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January 24, 2007
xkcd on wikipedia
This is only a problem if you can't justify it as "research:"
Posted by griffjon at 08:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 21, 2007
NYC? Get a bus.
So, I finally (with A's prodding) got to NYC. Some of her MIT friends were gathering for the weekend, and I have a brother and many Plan II folk there as well who I've been promising to meet for a while now. We took a bus up (http://www.washny.com/ - $35 r/t!) and dropped our bags off at a friend of A's office, and walked down to Battery Park from Times Square, stopping to admire the Empire State Building, a few street markets, parks, the Statue of Liberty (from afar) and "ground zero."
We met up with the rest of A's friends and hiked it out to Greenwich village to go to Lederhosen, a German beer garden with insanely excellent waitstaff. After tiring outselves out there, we retired to Brooklyn to pass out.
Saturday, we woke up to a light blanket of snow (the first for the season up in these parts!) and walked down to where A's mother and grandparents grew up in a more southerly part of Brooklyn, and then had dim sum for lunch, meeting up with one of my closest P2 buds, C., and wandered Chinatown a bit more, then headed to the Met and Café Sabarsky for coffee. We taxi'd across the park (it was COOOOLD by then!) to meet up with my brother Ev at Calle Ocho, a very hip Cuban place (yum!). We met back up with C. at a housewarming party thrown by yet another P2 friend in NYC, where a few other P2ers were in attendance. We eventually wandered back to Brooklyn and failed to go out with A's friends to Brooklyn bars as we had to get up early Sunday to make the best bus back.
NYC is... a bit weird. Too much city, but some interesting adaptations by its residents to living with so many people.
Posted by griffjon at 04:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Fox News Email Virus?
My mailbox is currently full of a virus/spam with titles like:
"Third World War has Started"
"(Chinese|Russian) missile shot down (Russian|USA) (aircraft|satellite)"
"First Nuclear Act of Terrorism"
"Supreme Court attacked by terrorists"
"(Hugo Chavez|Fidel Castro|Putin) Dead"
"Radical Muslim drinking enemies' blood"
"Saddam Hussein safe and sound!"
"The commander of a U.S. nuclear submarine lunch [sic] the rocket by mistake."
"Venezuelan leader: "Let's the War beginning"
Yay. Just what we need. Viral spam fearmongering.
Posted by griffjon at 02:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2007
Resignation
Resignation
So, I gave notice at $dcjob[0] today, as an old Peace Corps buddy encouraged me to apply for his previous position, where I will start next month.
It was hard, as my co-workers are awesome folk, and I'm leaving them at a critical time before two big events (to be fair, I can't think of any point in the last year or so where it wouldn't have been a "critical point" -- one of the reasons I was encouraged to follow this other opportunity. In the informal exit interview, the ED even mentioned that she'd noticed my lack of engagement of recent, due in large part to the high stress levels at work.
I do think that long-term it will be bitter but good medicine for the organization. It is at a point now that a full-time IT person, or the effective equivalent, is sorely needed; I've been running at full capacity for months now just to keep things at a bare minimum of operations. I try to be rather humble, but with this style of IT work, I am highly skilled -- if I can just barely keep things going at part-time, it's a sign that it's easily a full time position.
I was reminded of my favorite positive psychologist's introduction (to me) of the concept of "flow" where you are right on the threshold between overwhelming and (too hard and not enough time) and boring (too much time and too easy). My old position moved into the overwhelming area and has been there for far too long, and I haven't enjoyed that perfect balance of challenge and personal growth to reach that challenge due to the time constraints, and it is that more than anything else that's worn on me. I hope that my next job will provide more opportunities for that. At the very least, it provides a substantially better compensation package and almost 2/3 less of a commute.
I feel bad leaving, but if it causes them to change to a full time position, then it will be for the best.
So, let's do a quick catch-up from a more positive light on life - I'm starting my last semester in grad school, taking a full load of courses, one at Georgetown which promises to be more work than I'd like, and taught from a Bank-positive techno-positivist position (I love tech, but am a pragmatist and a cynic too - I want to see it work before I suggest someone go into debt for it). I'm also taking our capstone course, which is basically a team-project course where each group runs a class and we all have a big presentation at the end. The last is another IT policy course, focused a bit more on security and privacy issues. I still need to complete my independent study from last semester, which is mostly justa case of sitting down to do it, it's pretty close.
