Monthly Archive for January, 2005

Compare to my entry on Monday: Today was the best day of my life. Today, I am sick, I have some sort of sore throat and inflamed tonsils or something. And whatever was going on in my throat today made me the happiest man in the world.

Today, I am a bass. In ACC, I sang a G#. Lately I have been struggling to croak out a B-flat, and today I sang a full note below that. I didn’t croak, I sung. I was not a pretend bass, I was a really bass! BASSEN! I SANGED WITH THE BASSEN IN THE WOODESEN!

Anyway, that’s my exciting news for today. I hope your day went well too.

I just want to curl up and die right now. I missed ALife *again* today because I am a complete moron. When I went to bed last night, I was under the impression that ALife was on Tuesday, and all I had today was Eli’s class. But that was wrong. I am in idiot.

Then, I got what sounded like a very angry email from Eli. I can’t say for sure that he was angry because it’s just email, but it sounded like he was. I added a ton of pages on the Wiki last night to try and demonstrate how I think wikis need to work because I honestly believe they have disconnected the basic functionality of a wiki. What they’ve done to DesignWiki is a little bit like writing an instant messaging client and removing presence and displaying messages one at a time instead of conversation style.

But I think I was too aggressive, and now Eli probably thinks of me as a troublemaker. Before he seemed to just think I didn’t know what I was talking about which was slightly better.

There’s a bunch of garbage in my coursework right now, and the rest of it I am skillfully turning into garbage. Great.

When faced with a computer which won’t boot, a five page paper which must be written in three hours, a stubbed toe, a difficult question regarding whether to order another beer or go home, or any of a variety of other maladies, I generally respond on the same way. “Hmm,” I think, “Let’s sit down and consider this situation for a few minutes, and we’ll think of a creative solution.” It’s very Zen.

There are a few situations, however, when I completely freak out. It’s not easy to tell the difference between my freaking out and my getting Zen, because they both involve a focused look on my face, and a temporary absence of activity. You can tell the freaking out, though, when I break out of my meditation after about two and a half seconds and start engaging in what appears to be severly focused, completely insane behavior.

In some sort of cruel joke on my mortality, this behavior often comes out when I drive. If I have directions which tell me to “drive for a while, and then take the exit for 87,” I generally read that as “drive past two exits, space out for about thirty seconds, snap out of it, and freak out because you are convinced you missed the exit while you were spacing out.” I then proceed to turn around at the next exit, and drive thirty miles in the opposite direction looking for the exit I never missed in the first place. I am awesome.

It also happens while cooking. I’ve been trying to make Aloo Gobi (an Indian potato and cauliflower dish) for about a semester now. I had a delicious Aloo Gobi at one of the Indian restaurants in Bloomington, with a delicious buttery sauce that I have been trying to replicate. Unfortunately, when I get close to finished, it never looks quite right, and my brain seizes up, and I start throwing in tumeric: “IT’S AN INDIAN DISH, IT NEEDS TUMERIC!” and then tossing in more cayenne: “WHAT IF IT’S NOT FLAVORFUL ENOUGH, INDIAN FOOD IS SUPPOSED TO BE SPICY!” and finally adding butter and some flour and some liquid to create a nice gravy because “THE GOBI NEED SOME JUICE TO SUCK UP! WHY ISN’T THERE ENOUGH JUICE?” And in the end I have this thing that looks vaguely like what I ate in the restaurant, but tastes halfway between burnt cumin and a thanksgiving turkey.

Maybe I should make this a new years resolution.

Yesterday, my team made its submission to the 2005 SIGCHI Conference. You can read the web-ified version here, which may or may not be kosher by SIGCHI’s standards, but I’ve pretty much decided that everything I write will eventually be available on my web site in one form or another. I am 23, and in order to be successful, I need people to buy into my ideas in the intellectual sense, not the financial one.

I think this paper is pretty good. It’s high enough quality that it could be accepted, but not such high quality that it’s guaranteed to be accepted. Here’s my grading scale for my own personal evaluation:

F – I was forced to leave out a portion of the assignment in order to complete it on time
D – I covered the bases for the assignment, but there are significant gaps in quality.
C – Everything is done, and it’s good.
B – Everything is done, and there are attempts at real insight and value, but it is wordy, unclear in places, and it leaves serious questions unaddressed
A – It is insightful, complete, concise, persuasive, and valuable.

By this standard, I would give the paper a B on content and a C on writing. I think the research we based our design on is a very solid foundation, and lays the playform for a phenomenal design. And I think our evaluation is somewhat special in that we did a longer-term experiment on a critical aspect of our design in addition to usability testing, thus the B on content. However, the experiment could have been better executed, and we could have done more iterations of design and usability. Alas, we didn’t really have the time. And working in a team, while increasing the reliability of the work, decreases the speed.

Still, I think we did well. If this were an assignment for a class, I think it would get an A. I think a lot of what I wrote this semester that got an A is a B/C on my scale. It seems like the graduate grading scale in school maps to my grading scale something like this:

B content/C writing = A
C content/C writing = A-/B+
D content/C writing = B
D content/D writing = B-
D content/F writing = C+

Of course, you can have F content and D writing by my standards and still get a B+ or even an A- sometimes, which is a shame.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been working on for the last month or so, and I thought I would post it. It’s not perfect, but I feel like I’m getting closer to being able to write consistently great papers. We’ll give it another go around this semester.