Ubiquity

On Writing and Promotion

2010-12-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

For those who have found me from my blogger profile, welcome.

Most people know me from The Trader's Diary or from Podiobooks.

Some are finding me because of the voice work I've done for Star Ship Sofa or for various authors out there like Abbie Hilton, J. Daniel Sawyer, or P.G. Holyfield.

How ever you found me, it's great that you're here and I hope to spend some more time blogging about the writer's life in general.

Visit my portfolio site for more information about what I'm doing and the various activities I work on.

Visionary??!

2007-04-08T21:35:00.000-07:00

You Are An ENTP

The Visionary

You are charming, outgoing, friendly. You make a good first impression.

You possess good negotiating skills and can convince anyone of anything.

Happy to be the center of attention, you love to tell stories and show off.

You're very clever, but not disciplined enough to do well in structured environments.

You would make a great entrpreneur, marketing executive, or actor.

What's Your Personality Type?

If I Want to LEARN

2007-04-04T20:26:00.000-07:00

... The place I avoid is SCHOOL.

Why?

Because SCHOOL is about credentials. It's not about LEARNING.

If I want to learn, I ask a friend, I read a book, I visit the web, I go to the library, I ask questions of people who might know something. I try stuff out. I fail a few times. Ok, I fail a lot of times. Eventually I figure it out and move on. I've learned something.

If I go to SCHOOL I have to apply. I have to be approved. I have to get permission. I have to wait until the course is offered again. I have to be graded. I have to play the transcript game. I get a credential. I may not have learned a damn thing, but I've gotten the credential. By the time I get to even begin with SCHOOL, whatever I wanted to learn is moot.

WTF is wrong with this picture???

How do we fix it?

[Note: I posted this over on the School 2.0 group in Ning. Got no traction there. Maybe it'll get a little more interest outside of the walls.]

Book Trailer

2007-03-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

Proof that I probably have too much time on my hands.

Quarter Share

2007-02-22T14:49:00.000-08:00

Well, it's a modest beginning, but it's a start.

I've always wanted to write a science fiction novel.

The audio version for Podiobooks.com was a lot of fun and the search begins for a paper publisher. I'm not too optimistic but nothing ventured nothing gained.

The title has it's own website at http://solarclipper.com

[note: corrected link rot: 12/11/10]

'F I were King of the Forest ...

2006-11-05T12:18:00.000-08:00

Ten Things I'd Do if I were king of the forest ...

1. Repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and all it's follow-on legislation. Including the latest suspensions of habeus corpus and the military tribunals.

2. Repeal NCLB. We need to do *something* about Education in this country but it needs to be centered on Learning, not Accountability.

3. Along those lines, we need to re-tool the Economy to the Information Age, not the Industrial Age. We are never going to get those factory lines back and that's a good thing. We need to replace/upgrade that whole thing.

4. Restore Copyright to Life +25 years for individually held works and maximum 25 years for corporate owned material. A century is too long and it's not fair to the coming generations.

5. Healthcare has to be overhauled. If that makes us Socialist, fine. We can't have poor people dying because they can't afford antibiotics. It's ridiculous.

6. Bring the troops home and apologize to the rest of the world for the madness.

7. Repeal the bill that authorized the Iron Curtain South. That's billions of dollars we don't need to pay to KBR that we might be able to use to actually support the INS with personnel and equipment.

8. Cut the military budget by 10% and put the money into Pell Grants. It's insane that fewer than 25% of Americans over 25 have a college degree. I don't care what they get degrees in. We need 'em all if we're going to out-create the rest of the world.

9. Network is infrastructure ... If you want to provide network, you don't get to say who can use the pipes. Charge for the load if you want, but the price has to be the same for everybody not just the people you like.

10. Alternative energy production. Why are there no diesel hybrids? Why does public transportation suck? Where's the bio-diesel? What happened to ethanol? Why do we allow 15mpg passenger vehicles on the road? Somebody has to have some answers here and I know it's neither the automakers nor the oil industry. It's time we dealt with this.

Your turn.

Scarlet Letter 2006

2006-10-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

It has to stop.
It has to stop now.
Feel free to spread the Scarlet Letter.

Electric Results

2006-08-08T21:31:00.000-07:00

The bill has come in for the first full month of the "new conservation regime" for electrical usage.

The results are remarkable enough that the keeper of the bills IM'ed me as soon as she saw the balance. We've carved almost 200kwh's off the bill. That's about 1/6th of our energy. I was looking for a savings of 1/10h.

That worked. Time to look for more ...

Simplify, Redux

2006-06-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

1200kwh/month is an amazing amount of electricity. That's 1.2Million watt hours. How can I be burning that much ... 40,000watt-hours a day.

For the record and because I need to establish it my own mind, a watt-hour is the amount of energy consumed by using one watt for an hour. It's an awkward abstract concept but I found that if I considered a 100W light bulb it became easier. If I leave 100W light on for an hour, that's 100 watt-hours. If I leave a 100W light on for 10 hours, that's 1,000 watt-hours ... or 1kwh. In one day our house burns the energy required to burn 40 100W lights for 10 hours .. 40kwh.

Also for the record, I don't have any 100W bulbs.

So, I want to cut down 10% of my electricity use. Not because it's expensive. Not because I pay a lot. Just because I don't want to waste it ... if that makes any sense.

We have a fridge. Pretty modern, not the HIGHEST effeciency going, but all the seals are in place and it's less than 15 years old.

Electric range. I don't cook that much. Unfortunately.

We have a washer/dryer and do about 5 loads of laundry a week for a family of 4. That's one load per person plus one for linens. We always run them full, use cold water. It's constant and necessary, so it's not going to matter much.

We have central air. We keep it on 80 and spend a lot of time in the cool basement.

So far, not much chance of manipulating these.

But it's funny what you see when you start looking.

I have a light in the rangehood. It's a 60W bulb. It's on at least 10 hrs a day every day. Without it, anything on the range is in the dark because of the way the kitchen is arranged. That's 600wh a day. I replaced it with a 15W flourescent that provides the same light as a 60W bulb. If I left it on the same amount, that would be 150wh per day .. a savings of 450wh. But now that I'm aware of it, I find myself shutting it off. Call it about 500wh/day on that one bulb.

The big lighting offender is in the main hall bathroom. It has one of those four-bulb fixtures that uses the globe-shaped bulbs - each is a 40W bulb. It's the first light the kids turn on in the morning and the last one they turn off at night. We shut it off during the weekdays but it's on at least 4 hours every evening. That's 4x40W or 160W. For four hours that's 640wh/day. I replaced the bulbs with 15W flourescents ... using 3 15W instead of 4. I just unscrewed one of the bulbs a bit and left it there so there's no open socket. The bent-tube bulbs look a little odd, but the light is perfect and four hours a day is 180wh instead of 640.

One last thing, we've always kept the furnace fan on to circulate the air from the basement thru the house. I don't know what the fan is rated at but if it's as little as 20W, that's 20W times 24 hrs - 480wh/day. I'm not sure how much we're saving.

The last big electricity hogs are the computers.

Some of you know that I have a fairly extensive network in my house and the four of us have at least one computer (I use three). It's difficult to say what all these badboys use for juice. The powersupplies are rated from 200W up to 400W depending on the machines and I usually keep them -- and their monitors -- running 24/7. If they pulled full rated power, the normal computer load in the house would be 1200W plus another 500W in monitors. I am pretty sure they're not pulling full loads because if they were, just the computers would require more power than my electric bill says I'm burning (40.8kwh/day).

So I'm shutting down some of my boxes. I'm gone from the house for about 10 hrs a day, sometimes longer. I've started shutting down computers and monitors during the day. that's not QUITE half the day. And it's not time when the computers are under load. But it's something. I'd shut them off at night, too, but that's a much shorter time -- only 5 to 6 hrs -- and they do their scheduled maintenance and downloads at night so they kinda have to keep running. I'm wondering if I really NEED three computers or whether I could shut down one -- perhaps the one with the largest power consumption -- and only bring it up say, when I need to use it.

At the end of next month, I'll know if it's doing any good.

In the meantime, I'm doing something. It's a little thing, but it's a start.

Simplify, Simplify ...

2006-06-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

Recent readers will note that I've been going thru a kind of late-life crisis -- s sort of mid-course correction phase between entering middle age and senior-hood. Part of it is because I finished my Ph.D. a couple years ago. Part because of my father's passing. Part because of some uncertainty in my job.

Nothing like a little flux in your life, eh?

One of the issues that's come up is how much "stuff" I use. It's a kind of think globally, act locally issue at this point, but it comes from an ongoing conversation with my friend Donal. His recent thinking is about the growing disparity between the rich and the poor -- a kind of "how much is enough" question. The issue is one of personal ethics. The basic question is "What kind of mind set says that it's ok to earn $30,000,000 a year (or more) when there are people in your company that earn $30,000 (or less)?" Is this ethical? How about moral? How much is enough?

Which got me thinking about my personal situation. Is it right for me to earn what I earn when so many earn so much less? I'm not in the $1million range by a long shot. Even with two incomes we aren't going to make a million in a year, but we have a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. I think we've made good choices -- we have a modest home, low credit card balances, only one car loan at a time, and some retirement savings. We're far from extravagant altho we have our guilty pleasures -- my wife collects anime cels, I have my computers.

Which gets back to consumption. On an average day, our family of four burns 40kwh, about 3 gallons of gasoline, and 3 cu ft of natural gas. The water meter says we go thru 10,000 gallons a month (a number I find horrifying). We're spending as much on food as we are on mortgage every month. So, turning my own question back onto myself -- how much is enough?

