Vines, Berries, and Thorns

I'm taking a (long) break from morning breakfast and cleanup- checking news, making a list of what needs to be done in the next two days, and cleaning up a few citations in my database. I find that last one, citation cleanup- is best done in smaller doses, though making those doses frequent is the tough part.

We're adjusting again, with the kids home from school for the summer and my in-laws visiting for a couple of weeks. Our black raspberry bush has overwhelmed a quarter of the length of the backyard fence-I'm picking out the weeds that have grown in with the raspberries, but I'll just settle on keeping it against the fence. But, I'm getting used to the thorns, scratches, and slight itching, and the worst of it is over.

Hey- picking berries keeps the kids entertained for a half hour a day, though they eat most of them. I wish we'd planted the blueberry bushes when we first moved here 5 years ago, instead of waiting until last month..

But the literature review goes on- over 200 articles in the database, though at least a third don't have proper citations. Then the task of reviewing the list of authors, conferences, and database searches that yielded them- a load of fun over the next few weeks. I'd initially planned to generate a Big Fat Graph to visualize/present the results, but that approach seems to have fallen out of favor in the industry. I've got an enormous, sprawling body of research which seems a bit painful at times to work with, but occasionally yields a little tidbit of something useful. Kind of like berry picking I guess...

Cleaning up

After doing a couple of hours at my summer school job, I came home to clean up. My in-laws are coming from Japan in a few days and the place is still a mess. So, I spent the afternoon mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges, and taking out the trash for trash day. After realizing it's Spring Cleanup day here in Albany, I decided I had to clean out the garage too, or else wait until September.

But after taking out the slightly moldy baby stroller and car seat set, I went back to haul an old broken snowblower to the curb. I'd realized that someone already had taken the stroller set from the curb, not 15 minutes later. I had a slightly horrified moment when I though about someone putting a newborn into that thing, which had been sitting in the garage for about five years-- the last two of which it's been leaking. What do you do in a case like that? Demolish it first to make sure nobody tries to use it? But I'm just hoping the new owner cleans and disinfects it well before using it.

Some guy stopped and gave me $5 for the snowblower. Just as well- I'm not sure the city would have taken it anyway. Amazing what can happen when you wish someone, somewhere would buy you a cold beer for your hard work. I'm also amazed by all the men in new-looking vans that pulled into my driveway to examine the growing pile of garbage at the curb, occasionally swearing at the lack of anything good.

The garage is now clean and safe for the kids to walk in. I'm feeling my age now as I can barely move my arms and my shoulder is burning. After all, I just moved a Craigslist piano into my house three days ago, or at least watched my nephews carry it. If it weren't for the stairs, one of them could have done it alone with a dolly. Had I tried it, I'd be in the hospital right now.

Don't ask how I'm doing on my dissertation this week. My fingers are starting to stiffen up too.

But now that the kids are done with school for the summer, they can practice the piano, and get their bikes and summer toys out of the garage without injury.

Social Network Zombie

I don't know why I did it, but somehow in the middle of writing about Task Management decomposition, I realized I had just registered a Twitter account, which I had sworn I'd never do. I'll never actually use it, but despite that, I have a twitter post app now on my iGoogle home page and two new posts.
Blogger: the slippery slope to social networking.

Kiddie soccer

A though occurred to me today while watching my 8-year-old play soccer- this is the age where kids make the transition from "swarmball" to something that looks like an actual team sport. So despite my backpack with printouts and notebooks carried with the intent of "being constructive" during her game, I quickly realized that watching was far more important. But I did take some notes.

Why call it "swarm ball"? It's self explanatory if you watched. But I remember 4-year old lacrosse, when any butterfly on the edge of the field would result in both teams chasing after it with their sticks. 5-year-olds giving a big swinging kick at the soccer ball only to miss and fall backwards. 6 year olds who realized that they should only score in the opposite goal. By then, the kids start to develp the understanding of rules and the fact that they're on a team working towards the same goal: the whole herd of them chasing the same ball at the same time.

