tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-147975162012-01-29T21:49:53.270-05:00Random notes about balancing work, school, family life, teaching, and research in transportation, social and mobile computing while finishing a PhD in Information Science.Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.comBlogger4211100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-53199699753406343662011-08-26T17:19:00.000-04:002011-08-26T17:19:41.073-04:00

After my first full summer home with the kids, it's back to teaching next week. Classroom teaching starts Tuesday at 9, hardly a grueling start of the work week by many standards.  The churn of the start of classes has been well underway for a while now, in that there are always details to resolve, but I've gotten better at adding to the checklists with each successive semester. Some semesters

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-74794731585398873302011-08-24T23:24:00.000-04:002011-08-24T23:24:51.038-04:00

This step in the journey could be compared to the transfer from one train to the next. When you find yourself headed in the wrong direction, disembarking, only to wait for a transfer headed in the right direction. And during this period, there is time to contemplate the odd pattern of gum stains on the concrete, only to remind oneself that there is in fact no pattern that exists but only to the

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-32375847523805835672011-08-02T08:59:00.000-04:002011-08-02T08:59:57.884-04:00

Going through my dissertation and research personal wikis last night reminded me a bit about how dated the paradigm of the wiki has become. Though ongoing life changes makes bursts of productivity extremely few and far between these days, it's crucial to take a step back and ask questions at times.  Wiki was a great tool for what it does, but the authoring tools are fairly old school by Internet

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-23009827606284382362011-06-29T17:47:00.002-04:002011-11-02T06:00:07.434-04:00

This is the year like no other, in terms of life-changing events within my family. This is the first summer away from contract or research work since moving back to Albany, and staying home with the kids. I'm teaching a course online, facing some occasional issues in the Blackboard migration. But in the churn of everyday life I cannot help but be thankful of my career choice that allows me to

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-1925040914415310092011-05-19T13:19:00.000-04:002011-05-19T13:19:29.791-04:00

“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.” — Tom Bodett The lesson in all this currently escapes me.

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-12855354862970296662011-03-30T09:40:00.000-04:002011-03-30T09:40:40.928-04:00

Life is just what it is, and we just try to survive it so long as we can. As a friend of mine recently put it, we experience a "whole lot of life" at times that defy description or explanation. At the moment I'm at a loss for words, but someday I hope to make sense of this part of the journey.

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-89218062902107046902011-02-27T18:25:00.000-05:002011-02-27T18:25:16.935-05:00

Today had some time working on a little project, using a cut up toy from the dollar store, and various parts from Trojan Electronics in Troy, NY.  (They're awesome- old school electronic supply shop- go there and spend money.) Was interesting to find/take out my old soldering iron and assorted wire tools to wire up battery packs, a button switch, and big red LED bulb to make my son a Harry

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-34906247219816613742011-02-21T15:57:00.003-05:002011-02-21T15:58:49.091-05:00

After a number of discussions with my kids, I've gotten the impression that their friends spend a lot of time online.  A couple of questions that come to mind: What does it mean for kids to have fairly unrestricted access to YouTube and other media? What does it mean for kids to play computer games with each other more than board games? I guess you could lump in YouTube with TV, minus the

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-83008475431698893142011-02-19T14:55:00.000-05:002011-02-19T14:55:48.467-05:00

Nice lecture about Adurino and physical computing. Reminds me I have a soldering iron in the basement. Is this going to get people back into analog electronics again? (My kids have been having fun playing with a Radio Shack electronics kit.). Later sessions included Internet as development platform, Droid app development, and some parallel tracks I didn't make it to. But overall, it was another

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-35554078342507673722011-02-18T23:20:00.000-05:002011-02-18T23:20:42.381-05:00

Interesting thing about using Google for finding plagiarism: not only do you get a list of sites that the student could have copied from, but you realize that so many web pages are stealing content from other sites. So much that you wonder if plagiarism has any meaning anymore...

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-65151098751276622522011-02-17T22:18:00.000-05:002011-02-17T22:18:30.056-05:00

I'm suspecting that most difficult problems are really multiple issues intertwined. In what has proven the ill-advised designation of the "power charger drawer" at home, we have a sprawling knot of wires with plugs on one end, and a dangling mass or transformers on the other. This is often resolved by taking the entire mess to the floor or a table and slowly unwinding them, with the foresight to

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-36366624708477707592011-02-09T21:44:00.000-05:002011-02-09T21:44:05.785-05:00

With the death of my trusty Corolla behind me and one car to share in the family, I've started taking the bus again sometimes. Aside from the whole focus of my PhD program was originally on public transportation information systems, it's useful to remember one significant reality of urban living as I move forward with my various streams of research. You know, the least they could do is post a

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-75628434283002677502011-01-29T17:39:00.000-05:002011-01-29T17:39:49.543-05:00

