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Coming up on Christmas
Perhaps tainted as a child, Christmas has always been a little difficult to deal with. As I’ve gotten older (and more introspective) I know why this is. But it doesn’t make it any easier. The excitement of presents and “that thing you’ve always wanted” is what so many of us are inadvertently conditioned to think Christmas was about. But it isn’t. I know this now.
My mother used to work so hard to be able to give us boys gifts, and I realize now that it wasn’t about the gifts so much as it was about the giving, about wanting to show someone else how much you cared about them. She wanted to give us the world. Instead we got underwear and socks. In essence, the same thing.
For a number of years now, W. and I have stayed home for the holidays. This time of year travel can be treacherous and after the chaos of our jobs, we appreciate the downtime to decompress our brains and prepare for the new year. But we still struggle with the notion of Christmas and that it should be something awesome and eternally memorable. The media frenzy of the holidays and push to get people to spend their money is a factor I suppose.
So this year W. and I are looking at Christmas and preparing ourselves as best we can. It’ll be fine, we’ll hang out…play some games, listen to Christmas music, exchange some gifts. I’m going to focus on letting her know how important she is to me. Whether she likes her gifts or not.
And a few days after Christmas, we get to visit with family. A caravan of my kin are scheduled to arrive next weekend. We’re looking forward (with some hesitation as this has never happened) to seeing everybody at our house.
Image: Taken a couple weekends ago in downtown Traverse City. I grabbed my camera as we headed into the town hoping to get a decent shot of the lights. The exposure and our motion made for the blurred effect…no Photoshop this time.
The December Coast
With the semester finished and holiday travels behind us, I’m coasting until the new year and the start of Winter semester.
Our trip north to visit family went well. We enjoyed dinner at Mackinac Brewing Company in Traverse City on Friday, had breakfast with my folks a favorite breakfast place, Mabels, and enjoyed snacks and homemade pizza at a family gathering. With all the delicious eating, my tubes are full and my winter fat suit in full effect.
As we headed to the in-laws in Kalkaska and were tooling down a crazy bumpy road, W. notices a distinct smell in the Jeep; radiator fluid. Within minutes we both smell it and there is steam coming from the engine. With the temperature rising and a cloud of steam trailing us, we pull into their driveway. There is radiator fluid on the floor matts. Not good. The father-in-law suspects a bad heater core.
The next day we make a trip to the auto parts store to pick up some stop leak and radiator fluid. After some investigation, we head back for a thermostat. We work together in his awesome shop and replace the thermostat. As we’re filling up the radiator, thinking we’re done, we hear fluid leaking fast from somewhere else. Investigation reveals that one of the tubes that connect to the heater core has come off and we find that the clamp holding it in place was never tightened.
So the heater core is fine. It was a little stressful, but overall the experience was great. It was totally awesome working with the father-in-law in his garage…getting grease under my nails and swearing at the engine. I only wish I could spend more time under his tutelage. Maybe someday.
Image: This is a piece of glass art done by a friend of ours. We stopped to visit her gallery in Fife Lake on our way to Traverse City. Check out more of her work here.
What have I learned?
This past semester was one of the best. Not THE best mind you, but very close1.
My two courses wrapped up today and I couldn’t help but notice differences. One finished with a silent fizzle. The other applause and a receiving line. It was clear who reached the students and who has yet to make that step. The potential is there, I see it. But something. Missing. Anyway.
I learned that system engineering is not the same as information architecture. I thought it was…or at least was close. But after spending 10+ weeks pondering and absorbing the principles of IA, I realize that one is about building pyramids, the other envisioning an eternal tomb. Not the same, but similar.
I learned, and am living, the acceptance of trends that wash past in this flowing river of digital change and miscellany. Reviewing past blathersome blog posts I came upon one wherein I first learned of Twitter (June 2007). Oh how this has changed my perception of what the Innerwebs are about and can do. Such is learning. Such is change.
I learned, and continue to learn, about the inertia of culture and politics in the corporate and academic environs. People in positions of power have the power and thus the control. And I’ve learned that giving up control is a very difficult thing…at any level. I could easily go into a rant about attachment and aversion but it’s late and I’m tired. And you probably don’t care.
I learned, and recognize that opportunity exists where you look for it. Business ideas, government grants, and interested persons abound. Those that aren’t shy will make it2. Those that are shy will become part of the soil in which others flourish. Such is the way of the forest.
School is turning out to be a great experience for me. It could be so much more, but it seems to be enough. Stretching my mind scratches an itch i can’t explain.
I just wonder where this will lead.
I’m looking forward to finding out. And continue to pay attention. And ask questions. And see things for myself.
