cc licensed flickr photo shared by Johnny Grim

Dear Chrome Browser,

Despite our early leaps for joy I am sorry, but to quote BB King, The Thrill is Gone. Despite your spryness in startup and the slickness of the location/search bar, this relationship is just not working out. You have more than lost your shine.

You have really let me down. I cannot go on like this.

How? Do we have to keep going through your faults?

Ok, if you insist.

Today you just broke me with your penchant for inserting unwanted HTML cruft in a simple copy paste. Geez, if I wanted that, I’d be using MS Word. This has gone on again and again, as I work on a Wikispaces blog. Let’s say i want to copy a snippet of formatted text to another document (which works on every other browser as a format-preserved copy)

It’s just a heading and a bullet point. Yet, pasted into a new wiki page editor, it has something extra.. when I go to the wiki source, I see all kinds of <span> cruft:

==<span style="font-size: 1.4em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 5px;">**1) How might this technology be relevant to the educational sector you know best?**</span>== * <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 3em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0.5em;">your response here</span>

When the source it is copied from is simply

==**1) How might this technology be relevant to the educational sector you know best?**== * your response here

WTF with the extra stuff?

But before you go blaming Wikispaces, take this one on- I copied some text from my plain text editor (BBEdit) into a text field of a web site I wrote. Upon submission of the form, the content kept breaking, breaking (I have a routine that converts all URLs to hyperlink HTML). It worked perfectly in all the other browsers, but YOU inserted stray linefeeds that were not in the source.

Sure, there are extensions that make it possible for me to copy text unformatted- but I want some of the format– just what is in the source. And just for the spite of it, when I did enable the unformatted text copy extension– it broke the WordPress editor’s ability to add a hyperlink (the URL pasted into the tool was discarded and it used the highlighted text instead; which is useless)

Speaking of extensions, oh my. Although you list all kinds of Extensions (and it was slick how you made Greasemonkey compatible), I found many of them would just stop working after a while, forcing a restart to rejuvenate them.

You want more? My, the techies created you, but don;t you think you can manage to handle an RSS or XML URL without barfing? Safari has had rendering in the browser pane for years. You give me text and I have to view source to see the content.

I’m sorry Chrome, but its over. I’m back with Firefox, and on the OS X dock I use Safari, Camino, Opera for keeping me logged into my multiple accounts. None of them have put me through the hoops you have done to me… You’ve been cast off my dock.

Browsers are fluid, and the relationships are always in flux, so don’t take it personally. Maybe you’ll get your act together, but I’ll need some assurance you’ve really worked through your issues.

I just cannot take any more heartbreak with my content. Please don’t beg me to come back, it’s not dignified.

Take care of yourself, I am sure you can find another who does not mind your ways. But it ain;t me.

CogDog

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cobalt123

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

For someone who spent their first 27 years where the sky was the roof of the world, Willa Cather’s words are ones that truly paint the immensity of the western sky (from the New Mexico landscape she describes in Death Comes for the Archbishop).

I sit here now on my floor for the night sky that shows more lights than I had ever imagined growing up in Maryland, a place where I really can see the Milky Way.

It’s one thing to talk about it, another to feel the immense blue arc of a sky in the western places where the land feels flattened beneath it- my first taste was the open-ness under the South Dakota sky in 1987, and almost anytime I drive north to the high desert of Arizona:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

That Cather sky roof is raised even higher by one of the summer thunderstorm clouds

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

So what’s with all this waxing about clouds and skies? It’s that space it creates, its that smallness you feel as one person, yet it reeks of possibility and opportunity– it is the essence, for me, of everything when we talk of Openness.

In education, this feels like its being talked about more. It hit the mid-range timeline of this year’s Horizon Report, it was the theme of the EDUCAUSE Review summer edition, people are running and talking more of open courses– and all of this is good, but to me, openness, or rather Openness- goes way beyond the sky roof of courses, open resources, licenses, etc.

It is the Sky! The Sky! what I thought I aimed for at the 2009 Open Education Conference with the first Amazing Stories show– actually it was Nancy White’s words that still ring for me, her very last words in a video recorded for her story:

Openness. is not really about the resources, its an attitude.

Even more than an attitude, it’s a mindset, it’s a way fo being without having to think about it- the colleagues I know who live and work this way do it just as natural as breathing. They live under the Big Sky. The Sky! The sky!

Enter today when George Siemens shared this sad tale on Openness- but only it is closed. The Chronicle of Higher Education, that bastion of… well whatever, but they had interviewed George and Stephen Downes and others for their article on open courses– Online, Bigger Classes May Be Better Classes.

An article published on the open web about open courses… is closed behind a pay wall. Subscribers only. Those of us who live under the Big Sky of Openness get 90 words- and then the article is truncated in mid-sentence.

The absurdity is stunning, and even if they wake up Monday and read the memo and change this– it still painfully shows that a lot of people don’t “get” Nancy White’s attitude.

They don’t live under the Big Sky. They don’t even know it is there.

But rather than ridiculing them (well I guess it’s too late), I want to bundle them up out of their cloistered East Coast Roof Sky, drive them out beyond the plains, and have them breathe that Big Sky. You don’t even know a thing about it, till you found your neck craning back, lost in it’s reach and height, from the floor of Willa Cather’s earth.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by HeatherKaiser

The sky-ness of it all was brought out by a recent re-re-re-re-reading of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire , his May chapter (“Cliffrose and Bayonets”) when he surveys his “garden”. That is a euphemism for the entire stretch of land out the front of his trailer.

It probably means nothing if you’ve never stood under the Big Sky in the open desert, but if you have, you’ll know exactly what this feels like.

The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna; life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Not only love, much more flowers best in openness and freedom. It’s not that complex.

You just need to look at the sky. The sky! The sky!

Understanding openness and its opposite, is as simple as “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.”

You are free to live in your world under the roof of a sky, but I prefer and have chosen to live on the floor under the Big Sky.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Larry Johnson

It’s been a week since I got back from my London Calling trip– I was wondering what sort of prophetic paragraphs I could write, or somehow to try and distill all the senses and sounds of such a place into words. I #fail.

