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I checked the registration for the session tomorrow – it’s up to 50 people. We’ll have to open the extra wings in the Big Room, but there will be lots of room for all.

I just tested the visualizer to make sure it showed my old 3G iPod clearly, and it looked like a Stevenote circa 2004 – I should pick up a black angora turtleneck. Should be fun. I’ve grabbed a copy of the Creative Commons Senate Content Pack, and have a bunch of mixed podcasts preloaded for demonstration.

We’ll be followinng Levine’s Law, starting with a quick demo in iTunes to show the various podcasts out there. Then, to Audacity (if I can convince it to recognize the USB microphone) to create a quick and dirty recording and then publish it to either my blog or weblogs.ucalgary.ca (or both) to make a podcast. Then, back to iTunes to show it pull the file down, and then to the iPod on the visualizer to show the full round trip.

That part really shouldn’t take very long, so I’m hoping to leave a good portion of the session for a discussion of WHAT and WHY to podcast. And, perhaps more importantly, what NOT to podcast. Perhaps some brainstorming of how it might work on campus, and what kinds of activities would be appropriate. Should be fun. I’ll try recording the session – if that works out, I’ll share it with the rest of the class.

Photograph and QTVR by King Chung Huang of the Teaching & Learning Centre, The University of Calgary.

The playoffs start on Friday, with Calgary in first place in the North West division.

If you’ve got a spare ticket or two (or have some extra room in your Superbox) and want to support your friendly neighborhood edublogger, give me a shout. I’m willing to trade for some space on this award winning edublog

Yeah, baby!

Stephen Downes is hosting a keynote at BCEdOnline 2006 (Thursday April 20, 2:45-3:45pm) and was gracious enough to invite Brian and myself to take a ride on his coattails to join him on stage for the keynote. I’m going to fly into Vancouver just for the day (and will try to be as awake as possible during the keynote).

We’re planning to do something rather less conventional. Not quite an “un-keynote” – but more of a discussion or fireside chat, directed by the audience. It’d be pretty presumptuous not to tap into the audience for an event like this, so an open discussion-slash-Q&A session seemed more fitting. Likely not quite to the level of managed chaos that we were able to achieve for the Social Software Salon, perhaps more akin to the Edublogger Hootenanny.

But, for it to work, audience participation is key. It doesn’t have to be in-person participation, either. I borrowed a spot on Brian’s wiki to hold a list of potential topics/questions to be brought up during the session. If the lines at the microphone don’t form, we can fall back on these.

If you’re going to BCEdOnline, or just have some ideas about what should be discussed, please surf on over to the wiki page and edit to your heart’s content!

I’m not sure, but I’d guess the session will be recorded somehow for sharing afterwards with the rest of the class…

My bike has been collecting dust in the garage for almost 2 years. I used to ride all the time – even commuting to the University back when I worked in the Faculty of Nursing. But, I’ve been succesfully avoiding riding it (or doing any other real physical activity, really) for far too long. 2 days of Easter-related binge eating pushed me over the edge, so I pumped up the tires and went for a ride around the community.

I took a somewhat leisurely ride – likely because my bike computer had stopped working in the 2 year stasis hanging in the garage – so I could just enjoy the ride rather than obsessing about metrics. Max. speed this trip? Average speed? Current speed dropping below 20 km/h? I also left the iPod at home so I could enjoy the sounds. That was a great idea for the first half of the ride, following the pathway system to the northwest of my house with birds chirping and creeks/ponds splashing. The latter half of the ride was mostly along streets, so the iPod would have been a Bad Idea™ anyway.

Lacking my bike computer’s micromanagement, I fired up Google Earth after I cooled off to see how far I went. Turns out it’s only about 7.6 km, but not a bad ride. I wound up going for 7.5 km, and only dismounted to go through a fence at one point. That’s a huge accomplishment, given my physical condition and the very hilly nature of the community.

It was a bit odd, as most of the landmarks I used to use in my pre-hiatus Tuscany circumnavigation rides have been obliterated. Fields now full of houses. Dirt paths now paved roads or paths. That last house before the field? Yeah, it’s not a field anymore.

It’s got a pretty good vertical climb, since the community is built on the side of a hill. Going south/west is basically a free ride, north/east is a huff-puff heartbuster.

