So the pithy old saying about “thinking my old man was some dumb until I turned 29 and realized how much he learned by then” becomes GraphJammed:

more graph humor and song chart memes

Maps come up a lot from places pop songs reference:

more graph humor and song chart memes

to how Network executives see the US

more graph humor and song chart memes

to an old favorite (because I and 11th grade friends made a Super8 mm movie of it in 11h grade English) I Am The Walrus as a venn diagram

more graph humor and song chart memes

And while I reflect on younger years, from being a lifeguard:

more graph humor and song chart memes

A bit more snarky:

more graph humor and song chart memes

At this rate I might embed every one on the site! Its somewhat silly but also creative. Would it be a creaive exercise to have people illustrate in graph from a common saying or a historical note or?

“If I only had a phone…”

Note: Republishing in web as TwitterTools did not relay this post sent from iPod

Stand back, set the blog phasers on snark!

Before the rant starts (and if you cannot tell from the graphic above it might be juicy) for those that miss my not so subtle reference, do you remember all those times on Star Trek when they said, “Set your phasers on stun”? Did you ever notice, that they never set it on “annihilate”, “zap”, or maybe even just “tickle”? Phasers had pretty much one setting, which begs the question whey they had settings at all (besides the need for said script line). C’mon, my kitchen blender has more settings than a phaser!

My day started on such a roll! I drove down to Phoenix this morning for a dentist appointment, and I had no cavities despite being a year late for my six month checkup. An errand for some legal documents did not provide the hassles I expected. I picked up my old MacBookPro with the busted shift key and worn keys — I had forgotten to get AppleCare on it, but the repair cost only half the amount that plan would have caught. I then went to my yearly checkup at a retinal specialist- last time I spent more than 90 minutes in the waiting room for a 5 minute doctor visit, and this time I was in and out in 20 minutes.

On a roll!

So I was primed to drop in at the Apple Store at Chandler Mall and get me a new shiny 2G iPhone.

And the lucky sheen evaporated like water on the Arizona sidewalk. The store was mobbed, and I hovered around the phones expecting the usual quick response from the staff at Apple Stores. Nothing. I then heard an Apple guy say to someone else about a “line” and “just ran out”.

Here I thought a few weeks after the launch they would be no problem to come by. I tried calling the Apple Store at the Biltimore; first no one answered, then it was busy. I can guess what the calls were for. I looked up the number for the new store at San Tan Mall- their recording suggested checking an Apple site that would provide availability. That seems cool- I would know if there were phones w/o calling or driving.

Except the site says I can pick a state and city, but there is no menu, and it says I need to check after 9PM. WTF use is that? I’m not gonna even be in town at 9PM.

Hmm, so the Apple Stores were a wash. I next thought I might be able to snag one at at AT&T stores which seem to be second in frequency only to Starbucks. There was one just down the street! I walked in the store and said I likely had a popular question and pointed to the big iPhone sign. He shook his head before I even finished and said they were all out, but they could take direct orders and have it set up and shipped directly to me (”10-12 business days”). Since I drove 100+ miles to get here, that was starting to sound reasonable.

I then thought to ask about the signal strength in Strawberry where I live as I know their cell signals are weak here. I keyboarded a while with no reaction and then said, “We have no service there.”

“Well that makes this purchase decision easy. Goodbye.”

So not only cannot I buy an iPhone, even if I did I could not use it at home.

The luster has completely worn off the excitement.

What a luxury business Apple is in that it can pretty much shoo away people willing to spend hundreds for their devices and still rake it in. I have no conspiracy inkling of artificial shortages but the lack of products in stores weeks after a launch in these days of high fuel costs seems a bit smelly if people end up driving from store to store in vain. Walmart has this inventory fulfillment perfected- they never run out of toilet paper there, do they? Pffffft on Apple.

And their lock in to AT&T as a sole provider is appalling or worse. AT&T does these full page color ads in the Phoenix papers boasting how they have expanded their network in Arizona, with those bars superimposed on Monument Valley, yet here I am in a location where other providers (Alltel, Sprint, Verizon) all have strong signals and AT&T has tin cans hung on a tree branch. Pfffft on them. Wish they would spend advertising money on improving their infrastructure. Maybe I need to move to Mexican Hat where I could at least have a sight line to the AT&T Monument Valley bars.

I don’t really need an iPhone, though I was anxious to try all the shiny cool apps and start to use it for business travel rather than lugging a laptop, but am starting to think of looking at whats going to come around the bend, and maybe hang some hopes on Android.

