Last work post was back in March 2009! Just a quick update to keep things ticking over.
I'll be heading off to the Franklin Pierce Law Center (www.piercelaw.edu) in Concord, NH, USA (Map) at the end of October to show off SIMPLE, and I'm also involved as an advisor to the UKCLE's OER project
[via Plinky]
This is actually a hard one. It seems that I can easily recall what happened a couple of hours ago, but as we go back in time things become a lot more hazy.
I can recall being a teenager, hanging out on a bit of land, down the road from my house with my friends, on our bikes, simply wasting an afternoon. When was that? I couldn't actually tell you! Sometime between 1992 and 1997, and I can only tell you that because one of my friends was a year older than me so went to University a year before I did.
Before that though, things happened, afterall I spent a year living in Malaysia in my aunt's house, with two dogs: a white, fluffy thing and a german shepherd. Now the german shephard was overly energetic, and affectionate, unfortunately also much larger than my little brother. So when the dog put its forelegs on his shoulders, he fell down, with the dog on top...Do I remember that? Or do I remember people telling me that was what happened? I honestly can't remember....
and the diary is starting to fill up. Currently I have pencilled in a return trip to Australia & the Australian National University and the CALI conference in June, and then Concord, NH in August.
Cory Doctorow suggests that using any spare 20minutes you can find for writing is a good habit to get into if you are serious about writing (http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html), amongst other things (aside his suggesting of using "tk" to indicate a fact check has been useful too).
So in the interests of maintaining some level of skill in the use of the English language, I've decided to make an attempt to follow his suggestion. Unfortunately I guess the first issue for anyone who decides to start writing is actually finding a topic to write about. So for the next couple of posts it will be somewhat rambling as I attempt to find a niche that vaguely interests me in a personal capacity.
I'll be the first to admit it: I was never really that into blogging in the first place. Of course I'd lurk, reading the "cool" blogs, following the trendsetters. Right up until the point that the trend setters got so fast at setting trends that following them was too much effort.
I remember the first time that I started following what Robert Scoble was talking about when he was still a technology evangelist at Microsoft, I also remember not following him shortly after. Not that he wasn't interesting or didn't know what he was talking about, but more due to the fact that at the time following his thoughts, comments...replies to comments was just too much work.
Maybe it was me. I started using various RSS news feeds and most of these just aren't very good at providing an interface in which you can follow the train of thought from the blog entry, into the comments and onwards. Yes everyone published an RSS feed for the comment stream coming out of their blog, but then that disassociates the comments from the feed.
Ironically services like Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/) allow people like Robert Scoble to be just as verbose as they want may actually save the day. The conversational nature of twitter allows an engagement with the readers, whilst keeping the thread alive. Want to introduce a new case in point, drop it in using any of the multitude of URL shortening services (Tiny Url, Bitly to name but two), and there it is, and best of all: its all pushed directly to me.
You may say but how is this different from just following the blog and its comments? Well, the conversation is king: the blog post is no longer the starting point, the idea of the conversation is, the blog post just so happens to be a point in the thread, and ultimately the thread pulls everything together.
So what does this have to do with anything that I'm involved with? Well the idea of the conversation being king is an idea that I've been working with for a fairly long time. The fundamental principle of the simulation based learning projects that have been developed at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law are underpined by a transaction. This is a sequence of events or tasks, each reliant on the previous, and developed in the subsequent. Sound familiar?
So my next and final question to ponder is:
Can there be a correlation/correspondence between a (notional) educational conversation (how to do this, what does that mean) and the functional transaction thread and how do you make that link?
It has always amazed me with arrogance of some people. This week whilst going about one's own normal leisure activities, in this case taking a short detour through on of the local "GAME" stores in Glasgow, I happened to overhear a conversation between a very english person and the store staff.
He had read the notice offering 2 games for £20 with any XBOX360 hardware, which he was reading as meaning ANY hardware that had XBOX360 stamped on, and in particular the £9.99 Play & Charge pack he had in his hands.
At which point he turned round to the girl who was working there and asked here. Barely had she said no, and he was asking to speak to the manager! His argument with the manager being that the sign said "any XBOX360 hardware", and he had in his hands XBOX360 hardware. Of course the manager disagreed and said what he had in his hands was a peripheral (and quite correctly). To which our official twat replied, "no its hardware, I'm an electrical engineer".
As far as the store manager was concerned what was in his hands was "a piece of wire that's compatible with an XBOX360"
At this point I had to vacate the premises before I started laughing hysterically at the twat.
Eve Online has always had fairly grandiose features planned: Factional war, ambulation, store fronts....
Yes, the new Eve expansion which is coming soom
Excellent, just what I always wanted, well actually what I always wanted was them to sort out the traffic in Jita and Oursualaert but anyway.
Being well on the techie curve, I went and tried to update my iPhone to the brand new 2.1 firmware...and have very almost (it's almost done fixing it now...hopefully) iBricked it.
So a word of advice to everyone...don't try to update your iphone whilst running Windows in a VMWare Workstation 6 virtual machine on Ubuntu...it may work...but it definately didn't for me...
