I'd guess that the applications, and their arrangement on the menu screens, tells a fair bit about a person. I've been slowly gathering a frighteningly long list of apps - games, utilities...

My current favorite add-on apps? Twinkle. Wurdle. X-Plane. Cube Runner. Asphalt. Countdown. Line Rider. Seismometer. And the shortcut to Google Reader.

Oh, man does this take me back! I spent hour after hour playing the original handheld LED football game - working on my offensive fake-out and hammering the arrow keys into dust.

Now, I can play the game on my iPod Touch. Sure hope I don't put my finger through the touch screen...

The Boyâ„¢ and I went to the Kickoff '08 game, and had a total blast. Lots of fun, and the Dinos won (but we missed the action of the fourth quarter - had to leave a little early with a worn out 5 year old :-) )

(slideshow not visible in RSS feed readers)

I've been meaning to write a mini review of my 2008 Kona Dew FS, and figured after riding it for a year I'd have some thoughts on how the bike works as a daily commuter. I picked the bike up exactly 1 year ago today, and have ridden it to and from work in pretty much all kinds of weather (+30ËšC heat waves, monsoon thunder/hailstorms, blizzards, and -30ËšC cold snaps). In that year, I've put 4,800km on the bike.

I'd LOVE to have written a post on how awesome Spore is, what a great game/simulation it is, and how I've been playing it nonstop since it was released.

But I can't.

I prepurchased Spore for Mac on September 5 - 2 days before the release - and have yet to receive a download link for Spore for Mac from EA. They sent me links to the PC AutoDownloader, and PC installer. But no Mac version. So far, I've been ripped off by EA.

I mentioned this morning on Twitter that it took me maybe 30 seconds to upgrade my blog to the latest WordPress release. I thought it might be handy to show how I do it. I'm not sure if this follows best practices, and it might be a good idea to back stuff up before upgrading, but this process has served me well for the last several versions, and it's just so quick and painless that upgrading is trivial.

It appears as though 3 of the 4 major national political parties have balked at the suggestion that Elizabeth May represent the Green Party at the televised leader's debates.

The Green Party is a valid national party, now with a seat in Parliament (although the member was previously an Independent who switched to Green, not an elected Green MP).

According to The Canadian Press,

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday that letting May into the debate would be in essence allowing a second Liberal candidate to participate.

I'm working with a faculty member who is using a WordPress with his students this semester as a place for them to publish and reflect as a group. To make things easier for everyone involved, it's a good idea to batch create user accounts for the students so they don't have to go through that process (it's easy, but every step avoided means people are more comfortable and less aggravated with a service).

I just ran John McCain's speech from the final day of the RNC 2008 convention through Wordle to generate a word cloud to see major themes.

I've been slowly tinkering on the Learning Communities concept, playing with the idea and starting small by facilitating a "blogging and student publishing" group. Today, I opened it up pretty wide, sending an email to over 2200 faculty members to invite them to identify topics that would interest them for potential learning community gatherings.

I expected to have to explain what I was intending, to describe what I mean by "learning community" and to reinforce that the groups are completely about faculty (and grad student, and staff) contributions, rather than The Official Presentation From the TLC. This is a faculty thing, inquiry in action. I'm just there to facilitate and provide caffeine and carbs (and whiteboard and any other support is needed to keep the discussions moving).

Donncha pushed the WPMU 2.6.1 update live today, and it's a required upgrade for security reasons. I just wanted to post that I've upgraded ucalgaryblogs.ca to WPMU 2.6.1 and everything appears fine. It took all of 2 minutes to do, too.

Here's my process:

1. back stuff up.
2. login to the server via ssh
3. download WPMU 2.6.1 into ~/temp, and unzip it.

   cd ~/temp
   wget http://mu.wordpress.org/latest.zip
   unzip latest.zip

4. delete the wp-content directory in the freshly downloaded copy of WPMU 2.6.1 - I do this so I don't accidentally overwrite any customized themes, or nuke anything in mu-plugins or plugins...

   rm -R wordpress-mu-2.6.1/wp-content

5. copy the fresh copy of WPMU over top of the existing one in the web directory

   cp -R wordpress-mu-2.6.1/* ~/webdata/ucalgaryblogs.ca/

6. run the WPMU upgrade site script to run any necessary updates (I don't think there were any database updates, but it's probably a good idea to run it anyway). This will automatically run the script on each blog installed on that copy of WPMU.
7. done. test some blogs to make sure stuff is working fine.

WordPress has supported Gravatars for awhile, which is great, but if you're rolling out a site for a bunch of students to hammer on, it's not ideal to have to send them to a third party service to set up photos. It's awkward, and confusing, for new users to have to go somewhere else to add a photo to their profile. And profile photos can be very useful, especially at the beginning of a semester when everyone is just getting to know everyone else in a class, to put a face to a name.