Alan’s working up a 5 Card Flickr Story project to show at Northern Voice, and it’s a really fun little application to explore simple visual storytelling. Any photo on Flickr tagged with 5cardnv is sucked into a pool, where 5 photos are chosen at random and presented as a mini story. You can “keep” any of them, or roll the dice for a fresh batch, until you’re happy with the frames of the story.
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I just registered to participate in the 2009 Alberta Ride to Conquer Cancer. It’s an epic 2 day, 200km bike ride in the Rocky Mountains west of Calgary, with riders raising funds to support the Alberta Cancer Foundation.
My goal is to raise $2500. But I need your help. If you can, please sponsor me.
I will be training for the ride, to build up to the longer distances and mountains that will be part of it. It’s going to be one hell of a challenge, but it’s also going to be well worth it.
Read MoreI just cracked open the Google Analytics stats for my blog, and was curious to see how much data was available. I had it display all data (going back as far as November 16, 2005, which is apparently when I first started using Analytics). Google has tracked over 1 million page views on my blog. Over 600,000 unique visitors. The scale of that just blows my mind.
This article is making the rounds, and the comments on the Globe and Mail page are pretty entertaining. Professor Denis Rancourt gave everyone in his fourth year physics class an automatic A+ so they wouldn’t be stressed out over grades and could get into some interesting and meaningful stuff in the class.
I’ll be clear - I think that’s a fantastic idea. I’d maybe pull back a bit and make the course pass/fail rather than automatic A+, but I love the idea of nuking grades and focusing on learning instead.
Read MoreI spent some time this afternoon poking around in the database that runs UCalgaryBlogs.ca to see if I could get a better sense of how it’s growing. Turns out, it’s growing MUCH faster than I thought it was (and I thought it was growing pretty darned fast).
It’s still pretty small scale, compared with giants like WordPress.com and Edublogs.org, but the growth looks pretty much exponential. I’m glad we’ve got lots of room to scale this puppy. And that campus IT isn’t upset with growing demands on database resources.
Read MoreI’m going to be hanging out less on Twitter. I’m not deleting my account or anything rash, but won’t be accessing it from my desktop or laptop. Only from the iPod, where the drain on the battery will keep the nonstop twitterreloading in check.
I got tired of the noise, and the urge to check in on the noise. It’s silly, and distracting.
I’m going to be posting Asides more often on my blog - posts that don’t get published in the main feed, because they may or may not be relevant to whatever this blog is about.
Read MoreTaking a photograph is more about capturing light than documenting a subject.
A simple bottle of pilsner, when placed in the bright morning light, comes alive with refractions, reflections, and shadows. It doesn’t hurt that the bottle is so beautifully designed in a clean and strong 50’s aesthetic with thick green glass and a stylized painted label.
Read MoreIt’s a little strange this year. I haven’t had to struggle to get a daily shot yet. Hope I’m not jinxing it…
I’m actually really happy with the project’s photos so far, and it’s fun to see the recurring themes both within the first month, and compared to the first month of 2008. About the same number of photos of the Bow River in Bowmont. Photos of coffee/muffin breakfast taken on almost the same day of the year. It’s kind of cool to see constants, and how they change over time.
Read MoreThe Cylons were created by Man
They rebelled
They evolved
There are many copies
And they have a plan.
Exhibits A and B:
I’ve been using Drupal to power websites for several years now, since 4.6 was the latest and greatest. One of the constant, ongoing, relentless complaints from our users has been that Drupal is (or seems) too complicated. It seems hard to use. It takes some care and feeding to initially set up a site. For example, when installing Drupal and creating a site, there is no option to have a rich text WYSIWYG editor, out of the box. Sure, übergeeks would rather gnaw off their paws than use a rich text editor, but Real Live Humans™ need them. They need to be able to edit text visually, and to upload and embed media, without having to follow recipes or read through pages of instructions.
Read MoreWow. While surfing the NFB archives, I found the trailer to an upcoming film called RiP: A remix manifesto. An open source film about copyright.
From the NFB page for the movie:
Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 21st century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
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The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.
So the National Film Board of Canada has flung open the vault to make many national treasures freely available online. Wow. This is such an amazing set of resources, covering the entire range of Canadian culture. Films that helped define who we are.
Documentaries like Being Caribou. Churchill’s Island. Short films like 23 Skidoo. Art films like 21-87. Animated films like Afterlife.
I will now do my best attempt at channeling The Reverend…
One of the crown jewels. Log Driver’s Waltz.
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