My last project done.
Next one not due 'till Sunday.
Tonight I can sleep.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Friday morning, 1:30 am
Up doing more GIS homework. There's a lot about GIS I could do without, since much of the course seems to be about where to find the damn button/menu item to click to make the pretty colors appear. I can safely say I spent a good 8 hours this past week looking for that damn button. Now I can go on with the assignment, and maybe even catch a couple of hours of sleep before sunrise.
I was a computer programmer for 9+ years, or all but a few months working in New Jersey or Manhattan. I can handle a programming language, because it's basically made up of words that follow a basic logical structure. But teaching any academic course that involved finding things to click just drives me up a wall. My brain just doesn't get around that well. I'm just sufficiently old and worn down enough not to be as visually sharp as I was as a 23-year-old. Or old enough not to see a little checkbox in the middle of the screen directly in front of my face.
I taught myself CAD (Computer Aided Design/Drafting) that year while working out in California. It was pretty cool that you could draw an electrical schematic, conect some dots, and end up with a data file that could be sent to somebody who would return a few days later with a bare printed circuit board. Just with some mouse clicks, I could print out assembly instructions, part lists, etc, and send to the data to the factory by modem (pre-internet days). This was 1991. Has anything really changed since then? Maybe just the Internet, but that's just the same, but a little more, if you look at the surface.
Break time over. Time to finish the other business for the day!
I was a computer programmer for 9+ years, or all but a few months working in New Jersey or Manhattan. I can handle a programming language, because it's basically made up of words that follow a basic logical structure. But teaching any academic course that involved finding things to click just drives me up a wall. My brain just doesn't get around that well. I'm just sufficiently old and worn down enough not to be as visually sharp as I was as a 23-year-old. Or old enough not to see a little checkbox in the middle of the screen directly in front of my face.
I taught myself CAD (Computer Aided Design/Drafting) that year while working out in California. It was pretty cool that you could draw an electrical schematic, conect some dots, and end up with a data file that could be sent to somebody who would return a few days later with a bare printed circuit board. Just with some mouse clicks, I could print out assembly instructions, part lists, etc, and send to the data to the factory by modem (pre-internet days). This was 1991. Has anything really changed since then? Maybe just the Internet, but that's just the same, but a little more, if you look at the surface.
Break time over. Time to finish the other business for the day!
Monday, October 24, 2005
Upstate NY Wiki!
Yes, I created a new one: the Upstate NY Wiki. What can I say, it's free (if the site's administrator likes your idea). Funny, I noticed the Jersey City wiki a while back, but it seems pretty much blank. Maybe I should move my content from my Transitcat wiki there... or maybe not.
Why am I messing around with this instead of doing real work? Just that this has been in the back of my mind since the summer, and now it's done. Felt a bit burned by my earlier attempt to set up a site for my academic department, which got spammed to death, and I just don't have the time to install countermeasures against a 24/7 bot program hell-bent on vandalizing the site.
So it's there. If anyone wants to read it, go ahead. Contribute? Better yet.
Why am I messing around with this instead of doing real work? Just that this has been in the back of my mind since the summer, and now it's done. Felt a bit burned by my earlier attempt to set up a site for my academic department, which got spammed to death, and I just don't have the time to install countermeasures against a 24/7 bot program hell-bent on vandalizing the site.
So it's there. If anyone wants to read it, go ahead. Contribute? Better yet.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
My New Modeling Career
From reading my earlier posting at the beginning of the semester, I found something that somehow fell off (or was never on) my to-do list: making some system models relating to my research topic. Really, a series of models now expected of me in short order. Here's the deal: my original dissertation project related to producing an open-source public transit itinerary planner. That was before quitting my job in New Jersey, moving the family to Albany, and starting the PhD program.
Turns out, that's not terribly intersting to a lot of people. Ok, would be nice to have for free what currently companies charge an arm and a leg for (the itinerary planner for New Jersey Transit allegedly cost about $100K, plus ongoing maintenance charges. (I've heard $6M for Los Angeles, but that's pure rumor.) So if they got a hold of my program instead, they'd pay $0 for the software and some bucks for loading data. These are one shot deals.