Global income figures say that 1/7th of the world population -- about 1 billion people -- lives on less than $1/day. In the US median income is someplace around $45k and the "poverty" level is about $30K depending on family size. Look at that again. Remember that "median" means half the people make more and half the people make less. Notice the narrow margin between 45K and 30K. One other significant number is that the mean income (the average of all families) is about $70K. With a mean above the median, a lot more people are below the mean than above.

Call me a bleeding heart, but that seems wrong.

The question is what to do about it? The "clean your plate because children are starving in Asia" rationale is a bit ... feeble. Cutting back to save money is, perhaps, a viable notion. If I can save $40 a month on a salary of $4000, is a 1% reduction in expense significant if it causes significant inconvenience? What about an ethical argument?

Is it ethical for me to consume even one more gallon of gas than I need to simply because I can afford it? Am I weird for considering that I may not be entitled to it?

The New Communism

2006-06-07T07:57:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched Good Night and Good Luck -- a wonderful bit of propaganda about Edward R. Murrow and his battle with McCarthy in the 50s. It helped me articulate some of the malaise that I've been fighting for the last few weeks.

For those who weren't around - or aren't aware - in the early 50's, Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped the nation into a frenzy over the Red Menace. People found themselves blacklisted, and even prosecuted, for holding ideas that were outside the narrow range of what McCarthy and his cronies considered to be patriotism. It was not uncommon for children to be blacklisted for their parent's beliefs and for others to be persecuted on hearsay without recourse to any kind of due process beyond the kangaroo court called the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

During this time, the majority of the press sat silent. The Fourth Estate failed the American public by refusing -- under pressure from the administration and fear of retaliation -- to publish the stories of the abrogation of civil rights and the egregious erosion of liberty. Anybody who questioned the methods or legitimacy was, de facto, un-American and became a target for the Committee. It took Edward R. Murrow and CBS News to break the back of McCarthy's power by shining light on the abuses of the committee until Congress was forced to act by censuring him fo abuse of power.

Today Terrorism is the new Communism. The parallels are staggering.

The president and his cronies have created an environment where people can - and are - being prosecuted for where their parents come from. Legitimate American citizens are having bank assets frozen, are being banned from re-entering the county, and are subject to rendition. Thousands of American citizens find themselves on "no-fly" lists and individuals with similar names are being swept up in the net, prevented from making legitimate and legal travel within the borders of the country. The Congress has passed legislation to require that all Americans obtain and carry identity papers within the country. They are proposing to erect America's Iron Curtain across the southern border of the US. All in the name of keeping the country secure. The government is out of control and the witch-hunts are under way. Just like they were in the 50s.

And the Fourth Estate has let down its public obligation again. Mainstream media has been dumbed down, news budgets reduced, and newspapers are being turned into tabloids. The general concensus is that the American public doesn't want to read -- and wouldn't understand -- about the complex issues that face the nation. And it serves the administration well to keep the public uninformed.

So the parallels with the McCarthy era are uncanny. But unlike the 50's, we have no Murrow, and it gets worse.

Now, evidence is surfacing to support what many of us suspected all along. The 2004 election appears to have been stolen by the Republican party. The evidence is largely circumstantial, there are no photographs of hands in stuffing ballot boxes, no video of shadowy figures tampering with voting machines. But the statistical analysis of the voting patterns, the reports from election observers on the ground, and the unlocked doors represented by voting machines that were less secure than the average PC have created a "smoking gun." If the cookie jar is empty, the obvious suspect will be the 7 year old found unsupervised in the room. God's Own Party sure looks guilty because the 2004 election's cookie jar was very, very empty.

Therein lies one important source of my personal discomfort. I feel powerless. I know that the world is a dangerous place, and I recognize the need for a government to provide for the citizens collectively what they cannot provide for themselves. But my government is out of control. Most rational Americans appear to agree with me, but I appear to have awakened to the danger too late. When the election process can be subverted so easily, the winner will not be the candidate who gets the most votes, but the one with the best black ops team. As a citizen, my voice has already been silenced in the polls. By writing this I have violated the USA PATRIOT Act by criticizing the government. Secret Service would appear at my door and take me into custody. If I were to be declared an "enemy combatant" I could be held without charges and with recourse to due process. I 'd go to jail, directly to jail, and I wouldn't collect $200. I wouldn't even get a phone call for the NSA to tap.

This is not America, but I don't know how to stop it. And it's making me -- quite literally -- sick.

People Person

2006-05-12T10:26:00.000-07:00

While sitting in the San Antonio airport a couple weeks ago, I turned to my boss and pointed out a FedEx cargo plane taxiing past the windows. "If I were gonna be a pilot, I think I'd rather fly one of those."

She looked at me strangely.

"Think of it," I said. "No passengers to deal with. You fly it where it needs to go. No backtalk."

"You're *such* a people person," she told me.

Another comment that's been echoing in my head is from a conversation I had with a fellow student a couple years back.

"You never let personal feelings get in the way of a decision," she told me.

I don't think she meant it as a compliment.

As I'm looking back over my last few posts, those comments have been taking on heavier weight.

Did anybody else notice that I didn't include time for family in my ideal schedule other than as an interruption? Somethings out of whack here.

Back to dark ponderings.

Intermission: Can I die with that...?

2006-05-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

I spent most of my life considering options with the final criteron being "Can I live with that...?" Will I be able to continue my life and look in the mirror ever morning and not hate the guy looking back? And way too often, the answer was "Yea, sure. I can live with that." I'm a very forgiving guy.

For the last couple of years, tho, my bottom line has shifted to "Can I die with that...?" It's not as morbid as it sounds -- well, ya .. ok .. probably it is -- but the idea is that I feel like I need to be thinking about what it'll be like in that last month or hour or minute. If I look back over my life, will I regret making the choice I'm making? Was it something I decided because it was easy or pleasant or desirable, but ultimately wasn't the choice I'd make because it was Right?

The options are complicated by 20/20 hindsight of course and you never really know if your decisions are the right ones. But if you knew you were going to die this afternoon, would you still do what you're planning to do this morning? A lot of days with "no" as the answer means something is wrong.

Leslie thinks I work too much and she's probably right.

But I feel the clock ticking and there's so much I'm going to have to leave undone as it is. I *do* need some downtime ... no question. But if I were to die this afternoon and I took this morning off, it just wouldn't feel right.

Step 2: Where am I at the moment.

2006-04-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

So. I need to know where I am now ... how far do I need to go to get where I want to be?

My daily schedule isn't actually too far out.

5am Rise

This varies between 4.30 and 5.30 and I never use an alarm clock. I have an hour to clear the overnights and set up for the day.

6am Start transition to Office.

Because I pick up kids from school, I need to get to the office early and get in as much time as I can before mid afternoon.

7am-2.45pm Office time.

Sometimes I take a lunch. Most days I just walk over to the student center and get something to take back to my desk. Lately my boss and I are trying to walk more at lunch by trekking to a local sandwich shop.

2.45-7.30pm Kid time. Dinner time. Karate classes.

My wife goes to work late so she can drop them off at school. I leave early to pick them up and fix dinner. The spousal unit, bless her gizzard, is not a cook. Luckily, I am, so I fix dinner. (Confession: we eat take out too much. I don't like it, but the logistics of making meals that the kids won't eat are killing me.) My girls study karate at the local dojo. Sometimes they don't like it, but I see how it's helping them and I make them go. What that means is 4 nights a week, I'm at the dojo with one or the other of them.

7.30-11pm My time.

I need to put in an hour on work stuff here to "make my eight" and wrap up whatever loose ends my brain can still process. I don't get too anal about it because I usually work 7 days a week. It's easier to stay in the zone than jump in and out of it. I'll spend several hours on the weekends thinking, planning, and -- lately -- mindmapping in between household chores and such.

I have a monthly subscription to the local video store and for a time, I was catching up on movies in this time slot. I also like to watch some anime here. While I don't necessarily enjoy all of it, there are some shows that have been fabulous and the cultural differences between US and Japan tweak my noggin.

11pm Bed Time.

I prefer to go to bed at 10 because 11-5 is only 6 hrs. Unfortunately, I more frequently push it to 12, leaving only 5 hrs sleep a night. It's been like that for years so I'm not sure how serious it is. Lately I find I need a bit more sleep than that. Over a week, the sleep deprivation builds up and I wind up being groggy at in-opportune times. I find myself napping in the car while waiting for the kids at karate, or nodding out in my chair in the evening.

The only way this really changes on the weekend is we don't have to deal with school or karate, and I don't go to the office. My work is largely in my head and I have almost as good a connection in my house as in my office. The only real difference is the uplink speed is a bit faster at the office. My set-up is such that I always have all my tools at hand at all times. I like it that way because it means I can take advantage of various inspirations whether or not I'm "at work."

The reality is that I'm always at work, even when I'm chaperoning the kids scootering in the park. I don't carry a computer, but I do carry a cell phone and mp3 player.

My 7 year old asked my wife if I were depressed because I never leave my desk.

Interesting question.

Step 1: Imagine It

2006-04-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

The first step toward the future you want is imagining what it might be. Somebody said that. I'm not sure who but it seems like a good start.

So, what would a 'day in the life' be like if it were the perfect day?

5am: wake on my own. no alarm clock. I do this now so we're already on the path. Grab a cuppa from the fresh pot on the sideboard and head to my work station. I sip my coffee and contemplate the view from my various windows. Ocean? Mountains? Ocean, I think, but anything with a vista will do. Right now I spend my life in cellars. Spend an hour or so clearing the overnight correspondence.

6am: morning walk -- half an hour -- contemplation time.

7am: breakfast

8-12: writing
12-1: lunch on the veranda
1-2: nap
2-5: students and clients
5-7: dinner
7-10: r&d
10: bed.

Repeat.

Of course this gets interrupted with kids, spouse, yardwork, and car repairs, but as a "Daily Default" it feels pretty attractive.

