WARNING: Rambling, stream-of-consciousness, thinking-out-loud (hopefully not navel-gazing) ahead! Just trying to start framing some thoughts so I can make sense and move on.

It's one of the weird paradoxes of the last few years for me - I'm much more involved with external (off campus) groups and online communities than I am with local ones. I'm more well-known off-campus than on. I'm more linked to individuals spread around the globe than those at my own institution.

OK, maybe not really. But at least I know I'm not alone in thinking about rethinking my approach to this whole blogging/always-on thing. First Stephen dropped his H-Bomb (hiatus, not hydrogen, but the effect on the edublogosphere would have been the same either way), then I see that others are thinking about this (with more clarity than I can muster).

Lanny's posted some great thoughts on the topic:

Part of the problem is simply that those who burn the candle brightest are likely not leading full rounded lives but instead getting so absorbed in the moment and the possibilities that may exist that they are inadvertently putting themselves on an emotional roller coaster with little reserve left over for dealing with the tough but pragmatic issues that emerge from "day job" part of their lives. Periodically, I'm in that boat.

I just did a test upgrade of a backup of weblogs.ucalgary.ca to the latest Drupal 4.7 beta 5 - and it appears to be working just fine. I'll have to be doing some serious poking around to make sure everything is still hooked up and working properly. But' it's looking good - can't wait to move to 4.7...

Stephen Downes is taking a hiatus from publishing his awesome OLDaily resource. Stephen - I have no idea how you've managed to keep up the volume and quality of publishing you have done so far! You definitely deserve a break. I'll miss OLDaily while it's gone.

I'm feeling a bit like Rob - our Gandalf has just disappeared into the depths of Moria, and we're now left to stumble through on our own. Hopefully his hiatus is a bit more relaxing, but I'm looking forward to meeting Stephen The White...

Well, this just came over the wires, so I guess it's official. Looks like The University of Calgary is about to do podcasting in a big way.

The University of Calgary will be the first university in the country to introduce podcasting on a large scale when it launches four courses in the summer and fall featuring portable MP3 technology as a teaching tool.

and

The U of C will introduce podcasting in four courses that involve about 700 students: iCOMS 201, Introduction to Communications Studies, summer 06; iENGL 231, Introduction to Fiction, winter 07; iCHEM 351, Organic Chemistry I, Fall 06; and iSOCI 201, Introduction to Sociology, Fall 06.

wiki.ucalgary.ca got hammered by a vindictive wiki spammer last night. But, here's the thing - the spam prevention blacklist worked perfectly. The spammer wasn't able to add any of their own links to the wiki. So, they decided to punish me by vandalizing 50 of the most popular pages on the wiki with an apparently random (and invalid) spam URL.

The software they used to do this evil deed automatically created a new account for each edit, and the whole thing took them less than 10 minutes to do. It took me 45 minutes to undo, even with rollbacks etc... because of their insidious creation of 50 separate accounts for 50 separate edits. I would have just reverted back to a nightly database backup to blow them all away in one fell swoop, but we had actual valid users making actual valid edits, and I won't blow any of that away. Better to manually remove the detritus than to lose a single valid edit.

Just saw a tip about creating "feed books" in Elgg - subscribing to a bunch of RSS feeds that will be used to populate a blog. It allows filtering by keywords, so you don't have to have your offsite cat blog post aggregated along with your Chem 350 research notes.

Combined with the cool community stuff in Elgg, I'm wondering how close this might get to EduGlu?

ps. I'm reading Cryptonomicon too much lately. The title of this post almost looks Outer Qwghlmian. Code talkers beware...

I got the LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500GB backup drive back today. LaCie is suggesting it was just a firmware issue, so they thoughtfully updated the drive, nuked the data that was on it, and returned it. Over a month after it died. Going a month without any kind of backups is a little scary. Here's hoping it was just a firmware issue - the drive checks out OK now, and already has over 100GB of backed up data on it (and growing - likely will be close to 200GB by the end of the day) - and that's only 2 servers backed up...

I just took a few minutes to install a fresh copy of Drupal 4.6.5 along with the Aggregator2 module, which provides Glu functionality to Drupal. You can provide a bunch of feeds, and it sucks them in as if they are native content to that instance of Drupal. It tries to assign taxonomy/categories based on the data in the RSS feed, and provides some interfaces to view the feeds and items. I set up a prototype on my desktop box (so it might not be running all the time, and may disappear if my new box ever shows up), but it's there to play with. I've pre-seeded it with my blog, flickr, and del.icio.us feeds, and took the liberty of adding the same for another couple of folks (Brian and Alan) to see how it handles multiple users adding data.

More faves. I couldn't use the cool new Ruby-powered favinator because it somehow conflicts with the CSS on my blog, and I haven't had a chance to debug wtf is acting up there. Regardless, here they are. Links to individual photos on the Flickr page for this snapshot...

I'm involved with an ePortfolio project with our Faculty of Education - aimed at getting student teachers to build a series of high quality, interactive, personalized portfolios outlining their development as professionals. It's more about the journey (self reflection, writing, documenting) than the destination (the final website) so we were looking for tools that wouldn't require technical know-how in order for the students to produce interesting products. When the project got off the ground (in the fall of 2005), there wasn't really any off-the-shelf product that fit the bill, so we started to implement an instance of Pachyderm so the students could start authoring in it.