Don’t ask me why I tooled around in Firebug, but my sarcasm spot sure needed some itching. I was looking at some of the works done for the web story assignment in Martha’s ds106 session (wither the URL for the class blog?). I was wondering if this time I could do the whole thing in Firebug without buggering it, and I found out, YES I CAN. My target is the product blessed by all other MOOCs for synchronous events, specifically the page for the so called “Live” product (yikes, I cannot even find the original URL), and especially as it is underwoven by Blackbeard. Okay, so I went a tad overboard in messing with their content, and am not even sure it tells a story. The fun parts were poking a bit deeper with firebug, and being able to mod the style sheets for new images/backgrounds. The text on the ...

In watching the first episode of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace I became mesmerized by the shifting, laser like movement of Ayn Rand’s eyes in the interview sequence. It lulled me into a trance, mumbling zombie-like “Must mak...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Maybe. This afternoon I went out for a bike ride, and enjoying the tranquility of my small time life, I left my house unlocked. That was my first mistake. Apparently my hippy neighbor, one Maynerd G. Cosmo, decided to make himself at home in my house. Cosmo is a lost hippy, someone stuck in the 1960s. He made a mess of the place, leaving crushed fritos all over the floor, and some unidentified sticky drink residue all over my table. He also helped himself to my stash! But my mistake was leaving my laptop out, and that dirty hippy not only helped himself to my twitter stream, polluting it ith his goofball philosophy, but he went on the ds106radio and did a Trippy Hippy radio show! Trippy Hippy Hour (Maynerd G. Cosmo) (82.5 Mb 1:25:56). The playlist Cosmo infected the ...

Seems the obvious choice for a ds106 bumper sticker

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Digital storytelling expert Happy Camper has analyzed the facts of ds106, and to him the number are clear. Add the number of user generated assignments plus the bitrate for ds106radio plus the number of blogs publishing to the ds106 website reveal the number 279; the 279th day of the year is October 6– that is, 10/6! Camper predicts the end of times at 1:06pm on 10/6 when those who have not been blogging ds106 digital stories will perish in earthquakes and upheavals, while the faithful will enjoy the joys of all days, limitless bandwidth, and trippy music in the ether. The Rupture is coming! To avoid perishing with the faithless, sign up now to be part of ds106 and get posting your animated GIFs, radio shows, mashups, visual stories– and Camper assures that YOU WILL BE SAVED. “The whole world is under Storytelling ...

Scott Leslie was feeling his ds106 radio love at the ETUG meeting… I’m thinking of trying some more multiple camera shots to animGIF-ize. We all had quite a bit of fun with http://bigassmessage.com… for example, Try this one on.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This little case is going to contain an entire four months of shared, gathered experience on my road tour. Built as a way to easily, anonymously share files and chat over a local network (see David Darts hub site for full details). It establishes a public wireless network, but it is not anyway connected to the internet. The whole intent is local file sharing and, as coined in Ars Technica, is an “artistic provocation” I was introduced to the idea by Grant Potter, who was running demos at Northern Voice– Untitled from Travis Boisvenue on Vimeo. But it was the Nosieprofessor who proposed the idea that I would take one on my trip around the country (and that other one to the north) ILTPBHFYTR (I Left This Pirate Box Here For You To Read) even with some rules (some might ...

As someone dear to us has yelled before, “I WANT TO KNOW! I WANT TO KNOW!!!!!” The mystery is un-shrouded, whether it is Peter Rowan or Rowan Peter. Or is it that simple? I hear crickets from down under.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Moving this drafting table out here to California got me thinking of my Dad again. I found this table among the piles of stuff in our basement. Since leaving home for college, I had asked him for it, and have taken it everywhere I have gone, drove it across the US in my 73 Ford Maverick- you can actually see it poking out of the back seat of the car in this photo of my dog Dominoe: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A few years ago, I refinished the drafting table (ironically, or amazingly, this photo was used as part of a photoshop tutorial) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What I knew of this table was that my Dad used it when he took a correspondence course to get a ...

Today’s supposed digital story is an experiment in creating animated GIFs, which is totally legal in counting as a story! I did this by using the consecutive shooting mode on my Canon T1i, then importing into PhotoShop (“import as Stack&#...

I was behind the wheel all day (and then some) last night to go from Strawberry AZ to northern CA, and cruised I-40, paralleling the ghost highway of Route 66. Somewhere near the Oatman turnoff (a worthy side trip if you every are in the area and want to see a funky place), I stopped to check the load in the back of truck, and could not resist singing in front of this sign (and hence a Blabberize) Okay, is this a story? as much so as an animated GIF, eh? But think, if you did a series of Blabberizes, you could narrate a two character story. Hmmm. So who’s with the story a day? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? This trip is my training for the Odyssey trip that starts in a month – stay tuned at http://cogdogblog.com/odyssey. During the long stretches I listened to music, heard about 5 shows of ...

It was a windy day at the Grand Canyon, but it’s clear the vistas and grandeur brought some clarity to Jim Groom’s perspectives on who has the greatest blog. Yeah, 4Life!

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by your neighborhood librarian What else would you rather do on a Saturday? This looks like a lot more phone that silly rapture crap. Today’s bit is some combo of image (above) and me trying to read a...

Today was an epic road trip with Jim Groom- we hit Flagstaff, the tacky Flintstone Village at Valle, and then many of the viewpoints of the Grand Canyon out to the east exit, ending with an epic pile of Navajo tacos at Cameron Trading Post. This day wa...

