Blog Posts

forget this at your peril

This also works for Google, as well as any mainstream media outlet.

We are not their customers. We are the product they sell to others.

coldest ride ever

Not purely by temperature - I’ve ridden in -30ËšC weather and not been cold. This was +2ËšC, and I was definitely the coldest I’ve ever been in my entire life.

A friend and I went for a ride out to Big Hill Springs and back. He’s training for an Iron Man, and I’m training for the Ride to Conquer Cancer. We figured it’d be a good chance to put some km on the legs for an actual ride. The forecasts were saying likely snow overnight, so we thought we’d go for an afternoon ride. We made our way out from Calgary to Big Hill Springs - a good ride, with lots of hills. The headwinds were steady and strong - around 10-20km/h, so it was a good workout. And, we figured, the tailwind on the way back home would be a blast. Note the conditions in the photo. Doesn’t look bad, does it? Downright springish, even.

earth day sucks - piece on The National

I was interviewed yesterday by Reg Sherren for a piece that aired on CBC’s The National on Earth Day 2010. It didn’t turn out as bad as I feared, but he had me read the blog post he found, and the result sounded a bit stiff and scripted. Still, I think it worked out OK. The bit starring your humble and unqualified blogger starts about 2 minutes into the clip:

more fun with ride tracking

I’m going to have to try hard to stop obsessing over numbers and metrics. Whatever. Here’s the morning ride:

The squiggly lines on the graphs were basically the same as yesterday’s. Elevation was reversed, and speeds were slightly higher.

It’s strange - just knowing the ride was being tracked, I kept pushing a little harder. Not sure that’s a good thing, first thing in the morning. But, blowing off nearly 1300 calories before breakfast was a surprise…

Ride tracking

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…

Atta Kim - long exposure photography

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.

mesmerized by Alexey Titarenko's photography

Amazing, surreal photographs through what look like tiny aperture long exposures of people and places. Crowds blur into smoke monsters.

ALEXEY TITARENKO | PHOTOGRAPHY.

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…

Blocking Spam In Mediawiki

Too much spam garbage was leaking into wiki.ucalgary.ca so I wanted to beef up the antispam strategy a bit. Currently, the antispam setup is:

• Bad-Behavior blocks all requests to the webserver from evildoers (but I worry about false positives, so have whitelisted the entire UofC network)
• users must be logged in to edit (but anyone can create an account)
• SpamBlackList uses Wikimedia’s blacklist to block edits
• regex rejects content with sneaky hidden CSS attributes
• ConfirmEdit adds an extra step if content smells funny, as well as providing a simple match-captcha on account creation
• SimpleAntiSpam adds an extra (hidden) step to trip up bots

I followed some of the excellent instructions on the UMassWiki on tweaking antispam extensions and config: UMassWiki:Blocking Spam In Mediawiki - UMassWiki. (note there’s a problem with the current version of Bb2ext - the Bad Behavior Extra extension - that is easily fixed by following the instructions on the talk page for that extension)

on the ning exodus

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.

online collections

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.

• Science Museum Brought to Life (thanks to a timely tweet by George Siemens)
• Sputnik Observatory - Themes and Paths
• TED Talks - Themes
• Flickr Commons - US Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Galt Museum, Powerhouse Museum
• Glenbow Museum - Mavericks
• SFMOMA - Interactive Features - Frida Kahlo, Making Sense of Modern Art
• Google Books - Public domain collection (eg, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle)

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.

on filtering vs. curation

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?

toward a personal cyberinfrastructure

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).