So down below I have lopped in my pile of media- flickr photos, some place tagging in a Google Map, and a video of my obligatory Abbey Road crosswalk walk.

In my time, I walked as much as possible- I did easily figure out navigating the city via the Tube, but there is something about being in cities and seeing them afoot that I enjoy best. Highlights? Many- photographing the city at night (out past midnight with larry the first night, jat lag, what jet lag? see his great photos); wandering into a pub and finding the sport on TV was diving, watching the night lights of the city turn on from a river boat bar, visiting futurelab in Bristol, river boat ride to London Tower Bridge (perfect lighting) and Greenwich, seeing Babbage’s brain at the Science museum, a fun meetup at Slu and Lettuce arranged by @GianninaRossini, plus meeting Matt Jukes and Rachel Bruce there too, doing my Beatles walk, getting tossed out of the London Geological Society, gins and tonics, Indian food, meeting André Avorio (thanks for a twitter introduced by Barbara Dieu), seeing Prom 47 at Royal Albert Hall (getting slightly lost walking back at 1am), meeting up and seeing the Tate and Soho with Josie Fraser, the British Museum…. well saying it like that filled the space.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions on my Dog Calling London wiki- I annotated with what I followed up on. Here is a Google Map with a number of my stops:

View London Dog Calling in a larger map

And my photos are flickr-set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157624634053489/

Last, what is essentially fan’s pilgrimage, I made it a point to go out and visit Abbey Road, the place the fab Four did that famous walk across the street. It’s chock full of people like me, taking photos, walking back and forth, as well as ordinary people just trying to get somewhere. I made a gaffe by not bringing something to write with, as they allow, even encourage people to sign the white wall out in front.

They even offer the The Crossing a web site that runs a live web cam pointing at the spot. If you go there the same day, you can find your own footage– I did that the night after my visit, and used software to grab a recording of my little segments, and mixed it into this little video:

That was a fun one to edit.

London is huge, epic, and has more museums per capita than maybe anywhere- how can one person take it all in? In small bits, and then get the taste to return.

I hope to do that.

A tin full of stuff. Scout knife. Cuff links. Engraved bracelet. Puzzle game.

A tin full of my Dad’s stuff.

It’s just stuff.

But it was my Dad’s stuff.

Friday marked the day nine years ago Morris Levine left this earth. You don’t forget your loved ones, but their presence ebbs and flows without much regular pattern, except twice a year. First is May, for his birthday, a day I wish I could have back again to celebrate, and late August (2 days ago), the day I wish I could give back again.

Can it be nine years? I try cycling back to where I was, who I was, what mattered in August 2001. There was no user’s guide (and if there was I would not have read it anyhow) for dealing with your parent’s death, especially when it was the cancerous impending one that just unravels in front of you. My way to deal with this time was to tell his story, in a web site, started before he passed away, and finished afterward. My way is to do write something, photograph something on these two days a year.

Nine years? I play with math. I am now the age my Dad was in 1974. He still had another 15 or 18 years of work before retiring. He was in his rhythm of cutting the grass and washing the car. It was maybe a year after the oil embargos; I remember him waiting in line to buy gas that was suddenly much more expensive that before (but insanely cheap compared to now).

But those are just the snapshot bits I have as watching him as an 11 year old kid. What did I know of his thoughts? Dreams? Hopes? Worries? I have the hardest time trying to imagine my father as a man the same age I am now. I cannot warp time like that.

So the stuff in the can came from my Mom after Dad died. I don;t know why, but it helps just to open that box every now and then and look at it.

There was something else in there- his last wallet. Hah, what can define a man more than his wallet? It is something that sits close to him every day . I don’t think I had looked at it before; it looked empty. But flipping it open, I found some artifacts in the back pocket

He has my business card from the job at I held at the time (at Maricopa Community Colleges) with his familiar, careful block letter writing (something I did not inherit) with my cell phone number at the time. There his his Lee County Library card- he got a lot of joy in retirement volunteering at the library. That’s what I knew of that time, but did I know what that joy was about? Did we ever talk about it?

And then the hand written piece of paper with my coordinates from the year before, in 2000 when I had my sabbatical visit toi New Zealand and Australia, and more or less blogged it (before there was blog software, this was hand writing HTML posts and uploading photos every day) on my own web site http://dommy.com/az2nzau.

He followed my web site continuously from his home in Florida, even printing it off into a thick folder, a paper archive of a web version of a trip. It’s one of those things he did that silently spoke in volumes.

There again, that hand writing, so… Dad-like. Most of his communications to me were in hand written letters, pages and pages where he expressed himself more comfortably than talkin— wait a minute, now I know something perhaps I did get from him.

We did talk though on the phone, and in the Arizona portion of my life (after 1987) we had this tradition of me calling him (in jest) “Old Man” and him calling me “Junior”. That I can feel, in my ears, in my heart,

So now I sit here trying to unravel that time for him has stopped, frozen in memories, photos, words, a tin full of stuff, yet for me it flows on, to some place I cannot yet see. I will, in time, like he did.

Tweetbeat Firsthand hovers somewhere between subtly amazing and “meh”. But I’ve giving it a whirl.

What it is, is a browser plugin/extension (works with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari… there is some irony about the other browser shrinking in the mist of obscurity).

What it does is to figure out in the text of a web page, the name of something that has a twitter account, and it places a little “t” icon into the web page. For example, on a recent post here about open courses, Tweetbeat identifies George Siemens from the text in my article:

(I cannot explain its ability to identify George Siemens as having a twitter account but miss Stephen Downes (@downes– it opens the door for some George vs Stephen fun, but let’s move on).

So it lets me know, when looking at web content, who the companies and people are with twitter accounts. That’s not really compelling. But what is– is when you hover over the “t”, and it loads the latest tweets from that person:

Hmmm, that gets more interesting. Gets me activity streams on people and companies in any web content. Then from the Tweetbeat box, if you click share–

So this uses the new Twitter Tweet this functionally to say “I am tweeting about seeing George’s twitter stuff in this web page.”

