people gripe about content consumption and distraction and superficiality. but, we choose how we are. we choose to waste the potential of what would have been described as science fiction only a few years ago.
You can decide to throw birds at pigs. You can decide to check in on which strangers are pretending to like you today. You may even decide to see what you would look like if you were really fat.
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Good video, put out by the City. I get cut off by motorists turning right on a regular basis.
They’ve got a whole series of them - now, to get motorists watching them…
Read MoreI haven’t posted a photo to Flickr in a couple months, and am starting to think about how to migrate photos from there (a place I don’t own, and where the photos are only fully available if I pay an annual fee) to here (a place that I do own, where I get to say when/if stuff goes offline).
I can think of two scenarios:
Some mythical WordPress plugin that connects to my Flickr account and sucks in all of the images as Media items (for management) and Posts (so they’re visible) using the correct date/title/description/keywords. This doesn’t need to pull in the full resolution originals - I’d be happy with the Large (1024 pix wide) version.
Read MoreEvan and I headed downtown for some hanging-out time this afternoon, and stumbled into the #occupyCalgary protest. I knew something was planned, but had half-forgotten that it was going down this weekend. We stopped for awhile, watching the protest. He wasn’t scared at all - there was no feeling of anything unsafe, even with over a thousand people crammed into a square, chanting and waving signs. There were a couple dozen police officers in full gear, but they were there mostly to make sure everyone was OK. There was a really good vibe in the crowd. We even did some impromptu broadcasting for the DS106 community radio station’s coverage of various OccupyEverything events, and did a brief interview with an awesome woman representing a group trying to raise awareness about poverty in Calgary (specifically in regards to women and children, many of whom struggle to get by, despite being in a city that is the home for so much wealth).
Read MoreI bumped into a computer science prof who was lugging a cart to get coffee. On the cart was a big homebrew remote controlled car, with a Microsoft Kinnect sensor strapped to it. Turns out, they use it to capture the motions of athletes. They use the data both to analyse the motion later, and to provide immediate audio feedback to the athlete. They’re working on a model that can follow speed skaters, at full speed, around the track. Awesome!
Read MoreWe headed west today, for what seems to be a Thanksgiving tradition - an easy family hike in the mountains. We stopped at the Barrier Lake ecology research station, which is now part of the University of Calgary campus. The site was originally a military camp, used as an internment facility and later a prisoner of war camp during world war II. Evan was pretty blown away that this camp even exists, and even moreso after learning some of the history. After exploring the research station path, we went across the highway to check out Barrier Dam, and the lake. Definitely not an unattractive region, especially with autumn colours.
Read MoreI got the chance to go for a quick bike ride this afternoon, and headed out west of our house, into the Bearspaw region. Some really nice rural roads for riding, and gorgeous scenery. One stretch of road has a very steep and longish hill, and I occasionally try to see how fast I can go down it. Unfortunately, the wind was not cooperating, and I only got up to 67km/h. Still, total fun, but not quite what I was shooting for. The wind did line up to make some really fun stretches of open road. Hill climbing into the wind, which is way more fun than it sounds. And fast flat stretches - cruising along at 48km/h on a flat highway is a blast. After that, some quick bopping around roads to the northwest of the city, and then back to ride around our community before heading home.
Read MoreI just set up 2 t-shirts on my CafePress account, to raise moolah for the DS106 Radio telethon.
I added “profit” to each shirt - $9US for the men’s, and $8US for the women’s (the women’s shirt is more expensive, but I wanted them both to be the same price).
Buy a shirt at $24.99US (apparently, that converts to $30CDN. WTF, Cafepress?), and I’ll send every penny that CafePress sends me to the DS106 Radio Telethon. (however that works). Cafepress only cuts cheques for $25US or more, but I’ll pass on the cash as it comes in.
Read MoreThe latest iteration of the campus blogging platform, UCalgaryBlogs.ca, is 4 years old today. It had run previously as a Drupal community (started way back in 2005!), before migrating it to WordPress Multiuser, and now just plain old WordPress. For its first year, it basically sat idle. Then, starting in the fall semester of 2008, things kind of took off. Slowly, at first, and then in bursts at each new semester.
Read MoreEvan’s school is working on a schoolyard naturalization project, with support from the Calgary Zoo and money raised by parents and grants. The Zoo recently shot a promotional video, and included our school as the representative of the “planning stage”. Evan’s visible in a blur of blue on one shot. We’re working to restore the school’s land from graded-field status to something more natural and useful for education. The kids are pretty excited by the whole process.
Read MoreMy big summer project this year was to act as the chair of a newly formed “eLearning Discovery Working Group”, with the mandate to begin to identify what eLearning means at The University of Calgary. We were tasked by the CIO to find out what is involved with providing, supporting, and using eLearning tools in whatever ways are necessary to enable the activities of our students, instructors, and staff.
Over the summer, we began to build an inventory of eLearning tools - both centrally provided, and distributed and ad-hoc tools, to start to form a picture of what eLearning looks like to our University community. The inventory is extremely coarse, and we know we’ve missed huge swaths of activity on campus. But we had to start with something.
Read MoreI’m thinking something like this could come in handy when it gets a little colder. It’d help me thaw out, while keeping traffic at bay…
Flamethrower bike, built by Ground Up Designs for the 2010 NAHBS show. I think I want one.
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