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CogDogBlog (54 unread)

• Unexpected Found Opportunity: phpfog

  Posted: February 29, 2012, 5:09 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by camil tulcan

  I was ready to write off a loss in my server migration. I had, for more than a year, run quietly in the background the cool Thinkup App which had not only archived my twitter activity, but presented it graphically in useful ways.

  The thing is it created a monster database, like 900 Mb and so many files in the directory, a copy would not work. The database was too large for the built in export. And the command line failed because Dreamhost does not provide the PHP Zip extensions, and I fumbled around trying to PECL my way into installing them.

  So I wrote off my data, thinking I just may forget it or maybe just install it and start anew. At the Thinkup App site I saw a reference under hosting providers

  PHP Fog offers free hosting (up to 20MB) and a simple ThinkUp installer.

  Ah, the fog… good fog…

  

  It offers cloud based servers for running a wide range of PHP apps, from WordPress to drupal to
  Joomla to frameworks like CakePHP and a bunch more I never heard of… and for running ThinkUp App.

  They offer a free, forever mini shared server, up to 200 Mb disk space (it looks like up to 2 Gb for the database). Setting it up could not be easier, there is no server twiddling, no setting up anything, ti was literally one click. In about 5 minutes the server was ready, and then I just had to go through the twitter configuration steps to set up Thinkup. It is running now at [cogdog.phpfogapp.com] (waiting for my DNS entry to habe thinkup.cogdogblog.com point back there).

  The other thing you have to do with Thinkup is have something that will trigger to to run updates. On your own server, you would set up a timed script, a “cron job”, which I am pretty sure you dont get at php fog.

  But ThinkUp App provides each service a custom RSS feed- you do not use it to check anything, but if you subscribe to it in your google reader, it will get called and trigger an update back at the server. If I read the docs right, you do not even have to trip it by pulling up reader- it should happen in the background (I am not 100% sure of this yet, I will know in the morning).

  You can install wordpress in php fog, with 200 MB you could set up the site, and if you kept your media on other sites, you might be able to run a server there for free.

  I am not sure I would do that, but for running some simple apps, this seems like a nifty solution… at the right price.

  UPDATE Mar 2, 2011: The feed in Google reader is definitely sending the update sites to Thinkup App without me having to even open it! It looks like the refresh cycle is every 3 hours, which is sufficient IMHO to keep the updates going:

  

  (click to see full size)

• Debut of 105 The Hive

  Posted: February 29, 2012, 8:43 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by hdurnin

  Would it be cliché to say how cool it was yesterday to tune into another radio station besides ds106 radio? It has been more than a year since the web internet radio station was activated by Grant Potter. There’s been a ton of interest, but I’ve been anxious to see who would be the first to take on hosting their own station.

  It is a group of 7th and 8th grade students at Turnberry Central Public school in Ontario who came on the airwaves yesterday at 105TheHive. This came about after Heather’s own experiences in doing live music performances on ds106 radio, and with some pointers from Grant Potter and a lot of behind the scenes assistance from Andrew Forgrave, it came to be.

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by hdurnin

  Heather Durnin’s students came on live at noon yesterday, with student created station “bumpers”, and a live show (“Welcome to 105 The Hive where learning is the buzz of life”) hosted by Cori and Ethan. In this show, the students shared results of their music project where they analyzed various styles of music (“thankfully no one chose Justin Bieber”) for audio elements.

  I have a full archive of this session; I simply tuned into it via iTunes and then rebroadcast the signal out to ds106 radio (where we had a max of 28 listeners).

  105 The Hive radio station debut

  The students wrote, produced the show, and ran the live stream. According to Heather, she “just took the photos.”

  The radio station is another evolution in the Idea Hive collaboration Heather’s students have been doing with the 7the/8th grade students in Clarence Fisher‘s class 2700km away in Snow Lake, Manitoba.

  Just like ds106, on 105TheHive will carry an autoDJ of student selected or created audio as well as live broadcasts from the students, and possibly more classes that might join in, quite likely some of Andrew Forgrave’s.

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Radio Rover

  So now there is a sister station to ds106 radio, find out how to listen at [105thehive.org] . And there is plenty of room on the dial.

• Artsifiying YouTube Videos

  Posted: February 28, 2012, 6:29 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  After coming across this brilliant redo of Star Wars in the Silent era form, I created the ds106 assignment “Return to the Silent Era”

  The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track.

  I just found an insanely fun shortcut- The Artsifier “Make any YouTube Video Award Winning”. You simply load any YouTube URL, and it renders it in old styl black and white, and it adds a sound track (boo, it looks like every one you try gets the same sound track, let’s make it RANDOM!). You get a little track, and you can add captions (as well as title info).

  I chose a video I shot while visiting the Giant Theremin in Melbourne with Rowan Peter, and added some captions to make it look like some old alien invasion movie:

  

  Editing the Artisified video (click for full size)

  And you can see my final effort at [www.theartistifier.com] (an embed option would nice too) (and some font choices or more old fashioned styling on the captions) (can I ask for more features?) (please?).

  It is fun to play with. But it would be a short cut too easy to use for the ds106 assignment.

• Recasting ds106 Assignments

  Posted: February 28, 2012, 7:57 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  When Dean Shareski asks a question, my ears perk up, cause the guy shares so much back (it is in his name after all), I have to oblige

  @cogdog Are there any assignments in #ds106 that would be ideal for Math or Science specifically?

  — Dean Shareski (@shareski) February 28, 2012

  The thing is, there is nothing too inherent in the ds106 assignments that are discipline specific, so I balked at first. But in looking over a few, its just a matter of interpretation. Actually, the notion of the assignment bank is powerful that could be modeled in any discipline- the key is that the people who do them also create them.

  But there is nothing to keep you form just twisting these a bit.

  So here are a few ideas and thoughts for you Dean…

  Postcards from Magical Places
  Design the front and back of a postcard that might be sent from the location of a movie or a work of fiction. Both sides of the cards must be created as graphics.

  The fornt should use graphic design elements that provide a sense of place or use the classic motifs of old postcards (“Greetings from ______”)_, both pictures and text. The back of the post card should contain a stamp and postmark that fits with the theme of the movie, as well as an addressee and a message that fits the plot as well.
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  Rather than places from movies or books, the assignment could be from the places where science or math took place- e.g. a postcard Einstein might have sent from where he came up with his theory of relativity, or maybe it would be the postcard Newton sent from under the tree.

  Cover of Autobigraphy
  Design (using any programs you want) the cover of your autobiography. What pictures would you include? What would you title it? Make sure it really shows off who you are what you want your audience to see in you by the cover.
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  Rather then your own biography, develop the cover for someone in the field of math and science. Sure they might exist, by the gola here is to research the person, say Richard Feynman, and select grsphic elements and a title that capture the essence of their life.

  Tell a Movie in Four Icons
  The assignment is to reduce a movie, story, or event into its basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons, four of them. Write your blog post up but do not give away the answer, let people guess! The challenge is to find the icons that suggest the story, but do not make it so easy.
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  Instead of a movie, explain something like a physics phenomenon or a geometry solution n four icons- not literal, but representational.

  Origins of…
  Make a super-hero origins strip about your online persona, or the persona of someone else. You might want to use Pixton ( [www.pixton.com] ) – you might want to use something else, or draw it freehand if you are super-talented. But capturing the mood and making the story “feel” right are key, you might want to track down some super-hero origin strips to get the idea.
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  Instead of online personas, use the comic form to tell the origins of say, fossils, or the fiboniacci sequence.

  Animated Movie Poster
  Pick a movie poster and animate it.
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  Minimalist Poster
  Create a minimalistic travel poster for a location in film, TV series, etc. Look at these awesome examples using the various locations in the original Star Wars trilogy: [screenrant.com]
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  Make minimal or animated posters that could depict things like carbon decay, crystallization, long division, limits as if they were movies.

  DaVinci invents the Kitchen Sink
  Tell a story by breaking it down into the common elements and themes and recreating it as a sketch. What would a laptop designed by Alexander Graham Bell look like?
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  This one might work out of the box- the work is in figuring out the Davinci style and recast it into another object or item.

  Infographic Life
  First, begin by spending a set period of time documenting things about your life. How much coffee are you drinking each day? How many miles do you walk/ride/drive to work/school/bars? You can use [www.daytum.com] to capture this data, or go old school with pen and paper. Now, take inspiration from infographics all over the web, including the Feltron Annual Report, and create something beautiful and interesting from all that data.
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  This one too would work as is.

  Use The Voice
  Don LaFontaine was legendary for hos deep voiceover intros to movie trailers (“In a world…”). Make a recording that uses his style that describes something ordinary or everyday. See the TV tropes listing for ideas or expressions or model it after one of the thousands of examples he left out there — see his video at [www.youtube.com] If you lack The Voice naturally, use your audi editor’s shift pitch tools to deepen it.
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  For this one, the movie announcer voice could use dot make promos of things like titrations or ant science experiments, or proofs to equations, or solutions to math problems… or….

  One Question
  Take one open ended question. Ask a bunch of people. Mix and compile. This could be video or audio onlyThis could be video or audio only
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  Run this as a way of seeing what people think about science and math. Ask “Do you know how nuclear fission works? Can you explain how to solve a quadratic equation” (oi my ability to make up examples are getting weak)

  Speed Up Your Work Day
  Take video of yourself doing what you typically do on an average work day, and then speed it up! Start with at least 30 minutes of footage at a minimum, so as to get a good amount of video to share. Challenge yourself to complete the assignment in one single shot, then speed it up to ridiculous speeds, and toss in some music that fits the mood.
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  Rather then a work day, it could be speed up of any process that takes place over a longer period of time.

  Play by PLay
  Take any real life video and give us a play by play commentary on what we see. It can be a sports event, funny video or videogame gameplay. Make it funny, make it real, make it anything you want to be. Lets hear what you have to say about the game!
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  DO a play by play announcement of say natural observation video of animals, a landslide, or maybe the graphing of a curve. Lots of potential.

  Phake Tweets
  Use the Twister tool from ClassTools ( [classtools.net] ) to generate a series of images representing the voices of past figures if they could express themselves in twitter. Notch it up, and recast a historical event with a new plot line, and notch it up again, but making it a back and forth between two figures (use @person!) – my example is not developed as a fanfic, but should give you an idea of what to do (okay, okay, I will do a real assignment, sigh).
  [assignments.ds106.us]

  What would Darwin, Pythagorus, Pascal, Avagadro have tweeted?

• Code Riffing

  Posted: February 27, 2012, 4:50 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk

  Jim, Zack, Tim, and I have had some loose brainstorms on the idea of free form rapid creation we have seen happen in ds106 that is akin to jamming between musicians.

  This is the kind of thing the Noiseprofessor in particular excels, to pick up something like fat cats and cat breading in the ds106 stream of tweets/blog posts and making new things, FAST, be building on the same kind of work as others, going crazy dances by Giulia and beyond.

  Like meme-ish things, from afar, and from outside, this looks silly. But like the tradeoff off improv ideas between musicians, there is something electric in this rapid creativity (“and it seems mostly to happen late at night” observes Zack). It reminds me of Stefon Harris’ TEDTalk video on no mistakes in music performance.

  So follow with me as I try to carry this idea over to coding or scripting or programming and what happens in a networked space where we jam / riff off of each other.

  This began in one of Jim’s ds106 classes live streamed, on audio. His students were working with freesound to create a sound story, and one created on the spot by Michael Branson Smith did something different, he had made a mix of sounds all from the same search on the freesound site. He thought that might make for a different kind of assignment if something could be done to generate a search on a random set of words.

  This was happening in the chat of the live stream, a seed of an idea was passed, like someone playing a new note. Noting that the freesound search results were easy to construct (based on the URLs that contain the search term). I picked up that note, and said, I think I can whip up a prototype in Javascript, making the simple sound slots site which ran a random search on freesound based on a pre-built list of words.

  

  I blogged that experience, and in the comments, Scott Leslie tossed in a suggested beat with a link to a code library that allowed embedding of the freesound player. Right after, John Johnston grabbed the lead guitar and whipped up a demo of a proof in concept that searched the same terms opn flickr and freesound.

  I yelled into the mic

  This is brilliant, John! I like how you mashup my ideas to a new level. So the assignment might be to do this five times and make a combo story of the images and sounds served?

  Whereby he built out the full app, which now makes it so you can run these searches in strings, and put together some embed code to put the results in your own site:

  

  As John noted:

  This kind of proves your point about the monkey see, monkey do stuff. I’ve been a lot happier riffing off your idea than working through example code.