I’m going to try to do this quasi-regularly. I’d originally intended to take up jogging, but I think biking is better suited to me. For one, I can do it. Less wear and tear, and I enjoy it. If I enjoy it, I’m more likely to do it. I’ll see if that’s still the story in the morning. I bet saddle soreness beats shin splints, though…

I just updated the TLC’s copy of Drupal, used to host 10 Drupal-powered websites, to the latest Drupal 4.7 RC3 build. Upgrading the code took under 2 minutes (SSH into the server, curl the updated code down onto the server, then tar -xzf and move the appropriate files into place). Add another 5 minutes to run the update.php script on each site, and you’ve got 10 Drupal sites updated in 7 minutes flat.

The 4.7 release is really a smoking upgrade from 4.6 – it hardly feels like the same software. Modules install and update their own database tables now, piggybacking on the core update.php upgrade script, making it soooo easy to update the code and dozen-or-so added modules.

The multi-site hosting feature is one of the biggest things I love about Drupal. Initially, I was maintaining separate copies of Drupal, with modules etc. painstakingly added to each one and kept in sync. I was essentially managing my own distro of Drupal, which wasn’t the most productive thing to be doing. After some prodding from Patrick, I read up on the sites feature, and now every single one of our Drupal-powered websites runs from a single copy of the code. All modules and themes are automatically available to each site, making maintaining each one pretty much trivial.

I just realized – it’s taken me longer to write the blog post describing how easy updating Drupal is, than it took me to run the update itself…

Just testing out the latest build of the Performancing for Firefox extension – a fully-featured weblog manager built into Firefox. And it’s free.

I had to stop using it a while back because it was behaving oddly (character spacing in the text editor was wonky enough to make it unusable) but it’s behaving perfectly now. Not sure if it was the latest Firefox update, or a rogue extension, but whatever was causing the misbehaviour, it’s all good now.

It works with a whole bunch of weblog platforms. I’ve tested with Wordpress 2 and Drupal 4.7, and it claims to work with MovableType and many others.

The latest PFF build also has a few nice new features – like sorting categories, integrated Metrics display, and a nice del.icio.us bookmarking utility. Lots of other cool stuff, too. Definitely a handy extension. I’m looking forward to comparing it with Flock when the Cardinal build is released next month!

I played with the new Google Calendar yesterday (great timing – we had just finished a meeting at the TLC where we were throwing ideas around to improve our timesheet and project tracking systems, and a calendar UI was high on the list).

At first, I thought it was just a web based iCal knockoff. But, I just played a bit more, and now I realize it’s a web based Newton Calendar knockoff. That’s meant as a very high compliment. Maybe, 10 years later, we’re ready to get back into data soups and intelligent assistants…

Try this. Log into Google Calendar, and hit the “Quick Add” link. A text box pops up. Enter “lunch with elvis tomorrow at noon for 2 hours at the bellagio in las vegas”

What you get is a calendar event created, at 12:00pm, blocking the calendar for 2 hours, with location “the bellagio in Las Vegas” (including a link to a Google Map showing where the Bellagio is). I’m assuming if Elvis was in my Google Contact List, he’d be automatically added and invited to the event.

The UI is also by far the best calendar UI I’ve seen on the web. It feels completely like a desktop application. Want to create an event from 1pm-2pm? Just drag a selection on the calendar, and it creates an event – then prompts you for details. Just like a good desktop calendar should. But it’s a web app.

Calendars can also be shared, either publically or with a defined set of individuals – for free, without having to pony up for a .Mac account. And you can subscribe to standard calendars published in the iCal format. I subscribed to the Calgary Flames schedule right away

This is pretty cool stuff. It’s going to be tough reverting back to Oracle Corporate Time™ for use on campus. Now I have to put in for a schwanky graphics tablet so Google Calendar can have handwriting recognition like my old MessagePad did…

Peregrine falcons have been nesting on a ledge high on the exterior of the Library Tower at the University of Calgary for almost a decade. They’ve returned each year, but failed to nest in 2004 and 2005. As I was heading for the bus with Evan after work yesterday, we heard one of the falcons screeching from a nearby poplar tree. Evan hadn’t heard a bird that sounded like that before, so we got to have a nice talk about falcons while walking to the bus stop.

At least one falcon has returned this year. I’ll keep my eyes open for its mate, and hopefully they make a nest again this year.

More faves. More tropical places…

I took this over the weekend at the Butterfield Acres Easter Egg Hunt. Evan had a blast. And, Wordpress (or Godaddy) is acting up, so I just needed to post something to see if I get errors. Regardless, it’s a pretty cool photo.

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