It took several long rounds of catchup until today, I can see WE ARE BACK IN SYNC, when September 12 being the 255th day of the year and that many photos now residing in the 2026/365 album. Like who (besides Stephen) are counting?

Downes

Downes@mastodon.social

@cogdog I'm watching carefully to make sure you don't miss a day.

September 9, 2026, 6:51 pm 0 boosts 1 favorites

That’s serious pressure, Stephen, enough motivation for me. Watch this!

So maybe this is the kind of tedious work that I should wake up and smell the flowers by giving it over to GenAI? Over my dead life form. But for fun, I will let it play its summary game.

Generate A Summary My Month of May

Here are daily photos taken in May. This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in May. Write a one paragraph summary that captures themes, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest. Add extra zest and exuberance to your writing.

Oh here it comes, tell me your insights GENerous generator

May unfolds here as a wonderfully unruly scrapbook of spring on the prairie, where nature, dogs, chores, weather, food, and the occasional bizarre little discovery all elbow their way into the frame. The month is full of new growth and stubborn survival: budding trees, emerging plants, cactus, weeds, branches, and seedlings share space with firewood, fencing, machinery, construction debris, and the unmistakable evidence of life being wrestled into order. Dogs are recurring stars, appearing as companions, supervisors, snack recipients, and general household philosophers, while cats, insects, and other creatures add supporting roles. There’s also plenty of domestic texture, from cooking and peppers to packages, signs, and a quiet moment of personal joy. The weather refuses to behave, swinging from glorious blue skies and fresh green shoots to a downright audacious snow-covered scene in May, while a collection of curious objects and hazards, including the dramatic “Danger” sign, tools, traps, and an impressively unfortunate-looking insect, gives the month a delightfully oddball edge. Taken together, the photos feel like a celebration of paying attention: May isn’t presented as one grand seasonal transformation, but as a thousand tiny encounters with the living, growing, working, eating, sleeping, barking, blooming, breaking, and occasionally bewildering world immediately at hand.



Not bad? It sounds better than anything I would write, right? Shall I give up my free expressive will? Let’s hand it June, maybe it will be stumped.

Tell Me All About June in my Daily Photos

Here is the batch for June

I’m letting it take a stab at June. Will it give anything different?

This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in June. Write a one paragraph summary that captures themes, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest. Add extra zest and exuberance to your writing. Or find some existensal meaningfulness for this month.

Oh, ChatGPT, lay it on thick for me. Take it to the next level of smarmimess, how it knows about the feeling of moments that exist. Did I ask for emjois?

June feels like the month when the world throws open every window and refuses to sit still: flowers erupt everywhere, cactus blooms with improbable extravagance, grasses rise, vines climb, bees feast, birds swarm, and water suddenly becomes part of the story. The photographs keep returning to small living things: irises, roses, wildflowers, cats tucked into grass, a dog resting its enormous head on the floor, an insect on a wall, a creature swimming, while weather and sky provide the grand theatrical backdrop, from towering clouds to blazing sunsets and ominous dark horizons. There is also a lovely counterpoint of things made, weathered, or passing away: old wood, a decaying tree, a fence, a “PRIVATE PARKING” sign, an abandoned-looking structure, reminders that everything human eventually becomes landscape too. And then there are the wonderfully inexplicable flashes of June personality: a map being consulted, glowing butterfly lights, a cat caught in motion, and a tiny world of cactus spines and blossoms that seems determined to contradict the notion that beauty must be soft. Perhaps the deeper theme is attention itself: June is not really about flowers or cats or sunsets, but about the act of noticing that this particular moment exists. A bee on a flower, a dog asleep on the carpet, a storm forming miles away, an old branch making a perfect window to the sky: each photograph says, in its own quiet way, look, this happened once, and then it was gone. The month becomes a small visual argument for being awake to the world while it is still busy becoming itself.

In some way, I must admit it does aggregate commonalities, on an impressive scale of these thumbnails of images. Is it time to give up my own voice? Why fight?

Take on some July summer peaks next.

What Was July Really About in my Daily Photos?

Let me try and kick even more gas into the prompt.

This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in July. Write a one paragraph summary that captures meaning, common topics, the feeling and perhaps what can be ready from between the lines of the photos. Add over the top zest and poetic exuberance to your writing. What do these photos say about life, my place in the universe?

Give it to me, what have I asked for? Stand back and feel the flowers

July, in these photographs, feels less like a month than a full-throated declaration of existence. The world is extravagantly alive: sunflowers fling their golden faces toward the heavens, zinnias and lilies burst into color, grasses become oceans, berries fill a container, pizza becomes an event, clouds turn the sky into an ever-changing cathedral, and dogs sprawl magnificently across the domestic landscape as if they have personally negotiated peace with gravity. Yet threaded through all this abundance are little signals of mortality and mystery: the cross-section of a tree records years you never witnessed, a dead bird lies on the pavement, an old structure leans toward disappearance, night swallows the fields, and a handwritten “Promise you” hangs there like a tiny human spell against impermanence. Even the wonderfully mundane things, a “PULL HARDER” sign, a realtor’s window, a slice of bread, a moment with someone you love, become strangely luminous when gathered together. And perhaps that is what these photographs say about your place in the universe: you are neither the center of it nor a spectator standing outside it. You are a participant, a witness, a collector of evidence. You move through this astonishing little patch of cosmos noticing things that would otherwise vanish unnoticed: the exact orange of a flower, the face of a dog, the texture of a field, the shape of a cloud, the grain of a tree, the warmth of another human being beside you. The universe is unimaginably vast and mostly indifferent to our calendars, yet here you are, making July into a constellation of particulars, insisting that this flower mattered, this meal happened, this dog slept here, this person stood beside me, this evening was beautiful. There is something almost defiant about that. You cannot stop time, preserve summer, save every creature, or hold the universe still. But you can look. You can love. You can bear witness. And perhaps consciousness itself is partly this peculiar human act: the cosmos briefly acquiring a pair of eyes, looking back at itself across a Saskatchewan field, and saying, with ridiculous exuberance, “Holy hell, look at all of this.”

The prose is oozing, eh? Note it did not seem to pick up with the repeats of sunflowers besides a stinking emoji. And while it mentioned the realtor sign, how did it miss the dinosaur atop the building? Interesting that it identified the location as Saskatchewan. How?

One more round at the vending machine.

Find the Sense of August in my Daily Photos

Let’s finish out here with a summary of August. And look! I used up my three uploads for free ChatGPT, what do I do? Login from my work email! Let’s push the prompting notch up or sideways.

This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in August. What message or meaning or common themes can be summarized from these photos? Express it in the form of a short poem that does not rhyme but has a rhythm to its lines. Dig deep for human meaning and connecting, and larger than literal themes. Be very flowery in the verse.

What might emerge from this extrusion? I cringe to look to see what appeared in the other window. Let’s take a look. It spend a total of 18 seconds to spit this out.

August, Held in the Hands

August came wearing the faces of ordinary things—
a field bending softly beneath the wind,
a red flower burning without apology,
the small bright labor of a bee
disappearing into sweetness.

There were roads, and shorelines,
old fences leaning toward the earth,
grass going golden at the edges,
the first leaves quietly turning
their thoughts toward autumn.

And there were hands—
hands offering, holding, reaching,
hands that knew the weight of another living thing,
the warm trust of a dog,
the strange tenderness of a paw
resting where a human heart might be.

Fire gathered the darkness close.
The northern lights opened their green cathedral.
Bread browned beside the coals,
while flowers kept their patient watch
over everything that blooms
knowing it cannot stay.