One more click- where it says “learn more at Kosmix” — gets you to an entire page about George that seems to be assembled from many bits of Georgeness out there- from Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Howcast, Google Blog Search, and more:

Semantic or not?

Well that’s all nice for George, but what about me?

My listing in Kosmix seems to mash me up with a baseball player and a doctor from Louisiana… I do a little better searching for CogDog, but its still awry. (I am looking at the ads and wondering about my cousin Larry (Levine) and his polyester pants… but Alisha Levine is lookin’ HOT.

I guess it pays to be George

I’m not 100% on the long term value for using Tweetbeat Firsthand, but the relationships it draws, even when not 100% correct, is an interest way to link by assumption or known relationship.

What do you think? Keep or eject?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jenny P.

If we just lived our lives out by setting, pursuing, and meeting objectives, what a sterile world it would be. Here;s to what you learn when you are not expecting too, and for surfing by serendipity.

Serendipity is following the curious post titles in your RSS reader, leading my to Andy Rush sharing his discovery of a utility called Evom (well that was a nice find there– ).

But since Andy played around with the backwards spelling things– I thought it would be fun to write a bit of my comments in reverse text.

Now I thought I did this in BBEdit before, but I think I did something insane like a grep search to put each letter on a separate line, a reverse line sort, and a search and replace on the line return characters.

Surel;y someone has created something like that already– googled a bit on on reverse text generator, and what do you know? The first hit is Lucky-

The Reverse Text Generator does not only backward, but also Flipped, and Upside Down:

So playing with my opening sentence, I can do things like:

.ytipidneres yb gnifrus rof dna ,oot gnitcepxe ton era uoy nehw nrael uoy tahw ot s;ereH .eb dluow ti dlrow elirets a tahw ,sevitcejbo gniteem dna ,gniusrup ,gnittes yb tuo sevil ruo devil tsuj ew fI

or

Fi ew tsuj devil ruo sevil tuo yb gnittes, gniusrup, dna gniteem sevitcejbo, tahw a elirets dlrow ti dluow eb. Ereh;s ot tahw uoy nrael nehw uoy era ton gnitcepxe oot, dna rof gnifrus yb ytipidneres.

and the ever useful

˙ʎʇıdıpuǝɹǝs ʎq ƃuıɟɹns ɹoɟ puɐ ‘ooʇ ƃuıʇɔǝdxǝ ʇou ǝɹɐ noʎ uǝɥʍ uɹɐǝן noʎ ʇɐɥʍ oʇ s؛ǝɹǝɥ ˙ǝq pןnoʍ ʇı pןɹoʍ ǝןıɹǝʇs ɐ ʇɐɥʍ ‘sǝʌıʇɔǝɾqo ƃuıʇǝǝɯ puɐ ‘ƃuınsɹnd ‘ƃuıʇʇǝs ʎq ʇno sǝʌıן ɹno pǝʌıן ʇsnɾ ǝʍ ɟı

And this is just one of 20 free tools in the TextMechanic’s toolbox- a lot of them extremely useful.

So a little bit of goofing off, and I find something like this.

As Rick Schwier said…

But more so, it always sends a ripple down the spine, when I stare at this screen and knowing I am looking at a doorway to the infinite– not that the internet is really infinite, but relative to what I can know, see touch of it– it might as well be.

And there is infinitely more to know and find than what I can store in that grey spongy mass upstairs.

Goofing off is part of my method. And blecch to all my grade school teachers who scolded me for that.

Bleccch.

I ride the InfiniVerse.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jase The Bass

I have an addiction.

It involves…. cameras.

Since 2008, I’ve been in a flickr group of people sharing daily photos; we are now at 500. No one is in charge, no one makes rules. I’ve also been participating in the dailyshoot version since November 2009.

I cannot stop. My day is wrong if I am not finding imagery in it, and then reflecting on it later in the day (or at 2am in the evening).

But every time I do this process, every day, I am either stretching my ability on photography or creatively trying to write captions to make my photos fit the themes. It is daily creation, and as a metronome in my life, it is a steady creative click.

I’m using this loosely as a metaphor for learning in at least two upcoming presentations, so I’m casting a call (again) for help. No, Dean “I Always Cooperate” Shareski, I am not making you do another another video

The first one I am up for is the KU Village Online Conference next month- an online conference run by Kaplan University, and I am sharing the stage with people like Alec Couros (who is everywhere and anywhere and fabulous) and Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth has one of the best twitter icons and and shared stuff).

The conference is September 20 – 23, 2010– and the blurb reads

Here at the KU Village, we can get to know each other in the Village Square, share our ideas about teaching and learning at the conference events, and learn about emerging technologies that will change the virtual and site-based classroom experiences as we wander in the Greenhouse. It’s our time, so let’s have some fun and share the experience!

The theme of KU Village 2010 is “Connect, Communicate, and Collaborate.” KU Village 2010 will provide presentations on the following topics:

* Standards for academic excellence
* Innovations in the classroom
* Collaborative teaching techniques and initiatives
* Global learning and diversity
* Commitment to educational values and student support
* Technology tools and applications

You can register at http://www.kuvillage.org/ (it is free if you work for Kaplan University, US$95 for everyone else).

Okay. My session is loosely titled Say It in Photos, and in part of it, I am wanting to talk about what happens to people when they decided to take on doing a Photo a Day project.

So I am seeking a few testimonials or stories of what the experience of doing this has meant for people– please drop a few words for me at http://bit.ly/dailyphoto-stories.

I’ll also be doing a bit of five card flickr stories for them… if you want to add a few photos into the mix, just tag some new ones in flickr as fiveku and people will start making stories (or you can, it’s open).

Thanks.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It’s been about 24 hours I’ve been back from my week in London (and it took another 24 hours to do all the travel stops to do that). I have a dog blog back load of stuff to post, but I seem to be having trouble with the bulldozer I hired to clean off my work plate.

