OMG, it is the last stretch of ds106, finals! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Late last night, in a fit of energy, I decided to finish out my fandom assignment. Rather than blabbing all about it first, like usual, I share first “The Last Man on Earth is Not So Lonely” (note, the audio may have been flagged by the Onerous YouTube Content Sniffer, so I may ened up self hosting it here, nyeh nyeh). The question is, how can the Last Man on Earth be all that lonely, when there are not only two others (versions of the same movie), but also because the Man ends up meeting a Woman, having a dog for a companion, and outside are a bunch of vampires/”family”/zombies eager to play?. I got to thinking about this after watching I Am Legend on a plane flight earlier this year. ...

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog He was persistent and wore me down for a donation to Red Cross; my concession was asking for a photo, not quite the full Stranger Photo process, but in that direction. This was my lukewarm attempt at a ds...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I aspire one day to be as cool at the audio helm as DJ Lamb. Until then, I relish the experimental, free form, nobody gives a s*** if you screw up place we have come to hail as ds106 radio (soon to be subject of a documentary? WT? Why not a mockumentary?) Last night I took the stream with half a plan, and sat on it for 90 minutes going with something that was not in that half plan. My plan was to play some music from the German band that contacted me in 2005 about using an old photo for the cover of their CD (one of my own favorite Amazing Stories — view video) I read a bit of the story from the original blog post 9noting how many typos I had, sigh)– Now how else could a ...

I was here trying my best to stay on target on my list of tasks, when The Twitter® distracted me with A Life Eroding, a cool project from the Tokyo campus of Temple University As described there: This is a video call to participate in the first ever crowdsourced augmented reality music video, produced in collaboration between UK folk music band Songdog and a class of 20 film-making students in Temple University Japan Campus. The song, A Life Eroding (©Songdog, One Little Indian, 2010), is about all the moments of sorrow that fill a life, and makes it beautiful. Augmented Reality is used to symbolize all that one can remember, but that is lost forever – you can see it, but you can’t touch it. While augmented reality has been used in music video before, it is usually designed by monster-big production studios with substantial budget; this is the first ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Jim Blob Blann Disclaimer: I have no training in film critique or production, cannot cite obscure Peruvian directors nor dissect plot structures of obscure Norwegian dramas. I just see a wide range of web videos. And I find myself more and more bored watching ones likely created with budgets versus ones created with passion. I like the approach I got in this email from the Arizona Department of Transportation as they solicit citizen input for future transportation planning — http://www.whatmovesyouarizona.gov/. They have a modern web site featuring a short video, hosted in YouTube, and a survey published from SurveyMonkey (though I wish they had an option for open ended comments in the survey). According to the email, We’ve got one more week…more than 750 Arizonans have added their voices to the State Long-Range Transportation Plan by watching a short ...

For my attempt at the ds106 El Mashup assignment, I stuck with a subject used twice so far for other ones- the legendary Dirty Harry. Previously done were Soiled Harry web story page redone from IMDb, and a little audio play with Dirty Daffy. My plan was to mashup up Inspector Callahan with a Warner Brothers cartoon, so here I present Looney Harry: I can’t say it produces a coherent story line- my attempt was to maintain the integrity of the audio from the cartoon, and try and chop up, sauté, stir fry the video to try and match. I searched YouTube for a lot of cartoons- I needed something with a character like Elmer Fudd firing his gun, to match with the “do you feel lucky” scenes. I ended up using Robot Rabbit, where Farmer Fudd conspires to deploy a robot to destroy the rabbit who keeps eating the ...