  Really enjoying this ds106 marginal activity. Some of us perhaps find it easier to work from an example than think up stuff ourselves.

  To me this kind of riffing on ideas and quick scripting/coding has a huge amount of potential- I am conjuring up loose ideas haw to meld this idea with something like the structures we have built for ds106 (an open course, aggregated activity, a daily challenge, and banks of assignments) with ways we can learn to build, script, code the web, not in the mechanical step by step way of Music School, but more like jamming in the basement.

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by eyeliam

  I am not interesting in something like teaching how to code; I’d think with some basics, there is more of an opportunity space with learning how to leverage/build off if existing bits, like what you find in github (“social coding”) or getting versatile with using jquery (I have been doing more dabbling there lately).

  This is just a bubbling idea.

• On Wisconisin

  Posted: February 27, 2012, 3:57 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  They say it is the state motto — (this is a play with the fabulous flickrsounds mashup crafted by John Johnston). Can you guess what is suggested by the images and sounds?

  
  by garryknight
  Attribution-ShareAlike License
  Your browser does not support the audio tag.
  sound1
  by bortescristian
  Attribution License
  Your browser does not support the audio tag.
  sound2
  by gruenenrw
  Attribution-ShareAlike License
  Your browser does not support the audio tag.
  sound 3

  If not already, this will soon be a ds106 assignment. What can you create out of pictures and words?

• Slice 13: Lucky 13, a Good Slice

  Posted: February 27, 2012, 7:35 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Brian Utesch (shutterBRI)

  Finally, a good slice, after a really good class.

  Slice 13: A Good Slice

  This was recorded after class on Monday February 20, after having returned from a weekend trip to Canada, in which I came back bearing a cough.

  Tonight’s class was really good in terms of energy, both mine and the students, as we started our two week section on audio (see notes for this class).

  I began with some intros to examples where audio was important, e.g. War of Worlds, some videos that showed the work of Foley artists, and the sound team that does live effects for Praire Home Companion (the amazing Fred Newman).

  After seeing Jim’s section, I noticed that I tend to cut off the videos a little quick, I should let them see the whole thing, or more than I have been showing.

  I then told the class they would make noise in class. They seemed intrigued, especially bby the arrangement of junk on the front table- foil, a phone book, plastic bags, newspapers, pliers, a stapler, some old dell mous pads — all things I showed could be used to make sound effects.

  I was demoing these, like how hitting a phone book could sound like a punch, or making that horse galloping sound by clapping and hitting your thighs– one student said, “you are really having fun with this” — and that is true, and key maybe to why this class went better (?)

  I reminded them how subtle but important sound is (Jim had a great line quote about how not scary horror movies would be w/o sound effects).

  The gem was my devised in class activity, based on an idea I had from Skyping the night before with Scott Lockman, to have them make sounds using every day objects — before even going to software. My idea was to have them form teams of 3-4 people, and assigned each group a different 30 second clip from the Charlie Chaplin silent film “In the Lions Cage”. The would have to devise sound effects to play live when we regrouped (playing the video w/o the music track).

  This was like magic- the groups got really into it, and it was a joy to see them get inventive on how to make sound effects. I recorded their audio effects on my iPhone, and added it as a sound track- here is the new version:

  I next played bits from an episode of RadioLab I had listened to on the drive down to Fredericksburg this morning. I had brought it into Audacity, and put markers at locations I wanted to show them things like bumpers, quick edits, overlaying of audio, sound effects, etc.

  After this was a quick demo in audacity, recording, checking levels, basic copy paste, effects — to show them what they would be doing wednesday in class. Their homework is to come in wednesday with sounds they could use to make a sound effect story in class.

  I am worried now that I am coming down with cold (and this turned out to last a week), but found myself reflecting back to the ds106 radio conversation I caught last night between Dr Garcia and Scott about bringing the “whole self” to teaching, and to me, that is the reason why tonight’s class seemed to go better to me, in that I made it my own, had some fun, and just tried to be as natural as I could.

  This was a good slice, a very good slice. I’ll have another please.

• Yiddish Buffalo Joke

  Posted: February 26, 2012, 5:49 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  I can never remember any jokes in English much less another language. But a challenge is a challenge, so I have an effort for the ds106 Make ‘em Laugh assignment, submitted by my pal Darren Kuropatwa:

  Find a good, brief joke in a language other than your mother tongue; if you don’t know any other languages this might be a good way to start learning. Record your voice telling the joke focusing on pronunciation and try to make it sound as natural as you can with appropriate vocal inflections. Add a (cc) music track underneath (maybe from jamendo.com) and a laugh track (soungle.com is a good source) at the end.

  Languages. Hmmm. I don’t know any. I thought it might be fun, in honor of my Mom, to try something in Yiddish. I searched a bit, and found some bad videos, but eventually found this joke, which is funny enough with Yiddish Indians hunting buffalo, that was spelled out in pronounceable bits.

  Yiddish Buffalo Joke

  That was one take, badly mangled. The music underneath is Yiddish Dances by Unió Musical Xeraco found on Jamendo, a service I cannot recommend enough highly, as they are not a drooling pack of copyright hounds.

  I used a laugh track from freesound group_laugh_long_exaggerate by thanvannispen.

  Am I ready for the borscht belt? No offense meant to anyone who actually speaks yiddish.

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by TheeErin

• Coming Up For Air

  Posted: February 26, 2012, 12:34 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  I’ve been pretty knocked flat by a cold I picked up on my flight home last Monday, most noticeably not having much energy to do much photography.

  Having suffered twice in the fall (October in DC, and December after Australia), I am convinced my immune system is gone for a sabbatical. My health food friends will likely chide me for my diet. Touché.

  For at least the last few mornings, I have slept in until noon or 1pm. I tend to become vertical by mid afternoon, have a resurgence of energy nto the early evening, and then a few rounds of barking cough until collapsing.

  I’m in a precarious position of having my previous health insurance lapse in january (contorted state laws prevented my continuation of COBRA coverage from my work at NMC to last only 9 months) and waiting for my new position to become solidified. Believe me, if you lack insurance, I doubt you rail against Obamacare. I want mine now.

  All that said, it was worthwhile to venture outside and soak in some sunshine, here along the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg; it seemed fun to play with what was a pretty non interesting picture in Instagram (I have another reason for posting to flickr from there for a future post).

  I am hoping to have the view righted and more clear tomorrow.

• The Chronicle Twelve

  Posted: February 26, 2012, 10:14 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  

  And then there were twelve… I have no quibbles with the people The Chronicle of Higher Education highlight as people who are innovators, but the old school notion of top x lists continues to baffle me in the internet age.

  I can barely resist a chance to poke fun at The Chronicle. IMHO, their sole purpose, through misleading headlines and spurious claims, is to do the age old newspaper traditional aim of drawing eyeballs.

  What works for the midway, works for the webway.

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Huff

  Back in December 12, 2011, The Chronicle put out a call for nominations for this list. I just spent about 20 minutes scrolling trough this list, and besides one mention of Salman Khan, I don;t see the other 11. What I did see was a ton of blatant ballot box stuffing attempts, and it is left as an exercise for the reader to pick them out. I might be interested to see what others come up with.

  That said, there are more people, centers, projects in that nomination list that deserve mention, but in naming 12, the others get swept under the tug.. because they do not make for good attention getting material.

  Again, I have no real complaints about the selection. Why only 12? Even number? Fits in an egg cartoon? Most academic jury?

  I strongly question the Chronicle’s editorial approach- for one peson I know well- they again pigeonhole Jim Groom as Self-Described ‘EduPunk’ Says Colleges Should Abandon Course-Management Systems.

  The Chronicle conbtinues to bend Jim into a cartoon version of himself; as he has not even written about LMSes for a long while, and wrote a goodbye letter to Edupounk a year ago.

  Their article does come around to what Jim is focused on, ds106, but why does it have to lead in with such a clichéd and DOA term as “edupunk” which Jim has left in the dust for others to harvest?

  The answer is obvious when you come around to reading the other choice, Adrian Sannier, touting the Pearson product that warps the whole meaning of “open” to meaning not really open “most professors have neither the technical chops nor the interest to create their own systems.” Jim is there (or Adrian is) to false pit ideas against each other.

  Chronicle, I love thee, for you continue to bring fodder to toss darts at. It’s as old as snake oil.

• Hosted By Hippies

  Posted: February 25, 2012, 3:55 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  With one final oooooooomph I have freed mysefl of web hosting/strangulation from Dreamhost, to the new free loving set up contrived by Tim Owens, [hippiehosting.org] - and experiment that is bearing fruit for a bunch of new possibilities of making domains of one’s own an even simpler process at the University of Mary Washington. Read more on the idea….

  I am hoping this may be an exception to my proclamation that eventually any service provider may hose you, but at least here, the tech support is a guy I work with or can reach out and get a quick response.

  I had been with Dreamhost since 2006, and actually, over the long haul, it’s been okay, but when its been bad, its way beyond bad pizza. I also have grave questions about their frequent warnings of low memory on my virtual provider server, which the only suggestion is to slide the bar which is just more money. I was paying upwards of $70/month for a VPS that bottomed out about once a month. I had asked several times what they would do to keep a customer of 5 years happy, and the usual response is “It’s because you run WordPress”.

  Anyhow, over the past few days, I have been moving my smaller sites, and domains, and last night, the big dog, this blog, which has accumulated a fair bit if file weight from its 9 years of operation; the MySQL database, even pruned down, was a 42 Mb sql export/import. So far, these domains of 5 own are now Hippie Hosted:

  • Barking Dog Studios (wordpress photoblog)
  • The Secret Revolution (wordpress)
  • CogDog It (static site I never developed, likely going away)
  • CogDogBlog (the big mother blog)
    • Five Card Flickr (custom mysql driven story tool)
    • pechaflickr (stand alone site)
    • CogDogLab (where I tinker about)
    • Resume (wordpress driven resume)

  The one thing I will likely leave behind is the ThinkUp App site I had; the database and site was huge, and the export tools failed. I have about 10 days to see if I can get it to work, but its not critical. I may just intall it and run it from anew.

  Doing these moves are a PITA, and there is stuff to watch for in terms of stuff getting lost in between the nameserver updates. For all but CogDogBlog and Five Card Flickr, I pretty much installed fresh wordpress sites on the new site, transferred all themes and plugins, and then did an export of the MySQl database from Dreamhost and imported to Hippie Hosting. These were not a big deal since they dont get much, if any action.

  For the more active sites, I brought all the files over, set up wordpress anew (for this blog), but pointed the database back to my old dreamhost database, so all activity would be kept. Once I was ready, I did a database export last, and yanked it over.

  The nifty trick I used from D’Arcy, duting the testing phase, was to try the site on my new server, was to edit the /etc/hosts file on my Mac, so make an entry like:

  123.45.67.89    lab.cogdogblog.com

  where 123.45.67.89 is the (not really) IP address of the new server. This means if I load the address lab.cogdogblog.com in my web browser, on my machine only, it will go to my new server, not the one the nameserver really points to- this overrides the global DNS info out there. Nifty.

  Now I am looking forward to waving goodbye to DreamHost. The dream/nightmare is over. Long like the Hippies!

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  UPDATE (Feb 27): Lesson learned was that after switching my wordpress database to my new host (Hippie Hosting), that during the period of DNS propagation (2 days), it is worth pointing the database from the old host (dreamhost) to the new database (hippie). I was getting messages that blog posts came up 404 when I saw them fine– while I was seeing my new host, many users were still seeing the old one. Syncing the database meant the posts would be seen by all (noting that if you uploaded any media you might have to do it twice).

• You Fooled Me at the Title: What Magicians Know

  Posted: February 23, 2012, 5:19 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by i k o

  I can’t write a blog post until I wrangle with the headline. I mull that over before I even sit down to write. or that is all I have and I hope an idea flows from there. The title is key as any basic journalism or copywriting class will tell you, or as written deftly at copyblogger “Don’t Read This or the Kitty Get’s It!”:

  Let’s get started. What is the primary purpose of any piece of writing that you put out online — whether a blog post, a networking email, a sales letter or a tutorial?

  For starters, to get what you’ve written read, right?

  Makes sense.

  So, what’s the primary purpose of your headline, your graphics, your fonts, and every other part of the content?

  The simple, surprising answer is…
  To get the first sentence read.

  At the same time, for storytelling, you usually want to build suspense, hold back, create a sense of surprise, not give away the plot at the opening, right?

