Yesterday we brought the kids up to a local ski spot in Trento known as Bondone by the residents. The name is a shortening of the mountain it lives atop, Monte Bondone, which is the highest of the Garda Prealps at 2,180 meters (or 5500 feet). It’s kinda of where the Italian alps in Trentino begin. It’s a throwback ski resort from the 70s or 80s just over a 30 minute drive from Trento. We went because the local Skateboard and Snowboard shop Centone (translated 100 and One) was putting on a free all-day Snowboard clinic for the kids. The fact that they did this made be a loyal customer and fan #4life. And I am gonna need my own board soon 🙂 But seriously, a local store taking care of the local kids on a local mountain—what’s not to love?
Mugging a Minion on Bondone
It was good timing after our trip to Alto Adige, so we signed them up and they got another solid 6 or 7 hours of practice in. Tess is still skiing so she got lessons in the morning, but yesterday she made her first overtures towards learning snowboarding which is exciting—we’ll see how that develops.
Scuola Italiana Sci Monte Bondone Trento
Tommy and Miles are pushing hard on the snowboard, and their progress is really starting to show. Miles has been impressively disciplined in mastering the basics, whereas Tommaso wants to race down the mountain. But for both of them spending all day with a group of snowboarders from a wide-range of experience levels really helped them focus on what they need to work on.
Both the instructors and their peers were giving them tips and encouraging their progress. They came away beat up once again, but beaming with pride and accomplishment.
Tess on the other hand has really mastered the basics of skiing. She has had several lessons, and while this is technically her second season (she went once last year) she really just started. Her instructor said he thought she had been skiing for at least four or five years, which but a smile on her face that lasted all day. The power of compliments. The following video Antonella captured of Tess navigating an intermediate slope demonstrated this quite well.
I was able to tag along with Antonella and Tess most of the day given the other two were in the clinic, and I’m getting more comfortable on the slopes. Bondone was rougher than Merano 2000 with much more ice patches and shorter trails. I finally took a good spill that rang my bell, and reminded me that snowboarding is a full contact sport.
The day was exhausting but rewarding, felt like we could do this far more regularly which was rewarding all around, especially with such good company.
Reclaim Hosting is happy to announce a new shared hosting server in a Digital Ocean’s Toronto-based data center. And while the Toronto data center has been around since 2015, it just got block storage in September. We named this server after the pioneer political Canadian hardcore punk band D.O.A. With their first two albums Something Better Change (1980) and Hardcore ’81 (1981) you have arguably the earliest examples of the new punk style that would dominate the 1980s. D.O.A. political anthems like “Smash the State:”
Or “F**cked Up Ronnie” as an early instance of the sonic war against Reagan that characterized much of 1980s punk:
In fact, the song has been updated for the times:
It’s pretty telling to hear both Henry Rollins and Keith Morris talk about the impact D.O.A. had on the emerging hardcore scene.
I love Morris’s description of seeing D.O.A. open up for X in LA.
So, it seems only fitting to christen Canada’s first Reclaim Hosting server as D.O.A. If any one would like us to move their sites to this new server for whatever reason just submit a support request and we’ll be sure to make it so.
A couple of nights ago enjoyed an epic double feature of the two defining Vietnam War movies: The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). It was a 6 hour tour de force, and both films were even more mind-blowing then when I saw them as a teenager on VHS. Apocalypse Now is an all but perfect film, and it is insane to think it might not even be Coppola’s best—how can that be possible? But I do not think it is hyperbole to suggest The Godfather (1972) may be the greatest film ever made. Apocalypse Now narrative abstraction takes the war and places it within the literary landscape of Joseph Conrad‘s imperial critique of Heart of Darkness. A brilliant reframing of that narrative that enables the film to both engage and transcend the political specifics of the US in Vietnam.
