One of the things I was missing when I switched from Google Reader to FeverËš was a way to share items from my subscriptions. FeverËš didn't have any way to generate a feed of things I saved, so it was kind of a separate silo. But, the most recent version of FeverËš includes a cool new feature to share my Saved items in an RSS feed. Easy peasy.

Here's an embedded view of the last 30 saved items, thanks to the magical wondrousness of Feed2JS: (it'll probably bork in the feed, though. irony.)

Sometime after upgrading our copy of MediaWiki from the antique version I'd had to run, to the shiny latest version, I noticed (well, some of the wiki users noticed first…) that there were some borked characters - accented French characters, Mandarin characters, and fancy schmancy "smart quotes" were displaying as gobbledygook gibberish text. Smelled like a UTF8-related issue - IIRC, MediaWiki switched the front end of the web app to be UTF8, but my database was languishing behind in krufty latin1 encoding. oops.

A couple of weeks ago, the number of words in comments (i.e., stuff you wrote) passed the number of words in posts (i.e., stuff I wrote) on this blog. And now, the comment word count just pushed over half a million words.

This is no longer my blog. I'm not sure what it is, but it ain't (just) mine, for sure.

The Open Education conference last week was easily one of the best conferences I've ever participated in. It was intense, incredibly run, thoughtfully planned, and brought together an extremely diverse and intelligent group of people. I can't remember the last time I've been so intimidated by the sheer number of scary-smart people in the same room.

The conference was awesome. Lots of people have already recapped the conference itself - I'm not going to even try to add to that. I'm also not going to write a post about how fracking awesome everyone is, listing them all by name. I had a blast talking to everyone. They all rock. I am honoured to have had the chance to meet so many great new people, and to hang out with so many old friends. Blah blah blah…

Jim just asked me about what I used to do a quick Wikipedia search in Safari - I just hit a key combo and a text entry window pops up, where I entered "w trans lux" and got to the wikipedia page for the company behind the awesome Mighty Hercules cartoon.

I'm using Shortwave to search all kinds of crap - it's like the Firefox search shortcut dealie, except that you don't have to inflict Firefox on yourself in order to use it. It's just a javascript bookmarklet that is configured to search a bunch of services, and you can extend it with your own services by editing a text file. I have it set to search my own flickr account for stuff, search my blog, my delicious.com account, etc... Very cool.

I've been trying to be a voice of reason when it comes to how Apple operates. I'd rather see them as generally trying to do the right thing, but struggling sometimes with some of the nitty gritty things. Like letting individuals interpret blanket policies for what is and is not acceptable in the app store.

I'm fine with Apple deciding that an app is unacceptable if it crashes the iPhone. If it hijacks the cellular network. If it leaks memory, data, or something.

Update: Converge Magazine refuses to publish any of my comments on their blog, so I'm putting enough info here so that it will show up in google queries: The magazine is "ConvergeMag", aka "Converge Magazine", and the principal is Michael Smith, blogger at PrincipalsPage.com - and he is apparently not a principal any more, but is a Superintendent of Oakland CUSD #5 School Board. The article in question is Chocolate Milk Tastes Better When I am Not Being Violated - posted July 23, 2009.

I left a comment over on Andre's great post on social media training wheels. Rereading the comment, I wanted to post it here as a fully-fledged blog entry.

We're at a point where the exact tool selected really doesn't matter very much anymore. Any of these communities can be built in pretty much any open source web platform. The key is that it's open source, so it's easily modifiable (or at least modification is _possible_), and the ownership of the software and community is located within the institution, rather than at a corporate headquarters.

My Aperture library tends to grow much larger than it should. It seems as though Aperture does not delete the thumbnails for photographs even when deleting the originals, leaving several gigabytes of orphaned kruft behind, accumulating bits, filling up volumes. I delete most of the photos I shoot, so the majority of thumbnails in my library are orphaned. But there's a quick and easy way to clean it up. After backing up the entire library, I did this (after a blog post by Brett Gross):

Sometime this morning, while I was riding to work, someone viewed a photo of mine on Flickr, rolling the "total views" odometer over 1 million. That's a lot of views. There aren't many other venues where I could put my photos on display and have them seen a million times. Granted, there's no "unique viewers" stat - so it could be 10 people clicking reload repeatedly. But still...

ignore this post. I'm playing with a plugin, to see if I can add geotagging of posts and pages. It appears to work perfectly under standalone WP, but seems to fall over under WPMU (or, perhaps, under Multi-DB?)

[gmap zoom='18']

I lugged my camera and Flip on the Ride to Conquer Cancer, to document some of the ride. It was a pretty epic bike ride - the hardest thing I've ever done - but was well worth it.

Thank you to everyone that supported me in any way - it definitely made the pain of the ride easier to push through.

Full resolution photos are available on Flickr, and I apologize for my severe lack of video production skills...