Like a flying cannonball, like a balloon full of bricks, my goal to do a digital story a day for May has flopped mercifully: I’m not going to apologize, that is for weenies. It was a tough pace I was holding, but last week’s travel did me ...

Vcasmo is one of the 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story- it offers a platform to synchronize powerpoint/presentations to video. A typical use is to have video of a speaker linked to their slides, and it works elegantly there. I decided to tale a video I ...

For another hurry up and post story, this is an example of the flickr group Tell a Story in Five Frames, where you have to submit to the group discussion a single post with a title and 5 photos that… tell a story. It is in the vein of my Five Card Flickr stories, but of course here, you get to choose the images. This is a great exercise in being creative within constraints and making a message with mainly photos, and honestly, tough to pull off well (I cannot claim to ever have done a great one). The group moderator is pretty critical! Today, I posted what was a series of images I took form some folks doing some sort of team building activity on the Cambie bridge in Vancouver. Technically, the first shot was actually a different group of people than I observed later on the bridge. Posted ...

I won’t apologize for being a day behind but I am so sorry I am a day behind. This is a tough pace, but certainly no race. Folks, if you think that ds106 is dangerous cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Here is proof… So ...

10 days in to one digital story per day in May, 10 stories done. Still going strong. Today was a play with something I wanted to try for a while, an overdub of my own audio over a classic scene, where I change the script to say what I want it to say. My timing to the spoken part is sub par (that is really hard), which I did by doing voiceover in iMovie, reading from my updated script. Here you go, for the next time you are stuck in a boring lecture, dull presentation, deathly webinar. I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as bored as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. Well WTF? Even without audio in it, the YouTube copyright sniffers ...

Marlon Brando could have only achieved his heightened performance in On the Waterfront with the help of his film coaches, such as Talking Terry, shown in this historic footage. (this is the Talking Larry iPhone app, a fun little diversion of mimicry; ...

Caught Checking In to Morrison Hotel cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Some of the best creative challenges in the digital story game are ones that limit the things you can do; the creativity is in working in that space. A perfect example is the Six Word Story Group in flickr: Ernest Hemingway was once prodded to compose a complete story in six words. His answer, personally felt to be his best prose ever, was “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Some people say it was to settle a bar bet. Others say it was a personal challenge directed at other famous authors. I’d like you to post a photo with a Six Word Story in the title section of a Flickr photo. Be as inventive as possible. Have those few words tell the whole tale, and let the picture be its visual interpretation. Just make ...

I tried as hard as I can to post this yesterday, but the apps and the nets failed. I was sitting there in Washington Square park, and awash in seeing all kinds of human stories play out. There were film students doing a project, tourists being taken in by the card tricksters, breakdancers doing movies, a wedding party… At the end of a bench I sat on was an oriental dude with a banjo, and playing some really soulful blues. Some other guy walked up with a plastic keyboard and some sort of tube he blew into, and made wailing harmonica/accordion sounds. This little video was done in in Animoto on my iphone, but offers no way for it to embed. C’est la app. I have some audio I recorded that I may attach (okay it is taking too long to xfer from my phone and my flight leaves soon, ...

I spent a few hours in the New York Public Library archives, down in the basement, combing through piles of uncatalogued photographs. In one dusty corner was a box marked “Unpublished Bay Watch Set Shots”. Leafing through photos from guest...

Since I started May 2nd on my May Marathon of One Digital Story Per Day (#mayday), I am missing the first day of the month. So, while anyone can blog three times a day, I have gotten 2 stories done since being on the train 3 hours from Castleton Vermont. Did you know that Howard Beale got his start doing news for Penn State University? I’ve been wanting to do a mashup for a while with the “I’m Mad as Hell” scene from Network (I’ve thought of a school on called ‘I’m Bored as Hell and I’m Not Going to Take It!”), and since I had the clip on my laptop (and there was no 3g in reach for my network card) I began rummaging around my drive for audio to use. Since its too easy to use Jim Groom, and he would sync nicely to the frothing Beale, I ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Half Chinese It’s been illuminating scanning the posts the UMW ds106 students are writing in their “advice to future ds06ers” assignment. Most acknowledge the incredible amount of work and time the class took, and then counter with something along the lines “it was so worth it.” I’m not sure what they put in the water on campus in Fredericksburg, but they have a lot of intense, motivated students, the kind in other places teachers might hope to have just a hand full in class. And here is something else I don’t think Jim and Martha have written about, but Jim as relayed to me- no (or almost no) students have dropped out of the 3 sections. Is that remarkable to anyone else? I know from my years in the community college system, you could just count on having half, one third ...

Woah, it is ending? ds106 is almost over? Sigh. Well, sincr i have blog posts dribbled over the last few months, I thought about organizing it a bit better here in the doghouse- it’s not quite archiving, but it does feel like the suitcase needs help to get closed. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by demandaj What I talk about below in likely un-reproducible code is what I did to generate http://cogdogblog.com/tag/ds106 Doing this has been part of some other WordPress tinkering around here. The current template here has 2 widgetized sidebars, and I shifted the rightmost one to be the “standard” one that appears on all pages. The left side one, by default, will have blog related things, but I also now use it on a few templates to create more relevant bits. To allow for a new widget, I edited my functions,php template ...

There was no reason for this besides an opportunity to go over the top Watch live video from ds106tv on Justin.tv (Consider yourself fortunate if you do NOT get the mustard ad…..) Some Jim had to annihilate his network, I could not help but obey...