Look on the bright side, the posts about the dissertation will be over soon.. :) It's as tiring to write about as it is to write, but this journal is intended to add value to the discussion about the costs of a PhD, among other things. In my drafts, I sent out my Conclusion as the ninth chapter after a hurried week of finalizing two other drafts to finish the overall project.  There will be

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-76753564319192775232011-01-28T00:18:00.000-05:002011-01-28T00:18:51.226-05:00

I just finished my conclusion, just an 8-pager that exhausted everything I can imagine saying at the end of the previous 120 pages of text, 50 pages of source code (about 3000 lines) and 10 pages of data dictionary. I still consider it a draft. Tomorrow morning, my well-crafted 8 pages in the last 24 hours will as likely as not read as a caffeine-addled, incoherent stream of consciousness. This

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-91399183765512382622011-01-26T13:35:00.000-05:002011-01-26T13:35:56.286-05:00

I just sent out my 8th chapter, a few hours shy of my 24-hour deadline from last night. All that's left is the Conclusion chapter, and my program source code, data diagram, data dictionary, and a whole bunch of nice reformatting. And reactions from my dissertation committee. I'm banking on them being tired of hearing from me and eager to set me on my way.  But I'll start fitting myself for the

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-45863314336046736662011-01-25T22:09:00.002-05:002011-01-26T23:02:49.838-05:00

I've sent out two chapters in the last few days. I have one chapter to edit into a measure of coherency to send out, which may not take long if I were a little more awake and it were a little earlier in the day. I don't know why, but updating this blog actually seems to help, despite some difficult times in these past three months. I see that some posts from last year regarding Dissertation

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-645145881798910682011-01-25T12:25:00.001-05:002011-01-25T12:27:13.443-05:00

Once upon a time, there was a guy called Vannevar Bush who wrote the seminal article "As We May Think" for the Atlantic Monthly.  This inspired much of what we call the Web of today, in that documents would link to other documents.  At the time of writing, the digital computer was barely in its infancy, and the device envisioned was more mechanical than computational. Fast forward 65 years,

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-7746857281429812542011-01-24T13:39:00.001-05:002011-01-24T18:03:51.045-05:00

What I like about Personal Information Management (PIM) apps is that they do something everybody needs, all the time, only very badly.  When someone says that the "low-hanging fruit" applications have been done, the first things that pop into mind are calendars and to-do lists.  This is hardly the problem I want to define my career by- but it's annoying enough to take a shot at solving once

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-56122625866785787182011-01-22T16:29:00.002-05:002011-01-23T12:57:22.316-05:00

Despite an earlier thought to turn in a wiki as a dissertation, using a wiki for various research notes, development projects, etc. hasn't been the worst idea I have. I'm not sure it's made the process faster of developing a massive monolithic work like a dissertation faster, but they've become a trove of future work project ideas.  Wikis are after all geared to reuse with lots of limitations

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-51617373474871362242011-01-21T19:12:00.001-05:002011-01-24T17:05:18.622-05:00

Nice to see that Google is setting their sights on content scraping sites which they called "Content Farms". But Content Farms seem more commonly likened to blog sweatshops like eHow where writers churn out how-to articles more in competition with volunteer-produced WikiHow.  TechCrunch either redefines or conflates the terms in their bit about Google filtering: ...Content Farms Are Next. Is the

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-46951536099634400782011-01-20T22:11:00.000-05:002011-01-20T22:11:08.931-05:00

I've "discovered" that you can post direct HTML into Blackboard stuff,  which includes IFrames for things like Google Calendars.  The good and bad of exposing external content in an IFrame is debatable. So, in one place: I can share a Google calendar with my office hours to all classes, and it works well so far. I can share a link to aforementioned Google Calendar, which does seem to work well

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-45339110449721352372011-01-19T21:38:00.000-05:002011-01-19T21:38:32.677-05:00

Despite the slush and freezing rain, the new semester has started.  Each new semester starts with a rush- new students jockeying for parking in the morning, a mix of new faces in the seats as the syllabus is handed out and discussed on the first day.  Many faces are bright-eyed and eager, some apprehensive, some uncertain. As the weeks unfold, the new batch of questions, projects start to emerge

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-47048940590122286782011-01-16T18:02:00.001-05:002011-01-16T18:03:22.469-05:00

I'm experimenting with the Facebook Like button for a break from my dissertation progress, with my XML class starting in two (2) days and a strong desire to just add some fresh material. I start out with social media, and want to do just a little more than just talk about Facebook in passing.  A little quick googling, some code samples, and a grand total of 20 minutes later, I've got a Like

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-568569276429319032011-01-13T07:00:00.001-05:002011-01-13T07:00:02.410-05:00

I've stumbled into the bizarre world of scraper sites in the course of finding the (relatively) new "Stats" tab that Blogger offers.  The sites look incoherent, and I can't find the links that actually point here.  Though in a couple of cases, the page content is continually refreshed with text that's a jumble of content taken from elsewhere. I'd post examples, but I don't feel the need to send