During the 29th Berlin International Film Festival in 1979, the Soviet delegation expressed its indignation with the film which, in their opinion, insulted the Vietnamese people in numerous scenes. Other socialist states also voiced their solidarity with the “heroic people of Vietnam“. They protested against the screening of the film and insisted that it violated the statutes of the festival, since it in no way contributed to the “improvement of mutual understanding between the peoples of the world”. The ensuing domino effect led to the walk-outs of the Cubans, East Germans, Bulgarians, Poles and Czechoslovakians, and two members of the jury resigned in sympathy.[64]
The vision of the Viet Cong is anything but sympathetic, and demonstrations against the film’s racist portrayals of the North Vietnamese were not limited to the Soviet countries. More than a few US critics called-out the film for its overtly macho storyline and caricature-like study of the war. That said, the opening and closing acts of this group of blue collar Slavic-Americans coping with the fearful anticipation and post facto horrors of war provide an intense, compelling study of one town’s fictional story.
What’s more, my friend Andrea stopped the film at the scene when Robert Dinero’s character uses a flamethrower to kill a Vietcong soldier that had just gunned down a woman and her child. According to him, the Italian audiences in 1980 wildly applauded this moment. The Deer Hunter (or at least this scene) became both a lens reflecting Italy’s own political violence throughout the 1970s, a period known as the Anni di Piombo (or The Years of Lead)—as well as a release from it. Let me back-up, the Anni di Piombo defines the violent jockeying for power amongst far-right, far-left, police, and organized crime groups from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. There were various poles of power, a few of which were autonomous radical Marist terrorist groups—most notoriously the Red Brigade. The Red Brigade took this political violence to its extreme in 1978 when they kidnapped and murdered the Italian prime ministerAldo Moro. Dark times, indeed.
Aldo Moro’s body discovered in the back of a car in Rome
So, in 1979 when Robert Dinero brutally kills a communist soldier in Vietnam, the general reaction amongst Italian movie going audiences was to cheer. The cheer may have simply been a sadist celebration, but it has also been read as a final refusal of communism’s long battle for the soul of the Italian people. Italy had the most powerful communist party in Europe, and during the post-war era its loyalties between the USSR and the USA were split politically. So Andrea’s suggestion that this scene in the Deer Hunter might be read as a the metaphorical nail in the coffin of Italian communism was a fascinating reading to me. The cleansing by fire of Italy’s communist sympathies and a full blown engagement with US culture and politics during the 1980s—which by most counts was the case. I did some searching online to see if I could find anyone making similar claims, but given I was searching in English my first round produced next to nothing.
I say next to nothing because I did find one wild bit that is near and dear to my b-movie heart. The fact that the Deer Hunter was extremely successful in Italy when it came out in 1979 is reinforced by the fact Antonio Margheriti made a knock-off of the film originally called Cacciatore 2 (or Deer Hunter 2), but was changed to The Last Hunter to avoid lawsuits. It was part of the b-movie genre known as Euro War (or Macaroni Combat films) and was meant to capitalize on the success of The Deer Hunter, and it was the first of these Euro War films to be set during the Vietnam War. It was shot on location in the Philippines in many of the same locations as Apocalypse Now! So, I can at least confirm The Deer Hunter was popular enough in Italy to immediately spawn an unofficial sequel to capitalize on its success.
I have yet to see The Last Hunter, but it is now on my list. But more than that, I guess this whole post was inspired by the fact that a film like The Deer Hunter might somehow provide both a mirror and a release valve for Italy’s own struggles with their political identity in the wake of more than a decade of intense terror in the streets. I’ll have to do some more digging to confirm some of this, but for now I’ll just leave it here as a potentially fascinating complex resulting from a scene in a movie I would have never really been able to grasp if I wasn’t watching it in a specific place with a specific person at a particular time.