And of course, an itinerary planner such as this does precious little good when something bad goes down, like severe weather, blackouts, and mass evacuations. So the idea is this: an information resource highly responsive to real-time conditions as an overlay to sheduled data. Not as big a deal as it sounds, and actually a planned feature in my original system, on my dearly departed http://transitcat.com site.
But an added problem is this: the target audience for this kind of project isn't the browser-savvy web jockeys sitting at home carefully planning their itineraries. True, I was putting a lot of work into a mobile side to this, using PDA's or cell phones, again, not too bad. But potential users either do not have these toys due to economics, or can't use them in a power outage or other kind of scenario. Additionally, the data acquisition side isn't quite there, either, since it requires real-time data from a network of sensors. Hardly something that can be distributed for free along with my free program. And it gets harder yet.
Nothing here is a showstopper, but it just can't all be done in the course of the dissertation year. So the models have to start now, so that I have a blueprint to follow next year, or at least can draft a project schedule to see what's attainable, because the course I commit to next Fall is what I need to complete in Spring.
Turns out, that's not terribly intersting to a lot of people. Ok, would be nice to have for free what currently companies charge an arm and a leg for (the itinerary planner for New Jersey Transit allegedly cost about $100K, plus ongoing maintenance charges. (I've heard $6M for Los Angeles, but that's pure rumor.) So if they got a hold of my program instead, they'd pay $0 for the software and some bucks for loading data. These are one shot deals.
And of course, an itinerary planner such as this does precious little good when something bad goes down, like severe weather, blackouts, and mass evacuations. So the idea is this: an information resource highly responsive to real-time conditions as an overlay to sheduled data. Not as big a deal as it sounds, and actually a planned feature in my original system, on my dearly departed http://transitcat.com site.
But an added problem is this: the target audience for this kind of project isn't the browser-savvy web jockeys sitting at home carefully planning their itineraries. True, I was putting a lot of work into a mobile side to this, using PDA's or cell phones, again, not too bad. But potential users either do not have these toys due to economics, or can't use them in a power outage or other kind of scenario. Additionally, the data acquisition side isn't quite there, either, since it requires real-time data from a network of sensors. Hardly something that can be distributed for free along with my free program. And it gets harder yet.
Nothing here is a showstopper, but it just can't all be done in the course of the dissertation year. So the models have to start now, so that I have a blueprint to follow next year, or at least can draft a project schedule to see what's attainable, because the course I commit to next Fall is what I need to complete in Spring.
Wiki don't lose that number...
How telling is it that the first-ever Wiki conference by ACM (Association of Computing Machinery, (one of) the most prestigious Information Science organizations is going on right about now in San Diego. One of the first speakers: Sunir Shah, a leading expert on WikiSpam. Yes, spam is overwhelming our well-intentioned efforts to advance the free exchange of ideas and improvement of community knowledge, on the off chance that one in ten thousand viewers might ultimately decide to subscribe to a porn site. Particuarly where the community of interested users of that web site might number in the dozens.
But I need the wiki for my class, so I've had to resort to rather crude url scrambling and suggestions that nobody link to my site from anywhere else on the Internet. Is it annoying? Absolutely. I'm starting to wonder that until the current stock of humanity is socialized a little better (hopefully within the next couple of generations) we had better just dig walls and a moat around our communities to keep undesireables out.
But the real solution is to restore community sanctions against those who violate social norms. Is the anonymity of the Internet a good thing? Back in the ArpaNet days, there was no anonymity. You were affiliated with a research institute, government, or corporation, the community was self-selecting, and bad behavior had severe consequences (like the loss of employment). Nowadays, the masses are realtively anonymous, with little or no consequence for such behavior unless vast amounts of time and money are stolen because of viruses or other kinds of random vandalism.
Should there still be a single Internet? Or is it time to break up the network into communities that can police themselves and throw out the ne'er-do-wells? In the physical sense, the gated community has become more attractive. Do we need to resort to this in the online world as well? Or is it just enough to padlock individual sites, when there are no protections against vandals from all around the world?
