It looks like most of my training for the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer will be during my regular commutes to and from work. I’ve decided to treat the afternoon ride as a training ride, adding some hill climbing and trying to maintain speed.
I picked up a copy of the Cyclometer app for the iPhone today (thanks to a tip from Doug Springer) - it’s a very slick app that uses GPS to track the ride. Not entirely unique, but the implementation is very well done. I like that it doesn’t rely on a website to store the data, as well. It does suck up a fair amount of juice from the iPhone battery - 12% in the 38 minutes of my ride home. Also, I don’t use any of the display info or remote controls while riding - I don’t have an iPhone handlebar mount, so just start the app and toss it in the bag under my saddle. Seems to get strong enough GPS signal through the canvas, and I don’t have to worry as much about it sliding off, or getting wet, or otherwise schmutzed…
I’d seen a photograph a couple of years ago, taken by Atto Kim over 8 hours in Times Square. It stuck with me, how people and traffic dissolved leaving only stationary buildings and traces of humanity. It wasn’t dehumanizing, it was more of a merging of humanity and architecture. If I remember correctly, Kim used a few panes of welding glass mounted over the lens of his camera to block almost all of the light. Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I read the article on his series, or saw the photo originally. Google searching turns up snippets, but not the description of process that I vaguely remember.
I’m not sure how he managed such long exposures in what are obviously daylight photos, but I’ve been planning on experimenting with welding glass to try long exposure shots even with lots of light…
Ning’s new boss announced that free Ning communities are gone. Not a big deal. It’s a company, and they’re free to do what they want. I’m guessing they’ll just piss off their users, and the few people that pony up cash to stay will not be enough to keep the company afloat. Add Ning to the deadpool. That’s the risk of using a third-party-hosted service. It can disappear or change, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.
I started gathering some links to some good examples of engaging online interfaces to museum, library, historical and organizational collections, and figured it would be handy to post the growing list online as well.
Any other really good examples of these kinds of collections made available online? Ideally with interfaces that make it possible to view the collections in great detail, to reuse parts of the collection in new works, and/ to integrate with external resources.
I’ve been thinking about the distinction between filtering and curation lately. “Social media” is described as bringing a form of curation to the internet, when it is really providing layers of filtration. What’s the difference? Filtering is crap detection, wheat-from-chaff separation. Useful and important, but only the first step of curation. Curation is when a knowledgeable expert crafts an experience based on their understanding of context, in order to guide others through a collection. Curation is so much more than simple crap detection. Examples?
As the final requirement in the Conceptualizing Educational Technology course I took in W2010, I had to write a position paper on a topic of my choosing. I’ve been thinking about Gardner Campbell’s piece in EDUCAUSE Review, and wanted to dig a little deeper in that direction. The end result is still a bit rough (I polished it off early so I could submit it before leaving on vacation, and the APA formatting is likely utter shyte), and I had to skip entire sections I’d written in my head (I wanted to write about the obvious model demonstrated by Downes and Siemens in the Massive Open Online Course on Connectivism, but ran out of room and wanted to start with the examples of first steps before jumping into the “BYPASS THE INSTITUTION” angle).
How’s this for a first kick at the cat? Huge gaps, but I’m trying to avoid writing a 200 page definition full of acronyms and words requiring further definition…
Personally, I’m not a fan of the word “cyberinfrastructure” as it seems to make people glaze over in its made-up-wordness. But, it appears to have some legs. Whatever. I guess the next best thing to having a word that doesn’t suck, is having a crappy word with a half decent definition…
I’m riding in the Ride to Conquer Cancer again this year. It’s a 2 day, 200km ride south of Calgary through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, June 26-27, 2010. Last year, we were able to raise nearly $7 MILLION for the Alberta Cancer foundation. I’m hoping we can top it this year. But I need your help.
Please sponsor me for the Ride. Every dollar helps. Every donation $10 and over gets a receipt for tax purposes (in Canada, anyway).
I just wastedspent the evening training the Faces feature of Aperture 3. Wow. It can’t put a name to a face automatically, but as you teach it, it’s spooky how well it does finding photos of people. I’ve been sitting here giggling at all of the photos I’d forgotten of people I care about. Great stuff.
What amazes me is how few pixels it seems to need to be able to recognize a face. It’s finding faces in group shots (of course), in crowds at hockey and football games (even if the shot is a wide angle photo with hundreds of people in it). It even finds faces in photographs pinned to the wall in the background of photos. Fun with recursion. It could also be a bit scary as a latent crowd identification system - but The Man has this stuff already…