So here it is in little dribs and drabs. At the Slug and Lettuce meetup organized by @Gia, I was fortunate to talk to Leon Cych (@eyebeam) who does some fascinating work in gaming and education. He showed a nifty little iPhone app that I like especially for its simplicity.

It is called the Random Activity Generator (or RAG). It sets up everything in a DO – AS structure…

The “DO” is a topic or concept that a person might be asked to demonstrate as an activity. The “AS” is the way in which a person must try to present it. So you simply shake the iPhone, and you get an assignment like:

“Do the twelve times table as a rhyming couplet”

The green arrow offers a web link to more information on either side of the “Do/As” line- links to WikiPedia for reference or YouTube videos to demonstrate a process.

Maybe that would go…

Twelve times one is an easy one on the shelf
It’s 12 Since anything times one is itself.

If you do twelve times two it’s a simple chore
As doing this one gets you twenty four

Or another shake gets you…

I will leave this one as an exercise to the reader

Technically its a really simple app. But I like it because

• it leads to being creative.
• It is a technology tool that sets up an activity that is not done in technology. The app gives you something to do, but it is not done in the app. So you might have to act it out in front of a group, or maybe you would build the act in say a pecha kucha form, or something else.
• It is inherently social- you would do the activity in front of other people.
• The format lends itself to further research- if you do not fully know the “do” or the “act” (I had to look up rhyming couplet to be sure), it calls for further inquiry.

It’s a great recipe. The web site has a great set of video examples of how people have “done the RAG” http://theragis.us/

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I was told London was rainy and gray, but so far (apply jinx here), the weather has been stunning. This is just a brief bit to say, “Yo London”– this is my first visit to the UK and the first few days have gone by in a blur. A growing photo set is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157624634053489/

There was not too much of a jet lag blur arriving early Sunday, getting the train from Heathrow to Paddington Station, and then to the hotel we used on Southbank. The next day it was on the move again, riding the train to Bristol, where Monday was an NMC meeting day with the folks at futurelab, where we found a lot of collaboration points, and a mind opening view to a wide array of creative projects that have come out of that old warehouse by the waterfront.

Then Tuesday it was back to London, and mid day grays gave way to some stunning evening light for some photos of the London Tower Bridge (above) and then a nice nighttime boat ride to Greenwich and back.

Yesterday I had time to pay a visit to the Museum of London, and filled my head with more than i knew before of city history, and I played around as well with their nifty iPhone augmented reality app (“Street Museum”) which provides geolocated historic photos that overlay on the present view– a fab way to marry the past to the present. I got my taste of riding the Tube (very well organized and easy) and have had my sampling of English breakfasts and warm ale.

We also got a stop at the London Science Museum, where we took in the history of computing exhibit, where i was surprised/amused to see Charles Babbage’s brain sitting in a jar atop one of the examples of his Difference Machines that had been built from his designs.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

it was also neat to see in an exhibit on plastics (might there be an industry supporter? oops) – an example of RepRap- a 3D printer technology we’ve featured before in NMC horizon Reports

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Today is one more move to a different hotel over the river- the NMC part of the trip is done, and I have three more days to explore and gawk like a tourist.

I’m open to more ideas (they have been super helpful so far) — shared via my wiki http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/LondonCalling

If you are in London and want to say hi, there is a meetup at Slug and Lettuce on 5 Lisle Street tonight at 6pm organized by @GianninaRossini.

This is a quick one cause I still see blue skies out there! Time to go bark around town.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ~Aphrodite

After all these years (this march will be the 7th) I still love flickr most of all what has become Web 2.0 – the Vancouver crew that fortunately failed on Game Never Ending (that explains the .gne extensions on some of the flickr URLs) for it right on social media, long before we had a name for it.

And for me, it was the social tagging that lit a fire that continues to flame. I’m not going to wax on about all the ways tagging enables ways to share, find, connect, externally republish photos (oops, that’s a little wax), but there has been something I’ve noticed yet forgotten about.

I tag my own photos, well some.many of us do. We know where it was taken, we have some internal scheme for organizing (photos from a conference with s shared tag, photos to be pushed to a web site, photos form your daily photo project).

But if I find one of your photos, and want to use tags to pool or group it with the same tag I am using– for the most part, I cannot add tags to your photos. Well, I could, if you had modified your permissions from the default, as mine are:

I typically notice this in the Spring, when I prepare our social media aspects for the NMC Summer conference. Typically, there are no tagged photos, so I like to start with ones from the city the conference is held in. But How can I get tagged photos for a city I’ve not been to? What I try is to ask our conference hosts tot do some for me. But if I search in flickr, most of the creative commons photos I find, which are set to be openly used through the license, most are not open for me to add, say an nmc2011 tag

Because its not the default, and people mostly are not aware if it.

But if you live in ir have photos of Madison, Wisconsin, please tag tag tag some local photos nmc2011).

If you believe in openness and sharing, and you participate in flickr, shouldn’t you open your photos to be tggged by others?

If you tag why not let yourself be tagged?

I find it interesting to see what others tag my photos (I see notice of this in the RSS feed for my flickr activity). Wouldn’t it be illustrative to see what descriptive words other people see in your photos, perhaps themes, metaphors you do not see yourself? Wouldn’t it expand the findability of images via tags if others could do the work for you?

Sure, I guess someone would look at my photo of myself and tag it “dorkbutt” or “loser” but you can remove those. That, to me, is an edge case. Well, maybe it is a pretty regular tag applied by others to my photos.

And until most of the flickr userbase follows my wishes (dreaming), wouldn’t it be useful if flickr allowed an advance search for photos that are open to be tagged? I can think of all kinds of interesting activities and apps that could work off of that.

Let yourself be tagged, just modify your account settings. Open up your photos to community tagging…

I found the site that creates these fun ID cards a while ago (it probably came from the Generator Blog), but yes, I am a card carrying Agent.

I might be armed.

Or pawed.

Of course this may not quite as good as Scott Leslie‘s real business card that says “Shit Disturber”.

