From Quinnipiac University comes this gem: Blogging Across the Curriculum. Pattie Belle Hastings from the Interactive Design Department shares this resource that rose from her 2002 experiments on using student weblogs as alternatives to paper design jounrals. Her site provides a nice overview of blogging, how to blog, the role of blogs in teaching, lots […]
A very well written introduction to RSS: RSS – A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers (I cannot locate quickly what the “EEVL” acronym stands for but it is a UK resource for engineers). I like the plain language yet the forways into some of the details of producing RSS. <tiphat>Tip of the blog hat […]
I am all for expanding the use of RSS, and new things are popping up every day. However, stuffing an entire newsletter inside an RSS feed as listed at Lockergnome (referring to Barbara Feldman’s “Ezine-Tips” on Using RSS to Deliver Newsletters seems to me a bad trend of stuffing a lot of things into RSS […]
We just added a new feature to the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX)– every person that creates an account in the MLX receives their own unique URL that produces a publicly viewable web page that lists all packages entered by that person. For example, my packages are one link away: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/mine.php?id=160 If you notice, the results […]
For those not lucky enough to attend the MERLOT 2003 conference (any conf in Vancouver is worthy), I just posted the content from our MLX poster session: Building the Maricopa Learning eXchange (Using a Bit of Competition and Bribery). How do you cultivate the use and contribution to a learning object repository? We will share […]
Anti-Virus detection systems are removing viral email attachments, but they waste my time and clog the net with un-needed traffic by bouncing messages back to people who did not actually send them. So far, about every 8 hours, I have to delete 60-100 Anti-Virus detection messages from my inBox. I waste more time writing filters […]
It’s been bad enough delting the email crud generated by the latest virus, but today I got my first porn content inserted into a comment on this weblog, with links to just about everything possible you could imagine being enlarged, shrunk, photographed, made money on, etc. So if you exercise IP banning on your blogs […]
Wow, a variation on the BlogChatter, this nifty site shows, in near real-time, the World as a Blog… Real time and updating display of weblog postings, around the world… Weblogs.com + geocoding + RSS But what is it? You see a world map, and as weblogs entries are posted around the world, they appear on […]
Wow. If you are just reading some of the buzz (it’s about time!) about RSS, check out RSSlets – Functional RSS Feeds a series of prototypes for getting at RSS content that may be on the fringe of your idea scope. These are a whole raft of new services that are creative ways to syndicate […]
Lines at the gas stations, tempers flaring… Wow- it is almost a flashback to the 1973 oil embargo but this is 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona where a pipeline shutdown fuels gas shortage.
The events in ’73 are a bit fuzzy, but I recall my Dad waiting in long lines for hours to get gasoline that had spiked from 35 cents a gallon to (oh my gosh) more than $1.00 a gallon.
But Phoenix citizens cannot balme the oil cartel here, although theories abound on other conspiracy theories. IN a nutshell- all of the gasoline that is consumed (and much is) in Phoenix, arrives by fuel lines from the west (LA and imports) and the east (the big refineries in Texas). The problem is a rupture midway between Phoenix and Tucson in the 50 year old pipe for the Texas supply, normally 35% of what we consume.
Although the supply from the west has been beefed up considerably, the problem is not getting the fuel into town– it is getting from the pump stations into trucks and distributed to gas stations. There are also fishy rumors about the company that runs the pipeline- that they could have run it at 80% capacity after the break was addressed but decided to shut it down completely and other ideas about the delay of federal inspectors on the repair.
Combine a shortage of trucks, panic among citizens, and you see what I did today- most gas stations with pumps closed (no gas) and the few that did have lines 30-50 cars long, a reported 2-3 hour wait for gas priced anwyhere from $2 per gallon to $5 (price fluctuactions are always suspect, and by some coincidence, prices are always higher in Scottsdale, where the per capita income is higher- I live in the part of Scottsdale that helps keep that average low but pay for gas that scales to the monster SUV culture here).
Looks like a good class lesson in economics and public psychology/mob behavior (there is more….)
