Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
THIS WEEK ARIZONA TRUTHS BROADCAST MAR 18, 2011 We look for the truth in Arizona, starting with the real age of the earth, as well as the headless bodies in the desert, legislators on ice, and something truly amazing buried in an old mine shaft. Where is the truth? We find it. ----------------------------------------------------- This was the 30 minute audio assignment for ds106, I did in collaboration with my fellow proud Arizonan, Todd Conway. It is a blatant ripoff and mock of the greatest radioshow, This American Life, and we parody it to admire it. I do a very lame nasally imitation of Ira Glass, or on our show, Ira Cactus. Todd and I did our stories as separate segments, and I wove them together (thanks Todd for the great fake ad for Larry's Gun shop). What could be better than an interview with a real headless body in the desert, a look for legislators frozen below the state house, and lastly, a mystery found buried in an old mine. I had the most fun collecting sounds for this, driving my truck back and forth in my gravel driveway, squishing a washcloth in the sink, croaking frogs in the forest, and making the crawl space below my house the mine shaft. Almost all of this was one take w/o a script. Here ya go! This Arizonan Life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aporhBHQC8 Continuing on a theme of tough cop genre, I made a movie mashup of Steve McQueen's Bullitt mellowed out with the mellow sounds of Simon and Garfunkel's 59th Street Bridge Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQxG0Z72qM Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last. Just kicking down the cobble stones. Looking for fun and feelin' groovy. That was the sentiment I thought of contrasting to the speed of the chase scene as well as the mostly unspokem tension between McQueen's Bullitt character and Robert Vaughn's slimy Chalmers. I used MPEG ScreenClip to pull the classic car chase segment plus a few of the interchanges Bullitt and Chalmers. With not any dialogue during the chase, you have to imagine them cheerfully singing or at least toe tapping. This was edited in iMovie, of course the hardest part trying to match music to lip movement- I did a ton of splits to pull our bits of motion. It is still really challenging to match it up cleanly. Mostly I wanted to explore the juxtaposition of the music to the action. Driving Groovy... la la la la la la la I recently managed to fix an issue with a water pump I use for our irrigation projects that someone else had put together for me. The fix was round about. I did some web searching, found the culprit was likely a pressure switch, ended up swapping the whole pump out, rewiring it the same, and finding no flow happening. As it turns out, I found the issue was completely elsewhere, a faulty in line water flow switch. For me, it's hard to beat the satisfaction of fixing a machine or tool all with my own tools and methods. The same for finding my own end arounds with web stuff. That DIY joy is the best stuff. So here is the issue. I use Discourse for running the OEG Connect community site. Back when I started it in 2020, I used a little feature that allows you to publish what is typically a discussion topic as a stand alone page- a series of them I made as a users guide. It removes all of the Discourse interface, and looks like a regular web page- rather than the '/t' in the url for topic it has 'pub' -- see https://connect.oeglobal.org/pub/connect-guide. A weird issue I found was when I go to edit, it takes a ton of searching/scrolling to find the original published content as a topic, which I can edit was the content owner. My reflex came to view HTML source (like maybe 0.0001% of web users likely do), expecting the real URL was in there. Sure enough it is as a `<link>` tag in the header, a canonical link. And sure enough that URL gets me directly to the source. So I can when needed, view source, find the link, click or copy/paste and be on my merry editing way. But tick tick tick, my head goes, this is also a simple job for a browser bookmarklet-- these are still some of the most useful things I use on a daily basis. And they are all just simple Javascript code, stuff I make by hand. So I give you a magic link you can drag to your bookmark bar. For any web page, when activated, if there is no canonical link, you see an alert. If it does find one, it displays and asks you if you want to take a trip, with OK and cancel options. If you prefer the very simple, Alan's Brute Force Javascript, voila javascript:c=document.querySelector("link[rel='canonical']");if(!c) { alert('No canonical link found.') } else { if (confirm("Visit canonical link " + c.href +" ?")) window.location=c.href}; This is really trivial on the scale of programming feats. And its likely not even elegant. But it works. For me. And I hashed it out myself. I am sure I could have gone the route most people go now to ask ChatGPT et al to spit out the code. I likely would have had to go back and forth several times, likely not saving any time over what it did to do it myself, trip through my own syntax goofs, and finally get it working. But I get more satisfaction doing this myself. Even for this drably simple task, I'd rather DIY it. Make your own tools. See what it does for you. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4928594646 Multitool flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I'm reading along side Bryan Alexander and others in his "near-future" science fiction reading "club" (is it a club? a group?). What does one do in a reading group? I guess you read! Outlining the reasons for joining along and the braided stream of connections to his choice of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife may make it many scrolls before I even get to the book. Bryan published his first post at his 52% depth gauge into the book. I'm almost at the same level in the tank, just about ready to go into chapter 24, I am 55.8% into it. One of the many reasons the book relates to me is where it is set; in the arid southwest, some in Las Vegas, but mostly centered in a near future Phoenix where water is scarce, and where I have lived since 1987. Having come here to study Geology, that might be part of my own interest in how this place even works as major city in a place lacking water in place. The interest may have started in my love of the King of Desert rats (that's an honorable term) Edward Abbey, where the extremes of the desert and his disdain (but acceptance) of urbanization mingle, sometimes monkey wrenching - the idea of environmentalists possibly blowing up the damn creating Lake Powell (or Lake Foul as Hayduke would call it) happens at another dam in the book (though not for the same reasons). The precedent was a 1981 stunt by Earth First where they unfurled a 300 foot poster simulation of a crack on Glen Canyon Dam. Abbey's writings likely led me to Charles Bowden; my Geology interests got me to John McPhee's Basin and Range, perhaps one of the most approachable things to read and learn about Geologists. That took me to McPhee's Encounter of the Archdruid which gets to the heart of the battle between environmentalists wishing to keep rivers free and those in the 1960s who sought to contain, control, and manage them for power and delivering water to cities built in places that could sustain populations otherwise. McPhee's book is how two opponents on the issue, the Sierra Club's David Brower and the Bureau of Reclamations Floyd Dominy go on a river trip together in the Colorado River through Glen Canyon, what is now buried by Lake Powell. It's startling to think of people with completely polar opinions on an issue to spend that much time together listening to each other. It almost sounds like non-fiction. But nothing I have read provides more insight to understanding the water issues in the American southwest is Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert My weather beaten copy has written inside a date of 1990, right in the middle of my Geology grad school era at Arizona State University. I cannot recommend a book more highly. The recipe for what plays out as the plot of The Water Knife is outlined by Reisner: A land that few people knew first hand in the mid 1900s, remote and distant from the east coast. Battling bureaucracies and big egos at work at the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers The dividing of water flowing through the Colorado River by decree of the 1922 Colorado River Compact between the 7 states that the river flows through. The allocations were based on water flow of of an era of unusually high flow and climate conditions different from now. The states are now allowed by that law the same amount of water, but the supply is much less. It's no surprise that Cadillac Desert is mentioned so referentially in The Water Knife, multiple times. Characters have valuable first editions. When Mike Ratan offers his copy to young Maria, he describes it, "It's kind of how we got where we are now... I think people should start with this. It's the bible when it comes to water." And its even more telling when Maria refuses the book. Her condition is so desperate, she has no need to understand history. She rejects history: She glared at him. "I don't need books about how things used to be. Everybody talks about how things used to be, I need a book about how I'm supposed to live now. Unless you got a book like that, I don't need the weight." She flicked her hand at the thing, lying in the counter. "I mean, seriously. It's paper." A week or so before he chose The Water Knife, Bryan included me on an email to a few people where he shared: Very interesting futures work around Phoenix: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303815839_Designing_an_Experiential_Scenario_The_People_Who_Vanished "The name Hohokam is an O’odham word meaning “the people who vanished” (Mays & Gorokhovich, 2010). Being an oral culture, it is unknown what they called themselves. So a question which we hoped to evoke for participants at Emerge became: “could the people of today’s Phoenix be the next to vanish from the valley?”" While there is a citation there, my memory of what I had known about the Hohokam, was that the O’odham meant "All Used Up" (that is used in The Water Knife too as well as Wikipedia), so my reply (not that this is an expertise of mine) was: They might check their research better. What I remember (and look it up in Wikipedia) is the word Hohokam was derived from means "used up". Their culture was not just in the Valley of the sun, it reached well into southern Arizona, past Tucson, including the massive structure still standing at Casa Grande, and north almost to Flagstaff. Their culture, from like 800-1300 or 1400 grew from agricultural to city centers sophisticated, with established trade with other cultures, there are ball courts. The canal systems Howard describes were all created with hand tools, and I've heard they have grades that drop only inches per mile, irrigating off of the Salt River. The climate then was likely different from now; that bone dry river you see now in Phoenix flowed much more regularly. I don't think you can compare the modern to the ancient living. Temperatures are several degrees warmer year to year from the effect of all the concrete and asphalt covering the land. Plus people several hundred years ago did not complain about the heat in social media, they adapted ;-) They weren't the only cultures to vanish in the southwest, high civilizations also vanished without known reasons from the Pueblo cultures of northern AZ and New Mexico, including Chaco Canyon. It's still debated if it was climate change (long term drought?), there were theories that the effort in building cleared major forests, and changed erosional patterns' or maybe it was disease that spread rampantly, or maybe it was just good old fashioned violence. Las Vegas probably has more to worry about than Phoenix; they are having to spend billions to re-engineer their pumping system from a dropping Lake Mead; I heard a news story that at least Vegas was able to reduce consumption by 40%. I am not expert, and I only skimmed their article, but more homework might be in order. It was not one tribe vanishing from Phoenix, it was a broader crises. Still could happen, though. Keep in mind that there were about 400 years between the disappearance of the Hohokam and the arrival of Mormon settles who "discovered" their canals. That story about Lake Mead having to build a "third straw" comes in to play to in the Water Knife. Despite all my reading into the issues of water supply, I must admit I really like my long hot showers (well when I am not home because my hot water heater is small, and does not last too long). I sometimes get lost in thought, and I am pretty sure some of my best ideas from the few months I was on fellowship at Thompson Rivers University in 2014-2015... came from the shower. Sometimes I step back and wonder about how easy it is to take for granted a large amount of clean, and when we want, warm, water pouring out of the wall. What if we lived in a time where that was an unreasonable luxury? While staying last year in an AirBnB in Chicago, the older apartment's shower felt like a possible setting for a time when the water... stopped. I had made a really short video, but I noticed I had not published it.. until tonight. What would it be like, to be... waterless? https://vimeo.com/177027215 I did write Bryan at that time, because I was wondering if he knew of any science fiction of a time when water was not plentiful. He recommended a short story called The Tamarisk Hunter with a link to a podcast audiobook version: “The Tamarisk Hunter” originally appeared in the environmental journal High Country News. It was inspired by the only thing that really matters in the Western U.S. — water. Tamarisk or Salt Cedar are one of those many times when people thought it was a good idea to introduce a plant species that becomes an invasive horror story. They have invaded and crowded out native plants in every southwestern river system, and they consume a huge amount of water. The story again was a near future time when water was scarce, states fought over rights, and seems like a precursor to the Water Knife. And there is a good reason... the author of the Tamarisk Hunter was this person named... Paolo Bacigalupi (also available on Paolo's site). And Bacigalupi references his earlier work in The Water Knife when Angel tells Lucy: You know that tamarisk hunters, in the old days, would always share water when they met each other on the Colorado? But the connection with this book goes deeper. Last summer while visiting my friends in Paonia, we were discussion science fiction, and I brought up this story--- my hosts Ken and Oogie knew the story before I finished describing it. Even more, they knew the author, because Paolo lives in the same small town. they said he does a lot of his writing in the local hangout, Revolution Brewery. That's all my prelude to The Water Knife. But I am loving this book for many reasons- it's in a setting I know well, so when they mention an area known as "PV" I know they are talking about Paradise Valley. The suburban Phoenix, though in part ruins in the story, are places I am familiar with. The chapter swirls through three characters that are not connected in the beginning, though as the story spins, we know there is a connection. None of them seem too likely a heroic character, and they in a way all feel doomed (I am only 55.8% through). The very book title is interesting if you pick at it. What is a "water knife"? Obviously a knife made of water would be useless. But we know soon it is a name for what Angel does for water boss Catherine Case in Vegas, he literally cuts the water supply of other places (blowing up canals, destroying a water plant, or just killing people in the business) to bolster the supply for Vegas. But think again- he does not cut the water, he cuts all the things, people that provide the water. And Angel denies what he is (as a cover? confuser?): "Water knives don't exist," he said. "That's just something people talk about. It's a myth, right? Like the chupacabra. It's just something people make up so they can have a bogeyman to blame when shit goes wrong." I love that he uses chupacabra ("goat sucker") a word I learned about while in Puerto Rico, where the story likely originated from: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The setting is not a distant low water future like Dune -- it is so close it could be... now. But not all. The design of the "arcology" structures, the reclaiming of water in a way to sustain life for a smaller number of (privileged) people (made possible by water knifing the supplies of those left outside). While plausible, the arcology is still conceptual. And again, there is a local connection- the concept of a self contained sustainable architecture comes right from the ideas of Paolo Soleri, who used it to describe his ideas for Arcosanti (halfway between Phoenix and Flagstaff). [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by CodyR under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Are you following the lines? The ideas of Paolo Soleri are used by author Paolo Bacigalupi. There are "data glasses" used to identify people, again, near futuristic. The digital water meters at sinks. The ClearSac for the less fortunate to turn urine into water (it sounds like it was partly effective). An ecstasy-like drug called "Bubble". I like how they talk disparaging of Arizona people as "Zoners"-- in reality it's a term I remember people in Sn Diego calling all the people from here who go there for vacation, though they call us "Zonies". What does not seem implausible is the quasi breakdown of social order in light of environmental crises, the diminishing national power as states do things like use militias to keep the "waterless" (mostly the Texans apparently driven out by hurricanes and sea floor rising). It seems interesting that Las vegas would turn out to be a power player, perhaps driven to be more "Scrappy" by having maybe the least access to water. You think that Catherine Case is the real power player, but it takes a while to realize that the real power holders and the ones to fear are "Calis" or Californians. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] This fits into the story of water history of Cadillac Desert, and you read of the schemes that have drained Mono Lake for moving water 300 miles to Los Angeles (and of course the movie Chinatown). Lucy gives Angel a lecture on this: California. Those people know how to play the game. Los Angeles, San Diego. The Imperial Valley companies. These people know how to fight for water. It's in their veins. Their blood. They've been killing places for water for five generations. They're good at it. And this is what makes the book so good to me- it's a novel, it's a near future, but it completely is in sync with the history of water in the southwest, its division by a likely uneasy "pact" between the states that shared the water, and how that might crumble when the water drastically is decreased. I've not read how this happened, and there probably is no inciting event. This is not a future story driven by an aliens from outer space or an asteroid, it is not even an apocalypse because it just happens gradually. That's what makes it realistic science fiction. Also, with 44.2% to go, I have no idea what is going to happen. I am thinking it's not going to end happily. But I'm hooked on this book. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: I went to my own flickr photos, I had a few possible photos of mud cracks in dry lake beds, but when I searched on "dry" for some reason this one of an old water fixture, rusty, disconnected, called to me. You ought to listen to those calls. This is in the back of my friend's restaurant, the Randall House in Pine, AZ (if you like the web site, thanks), and the photo is on flickr https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14522849444 and shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I cannot claim as ambitious a summer reading agenda as Jim Groom, but somehow I have managed to finish an unprecedented two novels in the last 3 weeks. Both were titles I picked up at one of the book sales from the Pine Arizona Library; first was David Mitchell's Black Swan Green; I grabbed that only because of how much I enjoyed reading Cloud Atlas (oh wait, I have a report on that one when I read it in 2011). I could not put it down, but that's another post. I did jump a connection in talking about why zombies bore me. https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/479667056074166273 I had never read Elmore Leonard before, and likely picked it up out of curiosity/respect when he passed away last summer. And this is by no means a literary review or plot summary... but here goes. The story takes place in new Orleans and has a central ex-con, Jack Delaney as primary character. At first he was just a bit too perfect, former jewel thief, could have been model, a bit wry, obviously a ladies man, and he ends up getting involve with a beautiful ex-nun and a plot to steal money from some bad people. But what I found in reading this book is how Leonard really does not stick to the expected plot lines, there are twists turns, the obvious romance never happens, and it is more dialogue then action. And as described in a New York Times review, it really is more about the characters than the action: But it will do. Mr. Leonard has got his usual diverting cast of grifters and creeps up his sleeve and action as Byzantine as ever Chandler himself thought up. In fact, reading it, I felt like William Faulkner when he was writing the screenplay for the film version of Chandler's novel "The Big Sleep." The story is that he had to call up Chandler to find out what was going on. Chandler wasn't sure.Yes, it will do.Letting the Characters Do It"Most thrillers," says Elmore Leonard, "are based on a situation, or on a plot, which is the most important element in the book. I don't see it that way. I see my characters as being most important, how they bounce off one another, how they talk to each other, and the plot just sort of comes along." In fact, Mr. Leonard is so comfortable allowing his characters to control the pace and action of his stories that he didn't know how "Bandits" would end until three days before he finished it last April. And without giving anything away, the story could have ended in at least 4 or 5 different ways and still be satisfying. And you find out that the key character on which it all turns is not the one you have been following for most of the book. Deft. What I found enjoyable is how deep and genuine (as far as I can tell) Leonard gets to the setting of New Orleans outside of the stereotypes. He paints that tension of locals versus tourists: Out on Bourbon Street bumping into each other, the whole bunch of them aimless, probably thinking, this is it, huh? The street a midway of skin shows and tacky novelty shops. The poor guys at Preservation Hall and other joints playing that canned Dixieland, doing "When the Saints" over and over for the tourists in the doorways. There was some good music around, if Al Hirt was in town or you found a group with Bill Huntington playing his standup bass or Ellis Marsalis somewhere. His boy Wynton had left town with his horn to play for the world. That reference jumped me back to a trip in 2008 for a conference at Tulane, and my local colleague/friend Marie took me to a place called Snug Harbor, and saw not only Ellis Marsalis, but the youngest son, Jason, too. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Well written setting and a swirl of characters, none too sure who is quite the good guys... all for a good read. I wonder what is next? Featured Image: This is definitely my photo! That's my MacBookPro on wood table in Strawberry. But darn! I cant find it anywhere in flickr, taken sometime before June 22, 2014 tweet of book page. I'm just back from an intense but rewarding (best combo) of helping with three days of workshops for a new project supported by eCampus Ontario. This is the first attempt to capture some broader ideas, and is in the vein of what I tried to describe to participants as using a blog post to think out loud, not to encapsulate some grand articulate point (though if that happens, it's a nice bonus). Bearing a project name that might launch a thousand metaphors: Ontario Extend is a capacity-building initiative that is grounded in the belief that the impact on learning should be the primary motivator for creating technology-enabled and online learning experiences. It aims to empower educators to explore a range of emerging technologies and pedagogical practices for effective online and technology-enabled teaching and learning. The project is led by Northern College in collaboration with eCampusOntario and the publicly funded colleges and universities in Northern Ontario. It explores the skills, knowledge, and attributes required to extend and transform our teaching and learning practices and to enrich our professional development. The intent of these resources is to provide the basis for more deliberate course design and digital pedagogical practice. It was easy to take on the offer "extended' (ha) by eCampus Ontario CEO David Porter (new domain), working with long time ds106 colleague and friend Giulia Forsythe (old domain) (new domain), on project managed by Valerie Lopes (new domain), who I knew back to ETMOOC days (new domain). [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Domain Super Heroes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Yup. Domains. Of their own. In fact, during our days in Toronto we launched a big batch of new domains-- meet the Domain Super Heroes. My part was to facilitate the setting up and understanding of Domains of One's Own (my materials seem to lapse often in Domains of Our Own, same acronym). Thirty participants sent to this week's Summer Institute, three each from ten colleagues and universities, were each provided a Reclaim Hosting account, including domain registration and a hosting package paid for by the project. For five years. Because "capacity building" to me among distributed practitioners means developing and using a network, I was happy when Valerie told me earlier that participants would be asked to create (or revive) a twitter account. I suggested and set up a "choose your own adventure game" approach for them to choose how to represent themselves (I lifted modded from the one Mia Zamora and I made for Networked Narratives). This also led me to use one of my favorite ideas that seems to enter almost every project I do, a spawn of the DS106 Daily Create, or how we called it, the Daily Extend. https://twitter.com/ontarioextend/status/897407044352737280 I like using this for many reasons, to introduce people to new tools and resources, to have them try creative tasks they have never done before, but also in the act of doing this, they put twitter to use without making it seem like a class lesson. This was set up and put into motion two weeks before the participants even knew about... I also see it valuable with a site like this for people to enter it and see an active dance space, not a clean empty ballroom. The other building / developing piece was a site to include reference materials for the setting up of Domains: You will notice that site uses the same theme as this one (and I did for Networked Narratives). I like the theme. But it also works well for what I projected needed being done. Beyond the guide for Domains of Our Own and for Wordpress (incomplete), it is also a blog syndication thing using Feed Wordpress, latest posts on the front page (see also the list of blogs). There is some irony on the domain for that site -- https://extend-domains.ecampusontario.ca/ as not quite what I asked for. As it turns out there were technical reasons why I could not have a sub domain of a subdomain, nor could they install Wordpress into a sub-directory. Part of our advice on domain names is to avoid hyphens, and there we go. But to me it provides a perfect example of what often happens within institutional technology shops - there are rules and things that you live with, while if you have your own domain, you are not nearly as limited. I had maybe an hour per day for technical workshops, rather ambitious with the goals of having participants: Choose a domain and set up a Reclaim Hosting account. Understand how to get back there and to their cpanel (what the heck cpanel is). Installing a simple "Calling Card" site to be at the front entrance of their domain. Learn how to create subdomains. Learn how to install Wordpress into a subdomain (and how the same process works for the other apps they can install). And get a basic enough understanding of Wordpress to be able to blog when they went home. There are gobs of reference guides for cpanel and Wordpress, but they always feel so... referency. One gets lost in the how to details and not the "why" (I am not sure I did better, but there is more in the workshops than are in the guides). The whole challenge here is that all of this is new "domains" of understanding and experience for people. A few in the group had done blogging of some sorts, and maybe one or two had done some domain management. It calls for them to trust in you, to try and envision something that does not exist and they have never done before. And we need to try to energize them enough to do all of this, to take on the time commitment, before having an understanding of what it might do. Giulia and I had the first 90 minutes of the workshop to not only introduce the idea of Domains, but also to have them brainstorm a domain name, and set up accounts with Reclaim Hosting. Some of this was driven by information from Tim Owens that .ca sometimes takes 3-6 hours to propagate, so we aimed to do this first, as there was about that amount of time for other workshops. We started with a conversation, where we each discussed the reasons for our own domain name choice, as Giulia went with a choice that has her name in it (gforsythe.ca) and I more or less manufactured a word that did not exist (cogdogblog.com). In our planning we realized that we took weeks to make our choice, and in this workshop we might ask people to do it 10-15 minutes. We used the "Burtesian" approach that Martha Burtis so beautifully described in her Domains 2017 keynote - that DoOO was a process of: Naming Building Breaking Knowing Giulia led a (pen and paper) activity where we asked people to sketch venn diagrams of themselves as both educational professionals and their own interests. This group went way beyond what we thought they might do. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Ontario Extend Summer Institute flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Venn Diagram activity flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] The idea was to get them to brainstorm maybe 5 different word combinations that would work for them as a domain name. While that simmered, we framed the idea of domains (again of which they likely had no prior understanding). We wanted to emphasize that they are not a single technology nor a solution, but a "Possibility Space" [caption id="attachment_64805" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] photo background: flickr photo by Mind on Fire Photography https://flickr.com/photos/sandybrownjensen/10076125353 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license[/caption] which is, of course, still vague. I deployed what I said at the outset might be a problematic metaphor, of a domain as a plot of land that they can, as "owners" build many structures (or gardens). [caption id="attachment_64806" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Wikimedia Commons image https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_Delphi_Sanctuary_of_Apollo_colored.svg by TOMISTIlicensed CC BY-SA[/caption] Many think (and still do) of it as single web site. Or just a blog. I also tried to make a comparison I have used tried before, of appreciating the difference we feel in relation to rooms between spending time in a hotel room (I used a photo of my room as we were mostly in the same hotel) and our own home. We covered some of the suggestions for domain name choice: and set them loose with a special link to Reclaim Hosting that made sure they would not be charged for the account. I must say this went much more smoothly than I might have expected. But I was surprised as I might have guessed that most would have chosen domains based on their names, but many went metaphorical, whimsical, or discipline related. I collected their choices in a goole form, and with some gymnastics of Awesome Tables routed it to the Domain Super Heroes page [caption id="attachment_64808" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] 32 of these new domains created in one workshop, image generated with http://www.wordclouds.com/[/caption] In the afternoon session we reviewed accessing the cpanel and walked through the process of setting up a Calling Card site. It's always a challenge with hands on workshops with 30 different people, who will never go all at the same pace. You worry about the people who cannot locate their password and the people who get it so fast they get bored. Probably the biggest trip point was in accessing their cpanel via the Reclaim Hosting client page. If they log into the latter, they should always be able to access the former. But in many cases, the session code is lost, or there are just gremlins. When people get another login page for cpanel, it's confusing as it is a different username and password. But we got through that. Tim had given me the idea of using the cpanel Site Publisher for people to create a simple landing page. I like this as it should give people an easy early victory to publish something. If you start with Wordpress, then you are lost in explaining the interface, and what pages/posts are, and then people leave thinking a domain is a wordpress site. But the Site Publisher is not a great tool, the templates are limited, and in the end it's not what most people want on the front of their site. They right away want to have different links or images. So it was a lot of explaining that it's a place holder, a front gate, something we can return to with a better site later. [caption id="attachment_64809" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Examples of calling card sites done with the site publisher[/caption] I'm not sure yet how well this worked. I'm still committed to the approach. I also did on the first day, a presentation on finding images they can use in their domain work as well as some ideas for what I think is the best approach- take your own. I went overboard perhaps, but in http://picturethis.extendlabs.ca/ wanted to demonstrate what one might use a domain for besides blogging, and that Wordpress is more than for blogging, by using my Splotpoint theme. On the second day, I aimed to explain what subdomains were, and hence had people creating ones they would never use, like sillybanana.domains.me (I love that one participant used that for her blog). This is super important to comprehend the idea of a domain being more than a blog. I then had each person create a subdomain and install Wordpress into that subdomain. I'm guessing we had more than 85% do that, some put wordpress at the top of their domain or somewhere in a /blog directory (I showed one how to use the Installatron tool to clone the site where it belonged, and delete the first one) (I love Installatron). So we did not even get to using Wordpress until day 3. My approach was to start with a handful of important settings, like timezone and their user display name. I spent a chunk of time suggesting changing the default category name and setting up categories in advance ("I should never see a link to something in uncategorized"). The other big ask was for people to hold off on the decorating step of picking themes, where you can easily get mired down, and to work for now on structure and the practice of blogging (another reach for a building metaphor), suggesting for everyone to start with the default Twentyseventeen theme. I said many times, "We will be blogging soon!". I wanted them to set up blog categories that match the Six Attribute the Extend modules are built around - one reason to demonstrate about hierarchies for categories, but also, when we begin syndicating posts to the main site, how everyone using the same categories we can group posts together. Then it was into the post interface, my plea for Non Dull Titles, adding featured images, using categories and tags, uploading media, embedding youtube, tweets, etc into a post. Totally breakneck speed. We were fueled by coffee and bacon. But we saw the blog posts emerge. Maybe my most proud was one teacher who showed her concern in the name of her blog as Technophobeprof -- but she successfully created a subdomain, installed Wordpress, and wrote in her first post: I started the workshop with Ontario Extend with no idea what to expect. I will be teaching an online course, having had no training or experience whatsoever in online teaching. I have a fair bit of trepidation around that and was hoping for information on how to do it. That hope was not met, but if there is only one positive takeaway from this workshop, it is that I have made connections that will help me. Further, I have come away with ideas for helping other teachers feeling angst over teaching in an online environment. This, to me, is a smashing success. We had some people that maybe sat in the back and did other stuff but there were also people charing ahead. You nearly always have both. I am overly impressed with our "Extenders" and anticipate many of them taking this on: https://twitter.com/ontarioextend/status/897829523617722368 I want also to thank again David and Valerie for bringing me on to the project and giving me my typo-prone latitude to put up these sites, and also a big thanks to Giulia for planning our parts, and Joanne, Peggy, Lena from eCampus Ontario for being a great team. Doing Domains work is not easy as it's not just doing one system but many, but when you see people take off with it, as we are already seeing, there's your reward. And I'm looking forward to some possible ongoing support work with the Extendets. Featured Image: After talking to the "Extenders" about visual metaphors, I dove into this search even more than usual. My open licensed search was on "reaching" and "reach out" -- one Wikimedia image of branches reaching to water led me to look at my own. It's hard to top a more metaphoric location, a sense of possibility, immense space, and awe, than the Grand Canyon. Reach for the Sky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license How refreshing it is to catch some comment feedback that is not spam. Package #1463 Areal Weighting with Thiessen Polygons was created by Water Resources technology faculty member Lisa Young: a brief tutorial that demonstrates the procedures for determining areal weighting from point precipitation gages using the Thiessen Polygon Method. While I have no clue what this is, apparently a colleague in Indonesia found it useful, and left this comment: I am a lecturer of principles of Meteorology at DIploma Program RS&GIS, Geography Faculty, GMU, Indonesia. Your flash file of Poly.Thies. has shown clearly about the method. I have used it in class. It iwll be good if the layout is made better and clear/more interesting. Thank you before That pretty much balances out cleaning 1000 spams of phentermine flaff. Real Time Satellite and Space Shuttle Tracking by cogdogblog posted 27 Jun '08, 4.45pm MDT PST on flickr Nifty site for getting info about satellites and tracking them in real time on a google map. This shows locations of GPS satellites and my home location. www.n2yo.com/ Will This Redeem Alltel? by cogdogblog posted 7 May '08, 10.13pm MDT PST on flickr My battle to escape jail of my wireless internet provider seems in vain, but they did send me, for free, a newer USB mode, that actually has software for the Mac and promises to be a stronger connection (time shall tell). Still it tooka call to tech support as they had not updated my account. But the thing works so far, am getting about 800 kbps download and am actually able to tun Second Life. So I call this a partial victory. My new device seems to be providing good connectivity (in 2 locations so far in Arizona), and since it has the software now running on my Mac (and is a device that clearly is compatible with OS X), I guess I am in business. I got the new device, a UM150 USB wireless thingie, on Tuesday. I installed software, tweaked preferences, and was unable to connect. I called "Rick", the Alltel Executive Customer Rep who called my in Austin and arranged delivery of th enew device, but got his voicemail. I had to wait a day until I knew I had a couple of hours free in case I had to wade through the Seven Layers of Customer Support Hell, but actually, it took about 15 minutes, as the advanced tech person had to activate my device in the system. This morning I got an early call from Rick, who had said he went and called tech support and asked them to make sure I was connected. This is the kind fo service everyone who calls Alltel should get, not just the headcases who make a big deal on the internet. So while I lost the war to break free of my contract (which seems utterly hopeless anyhow), I consider this a partial win, as the ruckus Devon, Phil, Larry and others made online seemed to have an effect. Or at least I think so. My hunch is that you can have happy customer stories or horror tales with all carriers, so its a matter of just keeping the pressure on your jailer. It's been 8 years since I have been able to say directly "Happy Father's Day", and 2001 was not the best one as Dad was in the middle of his 6 month bout with cancer. For a man who had some many names/nicknames-- "Morris", "Mike", "Mickey", "Blackie"-- by any other name mattered not for the man I knew as Dad. A man who was not one for saying a lot in spoken words, he was almost a different person in the written form (those old fashioned things called "letters"), one thing was always sure is how proud he was of me and how much support he gave me for whatever choices I made in life, even the ones he did not understand. That kind of un-conditional love is the hallmark of Dad-dom. From his tribute I created after his death in August 2001, I never tire of the old 8mm video clips of him holding me as an early alpha version of Alan- he of course is silent except for the mouthing of "Say Cheese" and his big smile: http://dommy.com/dad/movies/alan.mov It's not surprising that the memories come and go in vividness, and today is an obvious one for them to flood back, and I can hear his voice in our phone conversations, "Take care, Junior" as he used to call me, which I would bounce back, "Same to you, Senior" or sometimes tossing in an "Old Man". Take Care, Senior. My scrambling of the title of this book I just finished means nothing, or maybe it does represent my confidence of understanding. ZatAoMM is certainly among the Books I Ought to Have Read but Didn't, and served as a perfect early book of reading while on the road. The heady philosophy parts are still muddy to me, and I write this without reading any other expert opinions, but the ideas about what it means to be on the road, the unpacking of form versus function (or looking at form AND function), and what the lead character attempted in his teaching are still ringing powerful echoes. I knew a little bit about the book before hand, but what I got from reading was much more, and have so many highlights. The opening quote now unfolds much more than when my eyes first passed And what is good, Phadrus,And what is not good...Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? For Phaedrus's forays into dissecting what is "Quality" in the classroom and in writing (it is undefinable yet we know it); his experimentation with not grading was fascinating, but mostly, the way he would take something that presented itself has a dichotomy, and how he would forge a third path. And this dichotomy finally presents itself in Phædrus's own relationship to his son. Let's dive in... Nevada Lonely Road flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Sometimes it's a little better to travel then to arrive. The road is certainly frontmost on my mind- and the trip in ZatAoMM is both a metaphor for itself and the travels of the human mind (or spirit). The author seems to be at his most relaxed state while in motion, when his Chataqua plays out. The trip the author and his son make up the mountain outline the notion of "being there" Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. This is really impossible to do-- the just float in the moment of a hike, and appreciate every little thing. I've tried it. I imagine this is the Zen-like state, letting go of ruminating the past and hand wringing about the future. When I figure out this middle ground... well, that is likely a life long project. It's wrapped up in another strain, but this travel part is, I think, one of the routes to work on "stuckness", which Pirsig cleverly re-routes from a thing to be frustrated about to something that offers potential: If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small.But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless you are a real master at staying stuck you can't prevent this. The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality...reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's really been getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation. What he describes is something that happens a lot to me, and has happened within the last week or too with trying to find a solution to a tech problem-- in this case I was fumbling around in my mind a way to deal with a bug in my fun pechaflickr tool. I decided to let it idle, and it was while walking on a trail in the forest, while barely mulling on it, that the solution opened up- not when I was hunched in front of the computer. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5948049210 2011/365/197 Today's Hike is Brought to You By the Letter H flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license And he does urge us to go to the "high country of the mind": In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out. Pirsig also hits on some of my frustration with the sameness one can see along the typical chain store part of what I referred to as Little Plastic America. Sometimes when you switch from a federal to a state highway it seems like you drop back like this in time. Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road"”old buildings, old people on a front porch"”strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff. Weeds and grass and wildflowers grow where the concrete has cracked and broken. Neat, squared, upright lines acquire a random sag. The uniform masses of the unbroken color of fresh paint modify to a mottled, weathered softness. Nature has a non-Euclidian geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study. This section was ironic in that the author rode through parts of northern Idaho that I had just passed through- Grangeville, White Bird, New Meadows... https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5925474994 Ranging in the Open flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It is that open spaceness I am feeling that their motorcycles went through, and the changes from places my friend Donna and I talked about where people are Wavers versus getting into the suburban areas where the conversation is absent or superficial. There is the freedom of open space that makes you feel more open, or an oppressiveness that closes you in. Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face...that searching look...then it's gone.We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV. Pirsig, here in the 1970s zeroes in on technology and probably not the kind we think of today-- Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices...TV, jets, freeways and so on...but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. I might have to come back to this, but it does connect with my own thoughts that we tend to give too much power to technology as an influence- "the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity" is a human issue, not a technological one. Phaedrus speaks like a guy in my circle (the non Google plus kind) on railing on institutions He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time. He didn't see these things and think this way at first, however, only later on. As much as he tried to play within the institution of Academia, eventually he was cast out (or left). The universities he was part of did aim for to perpetuate their own function, and what else can an institution do? They really cannot be 100% altruistic, as they would not go on without looking to perserve their way of being. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5952928481 Quality flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license It was the pursuit of Quality (capitalized) in his Montana teaching that went a long way down the road, when asked by a colleague "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students." This one question took him many miles, and his journey is worth considering among the initiatives that continue to roll out with the idea that Quality is Quantifiable. It is here where the book goes to a place I never hear mentioned- in Phaedrus experiments with questioning education and experimentation with doing away with grades. As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything...from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.He discussed this with a professor of psychology who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, "Right. Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you'll get real education." Abandon grading? My how far we have gotten with this since the mid 1970s. But he did not just spout about it- he tried it: Phadrus' argument for the abolition of the degree-and- grading system produced a nonplussed or negative reaction in all but a few students at first, since it seemed, on first judgment, to destroy the whole University system. One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, "Of course you can't eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that's what we're here for."She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude....The student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don't whip me, I won't work." He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him. He did not abandon the experiment when the students complained (maybe they were experiencing an element of 'stuckness'). As I said before, at first almost everyone was sort of nonplussed. The majority probably figured they were stuck with some idealist who thought removal of grades would make them happier and thus work harder, when it was obvious that without grades everyone would just loaf. Many of the students with A records in previous quarters were contemptuous and angry at first, but because of their acquired self-discipline went ahead and did the work anyway. The B students and high-C students missed some of the early assignments or turned in sloppy work. Many of the low-C and D students didn't even show up for class. At this time another teacher asked him what he was going to do about this lack of response."Outwait them," he said.His lack of harshness puzzled the students at first, then made them suspicious. Some began to ask sarcastic questions. These received soft answers and the lectures and speeches proceeded as usual, except with no grades.Then a hoped-for phenomenon began. During the third or fourth week some of the A students began to get nervous and started to turn in superb work and hang around after class with questions that fished for some indication as to how they were doing. The B and high-C students began to notice this and work a little and bring up the quality of their papers to a more usual level. The low C, D and future F's began to show up for class just to see what was going on.After midquarter an even more hoped-for phenomenon took place. The A-rated students lost their nervousness and became active participants in everything that went on with a friendliness that was uncommon in a grade-getting class. At this point the B and C students were in a panic, and turned in stuff that looked as though they'd spent hours of painstaking work on it. The D's and F's turned in satisfactory assignments.In the final weeks of the quarter, a time when normally everyone knows what his grade will be and just sits back half asleep, Phædrus was getting a kind of class participation that made other teachers take notice. The B's and C's had joined the A's in friendly free-for-all discussion that made the class seem like a successful party. Only the D's and F's sat frozen in their chairs, in a complete internal panic. And here is the key-- This surprising result supported a hunch he had had for a long time: that the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by. And thus we continue the system. I've got a lot more of thinking from this book than I can even try to write- they other major takeaway is Pahedrus' refusal to limit his thinking to binary- this or that, whether it is more important to know the operation fo a machine than to appreciate its outer nature (well maybe he was more leaned toward the function). Way, way, way too much I see ideas that are limited ti binary choices. In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom. The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity. There are many disciplines for this. One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhyna, mispronounced in Chinese as "Chan" and again mispronounced in Japanese as "Zen." Phædrus never got involved in meditation because it made no sense to him. In his entire time in India "sense" was always logical consistency and he couldn't find any honest way to abandon this belief. That, I think, was creditable on his part. And yeah, I keep mixing up the spelling of Phadrus/Phaedrus, but in the end he has to deal with his own bit of binary split into who he was and who he is. https://flickr.com/photos/uqbar/76705464 10110100 flickr photo by Uqbar is back shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license NotesI found a full text version of ZatAoMM at http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html - it smells like it might not be official, but I snagged it to make it easier to pull quotes. For the author's info, I did purchase a licensed version! Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5994851366 Got Zen? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license My web site submission multi-tool, which rolls a selected set of JavaScript submission tools into one, has hit its tenth tool. Thanks to those who have made recent suggestions. This means, you can build your own browser bookmark submission tool that includes all or any from: Furl del.icio.us Frassle Connotea Bag of URLs CiteULike Simpy Linkroll Blogmarks OpenBM How more can there be? I will add them only if the site includes a JavaScript browser bookmark tool. Finally, for those interested in the PHP code that makes the tool work (it is not very complex), it is now available for free, under a GPL license. Two weeks ago I was in Vancouver for the ETUG Fall 2014 Workshop, what a great gathering and with their un-conference format, a refreshing experience from the typical conference grueling treadmill present-o-rama format. [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] I was not sure I would stand up an pitch a session, but I was sort of prepared, I had brought the Storybox. It has been sitting idly since my return from New Zealand (a good sign was the battery still carried enough charge to last through my session). There was not much trouble getting this group interested. I did less planning, and pretty much gave them the challenge to log on and figure it out. [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] I ended up collecting about 18 files, not bad for a quick session. The energy did fuel me, so I decided (although just acted on it 2 days ago) to clean out archive the content from New Zealand, and reset it for stops in Canada. I'd like to see that sketch, Jason! https://twitter.com/draggin/status/532971914999119873/ Still, I remain on the fence about keeping the stuff in the box (which is what makes it a time capsule) or to put it online so folks can access it. This time I flipped a coin and chose the latter. Because I just love this media explorer I am using this time around; I made one especially for this current round. This is Infinite Grid Pro in action What I like about this jQuery powered media display is that many media files can be explored; as you click and drag around, the media thumbnails fill in, so it does feel a bit infinite (and its randomized). Plus I have categories for different kinds of media- photos, audio, video, documents, and new this time around-- Animated GIFs. You may notice I have 62 pieces of media listed- that's because I have to include at least 9 items for each categort, so I had to pad a few with older stuff. I am overdue a writeup on all the changes I did for this version of the StoryBox. I completely replaced the entire stock interface of the PirateBox (you can learn how to set up your own at http://piratebox.cc/) using the Treble theme I have used on several sites (I wisely bought a multiple site license). There's a whole lot that went into this, moving the web content to the USB drive (so its easier to update), putting in place a small python wiki, and a crazy assemblage of shell scripts and local PHP code I set up to prepare all of the media. This even included digging into some PHP text functions to overlay file names on the thumbnail icons. That's a post for another day. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It's still just cool. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog One day after talking to my Mom on the day marking 10 years since my Dad passed away, I got that call you never want to receive. A friend found Mom dead on her kitchen floor. My quasi plan trip now includes a sooner-than-charted dash south to Baltimore, where they are flying her body for the funeral. I was fortunate to be with friends Andy and Kent at dinner last night, who provided wonderful support, as was the response when I dropped my news in twitter. For some reason, the thought came into my head that I wanted to talk about Mom on ds106 radio. I am warmed by the love I felt over that hour and a half, plus even more the live singing later by olga. I did a chunk of talking about the route of my trip so far, and more about Mom, replaying the audio from her time on ds106 radio. ds106 radio tribute to Mom (90 Mb mp3 / 1:33:41) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I have (on the hard drives left at home) an hour of audio I recorded with Mom a few years ago where she told me her stories of growing up poor in Baltimore and her life after meeting my Dad. I was intending to work that nto digital movies, as she was intending to finish her own scrapbook project which I think she had gotten up o 1950 with. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog She described her Cookielady routine when I put her on the ds106radio last february when I visited in Florida. Every Sunday she would make a batch of chocolate chip cookies, carefully arrange them in plastic bags, and she would distribute that week to anyone who helped her or just look like they needed a lift. Talk about amazing stories! Her sharing of cookies led her to meeting Trisha Yearwood (and giving her cookies) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'm still numb or going on auto pilot, and am counting on that to get me through a day of driving. That and a lot of love and friendship I feel from my network. F*** the "Personal Learning Network" I have a "personal life network". It will propel me to hear some music today on ds106radio which I plan to be listening to once I get across the border. I'll be doing a direct shot down interstate 81 through New York, Pennsylvania, and as Little Feat sang, "right on through to Baltimore". cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog For all those years of telling me what butterflies mean, now I am watching them to see signs of Mom. Bye mom. Cue up your 1970 dusty, scratch ridden version of the classic John Barleycorn tune long ago wafted by Traffic: There were three bloggers [1], [2], [3] came out of the West, Their fortunes for to try, And these three bloggers made a solemn vow: Blog Trackback must die. They've wrote, they've dug, they've harrowed it in, Threw posts upon its head, And these three bloggers made a solemn vow: Blog Trackback was dead. Yup, the proclamation has been made. Trackback is Dead. I've read it all before. Trackback is too complicated. It is prone to spam. It's the wrong model for connecting blogs. It's yucky. Yadda yadda yadda. In the beginning, There was MovableType. Trackback was Simple. When I write a blog posting here, and reference Jermey's posting by the mere virtue of a hyperlink, my blog software would tell his that "someone was writing about your stuff" and build a link back form his first source and he, and his readers, would know of my connection. It worked. But there was a problem. The hitch was in the simplicity. The MovableType URLs were rather easy to spoof, and spammers, lusting for the glory of high rank granted by the Great One, wrote automated bots to insert fake trackbacks, all in the interest of self links. Millions of times over. So individuals have their own horror stories of how Trackback Is Bad. Does that extend to everyone? Is it a Universal Rule? Perhaps because I am well below the graces of the Big Famous Blog Pack That We Refer To By Their First Name Only, I have had little relatively little problem with Trackback (uh oh-- I am now asking for it- okay I have fought and complained about it some). WordPress provides a robust starting set of tools, and add on top of that the protection of SK2 plug-in (I bow in Dr. Dave's general direction. Several times. Profusely.). Rather than the plague and nuisance others are bothered with, I luckily am able, on almost a daily basis, to link to blogs and writers I had not previously heard of... merely because of the Trackback that links their writing in their blog toa reference in mine. And I often choose to click back, and expand my awareness and network. But ahem... how is that possible, since it has been decreed... Blog Trackback is Dead? And now I am repeating (muttering incoherently as drool dribbles down my chin?) a theme I blogged barely 24 hours ago-- does one's singular experiences ("Mes amis, I have seen three of zeesse, what do you call them, BLOGS?.... And they are ALL but measly pointless warbling of self indulgent merde, worthless.") extend to all the vastness, diversity and complexity of the 'net? If you, some, others, perhaps many, have had bad experiences from trackback, does that become a Rule For All?. Does anyone else find this logic slightly skewed? Don't just take it because some Big Blogger Says So. the again, don't just take my line of logic either. Argue with it. Test it. Throw up counter evidence. That is the process that works. Not overarching general decrees. Frankly, your experiences may be sad, deplorable, but how do they apply to all? I am concerned that others will follow this kind of path, without questioning it. I find it dangerous as a way of thinking and behaving. So if Trackback has a problem, then the solution is cutting off the notion of creating relted linkages? Links are what create the value, the power of social networls. There are steps to take against Trackback abusers, and just B****ing and M***ing ain't the answer. Where is our cleverness? Ingenuity? Poof. Bury head in sand. So in closing, we return to maiming Steve Winwood's lyrics: And little Small Blogger and their long-tail niche, And he's brandy in the glass; And little Small Blogger and their long-tail niche, Proved the strongest link at last. The Z-list writer, he can't find the reference, Nor so loudly to write his idea, And the author he can't mend thought nor nuance, Without a little Trackback And those Three Bloggers who did decree, Small never click back right to here. 'cause they've said Blog TrackBack Is Dead. Next song spinning up... the Low Spark Of High Heeled iPods (I am reaching for an all-time obscure title for this entry). Out of curiosity, I followed a link from a TrackBack notification to this entry on Rino's Blog (in dutch): Weblogs voor studenten OK, we zijn het er na de posts van Alan Levine , Scott Leslie, Sybilla, Pierre, en ondergetekende en de bijbehorende kommentaren zo'n beetje over eens dat: weblogs zonder kommentaar optie een belangrijk deel van hun funktionaliteit missen, zeker in. Without any knowledge of Dutch (sadly, as the folks over there are quite able to ready my English blog). I am wondering what was said in the entry on "Weblogs voor studenten" Not much heavy lifting needed to guess this is something related to "Weblogs for Students". Just for grins, i decided to put this through the Dutch to English language translation from WorldLingo, which helpfully produces: Web-unwieldly one for students OKAY, we are there it after mail of Alan Levine , Scott Leslie, Sybilla, Pierre, and undersigned, plus associated bowl driving ear about a beetje concerning once that: Apparently, the word "Weblog" written in dutch translates to "Web-unwieldly"! Hah! Is your weblog really web-unwieldly? The other one I am more or less guessing from other contextual clues is that the references in Dutch to "commenting" (referring to blog comments) comes out of the sausage grinder as "bowl driving ear ". What's the point? Not much really. Just the amazement that people in the Netherlands are reading this blog and filtering it through more networks of Dutch blogs. The other ironic thing bouncing around the blog is that one day after writing about the Digital Storytelling workshop I assisted last week, one of the faculty members mentioned there had already been contacted by an interested teacher in New Zealand who had scooped from across the Pacific what we were doing in Arizona. It's nice to be continually amazed by all of this, which was unthinkable as a way of connecting just a short time ago. Just do not put much faith in machine language translations, but check them out fro time to time. Despite their far from perfection performance, more than several times, I have used language translation sites to get the gist of what someone has written to me in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and even has allowed me to compose some crude responses. Now how about some more bowl driving ears? I could not resist this, even though I really should have spent the last hour doing something productive. But I read Mike Caulfield's post on True of EdTech As Well, where he latches on to a criticism of the TED technocratic approach to world problems, and this quote from a quote just cried out to be animated: According to the Khannas, "centuries of colonialism and decades of aid haven't lifted Africa's fortunes the way technology can." Hence the latest urge to bombard Africa with tablets and Kindles"”even when an average African kid would find it impossible to repair a damaged Kindle. And the gadgets do drop from the sky"”Nicholas Negroponte, having spectacularly failed in his One Laptop Per Child quest, now wants to drop his own tablets from helicopters, which would make it harder for the African savages to say "no" to MIT's (and TED's) civilization. This is la mission civilatrice 2.0. Look! From the sky (sorry this GIF is a 1.4 Mb bomb) I grabbed the famous bottle drop scene that triggers all the action in The Gods Must be Crazy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCQIGiXf0JA and loaded it into MPEG Streamclip to get a shorter segment. I then used Quicktime player to move ot fmor an MP4 to an MOV and used the Photoshop Import Video into Layers thing, using every 8th frame. That made like 120 frames, so I went through and deleted about 40% of them. Then I found some images of OLPCs and went through frame by frame, doing a bunch of selection, Paste Into steps to place the OLPC in the scene, merging the new layer into the video frame. It's a rush job, and I could have gotten some smoother action, but I could not stop doing this. This is my silly playing out, but Mike's words are ringing strong in my head: And my point of departure from just about everybody is that even in the Corporate/Open-source debate we are still submerged in the idea that the solution is technology and not governance or laws or additional funding, but if we all adopt the right technologies we can avoid messy messy politics. If Browser 1 is stealing your info and selling it to porn sites, your best personal option might be to go to Browser 2 or to buy additional software. Your best societal option is to make and enforce laws against stealing info. Getting those two things confused is a recipe for disaster, and it is what happens when a self-help culture collides with governance. Yeah, we must be crazy. Yawn, Twitter's Down, Yawn... by cogdogblog posted 5 Jun '08, 8.38pm MDT PST on flickr Hardly news, but at least the folks at twitter are not wasting time spell checking the error messages .I'm guessing a LOLCAT is at the keyboard. Twitter is currently down for We are quickly fixing some discrepancies across our webserves. Coming right back!. Roughly translated as "Twitter haz hairball n dadabaze"? But wait, there is hope! They now have an ETA: We expect to be back in about 1 hour. Thanks for your patience. Of course "in about an hour" from when? an hour ago? tomorrow? whenever? Easy potshots, yes, I know. Yeah, and crazy enough, I still love, want to be twittering. Nope, I am not jumping ship. As if we need loyalty to free addictive web sites that owe us nothing. January Crop of 366 photos posted 1 Feb '08, 10.20pm MST PST on flickr One month down for the year's pledge of 366 daily photos posted to flickr (plus one into February), 8.1% done! This has been so much fun to do; making time and effort each day to think visually, and look for novel things to snap pictures of. And I'm glad to say it truly ash been one a day, no backfilling (okay a few were at 2am the next day). D'Arcy started something incredible as there are 35 others in the pool! Stretched Out posted 12 Feb '08, 12.00am MST PST on flickr Fresa uses my laptop bag for a pillow Just to be clear, Fresa said, "Start blogging again" so the gates are opening.... What to GIF tonight? I was recalling a few photos I took of something in West Texas I spotted on my trip home in December. Then the lightning bolts flew, so thanks to Rowan Peter for the idea on my Who GIFs to include some Pete Townsend Windmill Powered GIFness I had a series of 10 sequential shots of these windmills in motion: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog At the same spot I had done a Cinegram one, playing with freezing the rightmost tower and making the others move in a fun but not so useful for generating electricity fashion From my series of photos, I imported them all into Photoshop as a Stack. In the animation palette, I converted the layers to frames. By examining the rotation, I was able to find 6 frames that did a smooth repetition, and deleted the rest, I used this clips of Pete Townsend's windmill guitar work from Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7LVHiMzyrA I believe this was the footage of the Who's last live concert performance at Shepperton Studios that was used in the film The Kids are Alright, the windmilling happening at the end of Won't Get Fooled Again. (I am hoping a proper Who scholar will set me right). After converted the downloaded video to a.mov file, I imported this into Photoshop via File -> Import -> Video Frames to Layers at maybe every 4th frame. In the animation palette I searched for 6 frames that would work well as a cycle (it might be two). I then selected all frames from the Pete file, used the Copy Frames command from the animation palette window. Over in my Texas Windmills, I selected all frames, and used the Paste Frames command from the animation palette window and the option to "Paste Over Frames" which superimposes Pete on the Texas windmills. By linking all of the pete frames, I aligned his chest with the hub of the front most windmills, resized him to fill the frame more, and then dropped the layer opacity to 55%. It was still a bit square and I felt like the background windmills were a bit hidden, so I applied a feather edge layer mask to Pete's action. Shazam! Another Rock 'n Roll GIFtar hero. Yawn... I almost forgot, Today through Friday is the Open Source Summit right in my own backyard in Scottsdale, and what a list of heavy hitters are on the docket. It kind of feels like peeking through the fence at an exclusive country club, marveling at all the shiny, pretty people. The Open Source Summit truly is a seminal event for education. It is designed to explore the concept of "open source" for clearer understanding and to discuss the impact of open source in education. Individuals who are making decisions about campus applications — including Presidents, Deans, and CIOs — will benefit from the candid discussions about the possibilities that open source provides for the education institution and better learning outcomes. There is a "white paper" [163k pdf] that looks pretty. Nice formatting. I was keen on going, especially with keynotes by John Seely Brown... until I saw the registration fee. Yikes, for 3 days of passive sitting in presentations. There was not even a break as one of our colleges is involved as part of the planning. I had offered assistance to our former chancellor who is central in the planning, but.... well... I never heard back. Am I a bit bitter? Not really, I have so much work I am rather enjoying getting done (despite the earlier spam rants). It does seem rather characteristic that there is negligible blog coverage of this "seminal event"-- draw your own conclusions. Oh well, me and the missus will just skip the big soiree, put on our best overalls and drive the jalopy down to Walmart to pick up a big bag of fried pork chips. There is a big tractor pull on this week anyhow. Update 12/2: I might be wrong. There are a total of a whopping 12 links on the internet to this seminal event. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I made this demo for my students to show them Audacity and basic editing for the Sound Effects Story assignment: Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds. Mine is a tale of a quiet walk in the woods, say up in the in the forests of Show Low Arizona. All of my sounds are from freesound (http://freesound.org/): Dry Leaves Walking http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/33207/ Memory Moon Wet Spaceship Loop http://www.freesound.org/people/suonho/sounds/27570/ phaser http://www.freesound.org/people/impactuniversal/sounds/63372/ Gulls by the Sea http://www.freesound.org/people/acclivity/sounds/13564/ These are all in tracks in Audacity. For the footsteps, I copies a segment, and sped up the speed twice, to make for a sound of hurried walking, then running. I also made a copy of the phaser sound and reversed it to make a loop. A few fade-ins, fade-outs, and bam, done. Bloggers can start feeling like their voice is powerful, but the power may be vaporized in the face of multibillion dollar companies. Jason Kottke, who has had a great running fascination with Ken Jenning's wild Jeopardy marathon, apparently is being threatened by Sony (who owns the show and likely 1/3 of the planet) is spanking Kotke for posting some audio spoilers to the last show. Things may be a little quieter around here in the short term as I deal with some stuff going on in the real world. One of the reasons for the silence is that my legal difficulties with Sony about the whole Ken Jennings thing have yet to be resolved. I can't say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org. As an individual weblogger with relatively limited financial and legal resources, I worry about whether I can continue to post things (legal or not) that may upset large companies and result in lawsuits that they can afford and I cannot. This would be pretty sad if the suits bring down kottke.org, a beacon of web design brightness, social commentary, and some of the wackiest pieces of the web (remainders) anywhere. Power, or the illusion of it, is fleeting, very fleeting. How do you like your eggs? When eating out I'd never pull the attitude Jack Nicholson's character sneered in Five Easy Pieces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wtfNE4z6a8 For most of my life, I've been a sunny side up or scrambled egg eater. In the last few years, maybe with a lot more road travel, I've gotten more fond of eggs over easy. The thing is... at home, for some reason, I avoided making them this way. Without too much Freudian analysis, for some reason I thought I could not manage the flip well. "I'm not good at making eggs over easy. I'm not a chef." So I just never tried. Once I tried flipping my sunny side up eggs over... well it was easy. And it's the only way I make 'em any more. I think I have talked enough about eggs; what I intended to write about was the desire in technology for "easy"-- sort of rumbling notion that challenging stuff is never easy. My colleague and friend Todd Conaway really framed this well in a smashing TechTalk performance last year at Scottsdale Community College. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAJjg99Wvq8 I'm glad I held off writing this post, because until an experience last night, my working title was "The Crock of Easy" (and that would have had crockpot metaphors not eggs). It was like eating someone else's dog food... from someone else's bowl... in someone else's house. And then finding out it was not even dog food. [caption id="attachment_39115" align="aligncenter" width="625"] Royalty free image by Stuart Miles / Free Digital Photos.net[/caption] By probably no means a provable assertion (and open to thrashing), it seems educators can have a built in "Learned Technological Helplessness". I hear it in utterances like "I'm not a techie" or "I don't know much about computers" as self-defeating statements before even trying something with technology. Because they make it about the technology, not what it might do. To me it's not much different when someone tells you "I am not a photographer". My response is "Do you take photos?" and when they say "yes"... well I wave my wand and say.. "Guess what, you are a photographer." If you use a computer, a mobile device for any purpose, to me you are a technology user. Not a java programmer, not a hacker, but you are capable of doing something with technology. I am sure my runny yolk logic will not go over well. "Easy for you to say, Alan, you're a programmer." Yet... using technology for a purpose does not require deep knowledge of Objective-C, much in the same way that for me to operate a vehicle to drive from Phoenix to LA does not require that I am a mechanic. Still, my analogies are leaking water, they are open to poaching. Sue me. I'm not a ---- oh well, I've watched Perry Mason. My worry is when people discount what they can do before they even try. Now this egg dripping post was motivated partly by comments from colleagues who are rather far from this state of technology helplessness. Quite the polar opposite. And this has to do with the stuff I have done the last few years, most recently in Connected Courses, to create Wordpress aggregation "hub" sites with Feed Wordpress and RSS feeds. In a comment thread in a recent What's next for connected courses post by Mimi Ito, my Blog Brother Howard Rheingold wrote: I am by no means an adept. I'm probably a lot geekier than the average indicator. I like that it's easy to click around in WordPress and figure things out. But it's complex! I don't see that the open, connected pedagogy is going to make serious inroads with many educators until the process of setting up a hub is easier. And likewise, Lisa M. Lane recently tweeted https://twitter.com/LisaMLane/status/543514923066617857 That "easy" word gives me a small twitch. An is it the setting up of hub really the block in adopting connected methods? There sure was a lot of other components in Connected Courses than the hub. But I cannot really fault either colleague; There are few educators who have tried more ways to use online tools than Lisa; she has tried and struggled with the Wordpress hub, with Google Sites, with Google Communities, she constantly seeks end arounds in Moodle, and wrestles with her LMSness. Howard too has done plenty himself, running connected courses in blogs, and wikis, and taking up the syndication hub thing too. But they are right. It's not easy like push button easy. And it's not easy, because RSS feeds can be messy, and there's a lot of nuances involved. Perhaps that's why it took five blog posts to describe my methods, rather than one click. Yet... it's not impossible. Look at what has been done by Kim Jaxson (Chico State U), Todd Conaway (Yavapai Community College), James Michie (open course for secondary school educators), Barry Gelston (K-12 home schooled math). Let me pry this apart a bit. When one says "a wordpress syndication hub is not easy to build" it frames the hub as a unitary thing. One model. One way. What you see on Connected Courses is at the top end- it relies on a Premium plugin (Gravity Forms) to automate the signup process, and to make that work, I had to do custom code, as well as to generate the blog listing in the format you see. These are "nice to haves" especially for a larger, wide open course like Connected Courses. But they are not critical needs. Here's how you can simplify setting up Wordpress Hub: Have people send you their URLs by email or a google form. I did the latter for ETMOOC. And I (glutton) processed well over 500 submissions via the form. A side benefit was... I saw everyone's blog at least once. I got a good overview of who was in the mix. But adding the feeds is as simple as entering the URLs in the Feed Wordpress admin area, and checking they work. Tedious, maybe, but doable. Especially for a class sized connected course. Use a plugin to generate a list of blogs. Because Feed woprdpress enters all of the feeds as Links type data in a category, you can use the Links Shortcode Plugin. The list of syndicated blogs you see on the Future of Learning Institute site is generated autmatically with this bit of "complex" coded inserted into the page content [links category_name='Contributors'] Not easy? Oh well. Simplify the Platforms Much of the headaches occur from the wide variety of blog platforms people may use. If you are running a class, you may want to dictate strongly suggest a single platform. This makes what you have to deal with easier. This is why for Project Community we have all students create tumblr blogs. One platform to support, and all they need is to send you the URL for their blog; feeds are found automatically by Feed Wordpress for tumblr sites. See the tumblr guide we offer. This past round we had well over 70 students, most brand new to blogging, use tumblr for an entire semester. These may not be all that convincing. You want easier? Don't even bother with a Wordpress hub - set up a NetVibes aggregator, you get the same result- a blog hub. And you know what you can do with all my advice. Toss it right out... [caption id="attachment_39116" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Creative Commons licensed geograph image by Evelyn Simak [/caption] I really want to have a better understanding of the stuff Mike Caulfield has been tireless promoting - the Smallest Federated Wiki. I can buy into the idea because of my trust and respect for Mike. His examples and videos are really helping better rationalize to me that there is some there. And yet, every time I have tried it, I feel like I have entered another dimension. I am looking forward to a Federates Wiki "Happening" he is leading online over the next two weeks. I want to "get it". Last night I got the urge to try and jump in... and I ended up in some bad corner of the anti-Narnia. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/544378178295189505 And it all hits home. This is what it feels like. Seems obvious. I think I am Over Easy. Heck I might be ready for Soufflé [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by St0rmz[/caption] And all of this dovetails into a really great hangout conversation I had this morning with Ben Werdmüller and Erin Jo Richey about Known. I've only been barely tinkering with it, but was fired up when Erin demo-ed the Reader/Hub functionality that is coming soon for the rest of us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzq64Yatt7I The things they showed and described about the vision and capability has literally lit a burner under my egg pan (bad one). I have no idea what I will do with known, but tis time to give it a serious look. I have a good feeling. Or I will just Do What Jim Does. While I am not ready to close up my Wordpressing by any means (yet) -- in fact the SPLOTs I have been working on have me quite excited. It's something about inverting a lot of the ways of thinking about the web, and the affordances of the way known works with other web sites. It's not necessarily the "easy" syndicating that compels me, it's a glimmer of a new. novel way of thinking about the locus of our activity, and how the web mention technology offers a more than singular information flow. Ease of use is important, do not get me wrong; I don;t want anyone to have my FederatedFrustration with setting up a connected course, but I am in it even more if it enables a way of doing things not possible elsewhere. So how many eggs do you want? You know how I make 'em. Top/Featured image: cc licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo by velkr0: http://flickr.com/photos/velkr0/423262977. This is a fun story. I did a flickr creative commons site search for "fried eggs" and the one I chose is by my friend Joe in Vancouver. It's a small big world. The recent flip of the calendar (well not so recent, jeez, it's been two weeks) reminds me that February is the time for my annual blog hiatus-- I take some time off from posting here and devote my attention to commenting on other people's blogs. This makes for the fifth annual CogDogBlogMuzzle, having done so in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. Usually this coincides with attending the Northern Voice conference but since apparently there is some other small event happening in Vancouver, NV10 has been nudged to May 2010. I do this because I still believe, after all these years, that blogging is not just about your own blabbing, but equally the critical act of participating in the spaces of other blogs. That is, if I can find any, as we all now allegedly blogs are dead. Again. That twitter, facebook, buzz et al have killed blogging. Bullshit. The only thing killing blogging, if indeed it is being killed, is people losing track of the value of having a publishing space of their own. Again as before, I hope to find this invigorating and also to sample some blogs I've not read much. And also in tradition, I have run my yearly set of stats to find my top bloggers; this is a MySQL query I run in phpMyAdmin: SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE comment_date >= "˜2009-01-01"² AND comment_date < "˜2010-01-01"² GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY acnt DESC And here's my applause for my leading commenters (well I wont applaud myself, that is not cool). I love you dearly. Alan Levine 149 Jim Groom 37 D'Arcy Norman 31 Gardner 24 Cole 18 Stephen Downes 17 Harriet 13 Patrick Murray-John 13 TOM 12 Darren Kuropatwa 11 Robin Heyden 11 Russ Goerend 11 Chris L 8 Gerry 7 Devon 6 Susan WB 6 Scott Leslie 6 Beth Kanter 6 alexanderhayes 6 Kristina Hoeppner 6 Liz Dorland 5 Ed Webb 5 David 5 Rob Wall 5 Mathieu Plourde 5 michael chalk 5 Allanah K 5 Laura 5 Suzanne Aurilio 5 But alas, the stats do show a drop in activity, both in my posting and comment activity, here in a chart generated in my Google doc of stats: Maybe blogging is dying? My number of posts this year fell to almost what they were my first year. Am I my own hypocrite? Is it true the Nobody blogs like the Bava? NOBODY? Yeah, I''ve been busy. Or maybe I shifted from blogging about neat web sites to... crap, I am an excuse machine. I'll come back to it- but in short the idea that blogging is only something that happens in a blog site is what I aim to challenge later this year. So for the next week (at least, I might go longer), I'm prowling other blogs, anxious to see if they are shuttered ghost town as the pundits claim. I'm not relying on any comment tracking tool, since, well they never work. Instead, I will do some delicious tagging of where I leave my tracks-- using tags of 2010 and commentblog to track my own activity -- http://delicious.com/cogdog/2010+commentblog. This embedded feed will change as i do my stuff.... So if you want me to write all over your blog, leave me a link and comment below (spammers need not apply). cc licensed flickr photo shared by mondopiccolo I've got nothing more to say (here) til February 21. Featured Image: Dog on the Floor flickr photo by Orin Zebest shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I really should be doing other work, but I thought of a quick improvement to the Built In Blogger presentation I did at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference on "More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs"... the hiding and showing of slide notes (using the "+/- notes" button in the top left) displayed a CSS chunk of text by toggling its display properties. What I did not like was that the notes simply showed up at the bottom of a slide, so a full screen slide, the notes would appear out of screen, below the fold line (requiring a scroll down). Well that was an easy fix- just change the positioning properties for the div to be absolute, so now a slide that appears like this: When you click the button in the top right, now the notes appear layered over the slide: And an extra right aligned button under the notes can make them disappear again. Neat, eh? Just minor updates in Blogger Template, and publish, correct? Well, yes, until you deal with the asterisked note in the slide I share how this presentation was created. Basically, this technique worked fine in web standard browsers I tested (Safari, FireFox in Mac OS X and Firefox on a PC). In Internet Explorer, almost anything wrong can happen to CSS. This tripled the time I spent getting this to finally work because: (1) The IE box model or lack there of, made the notes div be wider than the screen. Okay, so I added a fixed width of 500px to make it stay inside the window. (2) The notes div was made to display on top by setting a z-index:3. On standard browsers, it layered as expected (on top). In IE the div for the footer insisted on being on top. Even if I explicilty set a lower z-index for this div z-index:1 IE just does what it feels like doing. The ultimate fix was to remove the position:relative from the footer CSS class. Anyhow, you can find details on how this magic (or kitty litter) was done at http://cat-diaries.blogspot.com/2005/06/blogger-presenter.html where details are in the notes display area and you can also grab a copy of the entire template used in this production. How about a new IE motto... "Got way too much web design time on your hands? Let IE fill in those idle hours with thousands of unexpected CSS behaviors..." If you really want to take back your web on a PC, get Firefox. Now. Stop reading this, and get the Fox. What are you doing still staring at this screen? I've been using my CDB Bloglines site mainly to run a master copy of my regular RSS feeds (keep my home and work computers in synch). But playing with grouping of feeds, I've found some new tricks to play with. I had just been dumping all feeds into one Bloglines folder, organized alphabetically. I run them on the sidebar of the main entry to CogDogBlog-- yes, "blogrolls" are like, so, 2002, but I have used it myself numerous times to share the URL of a blog I read. And when I visit new blogs, I very much like to scan who they read and it has helped me to uncover new blogs. It was the low tech Friend of a Friend approach. Anyhow, Bloglines provides a JavaScript cut and paste that puts my current RSS list on the blog page. I had noticed James does something similar, but his generated feed has labeled groups, which is what I found Bloglines does for you know for the different folders you create on the BL site. So I made a few general feed categories. But the fun stuff came when trying to use this with my desktop RSS reader... (more…) NBC's "hit show" Medium is about a psychic who is helping solve cases in what is purported to be Phoenix, Arizona. I believe it is the "Phoenix, near Burbank". It looks like they are not wasting any money on location shots, because I have yet to see a cactus, a desert rabbit, a creosote bush, a snake or any recognizable building structures or streets. The clincher was tonight's episode (playing in the background before the news comes on, I am not absorbed in this drivel) where the main character is frantically calling 911 on her cell phone "I am on the corner of Chaparral and Miller, please hurry!" an intersection rather close to my home, and I see nothing that is even close to how the scene looks. Those palm tree lined burbs are most definitely southern California. Okay, it is not a documentary or reality, but hey, at least stick a saguaro cactus in the background! I've been using my iPod shuffle for exercising and playing through my car stereo (Transpod FM transmitter) for almost a year now. I've only listened to radio under duress or forgetfulness. But the last few weeks, I've left the pod home and re-inserted some CDs. This is only because I am trying to sell the 1999 VW Bug (low miles! great body shape! Flower Vase!), and I wanted to be sure the stereo on multidisc changer worked well. The surreal moment was driving to work (last week when I had to drive to work at my "old" job), and I was saying, "Wow, this random shuffle is sure bringing me a whole lot of Stevie Ray Vaughan songs in a row" when I realized the reason for this was it was on a CD, that old technology that played the songs in the same order. Now where did I leave those 8-Tracks? In the pre-launch fury for the ds106 Digital Storytelling Open Course, I thought it would be fun (and easy to set up) to create a new place on the Five Card Flickr Stories site for us to play. Want to have a go at making a story? Head over to http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/play.php?suit=ds106. I'm curious to see if people can go beyond the literal caption making approach that most make when they save their stories. Want to add to the pool? Just tag photos in flickr as ds106. A caveat is you should do this for new photos, because of the way the API works, I am not able to (very easily) go back in time to fetch older photos. So start sharing weird photos of stuff now with the class tag. I thought of making a special tag just for five card ds106 stories, but figured Jim will have us madly tagging anyhow. The gallery of ds106 stories will be at http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/show.php?suit=ds106 (right now there is one lame lonely one). One thing that can be fun is to look at an existing story, and write a new version for the same set of photos. Go play! An artlcle and links from University of British Columbia's e-Strategy newsletter (no RSS!) features some interesating tools developed at the UBC Arts ISIT. <tiphat>Tip of the blg hat to my colleague Michelle, who has one of the funkier blog names for an educator ;-) </tiphat> You gotta like the fun photos of the tool creators on the news story. (more…) 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) cc licensed flickr photo shared by .m for matthijs with apologies to Don McLean... Not so long, long ago... I can still remember How those tweets used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those people retweet And, maybe, they'd be happy for a while. But tweetspam made me shiver With every @message I'd deliver. Bad news from TechCrunch; I cant tweet what I'll eat for lunch. I can't remember if I cried When I read about how Ev's fortune did slide, But something touched me deep inside The day twitter died. So bye-bye, micro-blogging pie. Took my status to Facebook, But its interface makes me cry. Them good old internet boys weren't asking why Singing, "if I cant tweet, I doubt I'll die. "this'll be the day that I wont die." The cool ed-tech kids are deleting tweets. I'm not cool. Okay, I already did a cover version of the original for I'm a Reclaimer, so I am ripping myself off. https://soundcloud.com/felixadog/im-a-tweet-deleter I'm A Deleter G D G I thought twitter was only for status updates G D G Everyone sharing what they ate C G Trackers are out to sell me C G That's the way it seems. C G D (stop) Advertising mining all of my tweets. G C G G C G Got a python script, now I'm a deleter G C G C Not a shred of me in the API C G (1) C G (1) There's no more tweets oh I'm a deleter! F (1) (riff) It's my context, it's all mine G D G I thought likes were more or less a shared thing, G D G Seems the more I clicked the less I got. C G What's the use in tweetin'? C G These threads won't stop C G D (stop) When I needed news I got fake bots. G C G G C G Got a python script, now I'm a deleter G C G C Not a shred of me in the API C G (1) C (1) G (1) There's no more tweets oh I'm a deleter! F (1) (riff) It's my context, it's all mine C G Trackers are out to sell me C G That's the way it seemed. C G D (stop) Advertising scams mining all of my tweets. G C G G C G Got a python script, now I'm a deleter G C G C Not a shred of me in the API C G (1) C (1) G (1) There's no more tweets oh I'm a deleter! F (1) (riff) It's my context, it's all mine I'm a deleter, I'm a deleter yeah yeah I am just trying to flesh out a new idea for the Maricopa Learning eXchange. Since we have now real stories of how our faculty are using and modifying MLX content. I am hoping we can set up some new tools that can allow someone to create a new MLX item, and add that it is related to or derived from another MLX package. For example, from our video interviews, we had an Estrella Mountain adjunct faculty (Marylyn) who teaches economics who described how she used the human organs supply and demand lesson package developed at Chandler-Gilbert, but in doing so, Marylyn had added some new components. We would like it if people like Marylyn could ultimately post a new MLX item to describe how the existing one was adopted and perhaps modified. A tool for showing relationships would recognize use and re-use... (more…) It's been running as a free web service for over eight years, from my little humble PHP script hacking in 2003. Feed2JS (http://feed2js.org/) provides a tool where anyone can enter a URL for an RSS feed, choose some options, and generate a bit of cut and paste JavaScript code they can use in their own web sites. Once in place, this provides a widget that is updated automatically as the RSS feed it refers to changes. The idea owes its origin to the early work of Stephen Downes in RSS and the model of a ASP script I found created by David Carter-Todd (who I hope to find when I get to Blacksburg) In doing this, a lot of traffic is routed through the Feed2JS server. More than I may have even guessed. I developed this and ran it from 2003 to maybe 2005 on a server at the Maricopa Community Colleges, and then had been hosted for free at Modevia Web Services after a kind offer from Aaron Axelsen. I never even had to look at the web server for the last 6 years. In September, I got an email from apparently the company that bought out Modevia (I had been alerted this was happening) letting me know that they would be shutting down the server. CUt off. They did provide me a few days leeway to set up a new server. Now I jnow next to nothing about setting up web servers, but with some advice from The Twitter, set up a cloud based server at Rackspace. I got it going, but it was apparently not the most efficient set up, so Aaron kindly configured a new server. The thing is it runs a lot of traffic, and I am paying by the Gb. In two weeks, it's been about over 600 Gb of inbound and outbound traffic. The load crashed the server in week 1, and I had to double the RAM. If it is any measure of usage, the cache directory is cleared daily, and registeres at least 1500 different feeds a day it is serving, meaning it is used on at least that many web sites. At this rate, its going to cost me at least $200 just for hosting in September (for those who will chime in about their $15 ISP, keep in mind Feed2JS would choke in a shared server environment, it needs its own server). I can't afford to do this going forward, and unless something happens in the next few weeks, I am going to have to pull the plug on it end of October. I have set up a paypal donation form, and to date have collected about $70. But it really needs a major sponsor or some organization to take it over. I'm not too invested in running a web service. But I hate to leave people hanging- when the light's go out on the server, people's web pages will spin as it tries to load a script that is not there. It really is not the optimum set up that there is a single server; a set of distributed ones would make much more sense. So this is what's happening. I have placed a notice atop the Feed2JS site: This leads to a web page I made to outline what I have written here, along when three possible futures (see http://feed2js.org/index.php?s=support). Some generous benefactor is willing to cover the hosting costs. I am unwilling to inject advertising into the generated content, but there is no reason why this site could not be overt in recognizing this generosity. Some organization is willing to take over the management. This would mean hosting and also developing a plan to perhaps distribute the load across multiple hosts, as well as to party on efforts to develop the site. I'd even be willing to give up all ownership if Feed2JS is continued as a free service. Make me an offer. The free service goes away. I hate to see it happen, but this is a likely possibility. This would mean needing to find alternatives or look into installing your own local version- if you self host your web site, this is not that hard to do. See the Google Code site for all you need. I recommend this route anyhow as you will get much better performance from your own server. Also, I was a bit reluctant to do this because it suggests a possibility of what some bad person could do with a server, in that I have modified the central script to append a small "please support Feed2JS" at the bottom of all calls to the script (yeah it reeks of advertising): If you follow the link, it gives some info on how you can hide the nag message. It's not really that tricky. So why would you donate money if this might go away? I cant answer that either. I doubt a solution is running this on donations. But it would help me out in this lats stretch because IT"S COMING OUT OF MY POCKET and I DO NOT HAVE A JOB! Better yet, if anyone has connections or ideas for some generous entity that would like to underwrite this or take it of my hands- please contact me ASAP. I hate to kill Feed2JS, and frankly the code would remain available and open for anyone else to pick up and use/modify. Please, help me find someone to adopt my little project. Thanks. Update: Sept 28 I am happy to report some generous donations came in last night, with a notable shout out to Anil Dash for his personal email. I am about 3/4 the way to covering costs for the next 2 months and have a nibble of interest from 2 sources. No Loopy Loopy As I gaze out the window at snow falling on October 2, it may help to situate the reader who missed the story that this year I migrated from Arizona to the prairies of Saskatchewan, the call to move being one of love. And you may glean from flickr/Instagram photos that Cori and I share a lot, especially our love of the outdoors, chasing light with our cameras, laying down in the grass to grab that perfect image. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Cori in Her Element flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] You should know, however, that there is so much more to this woman, the way she is in the world, and mostly, the incredible work she does with some of the most challenging high school students. Yes, her superpower coffee mug may state her superpower is "I Teach" but her work goes beyond content and subject matter, but doing heroic level feats to help the students she works with, and reach them in a genuine way few adults do. And it's a strong dose of reality that makes my high school years seem like a quaint fairy tale and is hard to reconcile with the generalizations one often reads about students and school these days. The reality I am learning through her is quite powerful The stories she comes home with regularly, as Mom used to say, "blow me away" and humble me to the quiet keyboard pecking that occupies my day. I've carried this post around in my head as a draft for a while, and after this particular week, it really is time to publish. When thinking of a metaphor, I kept hearing the call of a song, and yet worried that it might not convey it in words to the feeling I am trying to pour into this editor screen. Long time readers may glean (I think it's in the Twitter bio) of my fandom of The Who ("...because you never get to know their names. You know them as The Who. Everybody says, 'who?' and you say, 'you know'"). The rock opera Tommy is all original except for one cover- Eyesight to the Blind (The Hawker) is their version of the 1951 blues song recorded Sonny Boy Williamson II, which the liner notes indicate Pete Townsend learned of from the Mose Allison version. The lyrics, to me, encapsulate, with yes, a bit exaggeration of what I think of her role as a Teacher who is More Than a Teacher: You talk about your woman I wish you could see mine Yeah, you talk about your woman I wish you could see mine Every time she starts to lovin' She brings eyesight to the blind. The "lovin'" in verse maye be inferred a more carnal blues way, but the one I know from Cori is the deep lovin' she has for her students, and the actions and lengths she goes to for them. Around town we meet and frequently she is messaged from students she has helped, sometimes from years ago, and it's clear in those exchanges that she is just about as memorable a teacher as one can be. I am in awe at our end of day exchanges of what we did. As much for the many things she does, often right in a moment, and addressing the needs of multiple students and colleagues at once. I would melt trying to do her work. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2018/365/266 Cori at Work flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] And there is much more; we have long intense discussions about teaching, pedagogy, values, ethics, research. What a joy for me to be part of her life. In the Spring I am proud to share (uh oh, Cori, and I spilling beans?) she is getting to share some of her Eyesight giving experience to education students at the University of Regina, leading a section of a first year teachers course. Those students will be beyond lucky to be in her class. You should be a reader of her blog which I am way overdue in my promise to help move to a Domain of Her Own. She's not about promoting herself so I am doing a wee bit. Yes, I may exaggerate with these lyrics, but it's my blog and it's what runs through my mind on hearing her stories: Just a word from her lips And the deaf begin to hear Featured Image: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Cori's Superpower flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] It seemed a little odd for week 3's ds106 assignment to be about 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story, but there is no way I would just do just another Dominoe story. I was flailing around for an idea, and the story just happened while wandering about. Here is a Vuvox Collage story about a boomerang at DFW airport (link to view directly). Vuvox can be quirky, but the media on a scroll line and its editing features are a nice change from the usual stuff. As usual I got the unusual music from ccMixter-- "PEACE" by rocavaco (feat. the world) http://ccmixter.org/files/rocavaco/26369 This is for my own "to do" list most of all, but I have a wheelbarrow full of stuff I've been immersed in (and 3 more palettes piled high with new things to do), but to be blogged sometime between tomorrow and the end of time.... * A Drupal State of Mind: in line with a previously successful strategy of using the technology that D'Arcy does, I am on the learning cliff to get a new site going that will be a dynamic web community for the 1999 vintage NMC main site. But as powerful as Drupal is, it is hard to find the right toe hold climbing up; the terminology, the billions of modules, the trillion of forum suggestions... well it is daunting. My plan is not to tinker in the lab and produce a nice shiny site, but to actually build it out in public view, sort of like peeking through a construction site fence, and hopefully get some input, building it organically. Actualy, my first step is to do a separate Drupal instance that will be mostly a blog about this work, to document both code and design as we go. * Web Audio Casting: i've set NMC up with a web audio/video content delivery network, for more effective publishing of media content, but we also have it set up to to live audio streams from our events... this is first put to use by streaming live audio into our Second Life Campus, and I've gotten up to speed with Shoutcast technology and found an even slicker Mac OSX client that allows me to stream content from any application or audio source to our streaming service, which then handles the multiple client requests. but there's more-- this Saturday we have an virtual event (an Artists showcase in Second Life) where we will have a live panel session-- our remote presenters will be both calling in to a phone bridge (toll free number in the US), but we have some panelists from the U.K., and we will be using Skype conference calling to connect to them, and then Skypeout that audio to our teleconference bridge... AND then a special hardware bridge that can take the sum audio from the phone conference, push it out through Shoutcast to our media stream. It's crazy! We went through some testing this morning and managed to create some freaky reverb effects, but its all working. * Moving to Flash Video One only has to look at the raging success of the Flash video sites like Blip.tv, YouTube, et al, to realize this is the way to publish video content. I've done a few examples of getting QuickTime or WMV video into FLV and create a web player, but I'm far from an optimal solution. I'd sure like some sort of jukebox player to select different video content. * reBlog I have two prototype sites almost ready for public view that use the reBlog concept, which takes rss aggregation to a new group filtering/publishing level. It's slick, but is taking time to simply the interface for the folks we are askng to do the reblog work. * Screencasting I got my hands on a copy of Captivate and am dabbling with some screencasts that will support some of our workshops. It is an enticing form, but there is a lot more to it than just turnig on the record button and talking as you click around a piece of software. There is an art to doing it right, and I am at the clumsy crayon stage of this art. * RSS in MediaWiki Other folks have pitched in a date display option, and I've updated a few small pieces in this code that allows you to embed RSS feed content into any MediaWiki page... there are still a few feeds that just do bizarre formatting things that require special treatment (that's you, Yahoo-- weird RSS formatting central! line feeds in item titles, why?). * Feed2JS Looks like my old server at Maricopa bit the dust. I have no access to it anymore, and have hoisted the new home at http://feed2js.org/. Sorry for broken sites. I have not had any time to focus on this, but I still intend to get the code on an EduForge site, develop a new approach for mirrors, and the code above has some insight for building key word filters. I'm getting some use of it myself on numerous NMC pages. Well, there is more, but I should be doing the work, not blogging about blogging about it..... Two reminders from past UMW ds106 students. The ethos of ds106 carries on. First, a short email from Eric, who was in my Fall 2012 class: I was checking up on my final project videos and was amazed at how many views it has. I just thought you might think it was cool haha. Definitely cool, haha. Step back, this video, that was part of Eric's final storytelling project, has over 112,00 views. You might add up the views on all my YouTube videos, and its still less than that. Crazy, right? Now views are not everything but 100,000 has to at least mean something. And this was really just a montage of clips from the Pawn Stars show, Eric even discounts the video a bit in his writeup: As somewhat of a conclusion, I chose to use the video assignment ds106 fave moments. I made a video montage of my top 5 favorite pawn stars moments, with a mix of actual items and just funny things in the show. Although I was disappointed that I couldn't fix the audio sync issues, this is the assignment that I spent the most time on and am most happy about. I wish I could have had good quality clips for each pick, but unfortunately youtube didn't have the best options. That said I am still very happy with how it turned out. It's part of a collection of assignments Eric did including a Pawn Stars Rap-- https://soundcloud.com/eric_greenlaw/pawn-stars-rap Dude-- that really needed some beats in it!) built around the Pawn Stars show for his final story work. I had wanted to see a bit more tying together of the different pieces of media into a cohesive story (note to present students, pay attention), but still, I have to drop all of that and says woah, 112,000 views. I hope your pappy is proud Eric, I sure am. But see, what ds106 is really about is this explosion of creativity for 14 weeks. It's not about the actual products but the process, and writing about it, and what it seeds for later potential in knowing the media creation skills and ideas. And that leads me to this incredible photo by early ds106 veteran Serena Epstein who's design, visual, photographic, creative skills were already huge in her time as a ds106 student, and have continued to grow since then. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Serenae In commenting on her photo, her reply fills in the story, and how she has taken the idea of blogs as open publishing where there is a blog at the school she works that is dedicated to the plight of tortoises. ds106 is just a start for many people. It goes on and on and on. You do not get this inside a closed box like Coursera, etc. That is the falseness of their mis-appropriation of the simple word "open", where in the xMOOC space, is only one way. In. In ds106, open is bigger, as last semester student Haley writes in her work to move the understanding to a higher level (my emphasis added): What I've come up with is the fact that the biggest, coolest thing about ds106 isn't the content it covers"”in fact, the course doesn't have a single consistent lesson plan. Instead, it offers students (and educators!) an introduction to numerous methods of creating stories using digital resources. The ways in which students learn to use those resources change depending on who is teaching the course, whether or not they're affiliated with UMW or are open participants, and even which assignments the individual student chooses to complete. At its core, though, ds106 is just as much about conveying a particular ethos, informed by the rhetoric of innovation and open education that's part of the larger conversation about edtech. When I say "rhetoric of innovation," I'm referring to the line of thinking that pursuing a new way of completing a task, a new way of thinking, or a unique experience is more valuable than sticking to well-established methods, which I encountered constantly (and found incredibly compelling) as a student in ds106. The value of open resources, online communities as vital spaces for learning, the thoughtful creation of identity online, and giving students the freedom to create their own learning experiences are all integral to the ds106 experience. Each of those elements reflects the overarching ethos established by the professors who constructed and teach the course, one that touts openness, creativity and the innovative use of tech as essential components for constructing a new, more compelling and student-driven educational model. You can have your badge or certificate, I will take the ethos for 500, Alec. And the Daily Double. What do they have in common? In the past I have sported one but would not be caught dead wearing one now. There is value, however, in sharing a list of the blogs you read or subscribe to, it's just sidebar clutter is not really the best place. On some long frequency wavelength, I remember to update (maybe once a year). It is still a sad missing and some-cheap-intern-could-code-it-in-a-few-days feature that Google Reader lacks a way to syndicate a list of the feeds we have in there. You can syndicate/share what you have "shared" in terms of items form different feeds, but nothing to share the sources. Ah, but there is a 2 step end around. I use GReader's export feature to save my feeds as an OPML. Then I go to my never-user-for-anything-else account on Bloglines. I then delete everything I have in my feed list there, and import the OPML file I exported from Google Reader. I then use the Bloglines Blogroll Wizard to create a cut and paste javascript code-- I use this to display my feed eating list as a WordPress Page I call my Blog Pile and also provide a local link to my OPML file. Update: D'Arcy Norman (comment below) has a much better approach- use a Grazr widget, so once again, I trashed my approach and am Copying D'Arcy%trade; So the big hair is not coming back, and likewise, the Blogroll has a shaved new appearance. Pssss - If anyone is noticing, I am playing with the Zemanta WordPress Plugin to add the related links below... more to be barked at in a future post, but I am trying it out and tossing it around the yard. Related articles by ZemantaDestruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google ReaderFeature Request: Google ReaderSidebar Widgets - Google Reader Shared Items It took more than 3 months to get here, but having waiting 50 years, well I'm patient. Within a fancy red velvet covered box I got my Joslin Center Medal for having lived with Type 1 Diabetes for 50 years (that line was crossed in late October 2020). The details were spelled out when I applied: https://cogdogblog.com/2020/10/joslin-50-medal/ Thank you Joslin Center for running the medals program. Thanks for my parents (deceased) who cared so much and worried far more than I knew as a kid. Thanks to all the staff of Camp Glyndon in the 1970s who taught me how to thrive with diabetes. Thanks to my wife Cori who cares so much and can detect I have low blood sugar before I know. I’ll be back for another application in 25 years. I'm hoping to catch up with Richard Vaughn who already crossed the 75 year line. Why not 100? For now, getting to 50 is a good, not glucose raising, sweet feeling. Featured Image: My Joslin Center 50 Year With Diabetes medal, just out of the box. Once the photo gets to flickr, it will be shared under CC0. Someone should be worried. With just a few sniffs, I might be getting hooked on Google Reader for my RSS habits. I've not really like using web-based RSS readers for scanning, as checking each site's news required a wait for a web transcation, whereas a desktop reader grabs allt he stuff quickly, or in the background, allowing me t paw through it quickly. But Google Reader's ajax scented interface is fast. And the keyboard shortcuts make going through items even quicker than my desktop reader. First off all, there is easy in and easy out via an OPML input/export of your feeds. So I was able to grab my list from either my Bloglines collection or my desktop reader's export functions, toss them into Google Reader, and was off to the races. And it kept my folder structure for organizing my feeds. And you can select an entire folder to see all the news from that folder's feed contents, or an individual feed. You can get the full contents view, or if you are a headline scanner, you can toggle to a list view: And a simple press of the "k" and "j" keys lets you pop open the next or previous story: And other key presses all you to mark them as read/unread, mark as special with "stars" or "shared" (more below). You can add tags of your own choice, allowing creation of cross feed collections. You can mark all as read or unread/ The left pane allows you to see all your feeds, or just the ones with new stuff. But what os really cool, is Google Reader offers tools to share your feeds, categories, starred or shared items. So I started keeping a collection of my "shared" items, for which you get a direct URL to share as well as an RSS feed. So in a very easy manner, you have all the functionality of a reblog site. But wait, there is more. For the shared sites collection, there is also an option to "add a clip" to your blog or web site; Google Reader creates a cut and paste Javascript so you can embed the latest stuff right into your site-- I have added it to the front page sidebar of my blog here, using the 5 most recent shared items. Heck, this could put my own project out of business. Oh yes, there is more. The public and clip features are also available for each "folder" of feeds you have (or tags you have created), just by changing their status to "public": I came across this most recently on the New World Notes site, where Wagner James Au reports from Second Life- he has 9 of these separate instances on the sidebar, w/o much page load delay. This is just things I have sniffed in my first 45 minutes of play with Google Reader, but wow, I am in looooooooooove. I love Creative Commons, ok? I've followed, used, the licenses since the start, I have the t-shirts. And like many, I can rattle of the stack of letters and explain them. But in my internet roaming, especially for my other strong interest, photography, I come across things in practice, well, that are much less cut and dry. Like a few posts ago when I fell into some slimy and weird toy spaces of public domain (not strictly CC, but in the same neighbourhood). And I also love cacti. They are unworldly, especially to an east coast born suburban kid (well I did taste the Southwest through Roadrunner cartoons), but so intriguing in design and beauty that defies the probably of life with almost no water. Both seem simple from afar, yet different up close, and occasionally you might get stuck by a sharp spine. Have I exhausted the un-necessary metaphor? I can't resist, this was my photo I found my searching my flickr stream on "details". On with the show. It Starts in My Feeds Old man internet warning- this started while reading my RSS feeds in my folder of Photography sites. I clicked to read the PetaPixel article Generative AI is a Minefield for Copyright Law. Of course it opens with the requisite surreal AI generated image, but frankly does not really give me anything new beyond what I've read before-- especially from those great CC folks. Bottom line, no one can really say for sure where the clear rules and guidelines will land on generative imagery. It's messy. Again. But this is where it got me curious. Down at the credits bottom of the PetaPixel article it reads: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. This article was originally published at The Conversation and is being republished under a Creative Commons license. https://petapixel.com/2023/06/18/generative-ai-is-a-minefield-for-copyright-law/ It is "being republished under a Creative Commons license". What license is "a"? And where is the link to the license? I am an observer of attribution practice, and this one falls way short of the Creative Commons Best Practices. Okay, that's just being sloppy. I am no perfectionist. But I am curious. I follow the one link to the original article published at The Conversation (I have read many great articles there, good writing happens, I declare). What's curious here is I can find no mention of a Creative Commons license on the article. There is a footer assertion "Copyright © 2010–2023, Academic Journalism Society" -- so I did around for more. Not that it would ever be clear to look for license details under a link for "Republishing Guidelines" there it is. We believe in the free flow of information and so publish under a Creative Commons — Attribution/No derivatives license. This means you can republish our articles online or in print for free, provided you follow these guidelines: https://theconversation.com/ca/republishing-guidelines The belief in free flow of information is a nice sentiment. And there is is, they are asserting a CC BY-ND license across their publications. One license to rule them all. Except. The conditions. Now this was somewhat new to me, but I heard the smart and esteemed Jonathan Poritz (certified facilitator of the Creative Commons Certificate) say in an online license quibble that adding extra conditions to a CC license... nullifies it (?) That seems to be clear on the response on the CC Wiki to the question "What if I want to add some conditions and I clarify what I mean by a specific term? Is there anything wrong with adding conditions on top of a CC license?" though the details written under License Modification fall into the Ask a Lawyer region. Back to the conditions on The Conversation's site- the first three seem to be the scope of the CC BY-ND license: "You can't edit our material" (that's ND), "You have to credit authors and their institutions" (that's attribution), "You have to credit The Conversation and include a link back to either our home page or the article URL" (also mostly standard attribution). The question to be is the next one: You must use our page view counter when republishing online. The page view counter is a 1 pixel by 1 pixel invisible image that allows us and our authors to know when and where content is republished. https://theconversation.com/ca/republishing-guidelines Can they really make that a condition of reuse? To deploy a tracking pixel? That smells a bit weird to me, along with there being no clear indication of the CC ND license directly on articles (hence why PetaPixel does not know what license to declare??). Okay, this is truly quibbling, but thinking about these details is important, more than just a simple pat acceptance of the basic rules of licensing. That's a Weird Kind of CC0 at Rawpixel For a recently published post I sought an image of a well known brand of candy- it's not surprising of course that there are not many available- funny in that my google image search filtered for CC licensed results, a high ranking one was my own flickr photo of the spanish language version I spotted in Mexico (and likely that might be a copyright infringement, shhhh). The one I liked (and used) was pointed from Google to rawpixel. There's a great image! But zoom in close, and there's some fishy things happening. https://www.rawpixel.com/image/3799787/photo-image-vintage-retro-grass I am very familiar with the iconic roadside Americana photos of John Margolies, readily available public domain content from the Library of Congress. Rawpixel does declare the image source (not linked) and the CC0 license. All kosher. So far. But try to download the image- you are required to create an account. Even free, why do I have to sign up for an account to access public domain content (hint, the upsell answer is in the lower right corner). So rawpixel is repackaging public domain content but putting a requirement to download. I can right control click and download easily (I did) and that trick of hiding images in a .webp file format is no barrier (Preview on OSX now converts it easily to JPEG). But there's more. What is that Editorial Use Only link, right below the link to the CCO license? Content labeled "Editorial Use Only" are for use in news and events-related articles, non-commercial blogs and websites, broadcasts and other non-profit media. This content cannot be used for commercial purposes including advertising, promotions and merchandising. Editorial content should not be edited or altered substantially from the original image. rawpixel.com Now wait a minute- how can Rawpixel put extra conditions on CC0 content? I'd say this is enforceable as wet tissue. Compare this to the source of this same image at the Library of Congress. No logins required, the images are directly there in usable JPEG format, and there are no extra conditions. The question is- why does Google give preference in search results to fishy re-packagers of public domain content over the actual source? We all know the an$wer. Who Cares? You should. When we just grab stuff because some web site says its free, us, especially as educators, should be looking at the fine detail. The same is true for the inevitable world changing tsunamic technofad (look closely at the top results, outside of Wikipedia, is there a pattern?). Again it's something at a quick glance has a statistically valid appearance of resembling useful information. If you grab and go, because it's done for you easily, do you understand/question what you got? Can you zoom in and get an understanding of how it works, where it gets its info from? Can you even view source? Nice pretty cactus there. Featured Image: My photo! CCO, natch! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/15304951495 2014/365/263 More to a Cactus Than a Bunch of Needles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) The [WordPress] world has enough hate dislike for the Block Editor (ask Tony Hirst). I like it better when a work around works. In my OE Global work I've been working on a podcast series, and saw a need to generate audio playlists for different groups of episodes. I remember doing playlists in raw HTML, it looks like in the present case of WordPress (see a reference) you either use the Classic Editor (Add Media button options for creating audio playlists) or some hand inserting of audio media IDs. I had never done playlists in WordPress, and would prefer not reaching for Yet Another Plugin, so dug in and found the backdoor. Here's a demo of just some family audio stories I found in my Media Library [playlist ids="56930,69162,68265,69997"] When you use the Audio block, the only option you have is to insert single audio tracks, either by uploading to the Media Library or by referencing a remote URL. So the backdoor is to use the Classic Block to Get The Old Editor Again. The clicking the Add Media button presents the old interface where you can choose to create galleries (for images) or playlists for Audio. Hello Old Media Interface! From here the media selector filters out just your audio content. I fished around and found 4 audio clips of conversations with family members. I knew I had more, but I remember that many I had manually updated to an /audio sub directory of my wp-content one (I forget why). Before I insert, I use the left side option to Edit Audio Playlist- here I can re-arrange the order by dragging the icons around. Then when I click Insert audio playlist I see it in the classic editor. The titles and names come from the audio metadata,and I can see being sloppy as the second and third items have titles that just come from the mp3 file name. These can be edited in the Media Library by changing their title (other meta data fields can be edited below). This will work for the purposes I need, but it's good to know there is a native WordPress way to create audio playlists, even if you need to use the Classic Back Door. Maybe one day there will be a block for this, but until then-- this works. Featured Image: Edited door sign to feature WordPress icon and text "Audio Playlists" from The Back Door flickr photo by Cliff Johnson shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license so I share thus under the same license. It's really not that difficult. If you can rationalize being part of an enterprise that profits from the sale of hate ads... provides a space for external entities to promulgate recruitment programs aimed at undermining our culture... can take millions of dollars aimed at influencing a political election... can compel media producers to create click bait hidden headlines... encourages the petri dish of spreadable hoaxes because it adds to the bottom line of data gorging... has an insanely profitable bottom line as a surveillance business based on what you give it for free... If you can rationalize all of that, and more, and still console yourself that somehow your own actions, data are not part of the above... well insert cliché of availability of cheap Arizona ocean front property. I live in Arizona, and I know where the ocean is. If you rationalize being part of supporting and supplying a surveillance business because "it's the only way to stay in touch with people" and resort to poor grandma or Aunt Bertha who would be cut off, well you are part of tossing their identity and data under the bus as well. You are discounting their intellect to possible communicate any other way and you are slacking off on assisting them. Just because it's "easy". Or "convenient". Humans communicated long before this company existed and they will after it crumbles. The numbers are big, but not immune; from John Lancester's You Are The Product (my emphasis added): Perhaps the biggest potential threat to Facebook is that its users might go off it. Two billion monthly active users is a lot of people, and the ‘network effects’ – the scale of the connectivity – are, obviously, extraordinary. But there are other internet companies which connect people on the same scale – Snapchat has 166 million daily users, Twitter 328 million monthly users – and as we’ve seen in the disappearance of Myspace, the onetime leader in social media, when people change their minds about a service, they can go off it hard and fast. For that reason, were it to be generally understood that Facebook’s business model is based on surveillance, the company would be in danger. How can you ignore the obvious extend of its business model? That there is a space for alternatives? Be part of that threat. Leave. Now. On the back of this card: Download your data. Delete (do not deactivate) permanently Do not wait for some benevolent entity do this for you; make it happen directly https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/908488158215413761 Or just keep believing your rationalizations. Featured Image: Color modified and evil logo superimposed on Wikimedia Commons photo Exit Sign Above Australian Door released into the public domain. Before the rise of social media as the web's public conversation space, where I felt it happened well, was across the comment space of blogs. As distributed as it was, it might have been a "distribuverse"- and was woven together by the use of hyperlinks and maybe trackback pings. Given the abuse of comment spammers making it a PITA to manage, many bloggers turn them off, or use some fancy new hip static publisher that does no support comments (aka D'Arcy). Or it happens away from the publishing source, maybe tied back with something like ActivityPub. There the depth of the response is thin, quick, all the intensity of an emoji or some meme gif. So when I get a genuine, non spam blog comment from a real person, with maybe complete sentences that indicate they actually read what I wrote, not glancing at in during a scroll session, it's quite a gift. What's funny is that you can write long and hard on something you think is insightful or profound or will instigate reactions... goes out with an un-commented thud. And then some little piece you just write quickly on a whim or a weird hunch, draws a long train of comments. That's the kind of post that drew a comment today, Secrets Beneath a Chair where flipping over a piece of furniture uncovered some curious numbers that opened up a whole world of people who cherish Temple-Stuart furniture... even drawing in the grandson of the company that made the chair. Someone named Karina wrote Alan, that is so cool! I sit here reading and think of all the hard working people that made both of your chairs; probably made just days or weeks apart. Real furniture! Not flimsy imported stuff! https://cogdogblog.com/2017/03/secrets-beneath-a-chair/#comment-1262580 The weird thing about the comments are half express their love of the old American Brown Furniture and orthers try to pitch sales of theirs. In in other blogged words: https://cogdogblog.com/2020/10/furniture-flea-market/ In the long ago heralded ages of blogging as something that necessitated having a blog, I wrote about Comment As Blogging after reading (in his blog) a stunning example of what Matthew Kirschenbaum described as “Comment Blogging” -- where a colleague named François Lachance blogged in the comment space of other people's blogs: I can predict the range of theoretical positions such a “blog”(should we call it a comment blog?) might be said to occupy: this is blogging in the margins, distributed blogging at the interstices of the discourse network. François appears on no one’s blogroll, his entries are not tracked by blogdex or weblogs.com or similar sites. He is an utter non-entity in the standard ecological renderings of the blogosphere, yet he unquestionably has a presence “here.” https://web.archive.org/web/20060213022358/http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000215.html I took this on as a little mission for four years after reading this, I would take a week to turn off writing on my own blog and instead spend the week writing bits in the comments of other blogs. https://cogdogblog.com/2009/02/muzzled/ I'm thinking as a new old experiment of striking up again this old habit. At the time, I did some database query tricks to generate the comment activity on my own blog. I had not really updated in a while that I updated and track in a google sheet. Here's the comment trend on CogDogBlog, peak commenting was 2011. Luckily with my MySQL rust, I had copied the formulas ino the sheet, just the date ranges need be altered for different years, examples below for 2023 data Total Number of Posts in a Year SELECT count( * ) FROM `wp_posts` WHERE post_date >= '2023-01-01' AND post_date < '2024-01-01' AND post_type='post' Total Number of Comments in a Year SELECT count( * ) FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_date` >= '2023-01-01' AND `comment_date` < '2024-01-01' Total Number of Commenters in a Year SELECT count( * ) FROM `wp_posts` WHERE post_date >= '2023-01-01' AND post_date < '2024-01-01' AND post_type='post' Who's Your Commenters? Part of my old process was recognizing those who gave me comments. I resurrected the old query for 2023's activiy, which matches the low end of the curve of activity. This is the query: SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_date` >= '2023-01-01' AND `comment_date` < '2024-01-01' GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY acnt DESC; The few who still comment and also commented here include (note, this list was updated as it was faulty!): cogdog 71 Stephen Downes 10 D'Arcy Norman 9 Tom 4 Eric Likness 4 John 4 Kevin Hodgson 3 Brian 3 Algot Runeman 2 Jim Groom 2 Dave Lane 2 Tineke 2 Kate Bowles 2 midlaj 2 TERRY ELLIOTT 2 Paul R. Pival 1 Mark Ahlness 1 Steven Crawford 1 stuart 1 Robert C Gordon 1 Draw your own conclusions. What Posts Have Gotten The Most Comments? While I was remembering how to query direcly in PHPmyAdmin, I tried to fumble through a query to do this; I knew it needed to join the comments table and the eposts table. Of course everybody these days reach for ChatGPT. I got there just as or more quickly using the old fashioned google search which everyone says does not work anymore, but shrug using "wordpress sql to find posts with the most comments" I found most of it in the second google result, a link to Stack Overflow. Since i was written for PHP, I had to rename the tables, and I removed the condition for just the last week since I want all time. My query worked (with extra SELECT statements to label results, get te blog URL, and the year: SELECT comment_count as count, ID, post_title as title, guid as URL, DATE_FORMAT(post_date, "%Y") as year FROM `wp_posts`, `wp_comments` WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_comments.comment_post_ID GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0, 10; Saving the results I got a table of my top 10 most commented posts: countIDtitleURLyear966454Into the Great Wide Openhttp://cogdogblog.com/?p=64542011769103The 60,000 Times Question Remains Unansweredhttp://cogdogblog.com/?p=91032012629371Meet Rachel... Anne...Tiffany... from Card Holder ...http://cogdogblog.com/?p=937120126164254Secrets Beneath A Chairhttp://cogdogblog.com/?p=642542017484786Join Me- Ban Spam Supporters Ubiquity Hosting From...http://cogdogblog.com/?p=47862010424881The Seven Circles of Canon Rebate Hellhttp://cogdogblog.com/?p=488120104054073Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidencehttp://cogdogblog.com/?p=5407320163848472Facebook as Catfish Paradise: Its Community Standa...http://cogdogblog.com/?p=484722015375759More Than Something to Share(ski): Make a Markhttp://cogdogblog.com/?p=57592010359476The Question Should be: Why Are You *Not* Blogginghttp://cogdogblog.com/?p=94762012 More of this was more my own self satisfaction of seeing if I could still wrangle my way around the WordPress database. But more is a recommitment to being a gift giver of blog comments. I'm going to pick a week soon to revive my comment blogging challenge. Getting blog comments are gifts and worth gifting it forward. Featured Image: Yup, one of mine, near as I can figure by adjacent photos in flickr, this was the visi to Jerome Arizona I did the year Cori first visited me. Find Gifts Where The Are flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Tonight I got another distraught and ashamed email ("You must think I'm stupid") (No I do not). This message someone who just had the veil lifted from their eyes and found they were a victim of a catfishing scam from a fake person wearing my photos. I decided to copy Alec Corous and set up a page I can send to her and others that might have fallen for Gary or Timothy or Roddick or ..... It's at http://cogdogblog.com/i-am-alan/ This post is just to get it tagged, so this information lands with my other posts tagged catfishing. I have zero faith, belief that companies like Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, etc care nor are able to actually do anything to stop the creation of fake accounts. More accounts make them look more successful, and that matters to them more than people being defrauded, lied, and cheated. In a recent presentation for students on this bizarre subject I suggest that rather than hoping a system (social media or the legal one) will protect them, that they should be proactive in investigating people they meet online. The chat log I shared there of one woman shows what they can do when armed with critical media literacy skills and information. Furthermore, I suggest that trying to lock down your personal information online is not the answer nor possible without a complete severing of online presence; the fact that victims can easily locate the real photos of me and my contact information suggest that openness is a weapon, not a weakness, against this kind of scam. What can be done is to spread awareness and critical online literacy skills. Top / Featured image: Screenshot of my flickr album of photos of mine known to have been used in fake social media profiles.