I’ve been watching Alan and D’Arcy do the 365 photo challenge for more than a decade now, which struck me when I read that fact. I envied the push, but without a phone until two years ago, the idea of always having a borrowed DSLR on my person seemed laborious, if not impossible. I flirted with joining the fray, but was keenly aware of my limits. I resisted the urge. This changed in October of 2015 when I finally broke down and got a phone. I haven’t regretted the decision for a moment, but sometimes miss the shock on people’s faces when I informed them I never owned a cellphone. The phone has been clutch for tethering when I need to take care of work for Reclaim Hosting on the road, but even more awesome than that for finally having a camera in my pocket.
I love taking photos. The satisfaction of capturing a decent shot every so often is truly rewarding, not to mention how purely it feeds my deep desire to capture and archive everything. Add to this the fact that I moved to a pretty spectacular part of the world, and my photos benefit from a natural advantage in terms of subject matter. I have been milking the beauty of Trentino regularly for over two years now. But after reading Alan’s post about another 365 challenge in the bag, I figured I’m at the point where I can actually do this pretty easily. What’s more, it will help me accomplish one of my modest goals for 2018: posting and organizing my photos on Flickr in a timely fashion. So, I joined the 2018/365 group on Flickr, and I’m officially in the mix.
So far, so good. I have successfully posted a photo for the first 8 days of 2018, which feels good, and I just happened to be on ski/snowboard vacation in Alto Adige which means the sites where a bit more intense than usual. What’s more, it features the little bavini that make it all worth while. So, here are the first 8 of 2018, here’s to 357 more!
It’s back to work after a week up in the mountains of Alto Adige, more specifically Val Passiria just north of the gorgeous city of Merano. It’s the first time in a long while I checked out almost entirely of work, something that does not come nearly as natural to me as my decadent European counterparts—but I am learning. The region has been getting tons of snow, so we took advantage of that fact and headed up north for our first full-blown family ski trip. Alto Adige (or SĂĽdtirol) is a gorgeous province, and of particular interest because it is a border region with a distinct culture that only became part of Italy 100 years ago following the fall of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire after World War I. Each valley has its own distinct dialect, and German is the first language for most of the region’s residents. One of the towns we visited, Comune di San Leonardo in Passiria, has the following linguistic distribution amongst its 4000 inhabitants according to the 2011 census: “98.83% of the population speak German, 1.05% Italian and 0.12% Ladin as [their] first language.[3]” In fact, Val Passiria has a long history of actively challenging its ties to Italy, and variouspoliticalgroups have formed to push for anything from more regional independence to secession from Italy and reunification with Austria.
So, while you’re still technically in Italy when you go to Alto Adige, it is in many ways a different country. What’s more, there is definitely some low-key competition between the Trentini and Alto-Adigians (?) regarding which region is better equipped for tourists (a common dinner conversation), which region has the better hikes, the more spectacular Dolemites, etc. I love Trentino dearly, but Alto Adige usually fairs better during these conversations and that’s even before someone brings up the nudist naturalist spa culture in Alto Adige 🙂 But I am pretty far afield already, so let me try and rein this post in.
We spent 5 days in Val Passiria to enjoy some skiing and snowboarding, as well as some hiking. The first day we went to Pfelders/Plan which is at the northern end of Val Passiria pushing uncomfortably close to the border of Austria. This was the first day Tommy and Miles would be trying out snowboarding, and unfortunately there were no lessons available. They all got introduced to skiing last year, and took to it quick. Tess decided to stay with skiing this year whereas Miles and Tommy made the jump to snowboarding. Unfortunately, due to the shortage of snowboarding instructors, they were stuck with me as their teacher. I failed day 1 pretty bad.
The above image is the only one I took that day, and it was captured during an afternoon snack of toast with those two troopers. They spent the previous four hours trying out snowboarding for the first time. More pricks than kicks, I’m afraid. While Antonella and Tess were tearing up the slopes, the 3 Groom stooges were rolling down the bunny hill in prime form 🙂 Luckily we had friends with us, namely Giorgio, Claudia, and Ruggiero, who were able to help Tommaso use the between-the-legs ski-lift, which proved a major stumbling block. After the first day I was pretty dejected. Miles had a horrible headache, Tommy wanted to go back to skiing, and I was convinced I had beaten the unparalleled joy of snowboarding out of them by throwing them into it headlong. I was truly out of sorts as a result.