Twitter has created a new widget that makes it more friendly to provide a tweet this button from your own web sites, blogs, etc. The benefit is that it pops a window up with the twitter functionality, so you are not sending people from the web site.

See the announcement from the twitter blog to learn more. The tweetbutton creation widget makes it easy to generate the code, and has a umber of options to choose from for the appearance of the button and what gets prefilled in the tweet (plus with their new url shortener t.co is one letter shorter than competitors!).

The sample code includes a Javascript link to the library that provides the functionality-

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="none" data-via="cogdog">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

This works well on a WordPress single post template, where it pulls the url for the current page and provides a tweet button where-ever you like it. I put mine in the header tag that displays the blog post.

I also want on my main index page and archives where there are multiple posts. Here is how I set it up.

First I put the Javascript link in the header template, inside the <head>…</head>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

This way we only load this library once, and now can use the code on any web page.

Now on my single post I can use the rest of the widget code to add my button (sans the javascript tags)

<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?> <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="none" data-via="cogdog">Tweet</a></h1>

That was easy.

But I wanted more- I would like it on each post on the front of my blog.

That is also easy.

For the main page template, index.template, we cannot use the basic code because it posts the URL and title for the current page in view (just my blog) rather than for each post in the loop. This is easily rectified using the WordPress loop variables, so inside my loop where it is moving through posts, I have:

<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permalink to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" data-count="none" data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>" data-via="cogdog">Tweet</a></h2>

so I am populating the data-url and the data-text fields with the permalink and post title as WordPress moves through the loops. Try it out on http://cogdogblog.com/ – each post title has its own tweet this button.

I can now add this to archives, search result templates etc.

I like the functionality and am looking at rolling it as well into our NMC fleet of web sites.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by boskizzi

Disclaimer. I have nothing but utmost respect and admiration for the people who are stretching (literally) the concepts of what is a “course” by experimenting with the form of an “open course”, one with a set of students taking it for traditional credit,. but potentially more, maybe thousands (?) who can participate by the generosity (or interests) of people running the course.

It is so much Dave-like to read Dave Cormier saying why he does it:

I freely contribute my time to some courses, and am paid to teach others. I ‘believe’ that working in the open makes my own work better, gives me broader access to other people’s idea and, well, i find it fun.

It tears at the silo-ed nature of courses, it aims to melt the walls enough to leverage the power of networked learning. The latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review has a fantastic buffet of articles on the Open theme (I am still bellying up to the table to read these).

So it’s all good stuff. I have some quibbles (hence the barking) in some ways people are looking at open courses that seem to fall back on traditionalist views of courses. It’s mainly when people talk about “drop-outs” or “why people don’t stay in open courses” (recently well summarized among other points by Dave Cormier).

I’m one of those people. I’ve signed up for every Connectivism course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes and a few more… and I am also one who falls off the edge of participation. The notion of “drop out” seems to assume that the measure of success is people doing all the assignments/activities from start to finish, filling the forums and blog space with their activity.

But that negates the possibility that people pick and choose what they want to participate in.

The openness door ought to swing both ways, right?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by yewenyi

I already wrote my thoughts in a comment to Dave’s post:

What is wrong with choosing some minimal or micro level to be in an open course? Is the only way to get something out of such a course is to be an active over-achiever in the forums? Why am I a no good drop out if I choose to pick the parts that interest me and leave the rest? Is it open or not, cause I smell a wee bit of hypocrisy if the assumption is I have to have a high attendance rate in an open course.

Or maybe I really am a loser drop out, someone who does not stick to the pace of the course, a lazy dog if you will.

As previously blogged, the motivation to do what it takes to be a DIY type student is, to me, a place where there is a wide open gap of understanding.

And I am a bit saddened if really the best motivator is the pursuit of credit as Lisa Lane suggests — there is nothing wrong with credit for open courses, in fact, there ought to be more of it to legitimize the concept. Yes, wouldn’t it be sad if that was the only successful motivator?

But I really want to know more about people who end being highly motivated or active in open courses who are not doing it for the carrot of credit. I want to know more of what makes those people tick.

The other thing is that the majority of open courses I have come across (and I do not claim to know them all) are about open education or education technology. I’m not really ready to put the victory dance out on open courses, until we see some examples in say, poetry, history, math.

And frankly, the open courses, marched to the beat of a fixed time length syllabus, might be seen as an incremental step from (I guess they would be called) closed courses? Non open courses? Are there other models than attaching the open network to a fixed course?

Believe me, I’m all over the joy of openness- but it really ought to swing wide open

Thanks to Alec Couros for tweeting about this video, that plays with an interesting style of fast cutting disparate video segments by their connection over words. It’s an interesting exercise to follow the visual/video representation of words in such quick jumps.

Apparently this was done as support for a new episode of RadioLab (one of my favorite podcasts, yes, old fashioned subscribe and download automagically, the way we did it back in 2006)

Following the credits, this is one of many fascinating videos and visual sites created by everynone, and I found myself falling down various rabbit holes to Routines or the multiple viewpoints done as Four Corners of Health Insurance.

Despite some claims, there’s no end to the magic and creativity of the internet. Nothing even close to the end. Please keep the lights on.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bitzcelt

Elwood: It’s 106 miles to get this sidebar coded, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.
Jake: Hit it.

I have no idea why I opened this way except for Jim Groom Inspiration.

But to jive my code chops, there’s nothing more energizing than doing a little hack and chop coding in WordPress.

Today I was again doing some sidebar fine tuning on the NMC MIDEA web site (previously covered in my almost done series on doing custom post types in WordPress 3.0).

It was one of those “oh this might take 20 minute” deals that ended up going a bit longer. but like Jake and Elwood, when you gotta go to Chicago, you drop the sunglasses and hit it.

And this is pretty simple, and most likely there is a plugin that already does what I needed, but sometimes, it is just worth the effort to roll your own code. It’s the same joy of actually doing something in your car engine that actually does not result in flames or calling a tow truck.

