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Apparently, my Twitter account became the primary stress test for the cool Tweetcloud service, which crunches through every tweet posted for a given account, and generates a cloud of words ranked by frequency. Although I’ve been posting to Twitter like a madman today, they were actually able to get it to crunch my account:

One thing that surprised me: I was sure “fracking” would be the #1 word, followed shortly by WTF. Surprise!

Thanks to John Krutsch and Jared Stein for their work on beefing up Tweetcloud to be able to handle the sheer scale of my self-absorbed banality.

The 2008/366photos project just hit the 1/4 mark. Just over 91 days in. I’ve been surprised at the number of edu-folk that decided to try the photo-a-day challenge this year. It’s fun, interesting, frustrating, challenging, and sometimes really difficult trying to come up with at least one photograph every day that doesn’t suck (or, hopefully, is interesting and/or good).

So now, we’ve got 40 people in the 366photos group. Currently there are over 1800 photos in the pool. There are likely many photos that are part of the project that aren’t included in the pool (for myself, several are marked as “friends and family” only, because they are photos of my son and/or his cousins).

That blows me away. And there are some really, REALLY good photos in there. It’s pretty cool to see people trying new things. Watching Michael play with off-camera flashes. Jen and Brian getting comfortable with their new toy. Stephen capturing winter in New Brunswick. Alan catching the cool stuff around Strawberry (and beyond). I’m not going to go through and list all 40 members but it’s been very cool watching what people come up with!

To be clear, though, this is not the only photo-a-day challenge group on Flickr. There’s a 365photos group, 366 2008, Project 365+1, 366 of 2008, and any number of other similar groups. There are probably thousands of people just on Flickr doing the project.

But what is so cool about our own little 366photos project, is that it’s composed almost entirely of edu-folks. A little community-within-a-community, of people trying something new and working (intentionally or otherwise) to improve their abilities and contribute content to the group. That’s awesome.

I’m firmly in the @injenuity “The Network is People” camp. And I freaking LOVE my network.

I’ve been experiencing an annoying glitch on my MacBook Pro since upgrading to MacOSX 10.5 – nothing serious, but occasionally it’d bug me. What happened was, if I opened a Finder window to /Users – it would show every user’s home directory except mine. I mean, I know it’s there, because all of my files are there. And if I used Terminal or remote SSH login, the directory was certainly there, as were all of my files. If I used Finder’s Go to Folder command (Command + Shift + G) I could enter “/Users/dnorman” and all was well.

But it was annoying.

Every once in awhile, I’d try to debug. I’d use Terminal and navigate to /Users. I’d run ls -l and I’d see this:

$ ls -l
total 0
drwxrwxrwt   7 root     wheel     238 23 Mar 15:17 Shared
drwxr-xr-x  13 demo     demo      442 14 May  2006 demo
drwxr-xr-x@ 47 dnorman  dnorman  1598 31 Mar 18:12 dnorman

The other user directories had either a + or no symbol after the file mode section. My directory had a @. WTF. I’ve tried looking through man. man ls. man chmod. Couldn’t find any mention of @. Try googling for @. Not helpful. This is where the gaping holes in my *NIX geekery are exposed. I was completely stumped.

Finally, I decide to try checking with the LazyWeb. I posted a tweet to roughly describe the problem – as best I could in the 140 character limit – and…

Waited 3 minutes before @thepatrick responded with a hint, and another one.

So, a few seconds later, I was running a new (to me) command via the command shell, finding out about xattr to list extended attributes about files.

$ xattr -l /Users/dnorman
com.apple.FinderInfo:
0000   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ........@.......
0010   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................

Bingo. There’s some funky bit set. So, how to nuke it. I ran man xattr and found it has a -d flag, which is used to delete attributes by name. So I ran this:

$ xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /Users/dnorman

Done.

My home directory now properly shows up in Finder. Everything’s hunky dory.

The power of my Network, harnessed with a simple LazyWeb plea, solved in 3 minutes what I’d struggled for 5 months to solve on my own.

I love my Network. It’s the people.

Thanks, Patrick. I owe you a $beverage.

