Yesterday was a calendar reminder of the death of a man 67 years ago that I don’t know. That as my mother’ father, aka Harry Herondorf aka my grandfather. I’ve previously written what I could in 2014, but I have found a few more shreds. The most interesting is a photo my suster s … | Continue reading
In the “I’m not ready for more of this department” two days ago a good colleague from my days of yore at the Maricopa texted with a message sharing sad news that Rod Freeman had passed away. Googling his name will not reveal much, but Rod was special as he was the very first facu … | Continue reading
It took some lubricant spray to get the Daily Photo to Flickr Habit going in January. Even with February providing one more day to summarize, and making it the Daily Photos 366 style group, I almost let is slip again. But alas, I managed to get 60 photos in 60 days posted to my 1 … | Continue reading
“Holy late to the blog writing, Levine” yells the inner critic. Whatever. Here is my tale of a circle I was most fortunate to have been swept into. I must write this one day later than it should have. And the title was supposed to have this text which WordPress seems to reduce to … | Continue reading
One day late! I’m sorry Flickr, your 20th Birthday was yesterday but I have been thinking about this for a while, I promise. My love is real! Okay, here are 20 special things (there are more) in no specific order except when they pop out of my head, well actually as I am blitting … | Continue reading
My calendar reminds me today marks my parent’s wedding anniversary- they were kind and made the math easy by having a wedding in 1950. I returned to the audio I recorded with Mom in 2009, amongst be favorite memorabilia is the sound of her voice, describing to me how Alyce and Mo … | Continue reading
Sometimes we just need a little magic spray to unstick ourselves. Of course in many cases, no one beyond our own inner critic sees the stuckness. 2023 was a low success rate for my self-inflicted efforts of daily flickr photo posting and might leave some games in my claims of sel … | Continue reading
Each passing day of trying to read on the web becomes a sad game of dodging pay walls, peeling off pop up pleas for subscriptions, and scraping away the barnacle-like encrustation of more and more ads. Witness the word of the year as coined and preached by Cory Doctorow … the wav … | Continue reading
Said pedal has no effect on time (me writing the obvious). I am among many many colleagues and friends who have been fortunate to have known, collaborated with, presented with, learned from, played music with or just have had a meaningful conversation with Irwin Devries. His last … | Continue reading
In several conversations I hear my own brain echoes of responses to AI mania of both fatigue and hype wariness but also some curiosity and itches to explore. My own reckoning I reckon is the comparisons to the disruptive force of the early web was we were not clubbed over the hea … | Continue reading
I have a thing for web serendipity and following tunnels to places not on my to do list. Hopefully it’s not curable. It happens without foreshadowing. Today I saw a Mastodon post from a favorite tech writer I remember Clive Thompson specifically vividly for a 2007 piece Clive Tho … | Continue reading
I never thought of this benefit when I set out to do things regularly on the web, be it actually writing in your my space (that thing that seems to be now called newslettering, WTF), posting photos, even spewing to some social media platform formerly known as something else). In … | Continue reading
Feel the power of good ole RSS, like shooting lasers from my finger tips. I just used the RSS feed from the OEG Voices Podcast I manage from, yes, a self-managed WordPress site to directly be connected, and updating without me lifting a pinky, to a YouTube hosted podcast. For eve … | Continue reading
There you go, a deliberately vague blog post title that give no real indication what this is about. Heck, at this point, 1.5 sentences in, I am questioning myself if I know. Note: I found this post hanging out in my Drafts. Was it left undone? Did I change my mind on publishing? … | Continue reading
I was in conversation this week with the folks concocting an AI flavored DS106 making use of the remarkable monster spawned of Michael Branson Smith of a generated Dr Oblivion All I can say is try it. But there was a round of group fatigue, ennui, fill in another synonym towards … | Continue reading
I can’t help it. I notice something reading online, it triggers a vague connection in my old school neural network device and I cannot get on with quote unquote being productive until I emerge with something from the internet rabbit hole. Notice the underlined, clickable words. A … | Continue reading
