Blog Posts

UofC Kickoff 2012

Today was the home opener for the UCalgary Dinos men’s football team. They slaughtered the UofA Golden Bears¹. But, lots of campus pride on display. We got to the stadium too late - all of the Kickoff 2012 t-shirts were gone already. The Boyâ„¢ was disappointed, but he got over it quickly enough…

september highwood pass ride

easily the hardest bike ride I’ve ever done. Not the longest, but over 1000m of climbing, with constant headwinds. Awesome. So much fun. And ouch. We started 25km further out (from Boundary Ranch) than our usual Highwood Pass route (starting at the North Gate), so the ride was about 50km longer than usual. I wound up snapping a spoke and getting a flat less than 3km from the cars. And Anthony got 2 flats within 1km of each other, near the summit. Still, what a fun ride.

ebooks update

So, last year I wrote a post declaring my boycott of ebooks, because of the fracked up pricing of the books I’m interested in, where the ebook version is significantly more expensive than the dead-trees version¹.

In the comments on that post², and indie author, Nathan Lowell, suggested I give the indies a shot. They typically have a saner pricing model, and they also don’t get as much exposure as the mainstream / high volume authors.

quick ride to cochrane

For my morning ride, I headed west on 1A to Cochrane, to take on the epic hill. Beautiful morning for a ride…

That dip in the middle is the Cochrane hill. About 200m of elevation over just 3km. It’s a fun climb :-)

Ramping up the Co-op in Hippie Hosting Co-op

The Hippie Hosting Co-op was started by the idea of friends and colleagues pitching in to share resources to run a server together. It kind of took off from there. In the months since the launch, it’s grown to over 80 members¹, most of whom were attracted by the idea². And it’s continued to grow.

But, we’re reaching a point where we need to make some decisions as a co-op. For this to work, it has to be more than just a discount web hosting provider³. We need to be in this together. For the server to handle the number of users it has now, the costs to the co-op are $186/month⁴⁵ . We’ve been lucky enough to have a bucket of cash to kick things off, but we’re going to burn through what’s left of that in a couple of months.

The Dead Moocmen - #2BIG2FAIL

debut release by The Dead Moocmen, including a painfully noisy track from yours truly. Thankfully, the other contributors have actual talent etc…

University of Calgary opts out of Access Copyright

The Provost announced today:

The University of Calgary has announced that they will not enter into an Access Copyright model licence but instead will manage copyright compliance and payments in-house.

The Copyright Office in Libraries and Cultural Resources has been expanded and new tracking software, Ares, has been purchased. Information Technologies is working closely with LCR to implement the software, integrate it with Blackboard and link it to other campus systems as required.. Library staff has begun working with the software which will later be rolled out to all members of the University community.

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2012 Banff Gran Fondo

What an awesome ride. 1500 riders, with highways through the Rockies reserved for bikes. Epic.

a few more photos and the Strava page for the ride.

Tent - distributed social networking

Via a post by John Gruber, Tent:

Tent is a protocol for open, decentralized social networking. Tent users share content with apps and each other. Anyone can run a Tent server, or write an app or alternative server implementation that uses the Tent protocol. Users can take their content and relationships with them when they change or move servers. Tent supports extensible data types so developers can create new kinds of interaction.

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fun with bike data visualization

I just picked up a license for the fantastic OmniGraphSketcher application. I’m using it to build the visualizations for my thesis, and wanted to see what it would do with my bike tracking data. OK. I was procrastinating, and couldn’t force myself to work on the thesis. But, at least I’m learning how to do more cool stuff with data, right? cough

Anyway. Here’s a visualization of almost 2 and a half years of data stored in Cyclemeter on my iPhone. I exported the activity history in monthly aggregate, and took the .csv file into Excel to select the rows, which were then pasted into OmniGraphSketcher. The visualization shows total distance (divided by 10, so the distance data points fit in the same range as speed data), average speed and maximum speed per month. I also overlaid lines to show which bike was being used. The Kona wound up being my winter bike, and my Cannondale is my fast summer bike. It’s pretty easy to see where the snow and ice crapped up my rides :-)

Big box social engineering in Calgary | Calgary Herald

via Big box social engineering in Calgary | Calgary Herald.

These stores also impede the economic viability of smaller format retail. There is only so much consumer demand to go around and therefore in communities where large format retail is present, the feasibility of a community main street is annihilated by design.

[caption id=“attachment_12193” align=“alignright” width=“476”] Layout of my community. Central Commercial Zone (and big box retailer) in red. The 2 roads into the community in yellow. Future train station in green.[/caption]

on commercial silo-ification of online discourse

I complain about twitter, facebook, and other corporate silos as much as the next person. If only there was some alternative… Something that didn’t mine everything and everyone I know to sell that data to the highest bidder(s).

One response to this has been the development of new private commercial silos, with barriers to entry (subscription fees, or invitation requirements) that are intended to keep out the riff-raff while letting the cool and worthy folks into the conversation.