I think I’m going to like the new media management and gallery system… Multiple file uploads, automatic image resizing (although it looks like my server doesn’t have enough RAM to crunch 8MP photos?) and embeddable galleries? Nice. Wonder if it works…

Yeah. GD or ImageMagick or whatever is used on the server to resize completely barfed on the original 8MP photos I tried to insert – they weren’t resized, so the full photos were embedded on the page. I’ll have to see if there’s a workaround, or just use smaller source images…

WordPress 2.5 went gold this morning, and I figured I’d go ahead and upgrade my blogs.

The very first thing I did was back. everything. up. Files, data, configuration. I used rsync to send everything to my desktop box on campus, where it will be further automatically backed up by Time Machine to an external drive. You can never have too many backups. Not that anything ever goes wrong…

Then, I upgraded the relatively simple mindfulseeing.com photoblog – no problems at all. WP 2.5 seemed happy on my server, and there weren’t any issues with the upgrade process. Now to try it on my main blog…

I made sure all plugins were up to date, then disabled every one of them. Upgraded WordPress and ran the database upgrade. Logged in again (it updates the password storage hash, so you get to login again to update that), and everything seemed good. Quickly poked around the shiny new admin interface, which is nice but will take some getting used to. Then, I headed over to the Plugins page to start enabling the constellation of stuff I use to make my blog do what I want. They all worked, with the exception of the Popularity Contest plugin. So I left that one disabled.

Interesting. The visual editor seems to be cranky. The ctrl-A shortcut to fire up the hyperlink doowackie doesn’t work, and when I hit the “link” icon in TinyMCE, I just get a blank popup. I’ll try nuking the TinyMCE plugin and reinstalling from the fresh WP 2.5 copy…

I do like the new Tag autocompletion. Kinda like what Drupal has had for what? 2 years now…

Anyhoo… If you can read this, it kinda sorta worked.

I am by no means an expert, but have been commuting by bike for awhile now. I’ve learned some tricks that might come in handy for others who are starting (or thinking of starting) to commute by bike.

