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My mom is turning 65 on Sunday, and we’re throwing a big bash at the Tuscany Club – about 75 of her closest friends will be there, and we’re going way over the top with a chocolate-themed party.

I was initially going to attempt to document the event myself, and then it hit me – I use Flickr and the like for collaborative documenting of events/conferences. This isn’t any different, except that many of the people attending may have never heard of Flickr, etc…

So, I started simple. We all gathered the recipes together for the items we’re putting in the buffet, and I put together a simple recipe book .pdf document that everyone can document. Then, the experiment begins. I created a very simple web page to act as a launching point (and download vector for the recipes) to direct people to Flickr to share their photos. I’ll beef up the page a bit after the event.

I was also toying around with the idea of a live wiki to act as the recipe book – even went as far as installing MediaWiki on my Godaddy account and researching recipe templates – then realized there’s no freaking way I should inflict a wiki on this group. I’ll keep the wiki there in case I need it though.

Should be interesting to see if/how people contribute their photos…

I just tested Elluminate, which will be used during next week’s “Podcasting in Education” session I’m doing for ADETA next week. We did a session using a Windows machine, which I reserved for the test because I just assumed it wouldn’t work properly for hosting the session via a Mac. It ran flawlessly on Windows, even sharing the microphone from the headset with both Elluminate and Audacity.

We ran through a quick sample of what the session will involve. Another Lambian wiki-powered by-the-seat-of-the-pants-if-they’re-available session, which will likely start in iTunes to show the Podcasting directory, then jump to Audacity to show recording, then to weblogs.ucalgary.ca to show uploading (and then listening directly on the website), then back to iTunes to show subscribing and listening there (and potentially on a portable device).

When I got back to my desk, I was wondering if it would work hosting a session from a Mac. Patrick thought it should work – it’s just a java app after all – so I fired it up from my trusty desktop machine. And it worked great! Application sharing appears to work, and everything else runs the same as it did on the Windows box. Man, if I can avoid using Windows…

The session will be recorded, and I’ll post a link afterward for those who aren’t registered. Apparently, the session is sold out. Pattie made that sound like a Big Deal, but it could be that every session sells out…

The wiki page of Podcasting resources is already online.

Update: Nope it ain’t broken. It was purely operator error on my part – I missed an “=” sign in the .html for a component, and that was borking file uploads. It was weird, because Safari and IE would upload just fine, but Firefox would barf.

Josh just discovered a weird behaviour in Pachyderm, where uploading files was breaking. But only on Firefox. WTF?

A quick google brought up this post on NSLog.org, via ryfar.com:

NSLog(@”Guido’s blog”);: WOFileUpload problem
WOFileUpload problem

I implemented today a generic component for file uploads to my application and got “no form data left” errors from WOFileUpload.

To solve this, I added:

System.setProperty("WOUseLegacyMultipartParser", "YES");

to my application constructor. Works, but I’m not happy with it. Have to check back later on that topic.

Update: Well, that didn’t fix the problem, but it may come in handy some day…

Update 2: Looks like the code mentioned above may break things rather than fixing them. We’ve removed it, and things are sorta working again. And, King found one cause of the exception we were seeing – a missing = sign in the name="myButtonName" for the submit button was causing FF to barf violently. But, we’re still seeing a separate upload problem…

I was just about to finalize the purchase of a shiny new battery for my 3G iPod, when I noticed the shipping charges listed on the Sonnet online store.

I’ll gladly pay for the battery, but paying $40 US ($10 US more than the cost of the battery in the first place) to have the thing mailed to me is a bit extreme. I’m going to hold off for now, to see if any Canadian stores or companies will be distributing the battery.

I finally got a chance to listen to Matt Pasiewicz’ interview with Brian Lamb during EDUCAUSE 2005. What a great discussion. Always fun to listen to Brian talk about subversive activities in the Academy

Main points I took away from it:

• I owe Brian a few bucks for mentioning me so positively – perhaps a round of brews during Northern Voice 2006 will suffice?
• I have to check out AGGRSSive – sounds very cool for an rss aggregator and tagger. I saw a preview of it a while back after stumbling across it in my referrer logs, and it was very cool. It’s kind of like an RSS rip-mix-burn-omatic.
• “Mass amateurization” – the concept that social software is at the point where it gets amateurs to 80% of the output quality that a professional would produce, with only modest technical skills and effort required. I’ve used the term myself a few times, and love what it implies about the read-write web.
• Blogging as “narrating your work” – Brian mentions (almost apologetically) that his blogging has shifted with the advent of tools like del.icio.us – less impetus to “link blog” new finds, as they just get hurled into the social bookmark bucket. His blogging has shifted to be much more personal in nature – more in tune with his daily activity. Brian mentions that he’s sure he’s got a smaller audience, but is getting a much more intimate/rewarding experience. I fully agree. Over the last few months I think I’ve switched to be doing much the same thing, with the blog providing a narrative journal of daily work/projects/interactions. IMHO, this kind of blogging is actually much more useful (or perhaps more meaningful or thoughtful) than the previous link-blogging style.