----
This is as good a description of software development as I have found (or could have articulated myself, since it's devoid of any profanity). Is this why I'm back in school facing a life of academia? Not quite, but it might have encouraged me to do what I should have done in the first place: get the letters after my name and do good research. But I wouldn't give back the experiences and lessons of the past decade either.
But I need the wiki for my class, so I've had to resort to rather crude url scrambling and suggestions that nobody link to my site from anywhere else on the Internet. Is it annoying? Absolutely. I'm starting to wonder that until the current stock of humanity is socialized a little better (hopefully within the next couple of generations) we had better just dig walls and a moat around our communities to keep undesireables out.
But the real solution is to restore community sanctions against those who violate social norms. Is the anonymity of the Internet a good thing? Back in the ArpaNet days, there was no anonymity. You were affiliated with a research institute, government, or corporation, the community was self-selecting, and bad behavior had severe consequences (like the loss of employment). Nowadays, the masses are realtively anonymous, with little or no consequence for such behavior unless vast amounts of time and money are stolen because of viruses or other kinds of random vandalism.
Should there still be a single Internet? Or is it time to break up the network into communities that can police themselves and throw out the ne'er-do-wells? In the physical sense, the gated community has become more attractive. Do we need to resort to this in the online world as well? Or is it just enough to padlock individual sites, when there are no protections against vandals from all around the world?
----
This is as good a description of software development as I have found (or could have articulated myself, since it's devoid of any profanity). Is this why I'm back in school facing a life of academia? Not quite, but it might have encouraged me to do what I should have done in the first place: get the letters after my name and do good research. But I wouldn't give back the experiences and lessons of the past decade either.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Free Meat Sauce
Mondays are rough days, not the least of which is the start of another week. The way my schedule works out, it consists of going to school at roughly 9-10 am and returning home at roughly 9 pm. It's not like a huge commute, a 10 minute bus ride (when CDTA does make an appearance at my doorstep). But it's hardly worth going home when I only have 30-45 minutes between appointments, and there's always a half hour of reading or research to do inbetween.
One problem is food and drink. It's a pain to bring / carry around enough lunch, dinner, and caffeine-laden beverages with me, and too expensive to buy on a student budget. One solution: go to Stewart's on the corner and get something. Stewart's is a strange combination of neighborhood deli, convenience store, and ice cream shop. Among their wares are hot dogs, 1 for 99 cents, 2 for $1.79. The bonus (I had thought until a couple of weeks ago) was the large sign labeled "Free Meat Sauce!!!". Obviously, there's a purchase involved, so it would be more appropriate to say "Complimentary Meat Sauce!?!" if that were in the vocabulary of the target population for cheap convenient store hot dogs.
So far so good. I've eaten this a few times over the past few months with hardly a second thought. It's not until I mention this to my friend Matthew and see his response that I start to reconsider the whole concept of Free Meat Sauce.
A little bleach, a little elbow grease, and the mildew-covered fridge in my shared Adjunct Faculty office is now ready for action. Farewell to Free Meat Sauce.
One problem is food and drink. It's a pain to bring / carry around enough lunch, dinner, and caffeine-laden beverages with me, and too expensive to buy on a student budget. One solution: go to Stewart's on the corner and get something. Stewart's is a strange combination of neighborhood deli, convenience store, and ice cream shop. Among their wares are hot dogs, 1 for 99 cents, 2 for $1.79. The bonus (I had thought until a couple of weeks ago) was the large sign labeled "Free Meat Sauce!!!". Obviously, there's a purchase involved, so it would be more appropriate to say "Complimentary Meat Sauce!?!" if that were in the vocabulary of the target population for cheap convenient store hot dogs.
So far so good. I've eaten this a few times over the past few months with hardly a second thought. It's not until I mention this to my friend Matthew and see his response that I start to reconsider the whole concept of Free Meat Sauce.
A little bleach, a little elbow grease, and the mildew-covered fridge in my shared Adjunct Faculty office is now ready for action. Farewell to Free Meat Sauce.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Push the button. No, the button's bad...
