I just realized that I never provided a "final" update for the little "unplugging at home" experiment/bet - where Janice dared me to go a month without being online at home.

Well, it actually went pretty well. Overall, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be - initially, it was quite hard (withdrawal, shakes, bugs beneath my skin - well, no bugs, but you get the point) and then it was just... gone.

I took a trip downtown for the afternoon of New Year's Eve, wanting to hang out with Evan and see what he thought of some of the cooler things downtown. We hit the Glenbow Museum, Calgary Tower, and Banker's Hall. Photos and more after the jump...

First up was lunch, of course, and then we headed to the Glenbow Museum to check it out. I was totally expecting it to be a running tour, trying to keep him interested. But, he totally surprised me - he loved the whole museum! He kept wanting to see more. We went through the Petra exhibit - the first North American stop on the tour of artifacts from the Jordanian lost city of Petra. That was pretty cool. I was snapping photos the whole way, not realizing that exhibit has a photo ban. Oops. They were pretty cool about it though, which was nice. There was also a craft station, where we got to make all kinds of things, like a mosaic (inspired by the stone/tile mosaics of Petra), and a copper wire figure (also inspired by the exhibit). What a great way to pull kids into the exhibit.

Albert totally nails it in his post on the Learning Objects "debate". Basically - get over it. Move along. Do (and use) whatever is appropriate to what you're trying to do. One size does not fit all. Caveat emptor, etc...

I especially like his tips for subscribers to "information transfer" vs. "social constructivitistic" paradigms of learning objects (and, I would suggest, of learning in general).

But wait! There's more! Albert offers a website/wiki on "virtual apparatus", which appears to be a set of guidelines for creating content in a consistent manner (did I interpret that right?).

A couple of weeks and 36 Flickr Faves later...

I made some time to sit down and play with Rails this evening, and thought I'd work on a simple Bookmark Manager (ala del.icio.us) - a piece of software that I am sorta familiar with, since I use del.icio.us a fair bit, and have some ideas that I think would improve the service. So, I'll try mocking them up in Rails to give me something to chew on while I learn...

Steve proclaimed 2005 would be known as "The Year of HD" at MacWorld SF 2005. We haven't seen a lot of consumer-level HD stuff this year - there's the iMovie HD edition, but that's about it. The video on the iTMS isn't exactly HD (320x240 MPEG4 video files). The only real application of HD is on the Apple Trailers and QuickTime HD Gallery. They're great and all, but don't exactly make this The Year of HD.

Here's hoping the Yahoo! team throws more (or better) hardware at the del.icio.us server. This sign was spotted at the current colocation facility:

I hadn't noticed that del.icio.us was down, but a comment from Rob tipped me off.

Michael just updated K2 to be WordPress 2.0-compliant. Looks like quite a few tweaks to the theme as well.

There were two gotchas that I found.

1. theloop.php has a stray character at the beginning of line 10. Just delete that character and all is well. (was solved in the comments on Michael's announcement post)
2. Be sure to remove the old k2-options.php file so there isn't method collision as the php files are dynamically loaded.

Looks like the banner image area has been resized a bit, so my banner images no longer fit perfectly. I'll wait for the next rev. to make sure the new size is stable, then whip up new versions of the 36 banner images to better fit the new area.

Cocoalicious is a kick-ass client application for MacOSX that connects to your del.icio.us account, making it easy/fast to search, list, add, index, etc. bookmarks in del.icio.us.

It provides some cool features, like adding star ratings to bookmarks, and has a built-in webkit page displayer. Very handy. It's using the back-end API for del.icio.us, and feels much snappier than the bookmarklet version (or even the Firefox extension).

And it has the ability to make fulltext indexes (indices?) of all of the bookmarked pages, to make searching even more powerful. I've set it to go through and index each of my 800+ bookmarks, and it's been chewing on that for a few minutes now. I'll try some searches based on that index when it's done.

Showing the star ratings, searching, live preview, and tag list.

When I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.0 RC3 last week, there was a bug or issue that corrupted a cookie used by the fancy schmancy new authoring screens. Safari barfed all over that corrupt cookie, meaning I couldn't use it to manage my blog. Firefox just ignored it (and the functionality that required that cookie apparently degraded transparently - the widgets were no longer collapsable or movable).

So, I thought it would be a good chance to switch to Firefox 1.5 for a while and kick the tires a bit as my primary (only) browser.