I am now going to have to walk home with no "Short History of Nearly Everything" to listen to :-(
Every so often I'll mis-read something and it will end up being more humourous than the original, so here's today's:
In my 8am morning blurriness I read this as "McCain vows to fight change in US", which I found much funnier.
Oh wow, again a long time since my last post on here, but let's not dwell on that!
Instead lets have a quick first look at Google's new "Chrome" web browser. Many may ask why exactly is there a need for yet another web browser on the block what with Firefox increasing its market share, IE still up on top, and the Safaris and Operas doing reasonably well for themselves.
Google think that all of these browsers are doing it, not wrong, but not necessarily well. And I think I have to agree. I've been a web user for nearly a decade now, not really very long in the horn, but I do still remember when the majority of the "Internet" was actually just bulletin boards. Consequently I've used just about every web browser that's come along, starting with Netscape, Lynx, Motif all the way through to Internet Explorer and Firefox, and over the last couple of years Safari.
Now I've been pretty happy with the latest generation of web browsers, except for the inconsistencies in rendering, increasingly sluggish performance and lack of any real cross-compatibility.
Hopefully with Chrome I'll at least get some thing that addresses issue 2! IE for me runs slow as hell, Firefox is pretty much starting to chew up as much memory as it can get is grubby paws on and Safari just seems to be chugging along at its own merry pace. Chrome on the other hand seems to go like shit of the proverbial shovel. Of course my tests (load up as many tabs as Firefox would complain at) are hardly rigorous!
So that's one up for Chrome, but cross compatibility and rendering? Well on the rendering front its nice to see a sensible approach and the re-use of what looks like it could (or at least should) be come an option for a standard rendering engine, in the form of WebKit, which is already used in Apple's Safari browser.
The holy grail however for web browsers will be cross compatibility. I'd love the ability to take data from any web browser and re-use it in another one, and then port it back. Google would be in a prime position to do this, although they have already deprecated their Google Browser Sync plugin for Firefox (which kept multiple installs of FF in sync and was GREAT!). At least however it looks like there's going to be Mac and Linux Chrome versions to boot, which means in addition Opera and Firefox there's at least there's web browser that I can have a consistent experience on across my different machines. Of course the final strength should be the open-source nature of Chrome, unlike all the other browsers (with Firefox as an exception), and hopefully this will mean that all the nice OS specific features that make Safari really useful for me can get implemented too
I'm starting to empathise with Greg Dean's UPS woes (Real Life Comics 29th July 08 -1 August 08).
So my Xbox has RRoD'ed and is meant to get shipped off to somewhere in Germany for fixing. Off I go to UPS' web site to request a pick up which I make for after 9am and before 12, so as I'm not having to take a whole day off work.
Their system turns round and says you'll have to say 1pm in order to get it collected, fair enough, 9 - 1 ok. And so I arrange a 1/2 day off work...
This morning, I'm up at 9am, box all packed and by the door, and start passing the time of day. It should be mentioned that in the flat I currently have NO (real) food (another story about discovering all the eggs had gone off :-( ), but I figure it should be ok, cos I'll be out by lunch time and grab some food.....
Roll on 12:45...still no sign....
13:15...OK best phone work and say I'll need the whole day off (which fortunately I still have enough holidays to cover!)
13:40...OK now it's just taking the piss, Phone UPS, give them my collection request number and say "yes I was expecting it to be collected by 1pm" LIKE I ASKED AND WAS CONFIRMED!!!....and get told (I quote) "You'd expect it to be like that, but it'll be some time during the business day..."
WTF!?!?!?! So why have a "Latest collection time" you freaking eejits!!!
So I've got a new shiny iPhone, and have been testing out Apple's .Mac replacement, MobileMe, and unfortunately I have to agree with the illustrious Walt Mossberg in that it's broke.
I love the notion of OTA (over the air) syncing of my iPhone with my desktop and laptop and even my work Windows box, if only for the fact that not having to plug things in is (as far as I'm concerned) the way forward. Its very unfortunate that on at least 2 occasions the Windows client has reported inconsistent data and asked that the data on MobileMe be refreshed, and even worse that upon doing so MobileMe was updated to, well, nothing...no calendars, odd calendars and definately no entries :-(
So back to the drawing board in terms of the Windows/Outlook syncing...On the upside it has worked a lot better for me on all my Macs, which is good given they're Apple's toys.
My problem however is the whole MobileMe set up. I just want syncing: I've got Google for Domains running pretty much every other aspect of my online services, and my own personal webspace.
So please (pretty please) even can someone allow me to do all my own syncing via my own servers and services without having to pay some one else for the priveledge!?
Well it already was, but I'm loving the direction it's been going..
[Article from Boing Boing Gadgets]
Just read this article by Joel Johnson off BB Gadgets, and I have to say that I agree with him on every point that he makes, and with his overall wish for MobileMe.
I'd be perfectly happy to pay $100 a year for over-the-air syncing if MobileMe allowed me to use other services than those from Me.com.
Of course I’ve not actually manage to get MobileMe working on my iMac, as clicking the “Synchronise with Mobile Me” check box makes it go blue for a while, it claims its registering the computer, then stops, randomly reverts back to its original state and still no syncing…funnily enough though it works on my 4yr old G4 iBook.
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