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-88593318545304158722011-01-12T07:24:00.001-05:002011-01-13T16:19:37.035-05:00

Circa Spring 2009 I took a detour in my dissertation research to investigate the question of time. After all, my research focuses on the central role of coordinating location and time in managing human activities, and what is a dissertation if not an opportunity to spend a couple of years either proposing the esoteric or proving the painfully obvious in excruciating detail?  This research has

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-80855557359236616322011-01-08T15:02:00.002-05:002011-01-08T17:39:38.804-05:00

I stumbled into this research paper ("Accelerating SQL Database Operations on a GPU with CUDA") with the takeaway: SQL is a good programming paradigm for accessing GPU hardware.  The takeaway: database processing seems to work well on graphics processing chips.  They cited speed improvements as ranging from 20x to 70x (or: queries take 1/20 to 1/70th as much time, which is pretty decent.) Given

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-28474188717640877402011-01-07T11:46:00.002-05:002011-01-12T07:27:46.123-05:00

The Economist's "The Disposable Academic" joined the chatter about the variety of educational institutions that crank out more degree holders than the job market can accommodate. Like many others slowly reaching the end of the PhD process, I've done any number of rough cost/benefit analyses about the process. And like many others, I've failed to reach a conclusion yet. A decade down the road,

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-84713513761579065172011-01-03T08:44:00.002-05:002011-01-03T09:01:40.306-05:00

Somehow, finding a cache of chicken bones and assorted roast chicken remnants from God- knows- when seems to suggest making a batch of chicken stock, if for no other reason that chicken stock seems to take up much less space in the freezer than the carcasses and freezer-burnt odd pieces that created it. But it's easy to forget that by volume, the stock is mostly water, which takes up a lot more

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-39363432719922697102011-01-03T00:46:00.000-05:002011-01-03T00:46:59.949-05:00

Still recovering from a day trip to the Syracuse Museum of Science and Technology, which is a bit of a drive this soon after the end of the semester. With New Year's Day activities coming to a close, I'm back to contemplating progress on the dissertation, in-between other miscellaneous setup for the semester of teaching ahead.  We're heading out to a Japanese New Year dinner in a bit, now that my

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-28719821802596894312010-12-30T15:58:00.001-05:002010-12-30T15:59:14.956-05:00

Concept Maps got me this link (http://www.dubberly.com/concept-maps) with such artwork as the following chart (link to PDF and more) makes me wish I had a reservoir of cash to throw at creative, productive people to train others and solve big problems. Just a thought. Really though I'm stuck thinking through the endgame for the dissertation. It's dawned on me that I was heavily in brainstorm

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-15126918411584094812010-12-29T21:28:00.000-05:002010-12-29T21:28:18.296-05:00

With grading done and final grades submitted nearly 36 hours ago, I'm somehow back to planning out next semester. This is really the best time to start, despite my urge to "chillax" in front of Netflix Online for the next 3 weeks. (That's really not true- I get bored after watching a single movie. There's that pesky dissertation that has to be wrapped up, though I still think it's a couple weeks

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-17047041121095242252010-12-28T16:32:00.000-05:002010-12-28T16:32:24.318-05:00

After posting 243 grades for my 9 classes, the relief I normally feel this time of year has hardly set in.  But it's done and I've reverted to Intersession activities- another pot of chili in the slowcooker (vegetarian on request from my daughter), a 15-minute nap ended by the boy's saxophone practice, assorted little tasks around the house, and a start to plan out the next 3 weeks before classes

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-46848739231038118252010-12-27T09:53:00.000-05:002010-12-27T09:53:32.848-05:00

Looking outside with a foot of snow on the ground. Knowing I have my Dad's old 7 HP snowblower that hasn't started in 5 years and has probably rusted solid in the garage is strangely of little comfort. I'm in for a good 1-2 hours of shoveling by hand, based on my empirical estimates from prior years of an hour per 6 inches, plus 10 minutes of transition cost overhead- the effort of getting ready

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-30217208215625770232010-12-26T11:06:00.001-05:002010-12-26T11:06:54.104-05:00

In the course of tracking down a little suspected plagiarism, I stumbled into this interesting blog:  http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/forgotten-art-of-programming  Some interesting thoughts here to digest after the semester is over. I also stumbled into some kind of indie music community site at http://www.thesixtyone.com/ largely in the course of checking something else from another (unrelated)

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-22956385530014231832010-12-22T19:04:00.004-05:002010-12-22T19:06:54.334-05:00

Still deep into grading final papers and projects, I'm struck with how Facebook has ceased to be the central topic, but a peripheral one.  In the many papers that hint at Facebook and other social networks (like Twitter) I think about the style of interaction: you post comments and pictures to no one in particular, and whoever is interested can respond. And as always, it reminds me of the "

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-787489974238282982010-12-22T00:06:00.001-05:002010-12-22T12:00:43.094-05:00

