I just finished the first Weblogs and RSS workshop/presentation - “Personal publishing with weblogs and RSS” - an introductory overview of blogging, rss, aggregation, and benefits (and some risks) of blogging.
The session was sold out (20 people), and I think it went reasonably well. Not the best presentation I’ve ever given, but it seemed to be received OK. It’s a hard topic to present about - acronyms are in blogging’s DNA - and some of the concepts are just plain foreign to novices. Read/write web? Aggregators? etc…
I’ve been such a total Google junkie since it kicked all of the search engine’s collective asses. Nothing else has come close, so I haven’t even bothered looking anywhere else for perhaps a couple of years now. It just hit me that I’m a little uncomfortable with that total reliance on one source (and their algorithms) for my searching.
So, following Mark Evans’ lead, I’m going to try going a week without Google. I’m not approaching this from a “Google is EVIL” angle - I think they’re the exact opposite - they’ve had opportunity to be evil, and have shown that they want to make the effort to be Good. I just need to take a look around to see what else is coming along…
I’m very late to this game, not discovering this gem until episode 23, but the EdTechTalk Podcast is great!
I listened to Episode 23 on the way home on Friday, and finished it this morning. An extremely interesting discussion with Jay Cross and George Siemens, covering Connectivism, “shallow thinking”, the nature of learning, trust networks, etc… It was a very lively discussion, and they apparently had a live audio stream of the event with a supporting chat channel, because Stephen Downes was relayed into the conversation via the chat room.
The Wiki Spammers are digging in. It looks like they’re falling back to brute force manual labour to spread their wares. The U of C Wiki was just hit by a moron who took 20 minutes to make 114 edits. It took me about 20 minutes to undo all of this clown’s links to whatever it was he’s trying to link to (using CSS to hide the links).
Then, at the last minute, I discovered the easy trick to nuke all contributions by a user. There is a handy page listing all of this roach’s contributions, and Sysops can easily nuke each and every one of them from this page, in no more than a minute or two.
There’s still a few minutes left in the Calgary-Vancouver game, but man it feels like the Flames are starting to hit their stride from the 2003 Stanley Cup run. Very physical game. Fast. Kobasew just hauled ass over half the length of the rink to prevent an icing call - a great race for the puck. They also killed a 5-on-3 powerplay! That was incredible.
And Kipper? Dayum! He’s on FIRE! Can’t believe some of his saves so far!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few months. I just wanted to write some of this down to help me form some slightly more concrete ideas. What follows is likely not the most coherent thing ever written - it’s meant to serve as a starting point for me to come back to later…
With the price of oil spiking, and the known reservoirs being depleted, we obviously need to move away from a total dependence on a non-renewable resource. That’s a total no brainer. But, there doesn’t seem to be a solid or effective movement towards that end. There are a few areas where progress is being made - the Prius, the solar/wind power initiatives, for example. But, there isn’t any large-scale movement away from petroleum. If anything, people are looking for subsidies to maintain their dependence on an increasingly scarce (and therefore increasingly expensive) resource. Gasoline prices skyrocket. Natural gas is through the roof. The cost of a barrel of oil is 6 times what it was not too long ago. And the solution? At least in Alberta, the provincial government is just cutting everyone cheques to help defray the cost of petroleum, since the government is literally rolling in cash as a result of petroleum taxes. And, other countries manufacture wars, and entire campaigns, to maintain their ready access to cheap oil. Addicted like a crack baby.
Strong and passionate, I tend to be misunderstood, sometimes even feared. I don't want to fight, I don't want to cause trouble, all I ask is a little love, and a little peace. If I don't get what I want, I get angry, and throw barrels and flaming oil at whatever's stopping me. What Video Game Character Are You?
Man, it doesn’t take long to cycle through a set of 36 favorite photos… Here’s a snapshot of my Flickr Faves from today. Easy to tell where my head has been lately ;-)
I had to book a hotel room today for the Big Pachyderm Wrapup Hootenanny at the end of the month. The rooms at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco were already sort of pre-arranged, so it was just a matter of calling, saying that yes I needed a room, and providing payment info.
I call the hotel, and the phone is answered by an extremely nice and pleasant operator, who assures me that it would, indeed, be a pleasure to connect me to the reservations desk.
YARtLWPaF (Yet Another Reason to Love WordPress and Flickr) - WordPress 1.6 will have a built-in media browser (complete with drag-and-drop addition of photos to posts via the web interface), and the media manager is integrated with Flickr! That’s so freaking awesome! I won’t have to go to my Flickr account, find the photo, click “All Sizes”, and select the correct size, then copy/paste the code to embed it in my post. I’ll just click a tab, and drag an image in. Rock. On.
This summer, at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference, they shot a bunch of video with interviews of some of the attendees, and some highlights of the conference. The video was distributed via DVD to the campus NMC rep - which is/was me. Instead of duplicating the DVD, or managing some form of sign in/out process, here’s the video. It was a quick-and-dirty rip of the DVD using Handbrake, so no bonus points for the art of video compression… The video is only 9 minutes long, so it’s not a big time investment.
Now, I’m really not trying to slag the fine folks at Fisher Price Toys, but man, this presentation (and WinXP, and other MS stuff) simply has to have been born at the toy company, rather than the largest/most mature software company on the planet.
