This is so depressing. It looks like Harper might be on the path to a minority government on Monday - with a slim possibility of pulling off a majority. That is sad for so many reasons.
In my riding, “my” MP Rob Anders doesn’t even have to show up at local events and debates. He’s rated “F” for his performance in the House, he’s described as dangerous and scary by reporters across this country - even by reporters in the States, where he made an impact as a Republican cheerleeder. He called Nelson Mandela a communist and terrorist, and blocked the granting of an honourary Canadian citizenship to the man. Then refused to come to the phone when Mandela called him with a “WTF?”
Kids in the Hall are/were the funniest comedy troupe on TV. Better than Saturday Night Live back in its heyday (and KitH coughed up funnier stuff than anything SNL has done in the last 20 years).
Dammit. It’s LA-only. That’s hardly a tour, is it?
davidicus, you’d darned well BETTER go to this thing so I can live vicariously through you! ;-)
I just downloaded the latest build of Flock, and went to configure my blog for posting. But Flock’s handy dandy blog account configurator was hanging while trying to communicate with my WP 2.0 blog. A quick peek at the Flock forums revealed this is a known bug, but no fix was offered.
But… you can trick Flock into letting you manually configure a blog. When adding the account, just give a bogus URL (or, in my case, I tried to configure it with my http://…/server.php file directly. That will fail, and bring up a dialog asking if you want to try again, or cancel and manually configure. Click “Cancel” to continue (of course - I love intuitive dialog boxes…)
I’ve been using Blogbridge for awhile, but I didn’t truly appreciate it until I tried to switch to another RSS reader. After I left, I realized I was spending much more time reading my feeds than I was when I was using Blogbridge. After switching back to it, it’s like coming home. I’m blasting through my feeds quickly, and “checking in” isn’t an onerous process anymore.
So, what makes Blogbridge better? How am I more efficient using Blogbridge than the other reader apps? Let me count the ways:
I’m trying really hard to get motivated to get back into the mind numbing mundanery of the copy-and-paste festival of horrors that await me on a project. While unsuccessful at motivating myself to deal with that particular albatross, I did find some more awesome photos on Flickr…
Thanks to a pointer from Alan, I took another look at my 43Things account. It’s a place where you can track stuff you’d like to do - like a shared wishlist. There are 2 other related sites. 43Places lets you track places you’ve been and/or would like to visit. 43People lets you track people you’ve met or would like to meet.
Sounds a bit lame on first blush. Why do that in a public place? What are they doing with the data? Amazon is an investor, so why would I feed my data into the corporate beast?
Dave Hyatt Tim Hatcher announced last night that the latest nightly builds of Safari now include a new tool for web developers to view DOM and CSS elements/attributes on a web page. I tried it last night, and it’s excellent - even better than the one built into Firefox. You just right-click anywhere on a page, and a contextual menu item will let you “Inspect Element”. This is perhaps more intuitive than Firefox’s “enter a new mode, then click somewhere on the inspected page” method of visually selecting an element to inspect.
It took a bit longer than it did the last time I switched (I’m older now, I guess), but I think my transition to the Dvorak keyboard is nearly complete. I now “think” in Dvorak - my fingers are naturally finding the right keys without any intervention. Most of the time. Occasionally I have to pause to think about where a letter is - mostly when entering passwords or shell commands.
Structured Blogging was just updated to version 1.pre13, and one of the changes is apparently a new content type (well, it may have been in 1.pre12 - I skipped a version) that supports a structured review of a journal article.
This could be quite useful in academic blogging. Imagine a spider that crawls the blogs of your students (or of students and professors across the ‘sphere), indexing journal article reviews. It could make it very easy to share notes and thoughts on an article, or to create a distributed journal bibliography for communities of practice…
Ultimate Tag Warrior provided a really handy way to tag posts in WordPress, by just entering tags into a text field ala del.icio.us or Flickr.
But, it uses its own tags database, meaning external tools like Flock, MarsEdit, Ecto, etc… are unable to tag new posts. And I get to do some funkery each time I update the K2 theme to match the latest and greatest beta.
So, I just spent a couple of hours this evening manually migrating UTW tags to be stored in stock WordPress Categories. I would have played around with some SQL to do it, but would rather do some mindless copy/pastery in front of the tube.
James Farmer just pushed the Nonscholae.org website, which was born from the “learning to swim” discussion in the edublogosphere a few weeks back. From the site:
nonscholae.org is a site devoted to the responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools.
Non scholae sed vitae discimus We learn, not for school, but for life - Seneca, Epistulae
We believe that these tools and resources should not be blocked or banned from schools. As educators, we should be familiarising learners with these technologies, supporting and facilitating their responsible use and equipping our students with the skills to keep them safe and savvy in the online world.