In the course of wrapping up my semester grades juggling between Blackboard, email, and my spreadsheet, I consider RSS and the recently-patented Newsfeed and what they could bring to the table.  It would be nice to be able to set up a feed from my email client, so that whenever one of a list of people (i.e. students) sends an email containing a key word (e.g. Blackboard, BB, online, final, exam,

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-33181249072705621932010-12-20T19:33:00.002-05:002010-12-21T09:53:29.014-05:00

Thanks to the recently discovered Blogger Stats, I discovered that my most popular post of all time was my 3-year old rant, "Blackboard Sucks" at some 300+ pageviews, while the vast majority of my posts have nary a page hit in sight. And a leading search expression that found it was "Can Blackboard tell if you cut and paste?".  Well, going through a stack of last assignments and term papers, I

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-27615953693245148062010-12-17T22:18:00.005-05:002011-01-08T17:35:26.639-05:00

The frantic pace of the closing semester continues, while the non-teaching students I know are just about winding down, and the non-teaching non-students around me seem to be continuing on like it's just another week between holidays. Somewhere is that dissertation I need to pick at once in a while to remind myself that it's not over until it's over. But the simulation is written, the data

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-7781115412279418682010-12-10T12:18:00.004-05:002010-12-10T12:32:51.062-05:00

There are hard physical limits to what can be done, what can be experienced, and what can be accomplished. Currently, I'm trying to write up the simulation results from my dissertation. Yet I'm struggling with the hard limits of what I can endure these days, with no end in sight. Currently I'm flailing in my progress- finding what I write has already been written months ago, losing sight of what

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-58112835622006894042010-12-07T16:42:00.005-05:002010-12-08T08:25:31.762-05:00

Somehow the Traveling Wilburys album speaks to me today.A difficult year has ended in a heart-wrenching month. But with help from family, I can have faith that things will ultimately work for the best. As some research has demonstrated, man has a propensity to walk in circles without a landmark, a guide star, to show the way out. Whether that guide star leads to safe ground is another matter

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-12934176035080366722010-10-06T19:50:00.004-04:002010-10-06T19:53:27.728-04:00

The semester rolls on. More teaching, more grading, more debugging, but not much left to write short of data to analyze.The dissertation is close to done, but not done yet. As they say in systems development, half of all project resources go into achieving 90% completion. The other half go into finishing the last 10%. But I do know I didn't finish by April, nor by August, nor September. Early

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-9288941528126682162010-09-29T07:48:00.002-04:002010-09-29T07:57:02.536-04:00

Apparently the rabbit hole is deeper than I thought. Or I'm still digging.Each run takes 5 minutes. Per simulated person. I have 2000.I've got to "sample" my sample of sims to get enough to start setting parameters for various probability functions, that I need to calibrate before running the varying set of optimizations (6 in total) so once I'm comfortable with the code, I'm looking at 7 runs

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-53027859397557056152010-08-31T00:40:00.002-04:002010-08-31T00:45:08.628-04:00

Change is in the air, which feels charged like the impending thunderstorms of August. How it unfolds is anybody's guess, but the best that can be done is to be prepared for whatever happens.

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-79138352222960130802010-08-02T09:25:00.003-04:002010-08-02T09:55:29.964-04:00

This is the end run for my dissertation. It's down to a few more pages of code, a bit of write-up, and that's it. So far as I know. But despite my near-abandonment of this blog, it was intended to chronicle my return to school and the progress of my doctoral program, so here goes, albeit neither inspired writing nor inspiring.I've fallen behind in pretty much most of the rest of my life- with no

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-71849656006332259572010-02-16T09:37:00.011-05:002010-02-16T10:59:26.515-05:00

Too many things to do, too many conflicts of late. It's easy to over-allocate your time, then situations happen that reduce the time you can spend. All the more ironic while working on a dissertation about Personal Information Management, Task Management, and transportation. Clearly not eating own dog food here.Here's where I am:Teaching 7 classes, one of which is being redesigned. This only

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-74215197379017783322010-01-06T11:30:00.003-05:002010-01-06T11:35:22.040-05:00

I'm back to the dissertation again- main thing apparently is to write everything I'm thinking, and salvage later. I start teaching in two weeks- and been on break for over a week, so have to put my back into it, 16 stitches notwithstanding.I can stop being lazy and just write a bulk import for TIGER road data- not like I haven't already done this exact task in Visual Foxpro, SQL Server, Access,

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-2974112379791308152010-01-05T13:31:00.004-05:002010-01-05T13:51:07.472-05:00

I'm sitting in the library, trying to make progress on my dissertation.I defended the proposal a month ago, and now feel little progress aside from sketches in my notebooks and a handful of library books to check out soon. I've got 16 stitches in my back preventing me from lifting much of anything for another week or so. One of my retinas is inflamed again, making it harder to read or identify

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-78965909517821410182009-11-08T02:22:00.004-05:002009-11-21T00:48:46.129-05:00

I've done my presentation at the ASIS&T meeting in Vancouver, gone to a social, and got back to my room after some conveyor-belt sashimi. My feet hurt, I have blisters on my toes from the walking, and my head is still buzzing a little from the enormous volumes of information I've been processing all day.Today was really cool. It went by in a blink. I'm amazed just how much overlap there is in

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-77684690256453121202009-11-03T21:51:00.006-05:002009-11-21T00:49:38.837-05:00

Saw this, reminding myself that someday, I'll have the free time to sleep 8 hours a night and draw orthogonal flow charts for fun.Back to my dissertation, and that long and winding road...

