An article on The Guardian that initially seems like an “OH NO KIDS THESE DAYS!” reaction to everyone having a decent phone in their pocket 24/7. I was prepared to read it through, groan, and then ignore it.

Then, this gem from Nick Knight, a fashion photographer:

But doesn’t incessant picture-taking, as psychologists argue, make us forget? “That’s old rubbish,” says Knight. “Like that old nonsense about how sitting too close to the TV will infuse you with x-rays. My dad went around a lot of the time shooting with a video camera when I was a kid. Now we have lots of great old home videos as a result. So what if someone stands in front of a Matisse and takes a picture to look at on the bus home? I think that’s great if they want to.”

Hugh Howey is the author of some really great science fiction novels. Most famously, his “WOOL” collection (the Silo Series), but also his Molly Fyde series is definitely worth picking up.

He has been an indy author/publisher, hitting the scene through online distribution of his books. Here’s his thoughts on that:

Where you once had vanity presses that suckered people out of tens of thousands of dollars for crates of books that would never get sold, you now have the ability to make professional-looking books that are in print forever at a fraction of the cost. And people still want to focus on the fact that “most authors lose money.” No shit. Most musicians lose money. Most painters lose money. Most photographers lose money. It’s art. Nobody is really losing anything. We are creating something. We are expressing ourselves. We are doing something positive and lasting with our free time. There’s no losing here, only winning.

We’re in the middle of our Fall 2013 “Pilot” semester - almost 5,000 students are using D2L this semester, with extremely positive feedback from students and instructors. We’re now in the process of setting up for the Winter 2014 semester - where 4 faculties will be moving to use Desire2Learn for 100% of their online- and blended courses (and many courses from other faculties thrown in for good measure). Likely 10-12,000 students using it next semester. That’s a lot of students. And a lot of courses. We still don’t have automated course creation integrated with PeopleSoft, and are working feverishly on that (the thought of managing course enrolments for 12,000 students using CSV uploads makes me break into a cold sweat).

I still can't figure out why this isn't baked into the Evernote application as a Service available system-wide, but there's a way to add a Service to send messages from Mail into Evernote as notes for archive. There was a previous applescript solution, but I hadn't used it (and it apparently borked on the 10.9 upgrade anyway).

I'd been using the Evernote email address feature, to just forward messages I need to archive for automatic importing into Evernote, but it's a pain. I have to remove the *FWD: * prefix on the note title. I need to decrease the indented quote level of messages. etc… It works, but it's funky.

Just checked my RSS reader - I subscribe to 79 101 feeds tagged as "edublogs". Not all are active - some are still in there, in the hopes that the owner of the site comes back to play. It's also not comprehensive. There are lots of feeds I don't subscribe to. But, these are my go-to reads, with a decent signal:noise ratio, with little breathless hype. Likely not everyone's cup of feed, but I find them useful.

Reading the post/transcript of Audrey Watters' presentation from the OpenVA pre-conference, and something struck me.

Compare the predictions of two experts in their fields, extrapolating their personal visions forward a few decades:

"I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers."
-- Thomas Watson, 1943

"In 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education."
-- Sebastian Thrun, 2012

I'm carrying 2 computers with me right now, and each one would have been considered high-end workstation-class devices only a few years go. I use several more, as does everyone else. Watson wasn't wrong - his vision clearly led to giant computers run by governments and giant corporations. Time sharing systems meant monstrous computers would be tasked with jobs from many client organizations. In 1943, he couldn't have possibly seen microprocessors and coprocessors and GPU-offloading and miniaturization of devices. Or the internet.

I checked the Activity Monitor page¹ for UCalgaryBlogs this morning, and noticed that there had been several thousand attempts by people (or “people”) to login using the usernames “admin” (the default WordPress admin account, which isn’t what’s used on UCalgaryBlogs) and “siteadmin” (which is the username for our server - scripts must have sniffed it from blog posts on the main site…)

Curious. I’d installed the fantastic Limit Login Attempts plugin to prevent people from brute-forcing logins, but that plugin only kicks in if the same IP address hits the login form repeatedly. This botnet attack was different - each request had a different IP address, and a different user-agent string. So Limit Login Attempts wasn’t blocking them, and my htaccess user-agent filter wasn’t catching them because they were either valid user-agents, or close enough to get through.

Via Neil deGrasse Tyson:

seriously. starstuff. our atoms come, literally, from the stars. and, eventually, will go back to them.

We're now in the third week of the Fall 2013 Desire2Learn pilot, and I find myself using the Users > Statistics page to monitor the status of the environment. It's an extremely coarse way to see if people are having problems (if there's a problem, I'd assume the user count drops to near 0).

It's not exactly ideal, though. What I'd love is something closer to what WordPress gives for recent activity, but for active users in the environment. Something kind of like:

Evan and I headed downtown for the finish of Stage 5 of the Tour of Alberta (along with several thousand others). What an amazing event, and a fantastic finish. Hopefully this isn't just a one-off - it would be incredible to see it come back next year, with some mountain stages (the 1 mountain stage that had been planned was rerouted because of the June flooding in Alberta - hopefully next year's route would include a stage over Highwood Pass and maybe through the Rockies).

We're about to launch a "small scale pilot" in Desire2Learn, for the semester that starts Monday. The goal was to keep it small and manageable, because we don't have integration with PeopleSoft for managing enrolment data yet.

28 registrar-provided courses, with many sections. 5,181 enrolments for 4,069 participating students (and growing). Small scale… The largest course is just shy of 1,000 students.

I managed to stay (mostly) offline for (most of) the last week. Didn't even check RSS feeds. Here's some tabs that caught my attention while checking in over high-test caffeine this morning (in roughly-chronological order of tab-opening)…

• Polling in Desire2Learn's Learning Environment (mostly because of how simple adding widgets via iframe is…)
• Signs of Life via XKCD
• massive canyon buried under greenland ice sheet. dang.
• twitter use in the alberta government by post-sec minister
• impact of post-sec cuts by that same twitter-using alberta gov't minister
• but same minister approves of UofC operations, so there's that…
• red bull illume photo contest winners. dang.
• apparently, tablets are a thing now.
• lots of construction on campus this fall
• and we apparently have narrowly averted adopting comic sans in our new official visual identity
• michael ullyot is kicking ass in digital humanities analysis
• sandy murphree returns as interim deputy-provost. that was unexpected…
• OMNI Reboot: Future Late Capitalism: A Timeline
• OMNI Reboot: Edible Memories (potentially interesting overlap with Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 and the ingestion of non-terrestrial microbes…)
• Flickr is upgrading the crap out of its iOS app, after a few acquisitions. Just in time for iOS7 to include the same functionality but without tying people to a third party hosting service…
• and, some photos from our trip to the Okanogan region this week. lake life is nice.