Let’s see the trends here… BBS, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Buzz… anyone else see the pattern? It’s just the same as before. Different companies always trying to solve some ‘problem’ the previous company apparently didn’t. But if you look closer you’ll find that they are all the same. Communication with more bandwidth usage each time.
I was looking at the latest news about what is going on and was reading about Nada. I happened to glance and read something about maskups. It was related to this picture on Wired about artist called Girl Talk. While looking for the music on YouTube I kept getting the standard maintenance message. This lead me to twitter to see if there was any ‘buzz’ about it being down. I glanced and the friend feed and since I’ve met and I used to read Robert Scoble who now works at Rackspace where I used to work. This lead me to Traveling Geeks. Followed by not recognizing the geek behind Pop17. Finally leads me to these great photos by Dina Goldstein called Fallen Princesses. I find the last image with Jasmine really striking considering what is currently going on. It’s interesting the mashups and cross linking can lead us to in this tangled thing we called the world wide web.
So I started reading about…
It’s amazing what you learn in 10 minutes.
So I’ve been criticized before for having my computer science students play poker in class. I usually have some type of card game in my beginning level programming classes I teach. Blackjack, poker, or some other card based problem/simulation/game is usually a semester long project. I think it is and excellent example of using some basic CS related skills regardless of the language it is programmed in. It’s great to see there is actually a group that supports this and more importantly has some very significant people backing it. I personally am not very good at poker however I always enjoy a good game.
So all the big projects at work have been keeping me a little busier than expected. In the last month we completely moved to a new house. So there has been even more delay in the projects I originally had planned. Baby steps are need in these times I guess. I started another semester teaching. Coming to the realization that I have been ‘teaching’ college classes for over 6-7 years now is kind of hard to believe. It’s even hard to believe I’ve been out of high school for 10 years. We recently had our reunion and while it was nice to see my classmates … something was very different. Hard to describe really. I personally was very disappointed. I have accomplished quite a bit in the last 10 years and am very grateful for everything I have. However, I can’t help but wonder if I could do even more in the next decade. Only time will tell…
Stephanie S. is discussing.
Stephanie S. 9:31 pm on January 28, 2008 Permalink
You always were a bit of a rebel… Glad to see you’re still teaching! Hope all is well.