I haven't had time (really?) to write much for OLPCNews of recent, though I did put up another post on cost estimates, this time referencing the incredibly detailed spreadsheet than an OLPC supporter in Brazil (who I got to talk to through the power of Google Spreadsheets + Chat (with some help from Google Translate too). I hope to get back to some more posts there, especially if I can tie them in to my Tech+Dev course.
Last weekend my girlfriend took me to this fantastic bed and breakfast in West Virginia for my (early) birthday present. WV is... well, let's say it reminded me of the more underdeveloped parts of East Texas, but the owners are South Africans who are huge conservationists and have been buying up as much land as they can to make a black bear reserve with conjoined to their B+B land. We saw a huge herd of deer (~20) and 2 black bears, one of which was just hanging out less than 10 feet away.
This coming weekend I hope to get away to NYC, as it's my last "open" weekend before school really gets nasty, and then the weekend after that will be my huge bday party. If you're interested in coming and for whatever reason weren't on my evite list (most likely, you're not in DC), post here and I'll add you.
Posted by griffjon at 07:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2007
Tech and Social Justice
I'm taking this course at Georgetown's equivalent to my tech policy program at GWU, based on the short description and title of the course - I mean, it's right up my alley! The syllabus, which I was finally able to access yesterday, leaves me a bit worried. The first things we're reading are Sachs' "End of Poverty" (What we've been doing hasn't worked because we haven't done enough of it!) and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (What the global poor really need is to be transformed into consumers!)
Ugh. Either this is "shock therapy" (like Sachs likes to use on country's economies by liberalizing them rapidly), or I'll be the class firebrand. I guess I need to read up on my Easterly!
Posted by griffjon at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 01, 2007
That was the 2007 it was
2006 had its ups and downs. 2007 was overall a decent year.
January finally got me up to NYC to visit some good college friends, some of A's college friends, and my eldest brother. It was fun, and I intend to head back there on occasion. January also found me switching jobs. I like my new job, and it's a great change in pace and stress from my previous job. It's not my career yet, but it's a good job to pay loans back with and look for a career-track job. I also turned 30.
In February I discovered the secret to Ararat's Drinker's Choice dip. Between that, school, and the new job, it was otherwise a pretty uneventful month, but I did buy a new-to-me laptop for Linux to replace my dot-com-vintage one that was falling apart quickly. I'm posting with it now with lots of eye-candy.
In March pretty much everything at the new job melted down, which sucked. Add on to that some friction with our tech support company and lots of workywork for school and it was a poor month overall.
April had me presenting (badly) at the STGlobal conference at the AAAS and going into high gear finishing up papers and independent study projects.
May got me all gradumicated from GWU. My parents came and we protested the white house and went wine tasting, so that was good.
June transitioned me into fulltime at the new job, and Audrey headed off for Japan and China for the summer. I joined a gym and enjoyed the many fruits of my labor on my summer garden, getting more tomatoes than I could have possibly hoped for, plus squash, potatoes, habaneros, cucumber, and spices. I'm totally doubling that garden this year. July was more of the same: gym, garden, cook, work, complain about our government, sleep, repeat.
August found me in a shouting match with my student loan company and their poor at best business practices. A got back from China (finally!!!)
September took A and I to India (she had a conference, I had vacation time to burn). India's a fascinating country, but man, not a relaxing place to travel. In case you missed my pimping of all the photos we took, they're still all at Flickr.
October saw another throw-down party from the NutHouse which was Life Aquatic themed and so badass we made a video of it.
In November I blacked out from hot sauce and also went to Nicaragua for Chana's wedding, and that's pretty much that. We had a tiny thanksgiving here in DC too.
December took me to San Diego for our annual conference, where I had a good presentation on web 2.0 and open source, which spurred a flurry of posts on another blog to create a basic how-to-web-2.0 guide for non-profits. A and I went to Angelo for xmas, and had a nice relaxing time there.
Overall, a LOT of traveling, which began to wear thin at the end there. I'm totally out of vacation days currently, tho, so I'll prolly stick around for a bit. It was a decent year, and I'm glad to be done with school and generally enjoying life.
Posted by griffjon at 10:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack