CogDogBlog

Back in the day when I was a free wheeling no responsibility grad student herein Arizona, I spent a lot of time doing solo backpack trips, especially out in the Superstition Wilderness Area and up on the Mogollon Rim.

It sure seemed time to get back to nature, and my equipment needed an upgrade, so I made got some new gear last week from REI (well actually it came Friday, the day before my planned trip).

I had picked a spot I had seen a few years ago- its quite a ways back on the Rim Road, Forest Road 300 which follows closely the General Cook Trail ruote east/west along the edge of the Mogollon Rim, a 1000 foot escarpment that marks the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. So it was a 25 mile forest road drive, maybe pushing the limits of my little MItsibushi Lancer Iwhich performed like a champ).

The hike was not long, about 3 miles, to get me to Dane Spring, a spot I had seen on a backpack maybe 5 years ago. Its on a higher altitude section of the Rim, pushing 7000 feet, so there are plenty of aspen and fir trees, but most important, Dane Spring is a running spring, so water was available.

So everything on this trip went to ;plan, almost to exact time and locations I had scouted, I always remark how the magazine articles about camping.hiking are nearly always about people struggling or having near death experiences– and that it is totally uninteresting to publishing when everything on an outdoor venture goes without adventure.

But wow, its been maybe 4 years since I wore a pack, and my feet needed to re-learn how to walk.

Yet nothing extraordinary happened. I packed in, set up the new tent, rook a walk and some photos, read, made dinner, lit a fire. and climbed in bed for a long night sleep.

Well, I was not totally unplugged- I brought along the iPod Touch and watched some videos. What a nerd.

Almost a highlight walking out when I passed a man with about 7 kinds all less than 8. The one in the back was this blond haired type, wearing PJs and cowboy boots, and lugging one of those big plastic bugle horns.

So I said, “Good Morning”.

And he replies right away, “Good morning! My name is Bo!”

I don’t know why this struck me except for the sheer energy of youth. before we grow up and practically kill that spirit.

On the drive home I dawdled more along the Rim Road, stopping to take in the views. It is nearly impossible to describe or catch even in photos the breadth and depth of the view. And being in sight of Payson, there’s good cell phone signal, so I was able to make a mountain top phone call to my Mom.

She told me she finally figured out how to access my blog (meaning she found the bookmark I set in her browser), but as she said, “I looked at everything and have no idea what you are writing about,”:

Oh well, here’s one for you mom… HI MOM!

So here is my first flickr post of a video, all looks good and flickry. The point of this whole ramble is to also see how it posts to the blog.

And now to plot the next trip.

This week I tried the free ServerMojo service which provides reports of uptime for your web servers (or databases) or pings you when they are down. The cool thing is you can get alerts the old fashioned grandma way (email) or as direct messages via twitter (which can then be pushed your phone).

So ServerMojo periodically pings your servers and reports and whether the ping comes back. I had 2 twitter DMs today noting a 3 hours when CogDogBlog went belly up, one message when it went down and another when it returned:

Maybe I am better off not knowing? Oh well.

I have two servers set- one is CogDogBlog and the other is the NMC web site - I plan to do another for the NMC MySQL service because it did get overloaded twice in the last few months.

You also get some basic uptime charts:

So far its a nifty service at a niftier price. $0.

Most people who have reached the high vistas of the Twitter Life Cycle curve have at least one, if not many small stories where they got information, a contact, a resource from twitter that they would not have gotten anywhere else. Or in such a timely fashion.

So here is one more, how I long shoot tweet in the air got me technical info I needed.

The NMC web site runs in drupal (no snark today). We use the TinyMCE module to give our users, and our office staff who create a lot of the content, a visual text editor. But I have had this nibbling problem which will likely seem nothing to a drupal-ista. I have our CSS styles include classes for hyperlinks, so that adding something like class="pdf" to an href tag will insert a small file type icon:

It is as simple as

(See the
<a href="/pdf/virtual-learning-prize-PR.pdf"
    class="pdf">press release</a>.)

I have a few classes for quicktime links, word docs, rss feeds, they all look something like:

.pdf {
	background: url('images/pdf.gif') no-repeat;
	padding-left: 14px;
}

But the problem was I would edit these in the drupal plain text editor, since I love seeing the HTML code, but if someone else in our office went to edit the content (like to fix one of my typos), when they went into the TinyMCE text editor and then saved their work, the damn class would be stripped from the source.

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My second presentation yesterday for the Maricopa Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference was my favorite gig these days, the 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story — which, as the audience learned, is actually hovering at ter Magic Heinz Number of 57 (well technically today 56, as toufee, one of the video editing sites, went from being a free site to a paid site, bye bye).