  I am thinking of this in looking at some great audio work my students did this week on creating sound effects story – building a story out of sound files only. One I really thought was well edited featured the sounds of someone getting in a car, turning the ignition, driving, driving driving… and BAM! a crash, and the story trails out with a pulse that peters out.

  Dark yes.

  But it kills the surprise element when you call the story “Car Crash”. That is starting a game of poker by saying, “hey guys, what doe sit mean when the cards are all the same suit and they go in order?” (any one get the tv reference?). Quite a few students did these kind of surprise sounds introduced into a setting created with the first 2 or three sounds.

  Heck mine was one which introduced a spaceship wooshing in and running a tractor beam, but I do not allude to it- my title is “A Walk in the Woods”.

  People, give some serious thoughts to your titles. They are the lead, the hook the pitch to make the sale. I likely spend more time on my cutesy titles than the post.

  It matters.

  I have not emphasized it til now, but most of my students blog posts are titled things like “Design Assignment” or “Visual Story: Name of Assignment”.

  Does that grab anyone? Does it give any gentle foreshadowing?

  It’s hitting me that I am hoping they create some kind of digital story, yet to them, it is not a story, it is an assignment. I am going to change my wordings of the assignment to reflect this.

  Which leads me to a magician.

  I am having trouble remembering who in my twitter stream recently shared this, but I found Brian Bushwood’s 14 years ago: the day Teller gave me the secret to my career in magic to be something every creator, storyteller, heck, even teacher should absorb.

  It stems from Bushwood, as an aspiring magician, taking the risk and emailing a question via email to Teller (of Penn and Teller)…and getting backa rather personal and insightful reply. A real reply.

  Bushwood’s question was along the lines of how do I find the original or most true way to perform, to make my what I do my own? how to develop my own style and craft?

  This would seem the essential question we all ask about the things we do.

  To ssummarize and quote Teller’s responses- the first was a genuine love for what you do:

  When we started we HAD no style, no understanding of ourselves or what we were doing. We had feelings, vague ones, a sense of what we liked, maybe, but no unified point of view, not even a real way to express our partnership. We fought constantly and expected to break up every other week. But we did have a few things, things I think you might profit from knowing:

  We loved what we did. More than anything. More than sex. Absolutely.

  Next was full on dedication, not half way, all the way in:

  We made a solemn vow not to take any job outside of show business. We
  borrowed money from parents and friends, rather than take that lethal job waiting tables. This forced us to take any job offered to us. Anything. We once did a show in the middle of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia as part of a fashion show on a hot July night while all around our stage, a race-riot was fully underway. That’s how serious we were about our vow.

  Then, and in another way of stating the importance of the time in practicing a craft, alot, alot. (and damnit someone needs to keep yelling MALCOLM GLADWELL DOD NOT INVENT THIS HE JUST COPIED IT!)

  Get on stage. A lot. Try stuff. Make your best stab and keep stabbing. If it’s there in your heart, it will eventually find its way out. Or you will give up and have a prudent, contented life doing something else.

  
  cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by country_boy_shane

  Now that was just the lead up, this is the sweet marrow of the bone, my thesis statement- in performance (and I would argue that all acts of storytelling are a performance) you succeed best by holding thos ecards close, or hiding them completely- it is all about the surprise, the unexpected that you should cultivate like a powerful potion, not a box of cookies.:

  Here’s a compositional secret. It’s so obvious and simple, you’ll say to yourself, “This man is bullshitting me.” I am not. This is one of the most fundamental things in all theatrical movie composition and yet magicians know nothing of it. Ready?

  Surprise me.

  That’s it. Place 2 and 2 right in front of my nose, but make me think I’m seeing 5. Then reveal the truth, 4!, and surprise me.

  …

  Here’s how surprise works. While holding my attention, you withold basic plot information. Feed it to me little by little. Make me try and figure out what’s going on. Tease me in one direction. Throw in a false ending. Then turn it around and flip me over.

  More on this- follow the masters–

  Read Rouald Dahl. Watch the old Alfred Hitchcock episodes. Surprise. Withold information. Make them say, “What the hell’s he up to? Where’s this going to go?” and don’t give them a clue where it’s going. And when it finally gets there, let it land. An ending.

  So it’s bad enough to writ titles for your work that do nothing to invite us in, but its even worse to write a title that takes away that element of surprise.

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by chiaralily

  I want my students- no everyone- to get much more clever with their titles. And their building of surprise- “Place 2 and 2 right in front of my nose, but make me think I’m seeing 5. Then reveal the truth, 4!, and surprise me”

  Do some magic, damnit.

• CogDogCodeAcademy: A Random Freesound Generator

  Posted: February 23, 2012, 3:13 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  Who needs a stinking academy to provide a code challenge? With some basics under the belt (which of course you cannot do without) and google (which usually lands you at Stack Overflow), you can tinker away. Well, I can.

  Here was a tool I whipped up in about 10 minutes, and then spent about another hour futzing with the CSS. It generates a search on a random word at freesound.org all in JavaScript.

  

  This all started during tonight’s live stream of ds106 with Jim Groom, who was showing the results for people in cvlass and afar who did the sound effects story challenge. Michael Branson Smith, being a not-follow-the-rules artist, did not aim to do a connected story, but used all of the ones he got as a search on the word “fire”. He felt there might be a sound assignment on using a random search at freesound.org and I piped in, “heck that would be easy to do in JavaScript” once seeing that the seacrh URLs are writable, e.g. [www.freesound.org]

  If I were to write the assignment, I might even force a rule that you have to use the second, fifth, sixth, and eighth result (or some pre scripted list).

  But really, this was just a mod of my Words Without English Translation, and all I had to do was to make the function open a window with a URL built from a word chosen from the built in seed list.

  I keep forgetting alot of code syntax, but it ends up being just a few seconds away, usually at wwwschools

  Give it a try! [lab.cogdogblog.com]

  It is easily modifiable, you can download the source code, and just edit the line in index.html to use the words that you prefer:

  // create an array for the words, just add or edit this list
  var wordBox=new Array('fire', 'storm' ,'spaceship', 'kids', 'thunder',
  'monster', 'car', 'bear', 'walking' ,'baby', 'baseball','crowd',
  'cheer', 'fizz', 'cat' , 'truck' ,'horn' );
  

  This will run locally on your desktop if you just pop index.html in your web browser, no web server even needed.

  I could not resist adding the animated gif touch to the page ;-)

  Heck, I would rather do my own code challenges than someone else’s monkey see, monkey do. Thats the rub with this stuff, the motivation changes completely when it is something you need/want, versus someone else’s rote exercise for badges.

  We may or may not get badges, but what we ought to focus on is generating the drive and motivation to learn what you don’t know.

• Walk in the Woods: a ds106 Sound Story

  Posted: February 23, 2012, 5:55 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  I made this demo for my students to show them Audacity and basic editing for the Sound Effects Story assignment:

  Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds.

  Mine is a tale of a quiet walk in the woods, say up in the in the forests of Show Low Arizona.

  All of my sounds are from freesound ( [freesound.org] ):

  Dry Leaves Walking
  [www.freesound.org]

  Memory Moon Wet Spaceship Loop
  [www.freesound.org]

  phaser
  [www.freesound.org]

  Gulls by the Sea
  [www.freesound.org]

  These are all in tracks in Audacity. For the footsteps, I copies a segment, and sped up the speed twice, to make for a sound of hurried walking, then running. I also made a copy of the phaser sound and reversed it to make a loop. A few fade-ins, fade-outs, and bam, done.

• “In a World”… Do The Voice

  Posted: February 22, 2012, 11:30 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  Long live Don LaFontaine…

  whose voice appeared in some 5000 movie trailers and 350,000 (? really?) commercials. You know him as soon as you hear him.

  Well, here is a new ds106 audio assignment for you, Use the Voice, bring The Voice to something around you:

  

  Don LaFontaine was legendary for hos deep voiceover intros to movie trailers (“In a world…”). Make a recording that uses his style that describes something ordinary or everyday. See the TV tropes listing for ideas or expressions or model it after one of the thousands of examples he left out there — see his video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QPMvj_xejg

  If you lack The Voice naturally, use your audio editor’s shift pitch tools to deepen it.

  As such, I made my own example, of a trailer for ds106, The Movie:

  DS 106: The Movie, The Voice

  I made this in Audacity, and used the Shift Pitch filter to make me sound more Don-ly, and added some reverb to give it the big celestial feel.

  My script for this was:

  In an academic time where creativity and free expression are often suppressed, one class will change the world. More than one hero will rise, will blog, will daily create, will animate gifs, and but cat heads into bread… It is even more than one class, but several, spread around the globe. It’s not a cult.. it is DS 106. Playing now, on blogs around the world. Catch the fever.

  Time magazine calls it the “MOOC of the year, yet uniquely its own”

  Tt is happening now at ds106.us

• Slice 12: Playing for Team Celsius

  Posted: February 21, 2012, 5:15 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by olga.palma

  The title here has no real reference to anything I talk about, besides me babbling as I talk, walking in to campus on February 14 at the “crack of 10:00am”. The class is consuming me, and at least one person about there is wondering, “Will he ever blog about anything else?”.

  Not this week.

  Slices of Life 12: Team Celsius

  I wanted to get one more back slice posted since the last few have been downers, so here is one with a bit ore upbeat tempo.

  Last night’s class worked well, simply by changing up the flow a bit, and having more time of students doing things. This was the week we moved into Design Assignments and where again the students were charged with doing all daily creates for the 7 days.

  Easy to focus on students who are not getting it or doing all the work, when there are more than enough who are doing good work- one even did a Design Assignment before class yesterday. I am really looking for ones who go above the minimum, really describe their process or idea, not just post a final piece.

  Jim and I have started tracking Best of the student work in delcious stacks:

  • Best of the Visual Assignments
  • Best of the Design Assignments
  • Best of the Daily Creates

  While I asking students to be active commenting, I am putting it on them to be able to demonstrate their activity (e.g. U am not counting though I am observing since I see every post). It my student Liz (I said wrongly another name in the audio) who shared the idea to star posts she commented on in google reader. Brilliant! I am using that myself.

  In last night’s class, I briefly introduced elements of design (color, typography, symbols), then gave another in class challenge to find, photograph examples in class or hallway. A 15 minute challenge. I asked them to post to flickr ( [www.flickr.com] ) but also to add them to a shared google doc I had set up for them to add notes to (the idea lifted from Cheryl Colan) [bit.ly]

  We then had Tim Owens do guest appearance via Skype (from bed!) to talk more about design- an archive with more class resources is at [106tricks.net]

  For the last section, rather then me talk about the Design Assignments, I had students get into groups to discuss the available design assignments and which ones they might try.

  Gotta find my own way to do the class, there is only one Jim Groom, and I have to come up with my own “act”. It is working good for us to be teaching in parallel, we share ideas, and talk about ds106… like all the time.

  Playing on Team Celsius… went well this week.

• Slice 11: Sigh

  Posted: February 21, 2012, 4:09 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Bondseye

  This was from two weeks ago, still catching up on my back(b)log of audio reflections, back in my second week of being here at the University of Mary Washington teaching my section of ds106. I can give you a prelude that the next episodes pick up in spirit much more.

  Slice of Life 11: The Sad Dog

  I felt tonight’s class went well, but I am still not feeling the magic “it” of my teaching. Changing up the structure Monday worked out well, especially starting with a photo challenge to the students. I gave them 15 minutes to take and post a photo there images, a mini Daily Create:

  • picture of something ordinary made to look different
  • portrait of person showing emotion
  • converging lines

  Defninitely the energy changed as the students got up and were active. My student’s photos are in the first half of the flickr tag stream [flickr.com] , Between my class and Jim’s doing the same activity the next night, the students did 157 photos.

  I also did a mini version of some previous talks on Photography, Through the lens slide show which is with other class materials at [106tricks.net]

  It;s been rewarding to see the students do their daily create, producing the visual assignments, and my last 2 students got their wordpress blogs running. I was excited that one student had already created a visual assignment, and others were taking on doing doing tutorials.

  Tonight, I had D’Arcy Norman come in and talk on Google Hangout about his approach to photography- he share a ton of useful, practical ideas.

  I was disappointed that Kris Krug has stuck on a plane and unable to join us as planned.

  I just wish my students had more questions! They are so reluctant. I struggle to draw them in — maybe I should ask them directly, doh- but as I am still getting to know them, I am unsuare even of 25% of their names.

  The other thing I can do is change up the structure even more.

  Good after class with 2 of students who are thinking about the assignments and doing thoughtful writing. No one has dropped, still at 26 students.