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-77889834083739262532009-10-24T09:45:00.002-04:002009-10-24T09:48:15.111-04:00

So I'm going over some class reviews and I see this sort of comment a few times: "All he talks about is his research/past jobs/work experience." I'm teaching a class that, when it's time to talk about database design, or web design, or e-commerce, or Management Information Systems, for instance, you'd better believe I'm going to mention something about how to do design on the job, in The Real

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-90490762328426235482009-10-23T13:27:00.002-04:002009-10-23T13:53:57.484-04:00

Am grading papers amidst piles of small devices, thinking of a lecture about Personal Area Networking I just gave. On the table is a bunch of SD cards in a bag, and other scattered devices. Sometime in the two weeks before heading to Vancouver, I've got to think about what to say about that, too. Sometime after dinner I'll go back to my Task data structure, and the literature about a Task

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-66039033119913864932009-10-22T22:35:00.005-04:002009-10-22T22:47:03.619-04:00

It's done- I finally submitted the revised conference paper. I'm too brain-dead now to start anything new. Pathetic: I'm too tired/lazy to type in the citation information for my own paper on Zotero. Maybe by morning they'll post it for me.My wife is watching Changeling on DVD, and from what I'm overhearing, I'm not up to trying to pick up the last 20 minutes. (I'll wait until it's done, then

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-86281593304425665372009-10-21T11:06:00.004-04:002009-10-21T11:21:33.520-04:00

Reading Domain Shame and thinking, what do browsers and email have in common?I've just finished sifting through a virtual mountain of academic journal articles on PDF for my frequently-mentioned conference next month. A bunch of articles not used discuss tasks and email, in that email is the "lowest common denominator" for managing your life- 0r in other words, anything you can use to replace

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-12369057060847982252009-10-19T23:49:00.006-04:002009-10-20T00:42:15.283-04:00

Just about done with a bunch of revisions for my first conference paper- the ASIS&T one in Vancouver this November. I spent much of my free time over the past month or so fixing it, while trying to rebuild my dissertation proposal. I got stuck a bunch of times, finally reaching the realization that I was writing the wrong paper, and loaded that text into another set of documents- funny when you

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-18872776467024110202009-09-27T00:16:00.004-04:002009-09-27T15:05:35.543-04:00

We went apple picking today. Didn't drive today because I felt a bit tired- so looked out the window instead, when I didn't doze off briefly.In the dining room at Indian Ladder Farms, my son, age 7, declined his potato chips- on the grounds that "they make potato chips to trick you into thinking you're still not hungry to make you eat more- and they're not good for you!"Likewise with the french

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-50467762515441073242009-09-23T22:31:00.005-04:002009-09-23T22:55:45.085-04:00

My funding requests for the ASIS&T conference I'm presenting at in November are finally submitted. I swear I spent more time applying for the cash to pay for the trip than I did writing the paper in the first place. It's Vancouver, though I'm not sure I'll notice much of the city.Apparently, getting a conference paper accepted doesn't count until you show up, plunk down a few hundred for the

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-35678233495955167292009-09-16T08:34:00.004-04:002011-01-16T22:41:30.502-05:00

In thinking about Dave Winer's side project of open-sourcing the URL shortening service tr.im, I'm struck with a thought. What creates an "online society"? If an aggregate of social interactions is a society, operating on some mutually-enforced constraints, can the same be said of "virtual society"? We come and go from the virtual one at will, so the boundaries are considerably more difficult

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-90726796606217087122009-09-14T21:37:00.002-04:002009-09-14T21:45:19.074-04:00

Found this today. For every 10,000 who click through, I get another free Dunkaccino! Yay!

