From the monthly archives:

March 2008

tweetcloud: dnorman

March 31, 2008 · 7 comments

in general

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 [...]

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2008/(366/4)

March 31, 2008 · 3 comments

in fun

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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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.

Start slow. Don’t rush it when you first start out. Take your time. Pick a day or week [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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