1. Start slow. Don’t rush it when you first start out. Take your time. Pick a day or week where it won’t matter too much if you’re a bit late, or if you get delayed a bit. Initially, you’ll need some time to figure out the route and get used to the routine. Starting slow lets you get into the groove without trying to push yourself too hard.
2. Plan your route. I poured over the Calgary bike route map to find my route. I fired up Google Earth to plot it out, and check elevations – you’ll want to avoid hills as much as possible, especially as you get started. Don’t plan your route as a car driver – think about parks, pathways, and other places that are accessible to bikes but not cars. Also, think about places you’ll want to ride through on the way. I’ve added about 3km to my regular ride because it takes me through quieter residential streets, and along a beautiful valley pathway instead of along a busy and stinky street. Worth it.
3. Prepare your bike. If it’s a new bike, make sure you’ve got the essentials – lights (headlight, tail light), reflectors, fenders, rear rack, paniers. If it’s an old bike, make sure everything’s in working order. I added a barebones speedometer, and find the odometer is a great motivating tool – knowing how many km I’ve gone in a trip, and how many in a year – really helps keep me moving forward.
4. Maintain your bike. Pick up some oil, and keep the bike lubricated. Keep the bike clean – road grime is evil, evil stuff. This is even more important in colder climates where the salty slush gets on everything and rusts the bike out. Keeping it clean and dry prevents that a bit. Keeping things lubed prevents some of the rust and wear on moving parts. Make sure bolts are tight, and that the quick-release on the wheels hasn’t slipped (I’ve had both front and rear wheels pop off on my old bike because I forgot to check them periodically).
5. Dress for the ride. I’m currently carrying 3 jackets – usually one or two on me, the rest in my panier. I wear a cotton hoodie if it’s cold, and if it’s REALLY cold I wear a MEC windproof shell on top of that. If things warm up a bit, I’ve got a lighter hoodie I can switch to. Layers are helpful – especially once you start to warm up after a couple of km into the ride.
6. Ditch the toe baskets. My Kona bike came with these silly little baskets on the pedals. At first, I thought I liked them because it was kinda like the toe clips, without the expensive shoes. But they’re really, really annoying. Imagine riding on snow or ice, with your toe out of the basket, and the basket itself dragging in the snow beneath you. One of mine actually got ripped off the pedal as I rode through some deeper snow (I pull my feet out of the baskets in case I go down in snow and ice, which meant for most of the winter the baskets were just annoying). Toe clips are a different story – they’re unobtrusive, and can actually help you pedal by letting you pull up in addition to pushing down. I don’t use toe clips though…
7. I don’t ride with a backpack or a messenger bag. Everything goes into one of my paniers (2 15 year old MEC paniers). In the right one, I put my “big boy clothes” to change into when I get to work. My iPod gets folded into my pants there, and my camera gets stowed on top of my clothes. My left panier is for my jackets, shoes, and my lunch. Using the paniers means I don’t have to worry about the backpack-sweat-puddles, but it also means I don’t lug my laptop to and from work. I leave the laptop at home, and use a desktop at work. I have my iPod Touch for everywhere in between. My paniers are old enough that the water resistant coating is long gone. So I use kitchen garbage bags to line the inside, keeping everything nice and dry even in very wet weather.
8. Ride safe. This should be #1, but you get the idea. Don’t be in such a rush that you are tempted to do stupid things like cut across traffic. Obey stop signs and traffic signals. Take the lane wherever possible. If you don’t ride safe, you’ll eventually regret it. Even if you are unscathed, you’re making things worse for bikers overall by riding like a jackass. Car drivers already hate us, and they don’t need more reasons to try to mow us down.
9. Plan for the weather. If it’s REALLY cold (-15˚C or colder), I wear my insulated hiking boots and 2 pairs of socks. If it’s just a bit chilly (0˚C – -15˚C) I just wear 2 pairs of socks and a pair of light Solomon shoes (which are really nicely ventilated). If it’s below 0˚C, I wear my thick hoodie and my MEC windproof shell to keep warm (and they do keep me VERY warm). Above zero, and it’s fine with just a single pair of socks and the hoodie. Above +5˚C and I switch to the light hoodie. I also have waterproof rainpants, but don’t pack them unless the forecast suggests it will rain while I ride. If it’s colder than -5˚C, I just wear my MEC pants. Warmer, and I try to switch to shorts.
10. Have fun! If it’s not fun, why are you doing it? Biking can be a total blast, if you do it safely. Being able to whip down a hill at over 50km/h is a rush that is hard to beat. Being able to out-accelerate a car at a green light is just plain fun. Riding along a river, hearing the birds and sounds of nature…

    Update: thought of a few more tips:

11. Plan a cool-off period after you get to the destination. If you have a 9am meeting, plan to get there at least half an hour early so you have a chance to cool down and get cleaned up and changed first.
12. Gloves. I always wear gloves. If it’s cool out, I wear a pair of thin(ish) leather work gloves. They cut the wind right out, and my hands stay warm. If it’s downright COLD, I wear a pair of insulated gloves (the ones I wear skiing etc…). If it’s warmer, I wear a pair of meshback fingerless riding gloves. I wear gloves partially in case I wipe out – grinding my palms into gravel isn’t something I’d look forward to, so a bit of protection is a good thing.
13. This one’s a bit morbid – but I always have ID on me, not just in my panier. My wallet is always in my pocket. If I wipe out, and for some reason can’t communicate, it’s important that my identification is readily available. Haven’t needed it yet, but the last thing I want is to wind up in a hospital (or worse) unidentified. It’s not a fear of getting hurt while riding – I have ID on me all the time. Hmmm… This is a pretty dark revelation…
14. Keep a spare pair of shoes at work if possible. Eventually, you’re going to get soaked while riding. If you don’t have clean/dry shoes to change into, you’re going to make that squish-squish sound when you walk into the Big Staff Meeting…
15. Carry a cloth to wipe sweat off with. It sounds nasty, but riding can be sweaty business. Having a cloth to sop it up with means you’re more comfortable.
16. Get a decent helmet. I had been using a crappy old Bell V1 black bucket, like the one that saved my life about 15 years ago. I decided to replace it, and got an inexpensive Nakamura (maybe $35 at Sport Chek) – it fits so much better, is maybe half the weight, is adjustable, and has much better ventilation. The better fit means that if I go down, it will stay in place – which is the whole point of a helmet.