The following day we took a break from skiing and decided to take a hike near Pfelders/Plan above a town called Moos (in German) or Moso (in Italian) —not sure what the English would be 🙂 We planned to hike up to a Malga which was at 2012 meters, and while the kids hitched a ride with Giorgio, Antonella and I hiked up from 1300 meters. It took us a bit over an hour, and the hike may have been the most beautiful I have taken to date. The landscape was dreamlike covered in deep snow with a storm pending. There was a blissful silence to the place, and everything was snow white.
I took a series of photos on the walk up, and the landscape and weather conditions actually made taking a decent photo pretty easy. It was a storybook setting.
By the time we got to 2000 meters it was snowing pretty intensely, it was basically white-out conditions for the last half mile to the Malga.
Here is a photo our friend Giorgio took of us walking up:
The Egger-Grub-Alm Malga was our lunch destination, and it was picturesque.
And inside it was small, cozy, and warm as the snow outside got to almost blizzard conditions (over a meter of snow feel in that area over that week) and we ate what was definitely the best meal I have had at a Malga yet. The spiegeleier was to die for.
The walk down was during a fullblown snowstorm, and it was too deep for decent sledding, which was part of the plan:
This hike was amazing, but getting the cars off the mountain was precarious. The upside was I finally got a chance to see how chains work and no one died during the daring escape from snow mountain. The trip was getting back on track, and despite the snow which continued throughout the next day, we headed to Merano 2000—a ski resort right above Merano. It was a Thursday so it was relatively empty and the snow was falling regularly. We got to the top of the mountain around 11 AM, and it was paradise. Fresh powder, few people, and an easy slope to revisit my attempts to show Miles and Tommy how to snowboard given there were no lessons available yet again. Day 2 was much better, there were still a lot of falls, but we had time and space to work through them, and the lift back up was a full-on cabinovia which made the ski lift anxiety far less an issue for Tommy.
It was awesome, single best day of snowboarding I ever had. Spent hours with Tommaso and Miles trying to get them comfortable on their boards, and they were starting to get it. Still had much to learn, but they were beginning to get serpentine in the snow. And by the end of the day they were beat up, but the joy far outweighed the pain—unlike day 1. I really did not get too many photos of Miles and Tommy (and none of Tessy given I couldn’t keep up with her) on the mountain, but I did share a ride back up the mountain with Miles where we had a little chat about by snowboarding exploits in the 1980s. It provide some insight into my meticulous parenting style:
Like I say in the video, there was a moment during the day when Tommy, Miles and I were all upright and moving down the mountain while the fresh powder was falling out of the sky, it was pure heaven. Few moments in my dubious parenting career have been more glorious. I think I might have even been singing “White Lines” at one point.
We went back to Merano 2000 the following day, and got there right in time for the first lift up to the top of the mountain. Miles and Tommy finally got a lesson, and Anto, Tess, and I took advantage and took a few runs down the mountain before the crowds arrived. It was phenomenal.
And the dumping of snow the previous day meant the morning was gorgeous with ample snow everywhere:
We lasted a bit longer after a solid lunch spot that you could only get to through skiing or hiking:
I always wanted to go on a snowboarding trip to decent mountain when I was a teenager, but it was all but impossible both logistically (I lived on Long Island) and financially (I was part of a family of seven and the only trips we took were to McDonalds). But finally being able to do it, I was quickly reminded how much I enjoy snowboarding—it may be one of the coolest things ever invented, and I live in a part of the world where my kids and I can actually do it regularly 5 or 6 months a year. I want to do it a lot more, in fact there were a few moments I began daydreaming about becoming a snowboard bum and moving up to a cabin in Alto Adige for the winter. Not all that practical, but why the hell not? How long do I really have anyway? What better then to spend it doing something wherein you feel totally free.
