Just got back from the AGM at the Tuscany Club. One of the less eventful AGMs we’ve had (which is a Good Thing™), especially with Carma nearly done with planning the rest of their development.
New member of the board of directors Kelly Taylor also represents the Tuscany Community Association, so there will be some nice connections there. All of the board members should be more active in the TCA as well… The existing 7 board members were re-elected, with Kelly added as a new one.
We’re going to have a really hard time meeting quorum in the next year or two. Carma still holds over 500 votes, so we were able to make the ~500 required voting member quorum this time. But, as Carma sells off their lots, the number of votes they hold drops. In the next year or two, that will drop us below the automatically-meeting-quorum waterline. We had 30 proxies mailed in from members, and maybe a dozen (perhaps as high as 20? I don’t have the roll call handy) voting members turned up at the meeting. Which means, after Carma is done, we would have had 50 votes tops, leaving us 450 short. We’ll have to do some thinking about this. There are ways to handle missed quorum, but it just becomes a pain (scheduling two meetings, one week apart, and holding the “real” meeting on the later one because nobody showed up to the first one…)
“official” meeting ended in record time - 14:59 after the meeting opened. Bob thankfully rushed through the official legal business. Wah wah wawawah wah blah blah :-)
Unofficial meeting/discussion begins
Home Depot to build a store on the northwest corner of the Tuscany Hill Drive and Nose Hill Drive intersection It’s going to be modelled after the 16th Ave. store, perhaps with some influence from the West Vancouver store
TRA to take over management of the Tuscany-Connect website in 2006. Karen’s already in training to handle the day-to-day management of the site. I’ve got some really mixed feelings on this one. We need to be taking responsibility for our services, so it makes sense to take over from Carma on this. But, we had no say in which solution was deployed for Tuscany-Connect (we approved the Carma-recommended BuildACommunity software), and no say in the technologies used on the back end. Now, we’re saddled with something that I was just told is powered by MS Access on the back end. MS Access? WTF? Netcraft reports that it’s currently served via Verio Inc., so maybe it’s just a matter of us paying the invoices for hosting rather than Carma… Update: Just checked the specs for BuildACommunity, and it looks like it’s all Perl and MySQL, running on Linux and Apache. Might not be too bad after all - wonder why Karen is taking Access training though. Still, I get the feeling we could have rolled something in Drupal for next to nothing, and be able to extend the system ourselves…
We need to run another survey of the TRA members to see what they want/need from their association, and what kinds of programming they want to see run at the Tuscany Club. The last one we ran was through Tuscany-Connect - an online service - and it generated a small forest’s worth of dead trees for reports. Perhaps we should use a simpler online survey tool this time…
Right now, it looks rather UK-centric, but once more people add themselves to the list it might be a useful resource to describe the global community of edubloggers. Would that be a part of a global community of practice?
Update: The global domination by the North American Edubloggers Guild has begun! 12 hours after posting the first image, the Risk gameboard has changed markedly:
Leave your first memory of you and me together. It doesn’t matter if I know you a little or a lot, anything you remember! Next, post this in your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you.
Not sure if this means face-to-face, or online, but this could be interesting…
I just found a link to Blogs n Dogs via Common Craft.com. Looks like a 4 day workshop on blogging and social software, held in Banff at the Banff Centre. Sounds very intersting. I’ll have to check it out, but not sure I can justify a 4-day conference/workshop in December. Or, maybe that’s perfect timing, since December is usually a write-off anyway…
Sounds like an event tailor made for the illustrious CogDogBlog himself…
One of my tasks for the next few weeks is to investigate Drupal, and specifically its ability to support the online interactions of a community of practice. We have a few projects that will involve some form of online interaction by students and professionals who are spread throughout southern Alberta, and it looks like Drupal may provide most, if not all, of the functionality to support these communities. I’ll be specifically looking at Drupal in the context of:
I just bought my registration to Northern Voice 2006 - for the full 2-day extravaganza including Moose Camp. I’m SOOOO looking forward to this. I’ll be taking time off to do it, and traveling on my own dime, but it’s going to be awesome. This year’s conference was one of the high points of a decidedly hectic and memorable year.
And, to make it even better, Alan and Brian will be there too, marking the first Three Amigos reunion since NMC 2004! The Three Amigos ride again, but this time on a big ol’ Canadian moose!
Here’s a current snapshot of my Flickr Favorites. Absolutely amazing stuff!
As an aside… I went to Bragg Creek with the family on the weekend. Found someone with the absolute perfect job. She runs a tour company slash photography studio slash African artifact shop. Spends a few weeks/months each year in Africa on safari, taking people with her (to pay the bills), takes a lot of photos while there, and gathers artifacts to sell in the shop with a selection of the photos. And, she has some great shots that are different than the usual silhouette-of-animal-at-sunset stuff you usually see.
I tried. I really tried to use Firefox as my default browser. I was kind of enjoying it, but kept finding myself tripping over stuff like a UI that doesn’t respond the way a native MacOSX app should, and a browser that was rather prone to locking up (although pages rendered quickly). Key commands that were quirky and decidedly non-Macish. Mouse buttons didn’t respond as expected (even my multibutton mouse with scrollwheel behaved more reliably under Safari than Firefox).
I ranted recently about how having advertising on my blog made me feel dirty. After saying that, it’s been kind of bugging me, especially since someone whom I deeply respect provides marketing and branding creative for companies.
I’ve been thinking about it, and the part that made me feel dirty was because I had changed the rules of my blog. I’ve always considered it to be nothing more than just my own personal outboard brain - a core dump indexed by Google. Changing the nature of the beast to become a “monetizing engine” would have subtly altered what/how/when I posted. Perhaps not right away, and perhaps not even visibly (to anyone but myself - hey, another circular reference - if it’s primarily for me, wtf do I care what anyone else thinks? :-) ) but it would have altered it enough to become less useful to me. I would have started writing for accumulation of Google Juice™, rather than just documenting thoughts and actions.
In the light of the recent weblogsinc.com sale, with each blog being given an insanely high “value”, there’s this handy utility to guestimate just how much your blog is “worth”, using the same formula used to calculate “value” in the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal.
My [blog](https://darcynorman.net) is worth **$60,970.32**.[How much is your blog worth?](http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/)
Stanford on iTunes will provide alumni—as well as the general public—with a new and versatile way of staying connected to the university through downloads of faculty lectures, campus events, performances, book readings, music recorded by Stanford students and even podcasts of Stanford football games. At launch, the service will contain close to 400 distinct audio programs, and the university will continue to add new content as it becomes available.
My first reaction to Flock was “holy crap!” - after using it for awhile, I’m still very impressed, but also a little surprised. I’d thought that the tighter integration to my blog, del.icio.us and Flickr accounts would have totally changed the way I worked with those tools. I suppose there is still the potential for that, but there isn’t really anything that I couldn’t replicate in other browsers using some decent bookmarklets. My del.icio.us account is already one click away on any browser I use (for adding, querying and viewing), as is my blog (again, for all CRUD tasks), Flickr, and lots of other handy tools. And my current blog posting utility (using the popup window in any browser) doesn’t give me the crappy-HTML-code-generation problems, or disappearing-post problems that Flock’s built in editor appears to suffer from.