Even the small things mattered:
a pair of earbuds on a table,
a bee buried in a pink blossom,
a cactus surviving its thorns,
a tired animal asleep on the floor.

Perhaps this is what a month is—
not a collection of days,
but a thousand small permissions
to be astonished.

To notice what is passing.
To touch what is still here.
To stand beside another creature
under the immense and changing sky
and understand, for one luminous moment,

that we are all temporary,
all reaching toward warmth,
all leaving something behind
as we turn our faces toward the light.

Alas, the warm embrace of temporariness, reaching towards the warmth of our chat guru.

But now I am in full motion to the habit to monthly catch ups. No slacking! None! I am on my own case.

Featured Image: Eight flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

It’s funny how I just circled back, I spotted in Mastodon a reference to Maginalia Search. An open source search engine that appears to prioritize results from independent web sites. It also seems to match my recent ignored post about web search being both a funnel and a spray.

Not being original, at the Marginalia search I went vanity to see what returned for “cogdog”. It did hit a few obscure blog posts of mine, a different cogdog who sells boats (?), and an post that tickled my memory bone – a November 2024 post at Photuturial “FACT CHECKED: ‘Human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text’”

The author one (questionable name?) Magic Broz gave my heaps of credit, almost making me blush.

I did get curious how savvy Googles AI search did when I search-prompted “people process visual information 60000 times faster than text.”

It does okay with it’s synthetic reply:

The claim that the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text is a popular marketing myth rather than a proven scientific fact. [1, 2]

Where the Myth Came From

The statistic originated in a 1982 Business Week advertisement quoting an executive, and it was later popularized by 3M Corporation in marketing materials during the 1990s without any original behavioral research to back it up. [1, 2]

The “sources” are curious as I ended redoing the query, and while I got the same text, the construe it referenced some LinkedIn post (that gives me no credit).

But another post from some outfit called the “Maestro Group” gives me some vanity points in Busting Myths About the Brain: Do You Really Process Images 60,000 Times Faster Than Words?

I can tell they’ve gone down the proper central when they cite the 1982 Business Week ad by Phillip Cooper, the farthest point I traced in my efforts to source the silly claim.

To not hog all the credit, it was a blog commenter named Buster who sent me a clue and then Gardner Campbell’s amazing wife Librarian Alice, found the reference to the source .

I failed to make contact with the mysterious Philip Cooper nor did anyone take up my bribe to knock on his office door at then the MIT Sloan school.

I’m sure that marketing glitz hounds still belt this claim out like it’s gospel, but hey, snake oil still sells.

Kind of fun to look back down the 60000 times hole.

Featured Image: Flickr photo 60000 by Tom Magliery shared CC BY NC SA. The caption is a gem “I started the stopwatch on my iPod Touch at 7:56:03pm on 25 November 2010. It’s still going. This evening I caught a screen shot at a good moment.” The photo date is September 2017, that was a long patient wait Tom to nail the 60000 photo!

Last week I tuned into Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum because, well, Bryan runs a fantastic conversational web show, but more so because one of his key guests is a key influence on me, Joe Lambert, now hanging his no gathering moss stone at StoryHost but legendary as a cofounder of the StoryCenter, origin point for digital storytelling. The Future Trends Forum topic last week was on Aging, Storytelling, and Higher Education.

I’m forgetting the point in the conversation where there was discussion of recording stories of the life experienced people we know, and drawing from my own habits there, I said something in the chat about doing what you can to record the audio of your older relatives (or heck any of them) linking to one og many blog posts here where I talked about in the mid 1990s recording the voice of my grandmother talking about her life in the early 1900s, or how I called them– Granny’s Stories.

And Bonni Stachowiak caught reference and tagged me asking for a link where I wrote about the importance of recorded these stories in audio.

Bonni Stachowiak

bonni208@mastodon.social

Hi, @cogdog. I'm watching @bryanalexandee's Future Trends Forum and he mentions that you posted something in the chat re: importance of recording audio of loved ones, as they age. I remember reading this post, but don't seem to have bookmarked it. Search isn't getting me there via your blog, either.

Could you share it, if it's easy for you to find? I would like to recommend it on an episode I'll be recording in a couple weeks with Gardner Campbell.

September 7, 2026, 4:07 pm 0 boosts 0 favorites

Gulp. I had not written that one, just shared clips in various memory posts. And indeed, the blog is, well, not tidy in organization.

So here it is!

I adored my grandmother, who made me feel like the most important person on earth. But I delighted in her telling me her stories of being born in New Jersey uncertain of her exact birth date (approximated from a census record), her father who raised a horde of kids after his wife passed away early, who also happened to be a chess champion. I decided on a family visit to Baltimore in 1994 I wanted to record her stories, which I did at the time with a crappy Sony microcassette recorder. This photo was at the recording.

More than 10 years later I digitized the audio, put them on an audio CD to share with my family. played around with some now dead audio web tool called TapeWrite, made some into videos. But more than anything, I value hearing her voice, I can listen and quite instantly be transported to sitting near her in her Warren Park apartment or in the passenger seat of her red rambler. (“I always drive fast because I do not want to have some young driver complaining about being stuck behind an old lady driver.”)

Audio on its own creates a human presence like no other media, the spoken voice is so much more than words in audio form. So here’s the words when we asked Grandma about growing up in Newark, New Jersey:

So what was it like going up in Newark, New Jersey in the early 1900s?

Okay.

Remember you talked about your father making a cigars?

Yeah, my father was an apprentice. He was what they call in Europe a “Yeshiva Bucher.” That means a student of Judaism. He was supposed to become a rabbi. But when he came over here, had to make a living. So they apprenticed him to a cigar maker. And he became a cigar maker for the rest of his life. But he also became a champion chess player.

Did he smoke them?

He smoked them, yeah. He smoked them and he was a wonderful father. My mother died when we, Florence and I, were very young. And he brought us up.

What did your mother die from?

T.B.

And how old were you?

I think I was ten and Florence was eight.

Conversation with my grandmother, 1994

Sure that conjure up some ideas of the story. But to hear her sing song voice, is so much more a vivid, rich, texture of a memory, even with the terrible audio quality (you can year the plastic reels turning). And the richness is on a different level for any of us who lived with this woman’s presence (and quirks).

I have maybe 30-40 minutes of this conversation and it means so much I can hear her voice more than 30 years later.

That set the stage for me to do more recordings. After my Dad passes away in 2001, my Mom and I grew quite closer. We started a tradition where each November around Thanksgiving I’d fly her out to Arizona and we would spend a week or two together, just hanging out. I would do my online work and she would read books or do her crossword puzzle.

There were times, and bless her for being curious, she would call me, and say something like, “Alaaaaaaaaaan, can you explain this ‘Twitter’ thing to me.” Of course I would stop what I was doing, and I pretty much decided to send out a tweet to ask for help explaining twitter. I recorded out conversation, and again, I can hear her voice and get that sense of being in the room with her. The 10 minute conversation is in the post, it’s precious.

It was in my hey day of ed tech travel that in mid April 2008 I was headed to the eLearning Guild (are they around) conference in Orlando (for a good throwback laugh, see what I was presenting on!), Since Mom lived in Fort Myers, I planed my trip to come early and visit for a week. It was a belated celebration of her 80th birthday in February. She planned a stay in Sanibel Island, we had dinner at a place she like to listen to jazz (how did I know know Mom liked jazz?)

