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General January 22nd, 2008
Well, that’s scary.
Electronic voting or One Laptop Per Child?
General January 17th, 2008
Two talks, same date/time, only one me. Stupid conflicts. Which talk should I attend?
One Laptop Per Child: Technology and the Developing World at Spurlock
or
ITI DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: Edward W. Felten, “Electronic Voting: Danger and Opportunity” up at Beckman?
The OLPC talk gives me extra credit for my class, but I don’t really need or care about it. The voting one is more timely, but it’s just likely to make me ornery come November. Which one would you sit in?
Someone posted to a CS newsgroup about job openings at the Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory. “Linux System Administrators and Librarians Wanted” I might have used two different job ads for those two roles. Standard Linux want-ad stuff (NIS, NFS, cluster skills, etc.) The librarian “should have good communication skills, must be generally e-friendly.”
(At this point I would insert some joke about the perception of what librarians do, and the skill sets required (”You need a master’s degree to be a librarian?”) and how communication skills probably shouldn’t be the core part of your job, unless you’re a TV anchor. However, that kind of cynicism wouldn’t be e-friendly. And the joke wouldn’t be funny.)
Also, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that a group that works with genetics runs Gentoo. Of course *they* would want to compile all of their applications from the source.
No wonder I’m confused
General January 14th, 2008
I went to BW3 with MC and Stuck2 and Chuck Chuck yesterday for the Illini game, and all day it’s felt like a Wednesday. That’s what I get for going to restaurants when it’s not Tuesday.
I had an alarm clock snafu this morning (when I woke up, it said 6:45am. Too bad it was really 8:55am.) Those kind of things also throw my day for a whack.
I had my first class today. More about that later.
I waited for the bus (since it’s 25 degrees outside and I’m still a little spoiled from the southern california sun,) on the way back from class and, I kid you not, like eight busses dropped by the library/wright pickup spot that didn’t go where I wanted. Maybe it was a 5pm confluence of non-campus busses, but that seems weird to me. Gold, brown, lavendar, silver, green…. And there’s like four or five different bus routes that go back up to north campus. I just hit all the *other* ones before I finally found a 6pack to take me north. That’s weird timing.
This was also the first grad class that I didn’t drink coffee during. Maybe it was the 3:30 start, or the assy Armory classroom (and no convenient coffee shop nearby.) In all of my LIS classes, in all of the courses, in all of the semesters, I can’t think of more than a time or two (including today,) where I didn’t have coffee. Today is weird.
I’ve been thinking about twittering/micro-blogging, because long blog posts are hard and usually I have small comments like this that don’t fit together anyway. If you follow my away messages and facebook status, you get more of a glimpse into my life than the blog, and that doesn’t seem right.
I got to use the “we have the same last name, just spelled differently” quip as my introduction in class today. That one went over pretty well. I hadn’t used it in that context before. Wednesday, I’m saving a thought about fabric softener as my ‘remember me’ item.
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