Month: February 2021

My Week Ending 2021-02-28

by dougpete, posted in Just Rambling

Here’s a summary of some of the things I learned and published this week.

Readings 

You can follow my daily readings as they happen here.  Below are a selected few, with commentary, from the past week.

Sunday

  • I had never heard of the “Winter Circle” before so I did go outside to see if I could see things. It was cloudy…
  • I had just been talking about this with a friend who wanted to know how soon I’d buy an electric car

Monday

  • I suppose that there will be people that will flip over this. But, there are many online calculators already and personally I have an Android RPN calculator installed already
  • What a wonderful tribute to a voice that many of us have heard for years

Tuesday

  • It looks like our Australian friends will still get news via Facebook as a result of this settlement
  • It’s heartbreaking to read of people who need to go to a payday loan agency to get money just to survive at the high rates charged

Wednesday

  • If you’re 60 and over, here’s the plan for getting vaccinated against COVID in Ontario. Well, until it changes
  • From NASA, an incredible image of the planet Jupiter. I guess all cameras were not pointed at Mars

Thursday

  • Here’s another indication of people being last to the party – we’ve know that we need to teach information literacy for years
  • If you ever had the urge to mess with Google’s advertising algorithm and didn’t know where to start, this extension might help

Friday

  • Peter Beens shared an image and wanted a date. I remember the date and had blogged about it. Unfortunately, the image had previously been embedded but not available now
  • I read every one of these articles about the COVID virus that I can find. The more you know….

Saturday

  • Online safety is important – I think we all know that or should – how to understand it seriously
  • Thirty years of web browsing. Wow, has it been that long? Can you remember when your browser did a real subset of what it can do today?

Blog Posts on
doug … off the record

My daily contributions to this blog are linked below. If you’re looking for a week in review for doug–off the record, you came to the right place.

#FollowFriday – February 26, 2021

voicEd Radio

On this week’s show, Stephen Hurley and I chatted about complexity, cheating, character, calendars, and c-blogging. (sorry)

The show is available here: https://voiced.ca/podcast_episode_post/complexity-cheating-character-and-calendars/

  • TheBeast – @thebeastedu
  • Tim King – @tk1ng
  • Dave Cormier – @davecormier
  • Cameron Steltman – @MrSteltman
  • Cal Armstrong – @sig225

Intro Song:

Closing Song:

All of the podcasts are archived here. The show is broadcast LIVE almost every Wednesday morning at 9:15 on voicEd Radio.

Technology Troubleshooting

I got a request from Ramona Meharg to help with the online Bring IT, Together Conference. My regular involvement with ECOO is in the rear view mirror these days but who could say no to Ramona. She has given so much to Ontario educators, it was nice to help her out.

I tried to get into the room a day in advance and it hadn’t been opened.

I tried the morning of and had the same result.

I then tried about 45 minutes in advance of the session and no luck so had to call for support. As it turned out, I hadn’t been given an account for access.

It’s nice to have the keys.

Once equipped, I think the sessions went off without a hitch.

Video of the Week

If I ever have to go to court, I hope that I get a judge like this.

Photo of the Week

From the school around the corner, a socially distanced snow person.


Thanks for reading.

Please join me daily for something new and, hopefully, interesting for you. I honestly and truthfully appreciate your few moments reading my thoughts. Time willing, this summary appears every Sunday afternoon.

Be safe.

dp

This blog post was originally posted at:

https://dougpete.wordpress.com/

If you find it anywhere else, it’s not original.

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Whatever happened to …

by dougpete, posted in OTR

… full length LP records?

Thanks to Sheila Stewart for the concept.

Whatever happened to… full album releases? Not just being nostalgic here about buying a new LP and listening to the whole thing while staring at the cover 🙂 Just thinking about how musicians now “premiere” one song at a time before their upcoming full album release. The sound bite era influence?

I never actually collected records much until university. My roommate was a big collector and I learned so much from him.

  • they need to be stored vertically to prevent warping – milk crates were perfect for that purpose
  • you need to keep them clean – he recommended a product call Discwasher for the job (Whatever happened to Discwasher?)
  • the paper sleeves that the album come with are scratchy for the records – he recommended Angel Sleeves which had a soft vinyl interior

I took all of his recommendations and also bought myself an anti-static gun. So, my albums were kept in Angel Sleeves, I’d zap them with the gun and then clean them with the Discwasher before playing.

I also bought a scale so that I could measure the exact pressure that the stylus would place on the record. I was on a mission to make sure that the records would get no damage when played. When I was done, I’d reverse the process and put the records back in my milk crates.

Now, once I got past the poor university years, I did get a cabinet to store the records but definitely vertically. Caring for these was a big deal to me. I can tell you that they’re all sitting there in the cabinet across the room waiting to be played.

Quite honestly, I thought I was holding on to a last vestage of media as record stores are so hard to find. We do have one in town, open now during COVID, but you get someone else’s used.

I can imagine that it was a big deal for artists back in the day. After all, you had to have enough songs to put together to sell an LP. If you have some, you know that they have some really good songs and then some not so good. But, they are full.

It’s just getting increasingly difficult to buy a quality LP these days, as Sheila notes. The industry has moved on to different formats. Yet, there still is something magical about reading the liner notes, reading the lyrics, and looking at the professional images often delivered inside.

For a Sunday, your thoughts?

  • do you still have a collection of LPs?
  • what’s your favourite that you never hope wears out?
  • do you know of an artist who had a song they never expected to do well that did the opposite and went over the top?
  • how are today’s artists getting their new creations to you?
  • do you feel cheated when you listened to a song that sounds like it was just there to fill out an LP?
  • what alternative delivery forms for new music today can you suggest?
  • the vinyl for the traditional LP is black but there have been special releases in other colours. Do you have any?
  • what’s the rotation speed of your typical LP?

I’d be interested in your thoughts? Please share them in the comments below.

If you have an idea for a topic like Sheila, please let me know.

OTR Links 02/28/2021

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

#RIP ?

by dougpete, posted in Twitter

Imagine my surprise yesterday morning when I was out and about away from my keyboard and I happened to look at my phone. Twitter had been left on and, in particulary, I had the “What’s Happening” screen open. I do find it interesting to see what is going on in the world and what people are talking about.

Sometimes, it turns up interesting things; sometimes, it doesn’t.

In this case “#RIP Twitter” was trending!

What?

According to this article on The Verge a subscription option will be made available on Twitter in the future. So, you could charge people for your content or likely, your premium content.

The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $4.99 per month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators and publishers get paid directly by their fans.

It’s not a new concept. I’m thinking particularly of online newspapers that only offer subsets of their content for free. This comes in the form of only allowing you to read # articles a month or you only get the headline and pay for the article or there’s just this super secret area that only paid people get access to.

I’ve been around Twitter for a long time. I always thought of it as “citizen journalism” where groups of us would share our learning and thoughts. Once it took off though, having a presence became really important for companies and media services. If you’re not on Twitter, you lose out on a quick and effective way to reach a larger audience.

But are you willing to pay for it?

I can see it as a business plan. But is it a plan that you want to buy into? The general concensus of those posting to that hashtag is that they wouldn’t.

As of yet, we don’t necessarily know all of the details.

My immediate thought is that we would lose an element of Twitter that makes it Twitter. People sharing ideas and thoughts with others. If I’m a business, am I going to stop participating in favour of a paid service where I could make more money for myself and Twitter as broker?

We’re already seeing promoted Twitter messages. Would we see even more as people / businesses try to get you to buy in to their services? Of course, we could unfollow them but promoted messages are there no matter what.

Would it lead to a noisier conversation place? Or would it lead to a quieter one?

I’d be interesting in your immediate thoughts. Would you hang around if the new model kicks in? If you wouldn’t, where would you go? Is this the end of online collaboration?

Please take a moment and share your thoughts.

OTR Links 02/27/2021

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.