Spent part of the morning at Uncommon Grounds chatting with Matthew and trying to sort through all the papers in my bookbag, which was literally a foot thick with printouts, binders, and assorted loose pages of scribbled notes. What a mess. It took the better part of an hour. But as always, these talks put me back on track when I begin to lose sight of why I went back to school in the first place. PhD student life is just a little isolating, far more so than life in the obscure cubicle , a far cry from the wild lifestyle of a Graduate student.
I scribbled out some notes and revisions for my next lecture. Oh, not to mention the exam I'm giving. It's like episodes of a story that unfolds between now and December. But then again, that's true of the courses I'm taking, it's just not so clear in following the story as it is in creating that story. It's something you don't quite pick up on when you're just a student...
But isn't there the story about the story, and aren't they quite different? I used to write a lot, back when I had free time. Where the ideas for the story come from, and the different versions that never make the final cut, are radically different from the outcome. Research is no different. Just this quote comes to mind:
(Thanks, Google, I only remembered part of the quote.)
So many loose connections, leads, scraps of research. It's amazing that as a PhD student (and not even a Candidate until I presumably pass the Comps this summer) all my time is exhausted on classwork and lecture preparation, and not enough on preparing for my research next year. But as I'm quickly realizing while sorting through my stacks of paper tonight, is that some leads are there already. It's just the disclipline in spending an hour a day doing nothing but planning for next year, assembling articles, writing notes, and informally running lots of stuff past my committee members. After all, if you're at your disseration defense and really defending anything major in the project in the Spring, you've either not done your job all year, or really not communicated with your committee. Or so says I the year before I formally start the process. We shall see, I guess.
I talked to my advisor, and determined that there's a "pre-research" phase, which is a pilot project to make sure that the dissertation project scope is doable within the timeframe allowed. Then there's the realities of the job market... to make sure that the research area is marketable after getting the diploma.
----
Had a good little chuckle this morning in the car: just the image of Chalkipedia, a user-developed knowledge management system constructed of slate and, of course, written with chalk. It would be freely edited by anyone with nothing better to do. Inserting additional pages might be a little rough though.
I picked up the book A Beautiful Mind, about John Nash, at a book sale, along with a bagful of others for about $1. I read about 5 pages and left in in my bookshelf to read when I have more time, say in June 2007. (I also have a book on speedreading, but I haven't gotten around to opening it yet.) But from the movie, I was struck with the image of his notes, clippings cut out, stuck to the walls, and referenced to each other with thumbtacks and string. He could have created an amazing Wiki. At least until the medication kicked in.
Maybe I just need more sleep and a lot less coffee.
----
Sure enough, there's another official site about Lost:
http://www.thehansofoundation.org/dharma.html in case you have trouble finding the interesting part. I predict that the title of this blog (my favorite quote from the show) is going to be a huge IT catchphrase. Were I still an IT grunt, I'd have posted it in my office already.
I scribbled out some notes and revisions for my next lecture. Oh, not to mention the exam I'm giving. It's like episodes of a story that unfolds between now and December. But then again, that's true of the courses I'm taking, it's just not so clear in following the story as it is in creating that story. It's something you don't quite pick up on when you're just a student...
But isn't there the story about the story, and aren't they quite different? I used to write a lot, back when I had free time. Where the ideas for the story come from, and the different versions that never make the final cut, are radically different from the outcome. Research is no different. Just this quote comes to mind:
"If you want to enjoy sausage or respect the law," Otto von Bismarck reputedly said, "you should never watch either of them being made."
(Thanks, Google, I only remembered part of the quote.)
So many loose connections, leads, scraps of research. It's amazing that as a PhD student (and not even a Candidate until I presumably pass the Comps this summer) all my time is exhausted on classwork and lecture preparation, and not enough on preparing for my research next year. But as I'm quickly realizing while sorting through my stacks of paper tonight, is that some leads are there already. It's just the disclipline in spending an hour a day doing nothing but planning for next year, assembling articles, writing notes, and informally running lots of stuff past my committee members. After all, if you're at your disseration defense and really defending anything major in the project in the Spring, you've either not done your job all year, or really not communicated with your committee. Or so says I the year before I formally start the process. We shall see, I guess.
I talked to my advisor, and determined that there's a "pre-research" phase, which is a pilot project to make sure that the dissertation project scope is doable within the timeframe allowed. Then there's the realities of the job market... to make sure that the research area is marketable after getting the diploma.
