This video, via PlanetBike, of bicycle riders in Copenhagen makes my head spin a little. Sooo many bikes, and no Hummers trying to flatten them.
What strikes me, after the sheer number of cyclists, and how they all move so wonderfully together, is that the people riding the bikes are just regular people. No hardcore spandex mercenary riders on carbon fiber racing bikes. No mountain bikes bopping all over the place. Normal people. Riding utility bikes. And lots of them.
I’d expected Canada to be much more highly represented - my perception of using Twitter is that it’s largely US/Canada/UK centric. Turns out, the US is responsible for about a third of all tweets, followed by the UK, Indonesia (? REALLY! Indonesia. I know!), Netherlands and Mexico. Canada is down in 9th place. Surprising.
I’m a serial open course dropout, but Jim’s course on digital storytelling sounds like too much fun to pass up. Is it really a course? Sounds like more of an experience. A festival.
Whatever it is, I’m in. It starts January 10, 2011 (despite the claim on the course website that we must travel back in time to start the course). I really don’t know what to expect as part of this - I’m sure it’s going to be noisy, messy, chaotic, interesting and fun. What more could a person ask for? I know I’m way out of my league - seeing the work that the previous (and current) students have produced. gulp
A friend just sent me a link to this interesting bike safety light backpack - looks like a display mounted on the backpack, capable of displaying symbols to show what you’re doing, in addition to providing visibility. Looks cool, but I’m not sure I’d want a glowing green bullseye on my back…
I’d seen something similar recently - a bike-mounted laser bike lane marking system by LightLane Bike. It’s still just a prototype under development by Altitude, Inc., but it looks really promising.
UCalgaryBlogs gets hammered rather hard by cretins looking to insert their rancid spam into any corner of the internet that helps people publish content. One just got through, and I did some quick digging to see how they did it. Persistent buggers.
I get an email notification any time an account or blog site is created. The username looked suspicious. I popped it into an IP locator, and found they claim to be from Alabama. Dothan, Alabama, to be precise. About 100 miles northeast of Pensacola, Florida. Not many UofC students are likely to be signing up for a new account from Alabama…
Whenever I’m in Vancouver (which, frankly, is nowhere near often enough), I’m struck by how many people ride their bikes to get around the city. Honestly, I think I’m amazed enough that I bore anyone within earshot with constant comments about bikes, people riding bikes, and infrastructure to enable bicycle riding.
In Calgary, it feels like riding a bike is definitely a fringe or freak activity. In Vancouver, it feels like just another way to get around. I hope someday Calgary can get to this level of bike activity.
> The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn’t lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, not digital. The digital is a given. This low-key position presents an opportunity to rethink the Web 2.0 hype. How might we understand our political, emotional and social involvement in internet culture over the next few years?
I picked up some gear to prep my bike for winter this year. So far, I’m extremely happy with all of it.
Studded tires
I rode with them last winter, too, but was really struck by how well they worked during yesterday’s snow/ice hootenanny. Roads and pathways were often sheer ice, especially on the steeper portions of hills. My studded tires gave me perfect traction, riding up hills that had cars spinning their tires.
In reading some of the fantastic posts coming out of the recent conferences in Barcelona (see Scott Leslie’s work of art or Jon Beasley-Murray’s, or Brian Lamb’s recap or the rest of the planet’s stuff here and here ), I was struck by how much more impact the “non-educational” Drumbeat conference seems to have had, in comparison to the “educational” Open Education conference. Maybe it’s just that the people I follow are strongly in The Choir, so the OpenEd conference isn’t as revelatory for them, but it seems as though the more generally hackerish and cultural-focused Drumbeat conference caused more of a stir in thinking.
Several times this week, I’ve received emails from users of UCalgaryBlogs. Awesome. People are really getting into it. These emails were asking for plugins and themes to be installed. Perfect! I put my email address in the header of the Dashboard for just that purpose - it’s super-simple for all users to get in touch with me for any purpose.
I realized with each of these emails, that it takes longer to respond “I’ll get to your request as soon as possible” than it does to just go into the admin dashboard and install what they’re asking. Seriously. It’s actually easier and faster to go ahead and implement new functionality, than it is to write an email to tell them that I’ll get to it ASAP.
I rode with them last winter, too, but was really struck by how well they worked during yesterday’s snow/ice hootenanny. Roads and pathways were often sheer ice, especially on the steeper portions of hills. My studded tires gave me perfect traction, riding up hills that had cars spinning their tires.