Regardless, I was never really tired all four days from the activity, which does reinforce the fact that the regularly hiking all year really paid off. I felt like I was in fairly decent shape, and that gave me the patience to not only try and show Tommy and Miles how to snowboard, but reminded me that with a little time and effort I can still do some of this stuff.
While I was in Barcelona this past October to co-present with Brian Lamb at the Open University of Catalonia’s (UOC) “Pushing the Boundaries of Higher Ed” symposium (presentation video above), they decided to subject themselves to my opinionated responses to a series of questions regarding the state of ed-tech. I tried avoid any topics involving predictions given I am no futurist, but rather a charismatic cult leader and highly successful edupreneur 🙂
But enough about me, I’d like to thank Marcelo Maina of UOC’s EDUL@B for his masterful work at both conducting and editing the numerous responses to the various questions. I was just one of many folks he was tasked with interviewing, and I know from personal experience the chore of recording, editing, and publishing such things is no small feat—and to turn it around so quickly is truly impressive.
As for the videos, they are all a manageable 3-4 minutes responses to a posed question, and I like them because they allowed me to discuss everything from the greatest course ever taught (i.e. ds106), the vision behind a personal API, the good old days of blogs and wikis, the limits of open as in textbooks, and more. Not sure there is much cohesion to it given I am all over the place as usual, but the videos are a perfect for for the “I love me wall” that is the bava!
Quality Education for Ubiquitous Technology
Drivers of Emergent Pedagogies
Digital Competence in Higher Education
Future learning environments and technologies
Future Relevant Certifications
What new modes of education provision should Higher Education pay attention to?
“I’m not one for end of the year posts,” he says as he writes an end of the year post. But I wanted to take advantage of this blog genre to clear the decks for 2018. What do I mean? Well, I have a bunch of posts I wanted to write in 2017 but never got around to them for one reason or another. So, this post will be a long, rambling exercise in exorcising my blog demons from 2017 and starting fresh in the new year. I’ll take this in bits:
Reclaim Hosting
Scene from the Reclaim trip to NYC in November. Image credit: Meredith Fierro
2017 was another awesome year for Reclaim Hosting. The thing that stood out for me was that we were able to grow gracefully and build capacity. We went to four full-time employees with the hiring of Meredith in September, and I feel like we are really hitting our stride for 2018 as a team. This year saw the opening of CoWork (a.k.a. Reclaim Hosting’s HQ) in Fredericksburg this past May, which seems much longer ago than that.
Martha Burtis killing the keynote at Domains 17. Image credit: Bionicteaching
Party like it is 2006 with the great Jon Udell at Domains17. Image credit: Bionicteaching
And despite all that, we have remained solid financially without depending on outside investment, and this is something I’m grateful for in the wake of the terrible, unexpected news of the sudden shutdown of the New Media Consortium.
For us 2018 will be about having some fun watching video kill the radio star with ReclaimVideo, and continuing to do what we do best: support faculty and students getting up and running with web hosting. There are no foreseeable price increases on the table for 2018, and things are looking good all around. I think the one thing I want to do for Reclaim in 2018 is blog more about the details. Feature more work from the various schools, talk more about how we work as a team, and share more quotidian details. That said it has been a great year, and I thank my lucky stars every day for Reclaim.
