It’s been a while since I posted about those smelly blog spam cock roaches… mainly because the MTBlacklist Plugin has been quietly running in the background. However, in the last two days the number and frequency of blogspam has picked up. You can identify them quite easily when the comments are emailed to you– especially […]
My work commute is not much more than 10 miles, but invariably during that morning stretch I witness at least once, someone tossing their cigarette butts out the car window. Maybe it is a lot of pent up frustration since the number of public places available for their habits is shrinking, and maybe so far […]
Just like my bookmarks, for a while I have noticed (and done little) about the discrepencies of the RSS feeds I have on my work and home computers. So in the contnued spirit of the work of Brian “Housecleaning” Lamb, I devoted some time to cleaning up the doghouse. Mainly this was exporting my feeds […]
Some interesting attempts at clustering or building maps of web search results (tip of the blog hat to EduResources). I cannot say I have found either of these more intuitive, but they are interesting.
Mooter is beta, but not bad. It sports a Google-like search engine (though there is no information or explanation what “mooter” is or does). A search result displays your query in the center of a map, with clusters of related terms around it, and clicking on the cluster essentially yields a Google-like list of results, though now a cluster is more refined than your original search.
For example I ran a query on “learning object” (It looks like you can copy/paste the URLs of search results, but this seems to fail due to a session variable) and you get this “map”
Niiiiiiiice. I have been mildly using Furl because I tend to bookmark things on my home computer I end up needing at work, and on my work computer I end up needing at home. Call it Murphy’s law of bookmarks. Furl does this with little fuss, just a bookmarklet link. I thought I had noticed […]
Last Friday’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting was the first announcement and access provided to a new experimental electronic portfolio service we are hosting. This is a new installation of the software developed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College— we have set up this new server so that faculty form our other colleges could explore the potential […]
This morning was the release of my keynote on “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” at the New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference. This turned out to be a 52 minute Breeze presentation, weighing in at a 70.5 Mb in authored PowerPoint, but a streaming 15 Mb via Breeze delivered Flash.
At 9:30 Am PST was the scheduled audio teleconference, which is a little of an odd format because the call in participants hear me via the audio telephone bridge, but post questions via the conference chat, and host Larry Johnson relayed them to me. Actually it kind of works well, and was a fast 30 minutes. The audio has been posted to the conference site.
It was good to see some new names and institutions listed in the chat area. I am guessing, but maybe there was disappointment that my vague reference to “franchising” was not the unveiling of a “Download MLX Source Code Here” link. I am hoping there is some more conversation about this.
At least on the fun side, there was an inquiry as to the whereabouts of the MLX tour guide “Biff Cantrell”….
Of course you can pick up a $20 bag at OfficeMax for your laptop, and end up with the same one as every other cheapskate on the plane playing solitaire on with their ThinkPad, with zippers that bust, too many stupid pockets, and just no protection for your investment of several hundred/thousand bucks.
On the flip side, I have just purchased my second beautiful RacerX from Waterfield Designs, the first was for my personal iBook and the new one for my G4 laptop at work. These bags are elegantly and smartly designed, as they have been crafted for use by San Francisco bike messengers (the RacerX has a grip that feels like a rugged Mountain Bike grip). The computer compartment is way padded to keep your laptop secure from major bumps and bangs.
Yeah a WaterField bag will set you back more, but why lug around a $1500 machine in a bag with the durability of a trash bag? And they look so cool.
But more than that, when you order from Waterfield, you get a personal email thanks from “Gary” the owner, and it is not a form e-mail, because he has replied directly to my replies twice. Even the invoice arrives signed with a thanks.
With a solid product first, and personal attention to boot, they have me easily hooked as a returning customer. I would think they teach that kind of stuff in business school, but since Waterfield’s attention and service seem to be the minority, I would say most businesses skipped that day of class.
Set up a feedback form on your web site, and you get cruft like: I am a marketer and am interested in buying the e-mail addresses of all your community colleges. Sure! Your odds are as good as a July blizzard in Phoenix. At least this spam merchant was direct.
Trying to teach and old RSS feed some new tricks? At first RollUp seemed like a nifty idea- build a customized collection of RSS feeds into one site, theoretically coalescing a pile of feeds into one sensible pile. And that becomes a web page you can customize some layout- colors, fonts. And then that single […]