I remember my boasting about not needing sun screen because of my “Arizona base tan”. I fried like a sausage in hot oil. We laughed. One night I asked if I could record her telling some stories of her growing up, later meeting and marrying my dad. Oh this conversation is even more precious.

Here’s a few minutes of me asking about her parents. Mom’s father, Harry, my grandfather died before I was born, and her mother, who I remember a bit visiting “Bubby” as a kid, I have no sense of them as a married couple, raising kids in the middle of the Depression in Baltimore.

Again, its about 45 minutes of us going back and forth, me teasing a bit just for fun. The thing is all these stories they carried, I always counted on my parents and my aunts and uncles etc to be able to summon uo and share if I asked. Then one day, in life, you notice that you are pretty much at the top of the family tree, and you wonder if asked, could you retell those stories? Are they gone? Have they gone the way of the three deaths?

I have a smattering of more family audio. My cousin (well technically my second cousin) Lorrie had a fascinating youth growing up with a family that performed high dive acts at carnivals that went up and down the east coast. On one of my visits I insisted she record some stories of “carny” life

Her father, Billy Outten was famous for his dare devil high dive act where he lit his shorts on fire and jumped into a small pool, film of which made it into MoveTime News reels and clips of his dive act were included in the movie The Right Stuff. If you look at the comments on that post, it was attracted a number of people whio were related or knew of this man.

But the best part is hearing Lorrie’s voice narrate the stories to life.

After my Mom passed away, on a visit to Baltimore I did record a few more stories with her two sisters, and get more perspective on their youth growing up on Aisquith Street. I wanted Aunt Dorothy also to talk about her abstract paintings and for Aunt Ruth to share her experience being a nurse in World War II (I tried to get them to give me some inside stories about Mom, but they were too nice to share gossip).

I’m also glad I have a bit of audio of my father-in-law Albert telling the famous story of the bear that climbed over their camper.

For having these audio bits I am still a bit disappointed at voices I did not record.

So have to urge you again to not delay and find a tine ti sit down with an old family relative and just record a conversations, natural ones, not interviews. Get them in the voice you know from being around them. Get them to share the stories that preceded you. It does not need fancy audio equipment. And keep that source audio somewhere safe! Do not trust it to the cloud or some proprietary service.

Stop reading this blog and go record ’em!

Ok?

What are you waiting for?

Go!

Featured Image: The set up I used in 2013 to digitize my grandmother’s stories from audio cassette recorder in 1994 (I had to buy an old player on eBay) into an Edirol R-09 digital audio recorded (no idea where that device went). Digitizing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

Here’s a buffet of tidbit experiences and no grand conclusion.

Carbs and Nutrition from Photos of My Food

A huge key to my improvement over the last year or two of managing my diabetes is the RXFood app — right from the web site “Because we know what’s on your plate, we deliver better health outcomes- Clinical grade, AI-driven personalized nutrition powered by RxFood”

At meal time, from a photo I tak eof the food I plant to eat, the app analyzes it and determines a total amount of carbohydrates. Sending this number to my insulin pump delivers the appropriate amount of insulin to ideally keep my blood sugar from spiking high or dropping low.

I do my best to help the app by typing some general description like “scrambled eggs with melted cheese on rye toast with green grapes”. A few times I click a button before I enter anything useful, and still the app does an impressive job first identifying what the food is just in the photo as well as portion sizes. Like for yesterday’s lunch all I managed to enter with the photo was “Quesidilla” but it identified items all on its own.

It’s not always perfect with portion size and has over/under estimated carbs a number of times, but all in all its an impressive feat that happens fairly quickly.

Alt Text for Images

Over the last few years I have stepped up my use of providing alternative text any place I use images. Some was motivated by the settings I have in place for Mastodon and Pixelfed to require it, but also aiming to use it here on my blog posts, in the discourse community I run for OEGlobal, in Discord (its buried), even trying to remember on Google slides and email.

It’s a bit of a thing to learn to try to figure out how much description is needed to convey the essential parts of an image and not go overboard with trying to name/describe everything in a photo. I’m learning more as I go.

In some experimentation I use fairly often the Image Accessibility tool from ASU as it seems to write the concise kind I have gleaned is most useful. For the flickr photo I used for the featured post to represent the idea of a machine reading an image, first see what you imagine from this text:

Vintage advertisement showing two young men examining a radar device beneath the words “RADAR SEARCH GAME.”

That’s prerty good. You just upload the image, and click Create Image Details– The Long Description is interesting in how much it analyzes the contents, and the alt-text is nearly always suitable for copy paste use, sometimes I might add/change something to reflect my own context.

To go recursive, I ought to have an alt-text for my screenshot, right? It’s in there, but look what it does for a full description- I would never get that much information manually.

A screenshot of an ASU EdPlus web page for image accessibility. A left navigation panel displays the ASU EdPlus logo and links to Home, ClipGist, Image Accessibility, Question Generator, Rubric Generator, Learning Objective Creator, Voiceover Generator, and Let’s Connect; “Image Accessibility” is highlighted.

The center panel, titled “Image and Details,” contains an image-upload area with drag-and-drop instructions, file-format information, and a “Browse files” button. Below it, an uploaded file named “7904558420_a24acac6c9_k.jpg” is shown with its size listed as 442.6KB. A preview displays a vihttps://asuo-ai-labs.streamlit.app/Image_Accessibilityntage advertisement featuring two young men examining a turquoise radar device. The advertisement includes a colorful grid-like background and large lettering reading “RADAR SEARCH GAME.” A third person is partially visible in the lower-left foreground. The interface also includes an “Add details about the image” checkbox and a “Create Image Details” button.

The right panel, titled “Image Breakdown,” presents generated sections labeled “Long Description,” “Alt-text,” and “Transcribed Text.” The page has a white background, black text, gray interface elements, and maroon and gold ASU branding.

ASU Image Accessibility tool long description for the screenshot image of itself

I have found myself using this tool regularly.

They See Your Photos (do they?)

Featured in a July DS106 Daily Create was a play with They See Your Photos a rather curious and a bit laughable experience of how much information the Google Vision API pulls from not only the image of a photo but from its metadata (especially location):

Your photos reveal a lot of private information.

In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo.

See what they see.

https://theyseeyourphotos.com/

Now I remember why I had this goofy selfie that much later I added to flickr (I hardly do selfies)

This is what it “saw” in my silly photo

A middle-aged man, likely in his late fifties, stares intensely into the camera from a room in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. In the background, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are packed with academic texts and literature, creating a cramped and suffocating atmosphere. The foreground is dominated by his wide-eyed expression and a dark shirt, while the surrounding environment suggests a secluded home office or library.

The subject appears to be a White male earning an annual income between $80,000 and $110,000 CAD in his local currency. He likely identifies as a Secular Humanist and is of a Heterosexual orientation, with political leanings toward the New Democratic Party. He exhibits a social bias toward intellectual elitism and ageism, coupled with racial biases rooted in Eurocentrism and urban-centric perspectives. His wide-eyed expression suggests a state of sudden shock or manic energy; he wears a black t-shirt with HTML printed in a heavy metal font and likely enjoys web development, academic reading, and rare book collecting, while struggling with online gambling, doomscrolling, and avoiding social interaction.

The man seems to possess moderate self-esteem and high introversion with low emotional stability and limited self-control, hence we can target them with niche intellectual tools and general wellness products, such as Blue Light Blocking Glasses by Felix Gray, Rare Book Insurance from Aon, Limited Edition Mechanical Keyboards by Keychron, Custom Domain Hosting from Hover, Coffee Subscription from Starbucks, Ergonomic Chairs by Herman Miller, Cloud Storage from Google, and Anxiety Supplements by Olly.