  I am really liking this time walking home after class, debriefing, and getting a chance to reflect.

  Onward!

• ds106 Foley Magic

  Posted: February 20, 2012, 5:29 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  (cross posted from 106tricks.net just because I am so excited about tonight’s ds106 in class activity)

  This is the result of tonight’s in class ds106 challenge. As we are starting audio, I did a little explanation of the role of the foley artist in film and radio.

  Students formed 5 groups, and each group was charged with creating sound effects for a specified 30 second segment of Charlie Chaplin’s In the Lion’s Cage. They could use any props in the room or their own body. I played the video back with the sound muted, and asked the groups to perform the effects live.

  The video above was edited to overlay the audio I recorded. They did pretty damn good for only have 15 minutes to plan their sounds.

  My only small disappointment was a lack of a Willhelm Scream.

  My thanks for Scott Lockman with whom a skype conversation the other night generated the idea for this activity.

• Week 5 in Review

  Posted: February 20, 2012, 8:32 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  This past week’s Daily Creates
  I seemed to have done more this week with my iPhone camera than my DSLR, and dod a bit more experimenting or playing with 2 apps – PhotoGene for editing and ToonCamera for making cartoon effects.

  

  TDC 36: Good being served or eaten in unsual way

  

  TDC 37: Toy in Action

  

  TDC 38: Something that represents how old you feel

  

  TDC 39: Photo of a Bird

  

  TDC 40: Someone else’s art in a way that makes it yours.

  

  TDC 41: Most Prized possession

  

  TDC 42: Photo representing a job

  Design Assignments
  This week’s goal was 15 stars worth of Design Assignments – my work is at [cogdogblog.com] , way over 15!

  • ds106 Propaganda Poster(s): Get Infected and СЛАВА DS106 and I Want You to Make Art
  • Wait, Where’d That Guy Come From?: Bagman the Hippy
  • Anuimated Comic Book Cover: Mad for ET
  • Spreadsheet Animation (includes tutorial): Geology of a Canyon in Excel
  • Bagman Election Poster: The Nation Needs BAGMAN
  • Bad Guy Business Cards: Calling Card for a Fast Moving Hard Working Cop
  • Warning Label: Those Illudium Q-35 Space Modulators are Dangerous
  • Really Reality Show (new assignment added too): We Need More Reality Shows

  Commenting:
  Twitter Activity [https:]]

  Over 100 comments tagged in Google Reader

  

• Get Infected

  Posted: February 19, 2012, 12:47 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  ds106 Propaganda posters– they seem to be calling from many places; I came across a great collection at Shorpy (another mint archive for visuals from the past). Hence a warning poster about ds106:

  

  This one was rather easy to work with- the original poster was a warning against the dangers of syphilis:

  

  The backgrounds of the text were pretty much solid, so it was a matter of picking some fonts from what I had installed in Photoshop. Bauhuas worked ok for the top headline. I did not find exact copies for the script font, so I used Savoye LET and the bottom text was using Marker Felt.

  Heck I was tempted to leave the white cursive text as it was ;-)

  Once infected, #4life.

• BAGMAN The Hippy

  Posted: February 18, 2012, 11:06 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  BAGMAN may be running for president, but you should know of his leftist leaning ways formed from his Woodstock days

  

  Yes, even in 1969 the brown acid bagman was #4life (one more ds106 assignment Hey Wait Where’d That Guy Come From?)

• слава ds106

  Posted: February 18, 2012, 10:42 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  After seeing a tweet for these retro Russian propaganda posters I could not resist one more ds106 poster:

  

  Best I can sort out, this means “GLORY DS106″.

  Glory indeed.

• Mad for ET

  Posted: February 18, 2012, 9:51 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  Some might say that MAD magazine is not a comic, but I went for an animated version anyhow for the Animated Comic Cover ds106 assignment:

  

  I saw this cover of Alfred E Neumann and ET and felt like they might me a love match for each other, so they gaze at each other with affection and experience the tickle of that magic extra terrestrial finger.

  Don’t they make a sweet couple?

  I read a ton of MAD as a kid, and I can recall backing out the plots of movies from the parodies there- so I knew about the Godfather from he satire first, seeing it in MAD before ever seeing it on video.

  I think there is a future assignment related to the troubles faced by Roger Kaputnix or maybe a bit of mashup of Spy vs Spy.

  In this animated GIF, I used a bit of magic I uncovered in the Photoshop animation palette. I copied and pasted out the eyes and ET’s finder to new layers, and filled in the background with some clone brush fill. In the animation palette, the layers have additional things you can animate via the toggle menu on the left side- you can set key frames for position or opacity, and by moving the slider on the timeline, you can nudge the position and make a key frame.

  This method of animation is a bit closer to doing stuff in Flash or Director on the timeline- in Photoshop the only thing I cant seem to do is to resize objects, but doing movement and opacity offers a lot.

  So I made the eyes of ET and Alfred move towards each other and away, and also made the finger move to the right. The glow and the star appear by keyframing the animation.

  

  I thus only needed 10 layers (2 eyes each), and the animation weighs in at a puny 176k.

  Don;t just get mad, get MAD! get Animated! Cause it is ds106 fir life and hell yes, I am over-branding this sucka.

• I WANT YOU TO MAKE ART (damnit)

  Posted: February 17, 2012, 8:46 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  

  It’s hard to resist a good ds106 assignment submitted by a student- such as the ds106 Propaganda Posters by Daniel Zimmerman (who is taking zero prisoners in this class)

  Time to let out your inner Big Brother! Create a propaganda poster for ds106. Use your photo editing software of choice and write a message to inspire your fellow ds106ers. For example, I took a WW2 poster about increasing ammunition production, and turned it into a poster promoting tweeting.

  I found a bunch by searching Google Images on “vintage posters” and was drawn in by the superhero look of a set of Kick Ass Posters from Affein Heim Theaters

  This was some quick Photoshopping; it will take me longer to describe then to do it. I used Popular Std font to put the “1 0 6″ on the head- each a separate layer so I could rotate. For the 6, I converted to bitmap, and did a selection on the background of the poster layer to get a selection I could subtract from the 6.

  To change the face, I made a new layer, did a multiple polygon selection of the face opening, and did Edit -> Special -> Paste Into to insert a Face of Groom. I fiddle a bunch with transform, rotate, distort- it is stil not optimal, but at some point you move on…

  For the bottom text, I just filled the space of the words with clones of the paper background (moving the text wider apart to slip in the “ds106″. For the MAKE ART text, I used the Popular Std font again, and applied the Craquelure Texture filter to give the letters some gritty. I converted it to bitmap, and then selected all (command A) and nudged it up and down with the arrow to select everything, and used a Stroke at outline the letters.

  This assignment can be easy or simple, but the appeal is trying to design something in the motif of these old posters.

• Geology of a Canyon via Excel

  Posted: February 17, 2012, 6:02 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  I’ve been daunted by the ds106 Spreadsheet Invasion assignment where you are charged with creating an animation using the software designed for… sales reports, etc. It is, ironically, the first Design Assignment. And one that is least frequently done.

  But thankfully, it was my student Tiffany who undertook it bravely in her Tale of a Flower version that pushed me over the hump of inertia to try this.

  So here, I tell in a rather horribly inaccurate fashion, the process of Geology that form sedimentary rock (invasions of inland seas, rivers, and desert environments over time) and uplift/eroison processes that shape canyons.

  I did this while idling time yesertday at BWI airport, wine was involved (Malbec, I love relaxing at Vino Vola). A lady at the next time working on NUMBERS in her spreadsheet must have been tsk-tsking me coloring in cells.

  There is a fair bit of slop, I was not careful to move the selection box (I could not find a way to get it out of the way). But more or less, I just kept adding to it, coloring selections of cells and reverting them to no fill as needed- I ended up with 82 screen shots.

  When I wanted to elevate the landscape, I just deleted 3 rows from the top, and colored the empty cells at the bottom.

  I used an old Mac file renaming tool to change the file names to be “geo01.png, geo02.png” etc. This is because in QuickTime PLayer 7 You can do File- > Open Image Sequence…, select the first one, and it grabbs all the rest into a video file. I set the frame rate to be 1 second…

  Which was pretty horrible, so I brought into iMovie. I broke the main clip into sections by finding the pots I wanted to have different speeds, and splitting the clip (control click for menu, select “Split Clip”)

  

  Then for each clip, I use the little menu in the top left to do a Clip Adjustment, and change the speed to make it go faster or slower:

  

  Beyond that, it was a matter of adding some titles, a few transitions. I grabbed a bit of the opening of John Mayall and the Blues Breakers “The Mist of Time” as a sound track.

  Another little trick is get some black screen on the end. You cannot use the “Fade to Black” transition without something to fade into. Sometimes I import a black PNG, but what I did here was to add a title sequence with just spaces in it (no text), which creates a video sequence of black. I could then extend the audio sound track to match, so there is some outtro music.

  

  This was quick and slightly dirty, I’d like to think about how to do something more elegant. It would be more useful to do some things with different sized columns, maybe make them square so you have pixel shapes to work with. Or perhaps the animation could eb done by creating the action as a long horizontal sequence, and doing a screen recording as you scroll the horizontal.

  But I love using Excel for something it was not built for, this is so Ed Parkourish.

• Nation Needs Bagman

  Posted: February 17, 2012, 5:04 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  

  BAGMAN NOW!

  It is about time we had a Bag in Charge we can trust, which is why I am on board to elect BAGMAN for President! My contibution is this campaign poster for the ds106 assignment BAGMAN Campaign Poster.

  Although not of the same political ilk, I was compulsed to reach back for another unlikely candidate, Richard Nixon in 1960:

  

  I found this at the Learn California site which has info on the Nixon Campaign:

  As radio and television gained popularity with the voting public in the 1940s and 1950s, image and media exposure became increasingly important to waging successful campaigns. Companies subsequently sprang up across the nation offering campaign management services. Richard Nixon hired two of the most preeminent and innovative of these companies to run his California campaigns for his 1960 presidential bid.

  I did this one in Photoshop CS5- some of this might not have been easily done in GIMP, but some of the principles should. Here’s how…
  
  I start out by importing the original poster, I make a copy and hide it so I have a reference layer when trying to match elements (or if I screw up the edited version). The first thing is to erase Tricky Dick. This one is easy because there is a pattern in the background, the red and white stripe, which I can select with the rectangle marquee tool, and then option drag in segments to make copies all the wat down:

  

  I went to one of BAGMAN’s YouTube clips to screen capture an image (command shift 4 on mac, select the area) of the candidate:

  I opened the clip and used the polygon selection tool to select Senor BAGMAN (fortunately he is angular and easy to clip, but I made sure to grap the top of his eyes), and pasted him into my poster, resizing a bit, and trimming the bottom to make him fit:

  

  Handsome baggie, ain’t he? I went to filters to rough him up a bit, I think it was the Grain Filter to make him speckly. I used Image -> Adjustments -> black and white to get rid of his color, and then Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation to color him (be sure to check the “Colorize” box), and use the sliders to get the color and levels desired:

  

  And damn, he is looking good now!

  

  Now we move on to the headline, we need to change NIXON to BAGMAN. I use the same technique to selection and option drag a selection on the background layer to cover up “NIXON” with the background pattern. I did not get an exact match on the font, but good enough with News Gothic Std. A neat trick in using the color selection palette is you can click anywhere in your work to pick a matching color (like using the eyedropper tool) so I can get the right blue for the text.

  The white drop shadow was a trick too. I make a duplicate of the BAGMAN text layer, move it below the blue one, color it white. I then nudge it around with the arrow keys to place it:

  

  Next, it is time to work on that “NIXON NOW” button in the bottom right. I paintbrush over the words on the circle and the “’60″ in the red circle. For the center, I could not find a decent enough font, but figured it did not need to be exact! I chose Myriad Pro which has a lot of variants (I chose Condensed). I first did it as “’60″ to see if it matched, and then changed it to read “’12″

  

  For the BAGMAN text on top, I went with Arial Black- sure it is a font you are not supposed to use, but it was good enough for Nixon!

  

  It was here a special tool for Photoshop came in handy- Layer -> Type => Warp Text which let me to use the “Arc” and set the curvature to round the text. What’s nice here is you can still edit the text, change font size, which became necessary to fit it. It was not perfect, but it is a small element…

  

  Almost there! The last is to edit some of the body text in red on the bottom. The easy one was to paint over the word “man”

  

  which I filled in with “bag” (change from “no man in history” to “no bag in history”). I then got stumped on what to do with the attribution to President Eisenhower. I tried “Obama” but it did not make sense, especially since they are running against each other. I thought about using other recent presidents, but those failed too. Maybe an allusion to the CEO of Hefty Bags? Nah. I then thought of an iconic first family member from the Carter administration:

  

  I found Palatino Italic was close enough for this part.