I found a link to Nexus in my reader this morning thanks to a post from Information Aesthetics, and decided to check it out. It’s an app for Facebook that graphs out a member’s network, indicating connections and clusters. Here’s my network:

Moving the mouse over any dot within the Nexus app highlights that person, and their connections. It’s pretty easy to see things like the University of Calgary folks (the lines of dots in the middle), the Northern Voice folks (on the left side, mostly), family members and old high school friends (the unconnected mini-networks outside the main circle).

It’s an interesting application, but is restricted to just the “friends” you’ve made in Facebook. I’d love to see something that takes this and adds the Google connections from TouchGraph, my network in del.icio.us, contacts on Flickr, subscriptions in Google Reader, etc… Tie that in with some kind of meaningful online identity system like OpenID, and we’ll start to see some pretty meaningful ways to organize and navigate our online networks.

I’m going to be showing some videos to faculty members who have participated in our Inquiry Through Blended Learning program. I get 20-30 minutes, during a wrap-up lunch on Friday. But I’m stumped. I could easily just show a TED talk (or two, if edited for time) but… what you YOU show, considering the audience is made up of faculty members from a wide range of disciplines, but are brought together by a common interest in inquiry and blended learning?

I was initially just going to remix/edit the Canadian eLearning 2007 Video Party but that’s almost a year old. Surely something more recent could be dropped in. Any ideas?

Focal length is the factor determining how much “zoom” you get when taking a photo. Larger numbers mean longer lenses, meaning closer zoom. But, if you have a couple of lenses, it’s sometimes hard (at least initially) to figure out which lens to use for which shot. With a point-and-shoot, it’s easy, because there’s only one lens, and it’s built in. The only control you have is over the level of zoom. With a DSLR, you can swap the lenses out, which gives a great deal of flexibility, but means you need to put some thought into what range of focal lengths you want to have handy.

Here’s an example shot, taken at a playground near my house. I shot a “wide” photo at 17mm (on a Canon 17-35mm L USM), and took corresponding shots at various key focal lengths on the other lenses in my kit.

18mm is the widest that the Canon 18-55mm kit lens will go, and is likely the widest angle most people will have available without spending a whole bunch of cash (which I haven’t done yet). 35mm is the long end of that L lens. 55mm is the longest that the kit lens will do, so that gives a pretty decent walking around range of focal lengths. The 50mm (shot with my Canon 50mm f/1.8 II) is pretty close to the long end of the kit, but the image was much sharper with the 50mm prime. The 75mm was shot with the wide end of the Canon 75-300mm USM II, and the 300mm was at the long end of that lens.

So the kit lens actually has a pretty decent range of focal lengths for regular use and landscapes. It’s not long enough to pull details out of things very far away, but does pretty well. It falls down miserably on its aperture range – it’s a pathetically slow lens, meaning it’s only really good for bright conditions (outdoors, or brightly lit indoor settings).

The Canon 50mm prime lens is actually the one I use about 90-95% of the time. You can see that it is not very wide – you’re not going to capture sweeping panoramas with it – but I love this lens for two reasons. First, it’s great at capturing the central focus point of a scene – the part that you are really looking at when you’re not peeking through the camera. Many people say 35mm is “normal” but for me, 50mm feels much closer. Maybe that’s a hint to visit my eye doctor again… The second reason I love the 50mm prime is that it is a fast lens. In this case, “fast” doesn’t refer to the speed of the lens, but at how it gulps light in through a wide aperture (the opening inside the lens that lets light through), letting the camera take pictures with a faster shutter opening. Yeah. It’s not exactly intuitive. Fast lenses are really “wide aperture” lenses, and they’re called fast because they let the camera take pictures with less exposure. Slow lenses (like the Canon 18-55mm kit, or the 75-300mm) are still great for outdoors, scenery, or even night shots with a stable enough tripod and a long exposure. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when picking the lens to use. I typically pick my 50mm f/1.8 lens because it’s so ungodly fast that I don’t need to use a flash even in relatively low light (especially if cranking the ISO to 1600).