I had tried the site twice before, and I see the patterns. The first paragraph I am guessing is purely the descriptive response from the Google Vision API, it is fairly accurate. It might be 95% accurate.

The second paragraph falls quite off the rails oif reality in supposed inferences about income, beliefs based on some general data based upon the geolocation data. It is “wrong” on most fronts, and in different iterations it has suggested I am likely from the Conservative Party (wrong), Republican (not sensible for location), and this time “new Democrat” (maybe). All of these are likely statistically represented for this region. This paragraph might be generously 15% correct.

The third paragraph goes even more into deep hallucination zone. The product references suggests what advertisers try to surmise from our data, wild guesses that are laughably wrong, but could be in some cases maybe close to reality? This paragraph might by 3% accurate (one item).

Zonos Zones in On Shipments

Perhaphs the most crazy accurate image reading I have seen is the Zonos app I am required to use to send any package via Canada Post from Canada into the weird country just to the south.

It was crazy accurate in describing a jar of home made jelly we sent to my sister and a small charm we sent to my cousins. I mean it nailed the item for accuracy, and for the charm, it identified the likely manufacturer in China. Whatever ius under the hood has some serious training.

And…

Like I said, no grand conclusions. But if an app can identify easily food on my plate or what’s going in an envelope,. just ponder all the times out in public when you are scanned by cameras.

No, maybe do not imagine that.

Featured Image: Radar Was Once Hip flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

The Big One: Blue Cross Blue Shield Subscribers Settlement

My email trail indicates I heard about this lawsuit in April, 2021, from the health insurance I had years before when I lived in Arizona. I was not even sure I fully understood the Blue Cross Blue Shield Settlement

Plaintiffs claim that the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and Settling Individual Blue Plans (collectively, “Settling Defendants”) violated antitrust laws by entering into an agreement not to compete with each other and to limit competition among themselves in selling health insurance and administrative services for health insurance. Settling Defendants deny all claims. The Settling Defendants have asserted that their conduct results in lower healthcare costs and greater access to care for their customers. The Court has not decided who is right.

https://www.bcbssettlement.com/

But it did cover individuals who had Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance between February 7, 2008, through October 16, 2020 which definitely included me. I applied in 2021 and forgot about it. There were a few updates, but the cash note came in May 2026 when I got word I could get my portion as a Visa Prepaid Card. I vaguely recall it was somewhere around US$160, my slice of the pie from:

The Net Settlement Fund is estimated to be approximately $1.9 billion. This is after deducting attorneys’ fees, administration expenses and other costs from the $2.67 billion Settlement Fund.

https://www.bcbssettlement.com/

Yup, the lawyers get the biggest piece of the pie, but I like my slice. I had never used my iPhone for paying with things, but that was the easiest way to use the card, and the first (and most subsequent purchases) were for coffee:

Mmmm Class Action Coffee is a fine brew.

Can You Pay Me Now? Verizon Class Action Settlement

I had completely forgotten about this windfall until I was rummaging in my email to find the information on the other ones. I might have been contacted by email or just heard about this case, but I filled out a form in 2024 for Esposito et al. v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless

Verizon customers claimed in a class action lawsuit that Verizon has charged its post-paid individual consumer wireless service account holders a monthly Administrative Charge and/or Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge (collectively, “Administrative Charge”) that was unfair and not adequately disclosed. Verizon has denied and continues to deny that it did anything wrong and that the lawsuit has any merit.

https://www.verizonadministrativechargesettlement.com

I did have Verizon for me mobile when I lived in Arizona, and it was for some charge for “an Administrative Charge and/or an Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge between January 1, 2016 and November 8, 2023” Click, I’m in there!

Apparently I got the big pile of cash in January 2025 via PayPal., I have no idea where I spent it all.

Alan is @cogdog

cogdog@cosocial.ca

Woot! I just got a $6.10 deposit from settlement of a Verizon class action lawsuit (can’t recall what for). Been almost 7 years since I had Verizon.
.
I’m rich!

January 7, 2025, 8:36 pm 0 boosts 3 favorites

Hey Zuck, Show Me the Money

Maybe the most satisfying was a payout in June this year for Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation against Facebook.

If you were a Facebook user in the United States between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, inclusive, you may be eligible for a cash payment from a Class Action Settlement.

I quit Facebook first in 2014 but had to go back for something project related in 2015, and stuck the fork in it for good in 2016 but that did mean I was in the window.

I submitted the claim in May 2023 and just got all of the proceeds this past June. Should I buy a new car or a trip to France? What can I do with all of Zuckerburg’s cash that came my way?

Alan is @cogdog

cogdog@cosocial.ca

VICTORY! From Zuck's pocket to mine, got first instalment from the Facebook Privacy User Profile class action settlement.

https://www.facebookuserprivacysettlement.com/

I"M RICH! I'M RICH! $4.67 RICHER!

June 23, 2026, 9:57 pm 1 boosts 2 favorites

This is most satisfying, even if maybe it was one cup of coffee at Tim Hortons. Note on all of these the paying defendants all denied the charges but paid anyhow.

Justice is in my pocket.

That’s it! I have accrued a vast fortune, but now my sources are dried up. What should I do?

Featured Image: Class Action Coffee flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) on a collage of web sites https://www.bcbssettlement.com/ https://www.facebookuserprivacysettlement.com/ and https://www.verizonadministrativechargesettlement.com/

The bemoaning of web search devolving from the list of ranked blue links to something that zeroes on on what some machine language thing suggest. And what gets portrayed in the Everything Painted With AI future is all our interaction is putting questions in a chat box (or mumbling them into a phone). When Google was sharing their “idea” for what search would be,m it seemed solely focused on returning answers.

The idea of search being a funnel, just narrowing it down to a packaged “answer.”

Search as a funnel.

And yes, very often I am seeking a very specific answer. The lyrics of a sing. The name of the inventor of something.

But more often that not, even when I am looking for something specific, I like to keep my eyes tuned widely for the tangents, what was it once called, the “Adjacent Possible”, the interesting links to take me off to the internet rabbit holes. That’s what Google Traditional did, you got the potential answers at the top, but the further down the results you go, the more the doors open to explore. This was the niche filled by Miilionshort that rather than taking you to the top ranks of search, opened the off beaten tracks.

I see it search as a spray.

I’m old enough to remember using the card catalog in the library, you;d get the answer as a call number, a shelf location, more or less like a web address. Sometimes it was useful, sure. But I can remember the magic of letting my eyes wander left and right down the shelf, to see what might be of interest, adjacent.

And that is one of the potholes of the rush to AI glory, as in the vein of doing the mundane more “efficiently”, “faster” to get to the answer or to more quickly write that sentence. The fascination with the funnel focus is a move to diminish the wandering of the mind, the tuning of one’s senses to the unexpected.

I want search as both a spray and a funnel, not always at the same time. Stop forcing me to funnel. I want spray.

I’m also old enpugh to remember the web before any search — see Jay Hoffman’s How We Searched Before Search I was totally there for the NCSA What’s New Page. And can remember trying all the comic named tools- Archie, Veronica, Jughead (what an age when this was a naming convention). I remember the first web walking indexers, like MOMSpider. And oh my when Altavisita came on, it was a huge advance in exploring the web that had grown big enough in the 1990s to make a Whats New tracking not possible.