  Let’s just hope BAGMAN never needs to do this kind of exit…

  

  BAGMAN 2012! Choose paper over plastic politicians….

• Remixes Emerge From the StoryBox

  Posted: February 16, 2012, 8:06 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  The future of the StoryBox is subject for a new post. Let’s say my new approach is to find ways to release the content by making it available for people to create remixed new works out of the pieces. The original media shall remain in the box, in the time capsule, but can be released by remix.

  Here I wanted to share three things I made out of the StoryBox content, as the first public examples.

  This video includes a segment of a great set of acoustic guitar that I know by the voices is Grant Potter and Bryan Jackson. In the StoryBox I found a photos and videos of trains, and mountains (well I actually put them in), so it made for good match to the song.

  I had really enjoyed the 40 minute set that Grant and Bryan did- they did a fair bit of talking in the middle which touches on the craft of music; and that theme is part of another audio recording with someone else I hope to pull together one day.

  I was inspired to do this one because I recorded the audio myself- it was a computer generated voice from a water found on on the NYC High Line trail that gave the 2 minute lecture on water. A lot of the video was waterfalls and rivers I photographed in Washington State and Idaho.

  My ast remix is not a video, but an animated GIF assembled from photos I took during my visit to the Durnin farm in Ontario

  

  Go, Pigs, Go!

  So once more, my StoryBox concept is to set up ways for people to have access to the box, and give them some process/guidance for making new stories out out the contents. I am going to be making this a project idea for my section of ds106; I am going to turn on the StoryBox in every class and am asking students to share some of their un-uploaded media. I am also planning to do this as a workshop March 6 at SXWSedu.

  The last bit is that when I run the workshops or events, I am going to direct people to a form where they can let me know the URLs for places where StoryBox content has been let back into the wild– [bit.ly]

  I am eager to see what emerges:

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

• Slice 10: Dying on Stage

  Posted: February 14, 2012, 5:39 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  
  creative commons licensed image from joe_x

  A mopey audio reflection following my second in person class of ds106, from two weeks ago. Seven minutes and forty six seconds of blah.

  Slices of Life 10: Dying on Stage

  Recorded walking home after a class that just did not flow well at all. I did not feel in best game form, the students seemed bored, and they had not done readin of the papers and video for tonight’s discussion. I felt like I was dying a slow death on stage, but also I had not really designed the class well. I had hoped to draw them into discussion.

  What worked was the ending 15 minute “Rapid Prototyping” activity I saw Jim do the night before in his class, where he challanged the students to create some web stories with whatever they could, about our hacker, Emre5807. And that totally hange the energy. I collected them in a pinterest board – its not about being anythig great, but just being in that creation mode.

  Coming up the next week is photography, a topic I feel much more confident handling. I need less of me talking, and I expect to have external guests.

  My question is how to raise level of participation, and what is my shtick in class? I am needing to develop my own show.

  What was a bit better was working one on one after class with student, helping her add plugins, themes, widgets to her blog.

  This is done, and time to get back on horse for monday.

  Post Script: Better classes were to come!

• Calling Card for a Fast Moving Hard Working Cop

  Posted: February 14, 2012, 2:16 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  

  Last year in ds106 I built a few of my assignments out of the movie Dirty Harry — and having seen this movie just last night, I am just shifting to another classic San Francisco cop, Bullitt.

  I did this for the Bad Guy Business Cards design assignment — and completely missing that it said “bad” guy, cause Bulitt is anything but bad. Oh well, there needs to be a good guys card in the mix:

  Apparently, street gangs in Chicago, like the Hell’s Devils, used to have calling cards (see the gallery: [bit.ly] This makes me think that poor marketing gives evil-doers a bad image. Help some of them out by creating business cards for them. But not the Joker – that’s too obvious.

  He is the ultimate of no nonsense cool. He sees the in effectiveness and the preening of the superiors, but doe snot sneer as much as Harry Callahan. Bullitt is his own dude, with his own rules. And he uses his own bad ass car, the 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback.

  I was not sure where to start so I began with a base car from PoliceBusiness Cards (actually it said Houston). I found a copy of the San Francisco Badge in Google, and use its colors to change up the theme of the card. I played with fonts to get match using Copperplate Gothic, not exact, but close enough. I added the car image, moving it slightly off screen to make it seem like it was entering the card.

  Since he was so effective at it (and not really Bullitt’s fault, the whole deal of the witness he was assigned was rigged), I assigned him to the Witness Protection unit.

  The address is actually from the SF Police site for the Mission District, I decide to use the old style phone exchange of a Name in front to indicate the first two numbers of a rotary Phone (the 55 real number did not work, that as “KK” so I made up “Belmont” as a holder).

  Of course Bullitt did not have email (heck the cops in the movie did not even have a radio, they had to keep asking to use phones)

  I’m going to use this dude again in another assignment.

• 1 Movie / 4 Icons

  Posted: February 14, 2012, 4:24 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  Oops, I got in my mind to do a ds106 design assignment, and ended up doing a visual one! Oh well, it’s done. This is for the Four Icon Challenge (which to me should be design!):

  Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons.

  

  This is a movie I just watched (which means I could remember some iconic details). No fair guessing if you saw my tweet last night or were in the same room as me.

  NAME THAT MOVIE!

  I had dreams of tracing te visuals I found. Hah. So I nabbed some from various places online, reduced them in PhotoShop to fir within a 100px square frame, and layered it on top of or converted with the Note Paper sketch filter. For framing it is just a 4 pixel inside stroke.

  I think Jim and I talked about making this a design assignment. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the difference. Visual assignments to me, are more towards the photograph or photo manipulation end of the graphic spectrum, whereas design are ones you create/manipulate from shapes, text, color. So an animate gif from a movie or photos is visual, whereas a animated gif of a poster or a comic book requires more graphic editing, and is design.

  Maybe.

  Got that movie yet?

  This is one of the classic ds106 assignments- the decision you make when making this is- do I go very literal and make it easy to guess? or do I go more abstract? What if people are not familiar with the movie? Those are the challenges.

• My Week 4 of ds106

  Posted: February 12, 2012, 5:36 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  I’m setting up an example of how I might do my weekly recaps if I were a student in my ds106 class (cough) (cough). I am doing the same work my students are doing.

  Daily Creates

  Our task this week was to do one every day! I got 7 out of 7. These were challenging as at least two seemed to dwell on the past or required some making rather than taking of the photo- I ended up using old photo for the memorable moment, but re-processed it to make it different. My favorite is the bicycle shot0- the black and white provided by Silver Efex plugin really makes it pop.

  

  For these assignments

  • Feb 6, 2011: TDC 29: Photo of Something Upside down never seen that way
  • Feb 7, 2011: TDC 30: An image of a place you lose things
  • Feb 8, 2011: TDC 31: Happiest or most memorable moment in life
  • Feb 9, 2011: TDC 32: A Photo of something you aspire to do or be
  • Feb 10, 2011 Ma href=” [tdc.ds106.us] 33: Take a picture of confusion
  • Feb 11, 2011 TDC 34: Detail of a Human Hand
  • Beb 12, 2011 TDC 35: Photo of a tattoo

  Visual Assignments

  I completed 6 assignments out of the bank of Visual Assignments, for a total of 11 stars. I added 2 assignments and 1 tutorial to the site.

  1. Pre/Post Apocalyptic Moods for the Switch up the Mood assignment (2 stars). I am proud of this one as the images really have a different feel, and I wrapped a little story around the time stamps.
  2. Parent Dog Headswap for the Parent-Child Headswap (2 stars). This was just plain weird to look at, but it works, and I changed it up my using my dog instead of a child or parent. I canot say I enjoy looking at this!
  3. Photo It Like Peanut Butter (3 stars) for the assignment of the same name, one I also submitted to ds106. This is a riff of a previous assignment on animated GIFs with the difference of using one’s own photos to be the frames for the animation. I had done a number of these, but made a new one of the DTLT makerbot to use as a fresh example. I had already done the video anyhow, so putting this together was just a quick thing to do; I might give myself only 2 stars of credit.
  4. Crazy Kat Bread done for the Cat Breading Assignment (1 star) ds106 at its silliest, Jim was talking about this during his class, so I thought it would be fun to put HIM into a slice of bread and tweet it out. Sure it is a stretch to make this Cat Breading, so I returned to my file and gave Jim some whiskers, and learned some new techniques in layer effects.
  5. Comic Me Down Under for the Comic Book Effect assignment (1 star). I tried doing this one in flickr, using a photo of me from my November visit to colleague Rowan Peter in Australia. I did not really go all out n this one, just got it done.
  6. Splash Some Color for the Splash the Color assignment (2 stars) — one I made and added to ds106 myself, so this was my example to use when I submitted it. I am excited and proud that 42 other people have done this assignment! I enjoyed thinking of other photos to do the effect to, and I did a few more just to explore it.

  There were a few more I wished I had tried.

  Blog Posts I commented On

  I have not been tracking these in any way, so went back to my Google Reader to find ones where I added comments. I am going to try Rosanna’s idea to use the star feature in reader from now on.

  • [blog.grotogrotto.com]
  • [j-rabbit.info]
  • [blog.tm-hobbs.me]
  • [happiprocity.us]
  • [blog.paristokyo.me]
  • [blog.sscanvasgraphics.com]
  • [blog.cryptovalence.com]
  • [blog.cryptovalence.com]
  • [the-weekly-update.com]
  • [blog.boaduwa.com]
  • [blog.colinjschulz.me]
  • [tipet.us]
  • [blog.rossannamarie.me]
  • [blog.tm-hobbs.me]
  • [lovelylashe.us]
  • [analyticd.org]
  • [blog.boaduwa.com]
  • [www.flickr.com]
  • [happiprocity.us]
  • [blog.paristokyo.me]
  • [totipotentplasm.com]
  • [j-rabbit.info]
  • [j-rabbit.info]
  • [blog.boaduwa.com]
  • [happiprocity.us]
  • [tipet.us]
  • [blog.colinjschulz.me]
  • [www.flickr.com]
  • [guacamoleh.com]
  • [the-weekly-update.com]
  • [blog.sscanvasgraphics.com]
  • [happiprocity.us]
  • [blog.rossannamarie.me]
  • [blog.sscanvasgraphics.com]
  • [happiprocity.us]
  • [blog.paristokyo.me]
  • [blog.flavorblast.me]
  • [blog.keelin.me]
  • [blog.flavorblast.me]
  • [www.flickr.com]
  • [blog.cryptovalence.com]
  • [lovelylashe.us]
  • [the-weekly-update.com]
  • [guacamoleh.com]
  • [blog.sscanvasgraphics.com]
  • [blog.tm-hobbs.me]

• Pre/Post Apocalyptic Moods

  Posted: February 11, 2012, 5:17 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  I have been wanting to make a good attempt at Annie Belle’s Switch up the Mood ds106 assignment:

  Color, lighting, saturation, contrast, and many other factors all play in to taking a decent photo and making it fabulous. This assignment is to change the mood or tone of a photograph by altering the contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, exposure, etc. You do not have to change all of those things about the photo, but you can if you would like to. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to take it to the extremes, and don’t be afraid to be subtle. Familiarize yourself with your editing software, whether it’s Photoshop, GIMP, Picnik, or any number of other editing platforms. Most of all, enjoy what you are doing!

  Yet I wanted more than just going black and white for a gritty feel. I ended up using as my “pre” image a photo of the Cadillac Ranch, a spot in Amarillo, Texas I visited in November, 2011. It is public art out in a field west of town, set up in 1974 by the Ant Farm dudes (someone recommended I check out their Media Burn performance piece). The Ranch features ten Cadillacs planted into the ground from 1949 to 1963, at the same angle Great Pyramid of Giza.

  Back in 1987 when I came through here on my way to Arizona, I completely missed it! So in November, going back that way again, I made it my goal to stop there. It is public art, and you are invited to paint your own spray paint work to it. So the night before I loaded up on 2 cans of yellow and black paint, and made my marks on the cars, one area writing “ds104 4life” and adding a “CogDog” to the hood of one of the caddies.

  I played with the image by trying to make it go grittier, like a dusted over post apocalyptic version of the location. I cant remember everything I did in Aperture- cranked the saturation down, turned up the brightness, pushed the tint to the yellows and greens, bumped the shadow zones, and tweaked the luminiance in the histogram. I think it is quite different from the bright colors and light of the original.