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-1493371134258989162009-09-11T08:37:00.003-04:002009-09-11T18:38:26.237-04:00

I posted a brief note in 2003. The NYTimes had a well-crafted essay about the "future that many feared." Not much else to say about it, other than to say that life did go on, back to a normalcy that was difficult to imagine for the first year afterward, though inevitably in hindsight.For having worked there, it took me over a year to have the guts to go back to the area, despite that I could

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-28206004336045349792009-09-03T00:41:00.004-04:002009-09-03T01:13:38.349-04:00

New semester. New students. New Blackboard annoyances.It's Fall 2009. Year #6 of the PhD program, semester #9 as an instructor. I've almost lost count of the number of classes I've taught (42), though I'm now able to nod and suppress any external signs of amusement when other PhD's describe their four or five classes taught over their PhD career to date as "a LOT". I taught 10 (TEN) classes

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-15826091334636740722009-08-20T20:15:00.004-04:002009-08-20T20:35:49.258-04:00

Weekend with Mom away, I watched the kids- opting for a trip to the Kids museum in Syracuse: MOST. Good trip. Not a lot of dissertation work though- maybe flipped through one article, but had a lot to think about during the drive. At the museum, they had a huge 3D climbing maze, which I sat out for part of the time, being about 2 feet too tall to navigate without injury. I was struck with the

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-46785087567897834662009-08-06T14:23:00.000-04:002009-08-06T14:26:10.414-04:00

Just in: when you ask Microsoft’s Bing, “Why is Windows so expensive?”The first result is about why Mac OSX is so expensive.The next bunch of results is a series of news posts and blogs about how Bing returns an anti-Apple result. At least that’s more like it!http://www.bing.com/search?q=why+is+windows+so+expensive%3F&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-65841104972499897442009-07-27T01:43:00.003-04:002009-07-27T02:05:48.984-04:00

Still up, reading conference proceedings. Not finding much- apparently that's good. Better would be not doing this at almost 2 am. Ah, the dissertation.Clever phrase: cute elaborationThis is the title pattern. I'm running into scores of article using this same tired format, a tiny subset of which are of any interest to me. I'm also finding in the Zotero-Sqlite-ooBase link that some of the

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-44229515718151576462009-07-24T00:31:00.005-04:002011-01-11T18:00:31.499-05:00

Getting a coffee at Uncommon Ground last night, mostly to justify occupying a table and tapping free wifi for a couple of hours. The guy behind the counter had a nametag on that read, "tell me a story!". I asked- he mentioned that all his coworkers talk about is going out, drinking, and various other 20-something mayhem that goes for social life in Albany. (I think I was young once, too, but

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-78874445594257323252009-07-18T11:38:00.005-04:002009-11-21T00:52:53.086-05:00

I'm discovering that making a query from existing queries in Open Office Base doesn't work well- it's buggy. It's also not picking up changes from an SQLite connection- so something clearly is wrong here- Zotero saves in SQLite, but there have been a couple of database restructurings since then, and there may be some incompatability there. Still, if they're using the standards, table/field

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-85100921940883187432009-07-10T23:08:00.004-04:002009-07-10T23:24:14.679-04:00

So, taking a break from taking a break and finally back to firing queries into Zotero to help clean up my citation list. I'm still wary of using SQLite to update Zotero- just reading data is fine for now. I prefer to use the native application for modifying data, since you never know what data integrity rules are buried in the client app.(Momentary shudder while remembering that decade of

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-43545089015011928062009-07-10T12:35:00.005-04:002009-07-10T13:55:13.242-04:00

With my in-laws on the plane back to Tokyo, I'm looking at the remnants of a literature review for next week, a summer gig doing database work, and my son with a tummy ache- which I really hope isn't the latest round of some GI bug I had last week that knocked me and my daughter out for a day. But I'm anchored at home today, with the kids relaxing a bit in front of Charlie and Lola while I get

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-57269162533238901382009-07-01T16:21:00.003-04:002009-07-18T18:53:08.742-04:00

I'm sick with some kind of (hopefully) 24-hour GI bug. My inlaws are in town, and let's just say that a GI bug and loads of kimchee don't mix well. Funny how these things drive you to childhood treatments- mine included toast, gelatin, and flat ginger ale.On a brighter note- I'm experimenting with Zotero, trying to get at the data store with an ODBC driver for SQLite. Unless I'm doing

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-20952211416746591082009-06-27T09:19:00.007-04:002009-06-27T10:02:23.278-04:00

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

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-5453655829235179002009-06-25T18:22:00.006-04:002009-06-27T10:01:37.009-04:00

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

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-48192126260466443042009-06-16T22:15:00.004-04:002009-06-27T10:02:12.830-04:00

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.