It’s so tempting to do. You write something or give a talk/presentation about AI and a few paragraphs/minutes in, you pull out the Big Reveal that what you read/said was generated by ChatGPT. “Woah” swoons the crowd (did not see that one coming, eh?) It’s basically this old trick … | Continue reading
According to Colo…Coloph-Thing I’m in the stretch of coming up doing 19 years of WordPressing, which started with this here blog. I might emulate the SNL Chico Esceula character to say, “WordPress has been vedddy vedddy good to me.” This is not the post to wax or moan about the n … | Continue reading
Last month I did some of my family history unraveling in honor of my Aunt Dorothy’s birthday, as she is the last living sibling of my Mom. The 1934 family photo of all five got me thinking of my mother’s brother, Harvey, the only boy. The expressions in these photos match my Mom’ … | Continue reading
(oops, look at who has been using WordPress for 20 years and still forgets to click “Publish”) For those with an eye for numbers and dates, January 1, 2024 has some math going- whether you are month/date/year or date/month/year, as Tristan Louis pointed out you have some fun prog … | Continue reading
As we careen down the hill of inevitable slope to a machine generated future, it’s relieving to have small experiences that reveal humanness. Here’s one. In the world of Creative Common Licenses (which I am a BF, Big Fan), one of the least favorite things I see are nitpicking/hag … | Continue reading
In the best Tom Woodward style1, this post is more a reference for me than most anyone else. Besides so many people are freaked out by the WordPress editor, who’s really gonna tweak a theme file? Me. Okay, I have a really old site that was part of the Networked Narratives fleet o … | Continue reading
Tick, tick, tick, hours before the Y in date functions goes up by one. There are no year end summaries here, no glorifying the air miles clocked (not many anyhow), no forecasts for 2024, and FFS absolutely no resolutions. The week of time away held promise for catching up on writ … | Continue reading
Be wary of nebulous titles as they forbode a blog post of meandering paths and uncertain destinations. As I look gleefully over his holiday break span full of plans to write all the posts rattling in my head and browser tabs left open for months, it too reminds me of this stack o … | Continue reading
Hi, so I like that nifty Mastodon post you shared, how can I WordPress it, do I have to do screenshots? asks my good great, fantastic behind the beard friend Bryan Alexander. Heck no, WordPress can grok this. Every Mastodon post has an embed link, like the one I sent to Bryan by … | Continue reading
Calling a technomechanical object “smart” is a few notches below bestowing intelligence, but I am happily surprised when I discover (often accidentally) what that phone thing can do. I’ve known for more than a year that after taking photos of a plant or flower on the iThing yield … | Continue reading
As usual, my favorite mode for discovering internet nuggets (c.f. bag of gold) are ones I was not looking for and pretty much stumble into while doing something else. Thus it was I found On Demand Smart Links, which honestly sounds like a buzzword. I deduce this was previously ca … | Continue reading
I previously blabbed that Twitter had done a full reverse cycle to its first impression in 2007 of being “that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of”– I was wrong. The stupid levels have gone much lower, like DEFCON -1. I don’t need to say much. And I am not the first to lament t … | Continue reading
The slow decay of memory… collective? My own? Two days ago, December 9 marked the 55th year since an epic event everyone should revel in, the 1968 Mother of All Demos (I am citing it as MoAD) by Doug Engelbart and his team from SGI. I think I saw one mention in my Mastodon feed [ … | Continue reading
Given most have left the technopastoral garden for the stream (Look our Mike Caulfield, incoming trackback pings from here), I’m given to wonder of how we swim there. Its a side venture to the old trope quote of giving fish vs teaching how to fish (I once spun in the fish nuggets … | Continue reading
So you have decided to join in and write some kind of post, article, thought piece about Artificial Intelligence. Of course you have something to add to the pile. And in a flash of brilliance, you turn to one of a kazillion AI Image Generators (according to Google, 1 kazillion = … | Continue reading
Twis (present tense of “twas”?) not a real big demand on the internet for the kind of silly randomness I spat out to make a web toy that generates random utterances about AI using the quotes of Agent 007’s gadget master, Q. And there’s still place and value to do these things wit … | Continue reading