One every three months I want to go somewhere. Convention, visit a friend in another part of the world, take a week off to go fishing. I don't know. The what is an 'ad hoc' but the DOING is the thing.

Normally I'd say this looked pretty boring but my "cognitive life" is massively consuming these days. I can't stop thinking about -- puzzling over -- pondering various things. How to get Education in the US back on track? How to get paid for doing good work? What is the fundamental shift in society going to do to the nature of work and career paths? Little stuff like that.

This notion isn't fleshed out enough. I haven't finished imagining but I need to publish this so I can see what it looks like. :D

A Year Ago

2006-04-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

I'm a couple days late getting this post out. I've had a head cold in my brain and it's made me kinda squishy between the ears.

A year ago Monday, I got the call that my dad had died in the night. I was expecting the call and I wrote about it last April. There's nothing like being 50-something and having your mortality waved in your face like that. I expected that it would be a kind of wake up call for me.

I'm not sure that it was, because looking back over my first year as an orphan I don't know that I've really done anything better than I've always done. Heck, I'm not sure I've even done anything differently -- better or worse. I'm pretty sure it's not because I'm completely satisfied with the way I live my life.

And I know it's not because I'm a peace with the world. The closer I get to the end of my time on it, the more angry and frustrated I get with it.

Start with the little things like finding/making/carving out the time I need to write/think. Or take my daily walks - which I miss dreadfully but which are pushed back so I have more time to do -- what? Read blogs? Discard email spam? Patch computer programs? Fix stuff? Break stuff?

Heck, I haven't watched a movie in a month or more! Last thing I saw was an episode of Battlestar Galactica from season one.

Move outward to the kids and their school which aggravates me beyond almost all bearing because of the insistance on protecting kids from learning while penalizing schools and teachers for failing to perform. Which reminds me of the Ninny-in-Chief which just infuriates me more. School policy aside, how can he SERIOUSLY be thinking of nuking Iran??

But I digress.

Too much doing. Too little thinking.

Too many messages. Not enough comprehension.

Stephen Downes has retired to an island to think.

Will Richardson has gone over to the dark side.

People all around are echoing my "wtf!?" on a variety of fronts.

I've 20 years left. Maybe.

I need to think how best to use them.

Crash

2006-03-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

Ok. I don't usually get into the whole Oscar's thing. I keep track of best picture because usually it's something I've not seen and I try to catch up when it comes out on DVD later. This year I'm ahead of the game.

I saw "Crash" a couple weeks ago. I won't spoil it for you by giving away any plot details, but this is a movie about stuff that almost happens -- a kind of a cross between "there but for the grace of God" and "somebody's watching over me" meme. It was kinda interesting for the interlocking plot twists, but I saw that gimmick on CSI a long time ago. By and large I pulled it out of the dvd player with an "oh hum."

The reason I bring it up is that there's another movie with the same name that has a heck of a lot better plot and character development. It's also got a lot more sex and violence so I'm not sure what that says about me. It's not a movie you'll want to show in Driver's Ed class -- or any class for that matter, unless it might be a Graduate Seminar in Abnormal Psych. These people are sick ... but the movie itself is fascinating for what it says about America's automobile based culture. If you have to choose between the two crashes -- and you don't have to worry about kids seeing it -- I'd recommend the older one.

But that's just me.

I Passed 8th Grade Math

2006-02-26T18:38:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I should be proud or not ...

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Life's Proportions

2006-02-04T20:38:00.000-08:00

I just noticed that my life has taken on a new proportion.

Do other people measure their lives in proportion? Like, when I turned 34, I noted the change when I'd lived more than half my life on my own...having left my parents' house at 17 to join the service and never going back. Last year marked the point when I'd spent half my life with my spouse.

In '87 I moved inland. Up to that point, I'd spent my entire life - 35 years' worth - within the smell of the sea. I spent summers as a boy in the tide pools along the coast of Maine. I remember visiting the "ocean" branch of the family -- the Gilliams, and Wallaces, and Pyes -- those who actually made their living from the sea -- and wondering how my branch could have given up the ocean and gone to farming, and eventually the factories.

I'm not that far removed, truth told. My grandfather Wallace was a lobsterman in his early years altho took up the new fangled Electronics trade in the 40s. My grandfather Lowell, and his father before him, however, were landsmen -- farmers who raised cows and planted potatoes and corn. My father left the farm in favor of the factory where he was able to provide well enough for us growing up -- although we did keep a large garden which kept us fed through the leaner times.

But growing up in rural Maine, the ocean was just "over there." And not just any ocean, but the North Atlantic. When you go to the beach -- Popham, Pemaquid, Old Orchard -- you're not talking about any enclosed area of water but the North Freaking Atlantic. Standing there and looking east, you're looking at Europe with nothing in between.

My whole personal identity, my self image from boyhood, was Downeaster. None of these prissy Boston Lowells, but a by-God Mainer -- and a Mariner once removed. I even paid my dues upon the briney -- first as a dragger boy, and later aboard a Coast Guard Cutter in that same North Atlantic. The saltwater in my veins carries the distinctive flavor of the cold, and rockweed, and clam flats. When it's silent, in those rare moments when I can hear my own body, I hear the sounds of the ocean I grew up with and the sussurus of the winds in the pines along the rocky headlands.

But I just realized, my proportion has shifted. A third of my life, I've been inland now.

Not that there's anything wrong with being inland. The Great Plains are amazing and the Rockies have an almost cliched majesty. From where I'm sitting now, I can walk to where the Oregon Trail once passed - altho in honesty it would probably take me a week! Cowboys once lived in my neighborhood and coyotes still howl in the night. For a Yankee, a Downeaster, this is pretty nifty stuff.

But, it's not me.

I miss the smell of the ocean -- the clean iodine smell of the rock and sand, the pungent soup of brine and mud and reeds, even the diesel fumes and bilgewater reek when the fishing fleet gets underway in the morning. I'm feeling neither "fish nor fowl" as we used to say -- not part of this Western culture, nor any longer part of the heritage passed down from father and grandfather and before. I sang sea chanties to my kids when I bathed them as babies, but they're just funny songs to them. They don't mean the same as they do to me -- they're not the link to the past, not an anchor for identity with the rode trailing into the past.

And because I see they cannot share the link -- have not the stuff with which to knit identity that includes more than a minimum of what I can pass on to them -- I begin to doubt my own identity as well. My anchor in the past has started to drag on a sandy bottom and I find myself wondering who I really am.

The proportion can still be said, "I lived most of my life within the smell of the sea." But that proportion is shifting -- and the more it shifts, the less I am who I was.

I wonder who I'll be.

An Odd Day

2006-02-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

As I left the video store today and crossed the parking lot, a woman crossed in front of me. I'd seen her in the grocery moments before -- so striking that she stood out in the sea of faces. Dark haired, well dressed, late 50s maybe -- devastatingly attractive. As I unlocked my car, she looked up and saw me looking.

Deer in headlights.

I wanted to buy her a cup of coffee and talk. So badly I shook. The conversation spooled in my head between two heartbeats like some movie loop where the guy gets into the elevator with the girl and has this great experience only to return to real beginning -- stepping into the elevator and not speaking.

Lump-Dump.

"Um! Hi! Can I buy you a cuppa coffee?"

"Do I know you?"

"Well, no. But I saw you in the grocery store a few minutes ago and here you are and ... well. I thought I'd like to buy you a cup of coffee. Maybe you could tell me about yourself."

"What do you want?"

"I just want to buy you a cup of coffee and talk with a fascinating stranger for 20 minutes and pretend that I'm not a 50-something, paunchy, balding father of two with a mortgage, a car payment, and bad skin. I just want to step away from the ongoing drama that is my life and see if there's something else out there that doesn't involve lawn care, house paint, and worn carpets. I thought -- perhaps -- you might spare 20 minutes to tell me about your life and then walk away and never see me again. And then I can go home and unpack the groceries, assure my very insecure spouse that I love her, and perhaps, have a fresh outlook on what passes for reality."

"You don't want much."

"Actually, I think I do. And I'm wondering if it's too much."

Lump-dump.

And the movie keeps rolling.

She walks by and I don't speak. I get into my car and drive home thinking I'm some kind of idiot for (a) wanting to speak (b) failing to have the courage (c) betraying, somehow, somebody ... Knowing how stupid it is -- how much being approached by a strange man in the parking lot might have frightened her.

And I get here thinking I'll write up a nice little post -- first of the new year -- and I find a comment from the woman I thought I should have married but who had the sense to follow her own path.

Yep.

An odd day all around.

Year End Reflections

2005-12-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with the end of the year is that it forms a natural inflection point. The problem is that once I start reflecting, I can get lost and start reflecting on unexpected things.

I don't so much think of whole situations. It's more like I flash on instants that carry a temporal echo. They're not necessarily in any chronological sequence, and even if I thought they were, my perceptions have to be suspect.

... sitting in the sand outside our first house on Little Sebago Lake in Windham, Maine. I couldn't have been more than four because we moved from that house when I was ready to start school. The sun was summer warm and I remember the smell of pine and stale tobacco. Dad had given up smoking his pipe by then and the pipe rack was a favored toy. I remember the chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee always having something to say ...

... riding my bicycle around and around the house on Dutton Hill. Flying with my sibs in a pack, racing on the wet grass. Heavy, old, clumsy, rattle-traps of bicycles ...

... crystal cold day. laying on my back on the frozen crust of snow at the top of the hill. eyes dazzled by the brilliant blue of the sun glinting off the ice crystals. letting gravity pull my body down the hill, sliding. whoosh of jacket against the crust, sky flashing over head...

... amazing hubbub from the family gathered in the house. "kids table" set in the next room because there just weren't enough chairs for us all to sit together. cousins and others mixing in uneasy, unfamiliarity at first ... slowly remembering that we really like each other...

