I switched my antispam tool from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet last week - wanting to play with Matt's new toy, and see how a distributed spam blocker would work out.

Generally, it was pretty good. But, I had to moderate several comments. I've almost never had to do that under SK2 - it just works, totally, and invisibly.

But, I just checked my WordPress dashboard, and saw an interesting item: Owen Winkler: Spam Karma 2 Akismet Plugin BETA. Hmmm... Akismet as a plugin for SK2? Cool!

I've become a huge fan of BlogBridge - it has been the most efficient and powerful rss aggregator I've ever used. But, it kinda sucked because it didn't behave like a native app. I've kind of got a fetish for native apps on MacOSX - apps that behave as expected, look as expected, and do stuff the way they should.

Well, BlogBridge 2.7 is now available as an "actual" application! It runs great and looks the way it should.

I just did a very dangerous thing. I downloaded the latest version of Second Life - one of those immersive massively multiplayer doowackies that I never really got into. I just threw an hour away twiddling bits to make my Second Life character kinda sorta look like me, then starting to wander around Tutorial Island. The environment is really quite cool, and I had a lot of "hey, this would be cool for a blended learning thing..." moments.

Brian just linked to a great description of how blogging can affect reading and writing in the classroom. The blog he linked to is one I hadn't come across in my travels, so I'm dutifully subscribing. Some good thinking about this stuff in Konrad's blog.

What hit me in this post was the simple and clear demonstration of the power of an online community of practice to support the "real" physical face-to-face community. In Konrad's case, it changed his perception of "reading" his student's work - it became a participatory experience - more of a conversation or dialog than a fire-and-forget writing exercise. That, through blogging (or more appropriately, through participation in a dynamic community of practice), his evaluation of students shifted to become somewhat more holistic. Less brute-force "marking" of writing, to more of a comprehensive assessment of competence.

I just grabbed the Locomotive distro of Ruby on Rails for MacOSX - what a nice package! Includes the latest build of Rails, a fresh copy of Ruby, all of the database connectors, RMagick and ImageMagick, some AJAX libraries, and a bunch of other stuff to play with. Best part is - it's all self-contained in the Locomotive application, so it won't affect any of the other bits installed on my system.

I'm really digging OmniWeb. It's got lots of cool stuff that work as I would expect them to, not as if they were ported from some other source. It behaves as a great MacOSX app should.

Over the weekend, I was writing up a blog post, and when I got to about 75% done, I opened a new tab to get a link. OmniWeb crashed. Crap! OmniCrashCatcher pops up, and I filed what would perhaps be described as a more-colourful-than-necessary bug report. The next morning, however, I fired up OmniWeb again, and all of the tabs that I had opened were restored for me - and, get this - the contents of the WordPress blog post entry form were also resurrected for me, right at the point OmniWeb had crashed! I didn't lose a thing! That's just plain awesome. It never occurred to me to even check to see if the form values would be resurrected after a crash, so I assumed the post was gone. Of course, it wasn't Shakespeare or anything, but still - that's just cool.

One of the things that Blogbridge has allowed me to do is rather dramatically increase the number of feeds I actively track. That includes re-subscribing to Scoble's new Wordpress.com blog.

Yesterday, something came through Scoble's feed that sent a chill through me. He was talking about how he finally understands "Attention" as described by Steve Gillmor. He proceeds to outline what can only be described as Big Brother, watching everything you do online, for the sole purpose of placing better advertising to beg you to click on links.

I'd emailed my alderman this summer to ask for a copy of the disaster response plan for Calgary, in light of recent events. I figured it would be a Good Idea™ to give the plan a once-over before a disaster struck, since by then we'd be too busy feasting on the goo in each other's skulls to read the instructions about how to evacuate a city of 1 million people.

Oh, man! I want to do this. Somehow, I think I'd get a citation or something. Sony dropped a bajillion superballs down the hilly streets of San Francisco to film an ad for their new Bravia line. Not in the market for a new TV, but the ad sure looks hella fun.

I'm sure glad I wasn't on the cleanup crew for this shoot. First, The City has the roving bands of parrots on Telegraph Hill, now it will have mysterious roving bands of bouncing superballs for years to come...

I just installed Akismet - the "official" antispam solution for WordPress. Ok. It's not really official, but it's written by PhotoMatt - the lead of WordPress - which makes it official enough.

I'm a bit nervous about deactivating Spam Karma 2 - which has performed absolutely flawlessly (and silently), but am curious about the distributed spamblocking approach used by Akismet, as opposed to a personal blacklist used by SK2.

And, if Akismet fails miserably, it's just a matter of clicking two links in the Plugin Manager to go back to SK2. One caveat to Akismet: you need a Wordpress.com API key to activate it. Download a copy of Flock to get one if you don't have one already.

I've been playing with different browsers for the last couple of weeks (Safari, Flock, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, iCab), and kept coming back to Safari because it just plain "feels" right. The other apps feel ported, in some parts poorly. Then, Les Orchard reminded me of OmniWeb. I've always loved OmniWeb, but the rendering engine was lacking in older versions, and the recent version switched to a custom WebKit framework which works quite well.

My mom is turning 65 on Sunday, and we're throwing a big bash at the Tuscany Club - about 75 of her closest friends will be there, and we're going way over the top with a chocolate-themed party.

I was initially going to attempt to document the event myself, and then it hit me - I use Flickr and the like for collaborative documenting of events/conferences. This isn't any different, except that many of the people attending may have never heard of Flickr, etc...