Look at the happy people (well they were chatting away madly as the opening slide show was running with Paul Simon singing in the background):

I do this one sans presentation files, all from pre-loaded Firefox tabs, which sort of works well for jumping around, but I think I overly tax it when I load the 14 or so demos, a few borked in demo mode, but oh well, it happens, right?

I have this one audio recorded as well
50 Web 2.0 Ways (33.6 Mb MP3, 48:52)

Since I heard the screens were hard to hear in ustream, when I ran this one, I left it in camera mode, and hoped my aim of the laptop camera was okay (note the stream was started early, so there may be about 10 minutes of chatter and noise before it starts- or maybe my presentation cannot be differentiated form chatter and noise).

This was a lot of fun, as always, and people just love the craziest things, like Blabberize.

And wow, did this jam packed day go fast! That was the end of the conference, and it was time to go for ppost conference drinks.

Thanks to all my former colleagues at Maricopa for the warm welcome, it was great to be back for a day

Wow, what a great day it was yesterday to be back at my old stomping grounds but this time as an invited speaker for the Maricopa Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference which has become a great regional event, as they had attendees from Arizona State University, Coconino Community College, I heard even people came from Texas (?).

Mike Wesch was an amazing speaker, and beyond his YouTube fame are some amazing projects he is doing with students generating learning content (check out the world culture sim) in all the good Web 2.0 ways (love his use of netvibes). We got interviewed by Veronica Diaz for a podcast that should appear somewhere on the maricopa conference site.

Mike’s morning keynote was a great leadoff for my Being There presentation, the first of two I did yesterday.

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Usually when I get emails about offers to advertise on my blog (which is a rather off thing to ask for), I just delete them. But for fun, when I got this recent one:

Hello,
We have a client in the e-learning sector who is interested in advertising on your blog. We find it relevant to our client and your blog to be of high quality. We are interested in buying links site-wide, homepage links, link within articles, or having you write about our client and linking to them. If you are open to doing so, we can also provide the content Please write back to me with your advertising rates and how much it will cost to sponsor a blog post on your site. Also, if you run other blogs, please send those to me too. We will be able to Paypal you immediately for these link placements.

… I decided to put a number out there:

My fee is $1,000,000 cash.

If I dont post ever again, you will know they went for the sucker bet.

So I finally have my magic card to get out of the Alltel Jail of Poor Service and Unrelenting Contracts

Last week I was down in Phoenix using the new UM150 USB modem they sent me. It worked fine for the first stop. Then, I had 5 disconnects in less than 2 hours, from 2 different locations. I left a message for Rick, the Executive Customer Relation Specialist who was following through - it was brief, “Hi Rick, this is Alan Levine, the guy with the new wireless modem. It worked for 2 hours and now I hve 5 disconnects in 2 hours. I want out of my contract”.

In the meantime I looked at my network settings and saw a bunch of unused connection types for the card. So I deleted them. And the thing worked for 2 hours.

So right on cue, Monday morning, Rick called, and said he talked to his supervisor and said for all my trouble, they’d let me out of my contract with no charge.

I was there.

I won.

But I hesitated since the thing was working. So i said I wanted to see if it was consistent with this week’s travel. After all, once out of my contract, I have to go to another carrier and start over. Maybe they are all crooks.

So tonight I came down to Phoenix. While waiting for my pizza I tried to connect. It tool 4 tries. I was disconnected twice after 5 seconds. Then I was in. Back in my hotel room, it took 3 tries to ger a connection. Then I was one for an hour. I was writing captions for flickr photos I was uploading. I went to upload and BOOM! Nothing. The damn thing had disconnected with no warning, and my photo captioning, tagging was lost.

Here’s a snapshot of my log- the pink lines are all “disconnected by peer” meaning they dropped me:

So I am ready to use the get out of jail card. I have had enough. I want to show that you can get companies to knuckle under. But it is utterly amazing the amount of effort it took to get to this point. Anytime you call the support, you will get a ceiling of support and no one there will acknowledge that it is even possible to escape. So they key is to persist until you hit this magic layer of “Executive Customer Relations” Those are the people to ask for.

I shall be free, than find another pirate ship that I will indenture myself to.

But I will revel in freeing myself from the Allhel Pirates

I have an interesting/weird presentation opportunity tomorrow, traveling all the way to Mesa, Arizona to do two sessions at the Maricopa Community Colleges Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference. It’s “weird” because I worked 14 years at Maricopa, nine of those years running the conference that was the predecessor, though I must say I never got more than 250 people registered for this one. Nope, this one is all different from that oid tired cactus thingie.

And I am looking forward to seeing former colleagues, many of whom are sure I moved to Austin, or some who did not know I was gone

Anyhow, I am doing an early warning here because I am going to see if I can stretch the audience to do live broadcasts of my presentations via ustream.tv- of course, this is all hinging on the local network (I requested wired connection but am not counting). To solve the issue of the poor viewing angle from a laptop camera- who needs to see my talking head anyhow– I intend to start the stream with the camera as people enter the room, and then switch the video source to my desktop, using CamTwist. There will be the usual shout outs to twitter as well.