... smell of the pine forest. babble of the brook. trout in the stream but I leave them ...

... working the winches aboard the Minkette out of Portland. Haul-back with half a bag of whiting that I know will take two hours to sort ... easing up on the power and guiding the cable onto the spool so it doesn't bind ... lifting the bag over the side and spilling an avalanche of silver across the deck ...

... warm day on the Hazel A, tuna fishing off Monhegan. Gaze across the water, the engines a distance rumble under my feet and the tower sways two meters left and right ... I've been here all day in the sun and my face is burned, my lips are tight but I spot the wake before the seasoned adults ... cousin Herbert up in the pulpit with his harpoon ready ... but the fish subside before we get close enough ...

... broiling in the sun, weeding carrots on a 100 foot row. 9 in the morning. soil already hot enough to burn my hands so I scuffle them along in the dirt to keep them off the surface. I'm not sure .. is this a carrot? is that a weed? twenty minutes for the first 10 feet...

... winter tobogganing down the Big Hill. Screaming down the soft snow only to crash into the stone wall just before the road. No wind. Can't breathe. Shock and snow and blood...

... horse dung and ammonia, mucking the stalls ... hating the job but loving the beasts ... hot summer stench and cold winter warmth ... molasses rich grain, sweet alfafa hay, arms breaking from the buckets of fresh, cold water ...

... night at sea watching the running lights of the factory ships around us ...

... night in New York City ... thinking of the millions of people around me, marveling that so many people live in such a small area after growing up where 100 people was a crowd ... all the lights like jewels ...

... frozen winter sky, telescope finding faint nebulae ... the sky suddenly awash from horizon to horizon in shimmering borealis ...

... leaving to go to boot camp

... leaving to go to Governor's Island

... leaving to go to Kodiak

... leaving to get married

... leaving to get divorced

... leaving to take my wife to the hospital because today's the day my second child will be born.

... standing on the deck of a ferry in Casco Bay listening to Schooner Faire playing on the speakers as we come around Portland Head and knowing that it's probably the last time I'll be "coming home" that way ... leaving for Buffalo in the morning.

... scraping the frost from the inside of my bedroom window so I can look up to see Orion's belt above the trees and wondering what I'll be when I grow up ...

... clam flats in summer.

... squeaky snow in winter.

... the icy run off down the dirt driveway in spring, puddles iced over in the morning from our dam building activity of the afternoon before.

... shockingly deep blue autumn skies alive with the colors of sumac, oak, and maple.

... the smell of wood smoke, perking coffee, and frying bacon on the woodstove. Electricity costs more than wood ... and wood warms twice ... once when you chop it and once when you burn it ...

This is will be my first New Year as an orphan.

Somehow, it's ok.

Political testing

2005-09-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

You are a
Social Liberal
(86% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(23% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Strong Democrat

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Thanks Leslie!

Tempus Fugits All Over!

2005-09-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

Jeez. I can't believe it's been a month since I posted .. My class over at Phaedrus Academy has just siphoned off all my excess bloggy goodness - not that I had a lot going in.

But I STILL have all the EVO2005 group in my aggregator and I'm still reading.

I used James Farmer's Edublogs.org for the students. It's worked well because they're all WordPress blogs and very smooth. The "theme menu" is nice .. they can pick a good looking theme and not worry about hacking the style sheets together. It loses a little bit from not being able to customize the template, I think, but the upside is that all they have to master is reading, writing, commenting, and aggregating while they're working on the basics of distance education.

And they're OFF!!

2005-08-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

This morning marked the kickoff of my course on Teaching Online.

The students have been "muttering in the halls" for the last few days -- I sent out a warm up message to the list server mid-week last week in response to the 8th "how does this work" email. So some of them are ahead of the curve and some, unfortunately, still haven't registered.

Anybody in the webheads group who wants to get on board (you can audit for free, but if you want the college credit you have to pay) is welcome to.

The blog is at http://nclid.unco.edu/campus/phaedrus

The moodle is at http://nclid.unco.edu/campus

The course is Phaedrus Academy ... :D

Phaedrus Academy

2005-08-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

On Monday I start teaching a course to teach classroom teachers how to teach online. The course is, of course, offered online. It's called Phaedrus Academy in honor of a student of Socrates who had a lot to say about the introduction of a new technology -- writing -- into academe. Socrates was rather upset at this innovation, fearing that it would mark the end of Education as each man no longer would rely on the command of his memory and oratory. It was, of course, the first distance delivery technology and so seemed fitting for our course.

This will be the fourth iteration of the offering and the first one that I've been able to use Moodle for. This is a big thing for me because the major work of the class is to coach classroom teachers in the process of design and implementation of an online course. We use that idea as an anchoring construct to give students a structure -- a foundation -- to which they can build their knowledge of tools, skills, and practice. In the past, we've only been able to talk about what we might do. This time, with a fully functional templated structure, we can actually have them design and build it. Time limits will prevent actually running the course, but we're one step closer to an authentic experience.

With only a few days left, though, I'm struggling with where to write for the class. Should I have a separate blog for my course writings -- separate from my meta-writings about the course? Should I have one blog for all my course writings? Including the meta-analysis of the course as it occurs? Should I incorporate it into an existing blog? Perhaps with a set of categories?

I need to make up my mind pretty quickly ...

Postcard from 12005'

2005-07-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

This week we took a little overnight trip to the other side of the mountains. Our path took us through the Rocky Mountain National Park - along Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuously paved road in the US. Along the way we stopped and hiked up the 200' from the Alpine Visitor's Center to this marker.

I took almost 100 frames and I'll be loading more of them to my flickr account over the next 24 hours or so. I need to get them loaded before I forget what they are.

Postcard from Florida

2005-07-26T19:53:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I was in Florida at a conference. We stayed at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort. It's quite a place. Late July, however, is a darn poor time to be in Central Florida.

Call me naive ...

2005-07-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

... but when did it become alright for teachers to lie to kids?

When politics and education intersect, we have some interesting issues arise.

I'm reading this (PDF, sorry) report on the abstinence-is-the-one-true-path sex education curricula. Now I appreciate we often gloss over details - we simplify for clarity. We have Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. But are these the same as deliberately promoting false/dangerous information in order to put forward a religious agenda? And why are MY tax dollars supporting this crap?

Yes, I'm overstating the case a bit. All these programs promote abstinence and if the students follow the advice, they'll be safe. But if they stray, they could die from a lack of knowledge and an abundance of mis-information.

These programs downplay the importance and effectiveness of safe-sex. "It's not all that safe" leads, inevitably, to "why bother if it's not going to work anyway." I saw a clip from 60 Minutes wherein the medical expert pointed out that all benefit from the abstinence programs evaporates on the first exposure to reality, since the students who've been fed this cark have no basis upon which to make any kind of reasonable decisions.

The logical line here seems to be "If we keep them stupid, we can keep them scared. If we can keep them scared, we can convince them that only marriage can keep them safe. And of course, once they're married, they'll breed like rabbits ..."

It's ok to kill them for not believing? When did *that* become a "Family Value"...?

Ok. So .. It's all a numbers game, right? ONLY about 1/3 of 1% of the people in the US carry HIV. That's only slightly more than people who are blind. What're the chances that you'd pick one of them? And as far as pregnancy goes, well, that's only gonna mess up the girls ... So, the Holy Fathers here seem to think that's ok. Everything else we can cure with a pill, or a shot, right?

Does this seem troubling to anybody else? As a father of two rather high-spirited pre-teens, I gotta say, this has me seeing red.

MIT Blog Survey

2005-06-26T06:29:00.000-07:00

Nerdy Goodness!

2005-06-25T16:59:00.000-07:00

Frankly, I didn't think I was THIS nerdy.

Thanks to Remote Access for the quiz link.

Learner Centered

2005-06-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'm wrestling with around the web these days is what is a "Learner Centered Environment." I wanted to bring that discussion over here with my EVO buddies and see what this looks like to you.

The problem I have is this notion that learners in a learner centered environment have to "come to class on time." Now this is a metaphor for all the stuff we make students do -- come to class, do homework assignments, study in a particular sequence, attend school at a particular place and time, etc. How is this learner centered?

There are several decentralized models lurking about -- I've been inspired by Scott Wilson's vision (corrected) for some time. But I think it's too complicated -- too specific.

So I made this diagram:

But is this too simplistic?

Cultural Creative

2005-05-29T07:32:00.000-07:00

I got this from Bee. What is it about these quizzes?

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Cultural Creative

94%

Postmodernist

88%

Existentialist

75%

Idealist

69%

Materialist

63%

Modernist

50%

Romanticist

25%

Fundamentalist

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

Tempus Fugit

2005-05-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

I am still trying to come up to speed from my hiatus in Maine.

It's difficult because I'm not sure where each day goes. I get up in the morning, go thru the day, and get to nighttime without being really aware of what has happened. I attend meetings and fiddle with code. I put other people's work online and graze mindlessly through blog after blog. I'm not writing here at all and only sporadically on my other blog.

There was a really cool conference last weekend just minutes from my house. I wanted to attend but stayed home and celebrated my daughter's 10th birthday. In a couple of weeks I may be going back on the road to help another school transition to online delivery. I still haven't heard back from my job interview from last month.

Is this Spring Fever? I just can't get engaged ...

My wife is convinced that I've dropped into depression far enough that I'm not aware of it.

Hm.

Postcard from Maine

2005-04-23T17:35:00.000-07:00

Early morning is a good time to visit a country cemetary. The woods are a flutter with birds and the chickadees are whistling off in the distance. A rich smell of forest fills the air -- musky and rich with pine and spruce. In the distance a dog objects to something.

All in all, a man might rest peacefully in such a place.

Postcard from Maine

2005-04-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

Odd shaped ponds like this are scattered everywhere in Maine. This shot was taken looking south from the Belfast Road (Route 52) as the sun was near setting.