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-48566993098802478232009-06-13T16:40:00.004-04:002009-06-27T10:03:03.149-04:00

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

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-28935070101728177652009-06-12T18:01:00.003-04:002009-06-12T18:09:37.346-04:00

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

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-73587301390382152712009-06-11T11:41:00.004-04:002010-12-22T10:37:56.403-05:00

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

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-90770086972587724302009-06-09T22:30:00.002-04:002009-06-09T22:35:02.379-04:00

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

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-83720054123063120142009-06-06T17:14:00.004-04:002009-06-06T17:29:25.715-04:00

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

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-8233924647743989422009-05-25T23:29:00.002-04:002009-05-25T23:38:08.740-04:00

This weekend has been a series of BBQ's, yardwork, and yea little progress on my dissertation save for a hard look at RDF and its complexities with time. We're discussing in my committee how to manage users' personal data in my weird, backward twist on the idea of Personal Information Management. It's the idea of "human optimization" as opposed to something that learns from your behavior after

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-11530609868218504992009-05-22T20:24:00.002-04:002009-05-22T20:34:58.045-04:00

Today I taught a roomful of 3rd graders (including my daughter) about wikis. She has a wiki of her own, which I've been helping her with, a little, though she's been working on it by herself for the most part. I think they sort of got it- the example I gave was organizing their book summaries. They had just been talking about how to organize information about Flat Stanley, and its author, Jeff

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-6149752916505154262009-05-18T14:13:00.002-04:002009-05-18T14:15:57.922-04:00

... now back to research. I'm not teaching this summer, so it means there's no excuse for not finishing my dissertation proposal by August. Or is there?On Friday, I'm going to my daughter's class to teach 20 8-year-olds about wikis. I'm trying to remember how I got into this.I desperately need a vacation.

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-69753365902128849892009-05-12T22:20:00.003-04:002009-05-12T22:36:22.624-04:00

I'm just rushing to get the last of the grading done to end the semester once and for all. This time of year, it seems impossible to catch up- except that it gets done, because there's an absolute deadline. And suddenly, I'm days away from my second commencement as I watch over a thousand students receive their diplomas, realizing that the next 30 years are going to fly by.Being a prof seems to

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-15260764345214688862009-05-04T10:20:00.003-04:002009-05-04T10:28:22.832-04:00

Odd thought in the car yesterday, as my GPS was prompting me to some unmarked address on Western Ave- what if we're really the robots of the future. I mean, what if we're not making machines that can think for themselves, plan, and perform various tasks on their own, but rather making devices that tell us what to do more efficiently. I mean, isn't that what technology has been for the past few

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-52984581931608696342009-04-25T11:09:00.003-04:002009-04-25T11:43:09.134-04:00

What better way to spend the first nice weekend in about 7 months than to work on my dissertation proposal. I'm facing a bunch of realizations, none of which are really a big shock- namely that I'm going off on a tangent about PIM and I need to reel it back in to the scope of my project. It's interesting, as is everything else, but there's only a subset that's relevant to this project, at this

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-76535378560532134212009-04-21T10:29:00.005-04:002009-04-21T10:43:33.845-04:00

I'm a bit interested in the sudden local interest in Social Robotics. Not so much about robots in general, but it means a framework for some other stuff I'm interested in: goal/task formation, activity planning, time, pattern recognition, pattern language formation, pattern grammars, and machine learning. And a lot of research seems to be a process of chasing grants to pay for the research to

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-28064703694920365082009-04-19T12:51:00.004-04:002009-04-19T15:57:46.961-04:00

In the back of my mind, I've been struck with the phrase "good enough". As in, "Iraqi Good Enough" or the other places where we've exhausted our resources and have to settle for a lowest-common-denominator definition of "not failed". I'm wondering when we're going to start discussing a "good enough recovery" or a "good enough economy."It's nice that we've opened up discussions and started to

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-61541553631858761562009-04-09T11:33:00.004-04:002009-04-09T11:47:55.311-04:00

Today's my birthday. I'm [larger prime number] years old. Next year, my age will be The Answer to the Ultimate Question. Things I've learned from high-end academic research in the past week:People use calendars to keep track of when they have to do thingsPeople who idealize the world too much (a.k.a. rate High in Irrational Beliefs) are annoyed by the little things too much (fail adequately to

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-73291086526447225502009-04-07T21:21:00.004-04:002009-04-07T21:35:47.295-04:00

I'm trying to work on my dissertation proposal now, and I keep thinking about networks. How much time do people spend in social networks, just navigating from one link to the next? It's the lowest possible level of network analysis. How about groupware applications, where you pick who to share your calendar with and try to find people to hitch rides with?It's occurred to me tonight that this

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-51027799140077141562009-03-18T22:19:00.005-04:002009-03-19T11:19:27.487-04:00

After a handful of conversations with students who explain that they "know" the material, but still have trouble with the homework and the tests, I recall the numbers of similar conversations I've had over the handful of semesters since I started teaching. Maybe we need to be clear with the terms: what does "know" really mean? I picture a continuity spanning...Absolute mastery of the core

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-7026639453816026332009-03-15T16:16:00.006-04:002009-03-15T19:32:49.477-04:00

I'm in Professor Java's reading Temporal Man, a 1981 book about how time is conceptualized- I can't believe I'm doing a section of my lit review about time. Time, as in the march of... Geez- now I know I'm writing a dissertation. I may as well do a literature review about the color blue while I'm at it.But, if I could put time in a bottle...Time is a central theme in transportation research,

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-73452119197556901652009-03-13T18:25:00.002-04:002009-03-13T18:40:33.507-04:00

