I'm working on my presentation for Museums and the Web, which runs this week in Vancouver (I'll be in YVR for just over 24 hours, but am so overbooked I will count myself lucky if I get outside except for the cab ride to/from the airport).

I'm using Keynote 2 to author my part of the Pachyderm presentation - I get to present on the technical architecture of Pachyderm, to a non-technical audience. So, instead of bullet-point-filled screens full of acronym soup, I'm trying to use the build transitions to help construct a framework for me to speak to. Nice layers-of-software diagrams, with arrows and boxes and stuff, rather than just acronyms all over the place.

I just got a couple of popup/popunders for DeVry Institute of Technology - despite the fact that I have a popup blocker installed and activated.

DeVry doesn't provide contact information on their website (perhaps that's a sign?), and this is really pissing me off. Do you people realize just what a shitty thing popunders are? They are almost as bad as Casino/Viagra/Texas-Holdem spam! You are diluting any reputation your institution may have had, and further negating the value your alumni may realize due to the crap you fling across the 'net in a desparate attempt to gather new students.

Josh and King are likely sick of hearing me gush about Battlestar Galactica. It's likely the best scifi series. Evar. Deep stories, without glossing over stuff or throwing in expendable Red Shirts or resorting to transporters or holo-decks. I won't give any spoilers - just don't let your revulsion over the resurrection of the '70s camp original series get in the way. At least watch the miniseries...

The first season actually had plot twists and conflicts that I didn't see coming, and didn't feel formulaic or rushed (unlike nearly every other show ever made). It's way more than the hottie f*ckbots (played by a small-town Alberta girl no less). There's riffs of spirituality, humanity, politics, ethics, honour, deception, etc... The last episode of the first season completely blew me away. I mean, I was literally stunned. That's never happened with any other TV show before.

My childhood haunt: Canyon Meadows and Fish Creek Park

I just tried my hand at rolling a Memory Map using maps.google.com and Flickr. Seems like a pretty powerful way to document a childhood (or a vacation, or whatnot). It would be even cooler if you could link photos in Flickr to notes or locations on another image...

Watching the footage of the Pope's funeral, I was struck first with how wide a cross section of the planet attended. Not just Catholics, but Jews, Arabs, Hindi, etc. all coming to pay respects for sprituality in general, and a great man in particular. This was followed closely (and sadly) with this thought:

Perfect target for bioterrorism. A vial released in the middle of the 2 million-strong crowd, if it took a week or two to kick in, would be spread undetected into almost every community on the planet within a week.

I saw a post from yesterday, by Michael Heilemann (the guy that created the Kubrick theme for Wordpress). He was advocating against "advanced" spam blockers (like link counters and bayesian voodoo), and was suggesting just using a simple funky-looking-comments-go-to-moderation strategy, as an easy way to let people post comments without interference by well-meaning software.

So, I gave it a shot today. After months of absolutely zero spam on this blog, I turned off my spam blockers, and tried Michael's technique.

OK. So, assume that AdScam is going to nuke the Liberal minority government, and they don't have a chance for re-election when it's called. They'll be written off (correctly or otherwise, it's irrelevant now) as a corrupt, mob-riddled bunch of money launderers.

What are the options? NDP? Not likely (at least in a majority government). It would seem as though Liberals would go to them in droves, but the NDP is too expensive to get elected as a ruling party.

I just found out (almost by accident) that the U of C has decided to block ping. I knew ping wasn't working - hasn't been for what feels like forever. I just heard today that it was a deliberate move to block the port used by ping - to prevent hacking of unsecured Windows boxes using those ports.

So, let me get this straight. You've got a bunch of renegade unpatched Windows boxes on campus. Possibly 0wned. And, instead of, you know, fixing the problem by patching and securing the boxes, you block frigging ping. Great. Because, of course, ping has no useful purpose aside from hacking lazily managed Windows boxes. It's not handy at all for doing things like diagnosing network problems, or monitoring servers, or whatnot.

UPDATE: this is just a blog post. if you want to see your house, go to Google Maps, or Bing Maps, or any of a bunch of other places. This site can't show you your house. Stop putting your home addresses into the search field on my blog in the hopes of seeing a satellite photo of your house. Seriously. People. Stop.

When I first started playing with maps.google.com, I thought it was freaking amazing. Then, I wondered out loud if the Keyhole team was talking to the Maps team.

There are a lot of things converging together at the moment, and I don't think it would take a huge effort to give the pieces a little nudge to form the loosely-joined personal and professional publishing platform we've been bouncing ideas around about for the last couple of years.

These are some of the things I'm watching (or hoping to participate in) in the coming year. This is a rough list, with no relevance to order. I'll be revising it at will. I'm also pretty sure I'm missing something important.

Excellent news! Carl Berger, the Gandalf of EDUCAUSE and Merlot, has (finally) started blogging! Thanks for doing that, Carl, and I look forward to reading your posts!

Leadership Institute Blog » Blog Archive » Hello from Carl Berger Judging from the photo in that post, I'm wondering/hoping he'll be making the trek to NMC2005 in Honolulu this year.

It's even cooler that Carl is blogging as part of the Apple Digital Campus initiative. I listened to the EDUCAUSE NLII podcasts, and it sounds like they're going to be doing some very cool stuff in the next year.

It looks like SourceForge is is planning to roll out subversion hosting as part of its service. They don't give a timeline, but I hope it's Real Soon Now.

That would be nice, because I've got to put a whole bunch of code there in the near future, and it's all under SVN control now. Being able to do an svn export would help quite a bit, since I don't want to lose all commit messages...