Anyway, give the interview a listen. Brian is always entertaining and engaging. And every single time I hear him talk about social software, I find new ways of thinking about it, or of applying it, or just of describing it. He is such a deep thinker about this that I am truly humbled as a mere software geek .

Just got back from the AGM at the Tuscany Club. One of the less eventful AGMs we’ve had (which is a Good Thing™), especially with Carma nearly done with planning the rest of their development.

• New member of the board of directors
  Kelly Taylor also represents the Tuscany Community Association, so there will be some nice connections there. All of the board members should be more active in the TCA as well…
  The existing 7 board members were re-elected, with Kelly added as a new one.
• We’re going to have a really hard time meeting quorum in the next year or two. Carma still holds over 500 votes, so we were able to make the ~500 required voting member quorum this time. But, as Carma sells off their lots, the number of votes they hold drops. In the next year or two, that will drop us below the automatically-meeting-quorum waterline. We had 30 proxies mailed in from members, and maybe a dozen (perhaps as high as 20? I don’t have the roll call handy) voting members turned up at the meeting. Which means, after Carma is done, we would have had 50 votes tops, leaving us 450 short. We’ll have to do some thinking about this. There are ways to handle missed quorum, but it just becomes a pain (scheduling two meetings, one week apart, and holding the “real” meeting on the later one because nobody showed up to the first one…)
• “official” meeting ended in record time – 14:59 after the meeting opened. Bob thankfully rushed through the official legal business. Wah wah wawawah wah blah blah
• Unofficial meeting/discussion begins
• Home Depot to build a store on the northwest corner of the Tuscany Hill Drive and Nose Hill Drive intersection
  It’s going to be modelled after the 16th Ave. store, perhaps with some influence from the West Vancouver store
• TRA to take over management of the Tuscany-Connect website in 2006. Karen’s already in training to handle the day-to-day management of the site. I’ve got some really mixed feelings on this one. We need to be taking responsibility for our services, so it makes sense to take over from Carma on this. But, we had no say in which solution was deployed for Tuscany-Connect (we approved the Carma-recommended BuildACommunity software), and no say in the technologies used on the back end. Now, we’re saddled with something that I was just told is powered by MS Access on the back end. MS Access? WTF? Netcraft reports that it’s currently served via Verio Inc., so maybe it’s just a matter of us paying the invoices for hosting rather than Carma…
  Update: Just checked the specs for BuildACommunity, and it looks like it’s all Perl and MySQL, running on Linux and Apache. Might not be too bad after all – wonder why Karen is taking Access training though. Still, I get the feeling we could have rolled something in Drupal for next to nothing, and be able to extend the system ourselves…
• We need to run another survey of the TRA members to see what they want/need from their association, and what kinds of programming they want to see run at the Tuscany Club. The last one we ran was through Tuscany-Connect – an online service – and it generated a small forest’s worth of dead trees for reports. Perhaps we should use a simpler online survey tool this time…

Josie Fraser is at it again, this time with a cool project to map the location of edubloggers around the world.

Right now, it looks rather UK-centric, but once more people add themselves to the list it might be a useful resource to describe the global community of edubloggers. Would that be a part of a global community of practice?

Update: The global domination by the North American Edubloggers Guild has begun! 12 hours after posting the first image, the Risk gameboard has changed markedly:

Update: a few hours, and the global domination of the EduBloggers’ Guild continues…

From Joshua’s Journals: Meeting Me Meme

Leave your first memory of you and me together. It doesn’t matter if I know you a little or a lot, anything you remember! Next, post this in your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you.

Not sure if this means face-to-face, or online, but this could be interesting…

I just found a link to Blogs n Dogs via Common Craft.com. Looks like a 4 day workshop on blogging and social software, held in Banff at the Banff Centre. Sounds very intersting. I’ll have to check it out, but not sure I can justify a 4-day conference/workshop in December. Or, maybe that’s perfect timing, since December is usually a write-off anyway…

Sounds like an event tailor made for the illustrious CogDogBlog himself…

One of my tasks for the next few weeks is to investigate Drupal, and specifically its ability to support the online interactions of a community of practice. We have a few projects that will involve some form of online interaction by students and professionals who are spread throughout southern Alberta, and it looks like Drupal may provide most, if not all, of the functionality to support these communities. I’ll be specifically looking at Drupal in the context of:

• personal and professional reflection (blogging – either privately or to selected audiences)
• information gathering
• asynchronous communication – forums, threaded discussions, etc…
• communication with peers and/or instructors
• combinations of the above to form an “ePortfolio” type of view on the whole shebang, suitable for sharing with potential employers, or others
• likely other stuff

I’m actually pretty excited to be working on this stuff – it feels like I’ve been working so long on media-production-supporting-utilities that I’ve been out of the loop on the whole community side of things. We’ll be looking at integrating Drupal with Pachyderm (likely via a download/upload process, rather than a direct tie-in), and the institutional WebDAV storage/sharing system. Should be fun.

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