I love my Mac, my iPod Touch, and see no chance of that changing. But this is really under my skin, and while it may be fun to have the cool device, I may just skip it out of stupid principle, until (a) it is less of a hassle to even plunk down my 300 clams to get one, and (b) when they break the lock of the AT&T pirate ship and allow my to use a provider that actually provides service.

Yeah, right, like I expect anyone to take up my gripes.

So I am setting my snark phaser on “disintegrate into tiny shreds”. Keep your distance, I am aiming– Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffttttttttttttttttt

photo credit: acme

Cheese, or more properly, cheese food product, is a wonderful thing. My head is not really exploding from web overdose, but for a break in the action, lacking anything really useful to contribute to the blog-o-sphere, I sometimes resort to the silly.

So a few days ago, I decided to spread some comment love by adding something completely irrelevant to posts form my friends. Sure its kind of like spam, but I know, even when I get a goofy off topic comment, it can lift my day. So I posted about 12 blog/flickr comments and a tweet for fun, somehow relating every blog topic I could find to the common world theme of cheddar cheese, and ending with the key magic phrase, “I can haz some” — the latter being a “tag” of sorts so I could see where they might get scraped in by google.

As of today, 3 days after the cheese a thon, google has 4 cheese comment sitings which, if I was truly devout, I might sweep into a dynamic RSS feed using the cool new feedmysearch site (twitterbution to Beth Ritter-Guth, thanks!).

I heard also of a study that cheese sandwiches are correlated with a high degree of intellectual acuity. Or perhaps correlated with hair on the toes. I keep getting confused.

Its a cheese world after all.

And it all brings me around to Grilled Cheese Pete.

In middle school, I got hooked on eating grilled cheese for lunch. You know those sandwiches, slathered in butter, with 2 thick slices of cheese food product melted to gold in between. One day, I ordered my sandwich, and the lady behind the counter turned her head to the woman at the stove, and yelled in a burly cigarette hasp voice, “Grilled Cheese, Pete!” I was strangely fascinated that there was a woman named “Pete” cooking in our kitchen, and I ordered them every day for a year.

I had a strange childhood, needed to get out more.

I had seen, perhaps tweeted. that Slideshare (’the YouTube of PowerPoints) was running a World’s Best Presentation contest. As I like Slideshare as a web service, I smiled, and moved on.

Then a few days ago I got an email from someone I did not know asking me to vote for their presentation in said contest. This is typically an email that goes directly to the trash (do not pass go, do not collect my attention), but for some odd reason it clicked.

To quote Bill the Cat, my reaction was “Aaaaack” - the one I saw was so bad and smarmy I almost lost my breakfast. So I hit the button the banner to see the next entry. It was worse! And number 3 was somewhere in between.

Note I am not linking to these (but love linking to Beth Kanter’s entry- she had me at dogs, and hers is a winner)- no reason really to shame someone who may have meant well- but I thought perhaps they had mis-read the rules that this was the “Worst Slideshow Competition”.

So felt one of those urges of a blog entry coming… or maybe that I could craft something worthy.. not for the prizes (yuck, who wants a Mac AirBook?) (me) but just as a self dare to come up with something different.

Then the thought fled away for a few hours. Simmered. Percolated. Fermented? My mind wandered to the video a lot of people blogged about more than a year ago (I had not yet seen it, often I am a bit late to a meme)- Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture.

If you have not watched this video, stop reading my blather right now, close the window and go off and take in what may be the most inspirational presentation ever. His story is amazing as is his strength and passion for teaching. And living. I am not giving any of it away.

And then I thought, surely someone had done a riff on this like “the last presentation”. Nope.

Thus I found my hook- The Last PowerPoint:

The extra hook I was going to provide was adding a stream of running commentary in the notes field in PowerPoint, which I thought was uploaded and published with a SlideShare (am I totally imagining this was ever a feature??).

You see one of my gripes is that often people blog about or email a link to a presentation file and when you try to watch it, generally you find that the Presentation File is Not the Presentation — it often does not stand on its own, not without a synced or linked audio file, or alternatively, some captions or notes to contextualize the slides. This is compounded more by new styles that are largely graphic imagery rather than text (which is a welcome change), but s stream of funky images does not give me much information content.

So in my “Last PowerPoint” PowerPoint I loaded the notes with paragraphs, links, even some funny (I thought) stabs at Guy Kawasaki, who is a judge for this year’s contest.

