homoLudens

For most of yesterday morning our school internet connection offered  us 78 kbps, a download speed of about 10 KB/sec.

It’s nice that, in New York at least, Eliot Spitzer gets it:

[via myDD]

Alan Levine is off to new adventures:

After fourteen years of doing technology ‘stuff’ here at Maricopa, I am making a break to run with a new pack… I have been offered (and accepted today) an excellent opportunity to join the New Media Consortium, where I will be something like ‘Director of Technology Resources and Member Services’. Whatever the title (like what does ‘Instructional technologist’ really mean?, I’ll take something like ‘web geek’) , it is exciting to be joining a Great Organization doing Cool Stuff. [via CogDogBlog.]

NMC are the Pachyderm folks. Cool.

Yahoo puts blogSearch in its news service:

If you haven’t seen this yet, take a minute to note the upcoming Manila 9.6 feature set:

Manila Beta: Changes In Manila 9.6:

The
news item summary feature makes it possible to display a short summary
of a news item on the home page, which links to the full version on
another page. ??? News items can now be associated with one, more than
one department, or no department. ??? Comments are now sent using the
email address of the commenter as the From address, so that you can
reply directly in your email client.

As Erin Clerico
says, “Manila has lots of well thought out features, very mature code
base and already has many nifty little things the competition won’t
even know they need for years ??? [but] the competition is wicked fast,
and can take much much more of a beating by
editors/surfers/aggregators/crawlers before you start to notice a
slowdown. It’s one of those ‘have your cake and eat it too’ things.”It’s also one of those “Where the hell in the digitally clueless world
of public education school districts do I get hosting for a decent
content management system?”

Choice, as Buddhists teach, is mostly an illusion.

All I want is one screen creation of news items with linked extension
into longer stories, which I don’t think is coming. But you never know:

Steve Johnson’s essay ‘Tool for thought’ in today’s NYT Book Review
gets to the increasingly real potential of digital writing for those of
us who want to do something less than create interactive hypertext
novels.

The illustrated addendum to the essay at Steven’s own blog is fascinating. [via BoingBoing] At edBlogger2003, Mark Bernstein touched on all of this. Some of the simpler tasks that Johnson writes about Tinderbox lets me do even at my novice level. It’ll be interesting to read Mark’s take on the piece.

Given the right title, this would be an interesting exercise for a reluctant reader:

Russell Beattie: “Many of us are too busy to read classic books out there, instead choosing ‘page turners’ or books that are more applicable to our every day lives (like a some new marketing book). But we do have time to zip through our aggregator daily, right? So by taking a 500 page novel and distributing it, a few pages at a time, via RSS, we could read a new book in a month or so without even trying.” [via Ranchero]

Impressive numbers. The short PDF (ugh) is worth a read, including a description of average
blog users (young broadband-using, rich, educated male internet
veterans) and a nice description of RSS.

more…

A tip of the hat to Jake Savin and Bryan Bell:

A new feature has been released for Manila: Content-Only Versions of Manila Pages. The feature supports a content-only rendering feature which allows you to request a version of the page with only the body of the page displayed. [UserLand Product News: Frontier and Manila]

more…

From cogdogblog:

“In the last 2 hours I experienced a computer religious experience. I opened the box for my new G4 laptop, connected a firewire cable from it to my old laptop, and then watched in awe as the entire content, applications, and set up were transferred over.”

I had the same mac-raculous experience last Friday as I abandoned a G4 with a cracked monitor rim for a new iBook.

What do people without school budgets do for holiday surprises?