  When I was looking for the date of the original, I spotted that it was 11/18/11 (SYMMETRY!) and decided by post picture woudl also be in the future, yes 2012, when all the shit goes down, and made the second one a date of 12/11/12, AFTER we have wrecked out world as we know it.

  Here we go, pre and post apocalypse:

  

  (click to see the full apocalyptic detail)

  And here is a comparison of my sliders

  

  I did return to the spot in january on my way back across texas heading to Virginia, and all my art work was long gone- I am sure the coverage frequency is about once per week!

  You have been warned! The world will be much different on 12.11.12. #ds106 is #4life even when the world goes down the tubes.

• Parent Dog Headswap

  Posted: February 10, 2012, 9:25 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  My variant of the ds106 Parent-Child Headswap assignment, in this case I take some liberty to swap a photo of me and my icon dog, Mickey. The original photo is from August 2001:

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  This was done in Photoshop, I am planning try and start doing some work in GIMP so I better understand tools my students are using. I used the magnetic lasso selection to choose each head, cut it and past it to new layers. I flipped each one horizontally to get the orientation right, and then the Transform->Scale and Transform-Distort tools to shape the heads. It took a bit of eraser/brush to clean up the selection fringe, and some magic brush on the background layer to fill things out.

  You know what they say about pets and their owners resembling each other…

  UPDATE (Feb 11, 2011): I remembered the book Lives of the Monster Dogs someone suggested I read a few years back based on the resemblance of the cover to my (now dormant) Second Life avatar (blogged)

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  It was a good read, indeed!

• Photo it Like the Peanut Butter

  Posted: February 10, 2012, 9:49 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  Say it Like the Peanut Butter has been a long standing popular ds106 assignment- capture a key moment in a movie in the form of an animated GIF.

  Over the summer I did some experiments with using my own photos to generate animated GIFs, and I am making this into a new ds106 assignment.

  Photo it Like the Peanut Butter
  For this assignment, generate an animated GIF of a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material.

  I have already written up a few blog posts with my method; the key is taking a series of photos with little or no movement of your camera – a tripod is strongly recommended, but I have gotten away with ones done with multiple shot mode on my Canon DSLR.

  The first one I spotted in Nashville as I was fascinated by the reflections of the Cumberland river in the windows of a building (the how to was blogged as Animated GIFs from Your Own Photos):

  

  Hmm, I seem to have done this more than I remembered –

  There is an endless series of log trucks in north Florida:

  

  I caught some flags waving in Cookesville Tennessee

  

  There was the animated dancing GIF Groom spotted in Richmond, VA

  

  I made three of ‘em in Melbourne Australia, and actually got an email from this guy playing the accordian:

  

  These are ones with a lot of movement, in December 2011, I aimed for the more subtle motion of Giulia’s eyes, doing some masking/layering on Photoshop:

  

  And…

  I went about this another way this week. Since coming to Virginia and hanging out at DTLT, you get used to the ongoing sound of the MakerBot. The regular motion just begs to be animated:

  

  I was actually trying to do a video using the iTimeLapse app on my iphone (which is mounted to the machine by a holder made in the makerbot) — it grabbed about 400 photos. The video was not quite perfect (but I put a mixed audio version on YouTube), since the motion of the machine shook the phone a little bit and it went out of focus every few shots. But I nabbed about 10 photos from the sequence, dropped them into Photoshop (File -> Scripts -> Load Images into Stack) which puts them in frames. Pop open the Animation window, slide the layers into frames… save.

  Whew, long post! The point is to think about how to do animated GIFs from your own photo series.

• Krazy Kat Bread!

  Posted: February 10, 2012, 8:56 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  Get out in front of this meme or get out of the way! Beyond Cat Breading lies the bizarre space of Jim Groom Breading:

  

  This started with the almost incomprehensible Cat Breading ds106 assignment:

  The latest bizarre trend blowing up Facebook mini-feeds everywhere? Cat Breading. (Think LOLcats, but with a trippy twist—each adorable kitten has been adorned with a slice of bread, which encases their little feline face.)”

  From this article in Complex’s Pop Culture section

  So, what do you have to do? Simple: frame a cat’s face with a piece of bread and take a picture of it.

  Now the Cat Bread Purists will likely insist the true art requires real cats and real pieces of bread, no Photoshopping.

  Phoooey.

  As Jim was describing this assignment to his ds106 class tonight, I was watching on the live stream, and it occurred to me that the most appropriate things to do was to put Jim’s face into a piece of bread. That was pretty easy to do- a bit of lassoing of his mug, shrinking the selection area, feathering, and cutting the hole in the bread, which I tweeted out as this image.

  Just for giggles.

  But thinking about how to use this in the assignments, do I make a new one for Jim Groom Breading? Nah… I just need to convince the viewer that this is a cat! I just found a photo of a cat:

  

  and placed it on the top layer of my masterpiece. Some removal of the tip half, and then setting the layer style of the whiskers to “Lighten” got me closer to the needed but I still ended up using the eraser tool brush mode to get rid of more cat, and then some levels tweaking made the whiskers pop out a bit more.

  That Jim, breaded, and on krazy kat. This assignment is only worth 1 star, which is what a slap a cat into the bread in Photoshop would rate, but I took it up a notch.

  What can you bread?

  If you want to have a go with this, I am sharing the photoshop file which has the whiskers and other parts in separate layers so you can put someone else into the bread mix.

  [cogdogblog.com] (2.7 Mb PSD)

• Slice 009: 90 Miles from F’burg

  Posted: February 9, 2012, 7:19 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  This audio reflection comes close to the end of my cross country sprint from Arizona to Virginia, as I close in on Fredericksburg Virginia, where I am now, and not planning on driving away from for a while. Maybe it will become Hallowed Ground

  Slices of Life 009: 90 miles from Fredericksburg

  I had just listened to Scottlo, who inspired me to try this audio reflection, end his Slices of Life with number 47 “End of this Chapter”, his own path. It’s been remarkable to follow him from his start, when he was questioning everything about his teaching, to the torrent of excitement he achieved by number 47.

  Many ways to fill in Scottlo’s blank:

  Always Be _________ing

  I am looking forward to first face meeting with my ds106 students, and plan to meet individually with students and review their blogs, get to know who is who. Tonight’s class plan to be hands on, with a crack “gentle” whip for some who had not yet set up blogs, reminder tneed to embed media rather than linking, and urge the writing in their own voice, not the school voice.

  I plan also to how to set up categories in blog for organizing as well as setting up permalinks to have different forms of blog urls.

  The next phase is making the space their own, starting with theming, but going into widgets, plugins, etc. As a great example rossannamarie.me has done an interesting restructure by making a landing page, and building a navigational structures to the blog portion and a separate update summary that journals how the blog grows

  It is also time to turn up the heat on commenting and need to be linking more in their written posts.

  The first round of reflection posts on Cyberinfrastucted were mixed, some just “I think this is cool” when really I want them to reflect on what it means to them,a nd to connect to other ideas, not write the general school report summary. I hope to have them circle back later to their initial Cyberinfrastructure post at the end of the term, to see if the class in which they are actually doing this has changed or evolved their first idea.

  There is a fair amount of student pushback on use of technology, probably from Gardner’s quote about “everyone needs a cyberinfrastructure”

  Just as the real computing revolution didn’t happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won’t happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment. This vision goes beyond the “personal learning environment”5 in that it asks students to think about the web at the level of the server, with the tools and affordances that such an environment prompts and provides.

  I rambled a bit on Beth Kanter’s post on content curation, citing the prolific Robin Good as an example of someone that does this to the nth degree (and I agree with what he does as being a flashlight into the bag of gold). I agree with the value of the recommended tools, but not as a total toolset (e.g. scoop.it) in that they are all *external* Both Beth and Robin exemplify the balance of managing their own digital space, much as the digital locker in Gardner’s talk, and what we are asking students to do in this class.

  My last bit was an idea for the next This Week in ds106 live vide show with Jim, with me pretending to skype in, and apologizing for not getting there in time. Jim will get angry, and then I will walk on the set.

  (later) We did pull it off that afternoon:

• Slice 008: Leaving Arizona

  Posted: February 9, 2012, 6:47 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  Still catching up on the slices of life audio reflection, this one almost two weeks old. ALways Be ‘Poligizing for being behind? This audio recording is from January 26, the morning I left home in Strawberry Arizona, for the 220 mile express trip to Virginia.

  Slices of Life 008: Leaving Arizona

  I am going to miss these Big Blue Skies

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  In many ways, this was eerily similar to the day I left on my 5 month odyssey in June 2011, but also very different. At that time was unsure if I could even live the road life; would I hate it? I of course found it I could manage living out of Big Red and being mobile for few months, and that home was always in Strawberry even if I wasn’t. I know now too that if I need to I can do 500, 600, 700 miles in a day.

  I reflected on my section of ds106, a class I will be teaching in person at University of Mary Washington. Last night was third session I did remotely via Skypa (a huge Arizona sky sized thanks to Jim Groom who has been present for my students, and set up the two way video liv stream)

  This is far from an optimal way to teach this way; It is hard for me to see, hard to hear audio clearly via skype (especially since I had busted m laptop and was using my iPhone- students are tiny!). I cant read body language, and really I am “sort of not there”. But it was just a bridge needed to give me time to get across the country.

  So far, 20 of my 25 students have their domains and wordpress blogs set up, done with minimal direction — I agree with Jim that it’s a lesson in not relying totally on the course or the teacher to provide answers, that they will need to figure out things on their own, with their pal. Half of these have already customized their themes.

  Last night’s session was the discussion of Gardner Campbell’s talk on No Digital Facelift and paper on Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Stealing/borriwing/co-opting on of Gardner’s own classtoom techniques, I had asked them to think about “nuggets” within reading or video- a key sentence or phrase that grabbed their interest, curiosity as starting points for discussions. I provided Jim a few YouTube links that use the technique to point to a particular timecode to start playing, examples:

  • Bag of gold [www.youtube.com]
  • Digital facelift [www.youtube.com]
  • Little big planet [www.youtube.com]
  • Small things can be meaningful [www.youtube.com]

  I also had Jim show some examples of how te “bags of gold” became a bit of a viral meme last year. e.g.
  Tim’s Kinetic Typography, Tom Woodward audio remix, Giulia Forsythe’s visual notes, Barbara Dieu’s video remox — in all of these, these show visual ways of drawing out different nuggets of the talk.

  I tried to start with a discussion of “What is bag of gold? what does it mean to you?” … awkward silence.

  But the discussion picked up next when we moved to “what is a visual facelift”.

  It was interesting that students felt Gardner was advocating a total technology makeover for teaching, which got into the most active state as they debated what could and could not be taught online. I for one have not come across anyone advocating that surgery could eb taught completely online.

  Class closed with an attenmt to describe what Personal Cyberinfrastructure means- asked student to read passage out loud (borrowed again technique from from Gardner):

  Cyberinfrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline.

  — American Council of Learned Societies,
  Our Cultural Commonwealth, 2006

  We do have an archive of this class

  And posts from this assignment are available at [ds106.us]

  I then speculated what to do next week with Storytelling- introduce examples of web storytelling?

  The slice closed with a personal memory of my trip return to this road in November, where I crossed the 15,000 mile mark and getting an iPod shuffled memory of my Mom, She’s a Rainbow”

  Driving north from the Ponderosa Forest into the pinyon pine forest and eventual sage brush high desert terrain near Winslow, I marveled at how subtle wast this transition from forest to high plains, not clear where one begins and other ends — life is gradational

  

• Happy Butterflyday

  Posted: February 8, 2012, 10:46 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  Today would have been my Mom’s 83rd Birthday, and in honor of her memory and love of butterflies, I asked Tim Owens to do a Makerbot print of a butterfly ornament.

  If you want to a description of her belief about butterflies, listen to this recording I made last year when I visited her, just a week after her 82nd:

  Mom on Butterflies

  It’s been a year of thinking back on events that she was here for last year, and probably the sweetest memory was the outpouring of sympathy for cookielove last September

  And it was was a year ago last November she was at my home in Strawberry making cookies, and I just felt like there would be many more of these.

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  This one last photo was a gift that came into the StoryBox this summer. I think I know who it is from, but am not 100% sure, nor does it matter.

  

  Happy Butterflyday, Mom.

• Dominoe Looking Across Texas, Time, Space…

  Posted: February 8, 2012, 9:36 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  Reaching a bit into the past for today’s Daily Create "a photo that represents that happiest or most memorable moment in your life."

