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Josh, King and myself went to see The Incredibles last night, after grabbing a bite and a pint at Kilkenny's Pub.

It's all been said about the movie already, but man does Pixar rock. The story was rich, deep and detailed. As were the characters. Many of the scenes could have been used as matte backgrounds in a Bond film. This was by far the best movie I've seen in a long, long time. It's kind of weird – after the movie starts, you just forget that it’s animated. It fades away and doesn’t get in the way. Not like another movie that kinda hits you over the head repeatedly with the "Hey, Look at the kewl animation we're doing! Isn't it realistic?" card…

I kept thinking that the Bad Guy – Syndrome – bore a striking resemblance to Darph Bobo from Tripping the Rift – rumour had it that the guys that did that were snapped up by Pixar, so that may be the connection…

Stephen Downes has been running his Edu_RSS educational blog aggregation service for a while now. I’ve used Edu_RSS to build conference blogging aggregators (for Merlot 2003, and NMC 2004). He has now put together a page that spits out all posts related to podcasting. Since he’s semi-selected the feeds to be somewhat educational in nature, this becomes a feed about podcasts in education. Very cool.

Episode #4 of Links. I rant a bit about wiki spam, and babble about some of the more interesting items to come across my NetNewsWire subscriptions over the last couple of days. Full links to stuff I talked about today…

• Cognitive & Logical Rationales for e-Learning Objects
• Metadata Repositories Meet Semantics
• RSS Enclosures are a fish with legs
• Podcasting with Adam Curry
• 1000th Post – Weblog as Lego
• International Journal of Web Based Communities
• Blogs, Courseware and Control
• Wired for Sound by the Miracle of Wikiphonics (Radio Free WIKI)
• Audigone – History of Panic and Audion
• James Farmer on Podcasting
• Learning Objects: Toys or the Real Thing?
• Weblogs@UPEI
• Shaw Blocking Traffic?
• SIMILE Project
• John Dowdell on learning stuff on MP3 players
• CBC Radio: Quirks & Quarks (show archives)

First, they try to kill weblogs via comment spam, now they’re trying to take over wikis to sell viagra and casinos and cheap electronics.

Someone please hit these spammers with a clue stick – WE DON’T WANT TO HAVE YOUR ADS ON OUR WEBSITES, AND WE WILL SPEND TIME AND ENERGY REMOVING IT! They are doing the equivalent of taking a crap on our front porch. We could ignore it, but that would be just plain nasty, and really wouldn’t benefit anyone (except for the spammer, who has an insatiable urge to defile any and all public spaces).

I just spent half an hour, on a day off (time that I would have rather spent playing with my son on an otherwise fantastic day), removing the crap from the wiki on our main server. Thank you so very much, you insidious spamroach(es). Consider this some pretty high octane negative Whuffie being sent your way. Your karma is going waaaay down. At this rate, you’ll be lucky if you don’t reincarnate at the level of an ass boil, or perhaps an ingrown hair on said ass boil.

I’ve started locking any pages on the wiki that aren’t being actively used, to stem the flow of crap onto our front porch. I’m really hoping to bump into these wasters-of-oxygen in a poorly lit alley… With a big ol’ clue stick at the ready… Perhaps they’d be joined by the geniuses at Google, who’s PageRank algorithm is responsible for this GoogleBomb nonsense…

Spam roaches of all denominations: consider this a declaration of war. I will do anything and everything I can to banish you from public sight, where you seem intent on ruining everything you are allowed to come into contact with. You are a blight on everything that is good about the internets, and you must be put in your place before you render open communication and collaboration tools useless for everyone.

The Links 2004-11-08 episode is now available. I added the Super Cheesy Intro, and tried recording using Audacity (after Snapz Pro X 2.0 refused to recognize my iSight camera/microphone). Levels are still messed up, and it’s essie as heck, but I’m still working on the process

Here are the links from today’s episode:

• John Dehlin on IRC
• Codebase: Lazy WOComponent Initialization
• Codebase: Programatic WODisplayGroup
• Edupodding
• New Map of North America
• Who owns metadata?
• James Farmer returns!
• The Tragedy of the Comments (signal vs. noise…)
• Some thoughts on metadata (and audioblogging)
• Internet as Distributed Cognition
• Internet as Extended Memory
• Steven Frank on QuickSilver
• MacOSXHints – Dismissing QT Registration Dialog Remotely
• Speech Assessment Tool
• W3C Workshop on Metadata for Content Adaptation

I just checked the webserver logs, and the first 2 podcasts have been downloaded a total of 237 times so far. Holy crap! I would have guessed maybe half a dozen times. Wow. I just did some basic math on that, and that’s over a gigabyte of podcast downloady goodness! (thank goodness for campus bandwidth ) As Adam would say: “Boing!”

And I’ve gotten some interesting feedback as well. I found the podcasting experience strangely cathartic, so I plan to make a bit of time to keep experimenting with it. I spent a few minutes over the weekend messing around with GarageBand to make the requisite Cheesy Podcast Intro. It should be Just Cheesy Enough…

Lazy binding is the smarter way to initialize variables only once, and only when needed. David LeBer just posted a couple of articles showing how lazy binding is useful in WebObjects apps.

• Lazy WOComponent ivar initialization
• Programatically creating a WODisplayGroup

I just did another quick podcast recording, this time talking about one of my favorite online tools: Flickr. I babble on about the Tags interface, and some cool stuff that happened via Flickr.

Podcast is available here (or via the RSS feed for you podcatchers out there…)

Brian Lamb just posted a link to the Northern Voice Conference – it looks like it’s like a BloggerConCanada, which should be very cool. It’s insanely cheap ($20 for pre-registration, $30 for last minute registrations). It’s a one day conference, and Textuality is listed as one of the sponsors (that’s Tim Bray’s non-day-job).

I just threw together a quick and dirty podcast using my iSight camera as a microphone, and a folder of flagged RSS posts as content. Talked for a few minutes about the links, and used Snapz Pro X 2.0 to record the works to disk. Extremely low production quality. Minimal content. Mostly done as an experiment to see if/how this all works. I may do more podcasts/audioblog entries (heck, it was kinda fun, once I stopped being so darned self conscious about my voice ). I’m sure the levels are goofy, and I’m sure I’m not close enough to the mic. Sorry in advance

Grab the podcast here (or throw the RSS feed for this weblog into iPodderX and get it automagically).

Links from today’s podcast:

• Joshua’s Journal: Holding My Breath
• Teaching and Developing Online: Implementing Podcast/Flickr/Wiki in the classroom.
• EdTechPost: Application Profiles and the LOM Standard
• Brian Lamb: Social Bookmarking
• James Farmer: Smacked down by The Man
• Blogsperiment: Blogs as process not solution
• Portals and KM: Engaging Generations with Blogs and Social Networking
• elearningpost: Why categorize?

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