Postcard from Maine

2005-04-21T03:39:00.000-07:00

After a stormy night, the sun is rising over Penobscot Bay this morning. All the scent was washed out of the air last night ... Or maybe my nose is just stuffed up.

Earle P. Lowell (1930-2005)

2005-04-17T05:43:00.000-07:00

In May, 2004, my father and stepmother flew out to Colorado to see me get my Ph.D. I hadn't seen him in several years so it was wonderful to spend a few days with him. After the graduation we went up to the YMCA of the Rockies -- a huge, and beautiful resort-like place just outside of Estes Park, Colorado -- and I snapped this picture of Dad and Betty standing on the front steps of the main administration building just drinking in the scenery. Since many of you don't know him, you won't recognize his expression as "broad smile" -- that confuses a lot of people.

Last month, he and my stepmother were on a 2-week cruise in the Caribbean. They had a grand time. I talked to him about it on the phone two weeks ago. It was a nice call. A couple days later he was in the hospital with pneumonia and last night he passed away.

I debated making a post on it. The rather macabre image of wearing a black "I'm blogging this" t-shirt to the funeral ... but as you can see, I decided that I needed to post something to honor his passing.

He loved the sea. I think the old Lowell blood called to him -- back a few generations we were fishers and farmers along the central coast. For many summers he worked as crew for a cousin on a charter boat on the weekends, coming home sunburned and calmed. Eventually, circumstances permitted his getting his own boat and he loved spending time puttering up and down the coast in it.

He was one of those quiet guys you find in Coastal Maine. Independant, self-reliant. Ok ... stubborn. He was a quiet, gentle, self-effacing guy. When he did say something, it was usually something worthwhile. When I was a teen, I went to work with him in the factory in the summer. I learned a lot about work and about him and about the questions one needs to ask about becoming whatever it is one becomes.

People outside the family don't understand us very well. We don't talk much. I talked to my dad on the phone 3 or 4 times a year. I haven't talked to my brother in years. I have his email address here somewhere. But we all know we're family. We're all busy living our own lives because that's the way we do it. The lesson that Dad taught us all was "live your own life."

When he was here for my graduation last May, we knew it might well be the last time we'd see each other. We made our peace then. I know he was very proud and that he loved me very much. Ultimately, what else can a son do for his father?

Thanks, Dad.

I love you.

Tough Day

2005-04-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

The EVO group in my aggregator .. ah .. what would I do without you guys??

My sympathies to Leslie. I hope the "site" is restored soon.

Nancy, thanks for making me think a lot. It distracts me something horrible - and nice that liked Scott Adams' post on Reasons to Blog. We're on a campaign over in my professional group to try to get them into the zone :D

Marco -- I loved the Errand Boy! And you've gotta be a masochist to keep reading CogDiss!

Blinger! "...hooked on phonics ..." that's sooo funny.

But where is Sarolta? I miss your clear voice! Has the coming of spring silenced you?

I'm Jack Sparrow. Who knew??

2005-03-24T13:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Lesley!

Now I have to rent the movie...

I did this TWICE and came up the same way both times. I think I'm gonna go back and do the "which Horror Movie Monster are you? quiz.

Still Alive!

2005-03-21T13:33:00.000-08:00

Ya. I'm still here.. still reading the EVO bloggers. Mostly I'm writing over in my Cognitive Dissonance blog. Lately we've been working on a discussion of media classification and the notion of Quantum Cognition.

I'm having fun, but I'm not sure how much in-road I'm making on the group.

Silly But Fun

2005-03-11T08:28:00.000-08:00

Everybody needs a lil fun ...

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Avocado Redux

2005-03-09T17:33:00.000-08:00

I was reading Nancy's Post on and was put in mind of the class I designed for Week 2. To refresh the idea, we had a group of adult students in a graduate level special education course. The teacher has been unhappy with the outcomes of previous online classes and wanted a different way to engage his students.

Lord, how they floundered. Unwisely, we allowed the students to pick their blog software. Everybody had a problem replying with comments because most chose blogs that require login to comment and they hated having to have an account on ALL the different blog servers.

But the last 5 weeks have been miraculous. Students have left the teacher gasping. They write. They reply. They assimilate. They rip, mix, and burn. Gone are the three sentence discussion board "I think the subject had problems just like Sam said" posts. Next week is spring break for us so the students don't HAVE to blog.

I'll be watching to see if they actually do. Any bets?

Eide Neurolearning Blog and Learning Styles

2005-03-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

Eide Neurolearning Blog and Learning Styles

Wow. I LIKE this post.

As an educational technologist I'm asked to justify all my silly notions all the time. This post does a great job of listing what blogs can and should do for people who are using them in learning environments.

In conclusion, it looks as if blogging will be very good for our brains. It holds enormous potential in education, and it could take societal communication and creative exchange onto a whole new level.

Ya. I think the EVO2005 folks would agree with this.

Btw, I'm using my "Blog This" applet to see how well it works .. First time for me. I'm excited.

Six Weeks So Soon?

2005-02-26T20:51:00.000-08:00

For all my curmudgeonly complaints, I have to say this has been a blast.

Thanks to the coordinators and my fellow participants. I keep coming back to see if anybody's left comments .. and I still have a HUGE list of blogs to watch -- without even going out into the branches that most of us have made into other areas.

Nancy, Lesley, Sarolta, Marco ... and all the others who've worked so hard and contributed so much to the course. It's been an honor to play with you here in the the blogosphere ... I hope you stay in touch and keep writing in your blogs.

NL

Unsatisfactory

2005-02-24T06:21:00.000-08:00

Part of this post is my lack of breakfast talking.

I missed my breakfast because I hurried to get to the office by 7am local time to participate in the Learning Times event this morning. I came to the office because none of the setups in my home actually work because the machines I can expose to the outside world are all linux based. My windows machines are not sufficiently hardened to be exposed. In my haste, I forgot that the university for which I work has changed their policies on access and my machine is now "behind the wall" and Elluminate is blocked.

While the experience with EVO2005 has been generally positive -- I'll do a full critique later -- this LearningTimes/Elluminate thing has been a hugely frustrating experience. Even when I managed to get connected, it was on an unsupported platform and I could not take full advantage of the participation.

I would recommend that this platform be abandoned until the issues of firewall and platform compatability can resolved. There is no way I could recommend use of this platform under the circumstances.

And I'm PARTICULARLY pissed because I missed my breakfast in order to be closed out of the experience AGAIN!

On Community

2005-02-23T20:31:00.000-08:00

At the Northern Voice conference last weekend in Vancouver, Stephen Downes offered this theory of community.

A Theory of Community
a system defined by three major components:
a means of organizing input and experience
a mechanism for putting that experience into context,
a means of creation, of becoming part of someone else's experience

The idea here is that community is defined by the relations between its members, not some inherent property or quality – defined semantically, not syntactically

I like this. It helps explain how a random group of bloggers is not a community, but a group like ours is. Granted Downes has this in a blogging context, but he really is talking about communities in general.

See The New PR Wiki for a whole raft of Northern Voice resources.

Something I Found

2005-02-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

Well, something that somebody else found, and somebody ELSE built upon until I listened to it this morning and wanted to pass on to somebody.

I follow about 250 blogs now in my Sage aggregator. I get a lot of linkages. Jeanne Sessum's Allied blog is one of them. And she probably follows 500. She's always got cool stuff in there that makes me think.

Today I found this audio file that's as good a representation of the potential as any I've heard. It's significant because the original audio was just the voice. One of the people who heard the mp3 took it and put the piano behind it.

Ack. My addendum: My apologies to STWC for NOT linking to his blog entry instead of just the audio ... Man, I meant to do that ... I claim "brain cloud"

Stavrosthewonderchicken's Empty Bottle blog

I should probably do the "language warning" (he swears a little) and the "adult content" warning because he talks about youthful transgressions of the pharmaceutical variety.

... Pete's Slings and Arrows questions the value of blogging in education. Well, education is about making connections. Blogging allows us to extend those connections outside our selves, beyond our comfort zone, into the area where new connections happen ... It's all about the linkages ...

People of Earth, remember.

ePortfolios.

2005-02-15T17:22:00.000-08:00

i) What are e-portfolios?

The construct e-portfolios is a simple extension of the "artist portfolio" where an artist keeps representative samples and exemplars of his work. In the digital age, it only makes sense that this construct move online and become part of wider communities of practice. This is especially true for education and technology where more and more professional practice occurs in a digital format.

I particularly like the opportunity to reflect and explain in the online portfolio. In the classic portfolio, the artifacts spoke for themselves -- the artist's inclusion of this or that work goes unexplored and unexplained. As Helen Barnett points out, the electronic portfolio allows for that reflective exploration of an artifact. Why is it included? What does it represent to me? What significance does it have?

ii) How can they be of use to me and my classes?

It would be easy to consider the artifacts of a class as being the grist for a portfolio. But from an educational standpoint, the value of class related artifacts rests in their ability to trigger reflection ("Oh, my! I'd forgotten I'd done THAT!") and to add a level of meta-cognition to the eduational process. ("Final Exam: Pick the 3 most important artifacts you created in the course, and explain why each is significant individually, why they are significant as a group, and how they reflect the changed state of your understanding of the content. Place (at least) those three artifacts and your paper in your permanent portfolio.")

I think the REAL value -- and I've seen this happening as I've been assembling my own portfolio -- is that months, or years, later, the portfolio becomes a powerful tool for synthesis and evaluation. I wish I'd had mine longer. I'd really like to have some of the artifacts from my early computer days. Pictures of my first computer (the one I built), the software I created to measure program complexity, the presentation materials from my first conference, pictures of the ships I helped build -- all of those are lost now.

