It’s been another strange day in this place of mystery. I took shelter last night on this deck behind an industrial building; again it was dead quiet all night long except for a constant electronic hum in the air and very distant noises of hovering helicopters. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In continuing down the marked road I had followed, I continued to move through a warehouse type area. Interestingly, each building had some sort of large satellite dish on top, and they all buzzed as if they were active. I am sure a number of them swiveled my way as I walked past, but when I turned to look they had resumed their position. Paranoid? Hell yes. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The road I was on was sporting “highway 49″ markers, and the scenery slowly opened up into ...

I have the ds106 fever- I could not resist Jim Groom’s new Spubble assignment (still looking for the tags in the ds106 assignment mix see http://ds106.us/2011/10/16/your-very-own-spubble/): Learn to love yourself, grab a picture of yourself in wh...

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by noii’s Since Michael Branson Smith’s ds106 class is moving into the audio portion of the course, I devised a new assignment for the audio section. And this is something I need as well in my own adventure to find the Center of the Internet. So here is the gist of the assignment. Like some people use special whistles to attract birds, your task is to create an 30 second or less audio file that might be used to “call” a particular character from a movie, tv, or real life. It cannot feature voices, but sounds only. Share a description why this sound would be attractive to the character (be inventive, write a story about it). So in my case, I am desperately trying to attract the attention of Dr Oliver, the character who is driving ds106 students on a Journey ...

Before I left the railroad car I was trapped in, I had time to fill, so played around with the Triple Troll Quotes assignment again for ds106. Given my current situation, I found the perfect theme, and 2/3 are hitchcockian Got them? The answer lies e...

Good morning everyone and thanks for the stream of messages. It really helps me cope as I have yet had any contact with other people in over 48 hours. I want to send a big shout out to Rowan Peter who has taken on the search aid from Melbourne. I was going to say “From the other side of the world” but I do not know where I am yet. The good news is I escaped the train cair. After loooking all over the car, on removing that picture from the wall behind me I found a metal sliding door that led to a keypad. I tried a few random codes, but only got a soft buzzing. I went back to the last message I got from @0pcode49: Like the blue/red pill from the matrix, you do have options here. One is going forward in time, just as if nothing ...

Hello everyone, I appreciate the concern and worry from the tweets sent over the last 36 hours. I am ok, and at least have had some communication with the people who brought me to this place. I think. This is somehow connected to the computer issues I have been having, I am thinking I have been tracked and spied upon. Here is what I have pieced together. I was at Gate 49 of the Nashville airport thinking I was headed for my vacation to Hawaii. I had scored a prime seat with electricity, and after striking up a conversation with this person (sorry for blurry photo, I was only only able to snap it at last minute): He had identified himself as “Ted” a retired Army Colonel, and he offered to get me the best cup of local coffee available. It is now I realize that the coffee must have ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by blakie I’m getting a tad worried on the road- my MacBookPro seems to be acting up. More than its occasional inability to wake up from sleep, now it seems to go to sleep by itself, and oddly, it always seems to be about 10 minutes of the hour. There is a photo in my Aperture library that I don’t remember taking, but I have taken alot, The weird thing is that any time I select it to look at or try to edit, Aperture quits. It seems haunted: All I can do is look at the thumbnail which looks like a wall with some text and numbers on it. Then I got this e-mail from a “Mr Blank” asking me to meet up with him at Dukes when I get to Hawaii, he’s interested in the StoryBox and wants ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Ever since ds106 started, I’ve had this rabid obsession for photos with a 106 represented, starting December 18, 2010 (a month before the first open class launched), when I saw a pole along a canal in Mesa Arizona. This is the Illustrate 106 assignment It was a sign (well with some help of post production it got psychedelic) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Since then I have tagged 63 ds106 photos. Recently Jim has remixed a 106 exit sign and Rowan has found an address marker Now finding them in a sign, an address is easy. It took me several months to find one in a license plate. I have also spelled them out with small objects, written it in dust, played an impossible guitar chord, eyeballed mile post markers, tested it with my glucose ...