What we have on this site is a number of accounts, me as admin, some staff as editors, and a few guest bloggers, with roles as authors. The category our gues authors blog under is called “Ideas“, and my idea was to add to the template sidebar, above the part where widgetized stuff happens, a blurb and a listing of our guest bloggers. I also liked the feature of not listing authors who have yet to post.

At first it seemed like the function wp_list_authors would do, but it has no way to list just authors of a certain role- it is meant for all authors (you can hide the administrator; I thought by making all our staff admins it would work, but that did not).

I scoured a few plugins, but most are widget oriented (its a long explanation, but because this only appears on category archives, doing a special set of widgets was overload) or or geared for listing author avatars.

Next I googled and found a custom function from WP Engineer that at first looked good, but it was written for previous versions of WordPress- things have really changed from the early days of basing author capabilities on an integer user role number, though the info is still there in the database. I started editing their script to get it to work, going back and forth to phpMyAdmin to run test queries.

it ended up sort of working, but still was not what I sought. I wanted it (a) to not only list the authors, but link to their profiles; (b) list the number of posts the author has written like the wp_list_authors() function does; (c) skip authors that have not posted (again like wp_list_authors() function does); and (d) list the authors in alphabetical order of their last name… which I did not find anywhere.

With some more elbow grease I more or less got it going, but really though the code was not quite as lean as it should be (this is the place where it may not pay to keep coding, but now Jake and Elwood were only 50 miles from the Windy City, and they could see the glow of light on the horizon).

There is actually quite a bit of fine grained tuning you can do for blog user accounts, down to the specific capabilities, and you can add/remove what accounts can do beyond the basic titles of “author” editor (see Roles and Capabilities). Most of this seems put to use for creators of plugins.

But with another round of Googling, I found the function I was looking for from Steve Taylor- it would return a list of ids of users that had a given role, and it made my code a lot shorter.

Only 25 miles til Chi-Town, boys….

I still ended up rolling some bits to do the parts I wanted… so here are the two functions I added to my functions.php template to generate a list of users with a given role as a >ul<…>/ul&lt list, in alphabetical order by last name (I made all the accounts, so I know they have these parts completed), skipping users with no posts…

It is pretty heavily commented, and ought to be semi-explanatory…

function getUsersByRole( $role ) { // find all users with given role // via http://sltaylor.co.uk/blog/get-wordpress-users-by-role/ if ( class_exists( 'WP_User_Search' ) ) { $wp_user_search = new WP_User_Search( '', '', $role ); $userIDs = $wp_user_search->get_results(); } else { global $wpdb; $userIDs = $wpdb->get_col(' SELECT ID FROM '.$wpdb->users.' INNER JOIN '.$wpdb->usermeta.' ON '.$wpdb->users.'.ID = '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.user_id WHERE '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.meta_key = \''.$wpdb->prefix.'capabilities\' AND '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.meta_value LIKE \'%"'.$role.'"%\' '); } return $userIDs; } function midea_list_authors($user_role='author', $show_fullname = true) { // Generate a list of authors for a given role // default is to list authors and show full name global $wpdb; $blog_url = get_bloginfo('url'); // store base URL of blog $holding_pen = array(); // this is cheap, a holder for author data echo '<ul>'; // get array of all author ids for a role $authors = getUsersByRole( $user_role ); foreach ( $authors as $item ) { // get number of posts by this author; custom query $post_count = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT COUNT( * ) as cnt FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_author =" . $item . " AND post_type = 'post' AND post_status = 'publish'"); // only output authors with posts; ugly way to get to the result, but it works.... if ($post_count[0]->cnt) { // load info on this user $author = get_userdata( $item); // store output in temp array; we use last names as an index in this array $holding_pen[$author->last_name] = '<li><a href="' . $blog_url . '/author/' . $author->user_login . '"> ' . $author->display_name . ' (' . $post_count[0]->cnt . ')</a> </li>'; } } // now sort the array on the index to get alpha order ksort($holding_pen); // now we can spit the output out. foreach ($holding_pen as $key=>$value) { echo $value; } echo '</ul>'; }

And this is simply called in my main sidebar.php template… I use a conditional to insert it where I want, so it only appears on the archives for the “ideas” category (I made the defaults of my function match my use case… sue me!)

<?php if (is_category('ideas')) : ?> <h3>MIDEA Ideas</h3> <p>Our panel of guest bloggers, all of them experts in the museum and technology field, bring you food for thought. </p> <?php midea_list_authors(); ?> <?php endif?>

And with that, welcome to the big city… see it in action

And the boys are now in town!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cszar

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Will Pate (the irony of this photo is it pre-dates twitter!)

We’re trying out a new strategy/approach/technology for our communication via twitter for NMC. Up to know, for an organization, we have the typical approach of having an “official” account @newmediac (Neil M. Cameron got there first – you have to roll with that; my thinking of “newmediac” = new media + maniac).

For our twitter account I use Twitter Tools in our WordPress sites and TwitterFeed for our drupal site to push certain content out. I’ve also set it up with HootSuite to provide a way for other NMC staff to send messages out (HootSuite allows us to do this w/o sharing the account password and to schedule tweets, yes three are a number of other tools to do this).

This works, but it is an approach of having one entity to represent an organization. And this makes sense if you are a Big Giant Conglomerate with Postions Like Social Media Spokesperson or even a PR person.

But we are small, and the nebulous organization account pretty much masks the fact that we are a group of individuals.

So I’ve been experimenting with a new avenue, as suggested by Beth Kanter, called ConnectTweet

ConnectTweet allows the contributors to your central Twitter stream to continue to use their personal accounts that they are familiar with, no new logins to remember. This approach also allows your organization’s followers to discover the Twitter streams of the unique individuals that make up your company.

It works like this- once our @newmediac account is set up on ConnectTweet, I can add the twitter handles of people in our organization (or anyone I like) whose tweets can be selectively be re-broadcasted via our main account.

The method is similar to the way, if you associate your twitter account with your facebook account, that you can filter the tweets that go there by including a #fb tag — in ConnectTweet, if anyone whose account I’ve identified, sends out a tweet with #nmc, our @newmediac account will essentially retweet it, and give attribution to the tweeter.