As a backup, I intend to record audio on my Edirol R-09, if I can remember to click the Big Dumb Red Blinking Button.

Hopefully, the streams will start 10 minutes before the scheduled times from http://ustream.tv/cogdog; with all the things to attend to, I most likely will not see much of the chat and am relying on my connected colleagues in the audience to keep me posted. So the showlist for Tuesday, lucky May 13, 2008, includes:

• 10:30am PDT (check local time) Being There.. in that Unevenly Distributed Future - yes it is a reprise of the first one last May at Faculty Academy and then a few times in Australia, but I’ve pruned some less essential pieces, added many new examples, and tossed a few new surprises in the mix.. including a mullet. Go figure. And in the most unlikely occurrence ever, I’ve posted the presentation early, so there will not be late night tinkering. What the heck, the presentation file is not the presentation, I’ve heard. If I get good audio, I may turn that into a SlideCasr.
• 2:00pm PDT (check local time) 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I love doing this presentation, of which there is no presentation being me having about 50 Firefox tabs lined up based on the workshop/presentation first done in Hobart Australia, October 2007. I am sure I will be still trying to ride this horse long after its time, so someone please tell me when to Stick a Fork in It. I’ve recently added a few more to the mix, including Jaycut (a multi track web-based video editor) and Vuvox Collage (a stunning rich media presenter, unlike any other tool, still in private beta)… so if anyone is counting, I have pegged it at 57, the magic Heinz number, and a few more in the wings that may top it at 60 soon.

I’ll be presenitng humbly in the shadows of keynoter Michael Wesch.

And what is fun to watch is the official conference site, and even I see a few of the registration tools I built there, and the unofficial 2.0ish one full of blgggy taggy utterzy twittery bling. Wow, what a cool template on the blog, where did they get it? So I am curious to see what happens when the 2 cross paths tomorrow.

I am quite excited about all of this, and to add to the craziness, the weather forecast I just heard is predicting an “outbreak of weather” for Phoenix- rain? and I might miss snow down to 6000 feet? Amazing.

I know a number of bloggers who regularly write about their family, or have gotten family members into blogging. That’s neat by me, but largely, in my case, its been pretty much a case of avoiding Where Worlds Collide, not for any really good reason; they just seem pretty separate spheres of my own life. Maybe deep down in the CogDogSoul, I know this “blogging stuff” is all fluff.

So tangentially, it reminds my of my colleague Klaus from graduate school, who would relay that his working class Dad would occasionally ask him when he was going to “get some honest work.” What could be more honest than Klaus, a grad student, chasing adventures on Mexican volcanoes?

But this is a positive story about my “little” sister, Harriet. That is in quotes because she is 6 years older than me, but she is shorter, yet has enough goods on me from growing up. But over the last year it has been fun as she had started reading my blog in October to follow my travels in Australia, but then in our conversation and email she was reading all the posts. Then, she got hooked on flickr, created an account, and started commenting on my photos.

That is kind of cool, like maybe she even takes what I do seriously

So we are talking this weekend, Harriet from her sailboat on the Chesapeake, me at Home Depot in Payson, AZ, and she’s talking about being influenced by my rant on presentations. She has a rather high level government job, and works in computer systems, but she said she attends these meetings full of deadly dull Powerpoint, the typical monotone reading of 8pt text slides. So for her recent presentation, she researched a bunch of the presentation related sites I referenced, and made hers nearly all visual… and she relayed that it caught everyone’s attention and garnered a pile of positive feedback.

So my silly blogging influenced my sister’s work, thats pretty cool by me. Now maybe she will be twittering soon, blogging, popping those snazzy presentations on Slideshare….

And being Mothers Day, I should note my mom asked me on my last visit to see “that blog thing.” So I went to her computer, and made sure it was favorited in her Internet Explorer (I do rue the day my sister got her a PC before I could get her a mac). I was actually already there… and boy did it load slowly on her dial up internet! Mom pretty much only does email, and says she “never goes on that web” and forgot how to get to my blog — which is all ironic as she reads her email (NetZero) in a web browser. But no sense being picky.

But who knows, one day, Mom may find her way here and leave a comment.

So does your Mom read your blog?

You’re hooked on twitter. At first you thought it was the dumbest thing anyone can do, but next thing you know, you have 8000 updates. You have signed the Twitter Life Cycle summit log.

And them, out of the blue something goes “technically wrong”.

Or as more often happens, you are paging through your tweets and the Older button at the bottom disappears.

WTF?

In this short, highly low production, “just hit record before I finished coffee” screencast I show you how to seize control back from twitter when it takes your button - Take Control of Your Twitter (7 Mb Quicktime).