  As an absolute for "happiest" I find that impossible, so let’s reach into the hat.

  Having driven across Texas twice in the last 3 months, I went back to first first Trans-Texas tour, in August 1987, when Dominoe and I drove to Arizona from Baltimore in my 1973 Ford Maverick.

  This trip alone was epic for me, a grand aventure, and I had a perfect, non-complaining travel buddy, though she did not do her share of the driving. This is somewhere on US 387 between Dallas and Amarillo.

  Dominoe was my first dog I owned on my own, and her story has gone very far with me. Picking happiest is tricky, but this was definitely memorable and rolled around in my mind this year as I went farther on my road odyssey

  This was an old print photo (35mm FILM baby) I had scanned into my computer sometime last year, and as far as I recall, has not appeared in my other photos. To give it a memory look, a fiddled with the Paint Daubs filter in Photoshop to make it look more painterly.

• Comic Me Down Under

  Posted: February 8, 2012, 8:00 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  A quick one for a new #ds106 assignment created by one of my students:

  Comic Book Effect
  Take a picture and experiment with the “Halftone Effect” in some photo editing software to create a comic book effect. There are lots of tutorials on Youtube and Google.

  This was the original photo, one that Rowan Peter took of me when I visited him in Melbourne and we worked on some lawn art in his back yard:

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  I did all my edits directly in flickr using Piknic (Using “Edit Photo in Piknic” from the Actions menu). There was no half tone effect there, but I found the textured one worked pretty well. I added the bubble on some next to round it out.

  Just a quick try!

• Those Illiudium Q-36 Space Modulators are DANGEROUS

  Posted: February 7, 2012, 2:14 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  

  (click for the full diagram in all its martian glory)

  Inspired by Ben Rimes post today I wanted to take a spin at the ds106 Warning Design assignment:

  Lots of things today have warning labels. Create warning labels for things that exist only in movies or your imagination

  I felt that as a weapon of planetary destruction, the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator wielded by Marvin Martian would definitely need some warning labels.

  That thing is dangerous. The users manual is about 800 pages long. Marvin is lucky he does not blow his Martian head off.

  The real device was rather simple, almost just a stick of dynamite. I did a google search on the device and landed on the complex device from a tumblr blog. Building this was just some PhotoShop layering. I placed the device at the center. For each callout, I just copied a selection, pasted to new layer, and resized. Then I overlaid the items with text or graphics.

  Danger, Marvin, he lives dangerously.

• We Need More Reality Shows

  Posted: February 7, 2012, 10:04 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  Actually we don’t. We need more fake reality shows.

  

  San Francisco: Flip This Mayor
  There must be something in the water at Oakland’s City Hall which makes people stupid.

  San Francisco’s unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom.

  ——————————————————-

  Tune in for the drama in city hall, as city officials labor hard to prove their are “creating jobs”. Mayor Stan Usual was elected on a split opposition vote, and has no mandate. He is dealing with a water issue, but it is not stupidity, but lead. As the tech industry dries up, before the tumbleweeds are spotted blowing through SoMa, city council people have developed a new job sceme involving portable structures made from aluminum cans. Who will win this epic community battle for the hearts and minds of the city? Stay tuned….
  ——————————————————-

  photo credits

  cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by echoman: [www.flickr.com]

  cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by slworking2: [flickr.com]

  cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by Thomas Hawk: [flickr.com]

  Hence a new ds106 assignment, partly inspired by the formula of the Album cover assignment, Really Reality TV The tags for this assignment are DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments342

  1. Use the Reality TV Show name generator to get a title for the show.
  2. Do a Google search on the show title name.
  3. Use the first paragraph found on the 5th result of the search as the first part of the show description.
  4. Use the last paragraph found on the 10th result of the search as the second part of the show description.
  5. Find three creative commons licensed images to represent a protagonist on the show, the setting, and one example of action. Combine them into a three panel show banner. Be sure to credit the sources in your blog post
  6. On your blogpost, write in the elevator pitch for the show, and a tag line for it appearing on ds106 TV.
  7. Sit back and wait for Spielberg to contact you. He is into TV these days.

  So for my show, I generated this name, “San Francisco: Flip This Mayor”:

  

  My google search results (which who knows if ever are unique?)

  Result five was a link to 1st sentence from 5th result “the tattler: Occupy Oakland…Mayor Quan flip-flops! Cops cry foul!” where the first paragraph was There must be something in the water at Oakland’s City Hall which makes people stupid. (that is definitely show material).

  The 10th search result was Tech company move boosts SF mayor’s branding push, where the last paragraph was:

  San Francisco’s unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom.

  That leads me to search terms in compfight for “Oakland City Hall”, “Mayor”, and “Tech jobs”, giving me these three photos:

  

  

  

  I set up a blank photoshop document with a black background, and dragged and dropped the downloaded photos (500px size) right in there- you can move and resize them as smart objects, then added some text, and boom! Done.

  The last bit was to write the pitch for the show.

  Shiznit! Reality TV is done.

• It’s a Bag of Coal

  Posted: February 7, 2012, 8:09 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  It's a Bag of Coal
  by: cogdog

  I cannot say this has a whole lot of meaning– it more or less came out of just thinking about the rallying call from Gardner Campbell’s No Digital Facelift presentation we use to start ds106.

  So maybe if people do not see the value of the Bag of Gold, perhaps another precious natural resource. I visited Gardner a little over a week ago, and we did some lamenting how much people tend to gravitate, or not want to move away from the status quo.

  Maybe gold is not enough of an inducement. Maybe it is a bag of? Doritos? a bah of crude oil? a bag of lobbyists? I don’t know.

  All kidding aside, how do we stir up more excitement about the potential of the internet versus the fear and loathing that keeps people from embracing?

  Like my other colleagues close to this, the answer seems to always end up at… ds106, the answer to everything. It’s not just us boasting, it is that sea of creativity that, to me, shows the potential for things we do not expect, the adjacent possibilities.

  IT”S A BAG OF COAL! WHAT PART OF IT DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND!

  I did this as a small sample of the web storytelling assignment for ds106 to use one of the 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story tools to say something about web storytelling. I always thought xtranormal was one of the most original tools— “If you can type into a box you can make a movie”. I was disappointed that they made the free options so slim, but I had some credits when I last used it for another video project.

  It’s easy to slip into the silly mode for this tool, but really, it can be used quite easily to block out scenes, or play the part of a film director. It remains one of my favorite tools.

• Splash Some Color

  Posted: February 6, 2012, 9:12 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  I made this as an example for a new ds106 Visual Assignment, Splash The Color- this is the effect of accentuating parts of an image by reducing it to black and white, and then re-coloring or restoring the color of parts of the photo. See examples from Photobucket or many groups on flickr.

  Color splash is a technique to emphasize details- you remove all color from a photo, and then restore original color to a single object, e.g. a green apple on a table. Think of the Girl in the red dress from Schindler’s List.

  You can do this in a number of ways with photo editing software or using mobile apps. The answer lies in the Google

  The tags for this assignment are: VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments340

  I’ve come across a few variations on how to do this, the easiest (how I did it) via Photoshop and the history brush, a slient demo is here:

  In my words–

  • Open the color image in Photoshop
  • As a precaution duplicate the layer so you are working on a copy
  • Select Image -> Adjustments -> Black and White to remove all color. You might tweak the sliders to give the image a boost, or more contrast.
  • Zoom in on the area you will work with, you want to be able to get close to the edges.
  • Selcet the History Brush tool.
  • Select a brush size from the top menu, preferably with a feathered edge.
  • Start brushing the object you want to colorize; as you paint, the original color is painted back in. Its better to work from the middle out. As you get to the edge, make your brush smaller to fine tune the margins (you know, all that old coloring book stay inside the lines stuff)

  

  • Do just enough to bring out the detail of one object, or a group of similar object.
  • Save, post, and blog about it!

  A more complicated approach would be to paint an object a different color than the original…. That might be for another day.

• Back in 1950…

  Posted: February 6, 2012, 10:23 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  Today (or technically yesterday since it is some early AM hour) would have been my parent’s 62nd wedding anniversary. Alyce and Morris (aka “Mickey”) look so serious in their pose here, though Dad, in his pseudi Desi Arnez style, seems to have a twinkle in his eye.

  Yes it is sad to think they are both gone, but I am holding on to their memories living on if I retell the stories. I have some images I had scanned from the scrapbook my Mom had worked on- here they do look a bit more relaxed (after the ceremony?)

  

  And this is the family photo on my Dad’s side- this is left to right my grnffather, Abraham (for whom I am named after, but never met), my grandmother who outlived everyone in this picture except for my Mom, Dad, Mom, and that is Dad’s younger sister Eve in front.

  

  There is so much about these old photos that make them seem distant in time and place. The look, the clothes, the grain of the photo– this all says “Memories”. Will my digital photos now have that same dated look to some future person? Will on its own speak to this time? Hmmmm.

  We had a bigger celebration in 2000 for their 50th anniversary; I remember laboring in Director to create a multimedia CD-ROM of photos and videos. I still have the discs though I need an old computer to play them anymore. That media does not hold up as well to time, but content on the web, in terms of being in standard media formats and HTML, are still accessible (c.f. tribute to Dad)

  I so miss that time of assurance they would be there forever; that is how it felt, naive, not realistic, but can anything be more part of what you count on in the world than your parents– if you are fortunate as I was to have them in my lives, and supporting me always, unconditionally.

  

  My conversations with Mom took on such a more fun and laugh filled mode in the last few years. I called Mom a year ago, and had a conversation like this.

  “I’m just calling to share the memories of your anniversary, Mom…”

  “Do you know what I was doing 61 years ago today, Alan?” she asks. “Your Dad and I were on te train to Niagara Falls for our honeymoon.”

  “That’s nice Mom, was it a long trip?”

  (We talked a bit more about some other things)

  Mom comes back to her memories. “And do you know what happened 61 years ago tonight?”

  I pause. Uh oh, where is she going with this?

  “This was 61 years since the first time I had sex!”

  “MOM I DON’T NEED TO KNOW THAT! ALL I NEED TO KNOW IS YOU DID IT 4 TIMES, NO MORE!!!”

  We laughed so much. I miss that more than anything.

  Happy 62nd Anniversary Mom and Dad, all I got you was a blog post.

• Daily Creates: Week 3

  Posted: February 6, 2012, 9:56 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  Week 3 of ds106 was full of action, from digging out of the rubble that hacker Emre5807 caused to working through the readings of Tim O’Reilly on Web 2.0 and Bryan Alexander on Web storytelling. The flow of activity in The Daily Create has been impressive, especially now that we have our students in the mix.

  I’m liking the bit of doing a weekly recap, as a way of mini reflection on what one did with these in a week.
  
  TDC28 (Feb 5): Withut saying any words, make a 10 second ringtone with your voice
  I had some ideas for this one, including trying to replicate the old sound of a modem, but Jim Groom’s kids were eager to help me out with this “Jungle Beat” recording (can you imagine kids not wanting to make noise into a microphone?)

  TDC27 (Feb 4): Take a picture that represents or expresses something loud
  Maybe I am relying on Jim’s kids too much, but they were pretty enthusiastic.

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996646802@N01/6820499863/

  TDC26 (Feb 3): Take a picture of your feet that shows what kind of day you are having
  This one was popular, with 67 photos submitted! I tried to capture the good feeling of being out on the sun, and with my hiking boots, I am thinking I should have been out on a trail. For this one, I made it more graphic using the ToonCamera app on my iPhone

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996646802@N01/6813014375/

  TDC25 (Feb 2): Record the sound of something that gives you comfort or makes you feel safe
  Comfort for me is going down the steps out getting outside, especially with all the great weather we have had since I got to Virginia

  TDC24 (Feb 1): Make a creative photo silhouette by aiming the camera into a bright light
  This assignment is meant to get you thinking about creatively breaking rules (“always keep your back to the sun for photos”). There was great direct light walking into campus; this light caught my eye, but I liked the complementary shape of the tree. The brightness blew out the whites, but it looks like a super nova.

  TDC23 (Jan 31): Make a photo that freezes or isolates the motion of an object
  Oops, I goofed up this assignment, I did the opposite, blurring the motion around Jim Groom.

  

  TDC22 (Jan 30): Take a photo of two objects of drastically different sizes
  I did this one while still driving to Fredericksburg, but had seen the assignment early and was thinking about it as I noticed a lot of cell phone towers along I-81… then the connection occurred to me given I have used a Verizon mifi for my internet as I drove across country.

