There’s a big “Bike to Work Day” in Calgary on Friday, April 11. The University of Calgary is running a special event on campus as well. It’s pretty safe to say I’ll be biking to work that day (and every other day as well ;-) ) and am looking forward to seeing how many people get into it.
On campus, they’re going to set up greeting/refreshment stations (with prizes!) on all major entrances, and there’s a workshop being put on by the bike club at the Mac Hall loading dock to show basic bike maintenance.
Take 30 minutes and watch Al Gore’s presentation at TED 2008. It’s an update to his first one, and is simultaneously more depressing because of the sheer scale of new data, and much more uplifting when framing the response as a call for higher consciousness to break out of our current democratic crises that are allowing the climate crisis to take place.
I’ve been struggling with what feels like a Twitter addiction for awhile now.
On the one hand, I love and value, even need the sense of community and connectedness that Twitter enables. I feel almost viscerally connected to the core group of people whom I consider my close friends, as well as those who are merely acquaintances and even strangers.
On the other hand, the constant sense of connectedness and the endless stream of updates became a source of discomfort - I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t turn it off. I was constantly “checking in” to see if anything new and interesting had been posted.
I tried to go offline from Twitter all day yesterday.
I failed. Miserably. Wound up posting all kinds of stuff.
I hate that I feel so compelled to constantly “check in” - just in case someone posted something.
I hate that I couldn’t just stop, as I said I would.
It’s not like any critical information came through the pipe. It’s not like I found out anything, except that a few of my friends have similar twittercrack habits.
I was riding my bike home from work today, and pulled up to a 3 way stop on Scurfield Drive and Scenic Acres Boulevard NW. As I was stopping, a bus pulled up behind/beside me (I was in the right lane traveling north on Scurfield Drive, the bus was in the left). I waited for my turn to enter the intersection, and the bus followed me through. I stayed in the right lane, and the bus remained in the left lane through the intersection.
Michael Geist gave a talk at The University of Calgary on April 2, 2008, on the subject of copyright. He talked about the need for Fair Dealings, the dangers of the Canadian DMCA, and even touched on the benefits of open access and even open education.
Dr. Geist’s presentation was very compelling, interesting, and engaging. I believe he was able to communicate the benefits of less-restrictive copyright, and am hoping he helped plant some seeds to get an open content movement going here at The University of Calgary.
I’m going to try producing a series of presentations in various media to document and share some of the tricks I’ve learned in my playing with digital photography. There are lots of other resources out there, so I’m not going to try to be canonical or exhaustive, but will try to answer some of the questions that people ask me.
This first episode is mostly just an intro/warmup for me, and I picked a basic topic: project and album management in Aperture 2.
When I got my 16GB iPod Touch, I knew I’d run out of room. I just didn’t realize how soon I’d do it. Moving from my previous 30GB iPod Video, I had trimmed my music collection - purging all files of questionable origin - and was able to fit everything quite comfortably within 16GB.
But now, with a bunch of TED Talks, some movies, presentations, a schwack of podcasts (I think that’s metric. or is it imperial?), and a bunch of photos, I’m starting to hit the ceiling. 16GB just isn’t enough.
I just got back from Michael Geist’s inspiring presentation “Why Copyright?” - where he laid out some of the issues relating to copyright, open access, sharing, reusing, mashups, and a long list of implications for the potentially pending Canadian DMCA.
It felt like there was much agreement among the faculty and staff who were present for Dr. Geist’s presentation. When he was talking about the need for, and the power of, open access, many heads were nodding. People were agreeing, and it felt like we might be about ready to start moving forward on some Open Content (if not all the way to Open Education) initiatives. I’ve got some ideas that I want to incubate for a bit longer, but I’ll be following up with faculty members to see what we can do to move in that direction.
I just took a quick peek at the “Top Posts & Pages” stats for my blog, as calculated by the WordPress.com Stats system. I had it run the numbers for my most popular posts of all time, and was both surprised and dejected. Apparently, this is not an edublog after all.
I’m actually not sure what kind of blog this is - my most popular post of all time was a comment on potential political/police entrapment of protestors. Followed, way back, by a stupid post on how (the then newly released) Google Maps could see my house. There are a couple of posts with source code or tips. One on MediaWiki. At #19, the first post that might be interpretted as educational in nature - talking about podcasting.
Apparently, my Twitter account became the primary stress test for the cool Tweetcloud service, which crunches through every tweet posted for a given account, and generates a cloud of words ranked by frequency. Although I’ve been posting to Twitter like a madman today, they were actually able to get it to crunch my account:
The 2008/366photos project just hit the 1/4 mark. Just over 91 days in. I’ve been surprised at the number of edu-folk that decided to try the photo-a-day challenge this year. It’s fun, interesting, frustrating, challenging, and sometimes really difficult trying to come up with at least one photograph every day that doesn’t suck (or, hopefully, is interesting and/or good).
So now, we’ve got 40 people in the 366photos group. Currently there are over 1800 photos in the pool. There are likely many photos that are part of the project that aren’t included in the pool (for myself, several are marked as “friends and family” only, because they are photos of my son and/or his cousins).
