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?).

It was an extended period of seeing the trusty old blog respond with “Error Establishing Database Connection.” I started to write out all the steps I went through, but it was even boring me. The short version starts the incredibly human and thorough support of Chris at Reclaim Hosting

• I shedded old unsupported plugins
• My old database had issues of language sets / collation (?terminology) that came up as errors, and also I know was a long running into MAJOR problems in that commenters who used emojis saw them rendered as “??” My research on fixing made me dizzy at the prospect. Chris went in command line and fixed that old issue.
• I had not optimized my database in eons, in fact I had to learn the magic link to find PHPMyAdmin in Reclaim Cloud (find the ****.reclaim.cloud url for your site and apppend :8443 to it) (I did learn this other way to optimize/repair database directly in WP)
• Finally I found PHP errors that with some help from Mr Google (!) indicated I was getting hit by SQL Injections attempts, I think through the RESTAPI trying to send URLs that would trigger commands to reveal admin user details. It looked like they were crashing the database.
• I set up WordFence to firewall these, but they kept happening.
• Then the Home Simpson Doh! Moment where Chris noted I was a few decimals behind in WordPress upgrades. BING! It stopped

I can’t thank Chris and Reclaim Hosting enough, if you hang your web sites anywhere else, I pity you. I am counting on Reclaim to go far beyond another 13 years because I have a lot of posts to come.

And which has been slow. I see a bunch of fellow blog heads (Jim, Tim, Sarah) have kept up a daily Blaugust pace, and I am moved by how long that has gone on (never heard it til this year, but the internet is big), but I slothed off. Maybe I will pick it up my Blogtober, or just get the blog in motion again.

This thing is on, and seems to be staying on. It’s safe to charge out of that blog hole. The only thing that every alleviates the block is to blast something out.

Go!

Featured Image: Dog Snoop found on PikPik labeled as royalty free, but my research questions this. Oh well, attribution chasing is so much work, I’d rather be blogging.

Oh no, Mr Bill!

One or two folks notified me (thanks Brian B and JR), but it hardly seems to have created havoc on the internet. I was on a vacation road trip and debugging my Reclaim Cloud dashboard in the car on a mobile device was not viable. What I could do is the venerable reboot / unplug / replug in.

My WordPress technical rust is showing. It took me a bit (thanks Reclaim for the docs) to find our where I could get to PHPMyAdmin on Reclaim Cloud. I had not done any optimize or database checks for eons. I also zapped some tables no longer in use. There’s a lot of “stuff” in the cellar.

Next was reviewing a few plugins that were not critical, a few that were rather old. And then digging amongst the various error logs to see what I could smell out.

Rust.

As near as I can tell there are issues with the age of my database and tables having different character encodings, older ones with tables using latin1_swedish_ci and newer ones using utf8 (thus the lack of emoji support in comments). The bits I read on fixes sound a bit intense and calling for some surgery inside SQL statements.

Fear not of wee handful of readers and various bots that fly by, with hopefully some support assist and a wee bit of luck, this old blog barge will sail again.

I thought I had an Uptime Robot monitor set uo, but alas no (now in place).

In lieu of blogging about blogging here is blogging about not blogging until the blog is fixed.

The blog shall rise again!

Featured Image: Broken flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license remixed with a screen shot of the Error Establishing a Database Connection message my site has been not so proudly displaying this week.

As thus it was following the adventures of Stephen Downes as he bicycles around Iceland that got me thinking of places I saw there for my month of house sitting in 2008 including a Gigapan panorama image I made on my last day seeing Thingvellir somehow becoming used in print form in a 6 foot printed high atlas.

Find the thread there!

And thus I am spending more time in 2026 re-writing a blog post from 2010 fixing links, adding images, and filling in what was a skimpy post. Why? Shrug. Because it’s my blog and I care about what’s left there hanging in the dusty corners of not too many people’s interest.

Zzzzzzzzzip rewind, let’s dial this back a few clicks.

Following Stephen Downes Iceland Bicycle Trek

I gotta admire how Stephen retires, far from puttering around on a golf course and sleeping in, he flies to Iceland with his bicycle and camping gear to explore. Not only that, somehow he is still reading papers and web sites to post to OLDaily- you can follow his bike adventure in Mastodon via #SDdaily.

It’s also a bit nostalgic for that month in 2008 when I live in Iceland to house sit for a family on vacation with my main responsibility of counting their 17 Icelandic horses in a pasture and tending a sweet Icelandic sheepdog named Skinna.

When I saw Stephen was camping near Geysir, I commented from my own memories of seeing natural landmarks there that anywhere else would be a park with fees and crowds.

Downes ?

Downes@mastodon.social

July 6, 2026. To Geysir. Iceland, Day 12. A bit longer a ride today (I didn't feel like staying in Laugarvatn) and fewer hills, but cooler and again against the wind. I made it feeling better than the previous day – still not strong but I made good time. I didn't actually go look at the geysers – time for that tomorrow. It's a major tourist draw and – disappointingly – you can't buy food here, only order from the restaurant. #SDDaily

July 6, 2026, 9:09 pm 2 boosts 1 favorites

Though yes, Geysir is a tourist draw for the Golden Circle, so not as quiet as some other places I remember like the majestic waterfall Seljalandfoss that I had to myself for hours. But in his reply Stephen mentioned that he had hoped to ride to Thingvellir, but was challenged by the grade (it looks like he did get there).

And thus the cascade of memories.

From that one place name.

Thingvellir 2008

I only got to Thingvellir or more appropriately Þingvellir on my very last day from my month living in Iceland, as it was a place if interest not only for its history as where Iceland formed a parliament in oh the year 980! but also from my university years studying Geology it is a spot to see as a place to see on land the manifestation of sea floor spreading and extensional plate tectonics.

And indeed like most of the places in southern Iceland I explored (by car) in November 2008, there was no one there at this national park. I stood in the rift zone!

And as I was doing regularly in my travels then, I was not only taking digital photos, I was making high resolution panoramic images with an interesting rig called a “Gigapan,” So in the quiet I set the device up on my tripod and set it in motion to collect images.

This device held a consumer grade pocket digital camera, then I was using for much of my travel photos a Canon IXY Digital 3000 IS I had bought in Japan as it was a model not even available yet in the US (it is in the Powershot SD990). The camera was attached to the rack of the Gigapan, and to create an image I used the controls to identify the top left of a large scene and the bottom right. Then you set it in motion, and the robot control moved the camera and pressed the shutter to take maybe 50? 80? separate images in a grid pattern, each image at maybe less than 4 Megapixels each). Later, its software would stitch them together into a single high resolution image by combining all those images into one. And when published on the GigaPan site, viewers could navigate it by zooming and panning, as well as creating “snapshots” of details in the big image.

Here is a video of the rig in action for another Gigapan image captured at Point Lobos, California.

Now here is the funny thing, as I was letting the Gigapan do its thing at Thingvellir, my quiet alone time there ended.

One car drove in, with 3 young men who got out, walked up and said hello (I was at one of the main viewpoint areas). I was shocked when one of them said, “Hey, that’s a GigaPan!” as I had set this up in several locations over a few years, a few in Arizona where I lived, in Melbourne Australia, in Beijing, Hong Kong, Golden Colorado, the Great Sand Dunes south of there- and never had one person recognized what I was using -it did draw a crowd, like a curious pan handler in Beijing (that’s Brian Crosby in the background)

But here, in late November, alone at Thingvellir, some Americans popped out of their car and knew this device, I recall one mentioned being a student at Carnegie Mellon University where it was part of a project, I think he mentioned working on the software.

Thank kind of serendipity often warranted the Amazing Story treatment, but I guess I never added this one.

But wait there is more, and it’s BIG.

My Thingvellir Photo in a Giant Printed Atlas

The image I created there with Thingvellir was not really one of my better ones, I had forgotten to set the camera to lock it’s exposure, so it adjusted as it traversed into more light portions lit by the sun. So the end image has a number of vertical bands. This is a screenshot if the image that was published on the GigaPan site:

The wild thing is that in 2026 the GigaPan site is still online, that seems amazingly unlikely the way web sites are abandoned across the board. The link for my Thingvellir image does not work (originally the viewer relied on Flash), but it does show up if you search for Thingvellir.

Sometime in early 2011 I got an email from a staff person at an Australian publisher named Millennium House seeking permission to use the image in a book, referencing it’s link in the GigaPan site. There was no Creative Commons license options on my image at GigaPan.com but in my reply I stated I share everything elsewhere under a CC BY license, just seeking attribution. As often it was, this was new information to a commercial publisher:

Thank you so much for getting back to me – appreciate the prompt response. Thank you so much for agreeing to allow us to use your image in our atlas.

As I’m not really familiar with the workings of creative commons, I’ve been and had a look online– and I believe that we are allowed to use the image with your permission, provided credit is given for the image? Is this how it works? Please advise if there are any fees involved. I’d just like to be sure of the terms and conditions before I arrange for an agreement document to be drawn up (I’ll need a postal address for the document too).

As you will have seen at our website, Earth Platinum will be the world’s largest atlas (at a whopping 1.8m x 2.8m when open!). It’s a limited edition and we will only print 31 copies. I am not yet sure whether all copies of proofs will be needed by the printer, or whether there will be proofs to spare. If there are spare proofs, then we would be happy to send you a copy of the page/s that feature your image (although it may be a little large to fit in a portfolio!).

Feb 28, 2011 email from Janet Parker at Millennium House Publishers

So I just had to sign a non-exclusive license agreement where all I got was credit in the published book (which is all I ever want, but wait for more). They did require a high resolution image for the scale of the book — if you are not used to meters, the print size of an opened page is 6 feet by 9 feet! The Gigapan software just sent it to the web site in some format that it allowed viewing via a Flash player, so to get them an image I had to run it through Photoshop I think to create a 500MB TIFF that I sent them via ftp.

I got a few updates from Managing Director Gordon Cheers documenting the publication of the Earth Platinum Atlas (as I write this the Millennium House Publishers web site is not reachable), including June 2012 when one of the 31 printed copies was set up in the British Library. Gordon cordially invited me to be there, not really knowing I was then self employed and not likely jetting to London for the soiree.

He did send a photo of where my Thingvellir Gigapan image appeared across the bottom of pages 24-25 of Earth Platinum in the section on Plate Tectonics.

That has to be one of the biggest reuses of my photo! Earth Platinum is still a record holder in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest atlas. It was only later that I learned that each copy came at a $100k price so look at how “smart” I was to give it away for free. Call me a fool for not asking for a fee.

Because that is how I work. I seek not to make money from what I create

Along with the British Library, I can trace that the National Library of New Zealand and the State Library of New South Wales bought copies, as well as the National Centre of Documentation & Research (United Arab Emirates) and “private collectors” in Saudi Arabia and Australia. That’s a hell of a coffee table book! According to a press release from the State Library of New South Wales, the Earth Platinum Atlas was printed in Italy and bound in Hong Kong.

Gordon cheers had emailed a picture of the Altas at the Hong Kong Bindery

He must have thought I was a high flyer (who was dumb enough not to ask for a photo fee) as he invited be to the launch at the National Centre of Documentation & Research in Abu Dhabi.

Alas I was busy June 12, 2012 as apparently I was hanging out with Scott Leslie in Vancouver and also sitting in Brian Lamb’s then office at UBC booting up the old CAREO server.

Didn’t I Blog This?

Heck yeah, in August 2012, I posted this tale of the Big Atlas

But when i visited the post this week, it was full of dead links, and missing a lot of details I found in old emails from Millennium House. So instead of blogging something new, I was rewriting old posts, which I do enjoy. There’s so much more to the story, and it swings full force to 2026 and then back to 2008– through connections and paths that no LLM could ever model, and even if it did, it would never have the experience of being alone making images at Thingvellir and getting weird requests from Australian publishers.

More on the GigaPan

And then there is that weird device I had in my possession. I came across it via my colleague Keene Haywood when we worked together briefly at the New Media Consortium. Keene was keenly savvy with both tech and connections, and it was his Austin connections to an outfit called Charmed Labs that was working on the prototype. Keene set it up so I could get one of the GigaPan prototypes before they went into production.

And it is only in 2026 that I came across the place this device had in science and technology back in an era where people did this crazy wild efforts- the GigaPan was a NASA Mars Research funded project in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University (remember the guy who showed up at Thingvellir and recognized my GigaPan?) – this was one of several CMU efforts under the Global Connection Project.

The technology behind the Mars rover PMAs inspired Randy Sargent at Ames Research Center and Illah Nourbakhsh at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to look at ways consumers might be able to use similar technology for more “down-to-Earth” photography and virtual exploration.

In 2005, Sargent and Nourbakhsh created the Global Connection Project, a collaboration of scientists from CMU, Google Inc., and the National Geographic Society, whose vision is to encourage better understanding of the Earth’s cultures through images. This vision inspired the development of their Gigapan products.

After seeing what the Pancams and PMAs could do, Sargent created a prototype for a consumer-version of a robotic camera platform. He worked with Rich LeGrand of Charmed Labs LLC, in Austin, Texas, to design and manufacture the Gigapan robotic platform for standard digital cameras.

https://marsdaily.com/nasa-derived-technology-captures-unique-inaugural-image-999/

The GigaPan goes big — At President Obama’s 2009 inauguration., photographer David Bergman used the device to create a 1.6 GigaPixel immersive scene of this event as reported in Wired as 1.4 Gigapixel Image of the Inauguration Shows the Day in Amazing Detail this using the same rig I used at Thingvellir.

For some reason I kept my GigaPan device, even though the software it once used does no longer work. It sits on my camera museum shelf with a Zoom Master, an old Olympus DSLR, a Kodak Pony camera, and my grandmother’s old Polaroid. Again, these are objects but each is a story, a strand of memories, that flow through me.

Just a mention of Thingviller from Stephen Downes sent me down a trail of discovery and rediscovery, it took sifting through captions in old photos, finding emails, and some good old fashioned web search.

This web thing, it still works. Big.

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

Ahhh, 2026. That’s another grumbly post.

But here it is, I was rather taken by this fantastic web site created at Thompsons Rivers University called Indigenous Peoples in Education: A Stock Photo Collection really worth leaving here and going to appreciate what and why this site was created. Someone may have been inspired to nominate it for an Open Education Award for Excellence. Maybe.

At first I was warmed that this might have been built with the TRU Collector SPLOT, but is not. It makes good use of the same parent theme that I love, Fukasawa by Anders Noren. No big deal.

I was curious to know how many photos were in this collection (not to brag, but its built into the sidebar of TRU Collector, see example.)

Thus the wonder, Surely (and yes I am calling you Shirley) there is a simple web tool or method to get the total number of blog posts on any given WordPress site. I would think this is quite done with the WordPress Rest API.

In fact this was bubbling around my mind when I wrote about the BC Corrections Leadership site I built more than a few years ago for JIBC that was still running. Maybe at my near peak level of custom code work with the WordPress API I made a mobile version of the course content called the CorrLeader Navigator (blogged to ridiculous detail).

The problem with my first web searches is that no matter how much I jiggled by search terms, the bulk of the replies were efforts to get all the posts via the API, I just wanted to count them.

What I did get that every request to the API returned in the response header a total number count for posts. Google’s AI review eagerly offered code that does not work:

fetch('https://your-site.com')
  .then(response => {
    // Retrieve the custom WordPress header
    const totalPosts = response.headers.get('X-WP-Total');
    console.log('Total Published Posts:', totalPosts);
  });

I can tell without even trying because the URL you need to pass to fetch is not the web address but an API call.

Stupid Gemeni.

But the leading clue I found in StackOverflow is you can just use a WordPress API url that just fetches a data on a single post (the latest, FWIW) which for this humble blog would be http://cogdogblog.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=1

Snd indeed, in any browser, that returns a wad of JSON content about a single post. But you do not see the response headers. I found via the W3 reference on HTTP Response Headers a link to Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer (See exactly what an HTTP request returns to your browser). This is the kind of little web tool I can see if one person’s effort to make something others can use, thank you Rex.

I fill out the form with the REST Api Url above

And boom I get results (and smiling at the URL of results noting its a perl script), in there noting X-Wp-Total: 5919 which is indeed my post count.

Now of course, this is a rather convoluted way to get this number, but in doing so, I have more of an understanding how the data is found and returned.

I thought about dusting off my HTML/Javascript chops and building a little tool anyone else could use, wouldn’t it make sense to have that kind of tool out there? it’s pretty simple, it could just take an input of the web URL, the API request easily assembled. If a fetch request returned an error, most likely it’s not a WordPress url. I bet Tom Woodward could build this in the time it takes me to make a sandwhich.

Or I could do what Everybody Else is Doing These Days and just ask Claude or one of his pals to build it for me. That’s not my jam, sorry.

For now, I cobbled some Javascript I can cut and paste into a browser console:

async function getTotalPostCount(siteUrl) {
    try {
        // Appending per_page=1 minimizes data transfer
        const response = await fetch(`${siteUrl}/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=1`);
        
        if (!response.ok) {
            throw new Error(`Probably not a WordPress site! status: ${response.status}`);
        }

        // Extract the special WordPress header
        const totalPosts = response.headers.get('X-WP-Total');
        
        console.log(`This WordPress site has, wow,  ${totalPosts} posts`);
        return parseInt(totalPosts, 10);
    } catch (error) {
        console.error('Error, likekly not a WordPress site?: ', error);
    }
}

// Example usage (Replace with your actual WordPress site URL)
getTotalPostCount('https://cogdogblog.com');

Boom, I get the 5919 blog post odometer at CogDogBlog.

I can try some other random b-blog

But getting back to the original quest, via this (sort of) simple method I can find that the Indigenous Peoples in Education Stock Photo Collection has just under 200 images.

That’s a long way (and actually about 3 weeks later) to getting an answer. If we think of the web, and its various tools, machines as something to dispense an answer, well there, it maybe could be spat out of a vibe coded site in less time then it took me to remix my featured image (but that is fun, and I do not want machines doing that for me).

But what would I have learned about the underlying mechanisms? What could I extend to a different situation? Are we just seeking answers any more or are we after understanding?

I’ll take that over speed and efficiency any day of the week.

Featured Image: Before Computers, Adding Machines flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This was a machine spotted in the Willowbunch (SK) museum. My own photo edited where I plunked in a WordPress logo and redid the Burroughs logo in similar type and effect. Nobody generates images around here except me by hand.

It started with a Mastodon post by Bonni Stachowiak referencing her own post on the metaphor of hammers and the hammering question of AI as “tool”

Bonni Stachowiak

bonni208@mastodon.social

I reflect on a recent post by @mahabali and really dig deep into the hammer metaphor. Plus a song about hammers and the flowers Dave and I planted in the front yard, recently.

Hammering My Way into AI-Related Metaphors and a Familiar Song: https://teachinginhighered.com/2026/06/07/hammering-my-way-into-ai-related-metaphors/

#criticalAI
#highered

June 7, 2026, 7:59 pm 0 boosts 1 favorites

And to trace the tunnel back, Bonni references the post by Maha Bali on Must-Read: AI is Not a Tool, It’s a Medium-Institution (Discover Abi Awomosu) itself referencing yet one link back another post critically going after the “AI is just a Tool” spiel. Maha digs into the relationship with a tool when we use it, not just admire it on a shelf, quoteing from Abu Awomosu’s article:

That framing [of AI as a tool] is not just dismissive — it is the ceiling of what tool literacy can imagine. A tool is discrete. You pick it up, put it down, its function is fixed. A hammer drives nails. You are the agent. The institution that holds you both remains unchanged.
….

You don’t pick it up and put it down. You inhabit it, or it inhabits you.

https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial

It all resonates for sure, but what tripped me off was the hammer metaphor.

Immediately I went to an association with what I remember being described by or attributed to Marshal McLuhan’s ideas of tools as extensions of humans, about when we hold a hammer in our hand, it is a new tool, not just a hammer, not just a hand, but a “hammerhand.”

That’s one of those associations that aew buried deeply, like it just takes a reference to “hammer as a tool” and it rises up like a shark eager for a …. well not that metaphor.

So I hit the web search, which again I find weird for how broken and useless it gets pitched, and yet somehow it works for me, (with Google in My Hand it is a powerful GoogleHand?) I looked for mcluhan hammer hand. The link I dug down to was below the top layer whioch indeed is mostly not what I want to see but what the Pusher pushes.

There I came to a 2011 blog post (remember blogs? and people keeping their knowledge online) Painfully Coming to Grips with ‘The Medium is the Message’. I admit I skimmed down past the title of the post and even the author nickname because I was digging down into something that felt right. It’s another post, but I cannot quantify fully that sensation on a search that I have found the golden thread to pull out of the web sweater.

I hit exactly what I sought, and even more, an important relevant message from 2011, forgotten in the glittery rush of AI in a bottle

One of the ways McLuhan tries to make this clear is through the concept of “extension”. He explains that media is not just a tool, it becomes a part of us – an extension of what we can do.  I had a breakthrough on this when I listened to the podcast conversation between Gardner Campbell and Alan Levine for the McLuhan session of a past NMFS series, on the heels of our Wednesday session (I wish I’d listened to it before!).  Gardner used this perfectly simple and powerful example to explain what McLuhan means by “tools as extensions of ourselves”.  Here goes…

“If you pick up a hammer, and hold it in your hand, what do you have?” Gardner asks. Our answers immediately jump to capabilities (“you can build a house” or “now you need a nail”).  But Gardner urges us to, instead, think in terms of the most basic, the most obvious thing.  You have a hammer in your hand.  Simple.  And the, he says, McLuhan goes further. What McLuhan would say  is that you don’t have a hammer in your hand, what you now have is a “hammerhand”.  You’ve changed the hammer.  And you’ve changed your hand.  A new union, that neither one was before you picked up the hammer.

Aha. The penny dropped for me. And my next immediate thought was how very wrong I’ve been in a key element of my thinking about new media technology (this is the painful, blowhard part). In my work, I spend a lot of time with teachers and students, talking with them (coaching them) about the use of new media as it’s applied to teaching and learning.  What I regularly say, in an attempt to soothe and reassure them, is that all of these wonderful web tools are just that – they are tools.  Not unlike a pencil or a chalkboard or a microscope.  What you do with the tool is what makes it worthwhile.  What you plan, create, devise is what has meaning.  Gawp.  Exactly the opposite of what McLuhan is saying.

emphasis added by me from http://Painfully Coming to Grips with ‘The Medium is the Message’

And boom! The tunnel went full circler- of course this was the wisdom of Gardner Campbell in the years of his New Media Faculty Seminars– or his title “Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty Development Seminar”. He lead a series of conversations with his faculty (then at Baylor University) on readings from The New Media Reader (it’s still online, how can you say the web is dead?).

But what Gardner had done is to run and share his seminar structure (you can find it in the wayback machine, well I did)- but it was a distributed seminar, he had other university groups sign up to run their own local versions, and then there was network sharing via RSS, forums, all that old connectivist stuff folks just shrug off in LinkedIn puff posts as “web nostalgia.”

It was real. I actually visited Gardner in 2010 and sat in one of his Baylor seminars. It was real. It reas real good.

But the post also mentions a podcast- yes, because I was then doing stuff with what was once the New Media Consortium, we collaborated on two years of doing a podcast (yeah, podcasts in 2010) where we would discuss the weekly topics, he would share what happened in his Baylor discussions and what we saw more widely in the network.

I found the posts for most of the podcasts yes again in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, including indeed New Media Faculty Seminar: Fall 2010 Week 8 the episode on 2 McLuhan essays in the New Media Reader in which Gardner spells out the Hammer Hand.

The love of the Internet Archive goes deep, as I was able to download from this, and all other episodes the audio for these episodes. When the NMC went out of operation, all of its assets where bought by EDUCAUSE like it was an estate sale, only because they wanted the gold plated Horizon Reports. They chucked or left in a back warehouse a huge web legacy of content, resources, media that I worked on whiole there 2006-2011. I shake a fist at EDUCAUSE for being a lousy caretaker of web history.

So I am doing it myself, I have all the audio I could snag, here is the Week 8 episode with the HammerHand conversation in the eloquent voice of Gardner himself (how quaint a podcast, no intro music, no show promotion and no effing ads, just audio).

And because I just ran a program to create a transcript, here is the segment starting at 12:09

Again, we were thinking more about I think The Medium Is The Message, but the extension idea, we had one fellow in there who’s a film and digital media scholar who had read McLuhan at the beginning of his graduate training and had understood that McLuhan was trying to get to a fuller sense of a kind of theory of media than anybody had, and so it was obviously groping around in lots of ways, but the illustration I brought up was that of the hammer in the hand.

And that’s the one that I tried with my students a few weeks back, and it seems to have stuck. It seems to have been just crazy enough, but just useful enough to keep McLuhan’s thoughts alive as we’ve moved along.

So what I said was, and we were in second life when this was happening, so it was a very interesting context, and I said, “So if you pick up a hammer, what do you have?”

I said, “Give me the absolute bare bones most obvious answer,” and they couldn’t do it at first. They said, “Well, you have a tool, or now you’re going to look for a nail, or you can build a house, or you have the capability to blah, blah, blah,” and I said, “Those are all right answers, but they’re not getting at the most basic reality that McLuhan wants us to start with.”

And after a while, one person just was bold to be as basic as possible, which is very hard to do. It’s very, very difficult to get to the absolute basic most obvious thing and start there.
And I think it was a “she,” she said, “Well, you have a hammer in your hand.”

I said, “Right. You pick up a hammer, you have a hammer in your hand.”

Right. That’s the basic level we need to start at, because what McLuhan would say is, “Well, looked at one way, you have a hammer in your hand.”

Looked at through the light of his media philosophy, if you’re truly understanding media, you don’t have a hammer in your hand, you have a hammer hand.

Gardner Campbell explaining the Hammer Hand

When I shared with Gardner, he reminded me of the earlier episode we recorded for week 5- we were actually in Barcelona for some NMC conflab with the UOC (University of Catalonia Online) imagining the future of the “Campus” in a digital era (Hah the horizons were pretty short of what 2026 has). But we did record our podcast literally form the roodtop of the place we were staying, we had all kinds of Abbey Road vibes going. I am surprised that amongst the many photos I took of the trip I have none from the rooftop studio, but I do have the audio.

Well I have dig up from the tunnel for air, and just appreciate all of this being triggered by a mention of hammer as a metaphor.

I still think of it as not just a tool, whether in my hand or not. It’s a tool with my mind.

Featured Image: My “new” hammer, a fun pen I bought on a whim, in my hand. It’s not just a hammer, it’s not just a pen, is it a HammerPenHand? Oh the metaphor os now kicked to the curb. Image soon to be uploaded to flickr where it will be shared of course into the public domain using CC0.

Aince I end up doing what one might call blogging over at OEGlobal, I wanted to just mention a post I spit out last week that has some overlap, a summary of the responses nominators made in 2025 when I added a field for declaring their use of GenAI in compiling a nomination. Read the whole shebang, it’s pretty much a blog post hanging as “news” (I have no luck convincing my colleagues to write posts that are not just ANNOUNCEMENTS).

First of all, I read / scan all nominations as the come in over a span of weeks. One part is that I have to add a few tags/classifiers on the back end, but also it gets me a good sense of the pool this year. So I already had a sense last year that much use of GenAI was for people whose first language is not English (the G in our organization’s name!) as well as fitting to the form field character limit, but also to help draft/frame replies to match the criteria.

It was in the mindset of experimenting that I decided to swallow my LLM loathing (actually I use them often for organizing unstructured data) and load the responses into NotebookLLM. I did not add an identifying information, I only used as data the response to the open ended question on GenAI transparency and also included a column for the country of the nominator.

I will not repeat the outcomes (read the post), but it did a fairly good categorization that was along the lines to my own, and also did a decent job to pull some relevant quotes. Also, because the question was just one question “Describe your use if any of GenAI in writing your nomination” I aimed to have to pull from responses some sense of what LLMs were used.

The assistance for non-English speakers is pretty obviously important and something I would never want to limit– although we encourage nominators to write in any language (we get a few in Spanish and French) as we can translate and send to multi-lingual reviewers, it is pretty clear that most feel like they should write in English.

On Groundtruthing

There is an aspect of the whole GenAI game I do not see discussed (though I hardly see all most discussion) but that is having a familiarity with the data one is analyzing. Without being close to understanding what’s being dumped from the truck into the magic machine, the only way you can judge the outputs is how readable or pretty they are.

This leads me back to my formative academic years studying the subject that has nothing to do with my current work- Geology. So much of the education and process was “experience in the field”- you can understand all the concepts and block diagrams and mineral thin sections, but without what was always called “ground truthing” you are getting into something close tio statistical or speculative conclusions.

For decades before I started and into my study years, for mapping and field work, we relied much on areal photography of landforms their relationships. When we trudged out to a real place on the earth, along with the maps and compasses and rockhammers and notebooks and granola bars in our backpacks, we’d take those photos out in the field tio see if what we saw from the air matched what was really there.

In my Masters research it went to another level in that I was using data from Landsat satellites to see what its data (some outside the human visible range) could tells us about large areas of volcanic landforms.

The satellites merely collecting the energy radiated back to their sensors from light bouncing off the ground. The work included analyzing and experimenting with representations the data recorded then on magnetic tapes, with then the field work or ground truthing to see what was revealed “out there” taking samples back for inspecting under microscopes and labs to measure their spectral reflectivity.

Old School Pasted Images flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

I see what we are rushing to do with LLMs and GenAI is to do a lot of fancy summarization, generation of stuff measured way way up in space. But if you have never walked up and down the hills, canyons, cracked open rocks to examine in details, took samples back to the lab, measured sections and mapped with notes, how to you know what to make of the pretty pictures the data could show.

I diverge a bit too much with my Geology field work nostalgia days (actually they could be extremely frustrating, another story).

If I am plopping something into an LLM to analyze, summarize, something-ize I will always have done some sort of first cut myself or at least have an understanding what data went on.

GenAI for the 2026 OEAwards

Again, I wrote more details already, but I did make some refinements in the questions for the 2026 Open Education Awards (open for another 26 hours!). The first was making the first question be a simple yes/no, did you use GenAI at all for writing your nomination (making this a clear data point not inferring form responses).

At this moment the “yes” rate is a notch above 60%. If this was the response, then the next question asks the nominator to explicitly share what tools they used and for what purpose.

From reading this year’s responses, the use cases/reasons are fairly similar, but what comes through more is how usual this seems (my inferring) for people who use GenAI, that it reads like part of their normal workflow. Also the tech last year was mostly ChatGPT, this year I am seeing more Claude and Copilot mentioned.

There will be a followup analysis.

Humans will Be Humans

With a bit of sad irony I spotted this pattern once in 2025 and twice so far in 2026. A nominator indicates that they did not use GenAI, but the at the top of the description or rationale entries is a bit of the reframing response from the machines, like “I have condensed the description for you to copy to the nomination form” or “Here is the text you can copy to the reasons for nominating response, reduced to match the word limit.”

