Blog Posts

Lawrence Lessig's EDUCAUSE Keynote

If you haven’t watched Lessig’s fantastic, passionate keynote yet, watch it.

(link to the video, in case it gets stripped from the RSS)

It’s worth it, if for no other reason than to get your own Certificate of Entitlement, signed by Lawrence Lessig:

Lessig-certificate-of-entitlement

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Charter for Compassion

Scott Leslie posted a link to Charter for Compassion, and I can’t think of a better thing to support. Compassion is so painfully lacking in the world today. It needs to be universal. We are all connected.

charterforcompassion

This is something I struggle with as well. I need to try harder. A LOT harder. Compassion is essential. Compassion is active. I can’t imagine leaving my son a world that lacks real compassion.

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How do YOU connect online?

I’m taking a graduate level course on Technology & Society, and for my Big Term Assignment, I’ve decided to try something a little non-traditional. Taking a page out of Alan Levine’s great playbook, I’d like to ask people to respond to a simple question:

How do YOU connect online?

More info is available over on the project website - but the short version is that I need people to respond to the question, however they interpret it, in whatever format they’re comfortable responding. I will assemble the responses into a narrative which will be published on November 30, 2009.

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moved

If you can read this, then the move to a new server at CanadianWebHosting.com is complete. They had to disable SSH on the existing servers because of an apparent hack attempt, so I asked to be moved to a server that had SSH available. They moved stuff over the weekend, and DNS took a bit to propagate. But relatively painless…

(sorry for the banal feed noise - I needed a post published on the new server so I could test DNS propagation - and if I post a bunch of these, I might catch up to The Reverend, now that he’s gone all Bob Villa…)

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Question about the nature of connections

Ceviche at Casa del LambI just posed this question on Twitter, but thought I’d try posting it here as well, in case there are different people reading each stream…

How is the nature of connection between people online different from “traditional” offline connections? How, really, do they differ?

I’m hoping to tease out some real, perceived, and possibly false differences between internet connections and traditional connections between people, for a project as part of the Technology & Society course I’m taking. I’m not meaning TCP/IP connections, or ethernet, but how people are able to connect, interact, communicate, engage, etc… online as opposed to offline.

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Missing the Wave

I finally got my invite to Google Wave, and it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. Google’s in a bit of a hard spot, because they have to live up to some insanely strong hype that was created by non-Google folks about how Google Wave Will Change The World! Google Wave Will Kill Blackboard/Windows/BinLaden/WorldHunger. Sure, there was some hype sparked by Google themselves, but most of the unrealistic stuff was spun by people dreaming about what Wave could possibly do, in some mythical Wave-enabled future.

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Fixing WPMU 2.8.4 and the ignored Banned Email Domains option

wpmufunctions_iconI’ve been having a heck of a time battling sploggers at UCalgaryBlogs.ca - roaches that create accounts and blogs so they can foist their spam links to game Google (thanks for providing spammers with such a powerful incentive, Google).

There’s an option in WordPress Multiuser to ban email domains - provide the domains, one per line, into a text box, and it will reject any roaches trying to create accounts from those domains.

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Battlestar Galactica Ringtones for iPhone

1_clumsyphones_adamaOK. I’m a dork. I made some ringtones today to use on my iPhone, based on short clips from Battlestar Galactica. Maybe someone else will find them useful. Please don’t sue me. They were all made from very short sound clips I found online.

BSGRingtones

I’m using “BSG - Phone Ring” as my ringtone (it’s the sound the telephones make on the ship) and the others are handy alarm notification sounds.

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Red Dawn

200px-Red_dawnIt’s time to pick up the Formative 10 Films series, after abandoning it after the fourth entry…

Red Dawn. 1984. A bunch of misfit high school kids work together to defend their town from an invading Russian military force. Patrick Swayze as the cool older brother. Charlie Sheen. Lea Thompson (I had such an ’80s crush on Lea…). Jennifer Grey. What’s not to love? WOLVERINES!

I was in grade 10, a misfit outcast just starting high school, and watched this movie maybe a dozen times. It was set in small town redneck Colorado. Which felt not too different from Calgary…

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YYCPhotoBook 2009

I was extremely fortunate to have been a part of the fantastic YYCPhotoBook 2009 project. It’s a community-based photography book project, featuring 32 different Calgary photographers ranging from amateurs to high-end professionals. The goal was to show the city from various perspectives, outside the traditional stereotypes and stock-photo views. From start to finish, the project took 4 months - including recruiting the photographers, sourcing photos, editing, designing, and releasing to print. Duncan Kinney did an absolutely amazing job in wrangling the project and pushing it forward, and Connor Turner did an equally fantastic job in putting the book design together.

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UofC Kickoff 2009

Today was the annual Kickoff event - the home opener for the U of C Dinos football team, combined with a party welcoming students to campus for another year. This year, the whole family went to the game, and we had a blast. Also, this year was different because it was the first time in a long, long time that I was able to score the free tickets offered to students…

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