a wealthy search company). cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I really dug the energy and unique musical sounds of the Dry River Yacht Club- a bit of stomp, a bit of ska, a bit of other musical styles beyond my scope. The lead singer was great even if she sang in some incomprehensible scat style- the words did not matter as much as the music. Among the interstitial TED videos were some gems, like Bjarke Ingels crazy but real ideas on 3 warp speed architecture tales- wild wild ideas. You have to see the invasion of the Pixels at http://www.onemoreproduction.com/video/209.html. And for over the top, see Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TEDTalks) where Sebastian Wernicke shows how analyzing the data around TED talks can be reverse engineered to create the most optimum (or worst) TED Talk via how talks are favored among viewers on the TED site. Heck you can create your own with is tool at http://www.get-tedpad.com/ - here's mine: It makes you yearn for coffee that is quite nuanced in the same way that our neurons are. Efficient trimming causes the brain to weigh emotion and experimental evidence. You don't have to like it, but a mirror can stop us from being so unbelievably disrespectful. (Applause.) Thank you very much. It's just that in the middle of all this routine, creativity is essential. How many of you would challenge that? You can see the beauty sink in once you take the time. Then all of a sudden it becomes easy for the brain to weigh emotion and experimental evidence. You don't have to like it, but a mirror model is needed of the United States. Therefore, this mirror might be helpful the same way that it has been before. I then remembered the story of a patient who hated art. I told him "you don't have to worry about it", because in the middle of the income distribution, there's equality. Well.... maybe Probably the most impactful session for me was the message of Kimber Lanning on the damaging effect of not buying products from local companies. Her research on state contracts showed how giving contracts for say office products to outside chains reduces the return to state funds from 30% for a local company to 10 or even less- factors being that large chains do not pay as well or offer full time jobs, do not give secondary benefits to local sub contractors (like graphic design, etc), and do not give back as much (or at all). to the community. The message (and title) was Buying Ourselves Broke- and she extends it to our consumer spending; that by going for the cheap pricing at the Big Box stores we are torpedoing our own economy. It was all very sobering- there's a lot of information at http://www.localfirstaz.com/, and I'm looking seriously at being part of their effort Shift Arizona which shows what a massive impact we could have on shoring up the ship wreck of a state economy by shifting 10% of our purchasing to local businesses. I buy into it, and see how it can be done easily if you live in Phoenix or Tucson, but wish they would consider the challenges of doing this in the smaller communities away from the big burgs. I got a lot out of this day! It was so fresh from the eduYawn stuff. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog While the tech choruses croon on about scale and AI and datadatadata, I prefer the long tail. Looking in the corners of digital stuff I marvel when you find small signs of quirky human presence. Like web messages you only see when you View Source. Or when you google recursion; and this new surprise search play: https://twitter.com/judell/status/1194408896829345792 Anyhow, I stumbled into one obscure message from a free tool developed by one person. A testimony to Why People Toil Away At Free Tech Projects of Passion. The odds of even seeing this are pretty small had I not followed a rabbit tunnel series of turns. It starts with a tweet. Yes of course people (via tweets) grandly declare Twitter a steaming cesspool of burning garbage. I smell the stench, but it's not everywhere. And not when you make your paths, not relying or counting on the platform to make Everything Pretty. So a tweet from Kevin, sharing what might be neat animation tool. https://twitter.com/dogtrax/status/1197826937139421184 Since I am working now on a site collection of creative tools, and trusting on @dogtrax for the stuff he shares (this is key, folks), I looked at the site he linked to, less to see the animation, but more to see where it lives. I back up to the top of the domain, https://antimatter15.com/. Joy, it's a domain of someone's own. Not littered with ads. It has a personality: Hi. I’m Kevin Kwok, and I’m currently a junior at MIT, and this is my obligatory online presence or whatever.This is my little corner of the internet, where I talk about random projects and ideas and stuff.If you want to contact me or read obnoxiously nostalgic autobiographical trivia, check out the about section.https://antimatter15.com/ This rings so true to the description of blogging I prefer most, from Dave Winer- the unedited voice of a person. That may sound cliché or fluff, but unpack it some (better, let Dave do it for you). It's human. But what's this tool? I pick part the URL some more to get to a blank creation space, https://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/ Typically I might play with it. If you were around in the 1990s it may have some resemblance to Flash/Director. But what is it? I pick around the Help menu, get a dialog box. Is there a story here? I almost give up, until I pick "Other." And here, is someone's personal message, tucked away in the drawer of a desk in the back of a second hand store down the end of an unpaved road (what more metaphors?, try "dusty"). It's a story and then some. If anything, it gets to the essence why some people work away tirelessly on personal projects, cutting corners around the limits of commercial software, and when Google Drops The Axe on The Tool You Love. Read this, please. Each paragraph might be a blog post, it's sequential. I really feel old writing this right now I probably don't need to write this, but I feel like putting some words on top of the first time I've updated this project which is really quite magical in my mind, being older than any other project of mine. I started thinking of doing this project back in late 2006, while I only wrote code starting at about March of 2007. I was 12 at the time. Until mid-2008, a lot had changed. It switched from being a raw idea to a UI sketch to a bunch of lossely coupled components, basic animation, 2 rewrites and a new core graphics editor. For almost a year, the project lay abandoned, and I had no urge to update it after it's relative complexity and several OS switches and rejection. Finally, I updated it, which brings it up to where it is today. While it is still lacking many features I and many users would like, I can't really do it all. I can't draw, and I can't really make sense with making a project which I can't personally benefit any more from. I started in 2006 when my Flash MX trial ran out and piracy felt wrong. I wanted a simple tool which could tween and draw stick figures, and it brought me along this 3 year journey. I felt pretty old writing that two years ago. Right now, it's the new years eve - the beginning of 2012. This has always been the one project which I would use to prove that I had done something with my life. It's one of the first things I've ever done, and remains the one that I'm probably most proud of. Most importantly of all, this is a story of visions and of ideas. What would I have thought those five years ago, looking at something marginally refined over the eternity which would have since passed? What would I have envisioned for a solitary musing into the development of creative software - not for professionals, mind you, but for the limitless naivete of students. But to a sixth grader, none of that made any difference. Professional and amateur was united in a singular appreciation for the craft and it was a vision which equalized everything. This project shifted from a means to an end, the cleansing of a guilty conscience of software piracy and the ulterior need to pursue an artistic desire into an end in itself. It became a duty, just like that of expressing notions of society from that fifth grade perspective to create software so that posterity may succeed in what I couldn't. But education is all about digging yourself into a hole, losing sight of the grandeur which was a flat landscape stretching into the distance filled with magnificent and seemingly bottomless trenches and tunnels. You can pick a nice region and start digging. You can make it your home, something warm with a barrier against the cold weather of idiocy. In this sense, I tried to be an artist but after shoveling knee-deep into the soft soil next to a tree with sticks and spoons, I had this marvel taken away by a higher power-- Adobe, or in real life, the administration of my Elementary school which deemed such a giant hole as a security and safety risk near the playground (actual story turned metaphor for another actual story, pretty cool right?). I went elsewhere to find another way to that end, but got lost in the process. Now I'm further away from the original goal than ever and I have no regrets. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if things turned out differently, especially at these nostalgic times of the year. It's been two years since the last release. A lot has changed since then and a lot hasn't. The most relevant is probably the death of Google Wave, which is scheduled for tomorrow. Google Wave, which in a few years won't be even part of a vague memory of humankind, was an amazing idea for the future. It, to those who allegedly grasped its sublimity was a definite harbinger for the world to come. A sort of retro-futuristic utopia of synergy and buzzwords galore filled with ideas of an age rendered impractical by the society and technology of its time. It was slow, clunky and didn't scale well. It promised everything and gave us nothing but cynicism for bold notions. Regardless, I was one of the naive few who saw through the noise and took a risk, reviving the already rotting carcass of this project under a new light. I saw no challenge as unsurmountable, and wrote a new graphics editor: jsvectoreditor, based off a new abstraction library called Raphael. I saw Internet Explorer as a roadblock which could be conquered, and felt that if Wave invested the effort and managed to get IE to work, so should mine. I developed a new data persistence layer so that sketches could be collaborated on in real time. The first sign that my vision was crumbling came with the announcement that Google Wave would no longer support IE. The wave client was sluggish and couldn't cope with the large amounts of data which this extension generated (On a tangent, I made a wave extension called Tsunami which caused waves to crash based on this principle and managed to pique the interest of the one and only xkcd). The vision came crashing down a bit over a year ago when the Wave project was cancelled wholesale. The rest of the world had abandoned Wave by then, but I was one of the reluctant few to cling on until the last dying gasp. This project stands now as a mere shell of what it was and could be. It should be clear to all by now that I'm not the right person to maintain this. But nonetheless, even though this project is now essentially a zombie devoid of meaning, I shall continue to exploit these naive and long gone ideals for personal benefit by pushing the occasional update to mock its demise. I'll pretend that the ideas are still alive and well and hopefully, maybe one day, I'll be able to convince myself that they are.From the "Other" tab in the Help menu of Ajax Animator, emphasis added by me. This is the kind of generator that keeps the heat on in our minds, and there were so many thoughtful messages here it was a challenge to pick just a few to highlight above in bold. So Kevin, you may never know it, but maybe I can convince you and confirm the ideas are alive, that this is all worth it. Not for the ends, but the means by which you work toward (and shared it), not for profit, or grandeur/fame, but because it feels important. Do we get even close to this kind of passion/motivation with the "Everyone should learn to code" movements? It's not about the coding, it's about the visioning, and finding the fire within to do stuff for no other reason than making something for someone else to maybe find a bit of that same fire. Thanks Kevin (both of y'all, I am looking at you @dogtrax). Featured Image: Another featured image story. I did a Google Image Search (filtered for results openly licensed) for "scrap paper ground", and saw a familiar photo, mine, but listed on pxhere.com and zero credit for the original. This is all "legal" for those who only care about licenses, but does it not lead one to wonder why Google gives preference to image vultures over the original photographer? Why? Anyhow I love this image I found in a real garbage dump. Because dumps are not all waste. If you look carefully, you will find shreds of human stories. 2013/365/47 Vacation Lost flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There is something... metaphorical.... about making bread. We are rich in quotations about it A quotation at the right moment is like bread to the famished --The Talmud quotes Think about it. You can just go out and buy mass produce, processed stuff-- cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by nchoz Or, with the most basic and inexpensive of elements- flour, water, yeast, sugar -- and manual effort -- make your own. It feels like magic. There is something to about that process of reworking, the kneading, of using your hands, of touching the substance of food you make-- that speaks to me more than just about the bread, but larger, for an approach to the things we do (or try to do). Bread is about being active: Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. -- Ursula K. LeGuin (science fiction writer) Long I've been impressed with my colleague Bryan Alexander's posted tales of home bread making. And I saw it in action when I visited him a few years ago- his kitchen has a permanent bread making station, and every day, there was fresh dough at work or in the oven. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I've been inspired to try, but to date, have gone the lazy way in the middle using a bread machine. My results have ranged from bricks, fallen bombs, to "not bad" cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Life is like a shit sandwich the more bread you have the less shit you have to eat. -- anonymous Even when it comes out less than great, it is still petty damn good. And even better that I have at least tried. So when it comes to bread, there is not shortage of advice, books, videos, advice, bread maker social networking groups, and advice. I am grateful for everyone's ideas and shared recipes - more water, less water, its my old yeast, more yeast, less yeast, its using splenda instead of sugar, weigh my flour instead of measuring, don't use a machine, you can use a machine... The thing is that while among these might be an answer that will help me make better bread-- like many things in life, we have to take in all this flood of information without taking it as an exact recipe for success. We have to try it out ourselves. It is an experiment. We have to perhaps put our hands in the dough. We have to apply our own effort. We have to fail a lot. We have to iterate. We may get lucky, we may get unlucky. We do not get anything beyond Wonderbread without trying. With bread and wine you can walk your road. -- Spanish Proverb So in the end, while I might try making a comparison of life, learning, education, loving, being -- to making bread, when it comes down to it, making bread is just like making bread. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by annelope If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a lily Chinese Proverb cc licensed flickr photo shared by zenobia_joy Against every sane, rational, "I'm so over committed I'm gonna explode" thought, I have decided to plunge my hand again into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the challenge where aspiring, and maybe aspired, writers take on the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel over a one month time span. I have always liked writing, but had never done anything substantial or larger than a long blog post, so it was one of those items I listed long ago on 43 Things. I had heard of NaNoWriMo, and it seemed analogous to running a marathon -- a goal you keep telling yourself you cannot do-- until you try. Last year I made my 50,000 mark (I burned a lot of adjectives up in the process), finished, and got through about 1 1/2 rounds of later edits before hanging it out to dry (see reflections on 2009). It never got discovered, I never got a book deal, and I still have a day job (none of these were primary aspirations, but heck, I'd not mind being surprised). The typical way one does this is mostly solitary- you write and write and write in most commonly a word processor (I did), and you update your NaNoWriMo site with your word count. There's really no vehicle (by design I think) where your novel goes; that one is up to you. Yes, they do offer a lot of tools to make friends and there are local discussion boards where there are options to meet up with other writers in your 'hood. I was fence sitting this year-- if I follow my running my running analogy, I ran the marathon once, finished, and never will do THAT again. But writing was a mental challenge that can be taken on, IMHO, easier than physical ones. IT'S IN YOUR HEAD. So I decided to do it this year to play more with the How I write more than the Drivel I Do Write. I decided I would not use Word this year, but do the writing in a blog to see how it works as a composition platform. I got myself the idea I could use it as one more Opportunity to Monkey with Wordpress, and add some code in to do word counts and progress. And since the Anthologize plugin came out a few months ago, it would be a new experiment in publishing to ePub and/or HTML. Even better, just last weak Patrick Murray-John offered up his new extension of Anthologize geared to publish NaNoWriMo content. My writing site is now fluttering in the open breeze at http://nano.dommy.com/ Like my running efforts, writing in the open becomes another impetus to finish as you don't want to bee seen failing in public. Below I will outline some of the tinkering I have done in Wordpress over the last 2 days to get myself set up. I'll say my novel really is not novel and idea, I am a Dog is the working title and it purports to be the insider view to the Canine world fur Humans to get past their naive assumptions of the dog-verse. I actually am so far hoping a plot emerges. But this was less about trying to Write a Great Story but just to try and also run some technical experiments. I did the automatic WordPress install on my Dreamhost-ed site, and pawed through the themes it provided, settling on the sparse Journalist theme. The code bits I hacked first was finding a way to add a word count to each post, and a method of summing the total words written. It ought to be a few database queries. After consulting the GoogleVerse, I found that MySQL has no function to count words, but I did find a blog that had a method for listing posts and word counts, and as the author says: MySQL doesn't have a built-in word count function for MySQL, but as with every other unanswered question, some smart guy on the blogosphere already answered how to