I stayed up way to late finishing it, uploaded it, and Poof! There were no notes! All that extra snark went away, and I was crestfallen. Actually I just said frig it and went to sleep.

But I could not rest with my work partly done.

So to set up the presentation as I intended it, I posted it as a flickr set, with the full notes as captions:

Actually I like flickr as a slide show archiver, so in the end…

So will I win a contest? I dont care. I just wanted to have some fun. Will anyone find my humor funny? Also questionable. Did I really make a point or say something I really honor? Its awfully hard to even think one can achieve the things that Randy Pausch did– but as his better message goes, you gotta try, and those brick walls are there for a good reason.

The rush of new technologies is not quite so different from this image, appropriately titled Armageddon. Among my cloud or network, are colleagues wiping out and restarting their social networks, jumping away from twitter to avoid mcirothinking or just hating twitter, or just pulling in the reigns from every possible social network tossed at them.

I feel this same sensation on a periodic basis, be it a blog funk, or that general sit and pause wondering, WTF am I doing does this stuff really matter? And yes, quite often my head feels like it is exploding. Or I am drowning in open web 2.0 water. The mantra I have used is in the sense of “Being There” is to face the future with a wide eyed sense of wonder, even when it is staring directly into a firehose.

That’s easy to spout off standing in front of an audience with a cool image slide behind you. It’s another looking at overflowing unread RSS reader items, more invites to social network than you can even keep them organized in your taxed brain, not to mention prying time to even do the work you are paid for.

So I am lacking an easy answer beyond shrugging it off, unplugging, letting stuff slide, or just floating along til the groove returns. I am reflecting though on questions about how much “power” we acquiesce to technology tools- twitter by itself does not force us to ignore other outlets or think in bite sized nuggets, nor do other social networks by themselves draw us in like some gateway drug to some zombie induced web coma– somewhere along the lines we make choices to get subsumed (my hand is raised in a “me too” formation). Some however may argue it is close to addiction behavior– so how much are technologies responsible? I dunno, I am fishing wildly for ideas, push back, etc.

On the other hand, if some of the most sharp and clever people I know and respect find themselves overly immersed in something like twitter, what does that portend for the many more people who look to them for guides?

I propose no answers, but have heard more than a few people communicate a yearning for a healthy balance in online/offline lives. So is Web 2.0 a seductress who sneakily draws us in a stupor to their smoky dens or do we walk willing through the door? Maybe its time to revisit the Twitter Life Cycle Curve for dips, crevasses, or even sinkholes.

Hmm, in trying to find that last link in google, OMG, I am number one for search on twitter life cycle! Poof! Adrenaline rush! I am falling back into the purple haze….

They call it a “book”

Yeah summer break from (some) technology is just doing some plain old reading. How novel!

So, in the current thing I am reading, this description comes up- does this described a country you know?

The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men to whom its ranks had once been closed; the lip service paid to values long dead; the pretense that we still are what we once were; the increasingly concentrations of the populace into richer and poorer by way of a corrupt tax system, and the desperation that inevitably follows; the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislature; ineffectual legislation promulgated with great show; the moral vocation of the man at the top to maintain order at all costs, while growing blind to the differences of ordinary life…”

Wow, does that describe America now or what? (my emphasis added)

Oops.

Not.

Off by a few centuries.

Guesses?

This is a description of the fall of the Roman Empire, in the opening chapter of Thomas Chahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization.

I’m not about to steer CogDogBlog away from its duly self imposed charter to play with tech toys and post pictures of silly signs and rants about stupid companies, I am not going all political gaga in some search to do something– actually I am taking this moment to mark the sheer power of words and ideas in their lowest, most accessible form- text.

POT (plain old text).

I love new media, make my life around it, yet among all the neon Vegas glitz of flash-web2.0-user-generated stuff, there is still happily room IMHO for good writing or ideas that make you stop and think.

What can you do with words? It’s not just words, though, its what you can do with whatever medium you have to create ideas and nudge people to think.

Okay, I am losing all direction with this blog post, so am delving into my repertoire to find the closing stanza, ad re-affirm to continue my passion for (most of) the things I am passionate about that are not allowed on some trails:

Its CogDog and friends night gathering at Almustafa, a fab Lebanese restaurant in Sydney

Leaving Sydney in style…

Actually the last night in Sydney was two nights ago… or tomorrow…. or I am #*&ing tired of trying to get time zones sorted out. It was more than a 24 hour travel journey from hotel in Sydney to LA to Phoenix and capped with a drive home to Strawberry.

