digital detritus

tiger lily
Originally uploaded by colinj.

I have to confess that I really like to take pictures of flowers for a couple of reasons:

1. They’re easy to take.
2. They look really impressive.
So far I’ve taken a little more than 100 pictures of flowers. Just today I wanted to start to label the photos with the flower names (common and latin). Of course I don’t know the first thing about identifying flowers, I just take pictures of ones that look nice to me.

So I went looking (courtesy of google) for web sites that might help me identify flowers. What did I find, that the web is sorely lacking in flower and plant identification material. Which got me thinking, what if there was a site that folks could use to identify plants? And what would it look like?

Here’s what I’m thinking about at the moment, wikiplants. I’m thinking that it would be really cool to set up a mediawiki that folks could submit pictures, illustrations and descriptions of plants.

Right now I’m thinking about how to structure the wiki so that folks could easily search based on different criteria and/or pictures of the plants and flowers.

Am I crazy or would this work?

sleeping boar
Originally uploaded by colinj.

I won’t for a moment pretend to be any sort of expert on farming or the care of farm animals. I have done a little and I’ve taught a little (things like how to milk a cow).

I used to be terrified of larger farm animals, I think because I didn’t know anything about them. Since the only way I’ve found to deal with the unknown and fears is to face them head on that’s what I did. I started working with farm animals.

Along the way I learned that I really love pigs. I’m not sure what fascinates me so much about them. In many ways they are very much like humans. They have similar internal organs that are very similar to us and if you’ve ever seen a sow get angry with someone for upsetting her piglets than you know that they are very protective. At the same time they are very friendly and good natured, provided that you treat them with respect.

compost happens
Originally uploaded by colinj.

All of last week I spent at a summer camp cooking for the staff that were setting up for the summer. It’s a far cry from my normal job and that’s why I do it. There’s something really peaceful about focusing on something as basic like preparing food.

This picture is of chard that we served for dinner. Actually the picture is what’s left over after we cleaned and chopped the chard. As I was taking out the compost I couldn’t believe how colourful it was.

teensy weensy usb drive,
originally uploaded by colinj.

So far the schwag situation here at TechEd 2005 has been pretty dismal. A few new hats. A couple of t-shirts and a small set of screw drivers that I’m sure will break inside a month.

The one highlight so far has been this teeny tiny little usb drive. It really is that small and it really does work. I’m sure I’ll lose it pretty quick as it’s so small that I often can’t find it in my pocket.

But, it is cool.

I’ve finished day one at TechEd and I’ve suffered through a snore inducing keynote speech by Steve Ballmer.

Steve comes across as a combination of a high school football coach who’s lost a few too many games and the motivational speaker character that Chris Farley used to play.

So he started off by giving the usual up with IT speech. The typical dreck about how the folks at TechEd are the best of the best and excited about doing what we do. And then he talked about how Microsoft feels our pain, and they are here to help.

I hope that Microsoft, and here I mean Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, will realize that as much as they may be excited they are not the best face that they can put on Microsoft.

So far, that’s about it for interesting things from TechEd.

I just got down having a conversation with Eliot who’s a member of the Microsoft Tablet PC team. He turned me on to a really cool drawing application called Art Rage from Ambient Design. It’s one of those applications that is deceptively simple and quite complex at the same time. On the surface it looks like the paint program that comes with Windows but don’t be fooled.

The brushes and tools are pressure sensitive on a tablet pc and you can do things like mix and smudge colors with the pens and brushes. And you can import images and then treat them like a painting and change them.

I’ve got it on my laptop now and it seems pretty cool. But now I really want a tablet pc so I can take advantage of all the functionality. Now I just have to figure out how to get a tablet.

Donations anyone?

For anyone who is just tuning in I’m at the Microsoft Tech·Ed 2005 conference. Right now I’m attending what they are calling “Academic Days at Tech·Ed” so it’s lots of folks from the academic world right now. Lots of faculty from different universities and colleges and a fair number of IT support staff.

So, the good news that I have so far is that the new Visual Studio (currently Beta 2) has some great new features including a very nice tool for designing enterprise level systems graphically. Very cool.

The bad news is that there are enough changes from beta 1 to beta 2 that anything written for beta 1 will break. So now I have a bunch of frustrated students and one very frustrated faculty member.

This is life on the bleeding edge.

linux was my co-pilot,
originally uploaded by colinj.

So, there I was heading to Microsoft’s TechEd 2005 conference. I’m getting on the plane and I notice that there are screens on the back of every seat. My first thought is “oh shit, now I have to watch commercials the whole trip.” Oh, but I was going to get a surprise.

Seems they cycled power on the plane and the entertainment system has to reboot. Lo and behold what to I see but linux running on the seat in front of me. I glance up and I see a little penguin. Seems that the folks at Delta/Song airlines have elected to use Linux as the software to drive their in flight entertainment system.

It’s a nice system, pay-per-view movies, satelite television, games and a cool realtime map of the path of the plane.

Just to re-cap: I’m heading to Microsoft’s premier conference and what do I see but all the seats in the plane running Linux. Did I mention that Microsoft paid my plane fare?