Monthly Archive for August, 2004

Habitat for humanity is fantastic.

I volunteered with them for the first time this morning. A lot of factors make it an easy choice for me: I have some construction experience, I love the outdoors, and the culture of building runs pretty deep in my family.

When I got there, a lot of people were standing around, unsure of what to do. After a round of introductions, and a prayer of invocation, the wheels started churning. I volunteered to get on my back in the crawl space and hammer in joist ties. A bunch of people got started putting a drip edge on the roof of one house, and preparing roof cross sections to go on another.

I spent a half hour on my back under one woman’s house, with a painter who works at IU. His house is one of the next couple to be built, and he has been working on other peoples’ houses for a year. We got a great ab workout, and I learned a lot about salary ranges in Bloomington versus Florida, painting versus driving a garbage truck.

The bulk of the day, I spent putting decking on the front porch with another fellow. We had it down to a science by the afternoon. We worked with a mormon missionary and a network administrator.

I spent most of the day working with these little groups, but as clouds began to gather, and the prefab roof sections were going up, people started slowly joining the push to get sheathing up on the roof of the second house. I helped push prefab sections up onto the roof for a while, and then helped push sheets of plywood up there, and then was recruited to start hammering nails.

The electricity of the incoming summer storm, and the energy of the growing crew started feeding off of each other, focused by the need to get the roof put up. As more and more crews got on the roof, the sound of hammering became constant, and I was scampering across swinging joists, pulling up and nailing down sheathing. We had three crews on three corners, with another crew on the ground cutting sheets of plywood to size. The rain would make an appearance for a few minutes and then abate, like a schoolteacher saying “the time is up, finish the problem you are on and turn in your test.”

I rode home soaked, dirty, the rain cooling my light sunburn. It was a full day of the kind of labor you tend to tune out over time, but I spent the entire day plugged in. I think I’ll come back next week.

Just got my first four figure credit card bill. *sigh*

Today I was more excited about program I’m enrolled in than I have been so far. Two factors caused that: first, we heard introductions from some of the new faculty in HCI, and second, I met with Yvonne and Kay and talked a little about their Pervasive Compuing course I am Ta’ing and what my responsibilities will be. Hopefully this isn’t a peak in excitement, and is only the beginning of an each-day-is-better-than-the-last situation.

One of my biggest concerns about this program was that there were only three faculty members in HCI when I accepted, and I wasn’t even entirely sure I was that interested in their areas of research. But not only have a learned a lot more about those three (and am more interested in their stuff) but I’ve met some of the new faculty in HCI, and even non-HCI people in Informatics that I think are doing interesting things. I feel like the School of Informatics is a place where lots of people are doing interesting things all over the place, and they are eager to work with graduate students. I wasn’t entirely sure of that before.

Also mentioned today was that since there is no Ph.D. program, masters students have opportunities to fill those rolls in faculty labs. It seems a lot like Brown in that respect, where undergraduates in CS carry a lot of the research load. I wouldn’t say the masters students here necessarily carry the load–after all, the program is generally geared towards putting people into industry–but there seems to be opportunities to do research for those that would have them.

And I really enjoyed meeting with Yvonne Rogers. We’re going to chat more in depth tomorrow.

I have so many ideas for projects that are really close to the surface. In the next few weeks, as I talk to faculty, I think those ideas will mix with their expertise and inclinations and advice, and I will settle into my work schedule, and I have a good feeling some of them will definately crystallize. I want to talk to John Paollilo about my ideas about the role of perception, simulation and action in natural language processing, and how I might cut that project down into something that dealt more explicity with just the language side of things. I want to talk to Jeff about the performance characteristics of Flash, and try to figure out whether it would be fast enough to mock up some of my ideas for non-zooming zooming interfaces with it. But I’m not really sure where Pervasive Computing speaks to me. I just haven’t been thinking about it long enough to have any good ideas. I have plenty of reading and thinking ahead though.

Does our inner monologue really change that much as we grow older, or do we just get better and better at hiding it from people? Perhaps the need to share stupid ideas just slowly dies.

I think most people will agree that everyone has stupid thoughts. What sets stupid people apart is that they fail to stop themselves from sharing them. So do older people really stop having asinine thoughts, or do they just master the art of seeming pragmatic by not needing to verbalize them?

I’d like to complain for a minute about this thing called “Bed in a Bag”. First off, let me point out that there’s no goddamn bed in that bag. That’s obvious by looking at it, but I just wanted to point out how overt the falseness of advertising actually is.

More relevantly, I’d like to highlight the slogan on almost every “Bed in a Bag,” which promises you’ll find “everything you need” to make your bed, right in the bag. Everything, that is, except say some pillows, which will set you back at least $20 a pop to get ones that aren’t complete arse. And much more if you don’t want to lay your head on something that feels like the governor of california’s abs.

“Everything you need” also doesn’t include, say, a matress pad, which will set you back another $20 at the very least. So the contents of the bag costs approximately as much as what they left out. What’s that all about?

How many journal entries can I write about bedding?