Information consumes our attention, or so I'm reading. To a point, it also helps us make better decisions. After that point (which seems to be in the eye of the beholder) it becomes a liability- the attention it consumes outweighs the benefits accrued through better decisions. After all, making the perfect decision is always expensive, but pretty good decisions can be relatively easy to

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-16588331086961283652009-03-12T15:01:00.004-04:002009-03-12T15:07:33.721-04:00

I'm doing a crash-course on Personal Information Management as a new framework for my dissertation- thinking that I've seen these little applications since the 80's that take a lot of work to use, and provide little benefit. Lots and lots of these projects in fact... I can't count the number of calendars I've seen go unused in various programs.Then it finally hits me.They all suck.What does that

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-44209099017615444472009-03-08T12:47:00.005-04:002009-03-08T13:28:04.102-04:00

The biannual nightmare of midterms are over- oh you R1 profs with a few dozen students and a handful of teaching assistants, how ever do you survive? Seriously though, with the ballpark of 150 students, weekly homework and quizzes, and no TA's, my baby steps towards automation have been my only hope of keeping a 60-hour workweek.But I've realized I've held an increasingly morbid fascination with

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-90272552296544956932009-03-07T10:37:00.003-05:002009-03-07T11:13:57.011-05:00

During one of my lectures about specialized databases, I discuss the Personal Information Manager (PIM). I have a few versions of these tired, dull applications for tracking address lists, a date book / calendar, and a to-do list. My first PIM application came on a TRS-80 Model 100 computer (which I still have in the basement) circa 1982- and they haven't changed a whole lot since then...And it

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-54565258184871194982009-03-02T16:46:00.003-05:002009-03-03T11:50:31.399-05:00

Just a odd thought after reading more doom-and-gloom headlines about the economy: is the sharp drop in business investment, in terms of computers and software, partly reflecting a shift to Open Source software? Because, the utilization of free software means a drop in spending, but a growth in assets- if you look at software as a factor in production capital. If you don't see it as a means to

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-57197679570799795342009-02-28T11:41:00.004-05:002009-02-28T15:14:35.887-05:00

I'm sitting here, staring out a window and trying to think of anything, anything to put down in my crappy 3-page remnant of a dissertation proposal. I've got hundreds of pages of old papers, notes, pages in my research wiki, scrawled little bursts of insights stuffed in plastic paper protectors surrounding me in piles, and even a 18-quart storage box in the basement.Goddammit, almost every part

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-83618266446447540982009-02-20T17:03:00.004-05:002009-02-20T17:07:38.485-05:00

I've got this link to Education for Well-Being. Just follow the link- any comments made here would just be a distraction.

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-802378825811313092009-02-19T16:39:00.002-05:002009-02-19T17:06:28.977-05:00

I'm showing a video in class about the Augment system from 1969, during the heady days of the first moon landing, the second-to-last Beatles album, and the birth of Sesame Street- in short, the year that planted the seeds for a generation of AADD sufferers- when it hits me. Why did we as a technologically driven society forget how to make outlines?Seriously, Word sucks for outlines, whereas

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-34590635212933478862009-02-04T22:49:00.002-05:002009-02-04T23:13:27.996-05:00

So, After dragging my feet about getting a DTV tuner for the TV, I finally got one before the coupon expired. It took all of about a minute to hook it up (actually longer to cut through the tape over the box and all the various contents). A few minutes to figure out why it said "No Signal", a few minutes to get it to find the stations in range, and then, Digital TV.It's kind of cool, at least

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-89164989933406670192009-01-30T19:57:00.003-05:002009-01-30T20:22:15.879-05:00

So after borrowing a DVD from the library for my daughter to watch, the ill-timed Kit Kiddredge movie from last summer, my daughter asked me if this was going to be like the "Great Desperation" in the movie. Got the name wrong, but captured the sentiment then (and now) perfectly, like always, from what she's seeing on the news and in classroom discussions.Oddly, I'm overwhelmed with work, with

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-22884660511528985232009-01-24T14:11:00.006-05:002009-01-24T16:04:31.621-05:00

Settled in my first free Saturday of the semester for research, and I'm still being hit by a flurry of student emails. Though I can't reproduce the questions of others without their permission, I sure can summarize my responses over the past week:Yes, you do have to read the required textbook for the course.No, the final exam isn't optional.No, you cannot get partial credit for work not turned

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14797516.post-28839414104882129912009-01-10T12:07:00.005-05:002009-01-10T13:36:53.288-05:00

So, after digesting a few months of headlines about the economy, I've got a couple of thoughts: things are bad, so what are we going to do about it? I'm struck with Dave Winer's interview with George Lakoff last year, where he discusses Lakoff's research into political dialog.In short, the Republican party appeals to those who feel the world is a dangerous place, and they represent the stern

Steve Lackeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16270633088468909420noreply@blogger.com0