Another lens that I’ve used is the Canon 28-135mm USM IS. It’s a great lens (we picked it up for the office) and I believe now ships as a kit option on the Canon XTi. I didn’t have the lens with me when I shot these test photos, but it should be pretty straightforward to see where the 28mm and 135mm ends of the range fit in – 28mm should be a bit wider than the 35mm box in the image above, and 135mm should be roughly halfway between the 75mm and 300mm boxes.

So, with a bunch of lenses in a photo kit, how does one pick the right one for the job? I came up with 2 handy tricks to help me pick. It should be noted that these tricks are calibrated for the length of my arm and hand, and for the 1.6 crop factor of my Canon XT.

First, if I’m thinking about shooting something far away, I just hold my hand up at arm’s length, like this:

The part of the scene that spans the first two knuckles of my finger are roughly what will be captured at 300mm. Makes it easy to see if a small/distant item will fit, or if 300mm will be enough. 75mm is roughly the span between the thumb joint and fingertip.

For 50mm, I came up with a quick test. Just make a shaka at arms length, like this:

The part of the scene that spans my thumb and pinky is roughly what will be captured at 50mm. Plus, it’s fun to make the shaka when composing a scene. (total aside: when swimming at Ala Moana Beach in Honolulu, a local woman shared the story behind the shaka. Picture the shape of a humpback whale’s tale as they make a dive. It comes out of the water, looking very much like my hand in the photo above. Shaka is the whale’s tail.)

Of course, with enough practice, these tips become unnecessary as you begin to judge what will be captured at various focal lengths automatically. But they can be a very handy shortcut, especially when learning to use a new lens or two.

This evening, while riding home from work, I was involved in my first ever bike vs. car door incident. As I was approaching a red light, a driver decided it would be a great idea to open his door without looking. I had maybe 1 second to react, swerved left, and was thrown from my bike as it bounced off another car. If I hadn’t been able to react quickly enough, I would have crashed square into his open door at about 20km/h. I pictured myself being thrown onto the trunk of the taxi cab in the next lane, and was trying to pick my spot on the trunk to minimize damage to me. Thankfully, I was somehow able to stop before hitting the cab (have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE disk brakes?) and wound up just being thrown to the ground as I hit the cab. Thankfully all traffic was stopped, because it was at a red light. Who opens their door at a red light?

Getting up, I shared some pleasantries with the driver (a profound “WHAT THE *ahem* ARE YOU DOING? *jebus* *cripes*!”) I pulled the bike off to the sidewalk to inspect the damage, and everything looked OK. I thanked the driver for his care and attention, and continued riding home.

This incident brought home three things for me.

1. assume every car on the road is full of braindead cretins hellbent on your destruction.
2. assume every car on the road is about to open its doors.
3. claim the lane. don’t ride so far to the right that an open door will kill you.

For the rest of the ride home, I tried to remember to claim the lane. It’s harder than it sounds. Riding in the lane, rather than along the edge. It’s intimidating, picturing traffic piling up behind. I was able to keep pretty close to traffic speeds, so that wasn’t a problem (except on a couple of uphill stretches). But, I’m going to keep claiming the lane.

I stopped a few km later to inspect the bike. There was no real damage, except for a chunk smashed off the rear fender from when it bounced off a car. Nothing fatal, but I’ll want to fill the gap so when riding in rain I don’t get a rooster tail.

Things could have ended so much differently. If I had failed to react, or if I’d been only a few mm to the right, I’d have had at the least a smashed right hand. At the worst, I’d have taken the full impact on his door with my head, or bounced off the taxi.

Update: It didn’t dawn on me until later that evening, but of the dozen or so cars stopped at the red light when I got doored, not a single person got out to see if I was OK. The driver that doored me asked “are you ok?” as he closed his door, but not a single person got out. Are people so insulated in their cars that they just don’t care? Did it all happen so quickly that they didn’t have a chance to snap out of their commuter comas in order to react?

Not a single person. This city can kiss me where I don’t have a tan.

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