----
Had a good little chuckle this morning in the car: just the image of Chalkipedia, a user-developed knowledge management system constructed of slate and, of course, written with chalk. It would be freely edited by anyone with nothing better to do. Inserting additional pages might be a little rough though.
I picked up the book A Beautiful Mind, about John Nash, at a book sale, along with a bagful of others for about $1. I read about 5 pages and left in in my bookshelf to read when I have more time, say in June 2007. (I also have a book on speedreading, but I haven't gotten around to opening it yet.) But from the movie, I was struck with the image of his notes, clippings cut out, stuck to the walls, and referenced to each other with thumbtacks and string. He could have created an amazing Wiki. At least until the medication kicked in.
Maybe I just need more sleep and a lot less coffee.
----
Sure enough, there's another official site about Lost:
http://www.thehansofoundation.org/dharma.html in case you have trouble finding the interesting part. I predict that the title of this blog (my favorite quote from the show) is going to be a huge IT catchphrase. Were I still an IT grunt, I'd have posted it in my office already.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
Yes, I'm hooked on 'Lost'
I usually make fun of people who get hooked on TV shows. Not just because I randomly make fun of people, but I really think TV is a huge waste of time. I do watch TV, I just acknowledge that I'm completely wasting the time I spend watching it. That being said, I got really hooked on 'Lost' this summer. Yes, everybody on Earth is watching the show. All the more reason not to have watched it last year. But they replayed most of the entire season over the summer, and combined with the relative lack of things to do at night in Albany when the kids are asleep, the low pay associated with student life, and that inexpensive and trustworthy babysitters are in short supply on short notice, I started watching more TV after work. After all, there wasn't much I could do in terms of advancing my academic career other than study for the comprehensive exams, do reseearch, file, clean the house, unpack, or start my dissertation a year early.
So the premise is this: a bunch of people from a plane crash end up on a (presumably) unknown South Pacific island and try to survive. Ok, it stopped being like Survivor on the first episode which I haven't seen yet. But it's the first TV show that made me really think about the storyline during the week. It was truly frightening to suddenly wonder if there were a wiki about it, and discover that there really was one. (Even more so that I'm now a regular contributor, but that's for another day.)
Ok, it has a lot of themes to take out of every episode, a lot of the "big" questions of life. Yes, I predict that I'll shudder when I read this sometime between tomorrow and next year, but it makes me think about the relationship between man, the community, and God. Each character has internal conflicts to overcome, and each character seems to have strange connections to each other in their lives before the fateful flight. Not to mention the numerological connections through the story.
I'm not the first to wonder if The Island is really a waystation between life and death, and whether the characters are in transition. Maybe the characters that die in an episode (the Red Shirt factor) are those who have resolved their conflicts, or at least have made the passing back to either life or death.
On the other hand, the second season seems to have 'jumped the shark' already. In the pleas of Stephen King, please end the show when the story is told. The second season seems to be the story of 'the Others', who are the 'wild' people who inhabit the island. That, and 'the Hatch', which will probably be played out before the end of the semester. Once these stories are told, and we meet the other 40 crash survivors we don't see much of, it's hard to see how they're going to pull out a third season. The story can't stay 'Lost' forever.
So the premise is this: a bunch of people from a plane crash end up on a (presumably) unknown South Pacific island and try to survive. Ok, it stopped being like Survivor on the first episode which I haven't seen yet. But it's the first TV show that made me really think about the storyline during the week. It was truly frightening to suddenly wonder if there were a wiki about it, and discover that there really was one. (Even more so that I'm now a regular contributor, but that's for another day.)
Ok, it has a lot of themes to take out of every episode, a lot of the "big" questions of life. Yes, I predict that I'll shudder when I read this sometime between tomorrow and next year, but it makes me think about the relationship between man, the community, and God. Each character has internal conflicts to overcome, and each character seems to have strange connections to each other in their lives before the fateful flight. Not to mention the numerological connections through the story.
I'm not the first to wonder if The Island is really a waystation between life and death, and whether the characters are in transition. Maybe the characters that die in an episode (the Red Shirt factor) are those who have resolved their conflicts, or at least have made the passing back to either life or death.