I blogged here and there about my new found interest of daily hiking here in Trento. That has been an ongoing love affair in 2017, and while I missed the coveted 10,000 steps average for each and every day of 2017, I did finish with a pretty strong average of 3.9 miles or 9126 steps every damn day, while climbing on average 28 flights of stairs. The last bit is amazing to me, and I got deeper into hiking after snowboarding for the first time in 20 years this past February and realizing I need to get my shit in better shape. I’ll be heading back to the mountains tomorrow, so it will be interesting to see how (and if) this labor paid off. Although, regardless of snowboarding, I quickly became sold on hiking for the temporary break it provides from work and all the other crap that can creep into daily life. Plus, the malga food and the scenery have quickly become reasons enough…
Car Sharing
Yeah, this was kind of a small but significant thing for me this year. I only blogged about it once because I’m not sure how much you can say about car sharing, but it contributed greatly to my attempt to get into shape. We remained carless in 2017, and that meant we walked a ton more than we would have otherwise—which has been the greatest benefit of car sharing bar none.
That said, the financials are also in for 2017 , and the way I figure it we spent half of what we would have if we owned a car. It cost us on average 169€ for car sharing each month, which includes gas and insurance. That’s a grand total of 2028€ per year. That is about half of what we would have paid to buy a new car and pay for gas and insurance. Even a fairly modest car loan of $225/month and another $100 for gas and $75 for insurance puts you at $400, which is about 340€. It’s good for you, for the environment, and it saves money—who is better than me?
Travel
I don’t even know where to start, and this section is why I wanted to write this post to begin with. I traveled a lot in 2017, but unfortunately I did not blog a lot of it. That pains me cause I had a lot of fun adventures with some great people, so this will serve as a cleansing of my bad travel blogging during 2017. I’ll point to some of them here with the limp promise to blog them in more detail sometime next year, although get ready to be disappointed dear reader (womp womp).
Fredericksburg: I spent almost 3 weeks of January back in Fredericksburg communing with Tim and working on the new office:
I also got to check out a few excellent films at the Library of Congress, Packard Campus:
Long Island: During my trip to Virginia I was able to head up to Long Island for a few days and visit with my family there. I got this shot of my dad at diner in Wantagh that captures him pretty well. Alive and kicking at 80, a new record for the Groom family?
And on the way out of the USA I got to see some of the blowback from the Muslim travel ban at Dulles Airport:
Sweden: After the trip to the US I had a pretty short turn around in Trento before I was heading to Karlstad University in Sweden to run a workshop with the great Tom Woodward. Our most gracious host Jörg Pareigis was wonderful, and we started work that week that we are still working on together. I will blog about this in more detail during the new year given I will be taking a class or two that they will be running as part of their open, online course initiative.
Ireland: In late March I was back on the road to Ireland and after that England for OER17. I actually had a one night layover in London before heading to Dublin, and I was able to catch a lecture about and a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which was a total treat.
After that I flew to Dublin and spent the night. I took in a great exhibit “Humans Need Not Apply” and even had Beckett and Joyce sightings, kind of.
Next day I drove to Cork to give a presentation at University College Cork, which was gorgeous.
After Cork I drove through the Highlands of Kerry, which was gorgeous (gorgeous is a common thread in Ireland):
And then I spent the might on the Atlantic Ocean just outside of Waterville:
After that it was a long drive up the coast to Galway for another workshop at NUI Galway thanks to the great Catherine Cronin.
Ireland was brilliant, and while I only had a few days, what I saw blew me away. After that, it was back to Dublin to fly back to London for OER17. It was a great conference, and a good sign of that was that I was so locked in I have no photos to speak of. After that I went to Coventry University with Brian Lamb, Audrey Watters, Kate Green, and Christian Friedrich for a series of small talks and discussions, which was a lot of fun.
New Zealand: After Ireland and the UK I had about 3 weeks back at home before Antonella and I headed to New Zealand. The trip was unbelievably awesome, and I blogged about it a couple of times at least. I went to present at THETA 2017 thanks to the ever awesome Nigel Robertson, and Antonella and I made a trip of the rest of it—I loved New Zealand.