I almost do not know what to do with someone who states a negative as on a question of transparency but leaves the tell-tale dirty fingerprints of LLM responses in what they copy paste.

It is most human of them.

Featured Image: I adamantly refuse to have any image for my writing to be spawned by GenAI., For the love of humanity, make use of the oodles of open licensed images to which you can credit real breathing people as well as go first to Better Images of AI if you need an image to represent GenAI that is not another Robot or blue glowing brain. For this post Better Images of AI graphic Distant Writing by Fabrizio Matarese Licenced CC-BY 4.0

Nope not me, I am still at full time work at Open Education Global and the real work of blogging here But I did get this interesting email from BCPensions:

We’ve received notice from your former employer that your employment ended on December 17, 2021.

As a vested College Pension Plan member, whose age at termination of employment was over the earliest retirement age, you’re entitled to a monthly pension benefit and are eligible to apply for your pension immediately. This letter outlines your options and explains how to apply for your pension.

Indeed, in 2020 and 2021 I had contracts to do web development for a few projects with the Justice Institute of British Columbia (mostly likely I have Tannis Morgan to thank for the referral. And the JIBC system had my hired as a Sessional Employee (working remotely from 2 provinces to the east), but it also meant for that time period I was paying into the BCPension fund.

And now just being around for a bit longer means that even though I am still working, I can start tapping into that fortune starting next month. Look at me on the retirement gravy train (after taxes, the monthly amount might be enough to buy 3/4 of a tank of gas, but its something).

But it was a fun reminder of the work I got to do then, back in my gravy days of WordPress development (have I used that expression twice in a post? obvious I ain’t writing with Claude), and it was good stuff. The funny thing is that this 6 year old project web site is still online fully functional.

BC Corrections Leadership

The first project was a resource for leadership in the BC Corrections system (good proof I can work in content I know nothing about). As we called it in oiur team “CorrLeader” was a mix of accumulated resources and also a guide to programs and offerings from the organization and JIBC.

Peter, the project leader had much of the concepty organized but what I liked working with him was his interest in the metaphors and the visuals. So we developed this idea of leadership being a complex terrain, and sometimes we traveled it as specified by a map and other times exploring by a compass.

There were a few prototypes with generated maps and toying with Leaflet.Js but in ended up being rolled into WordPress with an elegant theme. One of my proudest parts was, after hearing how busy these leaders are, they don’t have time to look at a computer all day, that often they were on mobile. I dug into the WordPress API and did a lot of monkeying with JQuery and local storage to create a mobile side site that could display the latest resource, and allow the person using it to use and save filters for content they were interested in.

It’s even more remarkable that the Navigator site ( just HTML/CSS/JS) is also still online and working https://host.jibc.ca/ccjd/corrleadernav/

Towards the end, we even added a podcast called CorrTalk that was done all by the project leads, Sarah and Peter (who was a natural at being a host).

I’m still not sure of how/why ther web site is still there and functioning. Do they still use it? (nobody updates). Is it one of those projects that organizations forget about and thus it lives longer?

Segregation Reform Program

The second project is one I am a bit rusty on, it was again a whole series of standalone course-like materials about models of Corrections that move away and beyond punishment. The specifications were that it would be built in Articulate Rise (A tool I never used before but learned as I went) that was in some ways a bit interesting to use as it was in someways very flexible but also very limited, no hacking on functionality like WordPress.

The course content was embedded into a Blackboard course, and I believe then the module end quizzes were scored there. There were modules in Introduction to Segregation Reform, Administrative Fairness, Indigenous Cultural Awareness, Trauma-Informed Practice, Mental Health Needs in Custody Settings (I know these from a hardrive folder of content folders). JIBC provided me access to a vast collection of photos from Corrections facilities I could use, I just had to blur any faces of inmates.

The one post about the project I could fine was all about playing with custom CSS to do better bullet points (?)

Again i was surprised/shocked to find in my notes that the login I used at the time still works! I was able last night to peek at the old content I built.

And So?

I got this far without a real destination for this post. It still strikes me odd that much of this web/digital content still lives. I wonder if there is a term for bits of the web that still live because most people who would normally nuke a web site just forgot about them. Like survival by neglect?

But mostly I remember these projects as part of the long arc I had in working with colleagues who loved teasing out ideas, not afraid to try new things, and also gave me a lot of leeway in choosing visual and functional design.

Yeah, I think that is what I retired from… the fun/exciting work all in a time of optimism or belief in the potential of digital tools interwoven with human creativity.

Now it’s just Ask Claude blah blah blah blah borg. Not me, as I am not retired from work or creativity.

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