Helping students -- especially those in secondary or post-secondary education -- to form the portfolio habit would be immensely useful for many of them.

iii) What relationship is there between blogs and e-portfolios?

Blogs can serve as repositories for portfolios. My portfolio is stored in a TextPattern blog. One of the artifacts is my "professional" blog space -- Cognitive Dissonance -- and serves as a repository of all my formative writings relating to distance education. In a certain sense, a blog becomes a portfolio in the absence of other artifacts, the same way a diary becomes a marker for reflection and synthesis. The public nature of the blog or portfolio means that everybody has the opportunity to build a little place to show the world what you are and where you've come from.

Online Portfolio

2005-02-14T10:20:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I came across Dr Helen Barrett's ePortfolios for Learning I was really impressed that she'd done a LOT of work looking at various portfolio tools from the perspective of ease of use, portability, etc. I'd been toying with the idea that I needed to get my own materials together. Last May I graduated with my Ph.D. and the artifacts of my graduate school days were slipping out of my control as I migrated from computer to computer, harddrive to harddrive.

I already owned a domain and rented private server space, so I repurposed it to be

Feel free to visit (click the graphic) and explore my site.

One of the key elements in the portfolio is the twin construct of selection and significance. This idea is that one doesn't include EVERYTHING in a portfolio -- only select those things that are somehow significant. I didn't included every web page I ever created ... only those that were somehow significant to me. Likewise, I chose artifacts of my evolution as web designer -- even leaving some of the embarassing stuff up -- and educational designer. There's still a lot to do, but I feel like I've made a good start.

The underlying software is a blog engine running TextPattern but it branches out as needed into my WordPress blog and even into coded spaces.

Let me know what you think of it.

How to use a Button

2005-02-14T04:45:00.000-08:00

This post is part of my tutorial on how to use a button.

At this point,

I've created a small graphic to use as a button,
I've created my audio file.
I've uploaded both to a server.

Now I just need to use them in a link

End of Week 4

2005-02-12T18:07:00.000-08:00

I've been such a derelict this week.

On the one had, I was looking for an excuse to play with mp3 files. Finally made my first one and it's not bad.

One thing I find troubling is that almost everybody else used proprietary HTML <EMBED> tags so I can't listen to their MP3s. I wonder if they realize it...

Aparently they didn't.

Standards (and the ways in which Internet Explorer subverts them) can be an nasty problem. I've been a thorn in the side by insisting on trying everything in Linux on a Firefox browser, I know, but it's one of the best ways to find those things that will cause problems in cross-platform environments.

I've spent part of this Sunday afternoon listening to audio clips (I have to do a lil work but I *can* extract the links from the source code and plug them into my audio player). Every day Sarolta does something else cool. I loved listening to the story about the hotel. And thanks, Nancy, for making a link I could click on to load it. It was a relief.

The real value for audio in education will be as podcast, I think. Being able to subscribe to audio feeds and download them over night -- or even during the day while I'm engaged in my office. The challenge will be in creating audio that's not lecture. Rob Reynolds over on Xplana Radio (http://www.xplanaxine.com) is one of my favorite educational podcasters because he makes really short essays and posts them in audio and print. It's nice to be able to load my MP3 player and take them on my morning commute.

In Week 5 we should have fun. . . I'll share my own ePortfolio ...

Audio post

2005-02-11T08:29:00.000-08:00

OK. A first try at posting an audio link.

MP3 Audio

2005-02-05T21:45:00.000-08:00

An old negative ...

Some years ago, my mother sent me an envelope of old negatives. These are the old Kodak Safety Film negatives in a large format. Tonight, I found the envelope and put the negatives in the scanner.

I remember the day my mother took this picture of me. It was a lovely sunny summer day and I was sitting on a green wool blanket on the beach outside our house. I'm playing with the pipes in my father's piperack and I can still smell the tobacco residue and the pines above me. I think there were chickadees... but I had no idea what the smells or sounds meant.

This negative is over 50 years old. It scanned pretty well, don't you think?

Mary Harrsch - a reflection

2005-02-04T13:51:00.000-08:00

Personally, I was disappointed.

Once again, Learning Times tripped me up. I was able to hear Mary's lecture but when she went "driving around" my browser wouldn't follow. Even after I released the firewall and reprogrammed my router to accept the extra ports required, the only time I saw any of the graphical content was when it got put on the Whiteboard. It sounded sorta interesting.

The other problem I have is this notion of getting everbody in the same space at same time so we can all sit around and listen to one person talk. Granted the text chat was there, but the presentation mode ... sitting at the feet of the master ... seemed like we weren't really taking advantage of the opportity to get in and get our hands dirty.

The material sounded like it was pretty good, but couldn't that have been offered .. say .. in a blog, or as some other kind of publication rather than having Mary walk us thru it. The questions that people were asking seemed pretty decent .. and some of the follow on blogging I've read says that the majority of people liked it and got a lot out of it.

Myself, I can't help but think this glass was half empty. While that means it was also half-full, I would have liked to use that other half glass.

Ideas for using RSS in class:

- Put a technorati key-word watchlist together and post the link to it to the class for use in their aggregators.
- Cross link all the blogs in the class to a single aggregator stream.
- Build a del.icio.us tag list and feed it into an aggregator.
- Teacher publishes work, assignments, content on RSS to the members of his/her class.

Ah, well.

NL

Picasa - Hello - Blogger

2005-02-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

A Quick Test of Bloggerbot and Hello

Learning Times == Frustration

2005-01-31T07:49:00.000-08:00

Man, I hate this stuff sometimes.

First, lemme just say, I've attended these LearningTimes sessions with the Digital Divide Network before. They always worked just fine.

Not today. I started trying to log in a full hour before the session. The session is almost over now and I just can't make the darn thing work. And I am REALLY pissed off because I'm a big Will Richardson fan and wanted to be in this session.

I know it's being recorded. I know a transcript of the chat will be made. I know that none of that is as good as being there and participating. It makes me crazy.

Second. I'm an expert. I build computers. I administer networks. I program in 9 languages. I've been involved in the internet since before there WAS a world wide web.

Last. I FINALLY solved the problem. It was the router on my home network. I wouldn't pass the packets back thru the firewall and didn't give me any kind of message to tell me what the problem was.

Bottom line.
1. Two hours that I'll never get back
2. I'm aggravated beyond all tolerance
3. I have a re-inforced notion that these kinds of "we'll pretend it's a classroom" environments are just not worth the cost.

Week 2 Assignment and Reflection

2005-01-29T20:34:00.000-08:00

This is my second week assignment. I'm supposed to write an article on the various kinds of information found in the student and teacher blogs from Bee's grid and design a blog-course for ESL.

Grinding thru the various blogs was, I suppose, a reasonable exercise. It was a good way to see the pedestrian applications of blog software in (what I assume) were ESL applications. There was a rather narrow range of application in both sets of blogs. I didn't see a GREAT deal of meta-cognition being applied to the blogging experiences across the 8 blogs I looked at. The majority of them were diary-like -- with a greater or lesser emphasis on the various coursework and assignments. I can't throw too many stones here -- the posts for my blog in this course follow basically the same format -- and this course is, after all, BSL (blogging as Second Langauge) training.

I felt a little cheated, tho, that nobody in the sample had done
a) A Newspaper style group blog.
b) Used the language/blog combination to write fiction
c) Engaged in a larger examination of what they thought about their thinking about blogging and learning English.

I was sympathetic with the one teacher who went on hiatis from blogging because she wanted to break out of the "blogging because my audience expects it" rut. I write a regular weekly column about Distance Education in my Cognitive Dissonance blog, and there are times when I wonder if it's all worth it myself.

The second part of the task is to design a course that has in it, a blog.

Now, in the first place, that's a backwards assignment. We should be designing the instruction and only THEN deal with whether a blog is an appropriate channel for adding to the class based on an instructional goal. But .. I'll suspend my disbelieve (and design sense) for the purposes of the argument. :D

Since I don't teach ESL, I'm going to take the liberty to write about the application of a blog in a Masters Level Special Education program. It's particularly pertinent because the faculty member who is teaching the class (and whom I am supporting in getting this thing rolling) wants to incorporate blogs into his class.

(i) the public you will be dealing with
- the class is 10 adult students, new in the field of special education.

(ii) their level, their communicative competence
- they are, generally, classroom teachers who wish to get an MA in Significant Disabilities
- they generally have limited technological expertise

(iii) your setting, degree of formality of instruction
- the teacher is a "hard-core classroom lecturer" who is having trouble adapting to the online melieu. He needs to find ways to let go and allow the students to learn without getting his digitized powerpoints in the way

(iv) access, amount of time you can spend on it
- target goal is to spend about an hour a day of teacher time, about 20 minutes a day of student time.

(v) curricular constraints, institutional support, technical resources
- topical constraints are largely limited only by the content requirements of a rather liberal syllabus. The course will have the services of an expert technician and blogger to aid the teacher and student in determining valid applications of the blogging tools.

(vi) your common needs and objective
- All of us share the common need to connect on a more personal and regular basis. When dealing with the often emotion-charged material -- especially in the field of Significant Disability -- it's important for the students to be able to communicate with each other and construct their own meaning out of the material, the relationships, and their "day jobs"

The teacher has decided that blogs will be a good way for students to produce some extended writings on selected subjects over the duration of the course. Some of the topics will be assigned, others will be more open.

This is coming up on the end of the second week of EVO-2005. I'm not as involved this week as last, in large part because of more immediate demands on my time and resources in the Real World. In addition, the exercises (and group acitivites) this week seemed a bit weaker than the week prior and I just couldn't work up enough "oomph" to participate in them. I *did* want to get up and meet in TappedIn last Wednesday, but I overslept -- the session was at 5am local time here.