I’ve tried to shedding much attention on OpenAI CEO drama. But after hearing whiffs of vapor about some Q star thing and the Amazon rolls out some other AI hooplah named… Q there is only one recourse. Mocking. That’s right, I haken back to my childhood adoration of the original J … | Continue reading
I was asked by a colleague to answer a question no one can really answer without extreme powers of omniscience. They wanted as much as I could share about the breadth of H5P use across Canada. In a week! Likely it was because of my involvement with the BCcampus H5P Kitchen projec … | Continue reading
I am more than comfortablly qssured that no generative AI can really hallucinate my writing. See those trademarked typos? Me. See a quirky nonsensical title? Me. I digress, as usual. Here is a typical small tale of unexpected adventure of one thing leading to another, like a neur … | Continue reading
Quote/unquote hallucinations, questionable use of copyrighted materials in training, exploitations of labor, environmental impact, complete lack of transparency, we should recognize the litany of problems with the 2023 AI Hype machinery. The natural desire is, what if I can have … | Continue reading
A reminder today from my Google Family Calendar, a descendent of my Mom’s paper habit of tracking events, read Dorothy b (1931). That means today her youngest sister aka Aunt Dorothy, turns 92 today. She is the last remaining sibling from the five kids my mom’s parents raised in … | Continue reading
It’s the little things, at least for me. With some luck and guesses sometimes I can fix technologies I do not understand the workings of. This is purely a followup for maybe one of my favorite web browser tools that I guess I might be the sole user of, the Library of Congress Fre … | Continue reading
My new blog post category might be “Enough Of the Web Nostalgia” where this one can be filed. Trust me, I am excitedly peering into the future! I took the Amazing/True Stories of Openness for it’s last hurrah ride, back to the Open Education Conference where it started in 2009. I … | Continue reading
I’m cratering and writing about AI. Call me a lemming. Stop the presses. Where are the presses? All the time in webinars and discussions about AI there is much weeping and wailing… no actually there is not, but much concern about what Large Language Models are trained on. Often i … | Continue reading
One of the Mastodon new user bumps is getting your head around the extra layer of your name or handle being doubled with the place you call home, both a positive for appreciating federation but maybe a complexity in unraveling names and links. This also comes into play for those … | Continue reading
Whatever the web is becoming or devolving or transmorgiphing to, DS106 still goes on, in some fashion, especially with the Daily Create. And look out, the machinations are at work to oblivate it into perhaps something new? A hallmark of DS106 always was not just spitting out thin … | Continue reading
There’s more to the Fediverse than trying to rejig your foregone twitter experience into Mastodon, indeed it is a party of distributed platforms. Given my love of photos, I’ve been casually exploring Pixelfed, the platform for photo sharing. Not that I will ever tear away from my … | Continue reading
My blog draft is up in the old grey matter, and I can’t seem to start typing in this box (not a prompt one) until I have a metaphor image and a title. Hardly efficient. I have done that. Just because it is 2023 and I loathe doing this, I asked the weakest LLM (free […] | Continue reading
Hello blog it’s been a while, and his post has been idling in neutral. Just about everyone has written their bird song post for Twitter. I won’t refer to it by some algebraic like single letter, nor to “The platform previously known as Twitter”- it always was, is, and in death sp … | Continue reading
I never would say that Domains of Ones Own (DoOO) has quote/unquote died, but certainly it’s post peak witnessing the withering of blog posting in lieu substacking and the reach for Google Docs more than anointing a web site. Like many who cling to a few, I have to glance at the … | Continue reading
Given a draft of a post is withering/dying where I fail to conjure something meaningful about the Two Letter Acronym That Rhymes With Hey Bye, I’m reaching back to the old stuff that still matters, the magic of what I call unexpected web serendipity that spring from something we … | Continue reading
This thing is still on, even if it has not sprouted much in a while. Just posting to make sure it works. And to add one more shredded post to the pile of likely the oldest blog topic. That’s all. For now. Hi. Featured Image: | Continue reading