Take a fine trip down south, maybe just a wee bit of adventure. Meet our local friendly folks who just want to say “hi”. You will squeal with excitement. This is a minimalist travel poster assignment for ds106, though not quite minimal in ...

In checking out some of the student visual design work for ds106 (which the CUNY students are really going far and powerful with), I could not resist one more Macguffin. A better real estate decision could have avoided dealing with that whole building...

Cannot resist the ds106 four icon challenges! This one was easy as the images I found were all black and white. Too easy? What’s the movie?

It felt time to play a Four Icon Challenge assignment in ds106. it’s always hard to know if you make these too challenging or too easy, I am thinking this one is the latter. My approach, as I usually cannot recall movies all that well, is to wat...

I’m keeping up with Scottlo’s Productivity ds106 radio segments, where he plays music for 25 minutes and we try to get a task done. Here I am taking on the assignment bank from ds106. What is there to say about Pick A Bad Photo, Apply A Vin...

Here’s a half-baked ds106 Design Assignment, feeding off of the MacGuffin-ing, but one to spiff up your blend and magic brush skills in Photoshop. Find a billboard or ad that features a friends or colleagues name, and modify it to personalize the...

He got there first. Todd Conaway was onto the combination of the MacGuffin Alternative movie ending combined with last year’s craze activity of animmated GIFs. I decided to take an animated GIF I did last time around from the classic card game ...

MacGuffins can happen in real life. The world as we know it would be turned inside out. Countries overthrown. Entire cultural history tossed aside. Dogs and cats sleeping together. Cubs wining the Series. Stuff like that.

I got MacGuffin fever- it might be this ds106 semester’s animated gif? We all know that collaboration is the way to go, right? We all hold hands, go off to northern canada, and sing tra-la-la-la? ;-) It’s 2011, a ds106 Odyssey! BA….....

Been thinking of movies to flip the McGuffin on for this week’s hot ds106 assignment, Messing with the McGuffin: Wikipedia defines the MacGuffin as “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of f...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog To add to the mix of opening ds106 salvos, inspired by Michael B Smith, Cheryl Colan, and Lou McGill, that was my somewhere near the end of high school. I found it at my Mom’s house; she had a 1982 date written on the back, but I am fairly sure this was junior year at Milfrod Mill High School. Look at me! I have FACIAL HAIR. Ha ha ha. And Big Hair. (and hair on the back of my head, alas). Like Lou, I am wondering who is this guy? I was so ready to be out of high school. After reading Emerson’s Self-Reliance in 10th grade English class, I connected with what would become my core group of friends- we ended up as the non-conformist club, even the Lunch Club. Rather than going to the cafeteria and dealing with ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by cj berry Every other sentence in this post is going to be a disclaimer that I am NOT criticizing the newest efforts of the ds106 course being drawn out by Michael B Smith. Can I repeat– I am NOT criticizing the newest efforts of the ds106 course being drawn out by Michael B Smith. Once more– I am NOT criticizing the newest efforts of the ds106 course being drawn out by Michael B Smith. One can tell from the opening that Journey to the Center of the Internet is going to be something cinematic, weird, and open ended, all of my favorite ingredients. It is everything that your typical online course locked inside a Bbox is not, everything that most other of these spray of newly minted MOOCs are not. At the same time, I could only follow the ...

While traveling, I am missing out on most of the wild antics going on in ds106 where there appears to be hostile class takeovers, student revolts, and a lot of name tossing going on. It’s no wonder what the MOOC people hardly mention this class, as it fits no mold any online open course has used before, or any course for that matter. But it bears saying that the rallying cry, “ds106 4LIFE” is not a throw away phrase. It does mean, that if things get rocky, you just don’t bail, and increment an integer– you stay in the game. “For Life” is not “For Life until the wind blows the other way” – it is FOR LIFE. And it works both ways- I have little actual understanding about what is going on between the various permutations of Dr O’Blivion and family nor what actually Jim Groom is up to. ...