On the other hand, the second season seems to have 'jumped the shark' already. In the pleas of Stephen King, please end the show when the story is told. The second season seems to be the story of 'the Others', who are the 'wild' people who inhabit the island. That, and 'the Hatch', which will probably be played out before the end of the semester. Once these stories are told, and we meet the other 40 crash survivors we don't see much of, it's hard to see how they're going to pull out a third season. The story can't stay 'Lost' forever.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Spam, Wiki, and annoying things
Amazing how quickly spam overtakes us. I just wrote my last post, and got 6 comment spam within about 5 minutes of hitting the "submit" button on my last post. I set up another wiki for my academic department, only to take it down because of robospam. My class wiki was preemptively "frozen" because the same spambot had found my site as well.
Where does it end? When does spam just become harassment? Nobody from my wiki is going to subscribe to offshore "adult services" websites, and the spammers must have a clue about this. So what's the point?
I've posted a bunch of old blogs from my dearly departed website, transitcat.com. I'm a student now, and have neither the time nor money to keep that thing running, and giving 4-year-old transit information for NYC isn't doing anyone any favors. Someday I plan to restore the site, whether intact or in pieces throughout various websites, blogs, and wikis. But not this semester.
Time to bed. It's late already, and the kids are early risers.
Where does it end? When does spam just become harassment? Nobody from my wiki is going to subscribe to offshore "adult services" websites, and the spammers must have a clue about this. So what's the point?
I've posted a bunch of old blogs from my dearly departed website, transitcat.com. I'm a student now, and have neither the time nor money to keep that thing running, and giving 4-year-old transit information for NYC isn't doing anyone any favors. Someday I plan to restore the site, whether intact or in pieces throughout various websites, blogs, and wikis. But not this semester.
Time to bed. It's late already, and the kids are early risers.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Scott, a pony, and his friend's birthday party
Scott on a pony. As a general rule, he's a little wary of being around animals larger than himself. Perfectly understandable in my book.
-------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent from a T-Mobile wireless phone.
Friday Night, 11:55 pm
It's still September for a few more minutes, and I've already turned on the furnace. It's going to be some winter, I think! Really, it's more the matter of not weatherproofing the house yet, and having toddlers in a 60-degree house won't get me any good parenting awards.
Classes are going well, in that I mean that the courses I take and teach all seem to be going well. I get slighly surprised looks from students on my off days, like they're unaware that I'm just a student on the other 6 days a week I don't teach. The problem with blogging is that I compose the best entries while doing something else, like while driving on the Thruway in the Catskills, moments that don't lend themselves to typing my most profound thoughts into a web form on Blogger.com. Theoretically, that would be the infamous "Driving Podcast" in the style of Dave Winer when he gets around to updating his feeds. (Don't get me wrong, I like his work, since he did invent RSS in the first place, early champion of blogging, and co-inventor of Podcasting. Whether he "gets" social computing the way I do, I haven't quite figured out that yet, since he's more tied to the machinery that makes it all function.)
I'm finally taking a GIS course now. The first few tutorials centered around where to click, rather than any theory, but that seems to be a necessary evil to getting to the point of doing anything interesting. The semester was a slow start for me-- getting back into gear was a bit tougher this time.
Oh, boy do I sympathize with my own students, who couldn't be less interested in learning the structural concepts behind HTML. But again, it's the foundation for doing interesting things, or as I awkwardly put it, "Paying your dues before getting to something more interesting". What can I say, I have to think on my feet a lot in there. I failed to appreciate before last year how much the instructor has to play the part of cheerleader, motivational speaker, salesman, etc., in addition to just presenting the material.
Kids are doing fine. Scott seems to be having a little trouble listening lately. I'm attributing this to being three years old. Which means the solution centers around consistent parenting, coping skills, time, and a glass of wine at night after the kids go to bed. (Unfortunately I'm a student, so the glass of wine has to wait for the weekend.)
