I think this might be the first time my blog has made it to a short list of anything. Josie just posted the “short list” for the 2005 Edublog Awards, and yours truly was nominated in the “Best designed/most beautiful edublog” category. Not sure how to take that, since I use the K2 template for WordPress and have only done some minor tweaks. I suppose it’s a vote for a combination of navigation structure, and those funky panoramic banners I swap through the header.
That last post was essentially a triple-modality experiment. It began life as a dead-trees offline notebook entry, then was recrafted as an audio recording (podcast), and then as a text-only blog entry.
This little experiment highlighted some of the strengths/weaknesses of each modality.
offline notebook
my handwriting officially sucks. I have trouble reading it myself, which is why I try to force myself to write in all-caps block letters
writing on a moving city bus doesn’t help, either. shaky bus = shakier writing = can I read this?
paper is a nice medium - can spatially organize stuff easily. can add sketches, doodles, whatnots easily
paper is harder to share, though. Scanning to Flickr helps, but is not exactly an invisible part of the process
not searchable. I was scanning through a decade’s worth of old notebooks over the weekend - wishing there was some form of index or searchability in them. chronology is nice, but makes it hard to find a specific piece of content unless the exact date it was written is known ahead of time…
the most private of the three modalities, which can be good for framing thoughts that you don’t want to unleash into the ether
audio/podcast
audio quality can be a problem
distractions while recording - my dog started whining to be let out into -30ËšC freezingness during the last couple of minutes of the recording.
really like it for the freeform thinking-out-loud style. not sure how valuable that is to other people, but the 1Ëš purpose of this blog is for me, so screw everyone else. well, ok, not quite that far, but as long as it’s useful to me, I’ll keep doing it
publishing process is still quite tedious. have to upsample the audio to 44.1KHz from 8KHz, massage the audio so it sucks less. put in intro track. convert to .mp3. upload. etc…
opaque medium - unsearchable without relying on external tools.
text-only blog entry
I think I’m most “at home” with this modality
can pause, rethink, and take time to write
it’s still legible. I can read it. And The Goog can read it.
Sometime in the last day or two, this blog’s wordometer ticked over 200,000 words. At the pace I’m blogging, that’s about 25,000 words per month. If anyone suggested I’d be writing that much I’d have told them they were completely daft. And yet, here I am. Almost 1,000 words per day, just by osmosis. It’s therapeutic, and helps manage my outboard brain, but I had no idea this blog would become so verbose…
The Mavericks online exhibit went live on Wednesday. The event featured several of the Mavericks (or family members) attending to answer questions. I missed the event, but it sounded like a great one.
The project is really quite cool, presenting a history of the prominent figures in Alberta’s history from the 1700s to modern day. Themes such as settlement, ranching, Mounties, oil, politics, war, and immigration are covered in pretty impressive depth. There are over 1400 screens of content (images, text, audio, and video), as well as a full teacher’s resource for use as part of the curriculum.
I just dropped the latest version of iPodLinux on my iPod to test out recording at higher sample rates. I cranked it up to 44.1KHz, and the recording from the TuneTalk microphone sounded freaking amazing! I’ll have to do some more playing/testing to see how it works for longer recordings (how fast does it suck down the battery? does it still have the high-pitched whine in the background?)
But, while I had linux running on the iPod, I poked around at what else is offered. It’s got some new games, including a non-playable demo of TEMPEST! That is so cool! Apple, please include Tempest as a default game! That is SO perfect for the iPod controller… Oh, and it’s got a version of an Etch-A-Sketch program that is pretty cool. Yay, linux!
On the left, what it’s like in The City this morning. On the right, what I’ll be landing into in a few hours. Sure, it’s “rainy” here (that means the streets are damp, but you can walk without getting wet), but at least things are liquid. I wonder how much shoveling is waiting for me at home…
Update: The TV news in SF was calling the weather “the worst storm of the year so far” and travel advisories were being issued. I kept looking for the storm on the way to the airport. All I saw would have simply been called “rainy” or “a shitty day” back home. Traffic was backed up pretty seriously on the 101 due to a weather-related accident, so my rocking driver hopped over to 280 to bypass the schmozzle. Oh, and I left the hotel 3 hours before my flight - you know, planning ahead in case something happened, so I wouldn’t miss my flight home…
On the way from the hotel to the restaurant for supper tonight, Tim took Josh and I on a short walking tour of what I called “art bars” - two very cool bars/clubs that were one part bar, one part art gallery. Very interesting stuff.
Then, to Osha (a Thai restaurant, coincidentally themed inside with elephants everywhere) for supper with the Pachydermers. I’d been crashing since about 10am, after working with Josh to stem the flow of negative Whuffie created by some miscommunication. (we got the Pachyderm authoring app up and running after an intense round of forensic analysis to find out wtf happened - then got to deal with a different but recurring problem, as described in the previous post)
I got the chance to play with debugging a running WebObjects app today, with the added fun of having a roomful of 20 users of the app taking turns to mention “did you know that [X|Y|Z] isn’t working?”
Long story short, if you need to get the status of threads of a running WebObjects app, jdb provides some great tools. I have only scratched the surface of it, thanks entirely to the great intro document by Andrew Lindesay. (Andrew recently moved his website to .Mac from some New Zealand host, so I’m linking to help throw some Google Juice his way so others can find his article)
Had a really good first day of meetings. We had a quick lunch on the 36th floor of the Grand Hyatt, overlooking the awesome skyline of San Francisco. Then we got into the recap of the last 2 years, and touched base.
Then, we packed into a bunch of cars, and headed over to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. What a cool museum! We headed straight for the Education Tower, with a spectacular view of The City - from an angle I’d never seen before.
This morning before the meeting started, I took a quick sprinting shopping spree through Macy’s and then to the Apple Store. Played with the new video iPods. Oh my f#cking god. How can they make something so obviously incredible? I must have one. Oh, yeah. Cash…
Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. I also picked up a Belkin TuneTalk microphone for my iPod. Maybe Evan will give it to me for Christmas. Plugged it into my iPod and it pops up immediately with the “Record Now” screen. Cool. So, I record some sample stuff, and it doesn’t sound like crap. Actually, it sounds completely decent. With some massaging in Audacity or GarageBand, it might even sound good. I can even leave the iPod on my belt, with the microphone in place, and record myself talking while standing and walking around. Kind of like I do when I present something to a group. Hmmmm… Might have to experiment with recording my next presentation… It also seems like a pretty handy podcasting recording setup as well.
This is the one where I rant/vent about my flight down. I’m blogging this from 30,000’ for therapeutic reasons… It wasn’t a bad trip down at all, and I’m seriously not complaining about being sent to San Francisco for a couple of days of meetings, but man some people are just ignorant enough to deserve a full-fledged ranting…
OK. I wake up at 3:20am - alarm’s set for 4 - and realize with a shudder that it’s only 2:20am Pacific time, but I can’t sleep the morning I have to fly anywhere. Get ready, sneak into Evan’s room to say goodbye while he sleeps, and then head downstairs to catch the cab at 5am. I arrive at the airport at about 5:20. Through checkin in about 5 minutes, then into the lineup for US Customs. It’s moving smoothly, and I’m through in about 20 minutes. I head for the lineup for the security check, and notice people starting to shove. They’re trying to follow the flight crews through the expedited lines, and they’re trying to shove their way through the remaining lines.