But they're on the verge of discovering teamwork- that the work is divided and everyone has a role to play. Sometimes you kick the ball, and sometimes you back off and wait for your teammates to pass it. That's as far as I ever got in soccer, but it's struck me more recently as a problem in self-organization, where complex behavior emerges from systems following simple rules.

Solar Theft?

Reading the NYT Tech page (online) there's a story about solar panel theft, particularly common in California. With the discussions of alarm systems, etc, there might be an easier solution: just brand them. Solar cells are thin films of silicon embedded with wires.

Just print a serial number into the wiring. Any attempt to remove the number will render the cell useless- without a lot of very obvious tampering. Serial numbers won't keep anyone from using the cells, but they'll be easier to detect when seized or during attempts to resell, which kills a lot of the market for theft.

It's the new media

I've started playing with media again, little by little. I had an AVI of some video content for testing- but found that it didn't play well on my Palm Tungsten E, using the freeware/Open Source Core Pocket Media Player- the video would just freeze, since the CPU lacks the power to fully process the video in real time. But it does play 3GP format video, the kind my cell phone uses- and that plays just fine. I've found that many of my students know how to convert DVD's to AVI, 3GP, take sound clips and turn them into ringtones, etc., far better than I probably ever will. It's a very complex workflow to combine these different software inputs, programs, and data migrations, something on par with many of the production environments I've worked in back in my project management and finance database systems.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

These kids are smart enough, but they need a more visual, interactive environment. It's easy to see when/why music videos grabbed off of YouTube don't play on your cell phone. Harder to debug a bad data migration from a mainframe into a database server. A lot of the *kinds* of operations are identical though, but the analysis is a bit more abstract.

Which leads to another point- just what are kids capable of these days? I'm reluctant to join in the chorus of our generation not being up to par- I recall being on the other end of that once upon a time, and it was wrong then, too. Is media just mindless zoning out in front of the TV, or is it something very different? I think media becomes the virtual environment we can build- or "augmented reality" that can make us more effective.

I've found now that I always drive with the GPS map on, even if I know where I'm going- that's an augmented reality application right there- because I find out things about my location that I wouldn't have thought to investigate. Sometimes more information helps you in ways you don't expect, and media is simply new ways to absorb information using multiple channels of delivery, without the added fatigue.

Where do they go?

A lot of attrition- something like 10% of new students- drop out in the first few weeks of class, sometimes before they even get homework or receive a quiz. That's a startling idea. I noticed my classes got a bit smaller after the first couple of weeks. But the research I'm reading tonight says that's widespread in the first semester of college. It begs the question: what did they expect that they didn't receive, so early in the semester?
Back to the research proposal...

Some kind of way out of here...

It's been stuck in my mind that we've all settled on business as usual, despite the house of cards falling all around us. This ain't your Dad's recession any more than we seem to have narrowly averted your Grandpa's Depression. (My parent grew up during the Depression, but that's a story I've covered before.) But things just seem very wrong as we see manufacturing go down the toilet, the collapse of Finance, the rapid accelerations in the costs of healthcare and education, the impending collapse of Social Security and Medicaid, and whatever other assorted mayhem they're discussing in the news between clips of Jon and Kate Plus Eight and that impending train wreck.

I forgot to mention Global Warming.

Are we doing anything different this time around? Or do we just think that by pumping loads of money into the economy, we can just going back to doing everything the same way, but somehow it'll be all different this time?

I've always considered the recovery of the 1990's, which could have well been a disaster following the 1987 market crash, to be the story of the rise of networks, Client/Server, and the Internet. Of course, the dot-com crash in 2000 would seem to be the end of that story, but the real story is that too many amateur investors bought into tech stocks on speculation, leading to a 7-year binge of speculation and asset bubbles.

I don't think just shopping at Wal-Mart and living in smaller houses is going to be the fix. It's going to basically suck until someone invents the Next Big Thing, and we ride that wave, the Build Out when the economy converts to some brand new paradigm. Not to say that won't end in another recession, but it's a way out of this one. Which makes me wonder, are recessions the breaks between periods of prosperity, or is prosperity the break between recessions? These days it feels a little like the latter, though this has gone on so long it's hard to remember the last boom as anything other than distant nostalgia.