For example, I tested with this message (yes not all that original…):

and in a few minutes, automatically, @newmedic sends its own message via ConnectTweet:

I rather like this as our NMC staff can more easily, via their own twitter accounts, send a message that goes to a different channel of followers.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by -Christophoros-

Or maybe you see it as spammy, re-tweeting yourself? i dont think so, but we are exploring it over the next few weeks.

I want to thank Ben Hedrington for giving us an early in to try ConnectTweet.

I have a few upcoming presentations where I plan to use Five Card Flickr Stories so was compelled to try and toss a few more code tweaks onto the bin.

The newest is an ability, when a story is published, to see for one one photo, all the other stories that it appears in. So for example, looking at this story, “all me”:

Below the image credits is a new set of thumbnails- so you can click any of them to see, oh, all the stories that used that fun photo of Nancy White:

This was more to see if this was potentially interesting/useful. My ideal was to have the links as hover notes over the story images, but my CSS chops fell short… can always try later. It’s my code and I’ll change if I want to….

Other options would be to create a gallery listing to list in order of most stories that used a single photo (the Ace of Spades display). I’ve also toyed with making a page with a grid of random images so that one could pick the first card in your hand- sort of like 4 card draw.

None of this is yet reflected in my source code, want to try it out a bit first.

Play a hand?

Also, for anyone adding cards to the system by tagging flickr photos 5cardflickr, honestly it really works best for new uploaded photos. I’m polling once an hour for newly tagged photos. There’s a bit of trickery, as the flickr API grabs maybe 100 or 200 newly tagged photos in my calls, so its a challenge to reach back in time without a boat load of API calls to filter by date.

UPDATE (Aug 6, 2010)
I pawed around with the qTip library and jQuery to update this so I have a hover box that appears on an image mouseover, allowing the link to see more stories with the same photo. I had to munge a bit (5 separate constructors) to get it to work, but it is cleaner!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by michael.heiss

Given the rising tide/trend of electronic books, for a number of months I’ve been pondering how to make our NMC publications available in an ebook format. With the push of an iThing it looked like ePub was the format to aim for. It is after all, a standard (or is it a guideline).

My experience suggests it is a muddy place, much depends on the devices that access the content (oi the browser wars of the 1990s), but this is a stream of what I’ve figured out so far. I will pre-amble that I have almost no expertise in this- its just what I figured out by head-banging attempts to produce an ePub.

I’ll foreshadow the hint that I am excited about the just released Anthologize tool for generating electronic texts but it’s too early to tell on that one.

First, I tried a number of the various tools that offered to convert a PDF to an ePub -e.g. ePubBud. I can say that you get “something” you can view at the end, but its really not optimal on format, layout- you don’t get much in the options to customize, so its a crapshot whether it does a decent job.

That is because under the hood- what an ePub file really is is not a file at all, but a container of files, many of them XML, and all the “content” portions of your ePub are structured HTML, or XHTML. So anything that attempts to “convert” your PDF must make guesses as to what are headers, where are breaks, etc, and who knows what it does with things like lists and links.

I learned the most from the excellent tutorial “How to Create an ePub By Hand” which clearly illustrates many of the moving parts in an ePub, and provides a template to start with. Harrison Ainsworth’s Epub Format Guide is another great reference (and is also available as an ePub).

So what you end up doing is a lot of hand coding of XML and XHTML files, package it up with a few other key files in a zip, and than just change the file extension from “.zip” to “.epub” If you are leaping ahead like I did and think you can take that DRM sprinkled ePub, swap its file extension to .zip, and pry open to peek at the structure– good luck. You get a *.cpgz file which when you uncompress– gives you another version of the original zip, endless circle (well not exactly true, I just found the unix command line “ditto -xk source.zip ” which seemed to pop it open, but thats just a detail- have not tried it yet with a dl-ed epub).

While embarking down this manual path, I also asked our publication designer, who does use inDesign to generate our documents, to experiment with its ability to export ePub. I’ve not hear much, but he was unable to even get a simple test file going, and as is, this would require recasting of his templates and styles to get something ePub-able.

I also got connected (thanks Phil Long) with someone who does this as a business – and found out on that end, they doe a ton of work doing it the manual way to get a template that works, and then get to the point of more automation in generating the content.

I thought this would be pretty easy to do for our NMC Horizon Reports since I already re-publish them in WordPress format (see http://wp.nmc.org/) so I already have the content in HTML. It took a little bit of tidying to get clean XHTML- changing extensions to .xhtml, closing some tags properly, adjusting local links, changing the HTML headers to:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"         "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

The tricky part was packaging the files up. The instructions indicate that the special mimetype file should not be compressed, and must be the “first added to the zip”. I had no luck getting this to work on a Mac, and even on a PC using WinZip, with everything as stated, I could not get the file to validate using the ThreePress validator– it kept saying the first file in the zip was not 8 characters long (meaning it was not finding “mimetype” first.

Crap. I was in a corner.

I looked at other apps- Calibre is very handt for converting between eBook formats, and allows some modifications of the various settings (setting a cover image, editing the metadata) but what I really sought was something that was more of a full fledged ePub editor.

And than I found maybe not the Holy Grail, but for me, what turned out to be pretty Grail-ish – eCub by Julian Smart. It is cross platform and free!

eCub is a cross-platform tool for creating EPUB and MobiPocket books. EPUB is become a popular e-book standard and is open and free for all to implement. EPUB files can be read by MobiPocket, Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader, Stanza, the Sony Reader, and many other readers and applications. MobiPocket books can be read on desktop platforms, mobile platforms and the Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

eCub offers a convenient way to import text and XHTML files and create all the necessary components of an EPUB file. It makes it easy to view and edit files, and check the generated EPUB, using external tools. It can also generate audio files from your book content using eSpeak and other text-to-speech software.