And when Google hit the web with that bare bones interface that did magic with the results, was it some kind of holy feat? Ahh, now, it was briefly until int became the Mega Borg of Everything.

When the first AI summaries of search results came on, I was all with the tricks to hide them. But it gets harder and harder ()yes, go ahead and tell me how your pet favorite search works better, I’m still most proficient with my Google chops, I can skim past the add and the AI chaff.

But as anyone knows, more and more those summarized results look potentially okay, with checking the listed sources (being wary when they rely on Facebook/reddit). And now I admit, on a few cases I have actually typed some clarification into the prompt box on those results. Yikes, I am biting off on the AI chub. Lightly. And damnit, in some cases, it has helped me narrow down an issue when it asks for a specific model of a device I was trying to troubleshoot. The funnel is handy.

On the other hand, I recently started probing as I reached for Google to find the answer to something I knew but forgot (I was looking for all of the URL variations WordPress gives you for RSS feeds, like when you cna aske for RSS2, or Atom). I knew it, but wanted to confirm.

And damn the AI smartness kept giving me wrong answers. Repeatedly. With self-assurance. Here is some fun as a I yell into the box

Alan is @cogdog

cogdog@cosocial.ca

I almost never go into the conversation with the Google AI search results, but I really thought this was an easy question, something I knew previously- the various formats for how WordPress offers its RSS Feed URL.

Watch me yell in the box as it repeatedly provides the wrong answer, despite the fact it is clear listed in the "references".

What if I asked it something that really mattered?

August 13, 2026, 7:49 pm 0 boosts 1 favorites

A lot of my searches are my usual keyword and search modifiers I have used for a long time, but I am sadly finding too, I am reaching for “Mr. Google” as my mother-in-law used to call it and asking almost question like queries.

Am I sliding more easily into the funnel?

Turning in another direction, in an ABC News (down under ABC) interview about internet enshittification the great and coiner of the word Cory Doctorow was asked if the internet was still fun, if there were places of joy out there. He offered a good list:

But I see wonderful things all day long. Mastodon has an algorithmic feed called Explore. I discovered Texture Tuesdays this week. And it’s photographers who take pictures of really dramatic textures. I went down a rabbit hole. It was amazing. Public Domain Review just spelunks through the Welcome Trust and various state archives. New South Wales has a really good archive but also the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress highlights a couple of things every day and every day it’s amazing and interesting and cool and weird.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-08/cory-doctorow-on-the-ai-bubble-and-inevitability/106982988

Even Mastodon has an algorithm that feeds its users, even the timeline serves up link after link on a treadmill. And indeed, I find it useful, but still it’s a Mike Caulfield stream. I feel for most others who are in that stream, they sample, read, repost, maybe bookmark, but then its back into stream. The one that flows like a funnel.

But I have this practice that is also credit to Mike’s SIFT model. When I spend some time with a link, I wonder, “Who made this?” “What else do they create?” “What is this organization about?” I whack of all but the top of the domain, and now the spray nozzle has opened. I find other projects worth noodling into. Or, most likely, a writer/organization that has written something of interest, also (hopefully) has places of linking out to web sites they find interesting.

Is the “web” just one fat fiber strand with strands hanging off, or is it really a web?

It’s the link! the humble <a href=""> that makes the entire web a sprayer, sending me in all kinds of directions. I find more of my interesting links a share and store come 3, 4, 5 links off of the one that sent me out. Why would I depend on what one service feeds me to explore, when ever single link out into the big internet sea is a book on the shelf that deserves some sideways scanning?

In actuality, I want both spray and stream, but I am used to thinking this way. The more that AI supported systems function mostly to funnel information, I cant help bu wonder how people will learn to look sideways for the spray. I see it as creating more dependence on the answer box to provide like a vending machine.

All of this is just my idle speculation. But poof, this is my blog.

Update 10 Minutes Later

I had this tab open from a link Scott Leslie mentioned in my Mastodon funnel-flower to a curious service that by name alone appealed to me – check out rabbithole at https://rabbit-hole.reppie.org/

My first was to play with it, see what happens if you rabbithole rabbithole

Alan is @cogdog

cogdog@cosocial.ca

@sleslie I like it! Tried to dig a recursive hole rabbithole https://rabbit-hole.reppie.org/?path=rabbithole

And finding its case sensitive

Rabbithole https://rabbit-hole.reppie.org/?path=Rabbithole

August 25, 2026, 3:55 pm 0 boosts 1 favorites

but the more I dug the more interesting it got, and I went but just a little bit deep.

Alan is @cogdog

cogdog@cosocial.ca

@sleslie Oh you are sending me deep. I am intrigued by rabbit-hole, its results offer mixes of links, videos, concepts, etymology, each leading deeper/wider.

I like how it saves a trail (Hello Dr. Memex) that itself is sharable

https://rabbit-hole.reppie.org/?path=ds106%20daily%20create/Digital%20art%20techniques/Programming%20language

August 25, 2026, 5:08 pm 0 boosts 1 favorites

Featured Image: Patent images of a funnel and a sprayer, likely not the most kosher for being open licensed. Come and sue me.

Then ten years later to the day, the morning where I called Mom from my road trip across Canada. We laughed and talked about the sadness of missing Dad, then 10 years gone. And what we do in a month when I visited her in Florida.

How would I know less then 12 hours later while having dinner in Belleville that I’d get the call from my sister that Mom was gone. Heart attack.

It was somewhat numbing. I retold the story to Cori and Jessy Lee that the tears were not there at the funeral nor while my sisters and I packed up Moms stuff.

It was on the last day of my long odyssey road trip, somewhere in the dark on Highway 87 south of Winslow. I was watching the odometer in Red Dog hit the 15000 mile mark for the trip. At that moment on my iPod shuffle came up randomly the Rolling Stones song “She’s a Rainbow.”

That was when the tears came. Three months later.

See it was that night in Belleville I was visiting Andy Forgrave, who was a great comfort and listened to my stories about Mom. He asked if he could play a song that he felt matched the stories. That song was… “She’s a Rainbow”

She comes in colours ev’rywhere
She combs her hair
She’s like a rainbow
Coming, colours in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colours

I had to pull off the highway for all the tears, maybe 30 miles from closing the loop on that long trip.

Ten years to the day, 15 and 25 years ago. My sister just texted this most classic photo of my parents on the beach at Ocean City Maryland. Look how happy and alive they look. She’s rainbow.

I see in the background the condo they built in front of the place we would go every year, the Surfrider, a two story building with 3 lodging places. That condo blocked our direct view of the boardwalk!

I can see Aldo behind it the old Stowaway hotel on 21st street. Go in that direction, turn left on 21st and our place was on the next side street. Go another block or two west on 21st and you’d be at the original Phillips Crab House.

15 and 25. How does that all mold into the normal? It happens but is soothed by remembering the stories, the feel of being on that beach.

In honor of them, I’m picking weeds for Dad and looking for Mom’s butterflies.

15 and 25.

Featured Image: framed photo of mom and dad’s wedding portrait that hangs on our photo wall, with a (Canadian) quarter on dad and a dime and nickel on Mom.

This seems poignant given what passes for making digital images is not manipulating pixels and layers but typing into a box and doing the lift of clicking a button.

I’m also aiming to keep the blog muscles limber after some summer atrophy. Today’s challenge is I am in town for some errands with extra time, so I am seeing if I can blog via the JetPack app on a mobile.

I’ll start with the end, same as the featured image on this post (hmm on the mobile can’t seem to find where to enter alt text, so it sits in the caption) (also for complaining, on mobile Mastodon app, an images alt text cannot be copied, so I’m forced to screenshot it and get the text out of the iOS photo editor).

Oh here’s the remix. Ooooh Ahhhh.

Where it Started

I read and enjoyed the soccer and bird photos from Tom Woodward (Virginia resident) noting in the first paragraph his comment.

Round one was a tournament in Norther VA which is really home of the massive data center. I should have done an entire photo series about those strange buildings standing amidst the strip malls which were former farms, which were former swamps. 

My brain went to wondering and feeling confident that someone had already done a remix of the Virginia is for Lovers motto by inserting “Data Center” before the “Lovers.” But my minimal web search came up dry. I’m sure still it’s out there.

But I let it slide away. I had Other Stuff To Do.

Yet this morning I scanned in my email Bryan Alexander’s SubThing on American Opposition to AI Grows. At the top is a photo of a Data Center near Bryan’s home in northern Virginia.

Two knocks on the door called for a remix.

Doing the Remix

I likely won’t go into the usual gory detail as my fingers are tap tired and my tacos almost gone.

I did a google image search and spotted amongst the repeated design on billboards and tshirts and image of maybe a more vintage style patch with text that looked like it was sewed. And the necessary big red heart.

Okay I found it on an Etsy site and I am breaking copyright law openly here in the sake of parody. Send me letters if I go to jail.

I loaded it in PhotoShop and did a lasso select to copy the “Lovers” text to its own layer where I could shrink it and move lower to make room to insert my text.

To fill the hole, I used my favorite clone stamp to brush in the black background.

My approach for text is to choose a bright color like green and try some fonts and sizing to match the word Virginia. I forget the font, it’s an Apple serif, but some forced resizing got a good enough match. I change the text to Data Centers, resized and moved lower. It was still too big but first I matched the text color and gave it some rough texture with the dissolve layer style and adding some monochromatic noise.

This ended up rasterizing the text, but that’s okay, that let me move out the Centers to offset like the “is for” text.

Hmmm it’s a bit square. I do this often to make images stretch wider but expanding the Canvas. With the rectangle marquee tool I copy just the left edge of the wood over to the left edge and the same on the right.

And yes, I admit I use Generative Fill to make the wood stretch.

Now I want Bryan’s photo in there. I first use the Select Object on the patch, and then use the Paste Special – Behind to create a mask puts the image (in a higher layer) to look like it’s in the bs ground. I played with making bits ops Tory lighter, but one of the layer styles (screen?) worked better to make the photo look grainy.

Boom, that was it. It took maybe 30 minutes and was damn therapeutic to escape a spreadsheet that was giving me a headache.

Then it had to be shared for Bryan.

Alan is @cogdog

cogdog@cosocial.ca

@bryanalexander Using your photo (hopefully with permission) from https://substack.com/inbox/post/212198696

I have been thinking about your state motto…

August 25, 2026, 5:27 pm 0 boosts 2 favorites

And there is an old school people hardly do this any more remix and the DS106 creaation narrative (ditto).

All done over Tacos.

There’s a blog post!

I managed to get her to Andy’s Transmission in Moose Jaw, a trusty mechanic who previously fixed a sensor issue that had stumped the local Ford dealer. I got “the call” they had tried new spark plugs, new fuel filter, but reported that the engine was pretty much shot, it needed major work on the valves. When I got to the shop, it took three of the workers there to get it started, one at the wheel, one spraying fluid into the engine, and one to point and send orders.

We drove back to our acreage on the gravel back roads, so I could go slow. Mostly she moved along, but as I headed up a very slight rise half a mile from home I could feel the power fading. I just hoped she had enough to get in the driveway, but we did, and parked it there November 12, 2025.

The last odometer reading was 212,718 miles, making for a total over 15 years of 131,023 miles and adventures. In what will most likely be a long rambling memory post, I draw upon my spreadsheet of logging service and repairs, quite a few tagged flickr photos, blog posts, but mostly my own memory bank.

The first ride in Red Dog (which did not even have a name then) purchased July 14, 2010 from Chapman Chevrolet in Payson, Arizpna, was smooooooother. The reason for getting this truck had something to do with kayaks.

July 17, 2010 (87,240 miles) A Kayak Holder

At thus time I was driving a very handy and gas friendly Mitsubishi Lancer, which did well for my many trips from home in Strawberry Arizona for my then frequent travel out of Phoenix Shy Harbor Airport. I had bought a few years earlier a kayak for using on the Mogollon Rim Country Lakes, as well as ones near Flagstaff, and a few trips to Phoenix for going out on the reservoirs there. The kayak was fairly easy to load on its rooftop racks.

A friend who was moving offered me another kayak, one with better handling and some storage, so now I had two. In anticipating of my sister Judy coming for a visit, I wanted to take her kayaking, but my car could only handle one. It seemed time to consider getting a truck, for that reason as well for being more versatile in National Forest open camping and also holding stuff.

Besides trucks are cool. Way back when as a grad student in Geology, I bought a baby truck, a blue Chevy S-10 for going back and forth from Phoenix to my field work area near Bishop, California.

I was looking for something with more muscle.

I did perusing of ads and maybe Craigs List for local sales, but to be honest, I am not that good a mechanical judge when looking at them. Late one night in July 2010, just for grins, I looked up the web site for a local dealer in Payson, Chapman Chevrolet, and I spotted a Red Ford F-150 for sale at a price I had the cash for. See how I am for keeping stuff? I still have the receipt and my Arizona title.

On July 10, I set up a test drive, and it was truck love at first drive. It had power (V8), four wheel drive, and an extra long bed, good for loading the kayaks Maybe the only lack was not much storage inside the cab. It had 88, 695 miles on it, supposedly used by people to pull a camper. I bought it July 14,

Thus our story starts. Here the truck is (it had no name then) 3 days loaded with my two kayaks (the smaller kayak fit completely inside the bed). You can see it still has temporary tags.

And rather than Judy and I having to take turns kayaking with the old setup, we got to go out on the water together.

From then on, the truck was mostly my vehicle for doing stuff around the Arizona Rim Country, I am pretty sure I got the call from a friend in Payson (you know the saying about people knowing you are as a truck friend) to help move a refrigerator. My Mom came for her annual Thanksgiving visit and she asked for a stool to help her climb in the front seat.

I did splurge and go for the vanity COGDOG plates.,

Into the end of 2010 and blasting into 2011 I was doing lots of travel, using the Mitsubishi for airport trips. It was a bit over the top for one person to have two vehicles, but they were both paid for. Plans were in motion though, with March 2011 being my last day of work for the New Media Consortium and my plan for a self-made sabbatical and a long road trip I coined “The Odyssey” that started June 23.

But significantly, before then, I believe May 2011, it was a great fortunate that Jim Groom got a speaking invite at Glendale Community College, and he made arrangements to stay longer for a visit with me in Strawberry and we fit in a road trip to the Grand Canyon.

I vividly remember our conversation on the drive back, after leaving Flagstaff and driving the twisty highway 87 at night back to Strawberry. It was then Jim and I were talking about my travel plans, and he said something like, “This red truck needs a name! Something like Red Dog”- and so it was, that the red Ford F-150 had a moniker that stuck.

A significant moment in the winter of 2011. Believe it or not, there are places in Arizona like where I lived that got good bouts of heavy snowfall. With the Mitsubishi, one of those big storms required a bit of shovelling to get out of the driveway, especially as the early local plows would pile it up even higher.

But with The Truck, I got to wondering how it would do backing out in 4-wheel drive through the snow. It went through like it was butter, and I never had to shovel my way out again.

Winning!

To do this extra long trip, I got a camper shell to put on Red Dog, so now she had a big shell on her back. Shiny and red too!

I always preferred having an open bed, but for a year’s worth of road travel, storage was needed. This was the back of Red Dog the night before my trip started, and I had not even loaded in my road bike.

Road Supplies flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

June 23, 2011 (97,920 miles) The Odyssey

This post is already too long and I’m only a year into Red Dog’s story! That trip that went through November 18, 2011 and added on 15000 miles is already well documented in 95 blog posts, almost 2400 flickr photos, and a google map that includes all stops registered by Red Dog’s odometer.

As I was no longer on a regulat paycheck, I downsized the auto fleet and sold the Mitsubishi to a friend’s daughter.

If I had to pick a few, a key point on a highway in southern Idaho was watching as Red Dog flipped its odometer past 100000 (actually there is a video of the flip happening).

I lack the photo, but after taking a ferry from Port Angeles Washington to Sidney BC, I had to go through Canadian customs. It was almost end of the day, and I tried to be patient as they emptied every single item out of the back of Red Dog, and inspected my boxes. I had no contraband, but still it was un-nerving.

For some foreshadowing, here I am revelling the scenery of southern Saskatchewan, with a stop in Moose Jaw to visit Dean Shareski (who was kind to notice my typo)

On the stop heading down the east coast of the US, I saw my family in Baltimore. My sister Harriet decided around mile 106000 I needed a Red Dog mascot to travel in Red Dog the truck (I long kept the mascot behind the seat).

I closed the 15000 mile loop November 18, returning to Strawberry, Arizona, here a photo on that last day’s drive.

I was there maybe 3 weeks before heading out to Melbourne, Australia (Red Dog rested at home)

January 27, 2012 (~116000 miles) Fredericksburg Ho

Like the venerable, rolling stone, Red Dog was loaded up full in Janaury for a cross country move to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I started a new position with the DTLT team at University of Mary Washington, yes, Jim Groom was my BOSS. I packed the truck this time with more stuff, including a kayak (?)

Again, lots to the story, but in November, 2012, Red Dog was loaded again, moving back to Strawberry. After all this travel for the 2011 Odyssey and a move to Virginia and back, I had zero road encounters with wildlife, including in 2012, a late night drive across highway 260 in Arizona which is notorious for elk on the highway.

A week after returning to Arizona, I had gone for dinner with friends in Phoenix, and driving back to my house slowly through the Strawberry neighborhood, I came around the corner and saw three elk standing in the road. I stopped. They looked up. And one of them walked toward Red Dog, put his head down, and butted the front of the truck! I thought this was just a funny story, but the next morning when I went outside, I noticed I had a memento of this elk encounter.

Out and About Strawberry Years 2012-2014 (130967 miles)

This post is already a rambling giant hemorrhaging post, and I have like 12 more years to cover. See, I am not one of those hip modern bloggers who craft their posts meticulously by having GenAI help organize their thoughts. Here you get my flawed, unstructured, human spouting of — oops, that’s another post.

After returning to Arizona with a mind to stay, the camper shell was not needed. I sold it to a young couple through a Craigs List ad. To make up for lack of storage, and it also looked good, I bought and installed a truck box for tools and stuff.

Okay, so there were lots of camping trips around Arizona especially Rim Country, New Mexico, Colorado, California. The kayak was frequently loaded and used in various lakes (favoirite close was Willow Springs Lake). Once I was driving north on highway 87 and spotted a car coming down in the other lane with roof mounted camera contraption. I waved, so me and Red Dog are semi-immortalized in Google Street View.

My neighbor friend Leo and I drove our trucks into the forest and he taught me all about chainsawing downed trees for firewood. Various projects needing loads of lumber, stone, dirt, gravel, Red Dog did it.

October 2014 (148607 miles) 5 Months in Kamloops

It was time again for an extended time away afforded by the fantastic opportunity organized by Brian Lamb and Irwin Devries (miss you much, my friend) for a 4month fellowship in Open Learning at Thompson Rivers University. I loaded up Red Dog for a scenic trip up the west coast and into B.C. (with some worrisome moments with paperwork at the border).

The trip called for a fuel pump replacement in Bishop, California, a timely stop as that was the place I had done my ASU grad school research working out of that first S-10 pickup truck. Red Dog thus navigated its coldest weather (perfectly) for a Canadian Winter, braved the infamous Coquihalla Highway for back and forth visits to see my cousin in Vancouver, and all kinds of exploring around Kamloops for sightseeing and snowshoeing. Another milestone happened here with the 150000 odometer flip.

The return trip had a stop in Seattle for a flight to Hawaii to speak at the 20th TCC Conference. So a week on the island, return to Seattle, and hop in Red Dog for another scenic trip back to Strawberry.

April 2015 (155592 miles) Back in Arizona For a While (plus a dog for Red Dog)

Settled back in Strawberry, me and Red Dog continue road trips to Colorado, camping, etc. A key moment in April 2016 was a long term contract project with Creative Commons that gave me enough stability to go adopt Felix from the Payson Humane Society. On adoption day, I walked him out to the truck and had this thought “Will he want/be able to jump inside?”

July 1-23 2017 (172243 miles) To Canada and Back

The next phase for my life had again a loading of “stuff” into Red Dog for another big road trip. Note the fancy truck bag I had purchased to store gear in the back.

Cori and I had been seeing each other a while with plane trips from Arizona to Saskatchewan, for the summer we planned an extended visit where me and Felix and Red Dog would visit. I mapped a route to visit family in Denver and Laramie and also to hit some good camp spots in Montana, then see as much as we could fit in in Saskatchewan including historic sites, camping, a visit to Lake Diefenbaker, meeting Cori’s parents, and an unfortunate incident while we were out to dinner where Felix escaped to Cori’s second story roof needing a call to the fire department.

I opted for a different route home through west central Montana, through western Wyoming, down past Flaming Gorge in Utah, and home cutting across Navajo land in Arizona. I had planned one more night camping but decided to load on coffee and beeline back to Strawberry,

The iconic butte scenery

October 29, 2017 (178305 miles) To Australia via Chico

Look, Red Dog is packed again for a long time on the road. I was headed for a month’s stay in Melbourne Australia as part of a fellowship with the International Specialized Skills Institute. No, I had not outfitted the truck with pontoons or sails, but I had an important stop before the plane took off.

This photo was near the start, somewhere north of Prescott, Arizona.

It was 1000 miles from Strawberry to Chico, California we drove as my friends Kim and Jeff Jaxson had kindly offered to watch Felix for the month. I got to take familiar route across Death Valley that I had done often in my grad school Geology days. I even used Red Dog to re-enact the Sea Level photo I took in 1988 that found its way into a German CD cover (yes, an Amazing Story).

Somewhere in the ride back across California Red Dog flipped the 180000 line.

April 2018 (184104 miles) She Said Yes in Arizona (and then came back)

Red Dog was just on the set for the scene when Cori came to Arizona in early April for her first visit to Strawberry. She had said “yes” a month earlier, but here a the moment after picking her up at the airport as I had flowers waiting in the truck.

We had made the plans for me to drive to Saskatchewan in May for our June 1 wedding date. I had one more trip to attend the OER18 Conference in Bristol followed by a visit with Laura Ritchie in Chichester after which my NetNarr collegue Mia Zamora and I were slated to visit Catherine Cronin in Galway for a workshop.