The coming week, I'm hoping that I'll be able to be more engaged in the group work and that I'll find an assignment I like. :D

Eat your own dogfood

2005-01-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

Man.

Every once in a while I come across an example of what NOT to do that's soooo egregiously bad, I just HAVE to point it out. I don't like to do it, because next time it could be me -- the gods know *I* make enough of my own trouble and karma will get me for throwing these rocks, no doubt.

But this one is a classic teaching moment.

The Six Laws of the New Software.

His laws are

Single-idea

Collaborate

Disappear (this refers to interface design)

Simplify

Release

Comply

To read this I had to switch to a different machine that had acrobat on it because

the default pdf reader on my linux machine wouldn't cope with the display

this thing is 17 pages of pretty densely packed text.

in a proprietary format

using a menu structure to manage page turning

written by (apparently) one guy

Now I appreciate that he's talking about software development. But the difference between programming computers (writing software) and programming people (writing manifestos) has a lot of parallels.

If you wanna talk the talk, then you gotta walk the walk.

End of today's lesson in what NOT to do.

Oye.

Welcome to Grendel's Lair

2005-01-24T11:18:00.000-08:00

Grendel's Lair

OK. After all the build up, I really wanted to see what 20six had to offer.

It's not that bad. But, I think I prefer blogger.

On the plus side.
a. The free account is Really Easy in a "any way you want so long as it's on the list" sort of way.
b. They have trackback built into it.
c. Graphics and other media seem to be really easy to deal with and you don't really need another website to host the graphical elements.

On the negative side.
a. They wanted my full street address (I put in a false one).
b. You can't edit the template. It's a "take it or leave it" menu choice. For me, this is unacceptable.

Other features that may or may not be significant.
a. Other authors capability. About the same as blogger.
b. Moderated posts. I can see where this would be handy for teachers to censor student output, but if you're in a group situation, I'm not sure about this. Perhaps, since the blog can be open to outsiders, this is a way to control blog-spam.

All in all.
Amusing, but not piquant. I'd give it about a 70 ... It has a good beat, but I couldn't dance to it.

Reflection 1

2005-01-23T06:21:00.000-08:00

The end of week one in EVO2005

Well, we've managed to get people "into the room" and it's STARTING to come together. I need to spend some time today rebuilding my aggregator. My trusted laptop died Friday night -- taking with it about 3 weeks worth of un-backed up work and I've spent the last 36 hours rebuilding my platform. I'm about ready to get back into the fray here now.

Back to the EVO experience.

Bee, Aaron, and Graham are doing a great job managing the group. I've enjoyed talking to the people in our group -- altho the conversation has been a little fragmented in the wiki. There's an interesting dynamic with wiki's ... They are MISERABLE to navigate in. You have to know what's there in order to find it. The collaboration sandbox pages are a great idea, but they're not supported by RSS so we need to keep checking and checking ... I wonder if there's a solution to that. Hm.

The group -- if the Ann Davis chat is any indicator -- is REALLY interested in the K-12 applications of this technology. I know the list has been filled with email about older students. And the main questions are technical. Which blog engine? How do you control access? How do you control the students? What do you get them to write about?

The more interesting questions are
- how do we build communities around this technology?
- what are the instructional goals that can be supported?
- what are some possible instructional strategies that the technology can support?

Of course, we haven't really gotten into aggregators yet, which is one of the reasons people are floundering on the listserv and wiki, trying to talk to each other. With about 70 active participants and almost 200 people in the Yahoo Group, that's a lot of floundering.

Enough reflection. I need to get some action going here. :D

Macs and Browsers

2005-01-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

At my day job, we've just recommended that we design to "a Firefox standard browser." This is a change from the IE-standard.

What that means is that we guarantee that the content appears as we intend it should appear for anybody running a Firefox browser. Before we only guaranteed IE. Most of what we did worked for other people. We got tripped up a lot by AOL folks who used the network browser that came as part of the AOL interface.

The good news is that Firefox is a standards compliant browser. That means that the only browsers that won't display what we post the way we intend it to be displayed are those browsers that implement the standard in a radically different mode. IE is one of those browsers. There are several positioning standards that Microsoft does in its own way, for example.

The bad news is that too many people are still using IE. And OS9 Macs don't have a Firefox option. I'm about to go boot up an OS9 machine and see how far I can get with Netscape 7. This notion that the IE version available to Mac OS9 people can't do simple things like deal with the Blogger.com interface is very troubling. Folks shouldn't have to spend a big chunk of change to access content that should work.

Call me an optimist.

EVONLINE 2005: Initial Post

2005-01-17T08:21:00.000-08:00

My first post for the course

[disclaimer]
My Role is Curmudgeon. I do not intend to find fault, pick nits, or otherwise be critical for the sake of being a PITA. But. I also have some pretty well defined biases about the use of web and internet resources for educational purposes, the role of the classroom in the delivery of education (and at the expense of learning), and how those two issues relate to the notions of distance education (a redundant phrase) and distance learning (an oxymoron).
[/disclaimer]

The assignment is to do one or more of the following tasks in this post:

a) Comment on the picture and the quotation (found on this week's task page) in the light of what you have read and done this week

Well, given that this post is supposed to be one of the first things we do this week, this seems like it must be intended to be a way to establish existing levels of knowledge rather than any kind of assessment of the week's activity.

What does this picture mean to me?

On the one hand, the paraphrase of St Augustine's, "ego cogito, ergo sum," indicates that blogging, somehow, represents a validation of the individual in the world -- that is, a person cannot exist unless represented in the blogosphere. In a literal sense, one does not exist in the community of bloggers unless one writes a blog, but in another sense, there are many other spheres in which an individual exists including other forms of community, other forms of publication, other forms of validation that do not include blogging. This carries back to the notion of "virtual communities."

A "virtual community" is called virtual only from the perspective that the qualifier "virtual" means created using a computer. It does not mean "virtual" in the sense of "existing in essence but not in actual fact." Online communities are real communities made up of real people who are represented by abstractions in cyberspace but are no less real than the abstractions that represent them in meatspace.

I think I'd prefer the caption to read "I think, therefore I blog." It would seem less trivial, less marginalizing.

As for the Doctorow paraphase of "Writing is an exploration..." I find that much more acceptable. Blogging IS writing. But I think that we miss an important aspect of blogging if we focus ONLY on the writing. My perception of blogging is that it is a communications channel - not a broadcast channel. A large portion of the blogosphere is reading and reflection on what others in the blogosphere are saying. If all we do is write, we fail to participate in the social construction that represents the blogosphere at large.

Many people read blogs. They are the ghosts in the shell. Their shades drift from notion to notion, taking what meaning they can back into other planes of existance -- or not -- based on their own participation in THOSE planes. It is the writing of a blog, however, that instantiates an individual in the blogosphere. A critical characteristic of that instantiation involves whether or not the individual actually participates in the blogosphere through reflection, or merely pontificates IN the blogosphere without participation.

A "real blogger" participates in the conversation otherwise the "blog" is nothing more than a web page.

b) Write about the most important thing you've learned so far this week

Let's see. It's the first day of the week. THE most important thing?

I don't like this set up.

On the plus side, it's using mostly free, readily available resources. The Yahoo Groups provides for a replicable environment with a minimum of technical expertise, as does the group blog on blogger.com. I can't tell about the MediaWiki on opensource.idv.tw - I haven't looked at it enough to see what it really is.

On the downside, I'm required to create (or re-purpose) specialized blog space for my personal blog in order to be able to participate in the group blog. Blogger.com isn't a BAD space, but I much prefer the trackback and "read more" capabilities of WordPress over blogger. Using the Blogger as a group blog, means I MUST have a blogger space in order to participate. That limits my ability to use my own knowledge and resources in my participation in the course. I may find this to be less of a concern as the course goes along than it feels like right now.

The other part that I don't like is the use of synchronous audio. The "bandwidth" limits on spoken language -- particularly in an environment of EFL/ESL -- is so drastically limiting. I need a pretty good pipe just to participate technically, but then the channel can only accommodate 150-200 wpm. Add to that the requirement that -- at least for ONE of the platforms -- I cannot participate in my prefered Linux/Firefox mode ... my feeling right now is "bleh."

c) Write about what you still find confusing

- I'm confused as to why the organizers would choose media that exclude non-sighted, non-hearing, non-Windows people. (I am HOPING that my participation here will help raise the awareness of the organizers as well as the participants.)

- I'm confused as to why synchronous modes of communication would be considered given the global span of the community. Perhaps there will be multiple, parallel opportunities for participation allowing for sub-sets of the group to communicate with each other.

Where do we go next?

2004-11-29T15:20:00.000-08:00

A few hundred years ago, a lot of us came to North America to escape the religious persecution back home in Europe. Rightly or wrongly (and there was a lot Wrong with that). In light of the current political situation, it seems like we've forgotten an important lesson.

Over on Gallup there's a story about a poll they did on religious belief in the US. It's troubling for a bunch of reasons. In this poll the Gallup organization found

About a third of those polled believe that the theory of evolution is sufficiently justified by "scientific evidence."

About a third disagree and believe that it is only one of many theories, all deserving of equal consideration.

About a third don't know.

Do the math.

Two-thirds of the polled people do not understand Evolution. On the one hand, this is a pretty distressing notion. On the other hand, I'd be interested to know how many of them understand Gravity. I also have to wonder, of the third that believe that Evolution is a scientifically-based theory, how many actually know what that means? How many were only 'going along' with the survey? Ironically, it's the third that say they don't know that gives me a little hope.

What is more distressing is the finding that almost half of the people polled believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago."

Who did Gallup call? Are there that many people living in the dark ages who have telephones? Lucy is a myth? Leakey's findings in Olduvai Gorge are a hoax foisted upon Man by Satan? What?