VA/OKC/Route66/LA/San Diego: This was another epic 3 week trip that took most of June. It started at the Reclaim offices for two days in early June, then we went to Oklahoma City to run the Domains 17 conference (I saw so any awesome people over that 3 days it would be impossible to list them all here), and after that Mikhail and I hit Route 66 all the way to Los Angeles. It was a lot of fun:
After we made it to LA and I spent a few days with my favorite Angelinos, then headed south to San Diego for my niece’s college graduation (but first a stop at Banana Dang in Oceanside to visit an old friend):
La Jolla was awesome, I got some In and Out on the way back to Los Angeles, and after that it was back to Italy.
Sardegna: Literally two days later the entire family was off to Sardegna for a beach stay. It was my first time, and I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
Australia:And if the year wasn’t rich enough already, I was invited to Melbourne, Australia by Deakin University to talk about WordPress and Domains. It’s where I saw the light of SPLOTs in their full glory, and also got to enjoy a memorable Saturday touring Melbourne.
After a week in Melbourne I headed up to Wagga Wagga for a presentation at Charles Sturt University and a very pleasant stay with the great Tim Klapdor. I even got to see my first kangaroos in the wild on CSU’s campus:
I am realizing I have a ton of photos from this portion of the trip still waiting to be published on Flickr. Maybe I’ll finally get around to setting them free in 2018.
Rome: Not long after Australia, the whole family took a trip to Rome with the Owens family (Tim, Emalee, and Sid). I have a ton of photos from this trip still waiting to go public, but a few of the highlights from this trip were finally getting to see the Vatican Museum:
Rome in August was a bit hot to start, but it cooled off after a day or so and the town was empty as everyone was heading out for vacation—as the Italians do.
And to my great delight, Audrey Watters even gave the papers we wrote for this conference a nod in her massive end-of-the-year awesomeness. Spending time with Brian is precious to me, and we made the most out of our short time together. He took this shot of me in that beautiful and relatively placid city just a few days after Catalonia’s vote to leave Spain. It’s my favorite photo anyone has taken of me in a long while, and not just because of the shirt. It reflects pretty much how I feel these days, but I may be beaming more than usual given the company.
VA/NYC: And the final trip was another jaunt back to Virginia for a Domains Workshop (which was awesome) and a Reclaim team trip to NYC (mentioned above) as well as a trip to Colgate University and a final bounce back to Long Island. And with that my travel would come to a close for 2017.
Family
The other 9 months I was not traveling I was home entertaining guests from abroad (there were a few), blogging on the couch, and basically haunting my family. The single best thing about my life since leaving the States has been the possibility of spending more time with Antonella and the kids than ever before. On a personal level, that has been the very best part of an amazing year.
But I’ll stop there, cause this post is already too long and I need to go snowboard some mountains in Alto Adige.
I just realized as I was trying to file away 2017 that this blog turned 12 years old two weeks ago with no fanfare. Maybe that’s proof it has become so much a part of the fabric of my life that I can take it for granted. At this point I’ve been blogging for more than a quarter of my entire life. And the long list of personal and professional riches that resulted from regularly sharing my incoherence over that time still shocks the hell out of me.
Scared Mario Bava GIF BY Kino Lorber
This year was a relatively quiet one on the bava with 117 posts (or a post every 3 days or so). I travelled a lot in 2017, which can throw off my writing rhythm quite a bit. That said, I’ve also been intentionally slowing things down in terms of blogging to focus on getting back into physical shape, reconnecting with my family during the 9 months I’m not traveling, and generally taking the pressure off a bit. That said, I passed a pretty big personal milestone this year hitting the 3000 posts mark and regardless of intensity, blogging still provides the best outlet I’ve ever had to share my thoughts and ideas freely. I find myself still blogging about random stuff without much of a pre-defined focus (save Reclaim and presentations), and I love that my most visited posts this year (combining for 30,ooo visitors) were guides for bypassing regionlock on the 3DS. I’m in the wrong racket 🙂 Thanks for any and all folks how graced the bava with their presence this year, I remain a very big fan!