use MySQL to get a Word Count. It's a little bit of a hack- a query that first sums the character length of a text column's contents and subtracts from it the character length of the same text with blank spaces replaced by null characters -- e.g. a word is defined by blank space. SELECT SUM( LENGTH(name) - LENGTH(REPLACE(name, ' ', ''))+1) FROM table First I would need a function that would return the word count for a single post, so I could add to the meta content for each post: In my functions.php template, I added my new function- it merely takes an id as a parameter and runs the word count query on the database using the Wordpress function to run a raw query, function nano_get_post_word_count($id) { global $wpdb; // get word count for a single post $word_count = $wpdb->get_results(" SELECT SUM( LENGTH(`post_content`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`post_content`, ' ', ''))+1) AS 'wordcount' FROM $wpdb->posts where `post_type` = 'post' and `ID`=" . $id, ARRAY_A ); return($word_count[0]['wordcount']); } I then monkeyed the part of the templates that output the author and date/time of post publishing to be more on line with what I need (not referring to posts)-- I lost the original part of template, but this is what produces the example above printf(__("%d words written by %s on %s",'journalist-13'), nano_get_post_word_count(get_the_ID()), get_the_author(), get_the_time('F jS, Y g:i a')); I use my own custom function to generate the word count for an individual post. The next part was to do something to create a running total of all words written across all published posts, put into my side bar. I could have done the calculation every time the sidebar loaded, but that seemed un-needed as the number would change only when a change was made, so I went for a cheap cache method. Again, modding the functions.php template, I first add a hook that will be called when a post is saved. // Use the save_post action to update word counts add_action( 'save_post', 'nano_save_post', 5, 2 ); This will call my own private function nano_save_post whenever anything is published or updated. The database query is similar, but we run it across all published posts. The last part is a way to write to a text file on my server. I've obscured my own path, put it is a directory named YYYY inside wp-content that contains writable file named XXXXX. it would likely be more sensible to stuff it ins a meta field of the database, and maybe I will get around to that later. function nano_save_post() { global $wpdb; // custom query to events whose end dates are greater than the current time stamp $total_word_count = $wpdb->get_results(" SELECT SUM( LENGTH(`post_content`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`post_content`, ' ', ''))+1) AS 'Totalcount' FROM $wpdb->posts where `post_type` = 'post' and `post_status` = 'publish'", ARRAY_A ); // update the file with the total word count $DATAFILE = fopen(TEMPLATEPATH . '/../../YYY/XXXXX',"w+"); fwrite($DATAFILE, $total_word_count[0]['Totalcount']) or die(" failed writing $DATAFILE"); fclose($DATAFILE); } And the last part is some code for the sidebar to put a count and display a percentage for progress value. I came across this Simple CSS shiny progress bar technique to add a fancy progress bar that will change as my word count increases: The progress bar calls for some CSS to be added to the style sheet, but the working parts are in the sidebar.php template. We simply get the contents of our cached wordcount file ($wordcount) convert it to a percent ($wordpercent), and use the values in the output: out of 50,000 words written (% done) Building collections of resources is among the oldest things to build on the web (and definitely before that). Heck, I made a "Bag of URLs" for this that ran for like 10 years. My first week on the job in 1992 as a green horned instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges I heard first what I came to called the "Database of Dreams" of who's doing what with technology. Why not one more? There's nothing wrong with the idea of resource curating, but more often than not, the collection ends up bound inside one database structure or one template design. As part of my recent short sprint of work with the Ontario Extend Project I was asked to create a "Toolkit" type of site for the tools used in the module. They had a few examples as models. These sites were used in the Experimenter Module as places to find tools to experiment with: Nifty Teaching Tools (The University of British Columbia – Instructional Support and Informational Technology)Projects to Build Your Media Literacy (University of Notre Dame – REMIX Top Tools for LearningeLearning Toolkit (University of Western Ontario) All useful, all very different in design/platform, yet all similar in concept. You could add as well the Online Tools for Teaching and Learning (University of Massachusetts) and even this collection powered by apparently a Google Spreadsheet. The site the project seemed to like the most (me too) was the UBC Nifty Teaching Tools -- especially the way to filter by topic from the front page. I could see doing that with the tabs being the Extend modules. My first step was to review all the modules (and their updated versions in draft) to see how many tools were specifically mentioned. It was actually quite low, even when including ones that were used in the content (H5P, Mentimeter, Padlet) but maybe not explicitly in the activities. This was because often the activities were written to not be tool specific- if the task was to create an infographic or to put together a mind map diagram, tool choice was left to the individual. So I suggested a different way to think about building this toolkit. Part of it still would be building an organizational scheme around what tools were relevant to what modules. But with a second taxonomy, we could create groupings of types of tools. And when a task calls for doing a Mind Map, a module might suggest one or two, but also link to a category within the toolkit to find more. I'll cut to the chase, but keep in mind this is just the first prototype and hardly near the full kit. And, as a prelude, do not get caught up in the appearance. Because it's all unfixed to format. Yup, just another WordPress made site https://toolkit.ecampusontario.ca/ We have on the front a means to filter tools by which modules they are associated with. The same collection of tools can be explored by function, or what I call "Families" of tools- video, visual organizer, quiz (this ones are not quite fixed in stone); here the view is filtered for "Collaborative Content Making" So what, I have create just another iteration of the other sites. You might not like my theme. Or that front filter thing. Or the way I have organized items. Or the meta data fields. The approach I have developed is independent of WordPress theme. It actually has no customized code for its functionality, it's all done via a set of plugins. The display of a tool page content (everything beyond the featured image and a brief intro) is completely managed by a single template, so one change there can update all entries. It can be exported as files for content, for the content structure, and the data fields, imported into a new site, and presented completely differently. A clone site could change the database fields. It's not a SPLOT, not a theme, it's almost a recipe. And when you cook by recipe, you can follow to the letter or introduce your own ingredients, cookware, and prep routines. It's along the lines of how Jon Udell introduced me to the idea of a "user innovation toolkit" There’s a reason I keep finding novel uses for these trailing-edge technologies. I see them not as closed products and services, but rather as toolkits that invite their users to adapt and extend them. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel calls such things “user innovation toolkits” — products or services that, while being used for their intended purposes, also enable their users to express unanticipated intents and find ways to realize them. I like to take it farther, in terms of using tools to make tools for other people to make tools. Enough arm waving, how the heck does this work? What am I blabbering on about? Well, the first concession is yes, this is done in WordPress. And some folks are turning to static site generators or other beasties and blasting the overhead of WP. https://twitter.com/realdlnorman/status/1201722406680719361 I'm not going to win any arguments against these, but I am trying here for something that people can do without going git commandline dizzy. First of all the front page thing I did with the filters is not core of the toolkit, it was just a thing to try out because the clients liked it. I looked at many plugins for doing these types of displays, none of the free ones would do what I needed with custom post types. I peeked at the source code of the UBC site and guessed they are using some version of the Metafizzy Isotope jQuery library, I found an older WordPress implementation that, well works. But you could go with any theme's way of doing content on the front page. For the site I built, it made sense to make the tools a custom post type, so in use anywhere, regular WordPress Posts could be used (or not) for news, announcements etc. As a custom post type, I was able to create taxonomies of: Modules (like categories)Families (like different categories, for the tool function)Descriptors (set up as tags, but not used here) While I usually manage these in custom themes/code, for this site, the post types and taxonomies are all created with the Custom Post Type UI plugin (free). Here I named the post types, and defined a few properties. So you're first step in making a copy of this site would be installing/activating this plugin. Your site could import the settings I would provide from mine: There would be a similar file for the custom taxonomies. This just creates the structure for the content types. It would give you a Dashboard menu like my site, with the Extend Tools Post Type, as well as the menu items for the 3 taxonomies. I will say that the custom post type is not required, other toolkits might be better built as regular WordPress Post types, and you could skip this step. Whatever the content type, these are used for the kinds of information WordPress provides built-in--title, featured image, category/tags/taxonomy. The kinds of collections you might build will also have a series of structured data fields to be attached, or metadata as the gearheads say. For the Extend Tool Kit, this is information like the web site for the tool, an icon, a list of modules it is used in, a list of resources, etc. This is where the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin gets powerful (free version used). It adds to your post editor all kinds of data fields you might want in your editor- drop down menus, radio buttons, text fields, full formatted editor fields. This is how you create the structure of your kit's information. I made two ACF groups, not really needed, but it made sense at one time: Each group has a collection of fields that will appear in the editor and be part of the data. The Tool Attributes are mostly editable rich text editor fields. Now if I was doing a custom code theme version of the toolbox, I could have more powerful use of ACF, repeater fields, etc. But to keep it code free, a number of the fields ended up being just editable, so if they are not edited carefully, it might not be quite as pretty. If you were making a copy site of the Toolkit, you might never need to peek much here (unless you wanted to add new fields, change their labels, properties). But once you had the plugin, you would use the ACF Tools menu to import another settings field I could provide by exporting. Again, this only creates the structure for the database. Content will be coming soon! But what it does do is expand the fields in your post/post type editor, below the content area, you have the Tool Ino section where you would enter a short description of the tool, enter a URL, and upload an icon. The Tool attribute fields are just edited and formatted lists, with links, etc. What we have done here is to make a WordPress entry contain data in small buckets for the kinds of information we want to provide. What we can do in the post area is use the shortcodes ACF provides to insert the information stored for that field. If I wanted to display the content in the More Information field, I would use [acf field="more_information"]. And while I could try to just format my posts consistently, that would be a lot of changes if I got the format wrong, or added/removed a field. So there is one more plugin in the mix.. and this one does something really slick. The Content Blocks plugin lets me create a template that can have within it, the ACF shortcodes, and anything else I want to be put into every post. It is added to the main post by it's own shortcode. The powerful thing about this plugin is you can format things with the new WordPress editor, and use its features to do whatever it can do in your theme. This gets even better in the recent updates as you can create groups of blocks. Here is a part of my theme's template, it creates two columns, uses a theme's built in shortcode for icons, and also puts in the ACF fields I want displayed: Which ends up being displayed with the content from the ACF fields as entered: To get the full content block in my tool entry, I just need to add to the content editor the shortcode for the content block I want to use. Now this may just be flying by, but there are powerful toolkit toolkit concepts here- I can update/change every tool page by modifying the Content Block template. Or I can even create multiple templates I could use in different places on the site, maybe a different layout or even in another language. The Content Blocks will come in to your own copy site in the next step where... finally you get content. I would make a WordPress Export file for all content, you get the custom post content, the data for its taxonomies, the content blocks, the custom post fields all in your site. What this means for Ontario Extend, is... once there is a built out Toolkit site with fill content, any teaching and learning center or other organization that might want to customize it for their organization could set up a copy site, use a different theme that matches their existing sites, edit out or ad new tools, make up their own templates for display, maybe add new data fields, and tailor the context of the content for what works for them. And this recipe is by no means limited to technology tools. It could be teach practices. It could be a structure for a portfolio. It could be a collection of resources. It could be... anything. This is all conceptual, and maybe a bit vague? But I am rather excited about the flexibility of this approach, and that so much can be done with no coding. I might have to build another kind of site to demonstrate how it can be used for something different from Another Tool Collection site. Yes, 27+ years into the game, and I am still building Databases of Dreams... Featured Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech image of Mars Rovers (from left to right: Mars Exploration Rover, Sojourner, Mars Science Laboratory rover). Image in public domain as the work of a US government agency. In prep for Tuesday's You Show workshop session on audio I worked feverishly about 4 hours Monday night and 3 hours Tuesday morning to create the newest SPLOT tool, the Sound Pool. This is a place to share audio clips, tracks, either MP3 audio either found on the web (via a URL) or uploaded to the pool. Last night I decided to add support for SoundCLoud tracks. It's a direct followup from the Image Pool with a few new enhancements. This is done as a Wordpress child theme of the Baskerville theme, another elegant gem by Anders Noren. Beyond clean design, responsive layout, a total lack of Theme Bloat, Baskerville makes full use of Wordpress Post Formats, a feature I've never much paid attention to. But it allows a post layout (or its representation on the front page or archive) to display slightly differently depending on the format (based on media)-- if you use a video format and provide a URL for YouTube or vimeo, the video is embedded on the front page of Baskerville and at the top of the post. If you use audio, then it embeds a sound player. Editing this post by hand, you would choose audio as a format in the bottom right (I actually hid the other 7 formats not used in this site), and then enter the URL for the audio in the top right. This means on the front page, all of the media can be played without even having to click to the post. To enable uploads of media, I am using the same approach as not only the Image Pool but also the TRU Writer. This is topic of a future post, but it means that I have to secretly, invisibly log a visitor into a secret Author account (to make available the media uploader, and for the Writer, the rich text editor). As an example, Jon Fulton uploaded a one called Splotsquelch - it is his example of taking a single recorded sound (the puff of an inhaler) and editing it into a musical composition: On the form used to add content (it currently does not require a pass phrase to access), we collect info (name of person sharing the sound, name of the person/entity to give it credit, and a license under which it was found or will be shared, if original). This provides the basis for a new feature, cut and paste attribution text, one with HTML: I'm trying to simplify the web form for sharing a new sound, the only required items are a title, the sound itself and a license. Clicking the "upload sound" button opens the media uploader; a file can be dragged and dropped to send to the server. When a choice is made, the URL gets inserted into the field below. But sounds can also be added simply by entering a URL for an MP3 file or, as of last night, a soundcloud track. I use a pair of functions; one that does a string match looking for "soundcloud.com" in a variable to detemrine if it is from SoundCloud, and another that can add a check to make sure the URL ends in ".mp3" function url_is_audio ($url) { // tests urls to see if they point to an audio type, either an mp3 URL or Soundcloud page // if we have a SoundCloud URL, activate the green light if ( url_is_soundcloud ( $url ) ) return true; // otherwise let's look at the file extension on the URL $fileExtention = pathinfo ( $url, PATHINFO_EXTENSION ); // get file extension for url $allowables = array( 'mp3'); // allowable file extensions // check the url file extension to ones we will allow return ( in_array( strtolower( $fileExtention) , $allowables ) ); } function url_is_soundcloud ( $url ) { if ( strpos( $url, 'soundcloud.com') === false ) { return (false); } else { return (true); } } Next we allow choices of categories, free form tagging, and a caption -- what becomes the body of the post. I heard you critics, there is no longer a requirement of a caption. This is sad, because you may end up with the contextless flow of stuff that typifies tumblr. Captions are important (to me). Last are the names of the person sharing the audio (take credit or stay Anonymous), and fields to add the name of who to credit for it (optional) and a license choice (not optional, I am holding this line). Once cleared of some basic form content checking, the info is added as a new "post" and adjusted to reflect all the things in the form (adding categories and tags, custom post data, setting the post format to audio). The URL that identifies the sound file is added as post meta data, and my code adds the other bits: The theme has a configuration screen for the site admin, where you can make access require a code word to use the upload form. I don't have email notification built in now, it could be an option to turn on/off in future. One of the first things I added to the theme was options to download the audio (for mp3 uploads or links) inspired by a tweet comment by Ken Bauer -- the native Wordpress audio player never provides a link to download. I put it in thrice, adding a link to the front page (as an icon) and in sinle post, below the content, and in the bottom post data: This is east to do since it is stored as the post meta data value for audio_url. Since I added the ability to embed SoundCloud (see below), my logic has to work only if the post represents an MP3. In the content-audio.php template which formats the content just for the audio post-formats, I use ($audio_url is fetched earlier from the post meta data). if ( $audio_url and !$is_soundcloud ) { echo 'Download'; } Note the use of download inside the link tag! This makes sure the link just downloads, rather than opening in a new tab. I had to create some new icons to present on the front page and the grey background box, just had to do some copying of the styles done use for the rest of the theme. I had not planned to make Soundcloud an options, but I am also helping Bryan Jackson on a new site for his Talons #IntroGuitar class; he took my suggestion to try Baskerville. He asked me last night why no sound played when he put a SoundCloud URL in for the audio field-- that's because the theme is not designed for it! The mods I made on his site, came into play for the Sound Pool. On both the content-audio.php (formats an entry for the front page) and single.php (formats a single post), I do the same thing. At the top, I fetch the value of the audio URL, and then run that against my function so I know if it is SoundCloud or not. And when it comes time to display the audio, if the URL is for SoundCloud, I use the function that embeds the player. If the URL is for an MP3, we use the native audio player. Sorry I have not blogged for a decade... Sigh, such excuses. I set up https://cogdogroo.wordpress.com/ in 2007 for a speaking/presenting tour of Australia I did in October 2007-- well it was every capital city in two weeks, a bit mad cap. But I did manage 75 posts starting back with planning in February. So it's with some interesting irony that almost exactly ten years later I am back on another invited tour (actually I have been to Australia maybe 5 times in between), this time in Victoria to do presentation and workshops arranged by the International Specialised Skills Institute (details are still being finalized). Thus I am reviving that blog... because I can. It was due a new look, this was how it looked a week ago, still sporting a 2007 vintage theme [caption id="attachment_65213" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The old 2007 era blog..[/caption] While this blog was in its youth then, I opted to use what was a relatively new (it opened in 2005) hosted Wordpress.com- some to learn it better but also to promote the kinds of tools were publicly available. Likewise, I hung all my workshop materials on a Wikispaces site http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/ -- and amongst the large pile of web services that have bitten the dust my Wikispaces site is rock solid 10 years later. This was the birth of the project, from a half thought out idea and metaphor, that maybe propelled much of my work in that decade, 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story. It's rather interesting to see what I was talking about ten years ago, in addition to web-based storytelling tools: Precious Web 2.0 Gems Tag We're All It Powerful Personal Portals Being There Technologies on the Horizon Virtual Worlds: Promise and Perils Actually I used a second wiki service (I think then it was called PBWorks, it's tagline "making a wiki is as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich") for planning purposes, so reps from the places I was visiting could feed me ideas. And that one is still alive after a decade! Despite the luck of those three old hosted free sites still being alive, I'm much less inclined these days to hang my work anywhere but a domain of my own. So the workshops and presentation materials will be at http://cog.dog/roo (see what I did there) as a Wordpress Multisite. My workshop descriptions are for now in a Google Doc, but will move soon to my web sites. I owe a big thanks to Brad Beach at Chisholm Institute for the invitation and planning. I met Brad on my trip in 2007. And also, to Nancy White who recommended me a year after she did the same institute last year. The parallels could not be more perfect, because my visit in 2007 as a Flexible Learning Leader, was... a year after Nancy was one on 2006. I'm following in her chocolate shoes again. On this decades trip I will be in Melbourne Nov 4-21, also getting a chance to visit Seb Chan at the ACMI and catching up with my DS106 pal Rowan Peter. And to do some photowalks with Michael Coghlan (who took that photo of me in 2007 used in the new blog post) https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/917649152300871680 Then I'll be trekking north to Wagga Wagga to visit Tim Klapdor and Charles Sturt University, and then a trip to Wollongong to visit Kate Bowles. So from 2007 to 2017 quite a decade bookended by trips Down Under. Featured Image: Screenshot of my Wordpress.com blog with literally, a ten year gap in posts. Maybe I'll start blogging cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by DonkeyHotey Today marks the 89th day of the ds106 Daily Create site. The TDC has been a typical ds106 roll as we go grand experiment, but it has more than rolled, it has rocked too. Below is a little bit of what has happened between tdc1 and tsc89- plus a plea for you to help us by adding new daily create challenges. This impetus was spawned a bit by the demise of the dailyshoot photography site which issued a regular challenge to do in photography. I fully buy into the idea that small acts of regular creativity is not only good practice, but good for the soul. I have no proof, just my own case study. For the start of classes in January, we hoped to create our own version, and to be more than photography, but video, audio too. Tim Owens did a masterful wordpress wizardry to put it together without ant custom programming (read his summary). The original DailyShoot worked by harvesting photo data (from numerous photosharing services) tweeted out with a specific daily tag- to make ours work, we had to pick one photo service (flickr), one for video (YouTube), and one for audio (Soundcloud) based on what they offered to aggregate content by tag. There is something mesmerizing on seeing the graphic overview of the photo and video works. I was hoping to pull together some stats on activity, and spent a late hour bouncing around the wordpress database with some custom queries before the anvil dropped on my head- the data is all external to the blog, so I need to code something up to get daily tag counts from the various APIs. I think its doable, and can be added as custom fields to the posts. Aside. We had a great wave of activity once we got rolling, some days getting well over 100 submissions. For the ds106 sections that Jim and I teach, we made it a requirement to have students to 3 per week, and ramped that up to one a day when we started our Visual assignments section. The activity is waning, and I got a sense from some of the student work, that is was becoming more of a chore as we set it up as a requirement, so have relaxed it as a firm commitment. What I am enjoying is that I am seeing my students continue at it, one after class mentioning how much she enjoyed it and planned to continue doing the Daily Create after the class had ended. Another student decided just to make up her own photo challenges. Yet another took a simple daily create for a reversal video and evolved it into a much longer video story-- just because he got driven by the idea. This is the personal challenge making I really dig. It does seem that total activity has leveled off... people are still doing it, and I can only speculate. There is no desire to have this get MASSIVE, but am just curious to find out if we are saturating. Heck, on my own, I have slacked off a bit doing this regularly. What I would like your help on is creating new assignments - we have a good supply, but more is always better. People like Zac Dowell, Dr Garcia, and many of our students have been all star idea machines. Plus, we are going to need at least another 270 to be able to put on our calendar offered on the Kickstarter project WE WANT YOU! to send your ideas now to the Suggestion Box. And of course, to make more daily creates. Today's challenge is relevant too, a way of saying thanks to Soundcloud. We went with them because of the widget that it creates as a player in our site, but to get the widget, we have to create a new group in Soundcloud. A limit of the basic accounts is that you can only create one group, and as an end around, we were asking people to make groups for us, or offering some bogus accounts if only to make a group. When we contacted them about this issue and what we were using their site for, Ben from Soundcloud kindly added the capability for us to create multiple groups. So today's Daily Create is to give SoundCloud some audio thanks: Show your appreciation for @SoundCLoud- record your thanks over a drum beat Soundcloud has recently given us permission to create all the TDC groups we need, so let's thank them with music! Record yours over a repeating drum track, such as the ones from Phat Drum Loops. Whatchya waiting for? Make some sounds! I was not going to do today's DS106 Daily Create task to add a modern context caption to a Frederic Remington painting: I had already done the one that appears there. But I am just sipping coffee, and in much less time than this blog post will take, I made a simple meme image (I do mine in Photoshop, using Impact Font with the Stroke Layer effect). That's the ds106 thing, there is this "assignment" and what happens along the way that goes beyond or around it. So I knew there was a lot of Remington art works in Wikimedia COmmons, so when I googled "Frederic Remington" in Google Image search with the usage set to Licensed to Reuse (please tell me you know how to do that?), I had a lot of choices, but this stare down of an Indian warrior and his horse jumped out at me. I found a nice surprised when I clicked to view the site (I nearly always go to the site first to see what context an image is used, and so I can get my attribution source) (please tell em you attribute images you use?) (why am I so parenthetical today?). I did not land in Wikimedia Commons, but on a page for this painting in a site I had not seen before, Wikiart: Holy Bag of Gold, Artman! I not only get the image, some informational metadata, but the story behind the story: In late 1905, Cosmopolitan magazine began publishing serial installments of one of Remington’s most successful novels, The Way of an Indian. The novel chronicles the life story of a Cheyenne man as emblematic of the life and death of his people. Born on the open plains, the man develops into Fire Eater, a fearsome warrior and chief. However, despite his bravery and skill, he becomes increasingly powerless as his tribe falls before the steady encroachments of the white man. By the time Fire Eater has reached old age, he and his tribe are decisively defeated in a final battle with the U.S. Cavalry. Although Fire Eater manages to escape with a few survivors into the mountains, he leaves the body of his son and the defiant spirit of his people behind. The novel ends with the despairing old chief calling to the spirits to take him away, so he can enter the shadow-land and return to the glory days of his youth. The themes in Remington’s novel have their visual counterpart in Ridden Down, completed the same year as the novel. Here a lone warrior, stripped for battle and covered with green “medicine” paint for protection, stands on the edge of a bluff next to his gasping, sweat-lathered horse, which has been ridden to exhaustion. A badlands landscape stretches all around them like an ocean of shimmering yellows, as a band of Indians gallops toward them from the desert flats far below. Like Fire Eater in Remington’s novel, this warrior stoically calls to the spirits while awaiting his inevitable fate. The story told by this painting is simple, yet very powerful. “Big art is the process of elimination,” Remington was quoted as saying a few years earlier. “Cut down and out—do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about—to imagine.” Is the internet like this great open land, full of battles, where we sometimes end up facing our sweat-lathered steed ridden to exhaustion? Do we end up wanting to be taken away to a shadow and and returned to our youthful internet glory days? But it was that last quote of Remington that totally resonated with me: “Cut down and out—do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about—to imagine.” It's easy to try and put so much into our work, to be explicit, but to me, it gets most creative when the audience is left to something to imagine. It's hardly a great painting result, but when I thought of the sentence to put into my GIF, I had in mind a second line, a response, maybe about being busy, or not understanding how friending works. But it seemed better, Remington-ish, to leave it open, and to not even try and indicate who was talking to who? And I have this idea in my head more firmly about looking for ways to do the hard work outside the web screen, and leaving more for an audience (that might be you, if you are still reading) to do more. All of this as a bit of creative muscle work, and finding a fantastic new resource in Wikiart. This is the does of serendipity that keeps me jazzed and not jaded. Check them out: The project aims to create high-quality, most complete and well-structured online repository of fine art. We hope to make classical art a little more accessible and comprehensible, and also want to provide a new form of interaction between contemporary artists and their audience. In the future we plan to cover the entire history of art — from cave artworks to the new talents of today. The project is non-profit. WikiArt filling system is based on the principle of wiki, i.e. free filling and editing the contents of the site by anyone who wants to participate in the project. The quality and reliability of the information will be ensured by consistent moderation of all the updates. Wiki functionality of the site is still under development and we are working hard to open editorial section for public. Please request an invitation and we'll let you know when it's ready. The site presents both public domain artworks and works that are protected by copyright. The last ones are posted on the site in accordance with fair use principle, because: they are historically significant artworks; the images are only being used for informational and educational purposes; the image are readily available on the internet; the images are low resolution copies of the original artworks and are unsuitable for commercial use. If you are the copyright holder of the work of art used for WikiArt.org and do not agree that its use on the site is in accordance with the fair use principle, please contact us by e-mail. That last bit of rationale seems so sound and rationale, rather than mumbo jumbo terms of use, legal threats, power/control, and strict licenses. It sounds human. Thanks, internet. Now what was I supposed to be doing now? Top / featured image: This is something I created in about 10 minutes for today's ds106 Daily Create which asked us to add a caption to a Frederic Remington painting. The image is his 1906 painting Ridden Down which I found via Google Images search (filtered for licensed to reuse) at Wikiart. Sigh, one cannot avoid The Topic, the Only Thing as it has been grailed. At least it provides fodder for some mocking. It's so easy even with the merest of ChatGPT et al interaction to respond under the influence of the Weizenbaum effect made visible in the verbs we choose. https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog/110333706798508168 And like Laura Czerniewicz wrote in Completely authoritatively made up I enter the prompt box with no expectation that what is regurgitated back is anything but Colbertian factiness: Made up, and yet not lies exactly, I think, since lies do imply intent. Rather, two “hallucinations” in one: Generative AI pretending to be human and authoritatively and confidently making up information. https://czernie.weebly.com/blog/completely-authoritatively-made-up It was quite clear when I tossed it a question about a subject I knew very well from a published research paper I did long ago, it was evident that ChatGPT has not in anyway drawing its responses by "looking up facts" as it assembles things like URLs and citations that only resemble these entities on a statistical guess, it does look up anything. Well actually I don't know what it does, but I feel like when people discover the falseness of returned facts that ChatGPT just has done sloppy research. Even in some experiments where I asked it to produce code for a WordPress plugin or a Javascript bookmark, it was impressive at first glance what it returned, because it very closely resembled those things. But my efforts never actually worked, and then I was debugging. I know others have much greater success, so I am going to accept I am a lousy prompt engineer. I question if I really want to be skilled in such a thing. Yet I Fall Into My Own Trap Still, I faltered again. I have been doing some work trying to learn how to get into Wikidata and leverage the query power of SPARQL. I took a course in November, but then let it lapse, so my query skills are really rusted. Without going too deep, after a really great OEG Live Webcast with guests discussing climate change as shown in film narrative I wondered about trying to see if I could extract examples of this genre, given that there is a Wikimedia category for it. Alas, my queries kept failing, and in a despicable act of desperation, IACFH (I Asked ChatGPT For Help) (I am as bad at acronyms as my AI prompts). Alan: Write a wikidata SPARQL query to list title and date of all films in the Climate Change genre. Almost instantly it returned with much confidence what resembled a solid query: It warned me too "Note that this query may take some time to run, as it is searching through a large database." so when I asked it to maybe limit the results to 100, it added the proper statement. But look, I did not even stop to think. There are only 44 films listed on the Category page I found, why would ChatGPT give that warning? I got 0 results, so I reported that back. Again, the obsequious ChatGPT replied with again full of that authoritative tone: And what I find is I am slipping on my own intuition. The first example it game my was listed as an attempt to find the Climate Change Genre using property Q32971 which if you plop into a URL is https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q32971 The grand intelligence if ChatGPT's first attempt was to look for a genre identified as "Alice Cogswell" Not even close. And upon questioning, it shuffles off with great sorry filled blabber to say, Oh My, I used the wrong property, try Q884794 instead. And I did. That borked too. Of course it would, that is trying to find a film genre identified as "list of state leaders in 1349" which is even more off base. Of course I would get zero results. I report failure. Now here is where it gets curious. Again, it falls over with this syrupy aplogy blather. Note the claim it makes: I have tested the query myself and was able to retrieve results, so I'm not sure what could be causing the issue on your end. ChatGPT, making **** up Wow, ChatGPT went out, ran the query, and got results. It's operating from the old tech support handbook, "It worked for me, so you must be a chump". But note that it is also claiming The genre ID for "climate fiction" is Q21246176: ChatGPT, Artificially Intelligent Well, not even close, now I am calling it out. The property it suggested is found at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21246176 is actually a species of fish known as Caristius digitus. I have to lecture ChatGPT: Alan: That cannot be right. Q8383103 is not climate fiction. The genre for climate change films is Q8383103 Why do I have to look s*** up for this machine? Again it apologies, corrects it's query, which I try... and get zero results. I can't let this slide. Alan: You said "I'm sorry to hear that the previous query still did not work. I have tested the query myself and was able to retrieve results," but when I tried the exact same query, I got zero results. Please explain and demonstrate how you tested the query and show me the results you received. This seems reasonable! Look at the way it weasels out of the hole it has dug, it blames me. None of the queries it provided me work, and I have shown that they are all faulty for the properties it is using. And doesn't this seem like lying? It is telling me it got results. Alan: But if you were able to retrieve results then you should be able to show me the results. Therefore you are lying. That is not respectful. Results are results, right? They should be reproducible. But look how it explains itself: Again, this sure sounds like lying, right? It says it cannot even get results, and that all it is really doing is checking syntax and expressing its confidence as "I believe". This is preposterous. After more obsequious blabber, it then reverts to claiming it gets results. None of this makes sense, because I am trying to reason with something that has no capability of reasoning. It is merely iterating through patterns to resemble results, to resemble writing, to resemble thought, but it is none. So yes, I think we need some help from Kirk and Spock and Harry Mudd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WRtqmHpLvg ChatGPT is not lying or really hallucinating, it is just statistically wrong. And the thing I am worried about is that in this process, knowing I was likely getting wrong results, I clung to hope it would work. I also found myself skipping my own reasoning and thinking, in the rush to refine my prompts. Postscript I should add that no matter how many times I could have asked ChatGPT for assistance, it would never succeed (despite its protestations) because of a flaw (human induced) from the outset. You see, I had assumed wrongly that because there is a Wikpedia category for Climate Change films and an associated Wikidata item for this category there is no use of climate change as a wikidata item for film genres. This was revealed because I asked for help from Wikidata Will (Kent) who helped me understand the reason why I was getting no results. And I am not making a stand for victory of human over machines, as for well constructed queries and many tasks, AI is doing wonders for me (transcription for one, and I am impressed with my runs with Elicit). I wrote this more as to make a case that ChatGPT and generative AI in general are not (yet?) any good at reasoning and in our use, we need to not park our own reasoning abilities just because its fun to be conversational with it. Featured Image: Animated GIF of some old slides I had used in a 2005 TCC Online Conference Keynote actually based on a Star Trek metaphor that I re-edited slightly for 2023. Probably not legally kosher, mostly for parody. Shrug. Just for fun, this was the abstract from that 2005 presentation (and bless you Bert Kimura for going along with this!) And the "slides" as it were are still available as a Flickr set. "Harry Mudd, Small Pieces, and that Not Widely Distributed Future"~ Where it (or IT) is for Educators ~ Predictions of the future are easily analyzed in hindsight and ought to be skeptically questioned -- you will have to tune into this session to see the connection with an old Star Trek episode. However, author William Gibson's insightful quote, "The future is here. It is just not widely distributed yet" is the framework I use to peek at the future. For the use of technology in teaching and learning, where is this "not widely distributed future?" I am not sure, but in this session, we will take some guesses at places you may find the future. The present form of the web was visible, but not widely distributed in 1992. Is there something of this scale already here? Will text messaging displace email as a communication mode? We will look at the drivers of consumer used technologies that become disruptive? For example, digital cameras have taken the lead in the consumer photo market and MP3 players are re-shaping the music industry. And how about those multitude of technology gadget web sites? Are small pieces of "loosely" joined technologies (often open source) displacing large comprehensive commercial tools? The future is here and it (or IT) is not. Explore hands-on some of the interesting "social" and connection technologies such as "tags", RSS, wikis, podcasts, and perhaps whatever else pops up between now and the conference. Last week I was at an NMC Board meeting, hosted at a very special location in Cupertino, and was oh, so overwrought with jealousy as colleagues pawed, swashed, swooshed with their shiny new iPhones. And I would be among the cool kids-- if were it not for the utterly ridiculous lock AT&T has on being a sole provider of connectivity. Whatever happened to the old American spirit of competition? Free markets? I cannot answer the economic theory questions, but my NoiPhone status remains as the sole provider for connectivity has almost no signal in the part of the state I spend a lot of time, and likely a lot more in the future. As such, the iPhone would be all 'i" and no "phone" (and no "net" unless I was near wifi). My rant is all about me. Or Them. AT&T plasters these full color page ads in our Sunday papers letting us know how much they are improving the networks in Arizona, they have these PhotoShopped images of Monument Valley, torqued in the shape of the "more bars" signal. I wish they'd spend money on actually improving that network rather than telling us it is improved. Cause it has not changed one lick in signal strength in the places I go (which is what matters, right?). That's where I love the web tools that provide user data that counter advertising lies- such as Signal Map- a mashup of mobile network signal strength and maps- so anyone can annotate the map with their signal reception and color code by carrier. In my location, Strawberry Arizona, and really the broader area corridor, there are almost no strong AT&T signals reported (blue), while Verizon (red) is way out in front. Strawberry is small (maybe 200 homes, 800 full time residents), but there is no ATT reported in nearby Payson (population more like 15000+) but lots of red. My carrier, Alltel gets a full 5 bars in the entire town of Strawberry and Pine. Of course, a user reported information, these are not "comprehensive" data, but hints at the potential this could have as a leveraging point should there a big flood of new data. This is information that can be put out in the public space, and AT&T's sorry face. My next trip up, I intend to zap a bunch of new data points to the map. There seems little technical reason why AT&T, a much larger company than Alltel, provides such crappo service. There is a nest of signal towers on top of the Mogollon Rim, within sight line distance from my cabin: I've been squinting, but cannot see AT&T logos anywhere. There are 2 bars in town (the liquor kind); much more than AT&T provides. I remain, iPhoneLess for now, no earth shattering kaboom travesty. But I give a collective Pfffffhhhttt to AT&T or Apple for the iMonopoly. Whew, I really thought I had my blog title pun game back on, but this one just did not work. This is mostly, as blog posts ought to be, for myself as a note of trying a new to me photo tool called Photini. As it turns out (BIB, Because It's Blogged), the name has nothing do with cocktails. It's mostly useful for editing metadata with photos, that's it. And why care about photo metadata? Well it very valuable information about your photo that travels with the image (or should) wherever it goes, including credit to the photographer, a reuse license, all the specs about the camera that took it, geolocation, and more. But for me it is more of a sensible work flow. I prefer editing and managing my photos on my own hardware/computer and uploading after. This way I am no up a creek if my online photo service goes bye bye. And all of the info I add after editing-- title, description, tags, can be sent with it, for me, where my photos are on flickr. This gets lost so much when people rant/rave about where they store photos online, they count on the service to be their main collection. So when Google Photos of SnazzyPix goes away, they are scrambling/praying/whinging about losing it or sweating a export. The big thing I learned long ago is developing a local photo management strategy/practice. Organize locally, export online. For a very long time I built mine around editing/managing my photos with Apple Aperture and using a Flickr Export plugin, I stretched this as long as possible running an old operating system because Apple stopped supporting the software in 2015 (which did not stop me using it for like another 7 years). I was forced to upgrade from the Yosemite OS for another key software used for my web work, and reluctantly decided I would move my game to Adobe Lightroom (since I had a license for the $10 monthly fee for Photoshop) (yes, I know there are lo of alternatives and Adobe's rep is sliding, but I have my game strong in Photoshop, so... shrug, Not ready. Yet). Frankly I have not been loving Lightroom. Yes, it has remote storage of the source photos (they love in file and folders), but learning to edit has been a bit slow, the interface is all over the place, and ... well, I will sop my complaints. I am getting there, but I have been blaming it for a backlog of un-uploaded Daily Photos (like April-August!). But I digress, the Lightroom battle is its own post. Putting on my Fediverse cap have been dabbling some, and want to be more active with my account on PixelFed, where I infrequently post through the web interface. Idly, I was searching last week to see if there was a Lightroom to Pixelfed plugin, but came up dry beyond one unanswered pos in Reddit. But somewhere in there I came across a reference to Photini which had listed features that it can upload to Flickr, PixelFed, and other services. Photini is not an image editor nor a photo manager, it merely (not so merely) lets you edit the metadata in your photos. Installing Photini is a command line judo dance of using python and a package manager (saying like I know what I am talking about). My approach is copying commands from a web site, watching gobs of mumbo jumbo text flow by, and hoping the darn thing works. This is second hat for many tech folks, but I am a faker at sys admin. I had to refresh my head to virtual environments in Linux, update/upgrade old stuff. It took an hour one night to even get it running, and another hour next night to chase down errors. As far as I can sense, running it on my trusty (old) (ancient) 2013 Macbook Pro requires this command line sequence in Terminal cd home source photini/bin/activate python3 -m photini I guess I could make that a clickable applescript. This post is not much of a how to, and I am not even sure how I will work this into my photo flow. For now, I first do all my edits in Lightroom- add titles, captions, tags. Any photos I wanto use in Photini, I export with the options I forget where they are to include metadata. In Photini, I open up the new images, and for each one on the bottom, I can inspect metadata. Here I have opened a photo which loads with info Lightroom saves. I does not come with Alt Text, but in Photini I can add. Pixelfed uses real alt text, Flickr sadly does not, it just uses the photo title (I tried to ask for this feature). I can also fix my frequent typos, or add new ones. Reading/editing Descriptive Metadata in Photini.. Next is ownership metadata, this already comes from Lightroom, but you can also create a reusable template. Editing Ownership metadata, credit, license, rights statement. Camera metadata seen in Photini. This all comes from my camera(s) and is saved in Lightroom. I see no need to edit, but you could change these items. Now I can use the PixelFed upload tab. I login in to authenticate (i remembers you are logged in for next time). The caption field is blank, as Pixelfed does not have a separate title field. I click Generate and Photini combines my titles, description, and tags into on caption. You can also add the photo to a PixelFed collection you have made for groups of photos. Now I can upload it to PixelFed. Here is my very first sip of posting to PixelFed with Photini: Just for fun, right from here, I posted the same photo to flickr https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54010283335 That Sky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I think this can work now in my flow, adding a step to post to PIxelFed: Import new photos to Lightroom Edit images and add titles, descriptions, tags Publish to flickr, along with extra automated steps to add certain tagged photos to albums Export any photos I want to sent to PixelFed to my designated export folder Use Photini to add alt text and upload to my PixelFed The downfall of metadata is that all the info that was se in my original photo is not preserved if you save a copy from PixelFed. I will see about requesting this, Likewise for photos uploaded to flickr, you only get your original metadata if you download the original size image. And anything sent out elsewhere, cough Instagram, is purely exhaust. My whole point is to preserve and organize not only the photos themselves, but also the information as metadata I add while editing More experimentation to come, but more importantly, I need to work on my daily photo backlog! The pile is huge. Featured Image: I inserted and distorted a bit the Photoini logo created by the software author Jim Easterbrook to put atop my own image 2010/365/190 Stirred Not Shaken flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Crikies! We just got around to setting up AWstats for our "Jade" server that runs our blogs as well as the Feed2JS contraption. For just a week of running, in the middle of a hot and slow summer, we see: 561,000 hits (42k per day)99,000 unique visitors (11k per day) It turns out 96% of that traffic is hitting the Feed2JS (well actually 38% is from the newest version of the feed machine, while 58% of the total traffic is hitting the old RSS2JS script. 42,000 hits per day is a lot considering our main site, which has 10 years of content averages 58,000 per day. Fortunately, those hits are tiny in size. No worries, the script is not going away, just having fun looking at the details on the stats and ignoring the (We can see you! ;-) It is interesting to see there are 5700 views this month for the RSS feed for the newest items on the MLX... ... which is a good thing. Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You has been out, and blogged about, for a while. I finally had a chance to read it over Labor Day, and have come away amazed at how fresh a view it is on pop culture, games, and even reality TV. If you know anyone struggling with making that connection between games and learning, they need to read the book. I had actually recommended it (before reading, go figure) for a reading in our Honors Program leaders, since the theme this year is Pop Culture. So we had a copy laying around the office, so I grabbed it before leaving for a long 4 day weekend. I am not going to try and summarize/recapsulate the entire book, but a main premise is that the knee jerk reaction of looking at kids playing shoot-em up video games, Fear Factor, engrossed in the internet, is not necessarily a clear descent from high culture to low. It's an easy slip, and one enabled by the fact that the current generation is always out of step with the next, or in the opening quote to Part One: The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they happen to be. -- Marshall McLuhan This is another way of characterizing the Digital Natives vs Immigrants. Early on, Johnson warns about the common fallacy of dwelling on the content of games (blood, killing, rescuing princesses) and not the processes, and activities deemed more "worthy", e.g. learning algebra or the simple rules of chess are more about the skills acquired, not the actual content. The quote he pulls from John Dewey has really got me thinking: Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only that particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lessons or lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. Johnson makes the beautiful case that if conventional wisdom applied to games is that gamers want something to zone out, tune out to, that it makes no sense that the environment these people are hooked on has grown immensely more complex with time-- if lethargy was the goals, the games ought to evolve to be more simple. But more so, he urges that the usual nod to increasing dexterity by joysticking it really short changes the problem solving and cognitive processes that goes on in games; they way he breaks down a portion of Zelda to the "telescoping" series of goals: I call the mental labor of managing all these simultaneous objectives "telescoping" because of the way the objectives nest inside one another.... part of this skill lies in focusing on immediate problems while still maintaining a long-distance view... it's about constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence. It's about perceiving relationships and determining priorities. So take these notions of collateral learning and telescoping and look at typical "instructionally designed" learning content boiled down to a discrete set of specific objectives; is there a disconnect? How complex do we make learning? How collateral is it? And I think it is Johnson's analysis of reality TV, and doing proper and clever comparisons bwtween say, the Simpsons and Dragnet. so show, once you look past just the content, the complexity of narrative structure in modern shows is much more though provoking and mentally challenging that the stories with the simple and predictable arc. Again, it is easy to quickly dismiss modern TV (as I too was quick to do with regards to Tommy Lee heading off to college), there is a lot more to it than passing judgement on the content. The section of the internet is perhaps the least thorough of Johnson's treatments, maybe because it is not so old, or is well written elsewhere. Or it is too new, too changing. This is just some of the quick thoughts I had, but Johnson's view on pop culture is so fresh, new, and insightful, it is invigorating. So maybe if you don't buy that "pop culture is actually making us smarter" this book should give some deeper thought before just dismissing pop culture as a wasteland. We give this book 4 paws up.