I’m relaxing in a coffee shop in Golden, Colorado, checking the ds106 streams and missing the creative play. Seeing Jim’s efforts made me wonder if I could whip one together ove lunch. Since I am traveling, I was thinking maybe one of my photos might be a start point… Then I remembered Dr Garcia’s comment on my sunset photo of Castle Rock and said yeah, that movie. So I searched flickr via compfight and found this beauty of the scene: cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by lindsayloveshermac Bringing it into PhotoShop, I looked to colorize it, and under Image — Adjustments — Channel Mixer I played with sliders to give it a green eerie hue. I then noticed under the same menu HDR Toning, which must be new in CS5. I used the Photorealistic High Contrast setting which gave it a lot more pop. I then ...

My friend Debbie (not friend like in the real sense) (or any sense) (but it sounds good) is so popular with her eHarmony bio video, she has like 10,000,000 views. She’s a star! And thus, she has inspired me to respond to Dr O’blivion&#8217...

ds106 is going to a new level of meta-ness, as unleashed live this morning on ds106.tv. It was here, that the teacher, Dr. O’Blivion, made his first class address, in the medium form which he will only communicate- TV. His TA, Jim Groom, will b...

A bad link click turns up some stuff from that Bag of Gold- the link was in the twitter river, for something I forget, and ot was not found on the site, but the site itself caught my interest– http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/, where the subtitle is “Ever get the feeling you’re living in the wrong time?”. It is a collection of images and videos that are geared to tap into an older era that links to the current one, yes, there is a faint odor of Steampunk, but its more than gadgets. The technology section is full of mocks of older advertisements and movies, amde out to use current tools– such as an iPod from 1977, and this video clip from 2001 A Space Odyssey where the astronauts are using iPads: In the History WTF section are color photos from inside the Hindenburg. There is a mile long scrolling infographic on the ...

Since I’ll be on the road alot soon, I’m doubtful I will get to play on the next Dr. Oblivion round of ds106, but while I have time, I wanted to dip my paws again into animated GIF creations. Now having done a few, I am trying to think more ahead of time what might work, or what actions might be isolated, or what seends have that cycle of motion that might work. I’m really keen for looking at eye motion or expression changes that can be lifted out. For tonight’s experiment, in this pair if animated GIFS (“jiffs”) I am aiming to put two characters in parallel, two that are trying to out con the others. This is from the poker scene early in The Sting (1973). Harry Gondorff, played by Paul Newman, is working to hook Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) into a much larger con. Gondorff knows that ...

This psychotic animated GOF was grabbed hastily from the Amazing Story video JIm did for me when he visited Strawberry last month. Not quite yet the perfect style, I am getting a better handle on isolating movement (sometimes- my Ayn Rand one was better). My current technique is: Load video into MPEGStream Clip Use the Export Frame option to export the single frames I need as a GIF Load into PhotoShop as a Stack (Files — Scripts — Load Images as Stack) – this loads each frame in a layer. Activate the Animation panel (Windows — Animation) Shrink the time lines into “frame” slicesYou can change the layer order. To do more isolated moviment, I have tried leaving the lowest layer as a background, and erasing all but the movement for the upper layers- this worked better for the Ayn Rand one where mostly it was just her face that ...

(one last post before I exit for camping!) For those in the ds106 Radio fold, this week’s drama has been the reported demise of our New/Old Radio Friend, Scottlo. The “death” part being a bit downloayed, it has been a fascinating thing to watch unfold as he (Scottlo? Otto? Frank?) examines, reinvents, who he is online, especially now, as he leads a course on “Sock Puppets”. Last night on the radio, we (@mikhailg and @jimgroom) held a “wake” for him, but it nicely eveolved more into a great discussion of identity, and and a dviersion into Border Blasters, John Romulus Brinkley, dramatic definitions on Urban Dictionary, and even an unexpected use for goat parts. And it was nicely topped when (Scottlo? Otto? Frank?) joined us, and provided some more insight into what he is thinking. I am hoping somewhere out there is an archive- it was not the “smoothest” technical ...