geek.teacher

Thanks to @dajbelshaw for the tipoff. While you’re at it, make sure to check out his new social networking site for edte.ch people.

I just saw the following info about a new Apple filing about advanced podcasting:

In one example outlined in the filing, the content capture system provides a video stream (Stream A) and an Keynote presentation stream (Stream B) to a recording agent such as a Mac running specialized Podcast creation software. The recording agent then blends the two feeds together based on certain cues and sends the combined feed to a syndication server that would then distribute the video wirelessly as a Podcast to any number of authorized Macs, iPods or iPhones.

This sounds like a very nifty idea that could especially get along very well with the concept of lecture podcasts for homework.

For those of you like me who can’t be there:

 Live .TV show provided by Ustream

Yesterday I went to one of the most delightfully zany Philadelphia traditions.  For 14 years now, the Fairmount CDC has been hosting a Bastille Day event.  they close off the street in front of Eastern State Penitentiary, local restaurants serve some French food, and at 5:30 they reenact the storming of the Bastille at ESP.  It’s a terribly hokey affair (for example, Marie Antoinette remembers the first Bastille Day, “I was talking to John McCain”).  The highlight, though, is clearly the following:

While I’m still waiting for the 2.0 OS drop in order to be able to play with all of the new software, you can now access the App Store through iTunes.  i was very pleased to note the presence of an Education section.  Right now it’s mostly language learning, but there’s also some neat-looking astronomy, flash cards, math, and language programs.  It’s enough to make me hopeful for the potential, and I’ll bet it’s going to have Lisa Thumann plenty excited.

I’ve been gone for eight days, and most of the time I couldn’t access the net.  This is how Google Reader greets me:

Montreal was awesome, but I bet I’ll still be a little jealous of you NECC peeps after going through that 145 posts.

For this Wednesday’s project, I had to tell something unique and interesting about where I live.  So I made a Google Map of some of my favorite places in Philadelphia.

 
View Larger Map

I like this idea a lot.  More please!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

So the new hotness these days is Wordle, which lets you throw in any text you want and get a cool-looking cloud.  Most people use it to make pretty del.icio.us tag clouds, but I don’t have enough clouds to make it very exciting.  So I thought to what other text I’ve done recently, and realized that I do more writing on Twitter than anywhere else.  I went to my page and copied/pasted everything from the past month into a text box. Then I cut and pasted it to Word, where I used find & replace to get rid of most of the obvious words that take up valuable space (AM, PM, June, May, Hahlo, Twitterrific).  Then I combed through to get rid of all the “in reply to X” lines.  The final result you see above, which you should totally click on in order to see the larger version.

One of the things that is simultaneously hilarious and frustrating about having nerdy pastimes is dealing with nerd anger.  Sometimes it makes you want to laugh, and sometimes it makes you want to punch someone in the face.  Worry not, I do not fail to see the irony in that statement.  The funny thing about it, of course, is that nerds are always sitting, waiting for mainstream acceptance of their hobbies, but the nerd anger makes it that much harder for people to accept them.

I would posit this comes from some compulsive beast inside the nerd.  It’s that which takes ownership of the hobby, compelling us to read and interact with everything related to our chosen hobbies.  I know that I am not immune.  I’m proud of myself when I choose not to read one or two comics a week because I dislike them, but at the same time, if I am in some way convinced that it might be important to know about later, I will continue to read things that I actively loathe.  Case in point number one, right now, would of course be Countdown.  Why did I read every issue of a shamefully bad series?  I was promised importance, so I was compelled to read it for myself instead of just getting spoilers somewhere.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there, I’m also compelled to read series that I’ve followed for ages, even if they have devolved into mediocrity.  Just this week, for example, Countdown wasn’t even the worst book released.  That would have to be this week’s issue of New Exiles.  I haven’t loved Exiles since Judd Winick left, and that was almost five years ago.  and now the series is downright terrible, but I still read it.  Self-loathing is one of the clear characteristics of the nerd hobbyist.

Anyway, I started off on this rant on nerd anger because Tom Brevoort shared his own dark past as an angry nerd, complete with savaging the motivations of the creators.  It’s a fun look at how the arguments kind of stay the same even as the specifics change.