I don’t usually remember dreams, or accord them much significance. This morning I awoke around 4:30 with one pretty clearly in mind. The dream had to do with drawing, which is something I’ve never done and feel that I have no talent for, though I greatly admire it in others. I was drawing cats, but via drawing pieces: a paw, a shoulder, the catenary (!) curve of a tail. Somehow these pieces (and there were many) were arrayed in 3-space so that one could walk around them, and from different perspectives on the collection one could derive a sense of CAT that was more complete and compelling than if one had seen a single complete drawing of a cat. So an aggregation of gestures (the single bits) allows the observer to construct a whole in a novel and hologrammatical way.
As I gradually transitioned to waking reality, the Cat morphed into an assemblage of the Web 2.x bits I’ve been messing with, and became a collage of my own watching, listening, reading, writing, searching… seen as a temporally ordered kaleidoscope which stands for and manages to communicate the flow of my attention. The rudimentary form of the default stylesheet for my oook.suprglu.com page is the barest beginning of the imagined cyberproduct, but it is a beginning. Like all such imaginings, the practicalities of execution are pretty elusive, and/or would tie me up in technicalities that are beyond my powers, and keep me from the pleasures of the hunt that I so enjoy.
I’m still searching for effective ways to verbalize my sense that personal connectivism is the direction I need to follow –that it’s the essence of lifelong learning to articulate the learning process in communications …but to whom, and for what, is still pretty problematic. And there’s still the problem of the requisite management and composition and delivery tools…

I’ve been resistant to OPML, feeling that “outlining” wasn’t a comfortable format for things I do. Fact is, I think I didn’t quite get it, but I’m perhaps a bit closer now thanks to a problem I wanted to solve.
I have spent a lot of time forwarding stuff to other people, and indeed I think finding-and-forwarding is probably a pretty good summary of my specialty as a librarian. This morning I started hand-coding a table of things I’ve sent to people in the last couple of weeks. How very Web 1.0. And then OPML Manager fortuitously crossed my path, and I decided to give it a whirl as a more grownup way of solving the problem. I’m pretty pleased with what resulted, at least for starters.
I’m not sure just where this leads, but it’s been a couple of months since last I was so involved in emerging technologies, and it feels pretty good to be at it again.

I’ve been experimenting with Suprglu as a means to put together what I’m paying attention to, but I’m not sure that it’s helpful to add a lot of sources –especially ones that update frequently. Sort of like having a braided stream of RSS feeds, all in one place… but one doesn’t know how effective something will be until one tries it out.

Bryant Adams sent me a pointer to a Slashdot article on Ted Nelson’s Transquoter and I’ve been playing with its possibilities, via the skeletal directions available (download the .exe, edit .edl file, double-click .edl and specify that transquoter.exe is the program to use…), but just how to aim it at the desired place in a file is less than completely obvious (how do you count the characters, and the spans, except [ugh!] manually).

It hasn’t yet occurred to me just what I’d want to DO with this, but that’s probably because I’m not really paying attention… I hope for revelation. Which reminds me of the Auden lyric:

Revelation came to Luther in a privy
Crosswords have been solved there
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker
Cogitating deeply
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.

(from Auden’s The Geography of the House, but for many years just a remembered fragment)