OK. 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.
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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It’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…
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreToday 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…
Read MoreOne of the things I was missing when I switched from Google Reader to Feverº was a way to share items from my subscriptions. Feverº didn’t have any way to generate a feed of things I saved, so it was kind of a separate silo. But, the most recent version of Feverº includes a cool new feature to share my Saved items in an RSS feed. Easy peasy.
Here’s an embedded view of the last 30 saved items, thanks to the magical wondrousness of Feed2JS: (it’ll probably bork in the feed, though. irony.)
Read MoreSometime after upgrading our copy of MediaWiki from the antique version I’d had to run, to the shiny latest version, I noticed (well, some of the wiki users noticed first…) that there were some borked characters - accented French characters, Mandarin characters, and fancy schmancy “smart quotes” were displaying as gobbledygook gibberish text. Smelled like a UTF8-related issue - IIRC, MediaWiki switched the front end of the web app to be UTF8, but my database was languishing behind in krufty latin1 encoding. oops.
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A couple of weeks ago, the number of words in comments (i.e., stuff you wrote) passed the number of words in posts (i.e., stuff I wrote) on this blog. And now, the comment word count just pushed over half a million words.
This is no longer my blog. I’m not sure what it is, but it ain’t (just) mine, for sure.
Read MoreThe Open Education conference last week was easily one of the best conferences I’ve ever participated in. It was intense, incredibly run, thoughtfully planned, and brought together an extremely diverse and intelligent group of people. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so intimidated by the sheer number of scary-smart people in the same room.
The conference was awesome. Lots of people have already recapped the conference itself - I’m not going to even try to add to that. I’m also not going to write a post about how fracking awesome everyone is, listing them all by name. I had a blast talking to everyone. They all rock. I am honoured to have had the chance to meet so many great new people, and to hang out with so many old friends. Blah blah blah…
Read MoreJim just asked me about what I used to do a quick Wikipedia search in Safari - I just hit a key combo and a text entry window pops up, where I entered “w trans lux” and got to the wikipedia page for the company behind the awesome Mighty Hercules cartoon.
I’m using Shortwave to search all kinds of crap - it’s like the Firefox search shortcut dealie, except that you don’t have to inflict Firefox on yourself in order to use it. It’s just a javascript bookmarklet that is configured to search a bunch of services, and you can extend it with your own services by editing a text file. I have it set to search my own flickr account for stuff, search my blog, my delicious.com account, etc… Very cool.
Read MoreI’ve been trying to be a voice of reason when it comes to how Apple operates. I’d rather see them as generally trying to do the right thing, but struggling sometimes with some of the nitty gritty things. Like letting individuals interpret blanket policies for what is and is not acceptable in the app store.
I’m fine with Apple deciding that an app is unacceptable if it crashes the iPhone. If it hijacks the cellular network. If it leaks memory, data, or something.
Read MoreUpdate: Converge Magazine refuses to publish any of my comments on their blog, so I’m putting enough info here so that it will show up in google queries: The magazine is “ConvergeMag”, aka “Converge Magazine”, and the principal is Michael Smith, blogger at PrincipalsPage.com - and he is apparently not a principal any more, but is a Superintendent of Oakland CUSD #5 School Board. The article in question is Chocolate Milk Tastes Better When I am Not Being Violated - posted July 23, 2009.
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I left a comment over on Andre’s great post on social media training wheels. Rereading the comment, I wanted to post it here as a fully-fledged blog entry.
We’re at a point where the exact tool selected really doesn’t matter very much anymore. Any of these communities can be built in pretty much any open source web platform. The key is that it’s open source, so it’s easily modifiable (or at least modification is possible), and the ownership of the software and community is located within the institution, rather than at a corporate headquarters.
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