I've heard from my brother, who is building a house in Phuket. He's fine, and his house is still there. Can't say the same for the waterfront, or the tourists that were going for a pleasant morning swim.
An old friend of mine is from Sri Lanka, and his wife is from India. I wasn't sure which parts of the countries their families are in, but was hoping for the best. I heard from him last night, and all of their family members are OK, in unaffected regions.
I just switched back from NotationalVelocity to DevonThink Personal Edition - the big reason? DTPE now has automatic (as well as explicit) linking between entries, in wiki style. And a whole bunch of new features, too. Sweet.
Now, if only it would get the auto-find-on-keystroke interface (like Launchbar or Quicksilver, but just for the content in the app) done like NotationalVelocity has... That would be the perfect personal content management system...
This is a brief article (Library Journal - Googlizers vs. Resistors) with discusson of ethnoclassification (bags-of-keywords) vs. controlled vocabularies to describe resources.
Stephen Downes pointed out the article, with the insightful comment:
I'm seriously thinking of biting the bullet and finishing my MSc, with a thesis on ethnoclassification vs. controlled vocabularies...
I've tried a bunch of iPodder aggregator programs. None have turned my crank. They've been quirky, unreliable, misbehaving beasts. All I want is a simple, faceless app that reliably sucks down the enclosures from a set of feeds.
Bashpodder is perfect! It's a BASH script, with a grand total of 44 lines of code (many of them are comments). You feed it a list of RSS feeds, and it sucks down the enclosures. It works fine via Crontab, so it can run invisibly in the background.
I just deployed a new Wordpress weblog to manage the APOLLO Project Website. It's a Wordpress 1.3 Alpha site, which gives me a place to play around with the latest builds of WP, and it also gives us a nice and easy way to officially publish information about APOLLO and related activities.
We were talking today about how to be more strategic with our various inter-related projects (and specifically with the communication of status and plans), and the idea of some form of blended learning strategic advisory council was raised. The theory would be to have representatives from various organizations (University of Calgary, University of Alberta, Alberta Learning, BCCampus, and any other relevant organizations) working together to share strategic planning for projects related to blended learning.
He didn't freak out at all this year (like he did last year). Santa looks more nervous than Evan does... :-)
We just put up the tree, and will be counting the days before it becomes an indoor jungle gym for the boy...
The Speakers and Schedule for Northern Voice were just announced. That looks like a pretty full docket - and one heck of a fine bunch of speakers. The problem is going to be choosing which sessions to attend ;-)
My day will look like this:
ps. please forgive them for their evil "browser detection" script, for they know not what they do...
I received notification today that our Big Session of Pachyderm Fun is a go for Museums and the Web 2005 (Vancouver, April 13-16, 2005). Josh, Michelle, Tom and myself will be presenting a session called Architecting the Elephant: Software Architecture and User Interface Design for Pachyderm 2.0.
This will be the first public showing of the new Pachyderm 2.0 authoring tool, which is now pretty tightly integrated with the APOLLO frameworks.
The session is on Thursday, April 14, 2004, from 3:30-5:00pm. We share the slot with some other Pachyderm-related presentations as part of the "Introducing Pachyderm" session, so it should be interesting to anyone who has been following Pachyderm, APOLLO, or learning object authoring in general.
Another comment spammer just attempted to crap on my blog. WordPress and the plugins I use stopped him/her cold, and their subnet is now banned (I know that's heavy handed, but screw 'em).
I checked the stats from Site Meter, and it looks like this clown found my blog by searching Google for the term "wiki" - and slogged through 29 pages of results to get to me. 29 pages of results. Do these people really value their time so poorly? I know they don't value mine, but I simply can't imagine slogging through 29 pages of search results in the hopes of finding a blog or wiki to crap on. Knowing full well that the crap will be removed within minutes, if it's even allowed through in the first place.
This sounds interesting... A new dead-trees and online Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects. They've put out the call for papers... Not sure if this will fare better than Pitch did/does, but maybe a dead-trees journal carries more cred with the higher ed. folks?
I'd have tossed this to del.icio.us instead of blogging it, but the Del is acting up today...
Rosemary Sanchez is the resident Flash Girl in The Learning Commons. She's working on some really cool stuff, creating learning objects in Flash, and working on some stuff for the Pachyderm project.
She recently started blogging! I've already subscribed, and am looking forward to her quirky style and sense of humour. Now, if only we can get some more of the Learning Commons folks blogging...