Like us canines hearing sounds beyond the human spectrum, participants in ds106 seem to see lights and colors others miss… cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This photo that was from a number light pole in Mesa, AZ, was the genesis for the Illustrate 106 visual assignment. I’ve dodged in and out of remembering to look for occurrences of 106ness in the world, but have collected a few. Beyond the obvious address signs, I still seek something with a “CVI” in it (Roman numerals), and I am missing more easy items like mile markers and road distance signs (“Fredericksburg 106″ would be cool to see in Virginia). But I keep looking and tag them both ds106 and my own with just 106 (there seem to be a lot of clutter in the public tag). I’m just posting this as I aim towards making a future home ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Last November I had an ambition to do another round of NaNoWrimo but fell off the wagon early. It began as an experiment to do the writing in the open– which was fun, but then, alas,, the story part eluded me. My plan was to write a story from the perspective of a real dog as an author, not a cartoon, but the real deal. But out of the failure to execute came a few gems, as commenter John King recommended, I found, kindled, and loved Timbuktu, the story narrated by the astute Mr Bones, and his tale of devotion to his less than stable human partner, Willy Christmas (book details). So I am building a collection of other Dog Point of View books, made a shelf on Good Reads I have just started reading Art of Racing in the ...

The media evolution of ds106 is progressing, first it was free form ds106 radio, now we have a free form tv station, what is next? Major kudos to @timmmmyboy for getting it going. I took my first crack at live broadcasting today, using Wirecast to publish to the justin.tv site. It’s been a while since I played with Wirecast, and once you sort out were the stuff is, you can sit back amazed at the sophistication you (not yet me) can do. I managed to make a title strip, add my icon, switch from live video to a still to a video, and swap in the desktop presenter. On testing, I found it useful to use the broadcast setting that saves as a local video recording. What is slick about justin.tv is how it automatically archives footage. If you log in within 2 weeks and make a highlight of a ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by ryancr We learn early and repeatedly that stealing is bad (and it is if we are talking about malicious theft), but perhaps as we grow older? wiser? that there are layers to this concept, and I am just loving How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 other things nobody told me) by Austin Kleon. A big kudos to Andy Rush for tweeting this link. There are powerful ideas here. Sometimes you come across a link and maybe toss it in the social bookmarking pile, sometimes it is better and worth sharing via a tweet, and then there are ones I find I just have to blog up and down about. Maybe this resonates in relation to what has been flowing by the last months in ds106, but I find more here, that not only apply more broadly in education, ...

I was way overdue in rolling some updates into the source code (available on google code) for my Five Card Flickr Stories site. Before my departure from NMC, I moved the site from their servers to my own, so the new main site is at http://5card.cogdogblog.com/ (I left a URL redirect on the NMC site, so all old URLs should cleanly jump to the new). This site was completely inspired by an activity I had seen Ruben Puentedura use in his workshops on comics. As a creative exercise, he used the Five Card Nancy game (originall devised by comics guru Scott McCloud) as it has been done by a nifty web version at 741.5 Comics. In this activity, you are dealt 5 different panels from Nancy comics, that have been detached from their originals. In turn, Ruben would have the audience choose a panel that made the most sense in ...

As a variation on the Google Maps Story assignment for ds106, I was thinking of some other creations one could do via the maps. This was mulling through me head as I was driving this morning to Flagstaff via one of the prettiest highways, the Lake Mary Road north of Clints Well. So my game was, what sort of (loosely used) poetry could one make from place names? So here is my entry, using 5 cities/towns, with a little embellishing faked to look like states/province abbreviations (or go to map) Starring: Golden, Colorado Superior, Arizona Why, Arizona Boring, Maryland Humble, Texas It’s rather forced, but was fun to look for place names in Google maps. Try one? One could always start with a town in Pennsylvania and go who knows where? Update! I was hungry, and thought of all the Burger Towns out there, so here is my Hold the ...