I have been working away at some of my end of the year archiving projects, and one that has been taking more time then I planned has been my various attempts to migrate and archive Known to WordPress. I started using Known back in 2014, and I was pretty excited about the possibilities and I blogged about them a few times. But as 2017 comes to a close, so does my exploration of the Known world. I still think Known is one of the best instantiations of the POSSE philosophy, but the inability to marry that with a space to read and interact on the various social media spaces you are pushing to meant it was often, sadly, an afterthought.
I used it fairly robustly for documenting the Wire106 course:
Those are a few highlights of my Known posts, I went through the archive pretty thoroughly and far and away the UMW Console is the biggest of the image/media posts (there were 300 in all). After that there were about 24 blog posts (cross-posted) and 6 streaming media posts (or audio). The other 1000+ posts on my Known site were either status updates/notes or bookmarks. I used the notes and bookmarks as recently as this month. In fact, those were the only features I used over the last year and a half or so. I stopped posting photos to Known, and basically became a place for bookmarking stuff on the web or recording things I wanted to return to. That said, I knew this was not the right tool for the job. I checked in Diigo—a tool I have logged into maybe 3 times in my life—and I saw there were 400+ cross-posted bookmarks. That was useful, but the bookmarks stopped cross-postingafter I had some issues with the Known plugin for Diigo. I am imagining there are at least a hundred more bookmarks not posted to Diigo, which leaves anywhere from 500-800 notes and status updates as the remaining posts.
I say all this because I tried to grab the Known feed for all content (https://example.withknown.com/content/all?_t=rss) and using FeedWordPress (FWP) to pull it into a WordPress site, but FWP choked on the feed. But thanks to Rob Fairhead I found another feed plugin called RSS Post Importer that could read the feed, but balked at pulling in all the posts. However, I could pull in particular types of content feeds such as posts, photos, and streaming media.:
I was able to use that plugin to pull all my photos, posts, and audio into this WordPress site: http://known.jimgroom.com/
The issue was that the feeds for status updates and bookmarks would not pull, so none of those came over and the WordPress archive site remains incomplete. [Would love hints from anyone that knows how I might do this.]
The other thing I tried was using Site Sucker to archive the entire known.jimgroom.com site, and that worked really well. You can see the results online at archive.known.jimgroom.com. Site Sucker keeps the styles nicely, and it even archived according to content types, which I was pleasantly surprised by.
Right now the archived site has everything as it was, but there may be one potential issue once I shutdown Known and move the archived site. I was using a feature through Known to upload all the images to an Amazon S3 bucket, and I am wondering if they will work given they point to known.jimgoom.com. Making sure the images work in the archive site is the last bit to figure out, then I’ll switch it over and archive the Known database and files.†It would be nice to find a way to syndicate the bookmarks and status updates, but at this point having an HTML version of the site should be more than enough, especially given I can sort by content—which was the extent of organizational metadata I added anyway.
So, long story short, that’s it for Known. Although I do think moving forward I want to use a WordPress site for bookmarks and notes (maybe just bavatuesdays, and hide them from plain blog sight and remove them from the feed). One thing I did use well with Known was the Bookmarklet for adding sites as notes and bookmarks, and in the new version of my bookmarking/notes site I plan on using the bookmarklet—-which is an under-used tool—right Tom! : )
†Turns out the image are preserved, but the links to them on the old Known site are dead. I moved the Site Sucker archive over to known.jimgroom.com and it is working brilliantly. I am loving Site Sucker for these archiving/cleaning up projects.
I started this post years ago to collect commands I need from time to time, but it never got published. That said, years later I still need such a resource so I figured I would post this fairly idiosyncratic resource as a personal guide that I hope to update and maybe even organize over time. I kept most of these as bookmarks in my Known site, but that is proving increasingly untenable as a useful resource. Anyway, here it is, and if you have any favorites I might benefit from share away—not to mention any I forgot Tim 🙂
Command for importing existing installs into Installatron:
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
I blogged 