And what about the third of Americans who are, apparently, "biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word." My other blog is called Cognitive Dissonance - which is the ability to hold to two or more conflicting beliefs simultaneously - but I don't know that the level of spiritual schizophrenia outlined in the various books of the Bible can come close to mere "cognitive dissonance." And which version of the Bible do we take literally? King James? Gutenburg? Laridian? Geneva? American Standard? Concordant Literal New Testament? Which? "The one down at the Church" leaves a little to be desired in terms of an identifying citation.

Ok. I can see some overlap here. The third who are literalists must be the ones who reject Evolution. That's ok if it's the same group. It makes it much easier to accept, somehow. I'm sure it's not a hundred percent overlap, but there have to be some considerable numbers in common.

And THESE are the people who are in charge of the government?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-Christian. I'm one of those liberals who believes we all have the right to go to Hell in our own way. But just as freedom of speech doesn't include the freedom to yell "Fire" in a crowded theatre, freedom of religion doesn't include forcing me to worship your gods. And there is where the rubber is meeting the road.

The "Evangelical Christians" believe that it is their God Given Responsibility to force me -- and thousands like me -- to embrace Jesus as my savior and live life according to their interpretation of the Bible. And that's the problem.

The Big Deal with the "separation of Church and State" is that it provides -- not for freedom OF religion so much -- but for freedom FROM religion. The Evangelical Fundamentalists would take that freedom away in the name of freedom of religion.

A democracy isn't supposed to be like that -- it's not Majority Rule. It's supposed to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. It's a concept that I think most Christians understand.

And if they don't, where else can we go to escape the tyranny?

Blogshares, The Game

2004-11-20T20:31:00.000-08:00

Once in a while I come across something cool. Most of the time it's stuff that only *I* think is cool, but lately I've been on a roll.

A couple weeks ago it was podcasting.

This week it's Blogshares (http://www.blogshares.com). Some of you may have noticed the tag on my blogs that I'm now "listed."

Blogshares is an interesting index of blogs that just happens to be a "game." The premise is that blogs are "stocks" and you can buy shares of the blog. The price of the shares goes up and down based on the amount of traffic in the shares. There are ancillary markets in "ideas" (measured by the numbers of "incoming" links in a particular industry. The game is pretty darn cool, but the *interesting* thing is that it serves as an index and that index is created by the players.

At the moment there are about 1200 "industries" listed in the index. Players read the blogs and vote on what industry they believe that the blog belongs to. Some industries (like Diary) are pretty broadly defined. Others (like Art History/Impressionism) are pretty narrowly constrained. The industries serve as concentrators, so that if you want to see blogs about Medieval History, you go to the Medieval History industry, pull up a list of blogs, and start wandering thru the list. The advantage to this is that these categories are assigned by "reviewers" who have, for the most part, actually looked at the blog in question and made a judgement call.

This goes back to a couple of David Wiley's long standing issues -- the scalability of tools, and self organizing systems. With the number of blogs growing on the web, getting a handle on the content and activity is a monsterous undertaking. Keyword searching doesn't help much when you're trying to locate a blog with a specific bent.

Enter Blogshares.

The game rewards the players for playing with the blogs, not as blogs per se, but as commodities to be categorized and sorted. Because very few people use good descriptive names on their blogs, accurate categorization depends on somebody actually observing the blog and making a judgement. The game itself is rather compelling, but the by-product, a searchable index of categorized blogs is an amazing asset.

Drop by and see what I mean.

Ubex

Blogshares Index

2004-11-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

This is a test of some stuff I'm doing over in Blogshares

If you haven't looked into it yet, it's darn cool

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

Blog Link

This is a test of linking within blogshares.

New Industry: Music > Reviews

2004-11-18T14:58:00.000-08:00

--Industry Proposed: Music > Reviews

--Description: The industry will provide a place to generate ideas based on music reviews. The reviews can be of CDs, venues, concerts, or any other medium in which music can be enjoyed.

--History: The game already has Film, Book, and Restaurant Reviews. This would provide for the wealth of critical material available in music related blogs.

--Modern Non-Blog Resource:
There are large numbers of non-Blog resources from around the world.
(From Google)
Music-Critic.com | the source for music reviews
Music-Critic.com - the source for music reviews | Album Review. Music reviews - new albums reviewed.

1000s of Reviews for Movies, Music, Games, DVDs
Reviews, quotes, and scores from major critics for film, video/DVD, music, and videogames.

Jazz | JazzReview.com Magazine is your complete guide to Jazz
Since 1997 JAZZREVIEW.COM has been your jazz music connection to reviews of the hottest new jazz releases and so much more.

Yahoo! Directory: Music > Reviews

BBC - Music - Reviews
Music reviews on the BBC. From blues to world, your guide to the best new releases.

All-Reviews.com CD and Music Reviews
All-Reviews.com CD and Music Reviews.

--Blog Examples:
We already have one blog -- delicado -- is registered with the game and is reviewing music. This would be the perfect industry for it.

Tribe.net: *Album/Music Reviews*
Just bought a new CD? Review it here! Heard something new on the radio? Talk about it.

Drowned in Sound - Albums
News, reviews, interviews and opinions on the British music scene

Tribe.net: Seattle Death/Black Metal Freaks For Seattleites devoted to the music of the inverted cross, Death and Black metal. Post upcoming shows and review new music in the scene. Hail Satan!

Tribe.net: New Music and Band Reviews
Do you want to find out about cool new music but you're too busy or out of the scene to find out? Have you heard about a band but have no idea what they sound like? Do you want to find out if a new album is good before wasting money on it?

My Profile

Blogshares Contest #3

2004-11-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

--Industry Proposed: Sports > Geocaching

--Description and History: Geocaching
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Geocaching is an outdoor sport that involves the use of a Global Positioning System ("GPS") receiver to find a "geocache" (or "cache") placed anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small, waterproof container containing a logbook and "treasure". Geocaching is a unique take on a traditional Easter-egg hunt in that it uses two recent technologies, the GPS and the Internet.

The sport of Geocaching was made possible by the "turning off" of the Selective Availability of the Global Positioning System on May 1, 2000. The first documented placement of a cache with GPS assistance took place on May 3, 2000 by Dave Ulmer. The location was posted on the usenet newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav. By May 6, 2000 it had been found twice and logged once.

Geocaching is growing rapidly in popularity all over the world. As of August 21, 2004 there were 116,015 active caches in 210 countries posted on Geocaching.com (http://www.geocaching.com).

--Modern Non-Blog Resource: The primary source for Geocaching information in the US is Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site

--Blog Examples:
Geonap's Journal: A slightly out of date blog, but shows the kind of activity that's possible. Note the activity thru the summer months, altho this is not--strictly speaking--a summer sport.

GeoROCKS! Adventures in Geocaching: Another diary of geocache activities and stories.

Geocaching: Current postings demonstrating that this isn't just for summer.

The Triple-S Blog: A cute entry on the "travel bug" Morton Moo Cow -- a kind of twist on the Vacation Lawn Gnome idea.

--Link to my user page in Blogshares:
http://www.blogshares.com/user.php?id=22502

Stuffage

2004-11-16T18:50:00.000-08:00

I've set this blog up so I can see what the "freebie" services have to offer. I also wanted a place to post weird crap that didn't have a lot to do with some of my other efforts, and to look at things that don't fall into the perview of my other blogspaces.

One thing I expect to do here is review some of the podcasts that I find and like, run up news of different tools that appeal to me, and perhaps some other stuffage. I'm running in so many directions at once, I'm thinking that having different blogs in different spaces might help me to track and arrange it all a bit better.

Ship Pictures

2004-10-27T21:20:00.000-07:00

Grendel in orbit.
One of the silly things I do is work in VRML. This is a screen shot of a one of my freighters -- the Merchant Vessel Grendel -- in orbit.

Ubiquity

On Writing and Promotion

Visionary??!

If I Want to LEARN

Book Trailer

Quarter Share

'F I were King of the Forest ...

Scarlet Letter 2006

Electric Results

Simplify, Redux

Simplify, Simplify ...

The New Communism

People Person

Intermission: Can I die with that...?

Step 2: Where am I at the moment.

Step 1: Imagine It

A Year Ago

Crash

I Passed 8th Grade Math

Life's Proportions

An Odd Day

Year End Reflections

Political testing

Tempus Fugits All Over!

And they're OFF!!

Phaedrus Academy

Postcard from 12005'

Postcard from Florida

Call me naive ...

MIT Blog Survey

Nerdy Goodness!

Learner Centered

Cultural Creative

Tempus Fugit

Postcard from Maine

Postcard from Maine

Postcard from Maine

Earle P. Lowell (1930-2005)

Tough Day

I'm Jack Sparrow. Who knew??

Still Alive!

Silly But Fun

Avocado Redux

Eide Neurolearning Blog and Learning Styles

Six Weeks So Soon?

Unsatisfactory

On Community

Something I Found

Ack. My addendum: My apologies to STWC for NOT linking to his blog entry instead of just the audio ... Man, I *meant* to do that ... I claim "brain cloud" Stavrosthewonderchicken's Empty Bottle blog

ePortfolios.

Online Portfolio

How to use a Button

End of Week 4

Audio post

Mary Harrsch - a reflection

Picasa - Hello - Blogger

Learning Times == Frustration

Week 2 Assignment and Reflection

Eat your own dogfood

Welcome to Grendel's Lair

Reflection 1

Macs and Browsers

EVONLINE 2005: Initial Post

Where do we go next?

Blogshares, The Game

Blogshares Index

New Industry: Music > Reviews

Blogshares Contest #3

Stuffage

Ship Pictures

Ack. My addendum: My apologies to STWC for NOT linking to his blog entry instead of just the audio ... Man, I meant to do that ... I claim "brain cloud"

Stavrosthewonderchicken's Empty Bottle blog