Whew, I finished my ds106 Video Essay assignment on Lonely are the Brave, the 1962 not-western starring Kirk Douglas. The movie is based on Edward Abbey’s second published novel, The Brave Cowboy. According to the extras on the DVD, Douglas was very taken by the novel and personally was driven to see that it was ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today’s excursion in the Fossil Springs Wilderness Area was both mind cleansing but also connected me with the memory of another trip, to a much bigger stream, back in 1991 when I did a 9 day Grand Canyon river trip. I was also reminded after ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Profound Whatever One of my long time favorite web site references is the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), not only because of its comprehensive depth and breadth of information about movies and TV shows, but also because it is rich in data- you can go ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by deep_schismic I don’t know if this will be picked up by anyone else, but I wanted to try and propose a theme for a day on ds106 radio — it probably hinges on someone pushing for it in the morning. But oh well, you can’t ...

This turned out to be a love/hate/love assignment for ds106- Telling Stories in/on the web. It was a brilliant, creative, and challenging assignment cooked up by Martha. The task is to re-write a public web page to have it tell a new story, using only code (especially the Firebug plugin for Firefox). I’ll b&m about Firebug later, but first, it is story time! I went for an IMDb profile page for a movie to have it portrary a well known movie radically different. I chose Dirty Harry, partly because I love the series, but also saw the Harry Callahan character as one to be turned inside out. I present the full version of Soiled Harry online at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/soiled/ – the screen below is just what is above the fold you can enjoy a full screen version. Basically, I transformed Harry the tough “do you fell lucky, punk” bad-ass into a ...

While sanding my deck I am mulling over what I will do for the Web Story assignment in ds106. I have my target and plan in mind, and hope to hatch it over the next day or two. An idea I had discarded as pointless was doing one on Wikipedia- pointless because one can already ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I grabbed the mic for 15 minutes tonight to read a few more tales from The Thing at the Foot of the Bed. It occurred to me that this book was a bit like going back to the elementary school you attended and noting how ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by sendarko I have been deeply touched by the (most ever at CDB) comments to my Into the Great Wide Open post as well as the #roadsongs shared on ds106 radio yesterday, masterfully conducted by the dog’s favorite bava. Late last night (after midnight here on ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Joe Lencioni The energy of ds106 radio continue to shine, with the almost impromptu music themes this week, from work songs to a fun day (was it Wednesday? just yesterday?) of “Songs to Grow By” — meaning songs you heard as a kid, or ...

One of the tweets Nixon did not manage to erase in 1972… Just kidding. I found this great, fun tool Twister from Classtools (twitterbution to @John_larkin, about time I gave you one back). It is a simple web form where you can enter info about a historical figure, and create a fake status message from ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by misterbisson “Curating” web content has been a medium flying buzzword over the last year. I’m not going to wade into the definitions or the tension from the museum quarter. For irony, on searching flickr cc images for “curator”, the image above is of a ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Zellaby Radio is old and new again with free form ds106 radio, but today, today, today, took it to a whole new level. One of the best parts of this experience has been making new connections, and one I have really dug has been ...

Thanks to the glory of keyword search and random related videos linking, today I found the new theme song for CogDogBlog– I can hear your toes tapping to this song by comedian Sean Morey, but just so you can enjoy it more, I put some energy into transcribing it. I am your dog and I ...

I found the official ds106 restaurant in Austin- another one for the Illustrate 106 assignment cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And am thinking we need a version of this for the theme song ds106 ds106, oh no Me gotta go Aye-yi-yi...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That photo was one I crafted in November when my Mom visited, and I tried to get her in the same pose as her high school graduation photo. After this past week’s fun of getting my Mom to talk live on ds106 radio, it was ...

Here’s a new assignment for your ds10ers; put your Mom on the radio. I have an unfair advantage that my Mom is (a) alive and (b) a good sport. On her annual visits to Strawberry AZ for Thanksgiving, she has let herself be recorded on how to use her Twitter account or her previous amazement ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by fotoandrew This is a slight twist on the ds106 Sound Effects Story assignment- a short story done with only audio effects. Rather than use ones from a library, I mixed together a set of voice-less sounds I made or got from my surroundings. The ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by arnoKath All of this creativity is doing crazy things to my heartbeat…. damn you ds106 and your flow of wildness! ds106 revving my heart