I had to take down the wiki I had set up for my department, due to automated spamming. Somebody from a Russian IP address had set up an automated spam attack against it, and the department told me to pull the whole site down due to the, shall we say, unsavory content flooding the site one link down from the department's home page. Shortly after, I locked down my personal wiki, and tonight I fully restored it from my backups at home. It's back to where it was on August 30th, though I've probably lost a few entries made since then. I was a little annoyed at first, but there's an interesting lesson to be learned there. I hope I'll appreciate this as an opportunity for learning someday...
I watched a Taiwanese movie from the library tonight, "Goodbye Dragon Inn". After 80 minutes of long shots with silence and minimal action, I can safely say that I have absolutely no idea what that movie was about. I could attribute that to being a foreign movie, but there was virtually no dialog. Sadly, my Taiwanese lab partners from last year all went back home, so I don't have a good chance for an explanation of what the movie was about. It's the emperor new clothes effect, where I can't just say that the movie sucked and nothing happened, because obviously there was a lot of dramatic tension and understatement that built the story out of those long pauses and reflections. But the fact is that my wife was sound asleep after 30 minutes, and I was only awake because of all the coffee and Diet Pepsi I drank today. And still am, only slighly puzzled as well.
Now that it's 12:30, I should end here and take another shot at UML modeling before going to bed. ~sigh
Classes are going well, in that I mean that the courses I take and teach all seem to be going well. I get slighly surprised looks from students on my off days, like they're unaware that I'm just a student on the other 6 days a week I don't teach. The problem with blogging is that I compose the best entries while doing something else, like while driving on the Thruway in the Catskills, moments that don't lend themselves to typing my most profound thoughts into a web form on Blogger.com. Theoretically, that would be the infamous "Driving Podcast" in the style of Dave Winer when he gets around to updating his feeds. (Don't get me wrong, I like his work, since he did invent RSS in the first place, early champion of blogging, and co-inventor of Podcasting. Whether he "gets" social computing the way I do, I haven't quite figured out that yet, since he's more tied to the machinery that makes it all function.)
I'm finally taking a GIS course now. The first few tutorials centered around where to click, rather than any theory, but that seems to be a necessary evil to getting to the point of doing anything interesting. The semester was a slow start for me-- getting back into gear was a bit tougher this time.
Oh, boy do I sympathize with my own students, who couldn't be less interested in learning the structural concepts behind HTML. But again, it's the foundation for doing interesting things, or as I awkwardly put it, "Paying your dues before getting to something more interesting". What can I say, I have to think on my feet a lot in there. I failed to appreciate before last year how much the instructor has to play the part of cheerleader, motivational speaker, salesman, etc., in addition to just presenting the material.
Kids are doing fine. Scott seems to be having a little trouble listening lately. I'm attributing this to being three years old. Which means the solution centers around consistent parenting, coping skills, time, and a glass of wine at night after the kids go to bed. (Unfortunately I'm a student, so the glass of wine has to wait for the weekend.)
I had to take down the wiki I had set up for my department, due to automated spamming. Somebody from a Russian IP address had set up an automated spam attack against it, and the department told me to pull the whole site down due to the, shall we say, unsavory content flooding the site one link down from the department's home page. Shortly after, I locked down my personal wiki, and tonight I fully restored it from my backups at home. It's back to where it was on August 30th, though I've probably lost a few entries made since then. I was a little annoyed at first, but there's an interesting lesson to be learned there. I hope I'll appreciate this as an opportunity for learning someday...
I watched a Taiwanese movie from the library tonight, "Goodbye Dragon Inn". After 80 minutes of long shots with silence and minimal action, I can safely say that I have absolutely no idea what that movie was about. I could attribute that to being a foreign movie, but there was virtually no dialog. Sadly, my Taiwanese lab partners from last year all went back home, so I don't have a good chance for an explanation of what the movie was about. It's the emperor new clothes effect, where I can't just say that the movie sucked and nothing happened, because obviously there was a lot of dramatic tension and understatement that built the story out of those long pauses and reflections. But the fact is that my wife was sound asleep after 30 minutes, and I was only awake because of all the coffee and Diet Pepsi I drank today. And still am, only slighly puzzled as well.
Now that it's 12:30, I should end here and take another shot at UML modeling before going to bed. ~sigh
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