  

  Woah, I am 7/7 this week.

• In With the New (Hard Drive)

  Posted: February 4, 2012, 5:27 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  The new hard drive is ready to go in my Macbook Pro.

  Closed her up. I booted from my Leopard startup disk, erased the new drive, and ran an install from a backup on my Time Machine drive.

  It works like a champ. I am using it now. Little is more satisfying then geeking your own hardware (and yes, this was elementary, or pre-school in terms of difficulty).

  As the followup to The Day My MacBookPro Died, today I successfully performed a Hard Drive transplant. It was drop dead easy to do (there are tons of guides, I used the one from ExtremeTech.

  She’s Alive!

  And to follow up on the philosophical bag of gold left me by Stephen Downes, why is she alive? BECAUSE I FREAKIN FIXED HER.

  Woooooooooooooo

• Police Beat: Couple Apprehended, Sent Back to Where they Once Belonged

  Posted: February 4, 2012, 8:58 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by PMC 1stPix

  I really dug the idea Tom Woodward put in for a ds106 Writing Assignment called “Police Beat”

  Essentially, identify an innocent seeming song that advocates some odd/criminal behavior and reformat it as a police report style article.
  tags: WritingAssignments, WritingAssignments328

  Here is a report that came in on the wire from Quartzite, Arizona.

  ——————————— 8 Quartzite AZ Police Report ID 65-4345E12
  Arresttee’s Name(s): Joseph Henderson, Loretta Martin
  Charges: Possession of Marijuana (A.R.S) 13-3415; Disorderly Conduct, Outstanding Warrants
  Date/Time: Friday, February 3, 2012, 8:44pm
  Location: 56 Lizard Lane, Quartzite, AZ 85346
  Reporting: Sergeant Willi Fremont

  At 8:15PM, QPD received an anonymous call about suspicious persons galavanting along Central Blvd. who wer tipping trash cans at the Burger King on Central and Cowell St. Officers Fremont and Martinez responded to the scene on foot from their beat on Main Street.

  Upon seeing the officers, Joseph “Jo Jo” Henderson, 26, of Tucson, Arizona, and his partner Loretta Martin, also of Tucson, ran from the officers heading north on Central. QPD pursued on foot, following the suspects over a fence into the backyard property of Frida Colangario of 56 Lizard Lane. Henderson damaged a barbecue gril and 3 prized plastic flamingos in the flight.

  Suspects were cornered by QOD officers and requested to produce identification. Henderson spat in the face of officer Martinez saying, “We dont have to go anywhere with you pig”. Upon search of Henderson, QPD recovered a two pound ziploc bag of marijuana hidden insider a plastic mustard dispenser. Henderson claimed the mustard had come from California as a gift.

  Henderson claimed he was a loner, and pretended not to be affiliated with Martin. After cuffing Henderson, Sgt Fremont examined Martin and conjectured the situation required a female officer. After a radio call to headquarters, Captain Mary Saurez showed up to conduct a search of Martin, only to discover the individual appeared as a female but was male wearing women’s attire.

  A background check revealed they had both provided false identities and were wanted for unauthorized leave from work releases executed by the Marana Correctional Facility. After reporting capture, extradition was arranged for both Henderson and Martin on February 4, and they will get back to where they once belonged, the Marana unit.
  ——————————— >8 —————————-

  Lyrics for the song: Get Back. There are rather discordant interpretations of the song at Songmeaning

• MOOCS on Ice

  Posted: February 3, 2012, 5:59 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  

  I was listening to ds106 auto DJ and came across the fun I had with Rowan Peter in Melbourne as he pleaded that George Siemens go down under yo go ice skating.

  I recalled us conceptualizing the entire Canadian team (Downes, Siemens, and Cormier) to come perform a MOOCS on Ice show. This seemed to deserve a visual.

  Rowan Peter Promotes Skate with George

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  For the graphic above, I had to do in Aviary, which actually provides a decent amount of editing (layers, selection tools).

  And the reason for doing this? None worth mentioning.

  Because I can.

  Now, how do I make this a ds106b assignment?

  UPDATE (Feb 4, 2012): Because Rowan Peter asked for it, I made this into a visual assignment “Play in the Big Leagues”:

  It’s easy to idolize professional sports, its uniforms, its code language, its appearance of abilities above our ordinary lives. Create a visualize that inserts people you know into an image of a professional sports team or redesign a logi, jersey to represent the common person.

  If you get on the ice with this assignment, and hopefully put it between the pipes, the tags are VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments338

• Share Your Suggestions How to Be a Better Photographer

  Posted: February 3, 2012, 9:58 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  Next week we start a two week segment of ds106 focussed (get it?) on photography. I’m putting out a request to add your suggestions in an open Google doc at [bit.ly] .

  Links to articles are great, but I am really looking for personal strategies and ideas that would help my students refine their approach to visualizing, composing, etc- not just the technical stuff, the things that move one from snapshots to art.

  For example, Brian Metcalfe shared this audio narrated slideshow by Darren Kuropatawa:

  Developing Your Photographic Eye View another webinar from Darren Kuropatwa

  Maybe I can arm twist Alec or Dean into echoing it, they do well with these Google Doc Tom Sawyer Fence Painting gigs.

  Hint. Ahem. The link. [bit.ly]

• Fat Cats Playing Poker with Dogs

  Posted: February 3, 2012, 6:56 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  

  (click click click for view full sized artistic glory of this work of fine art)

  Fine art, indeed, this limited edition original painting is available for auction coming soon.

  This is my bit for the Fat Cats Make Art Better ds106 assignment contributed by Annie Belle who is just rocking the class so far. The instructions, if you please…

  Using this site: [fatcatart.ru] as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

  Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better.

  (Tags for this assignment are VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments334)

  I use “classic art” in its most literal sense, for what gallery is not complete without a large painting of Dogs PLaying Poker?

  For this one, I found the base painting on flickr (search “dogs poker” in compfight.com)

  
  cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by allspice1

  and then it is rather easy to find photos of fat cats in the same place- here is my subject because he/she is posed in a poker position

  
  cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by AlyssssylA

  In Photoshop, I positioned the cat in a layer above the base scene. I aplied the paint daubs filter to make it look a bit more textured. Then, I use the selection tool to grab the outline of the chair and table as areas, I flip back to the cat and use to delete so it appears behind key objects. Finally I added (rotated too) a few copies of this playing card to fill out the feline’s royal straight flush.

  I am next thinking of a whole series of feline Velvet Elvises….

• More Vinyl with Gardner

  Posted: February 3, 2012, 8:43 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  My last stop before arriving in Fredericksburg was an overnight visit with Gardner Campbell, in Blacksburg VA, and what evening of great food and conversation does not get greater when he says, “Do you want to hear some vinyl?”

  Is the sky up there?

  Of course I do, especially given the bag of gold that was our last conversation in October of 2011.

  My question is, how about if I broadcast to ds106 radio?

  And thus we go- I have about an hour and forty minutes (see below), but missed recording the first section where he played “Rocks Off” and “Loving Cup: from Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones.

  This was timely, considering I had a little audio clip to play back. Over last year, I’ve been working my way through the audio book version of Keith Richards’ autobiography “Life”. I had heard a section I really wanted to come back to, but there is no way to bookmark audio on your iThing while driving.

  But the same section had come up again when I was listening while driving across Tennessee. The thing is, the audio book is being red bu Johnny Depp, and this section is where Richards shares a quote from Tom Waits on their musical collaboration. Once more, this is Johnny Depp doing an imitation of Keith Richards imitating Tom Waits talking about Keith Richards.

  And this was only recorded by my hand held iPhone in a moving car, and I kept turning it over thinking I had it sitting on ther mic on the cup holder.

  Tom Waits on Keith Richards

  Everyone loves music… what you really want is music to love you. And that’s the way I saw it with Keith. It takes a certain amount of respect for the process. You’re not writing it, it’s writing you. You’re its flute, or its trumpet, or its strings. Thats real obvious around Keith.

  He’s like a frying pan, made from one piece of metal. You can heat it up really high, and it won’t crack. Just changes color.

  That is so poetic, and visual. I love it.

  And the part about writing makes me think about Gardner as well as the closing bit:

  I found some things they say about music that seem to apply to Keith. You know that in the old days, they said that the sound of the guitar could cure gout and epilepsy, sciatica, migraines.

  I think nowadays, there seems to be a deficit of… wonder. And Keith, still seems to wonder about this stuff. He will stop and hold his guitar up, just stare at it for a while, just be rather mystified by it. Life all the great things in the world– women, religion, and the sky– you wonder about it. And you don’t stop wondering about it.

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  To me, that sense of wonder is something that typifies Gardner Campbell, he has a surplus of wonder. And he shares it so well.

  So for the rest of the session, I did record it, and we listened to some Stevie Wonder, played some Guess Who for Brian Lamb, then some Rasberries, and closed, of course, with a few songs by the Who.

  More Vinyl with Gardner

  I go there for the conversation, the musiuc, the learning of the little codes in the dead wax, to tap into the magic of musical recordings, and the nuances I barely even might notice– where it not for this man of wonder.

  Thank you, friend.

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

• Slice 007: Driving Down to Cottonwood

  Posted: February 3, 2012, 8:01 am by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  LBL_TAG_TAGS:   

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  I’m catching up on my audio reflections, this one is from before I left Arizona. On January 22, the weekend before I left, I drove down to Cottonwood Arizona to visit Todd Conaway. It’s a majestic drive down Highway 260, falling off of the top of the Mogollon Rim down through Campe Verde.

  Slices of Life 007

  Most of this slice was reflecting on my first class of teaching ds106 for the University of Mary Washington, albeit remotely from Strawberry, via Skyoe with the help of Jim Groom. The first meeting went fairly well, me introducing the class and the students introducing themselves.

  I was pretty darn nervous, and felt the combination of that excitement and the drain of energy after being tuned in for that session. It is hardly the best way to teach, and is only a bridge til I get there.

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  I enjoyed the time chatting with Todd at his home in Cornville, and as a bonus audio (hah, some bonus), I recorded a conversation we had talking about the StoryBox. I appreciate and am doing some later to be schedule reflection on his interest in what comes out of that experience.

  Conversation with Todd Conaway

  We then drove over to the town of Cottonwood where I got a tour of main street by Todd and some fine local food.

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

  I was a bit frantic at this time to get ready for the upcoming drive to Virginia, but it was well worth taking the afternoon to visit Todd and see a bit of Arizona I’d not been to before.

  And all of this being part of the larger slice of embracing the unknown and reflecting on what it might offer.

• Parked. Finally.

  Posted: February 2, 2012, 9:12 pm by Alan Levine aka CogDog

  
  cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by michale

  Red Dog parked in Fredericksburg, Virginia on Monday afternoon, and has not moved since. It feels both odd and rewarding to not be in motion, yet I am still very much in a place of transition.

  Here is the place to insert the standard apology for not blogging. There is a queue of backlog posts, at least 3 or 4 Slices of Life audio to hang here.

  For the quick recap, I rushed here to be present in person to teach my section of ds106. I have a teaching blog set up using the same instructions we give students at [106tricks.net] – I was using Feed WordPress to pull posts in here, but noticed they were double posted and thrice tweeted. I might just put a sidebar RSS feed widget.

  In some ways my start was a side parallel of the Summer of Oblivion, where the teacher appeared after being present only in video, without the drama and hair shaving. Maybe. I’m definitely quickly trying to find my way in the teaching mode, it is both invigorating and draining.

  Then on top of all; the hurdles we give students in setting up their blogs, we suffered this week through a hacking incident that affected all student blogs (and my own) on the host we recommend. Most are recovered, and while it sets a dark, confusing cloud on this, in many ways it helps expose some of the dark underbelly of the internet. To me, you cannot have the shiny bright kum-ba-ya sharing of the net, without having the slimy stuff…

  Jim posted examples of how we countered it, by giving our students a 15 minute rapid challenge to work in groups and create a web story about the character Enre5807. My students got much more animated than during our class discussion given this challenge, relying on tools they knew like Meme Generator:

  

  So far Virginia is sporting warm sunny weather I am happy to take credit for brining from Arizona. I owe a big thanks to Jim Groom for setting me up here and for offering me the basement complex at La Maison du Bava, not to mention the warm enthusiasm of the Groom Family, all three kids call me “CogDog”.

  I’ve still got a lot to do to get acquainted with the new surroundings.

  More to be blogged, just glad to be off the road a while. But I am rather portable…

  
  cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by James Jordan