Image: Graduate students sure are young these days. As if I didn’t feel old as hell already. This is actually the son of our IA teacher, brought in under some pretense of curiousity…but I wonder about the real reason…not that it matters. He was good and didn’t seem to affect the final lecture from he-who-is-inKlyned.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ The best will be identified when all have been completed. [↩]
- And by make “it” I mean, make money to afford basic necessities and sweet shix that aren’t really necessary but seem to satisfy some itch. [↩]
From cradle, crowd, to cloud and beyond…
I attended a conference this past week called FuturTech. It was cold and snowy but I didn’t care. I was eager to listen to thought leaders talk about how Web 2.0 is affecting lives in The Cloud1. It is certainly true that my life has been seriously altered by this cloud. I was eager to hear what others make of it. I won’t go into my notes, you can see them here if you feel so inclined. Instead, I figured I’d ramble on about nerdy stuff that can make a coma sound inviting to some2.
I’ve been pondering the notion of “cradle to cradle” as it has come up in various venues3. I see it is an extension to the “cradle to grave” notion of life cycle assessment often repatriated for business purposes aiming to stir up metaphors of life long commitment. Cradle to cradle speaks to a generational interest…an interest that reaches beyond the short and midterm. An effort to see the long term as the end game.
Thinking about how long term matters more than short term, it is important to consider the context in which we learn things. Daily lessons, like the kind that make you slap your forehead later, are short term matters. As long as you learn and keep moving forward it’s all good. Everything fits into the long term interests if you take the time to see things for yourself.
With the ever growing reach of The Cloud, lessons and learning take on new meaning. You may come to trust the opinion of 50 complete strangers whose reviews you read that contradict the advice of your closest friend. The voice of the crowd in The Cloud can be deafening.
And you can’t ignore it. If you’re in The Cloud, really in it, then you know that it is a personal thing. More personal that you even realize. The Cloud obscures distance and protocol, changing the way you interact with others. Changing how you learn, how you perceive. What you perceive.
Unless you fear the crowd.
The crowd, in its vast envelope of knowledge, knows all but doesn’t know what it knows. The accumulated and crackling awareness of the masses is very real and can reach out and slap you in the the most unexpected ways. We are foraging our way into a new digital nation, an Internation, and there is no turning back. You have already been assimilated. It’ll be okay.
Image: A quick pic taken during the lunch keynote. Mostly MBA types, but a few of us SI folk were in the house.-----------------------------------------------------------------------
- An interesting and fitting analogy for the tubes we call the Innerweb or, it’s more classical name, the Internet [↩]
- Unless you’re a nerd and appreciate thought-works by other nerdy articulate types [↩]
- Herman Miller got me thinking about the notion of serving customers cradle to cradle…thanks HM. [↩]
Clustering, dissimilarity, and pattern recognition
Today was the second-to-last day of classes for this semester. I can feel it in the air on campus. The library doesn’t have as strong a smell of coppery fear and panic like it does around mid-terms. It’s there…but you can tell that everyone feels the end in sight. And we’re ready for it.
My class dealing in data analysis and retrieval techniques has been very interesting for me. I’ve sort of enjoyed the challenge of it. Having to take in various forms of data and chop, dice, slice, and mold it into something new and interesting. What intrigues me most is that these new and interesting perspectives aren’t just conjured out of thin air, they are born of actual data. New ideas and understanding can emerge from this process of taking what you already have and finding a different way to view it.
Which brings me to the subject of this week’s lecture: clustering and dissimilarity. We are to create a dendogram showing dissimilarity via clustering of term document frequency across a body of files. First, I’d never heard the word “dendogram” before. Term document frequency is something I’m still coming to grips with, but data vectors, matrixes, and Jaccard coefficients are not things I run across in my day to day grind of server monitoring, fixing bugs, pushing innovation, and forever seeking to organize and architect the chaos involving web application development processes and projects.
But then…as I’m thinking about all of this, it occurs to me that maybe these ideas aren’t as foreign as I first thought. Maybe they aren’t a product of black magic statistics and genius mathematicians (though I’m just kidding myself…cause they totally are).
As humans we (typically) are very good at recognizing patterns and extracting new meaning from those patterns. This ability is fundamental to learning and is supposedly what has distinguished us from other animals. We are able to cluster, label, categorize, and from all this, surmise things based on what we’ve seen before and already understand. The only difference is I’m having to think about these things is a more programmatic and statistical way so that I can take digital information and get a computer to try and do something similar.
In a nutshell; black magic in binary form.
Everything is so complex, there is no denying this. Try coordinating holiday travel plans and family visits or figuring out the dynamics of academic or corporate politics. Things can seem simple on the surface. We want things to be simple. And a lot of the time it’s critical that we only look at the surface. It’s tough to drive a car if you’re trying to calculate pounds-per-square-inch pressure to push a pedal, turn the wheel, or to derive acceleration vectors determining if you have time to pull into oncoming traffic without getting the smashem-up. But for a computer to do any of this, gray matter has to look beneath the surface to another dimension of happening. And that makes my brain hurt in an oh-so-special way.
Image: Normally these kiosks are covered in event posters and other sorts of going-on craziness. Seeing it all stripped and barren is another bit of evidence that the semester is coming to a close and peoples focus is elsewhere. I recognize the pattern.