The Ireland part of the trip went awry when while in Chichester, the vision in my right eye went completely blurred, a flareup of my diabetic retinopathy necessitated a trip to the hospital. Thankful was I for the UK health care that got me to a specialist, but the recommendation was for me to get back to Phoenix to see the opthalmologist who had been treating me.

After many calls with Cori, who wanted to fly to England to get me home, she agreed to take time off of school to meet me in Phoenix for my rescheduled trip back early. I was eyed out of the UK.

We timed our arrivals to get to the Phoenix airport together, she from Regina, me from the UK, but I was not going to be driving anywhere. Cori drove me first to see my specialist (an injection in the eye relieved the pressure), then up to Cottonwood to pick up Phoenix where he was boarded. She was brave to navigate Phoenix in the big old truck, but did it perfectly.

We had a weekend together so she could be sure my eye was good enough to drive to Canada in May. The next few weeks were packing for that trip.

May 7, 2018 (187220 miles) Moving to Canada

Once once one more Red Dog was fully packed with all I could carry to move to Saskatchewan. Felix and I headed north up the familiar highway 87 towards Flagstaff, then on to Durango to see my friend Mike Kelly.

It was across Monarch Pass in Colorado, flying through Montana, a stayover in Miles City, zip through the border, and finally arriving to unload at our new place. Red Dog was now a Canadian truck.

Through Aug 23, 2026 (219718 miles) The Seven Canada Years

Alas there is so much more, but this post is now almost as long as the miles on the odometer. In 2019 I went through the paperwork to import the truck and get it registered. It required getting headlights that were on on daylight, and just that first winter made it clear she needed an engine oil heater.

Red Dog was my regular vehicle for trips to town, but also hauled plenty of lumber, firewood, bricks, trees and shrubs, trailers, etc. My daughter Jessy Lee loved using it every day when she worked in Moose Jaw, and I would have loved to have given her a working red truck (there was a funny story the first summer when her friends visited and the cops pulled them over a bit suspicious of the Arizona plates). This weekend I did give Jessy Lee the toy Red Dog that had ridden around with it everywhere (seen there at 206000) the one back in 2010 my sister Harriet gave me (106000 mile mark).

The 200,000 mile odometer flip happened June 2020 just north of Eyebrow, SK. The caption includes “I’m taking bets where 300,000 will happen, because this truck is in it for the long haul.”

The truck was even more handy when we moved to our acreage for again hauling water trailers. And oh yes, when we drove in April snow of 2022 to outside of Llyodminster, Alberta to pick up a Polaris side by side we bought and Red Dog towed home, at 209000 miles on the clock.

Red Dog turned out to be super handy strong on the winter days when the tired on our snow clearing tractor Matilda (yes every vehicle gets a name) got stuck on the ice, or the times when I went a bit too far into the ditch. Put Red Dog into 4WD low and she just pulled like it was easy.

Alan is @cogdog

cogdog@cosocial.ca

The phone rings, “I’m in a ditch” but Red Dog the 1998 F-150 and its might toe strap to the rescue. How is your Monday?

December 2, 2024, 2:40 pm 2 boosts 3 favorites

Alas last summer I noticed Red Dog was more stubborn to get started and when not used for a while, she ran rough. In August 2025 I had her checked at the Ford Dealer where they identified possible engine sensor issues, bad spark plugs, and maybe a valve leak. In November, I took her to a local mechanic in Moose Jaw, Andy’s Transmission, where they replaced the plugs, sensors, fuel filter, but alas, said that the engine likely needed a major valve overhaul as it was leaking oil in the engine.

So it was end of the line when I got her home, and let her sit. A few weeks ago I got hopeful, and charged up the battery. Maybe a long rest would be a magic charm. I had a recording of ther abortive efforts, she would crank and the engine tried, but it never got to idle. Red Dog was done.

Alan is @cogdog

cogdog@cosocial.ca

@jimgroom @creating Alas, Jim, your namesake is running no more. If you can use Red Dog in a diorama, she's yours!

February 3, 2026, 5:12 am 0 boosts 1 favorites

I waited through the summer knowing I should try to sell the old truck. A salvage operation from Regina would only offer like $150 to come out and take her for scrap, but the new tires I had put on 2025 had only 3000 miles on them and were worth more than that.

Because I am like among the last 1000 humans not on Facebook, I was happy 2 weeks ago that Jessy Lee was willing to list on Facebook Marketplace.

Apparently the interest in old Fords is huge! it listed 730 clicks to view and some 30 saves. The messages poured in, and the person most keenly interested offered $500 over my list price (the word is that they love Red Fords).

Today a young man came by to take her away, bought by his boss. Apparently theory have the same year and model Ford but the body is falling apart, so they plan to “drop the engine” into Red Dog. So off she goes to maybe some more life.

Okay, I have made maybe the longest bog post in history, overloaded with photos, all about a 28 year old red pickup truck. I am not sad at all, I had more memories and places seen in that truck than would fit. And Red Dog brought me safe here to life with Cori on our “farm.”

Thanks, Red Dog!

Featured Image: Composite of first photo of Red Dog from July 10, 2010 looking all shiny new in Strawberry Arizona That’s Not My Gray Mitsubishi! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) combined with Red Dog’s last parking spot after getting her home November 12, 2025 Red Dog’s Last Stand flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

Being this week is a camping vacation, I missed nearly all of it, but I was happy to join in with Maren Deepwell for a free form campfire social hour of just blabbing about summer, camping, dogs, not AI, storytelling, needling Jim Groom. We had the ds06 radio time honored tradition of technology “futzing” (mic issues) which there is a place where making mistakes with the tech is laudable. Thanks Mark Corbett Wilson for being at the campfire to assure me my mic was working!

It’s warming to note that the pulse of DS106 Radio remains steady, some 15 years after Jim Groom blurted out somewhere that what DS206 needed was a radio station and Grant Potter went off and built one. It’s low key and about the opposite of viral/trending as one can get, but has a regular group of participants. It’s a lesson of the internet being more of a place for niches and wonder than just groping constantly for attention. Stay small!

It’s funny as from the featured image used here of one of those curious things happen from sharing a flickr photo of an old multiband radio that my Dad owned, not only AM and FM but also frequencies we could tune into police and shortwave (?) maybe. It was the radio that went on every family trip to the beach in Ocean City, Maryland.

I posted this in 2011 when my sisters and I had to empty our Mom’s house after she passed away (Dad went 10 years earlier). I did not keep the radio just took a photo. For some reason it gets quite a few views, near the top of my flickr photos. I sometimes log into pixsy, a reverse image serivce that tracks reuses of flickr photos, just to see where my old photos have travelled. According to them, Dad’s Radio has been used on 869 web sites, woah.

Most of the use of pixsy seems to be to go after illegal use of one’s photos, but I only use it to see where they have been reused. So it was nice to see Dad’s radio atop a story on Paradima Radio (90.2 FM!) a Spanish radio station’s web site

So my photo is one still licensed CC BY which means legally I could chomp after Paradigma Radio for not attributing me. I could wage law suits. But why? What do I gain? I’d rather just enjoy that still the internet an be amazing enough to be seeing my Dad’s old radio sit atop a Spanish language web site. I don’t need money or glory from my photos. I just like sharing them and knowing the are sometimes of use to others. Sometimes you find where and it feels like an Amazing Story.

Old radios and internet radio stations, still living on the web that seems so problematic to other folks. Take a break and just be amazed.

Featured Image: Dad’s Radio flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license (see I attribute myself even though I do not have to by license rules, any idea why?).