My favorite superhero is Cliff Stoll Check him out on TED: Clifford Stoll on Everything and he’s written one of my favorite books: The Cukoo’s Egg (check out Stalking the Wiley Hacker)
The Custer Observatory is home of the largest telescope on Long Island. Since it’s open to the public every Saturday night, I had the oportunity to gaze at the stars through it last weekend. It was a beautiful stary night and I look forward to going back again.
Evaluate / Install / Document SMS Messaging software. This semester I’ll be working with Kannel and RapidSMS in the context of Ushahidi. It should be rather interesting. My kickoff is tomorrow afternoon. My wife will be away for a few days so it should give me a chance to get the project well underway. I’ll report progress back here on that matter.
Wow, this was a tough semester. I had a really hard time getting into the work this time around. The topics were interesting, but I have to admit to feeling a little burned out. Just a few more classes before I finish though.
In class this semester we did a lot of work with XML and web services (UDDI, WSDL, SOAP)
well, it was that time again. BiffSocko.com was about to expire and it was time to renew the domain name. We’re safe for another few years!
I don’t generally read a lot of the trade magazines because all the articles seem like paid advertisements from a technology company. You see hugs ads for Oracle products, then .. oh my, an article singing the praises of Oracle’s latest and greatest products. The articles are not even the slightest bit objective, so I generally don’t bother with the trade rags at all.
That being said, This article by Infoworld is dead on: Infoworld’s top 10 emerging enterprise technologies
A student posted a message on our dean’s blog:
Anonymous said… What are ways that you can benefit most from the time you are in Graduate school if you also work full time?
I thought about this for a while since I’m in the very same boat.
Graduate school for most involves working full time while attending classes. What do you learn from this? Perseverance. It’s difficult to go to classes after working all day. It’s difficult to complete school assignments on time, especially when there are work assignments and the dealings of every day life (dropping off the dry cleaning, spending time with children, food shopping, etc). While there is no doubt that the courses are beneficial in terms of learning information and expanding your horizons; just as important is learning how to manage your time, and developing the grit to just put your head down and “get it done”.
I approach life in graduate school as “Basic Training”. Once it’s completed, nothing my regular workplace can throw at me will seem difficult. Why? Because assuming you know how to do your job, 90% of being successful at work requires the ability to manage your time and completing projects. Graduate students who work full time simply become experts in this because we have to.
For me, there are only three courses left to finish after this semester. I’ll try to finish before the end of summer. I have to think long and hard about the committment required before continuing for the Ph.D.
For the last few semesters, I’ve been in the same class with a few other fellows. We’ve decided to undertake the DC3 Challenge this year. It seems like it’ll be a fun project to work on.
