Blog Posts

Flickr Faves 2006/10/21

Another great set. Surprisingly, there are 8 photos in here from Calgary…

Rob Wall on the Myth of Digital Natives

Rob Wall just posted a great blog entry about the myth of the “digital natives” - he (rightly) says:

People are learning in the same way that we always have - mostly from each other, but in some cases we learn in formalized learning institutions. The elements that make for sound instruction, whether formal learning with a teacher teaching a math class to grade nines or informal learning with an apprentice welder learning the trade from a journeyman, have not changed. Indeed they cannot change since they are so deeply dependent on the way our brains work.

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Moose Season is coming!

Brian just posted about Northern Voice 2007, which will be hosted in Cyprien Lomas’ palacial treehouse on the UBC main campus. I’m going. The first two NV events were awesome (the first was the best conference I’ve been a part of).

With more room to spread the sessions out, and in a more flexible, amazing new learning space, this is going to be one helluvan unconference. Here’s hoping they dial back the femmie quotient on the conference T-shirt this year, though…

Garth Turner for Prime Minister!

Sami beat me to the punch, but it’s worth publicly repeating. Garth Turner, MP for the Halton Constituency in Milton, Ontario, was booted out of the Conservative Party yesterday. For blogging. An elected member of parliament was Dooced.

Here’s the comment I posted on Sami’s blog, but I want to repeat it here as well (in case someone like the MP for my riding happens to see it):

It’s strange. This is our Government, and they boot someone out for documenting meetings and voicing honest opinions. Isn’t that what we do every day? Isn’t that what we should expect, even demand, from our representatives? The MPs represent US, not Harper. They have (IMO) an obligation to be honest (and open, and public) participants, not party mouthpieces.

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Lexi.net - Calgary conference on blogging and online identity

I was contacted this morning by someone from Lexi.net to let me know about the upcoming “Your Online Identity” conference in Calgary on November 17, 2006. I hadn’t heard of the event before, so had to check out the conference website for info. It sounds like a really cool event. Not as by-the-people-for-the-people as Northern Voice, but still sounds interesting. They’ve lined up an impressive list of speakers, including The Dooce herself.

I think it’s pretty cool to have an event like this in Calgary. I’ve been toying around with the idea of a Northern Voice YYC since I went to the first Northern Voice YVR. I’m not sure Calgary’s ready - Vancouver’s much more plugged-in and seems more aligned with the whole “web 2.0” / blogging / yaddayadda stuff. But, maybe this is a sign…

... and back online

Got back from Peachland last night. Had a great week relaxing in Okanogan wine country - even though the lake was too cold to actually go into the water. That was a bit tortuous for Evan, but he adapted OK. Thankfully, there were LOTS of rocks to throw into the water…

I wound up taking way too many photographs - probably took 1000 shots, nuking 90% of them and really liking only about half of the survivors. I was driving Janice nuts by dragging my “camera purse” everywhere. But I got some shots that I’m really happy with. I’m not going to write a long, boring (especially to me) post recapping the week. That’s why I took pictures.

offline

I’m packing up and heading to the interior of BC for a week. The family will be hiding out in a lakeside cabin with no phones or internet. Although apparently there’s wifi nearby. Dangit. I’ll have to bring the Powerbook to offload photos from the camera, so will have to fight the urge to check in. See you in a week, internets!

Ancient Peru exhibit at U of C

I went to the Nickel Arts Museum on campus during lunch today, to explore the Ancient Peru Unearthed exhibit. It’s a collection of the first archaologically recovered artifacts from northern Peru, from the Sicán era 900-1300 AD.

It’s a pretty cool story. Until this find, all previous artifacts from northern Peru were recovered through looting. Amateurs with shovels or even bulldozers. No concern for archaelological preservation or documentation. But, the groundwater level in the area was high enough to protect the tomb of the Sicán Lord as looters couldn’t get past the groundwater. In the early ’90s, the water level dropped low enough to allow excavation, and the team went to work properly documenting and carefully extracting a ton and a half of artifacts.

Dreamhost ups account limits

Woah. Dreamhost is celebrating their 9th birthday, and decided to party by increasing limits on accounts. Account holders now get 200 GB (200 gigabytes - a fifth of a terabyte) of disk space. And 2 TB (2 terabytes) of bandwidth per month.

That’s insane. Three things must have happened, in order for them to be able to offer this at $7.95/month.

1. bandwidth costs have come waaaay down over the years
2. the cost of hard drive space has come waaaay down over the years
3. almost nobody comes even close to using their full allotment of either

It’s awesome that Dreamhost is doing this. It’s pretty cool knowing I’ve got 200GB backing my account, and that I’ll never have to worry about bandwidth. Now, if only the performance of the MySQL server would get a boost…

Be Careful With rsync --delete

I’ve been using an rsync-based script to backup my iPhoto library to another computer, just in case my Powerbook blows up or something, so I don’t lose every photo I’ve taken for the last 4 years. It’s worked flawlessly, run every now and then from home, to squirt changes in my Pictures directory to my desktop at work, where I further back it up on an external drive using another rsync script.

Playing with Aperture

I got a copy of Aperture this week, just in time to get to play with the new 1.5 update. I’m really impressed with the application. It blows iPhoto out of the water.

I was trying out some of the new features, and thought I’d see if I could tweak one of my favourite photos of Evan to make it “pop” a bit more.  On the left, the original, “in camera” image. On the right, a version with white balance correction, and an application of the new “Spot & Patch” tool to remove some blemishes.

UCalgary Flickr Group Geotagging

The UCalgary Flickr Group has really taken to the new Flickr Geotagging feature in a big way. The almost-30 group members have tagged 154 photos of campus already, providing a pretty impressive coverage of the major areas of campus.

UCalgary Flickr Group Geotags

I’ve been spending the morning doing mind-numbing copy-and-pastery, so I’m going to grab the camera and try to fill in some gaps. I might hit the Olympic Oval, or even as far west as the new Children’s Hospital. (the brown spot on the left side of the map above is now the most advanced children’s hospital in north america - opened on Wednesday)