But what a great time it was connecting with past and new colleagues and getting to see just a wee bit more of the grand Australian country (and cities). Twice as long in Australia would have felt like it was not nearly enough.

And Sydney is such a lively place, with our without the thousands of unexpected extra guests, though a few of my colleagues who live there refer to their living quarters as “grotty little moldy box hovels” (inside joke). I took maybe more photos in Sydney than anywhere else.

I was down under for two weeks for NMC related projects, primarily the Horizon.au meeting in Melbourne on the front end of the trip. The rest of the time was spent visiting other NMC members in Brisbane and Sydney with some needed R&R up in the Reef country north of Cairns.

And it was really not all that blogged, cause it gets, well tiring to try and write up so much, and taking photos is more rewarding. But I’ve got a string of things to back blog, so in true blog fashion, toss in reverse chronological order.

And for the last night, our colleague Angela Thomas had coordinated a casual meetup dinner at a great local spot, Almustafa, a Lebanese family style restaurant, which besides great food (the grape leaves were to do for, and I was popping the falafal like candy), erupted into loud music and belly dancing, and a number folks at our table were pulled onto the floor. I have some grainy video, but will hang on to it, thinking how I might feel if it were me in front of the camera.

So along with NMC colleagues Larry Johnson and Rachel Smith, larry’s wife, and Angela, also joining us were (oh, hoping the memory cells are working enough), Gary Hayes whom I’ve crossed in Second Life and blog space, a new colleague, social networking expert Laurel Papworth, my good friend, colleague and hiker Sean Fitzgerald (who looking to do something beyond ed-tech), media artist Kate Richards and Kerreen Ely-Harper (who is like a real star) who are working on an exciting SL project with us and Angela, Stephan Ridgeway who I met on my October trip (and who gifted me with sime great beer in giant bottles at dinner), Robyn Jay who I also get to know last year and was part of our Horizon.au board, the irrepressible and always active Alex Hayes, who was the wizard behind the curtain for my Sydney presentations in October 2007 and I think roped me into doing some future event, Illaria Vanni, a new colleague at UTS, Paula Williams whom I forgot how connected to our group but was fun to meet, Bronwyn Stuckey someone I have seen in other blogs and circles and was glad to finally meet in person, Anne Paterson who enthusiastically reminded me I met and forget her from my October speaking tour…and… and .. who the heck I am I missing?

Anyhow, what a great dinner it was, a bit hard to talk to everyone, but it seemed like a good time was had, especially for those that got a littler exercise on the dance floor.

It was perhaps not the wisest plan to have a last night party the night before needing to get up at dawn to race the pilgrims to the Sydney Airport, so my energy waned pretty quickly knowing what the travel day would include a parking lot jam in taxi getting to the airport, a long long check in line at Qantas, and the usual fun of being crammed up 12.5 hours in a confined economy class seat.

There’s more to back blog on the great Manly Scenic Walk (10k!), the projects we were working on with University of Sydney, the meetings we had at University of Queensland, and more of a recap of the Horizon.au meeting.

But I have a bit of jet lag to catch up on tomorrow (no to mention not having a crumb of food in the house or any clean clothes).

And as Arnold is prone to say, I shall be returning. To Australia! Ogs Pro bited!

Look Right! There is a car!

Even after 2 weeks in Australia, I remain confused at traffic crossings- yesterday I cam oh so close to stepping in front of a fast moving bus. The horn blew and there was not even time for the life flash before my eyes (or there are not enough highlights to make a reel).

Sydney has plenty of these curb notes for Americans, supposedly left over from the 2000 Olympics. They probably saved thousands of lives.

And hopefully it is not a political suggestion

My friend/colleague Sean FitzGerald is picking out some routes, and we’ll make a group decision in the morning for some options for long walkers or folks that may want to catch a museum. Meet us at Circular Quay around 10:30am Saturday. Okay, that is a big place, am waiting for Sean to identify a more discrete landmark, so either tweet me @cogdog or @sean… or maybe not the smartest thing to blog, SMS me on my aussie phone 04 3127 3616.

Weather looks like it will be sunny and ripe for photos, hoping to capture some good gigapan scenes, or failing that, a number of beer photos- would take some work to top the 3 from Port Douglas