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.
After proceeding through the intersection, the bus started to pass me, and then started entering the right lane as it accelerated. It was not approaching a bus stop, and was driving half way into the right lane, coming within a foot of my handlebars. I had to swerve to the right to avoid being hit.
After the bus finished passing me, it returned to the left lane, and then swerved back into the right lane ahead of me, kicking up a cloud of dust and gravel as it did so. It then returned to the left lane and continued driving up the hill along Scurfield Drive away from me.
There were no obstacles in the left lane. There were no pedestrians or animals. There were no other cars or vehicles moving in either of the two lanes.
I can only imagine 2 scenarios.
In scenario #1, the bus driver was simply unaware that I was there. If so, that is extremely dangerous, as it came up from behind me, and followed me through a controlled intersection. If the driver was unaware that I was in front of the bus (in another lane), it suggests a dangerous level of negligent and erratic driving.
In scenario #2, the bus driver was fully aware that I was driving in front of, and beside, the bus. This would mean that the bus driver intended to enter my lane in an attempt to crowd me off the road or into a parked car. If this is the case, it suggests malicious, dangerous, and aggressive driving.
I ride my bike cautiously, observing all traffic laws. I can think of no action or behaviour that I had taken that might have provoked a driver to attempt to push me off the road, leaving their own lane to do so. The fact that it appeared as though a professional Calgary Transit driver did so is extremely disturbing.
I am extremely concerned about this kind of behaviour. This is now the second time that my life has felt threatened by Calgary Transit drivers.
Unfortunately, at the time of the incident, I was too shaken to remember the bus ID number. It was a #37, traveling north along Scurfield Drive at 5:18pm on Friday April 4.
If there is anything I can do to help ensure that this kind of incident isn’t repeated, please let me know. I couldn’t find anything on the Calgary Transit website about filing a formal complaint, but am interested in doing so if such a process exists.
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).
I’m firmly in the @injenuity “The Network is People” camp. And I freaking LOVE my network.
I’ve been experiencing an annoying glitch on my MacBook Pro since upgrading to MacOSX 10.5 - nothing serious, but occasionally it’d bug me. What happened was, if I opened a Finder window to /Users - it would show every user’s home directory except mine. I mean, I know it’s there, because all of my files are there. And if I used Terminal or remote SSH login, the directory was certainly there, as were all of my files. If I used Finder’s Go to Folder command (Command + Shift + G) I could enter “/Users/dnorman” and all was well.
I think I’m going to like the new media management and gallery system… Multiple file uploads, automatic image resizing (although it looks like my server doesn’t have enough RAM to crunch 8MP photos?) and embeddable galleries? Nice. Wonder if it works…
[gallery]
Yeah. GD or ImageMagick or whatever is used on the server to resize completely barfed on the original 8MP photos I tried to insert - they weren’t resized, so the full photos were embedded on the page. I’ll have to see if there’s a workaround, or just use smaller source images…