A wizard allows you to create a new project in seconds, with options for generating a table of contents, a cover page, and a title page. You can create a simple cover design image using templates and a simple design tool. Then you can compile, check and try out the EPUB at the click of a button.

With eCub, I simply made a new project, and was able to import my directory of xhtml files. The file tool allows me to change the order, and even to edit them if needed:

There are a number of settings panels that pretty much take care of the grunt work of generating the content.opf and other XML files the ePub needs, plus it adds the meta data.

It has templates you can use to generate a cover, but I just went for the simple of the same cover image from our publications.

I went a few rounds of edits (mostly tweaking the XHTML for some formatting errors) with the ThreePress ePub validator to get all but one error cleared there (it seems to be saying the format for my publication date is invalid, but I cannot see any issue there).

So here is 2010-Horizon-Report.epub (236k) a test version of an ePub equivalent of the 2010 NMC Horizon Report (web version) This is a draft version, yadda yadda, small type legal mumbo jumbo, batteries not included, your mileage will vary…

But the test was in seeing how it worked. The desktop version of Stanza was sad, as it seemed to ignore all formatting, and produced a river of text.

I have to say the iBooks app in the iPad looks and acts the best so far. I like how my own publication sits in the shelf

The downside is of course, the jump rope of having to get stuff there via iTunes sync. Also, mysteriosuly enough, with ePub files sent my mail or even when accessed in DropBox, iBooks is never offered as a helper app for opening ePub files.

But in iBooks, this version works in a lovely manner- it displays using the simple styles I made for headers, the hyperlinks to internal and external URLs all work, the table of contents and other bits work great.

Stanza too displayed the content reasonably (though it ignored my own style sheet), but did all of the lists, bold, italics as it should:

However, the hyperlinks in the generated Table of Contents as well as internal ones went nowhere. In some searching (I cannot locate the exact location now, but thought it was here)… I found out to get Stanza hyperlinks to work, you actually have to press and hold the link at least 2 seconds. I think that is “the fix is in progress” statement here.

So I have an ePub proof done, and tested it small scale. I don’t have access to other readers, and assume I might have to run it through Calibre to generate versions that will work with other eReaders (which has my scratching my head over the concept of “standard”). With eCub and my content already in formatted HTML I should eb able to convert a number of our other documents more easily.

In the end, creating an ePub is far from easy. I would think there is a ton of room for someone to create a better kind of application to generate ePub files and more than the quick and slap conversions, but a full fledged editor.

And most ideally, I am hopeful the just off the code press Anthologize will be a viable option, which might be the best since our content already exists in WordPress. It does require a little bit of server sized tweaking (re-compiling PHP to include the ZIP extension).

This is really an early stage for ePub– there are some interesting possibilities of JavaScript ePub readers perhaps making it possible to embed/integrate ePub with other web content. Then there is the headier stuff, since ePub can allow for scripts and object tags, for Interactivity in ePub. Definitely the folks at ThreePress are doing a lot with this leading edge — see http://blog.threepress.org/.

And that’s all I know for now!

Sometimes you have trips with very well defined and choreographed itineraries, where you know what is/should be happening down to some overly detailed level of detail.

This week has not been one of those, it’s been more of going with the flow.

And that’s ok.

A planned trip to visit friends in Monterey was built around an invitation to co-present some new Amazing Stories in San Jose but the session took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and did not happen, so now I have a new presentation’s worth of materials sitting in the wings (and thanks to people like Silvia for tossing me even newer and more Amazing ones).

So for my time hanging out in Monterey, with visions of chasing Steinbeck or Eastwood planted in my mind, little did I expect to end up participating in a wedding.

You see, my friends, who must be about the most gracious and welcoming in terms of opening up their home, befriended a family who was here for a wedding, and some of the bride’s family had been camped at their place for almost two weeks. John volunteered himself, his son, and now me, to be part of the “A/V” crew, setting up a sound system for the ceremony and shooting some candid photos during the rehearsal and the main event.

Heck, the closest I came to bringing formal wear was long pants (jeans). And cowboy boots. I had to borrow a belt.

What seemed remarkable, and honestly should not seem so, was how equally gracious this family was in welcoming someone they did not know to such a pivotal family extravaganza. And these was no ordinary family, or maybe in some ways it was- I came away with something enriched in terms of what a modern American family could be.

From what I could count and map mentally, both sets of parents on each side had been remarried, so there were at least parental units (you really did need a program and maybe a John Madden diagram to chart them)… and they all got long- not just in the way ex-spouses might tolerate each other, but in a genuine, down to earth, honest manner. And what an ethnic stew- there were strands of Korean, Caucasian, Japanese, Hispanic, and probably more I could only guess at. It really meant nothing.

And also reassuring, in this world where I mingle with a lot of new people on a daily basis in the somewhat removed online world, here was a chance to socialize in the ordinary face to face manner (though most people had mobiles out and in use at various times- and fortunately not updating facebook status not at the I Do moment).

Had this trip not happened, I would not have had some great conversations with a talented musician who is also a self employed programmer, and gave some great insight into a city in the middle of the country I would have never before had much interest in even knowing about.

And yes, as someone on the dissolved end of one marriage, I aimed to to keep my own cynicism in check, especially for a day when the hopes are at the high plane all hopes should be (and should live forever). Just because many marriages don’t make it the 50+ years my parents had, does not preclude this very one from being on that path. Many do, but it’s just not really news.

Without our high hopes and dreams what would we be? Or where would we dream of going?

So despite the fact I did not “get much work done” on my weekdays here, and I did take advantage of any of the available attractions here, I cannot think of a better way to have spent the last few days, just going with the flow of unexpected activities.

Just going with the flow has been more than ok.

I’m really excited to be making my first trip ever to London next month (too late to meet up with Scott or Brian) for a few days of NMC meetings. I have set aside a few extra days to be a tour dog.

But I am a total n00b in my London knowledge– so I am asking to crowdsource my free days here (August 19-21). Give me some ideas what to see/do, where to stay, etc, or maybe arrange a meetup? Leave me some tips over at

http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/LondonCalling

/me wags in appreciation.